The same sea, the same mother          

Nadine Ltaif                                 

NL: The door opens and a tall woman enters, walking with difficulty on crutches. Her foot is in a cast. She spots a curly head at the back of the classroom and climbs the steps towards me despite the effort. She needs to sit beside someone who looks like her. Maybe she thinks I could help her. I don't know. But that's how the friendship started, in a film studies course.

MF: It feels like a metaphor — an immigrant searching for her place. Do you think you would have been friends in another context?

NL: Who knows? You can't question the throw of the dice that brings people together. It was destiny. Certainly, the fact that both of us were immigrants made us closer, and on top of that we came from Mediterranean countries, she from Tunisia, I from Lebanon. We had the same sea and the same mother, so to speak. A temperate climate that doesn't have the cold streets of the North American winter.

We did not come from the same background or the same experiences. There was a difference of 12 years between us. I was 18, she was 30. When you're 30, you already have intellectual experiences, you've seen films, read books, suffered, loved, etc. But at 18, what do you know about life? I had suffered, yes, from the war in Lebanon and the many moves. But I was immature.

MF: So she taught you things.

NL: She was my reference as far as films were concerned. I think my innocence and naivety and positive nature intrigued and amused her. She was rather pessimistic. It was this difference in character that we wanted to emphasize in the film The Sleeping Tree... She played the negative, I played the positive. Even if it wasn't so obvious. So, playing our own roles, that's what she told me we had to do. In fact, that was my bottom line. I wouldn't reveal myself in the documentary if she didn't as well.

MF: We talked about your memories of the film for her website a few years ago. You said, "I'll get wet if you get wet."

NL: The word se mouiller in French means to dare — to dare to get involved, to dare to reveal yourself. To show a part of what's inside you. When you act in a documentary, you make the intimate public and expose yourself. And we all have a part of ourselves that we want to keep private.

MF: For Loin d'ou? she talked about your "otherworldly" presence, your grace and your labyrinthine gaze. Were you afraid to reveal yourself?

NL: I was brave because I accepted everything, but I wasn't really afraid. Actually, I was quite naive in front of the camera. I trusted her. I think I was very natural in both films.

MF: Did you talk about her expectations before you started filming?

NL: She had the script, but she saved some moments for the poetry of the film. For example, she told me to write something in Arabic on the window, so I wrote "Montreal". I learned to write in Arabic until I was fourteen. I didn't really practise that much, so it's really almost a drawing.

MF: The Sleeping Tree is a much more political film than Far From Where?

NL: She was politically engaged, especially around racism, but she was not militant whereas I was very militant and especially very feminist. There are scenes that were left out of The Sleeping Tree. For example, we demonstrated during Labour Day, and later took part in the Bread and Roses march with my friend Hélène, who sings in the film around the table of friends at the Byblos restaurant. I can't say that she wasn't a feminist, really. But she didn't like labels.

MF: She was part of a roundtable that was organizd by the NFB[1] on women in cinema. There was an article about it published in one of the Montreal newspapers. And Mishka, of course, had strong opinions that went against the majority. She said the only difference between male and female filmmakers is where they put the camera in the love scenes.

NL: She was right. She was absolutely right.

MF: She also worked as a programmer at a women's film festival. She told me the only word that interested her in this job was not "festival" or "woman" but "film".

NL: She also told me it doesn't matter if you write in French or English, the important thing is to write. I remember that very well.

MF: English and French come into her films whenever it feels right, like it does in Spoon. She mixes the two languages all the time. For her, it's about freedom.

NL: Exactly. She was very North American actually. She was very fond of New York, of jazz. But I think that what she communicated to me above all was her love of Fassbinder. She placed him very high. She told me a lot about her love for his cinema.

MF: She did her master's thesis on Fassbinder.

NL: She also talked to me about German women's cinema. When I say she was my reference for cinema, it's because she had already seen everything. For me, she was the one who knew — who knew cinema, who knew everything.

MF: She told me she found the education system in Quebec a bit weak in that sense. In France, she was always encouraged to do even more, and in Quebec much less. Sometimes she knew books that her teachers had never read.

NL: Absolutely. We were both taking a journalism course from Monique Bosco. Michka was doing wonderful work and I was doing creative work that was not so bad. But Monique Bosco criticized me a lot. Yet to others who didn't write as well as I could, she would say "That's good", and so on. Michka became a lioness protecting her cub. She said to her, "But why are you attacking Nadine like that?" Then Monique said, "Michèle — because it was still Michèle back then — "I’ll talk to you after class". Then Monique told her, "If I'm hard on Nadine, it's because I know she can do more. But the others, I know they’re not going any further." Michka was defending me, actually.

MF: She told me she'd learned from Monique Bosco that you enter a scene after it's already begun and you finish before it's over.

NL: That's a good way to do it.

[1] National Film Board of Canada