Filmmaker Rachida El Garani is dealing with deeply personal and traumatic subject matter in her new project In My Father’s House. The project, which is being presented at the virtual RE>CONNEXT showcase, focuses on the Belgian-Moroccan director’s relationship with her father, a stern patriarch whose decisions many years ago threatened to ruin her life.
The father is now in his late 70s and suffering from the early stages of Alzheimer’s Disease. She is hoping that making the documentary will provide them both with a chance of reconciliation.
“I’ve been very silent about it for so many years – for 25 years,” El Garani says of the harrowing events that her film will expose.
When her father was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s in 2016, she realised that he was slowly turning into a different man. She wanted to rebuild her relationship with him before he lost his memory entirely.
Her father was a huge movie fan and liked to film family occasions. “He introduced me to cinema,” she remembers. She was the oldest daughter. In her childhood years, they were very close. Nonetheless, he was the one who forced her into an arranged marriage which came close to destroying her. This is the paradox that the documentary investigates.
“It’s obviously a very cultural thing. Morocco is a very patriarchal society. My father is a man who is very dominant. My mother was always the one who took care of us. She never worked. She took care of us. She took care of her husband.”
El Garani talks about growing up in two different cultures, with one foot in Europe and one in North Africa. The family was based in Genk in Belgium but the father didn’t want to stay there. Nor did he endorse her ambitions to become a filmmaker. It was always his plan that the family would eventually return to Morocco.
The man her father forced her to marry turned out to be an abusive husband. He beat her up and was also capable of sexual violence. At first, when she ended up in hospital, her father promised to support her against him. However, he soon backtracked. When she got out of hospital, her family delivered her back to the husband.
There were reasons for the husband’s antagonism toward her. She made it very clear that she didn’t love him. She was still a teenager, living her life, when she was made to marry him – and she was in love with someone else. She remembers her father’s fury when she resisted the idea of the marriage – how he broke her stereo player which shattered “into a thousand pieces.” He then told her: “this thing has rotted your mind and made you listen to things not allowed in our culture.”
The irony was that the father, who left Morocco in the early 60s, himself had enjoyed the western lifestyle, drinking beer with his friends in the local bars and hooking up with a Flemish girlfriend. He himself had later married out of love and yet had denied his daughter the opportunity to do the same.
His daughter’s marriage was doomed from the start. She wanted to complete her education, not to become her new husband’s vassal. ‘I was like a dog who was beaten up,” she says of the relationship.
Now, El Garani is re-married, to her “first love.” Her family try to tell her that “time heals the old wounds,” but she can’t accept this idea. She wants to face up to the past. They’re deeply suspicious of her documentary. Nonetheless, she is pushing ahead. As in David France’s Welcome to Chechnya, she is using animation techniques in order to hide the faces of her relatives, who haven’t given permission for El Garani to use their identities.
The film is produced by Jurgen Buedts and made through Las Belgas. It has support from the Doha Film Institute. This is El Garani’s first feature, following on from her award-winning graduation project Into Darkness (2015). This won her the “Wildcard” prize from the Flanders Audiovisual Fund which enabled her to begin work on the feature. Now, the director and her team are due to travel to Morocco in early October to start shooting.
The director’s father’s health continues to deteriorate. His short-term memory is going. Nonetheless, she believes that making the documentary will be cathartic for him as well as her.
“That is what I am aiming for…to restore my relationship with my father,” she says. “I want to sort things out because we are a broken family. I really want this broken family to get reunited…”
