Rand Beiruty’s Tell Them About Us (a shared world premiere in CPH:DOX and at Thessaloniki Doc Fest, produced by Tondowski Films and sold by Syndicado) is a refugee movie with a difference. Its young female protagonists have fled their homelands to come to Germany. They and their families are living in difficult circumstances but the tone of the film is very upbeat. The girls are all likeable, optimistic personalities with a lust for life and the documentary reflects this.
“For me, from the beginning, it was quite clear that I didn’t want to make a film about the girls for Germans to watch and to look at them and think ‘oh look at them, poor girls!’ I wanted it to be more participatory and more empowering for [them],” Jordanian director Beiruty says of her intentions. “It’s also a film about family, about friendship and about the love they have for each other.”
The director had been invited by a friend, who is a Roma activist and actress, to ‘tag along’ at a workshop the actress was holding at a community centre. This is how she first met the young women who feature in the film.
“It was quite organic. I didn’t want to force anything. I had spent a lot of time with them at the workshops without filming and [then] basically just bringing a camera by myself, filming parts of the workshop as research for them to get used to the camera,” Beiruty remembers.
The young women became friends through the workshops.
Beiruty quickly shelved ideas for “following a Frederick Wiseman approach” Instead, she decided to focus on the workshops. That way, she wouldn’t invade here subjects’ privacy “or be in any way exploitative and invasive…but then we became close and I was invited to their homes with their lovely families and with lots of good food. With me being away from home, it was just really nice to be among these big and warm Arab families.”
At this point, Beiruty decided to show the girls in their daily lives. (And, yes, the food tasted as good in real life as it looked on screen.)
The doc is structured in stylised and sometimes playful fashion. There are re-enactments with the girls playing themselves or their mothers, as well as dream-like role-play scenes as the women imagine careers they might one day pursue. “I was exploring issues that are affecting their lives in their new home country in Germany but also in their own communities and the pressures of being a young girl.”
These were typical teenage girls. They wanted to meet boys, hang out with each other and have fun.
The director was astute enough to understand the thinking behind the girls’ career aspirations. “I didn’t want it to be too explicit but one could see that the reason for wanting to become a policewoman is deeply rooted in wanting to feel empowered to defend yourself and protect yourself. It was the same for the flight attendant. It might sound silly, but for her it is about being free and emancipated.”
In her work, Beiruty takes inspiration from classic films, such as Abbas Kiarostami’s Close-up (1990), that “use fiction as a tool to find out truth and understand ourselves.” She is always ready to experiment with different storytelling styles.
On one level, the director’s own story matches that of her subjects. She also left home to come to Europe. “That was never my aspiration. When I finished high school, I was planning to go and study in Egypt because that is where I grew up. I love Egypt and feel connected to it. But then, because of the political situation and because there was a new university in Jordan, a German-Jordanian university, I ended up going there. And it happened that I ended up in Germany.”
The aspiring young filmmaker did a practice-based PHD at The Konrad Wolf Film University of Babelsberg.
Tell Them About Us includes some shocking moments. At one stage, someone shouts at one of the girls to take off her hijab. German boys are sometimes very tactless in their presence. Beiruty registers these scenes on camera but doesn’t make a big fuss of them. She talks of “steering away from any sensationalism. My whole artistic research is about the representation of refugees and how we can tell stories together. I thought of just letting these moments speak for themselves.”
The director decided not to include some of the girls’ stories about their more traumatic experiences for the same reason.
Beiruty has her own production outfit, Shaghab Films (the name is Arabic for ‘turbulent’) which she set up with fellow filmmaker Jude Kawwa in 2019/2020.
“It’s this idea of being able to tell our stories deliberately and of retaining control…and not just catering to a European audience,” she explains why she established the company. “It was a way of empowering myself and having Jude as a partner has been extremely important.”
Tell Them About Us was presented in Co-Pro Market 2020 at DOK Leipzig and won best pitch at the Reception of German Film Schools during Berlinale 2020. It has German support. Beiruty is happy that there are also sources of funding she can now draw on in the Middle East, for example the Red Sea Film Fund or the Doha Film Institute (which backed her earlier animated doc Shadows). She remains very conscious of the “colonial gaze” and the prejudices and unconscious bias that Europeans can sometimes feel toward filmmakers from MENA.
“[But] I am interested in co-productions. I love co-productions,” she says of her continuing desire to work with European partners. “I am interested in building bridges…It’s about seeing eye to eye.”German distribution of Tell Them About Us is being handled by Real Fiction Film. The film is set for a September release following the German premiere which will be at Munich International Documentary Film Festival.
