The Egyptian director Amal Ramsis (Cairo, 1972) arrives at the meeting in a hotel in Bilbao full of energy. He wears a badge with the Palestinian flag and asks directly if we can talk about the war in . He describes himself as an “activist”: this is how he understands his life and professional career, which has included the legal profession, political militancy in clandestine parties, academia (since 2009 he has been the head of the ) and for almost two decades, around the world. of cinema.
(2018), her latest documentary, left her exhausted. The work, in which he addresses the Civil War through the portrait of a Palestinian family, took him more than a decade of research and several lessons about the film industry.
“It was a film for which I barely had financing. I got little and at the end of the process. In Europe, no one was interested in financing a documentary about at least the participation of Arabs in this conflict and even less in supporting an Arab woman who wanted to tell about it,” she says, in this interview, conducted last October. “When you are an Arab woman you have to talk about how difficult it is to live with the veil or the oppression you feel from men. They are the only narratives that interest the West,” he criticizes.
For Ramsis, cinema is a tool with which to question the reality that surrounds her. “I don’t have the luxury of making other types of films, more banal or contemplative, of testing myself as a filmmaker by experimenting, for example, filming a tree in the middle of nowhere,” he quotes, explaining that he uses the camera to get closer to the stories that help deepen on issues that may be more invisible, that provide nuances and put the focus on everyday heroes.
For example, in (2011) he clandestinely recorded activist friends in Egypt just before the revolution. The documentary portrays a country that articulates its discontent over a slow fire and gives many clues to understand what happened before the “explosion” (2015) follows the steps for two years of Mary Daniel, sister of Mina Daniel, known as the “Egyptian Che Guevara.” He was one of the 27 protesters killed in the Maspero massacreon October 9, 2011. That night, the Egyptian military police repressed the In the film, Ramsis is interested in the radical mutation that this event represented for this woman, both on a personal and political level. Both films were self-financed. “I wanted it to be like that, to be free and tell my story without thinking about where the money comes from,” he explains.
When you are an Arab woman you have to talk about how difficult it is to live with the veil or the oppression you feel from men. They are the only narratives that interest the West
“Women have a lot of difficulty entering the film market, but when they pick up the camera, most of them really speak from what moves them. They have a different perspective, because the social situation of women is different from that of men, which is what we are used to seeing,” says the director.
In this, she recognizes the role of her predecessors, such as Assia Dagher, a pioneering actress and producer of Egyptian cinema, and many other contemporaries who are receiving international recognition, such as the Palestinian Mai Masri, the Lebanese Eliane Raheb and the Moroccan. “Making films in the Arab world, we are the continuation of a very long tradition,” says Ramsis.
“I don’t want them to accept me in their circles.”
Before traveling to Bilbao, Amal Ramsis was in the Lebanese city of Tripoli, participating in a creative documentary workshop with eight women, within the framework of the initiative . Created in 2008 and directed by a group of film directors and curators, the project seeks to strengthen an international network of women filmmakers from various regions of the world, especially the Arab world, with the aim of advancing towards gender equality.
What is on the market does not represent us, so making films is our way of defending our existence.
In the context of the Israeli intervention, he doubted the convenience of traveling there. But “the participants were present and working as if nothing was happening. That is their way of resisting: making life continue,” explains an impressed Ramsis. “We cannot stand by and watch them destroy us, we have to continue working to present our own vision of what is happening. What is on the market does not represent us, so making films is our way of defending our existence. What is happening in Lebanon and Palestine is not only military: it is a war of stories,” he argues.
According to the filmmaker, “when the Palestinian or Lebanese people are seen only as victims, there is a look of superiority that is comforting.” “But if we see them as people in struggle, we look at everything they do despite being bombed and your attitude changes,” he says.
From the women trained in the creative documentary workshops not only films are born, but also a collective that now works in solidarity on each one’s individual projects and that breaks the rules of the film industry. This feminine and cooperative model will try to replicate in Lebanon in 2025 and later in other countries. “The market is very competitive, especially in documentary film. I don’t want to be accepted in those circles, I want to create more just ones, which is what we are trying to do in Egypt among women,” she says.
