26/06/2024 - With her unclassifiable sung and animated documentary, Leila Albayaty delivers a musical tale all about herself and a family-focused quest in search of her own story

After Berlin Telegram and the medium-length film Face B, premiered in Berlinale's Forum Expanded, Leïla Albayaty is returning with another film which defies expectations. Screened in the National Competition of the 7th Brussels International Film Festival, From Abdul to Leila [+see also:
interview: Leila Albayaty
film profile] is racking up prizes and festival selections (presented in the El Gouna Film Festival where it won Best Asian Film, as well as in the Thessaloniki Documentary Film Festival, before scooping the Grand Prize at the Tetouan Mediterranean Film Festival and Best Documentary at both the Aarhus Film Festival and the Rotterdam Arab Film Festival).

"I’ve always preferred singing to talking". Daughter to an Iraqi father and a French mother, Leila feels torn in two, preoccupied by her origins which she’s been trying to trace back for twenty years. She’s missing the magical command to access her past, but it eventually comes to her through language and song. All throughout this sung and drawing-filled film, Leila tries to untangle truth from fiction. The story begins in Berlin, a city for new beginnings, for multiple ways of being. Reading the poems penned by her father, an exiled Iraqi who fled persecution, she immerses herself in her roots and in the story of her country, a country which becomes an obsession for her and whose ghosts invariably haunt her dreams. Leila’s is a well-trodden path, which the audience walks in reverse: her present state of diffracted identity gives way to wanderings from one country to another, to the accident which leaves her bedbound in hospital for a year, to a stay in Iraq, 20 years earlier, which changes her life, destroying it whilst offering rebirth. We come to realise that the film is some kind of journal of a recovery, the written and visual diary of a form of post-traumatic stress which has muddied the confines of Leila’s personality, driving the filmmaker to create a new character for herself, who lives her life and wears her clothes.

In the family home in the South of France, Leila, her father and her mother too embark upon a veritable journey through time, uncovering buried memories and badly healed wounds. In order to understand these existential explorations shoring up the film, poetry imposes itself as the most precious tool of all. Poetry and singing. There are Leila’s words, first of all, which deliver both of these, then her father’s words, which provide a horizon of expectation, and then the anthemic side of things: "I am a flame, I am a revolution, I am free", she sings in Arabic. The film takes on a dogma-free form, like some kind of restrained improvisation. Her encounter with her family’s original language is, for the filmmaker, an exploration of the past, and a passport for the future; an emancipated future where the fears she must face are no longer obstacles. The singing in the film also acts as a guide for the audience who are plunged into a whirlwind of family intimacy, bearing witness to the rebirth of a girl and a woman who tends to her wounds using images and song.

From Abdul to Leila is produced by Dérives (Belgium) and Volte Films (Germany).

(Translated from French)