05/07/2024 - The filmmaker chatted with us about her documentary, following a road trip between Brussels and Beirut with her father, journeying through the history of their family, Europe and the Middle East

Angie Obeid and her father Mansour Obeid (© Vivien Ghiron/BRIFF)

We met with the Lebanese director living in Brussels, Angie Obeid, to discuss her feature-length documentary Yalla, Baba! [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Angie Obeid
film profile], which was presented in a world premiere within the 7th Brussels International Film Festival’s National Competition. The documentary road-trip Yalla, Baba! sees Angie Obeid making a car journey from Brussels to Beirut with her father, which he already made 40 years earlier, journeying through the history of their family, Europe and the Middle East.

Cineuropa: Where did the impulse and the desire to tell this story and to embark on this film and this journey come from?
Angie Obeid: This project came to me pretty much when I first arrived in Brussels to study. My father had often spoken to me about the journey he’d made in 1987, the only big trip in his life. He’d come as far as Belgium where he’d bought a car in order to return to Lebanon by road. When I arrived here, he started calling me almost every day - which wasn’t normal for us - in order to tell me about that trip again. I realised that each of us has our own, very different version of Europe that’s familiar to us. I thought about the map of the continent, the different countries, borders, and everything that had changed since 1987. I also needed to reconnect a little with my family and my roots, so I thought it would be an ideal opportunity.

Is it a voyage through time as well as space?
Yes, especially since this trip took place in the past and I then experienced it in the present, while thinking about the future and what it might bring to my relationship with my dad and to both our perspectives on the world.

What did the road trip format bring to the film?
First off, it was really stressful to think that I had to spend all of that time with my father, which I’d never done before! We travelled across 10 countries, which is also really stressful in itself. But most importantly, the huis clos situation meant that we couldn’t escape conversations. I was also relying on meeting people in order to facilitate discussion between me and my father, and to broach subjects we wouldn’t naturally gravitate towards. A meeting between different generations was obviously central to what I was trying to explore.

It’s a very intimate film, but it also crosses regions which are a key part of European and even Middle Eastern history.
All these borders, all the wars people have lived through over the past 42 years in this region of the world, are central to the film and the road trip. There’s so much crossover between Lebanese people like us and lots of other nationalities. That’s another reason why I really wanted to keep the encounter with the Zimbabwean in the film, the one who lost his identity papers when Slovenia gained independence. Identity papers, visas, rights and displacement are a regular feature of daily life for a lot of people. Obviously, these days, it’s easier to travel, technically speaking. But obtaining a Schengen Visa is probably harder than when you had to get additional visas back then. Not to mention the fact that it’s now more dangerous, politically speaking, to express an opinion on certain subjects.

What did you most want to share in this incredibly personal documentary?
Lots of things happened during the year we put this film together. More recently, the attack on Gaza, the genocide… I’m from South Lebanon, which is currently being bombed, a land which was occupied by Israel until 2000. That’s my past too, it’s part of my childhood, my adolescence. As events continued to unfold, it became more pressing for me to say where I came from. It’s a personal story about a father/daughter relationship, but I didn’t want it to end there. What I was interested in, the conversations I wanted to keep were those which had the potential to resonate with other people and other experiences.

And what was the greatest challenge for you?
The greatest challenge, during filming, was definitely being both the director and a character in my story. And during the editing phase, there were clearly lots of brilliant moments, but they weren’t useful to the film. I had to choose personal moments which also resonated with a wider audience.

(Translated from French)