In her self-shot film, selected for IDFA Best of Fests, Cléo Cohen, a granddaughter of Jewish Arabs form Tunisia and Algeria, is determined to discover her identity. She speaks to Business Doc Europe about the emotional and evocative journey that results, as well as colonization and the essential business (at least from her grandmothers’ perspective) of straightening her very curly hair…
Since her teenage years, filmmaker Cléo Cohen has always been acutely self-conscious about being asked where she came from. She lives in France but many assume she is from Morocco, Tunisia or Algeria. “People were thinking that I had a common origin with them.”
Cohen wouldn’t reply out loud but, whenever it was suggested she was from somewhere in North Africa, she would say to herself, “What? No, I am Jewish. I have nothing to do with these countries.”
However, Cohen couldn’t help but become more and more curious about her origins. She began to read the work of Albert Memmi, the French-Tunisian writer most famous for The Coloniser And The Colonised, a 1957 book looking at how colonisation affects and distorts the lives of both oppressors and victims. She also studied histories of the Jews in North Africa. She started asking her relatives searching questions about their lives in Tunisia and Algeria before they came to France.
All this research fed into Cohen’s debut documentary feature May God Be With You, which had its Dutch premiere recently at IDFA, having won a prize in the International Competition at Dok Leipzig and also screened at the Cinemas Festival in Montpellier. It is sold internationally by Pascale Ramonda.
The director realised that there was a big gap in knowledge and consciousness among her relatives about their ethnic and national origins. They would refer to themselves as “Pieds-Noirs,” which was the term used pejoratively for those of French origin born in Algeria during French rule. She knew the real story was much more complicated than that.
“They were not so interested in my obsessions!” Cohen remembers how her family responded to her investigations. She’d advise them to read more about their background but they would tell her, “we don’t really care, we know where we come from.” Besides, this all seemed like a story from very long ago. They had been assimilated within France for many, many years. Yes, they were nostalgic about the old days in North Africa but they had moved on. They were therefore startled when Cohen announced she would be visiting Tunisia and Algeria for her film.
This turned out to be an emotional and evocative journey for the filmmaker. “I felt really familiar with the places and the life and the scents.” Tunis hadn’t changed that much in the years since the family had left. Her grandmother’s descriptions of the city turned out to be remarkably accurate.
“I could really find the places she knew and she loved. So it was really moving.”
Her family had talked about Tunisia as if it was another world. For Cohen, it was a simple matter of a two-hour flight.
With her film, Cohen intends to make a political statement. She is reclaiming her identity as an Arab-Jew. “I think it is very important to maintain the common history we had,” she says of the many centuries in which Jews and Arabs lived side by side in North Africa. She discovered that the familiar narrative of the French “saving” the Jews in the Arab world simply wasn’t accurate.
“Jewishness is not exclusive from other identities…” the director reflects.
Cohen’s frizzy hair features prominently in the film. Her grandmother is shown combing it, as if trying to tug out its curls.
“It has always been something important between my grandmothers and me because they always wanted me to straighten my hair, since I was a kid. They think that if it is not straightened, I look like a ‘crazy girl,’” she explains. “For me, of course, it is a big metaphor for the fact they are ashamed of those physical signs of African [identity].”
In the film, Cohen is shown performing her ironic, playful version of an Arab dance. “I look very…not comfortable. But still I am trying,” she says of her little solo performance.
Cohen shot the documentary herself, on her own, using a Canon C100 camera – and is constantly in front of the camera. How did she manage it? “I did it with a tripod most of the time and it was a lot of trials and failures. I tried to choose my frame. I was like, OK, I like this.” She shot quite sparingly. Her editor said she had far fewer rushes than most filmmakers. “But I think that is how I learned to do film, not to shoot everything…it is not direct cinema. I didn’t have a lot of hours because I knew specifically what I wanted.”
The director is now carrying on her investigations into French, Arab and Jewish identity in her next project. “I am not done with this subject. I am currently working on a fiction project about two families from Tunisia who have the same family name but one is Muslim and one is Jewish.”
Meanwhile, her next documentary is likely to look at the challenges facing young Jewish women from Arab origins.
