It’s a Friday morning in Amsterdam and filmmaker Ishtar Yasin Gutiérrez has been drinking coffee after a late night. The previous evening, her film, My Lost Country, won an IDFA Award for Outstanding Artistic Contribution in the festival’s Envision Competition (where it received its world premiere). The celebrations went on late into the night.
The documentary might best be described as a voyage around her father. Mohsen Sadoon Yasin was an Iraqi artist and theatre director who spent much of his life in exile.
Ishtar herself has often been on the move. The director was born in Moscow but describes herself as a Costa Rican, Chilean, Iraqi filmmaker. “My mother [Elena Gutiérrez] studied in the Bolshoi ballet. She was a dancer. And my father studied theatre direction,” she explains.
Ishtar grew up in a period when “thousands of students from Latin-America and also from the Arab world” came to the Soviet Union. Scholarships were available to study at film schools and universities that these visitors would never have been able to afford in their home countries. “Also, the level in theatre, dance and cinema was very high.”
Ishtar didn’t grow up in Russia. When she was still a toddler, her parents moved to Chile. However, she later returned to Moscow in the mid-1980s to study at the Moscow Cinema Institute VGIK, the film school founded by Sergei Eisenstein. “I grew up first in Chile, until the Pinochet coup d’état, and then we went to Costa Rica which was the land of my grandfather, the father of my mother.”
Ishtar was studying in Moscow during the Perestroika period, when Russian society was opening up. While at the VGIK, she fell under the influence of legendary actor and director, Aleksey Batalov, star of the Soviet movie The Cranes Are Flying, winner of the Palme D’Or at the 1958 Cannes Film Festival. One of his later films, Moscow Does Not Believe In Tears, won the Oscar for Best Foreign Film in 1981.
Many great directors attended the VGIK, among them Andrei Tarkovsky.
Tarkovsky’s impressionistic, lyrical, autobiographical 1975 masterpiece Mirror, about his childhood and his poet father, is a clear influence on My Lost Country. “It is my favourite film,” she declares. “I love this film because its structure is poetic. There is not a narrative voice. It has moments of his [Tarkovsky’s life], his memories and his father’s poetry also.”
Every time she sees Mirror, Ishtar adds, she discovers something new. “It is never the same!”
The director hopes that My Lost Country will have a similar effect on viewers. Most documentary films use talking heads, inter titles and interviews. Ishtar avoids such scaffolding. Instead, she pulls together photos, 8mm film, 16mm footage, VHS home movies, scrap books, images in catalogues and books to bring her father’s story to life. “I want to create a poem with this film. I spent more than 10 years shooting and editing,” she says of the “natural, organic structure” of the film – and of its many “different textures.”
“I tried to give to the viewers the possibility to imagine and to have their own interpretation,” the director continues. “This is what I want, an active viewer.” She wasn’t working with a script or a treatment. Her approach was improvisatory and free-flowing. “I was trying to find the film inside the images.”
In a period when humanity is teetering on the edge “of the abyss,” Ishtar argues that art and poetry are more important than ever. “The poetry is in the film in many moments. We need now, more than ever, to read poetry, to share poetry, because the opposite to destruction and war is artistic creation.”
Pulling together the archive material was a painstaking task. Much of the memorabilia belonged to her father. Ishtar describes it as “almost a miracle” that it survived, given how much her father travelled around the world. “He never lost these photographs or these memories.”
Ishtar also contacted her father’s old students and the actors who worked with him. They too contributed material.
By its nature, theatre work is ephemeral. It isn’t captured on paper or celluloid. Nonetheless, the documentary provides a vivid account of the father’s life and work. Ishtar includes montages of old stills that are so fluently edited together that it seems they have come to life.
One aim behind the documentary is to give younger generations a sense of the creative world in Iraq before Saddam Hussein and in Chile before Pinochet. “They [the two dictators] damaged this artistic development. This was a tragedy also…It was very important to rescue this. I want the new generation to know about these memories. They need to continue to live, to create.”
Ishtar self-funded the project in its early stages. She edited and produced the documentary on her own but later brought on board her friend, renowned Egyptian filmmaker, Hala Lotfy of Hassala Films, as executive producer. The project also received some backing late on from the Red Sea Foundation. Omeed Khalid for Iraqi Films was also a supporter as were Soledad Cáceres and Rod Sáez for Cintámani Films. The final part of post-production was completed in the Dominican Republic, primarily because Ishtar teaches in a film school there.
“This film especially I dedicate to Iraq…but also to Chile,” Ishtar says. Like her father, she has a very deep connection to both countries. “This film also is about the love I feel with my father and the pain I feel because he couldn’t go back to Iraq, he couldn’t work in Iraq. This pain lives with me and this film, I think, is like a country that I create for us, a lost country but also a recovered country!”
