Jimmy Goldblum’s Oscar shortlisted 20-minute doc A Broken House, about US-based Syrian architect Mohamad Hafez, has a very unlikely patron and executive producer – leading US Democratic politician and former House Majority Leader, Dick Gephardt.
“I was working to set up a TV show for Apple called ‘Home,’ their first documentary series. It was about architects exploring the notion of ‘home’ in their work,” the director remembers.
One of the intended subjects was the US-based Syrian architect, Mohamad Hafez. This was in 2017-2018, at around the time the Trump administration had just announced its “Muslim ban.”
Goldblum believes that having Hafez on screen in a drama shown on a major streaming service would have been “enormous,” – a powerful symbolic protest against the Trump Executive Order. In the event, an Apple exec rejected the idea.
“I was very upset because of everything that was happening in the country, and it was really by a pure act of kismet that a producer who working on the series introduced me to Congressman Gephardt,” the director explains.
The veteran US politician (who had written his own book called The American Immigrant: The Outsiders) was “apoplectic” about Trump’s immigration policy and was determined to produce films about refugees that would be “humanising in a dehumanising environment.”
Gephardt immediately agreed to back the project.
The film shows how architect Hafez coped with his immense homesickness about Damascus, his home city to which he was not allowed to return, by creating astonishingly elaborate miniature models of it.
Hafez’s sculptures preserve the city that he remembers – a city that has changed immeasurably since he last saw it. “He was in love with his memories…but the memories stay static whereas the culture and the country is ever evolving and changing,” Goldblum notes. “The memories are not necessarily reflecting the reality of the place.”
The Syrian architect had come to the US 20 years ago on a single-entry visa and has not been able to return to Damascus since then. However, he has been back to the region, to Beirut, on a very emotional journey to visit his mother.
“I had no idea that we were going to go to Lebanon at the outset of production,” the director remembers. However, when he discovered that Hafez was planning to visit his mother in Lebanon, he decided to go along too, and to include footage of the visit in the documentary. This entailed cancelling the last planned day of the shoot so there would be some money left over for a plane ticket.
The trip to Beirut took place in early 2019, therefore before the 2020 explosion in the port which caused over 200 deaths and resulted in enormous damage. Because of the blast, some of the locations which Hafez had visited during his trip no longer exist.
The original title of the film was ‘Hiraeth,’ which comes from a Welsh term for longing and nostalgia. The name was changed as the documentary began to strike a very strong chord with viewers separated from loved ones and loved places during Covid.
“We did put it together pre-pandemic. It was really hard to get the film out…what I think happened ultimately is that this is a film about homesickness, specifically homesickness that refugees and immigrants experience. Mohamed was missing weddings. He was missing funerals. He was missing all these major events – and then all of a sudden, because of the pandemic and quarantine, it became a more collective experience everyone could relate to. Somewhere in the middle of Covid, the film really started connecting with people in a way it hadn’t at the beginning.”
A Broken House may deal with upheaval and loss but it is never a violent film. Goldblum was determined to keep violence out of it for the sake of his wife. “In some respects, it is a love letter to her,” he declares. His wife, a documentary filmmaker, is a Muslim immigrant from Pakistan. They married shortly after Trump was inaugurated.
“The state of mind of a lot of Muslim immigrants at that time was one of terror. We were so afraid and we were so angry.” His wife had developed complex PTSD and was deeply homesick. “All this violent imagery she had ingested in Pakistan had really ruptured her sense of being and I wanted to make a film for her that was about homesickness but to tell in a way where you wouldn’t have to use re-traumatising imagery.”
The New Yorker Magazine acquired the documentary after the Hamptons Festival. (It is available to watch on the New Yorker website).
Another project Goldblum was working on at the same time as A Broken House has been distributed in a very different way. He directed the pilot for the Netflix re-boot of the cult TV series Unsolved Mysteries, watched by millions on the streaming service. He was portraying a man suspected of having killed his wife many years before. All in all, a world away from the gentle lyricism of A Broken House.
Not that his storytelling style changed. “My strength as a filmmaker is my ability to build intimacy. That is what I do on set when I am making the documentaries. I always want to create a space for people to be vulnerable, to be their authentic selves,” Goldblum says.
On A Broken House, working with Hafez had been “a joy.” The mood on Unsolved Mysteries was far darker. “I was essentially working with a person I’m pretty sure murdered his wife and got away with it. Before we went into his house, I turned to the entire crew and I said ‘every room we are in, that person is our hero. We are putting our judgements aside for the next three hours and we’re going to hear what this person has to say. We are going to treat them respectfully, we’re going to treat them kindly – whatever unfolds, unfolds.’”
The director believes this is the reason the episode was so well received (and went viral).
“I was actually working on A Broken House and Unsolved Mysteries concurrently…A Broken House was, I think, the way I was able to stay grounded.”
Now Goldblum is taking the leap into dramatic features. He is adapting Sarah Elaine Smith’s novel ‘Marilou Is Everywhere.’ “That novel very cleverly reappropriates true crime tropes,” he explains the attraction of the source material. “It starts with the disappearance of a young woman of colour…you think it is going to be a good cop comes in and finds her. But oftentimes when women of colour go missing, at least in this country, they are not found and they are not searched for. It shifts perspectives.”
Goldblum is currently writing the script and hopes to put the production together next year.
