Leena reviews Darine Hotait's beautiful short film, I Say Dust, and talks with her about her thoughts on the role and power of film.
In bustling Brooklyn, Moun and Hal, two Arab-American women, fall in love and explore conflicting meanings of home, identity and memory.聽
I Say Dust, written and directed by Darine Hotait, is unique in that it centers the stories of two LBPQ* Arab women. Arab literature and cinema are riddled with depictions of women鈥檚 bodies as metaphors for home and objects onto which men carve their conceptions of identity. Women are the canvas and substance for men鈥檚 self-creation, always defined by their relationship to them, relegated to symbolism and rarely active agents in the dialogue. At the same time, creative depictions of LGBT Arabs have focussed on the gay male experience. While these depictions are groundbreaking and worthy of celebration in their own right, the preclusion of LBPQ women from these depictions arises from the same biases against women.聽
In I Say Dust, Darine defies both traditions. She fuses the worlds of sexuality and national identity - the body becomes not only the vehicle through which Moun and Hal navigate complex discourses around identity, but also the ground upon which their identities are built and constantly reconstructed. Their relationship is both an expression of love and romance, and a metaphor for the labour of home-making. Intimacy is a way for Moun and Hal to find homes in one other, to make homes of each other, even as they battle the loss of belonging they live and embody.
The film鈥檚 power and beauty comes in its subtlety. The dialogue is sparse yet rich with meaning; the acting is delicate and arresting; a soft, warm glow infects all the shots with a dream-like quality; the music, tender, washes over you to paint a tranquil backdrop for the events of the film. The story鈥檚 intensity and potency lies in Darine鈥檚 ability to sing cinematic brilliance in the interstices between scenes and to reveal more about the characters in their silence. The plot is unsaturated and always in dialogue with the audience: what is strategically unpictured by Darine is viscerally felt by the viewer.
The closing scene is open-ended with Moun in a hot bathtub, unfurling in the steam like one of her tea flowers and Hal crunching snow under her boots. The creation of identity, we are to understand, is an eternal process of sublimation: a simultaneous evaporation and crystallization of self. The collision of Moun and Hal鈥檚 worlds sends reverberations that linger in the air long after the credits roll.聽
READ THE FULL REVIEW/INTERVIEW AND WATCH THE TRAILER聽HERE
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