In Let My Body Speak Madonna Adib reflects on growing up in Damascus in a repressive and deeply patriarchal society in which the very idea of queerness seemed hardly to exist.
Madonna Adib’s short Let My Body Speak premiered earlier this week in IDFA’’s Luminous programme. This is a deeply personal film for its Syrian director. As the title suggests, its main focus is her own body which is shown naked on camera. In the film, the director reflects on growing up in Damascus in a repressive and deeply patriarchal society in which the very idea of queerness seemed hardly to exist.
It wasn’t that her childhood was unhappy, the director explains. She was surrounded by her family and grew up in a safe and loving environment.
“But the thing was that I was stressed and nobody knew why, not even me,” Adib reflects on her feelings of being different and her struggles to address her sexuality.
She has no nostalgia for her Syrian childhood or desire to live in the country again. “Actually, after you see how the political and social oppression affects your body and your freedom,” she notes, she wouldn’t want to stay there, even if she wasn’t gay.
When Adib left Syria in 2009, she went first to study in Canada and then, in 2014, moved to Beirut where she now lives.
The idea for Let Me Body Speak had been in the director’s head for several years. However, only after she “came out” did she feel the confidence to tackle the project.
“I decided that, yes, I would tell this story,” the director says. “Of course, it’s difficult to come out. Once you come out, everything becomes easier. But it’s not being in my comfort zone to be naked in front of the camera!” she says of the shooting process. She deliberately made the film with a small crew. “And even the editing wasn’t easy. It is isn’t easy to sit in front of your naked body every day.”
However, Adib realised in advance what it would take to make the documentary.
Her hope is that the queer community in Syria will eventually have the chance to see Let My Body Speak. “I will try to show it there secretly, underground, or I might share it privately with a few people. Let’s hope that later, when it is online, they will have access to it. I am going to share the link on my social media.”
Let My Body Speak was produced by Noe Mendelle for Scottish Documentary Institute. No, Adib, now based in Beirut, has never been to Scotland but she and Mendelle hit it off. They met at a workshop where Adib was developing her first feature documentary.
“We got to know each other. I liked her way of thinking,” Adib remembers. “I wanted to work with a producer that I love. I contacted her and she accepted…I was very, very happy. I really love the way she thinks. She really helped a lot in pushing me out of my comfort zone but without being aggressive, without being invasive.”
These have been tough times in Beirut. The combination of political upheaval, the economic crisis, the huge explosion in August and the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic have been hugely destabilising. Adib talks of the “fear, trauma and disappointment” that almost everybody feels. She herself could easily have died in the explosion. Nonetheless, she is carrying on with her next project, her feature, Four Bras And No Veil.
“I’ve been working on this feature for two years now. It’s also a coming out story but in a different way. It’s about four young Syrian women who left Syria and came to Lebanon. They were all from very fanatic families. They studied here…and they took off their veils one after another!”
