Cineuropa met with filmmaker Samira El Mouzghibati, whose debut feature, (Y)our mother [+leggi anche:
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intervista: Samira El Mouzghibati
scheda film], discovered in the Burning Lights section at Visions du Réel where it won the FIPRESCI Prize and the Zonta Award, was selected in National Competition at the 7th Brussels International Film Festival. The film paints the portrait of women from her family, her mother, at first seemingly unreadable, and her inseparable sisters.

Cineuropa: What are the origins of this project?
Samira El Mouzghibati: The desire to make a film about my family had been circling in my head since film school, without knowing exactly what I’d like to say. I’d made small attempts by putting the camera in the middle of the family living room. But it’s only once I myself became a mother, of a little girl, that I understood I had to go dig into the history of the women in my family in order to understand why I had such a complex relationship to feminine identity. From the start, I knew I wanted to make a film of interiors, at the heart of intimacy, but the more I thought about the form, the more I felt blocked. I had to let go, which happened in a very instinctive way, to adopt a slightly hybrid form.

Speech is indeed at the heart of the film’s device, and you use different tools to bring it forward, phone calls, messages, even word play.
Sometimes, we struggle to tell each other things face to face, but thanks to technology today, we leave each other messages. My mom doesn’t know how to write, so she leaves voice messages. Suddenly, her voice was unfurling, she really offered herself a space of freedom. As for word play, this goes back to the first moments when I brought the camera into the home, we were doing vigils between sisters, and I had prepared a small box with rather generic words, such as “love”, “freedom”, “marriage”, with the idea of encouraging speech. It’s an archive that in the end has a very important place in the film.

In the film, your sisters and yourself say “your mother” and never “my mother”, at least until the end. What’s the meaning of this possessive adjective?
I think the entire film is a kind of interrogation about why we call our mother “your mother”. It’s a formulation I inherited. There’s a form of exclusion in that formulation, as if we didn’t own her. The film is clearly an attempt to include her in the clang of the women of her family. I’ve had to go encounter her history, have a look at it. I’ve also had to see similarities between her and myself, her and my sisters. Despite the obstacles, I think she’s someone who is free, even if her freedom doesn’t necessarily correspond to the idea of freedom I have, or you have. It is after all the story of a woman who’s had to leave her birth country and face huge changes, with all the insecurity and solitude that could come with that. And despite all that, she’s managed to find her spaces. Freedom is something very vast, we are constantly redefining what it means, I think the film shows that as well.

In the end, isn’t the film about the story of your encounter with your mother?
The film has allowed me to spend time with my mother and to travel with her to Morocco, in the Rif, the region she comes from. I took the time to look at her as an adult woman, and I realised she was transforming herself. In fact, even her body changes when she’s in her native village. It was very moving to see how she blooms there, she’s much more comfortable, she laughs more. When I was filming her, I could also see the little girl in her.

What was the biggest challenge with this film?
My own fears and resistances. My tendency for self-censorship. I think there’s a challenge I still haven’t completely untangled with the fact of placing a camera within the family. And while editing the film, I realised that making a film about the intimacy of a family that is Belgian-Moroccan, and muslim, to show that this intimacy has many layers and much complexity, is important in a world that prevents nuance.