Prophecy of the Plants
Interview
This year’s CPH:DOX festival presents the new film by Nour Ouayda, The Secret Garden (2023). It is a fable in eight chapters about a forbidden garden that suddenly explodes inside the city. With her restless camera Ouayda searches and captures images of nature that find its way through the cracks of the asphalt, climb the walls, and sit in pots on the balconies, all accompanied by a voice-over that tells the story of two friends trying to solve the mystery of the garden. It is a perfect film for the festival that every year showcases the avant-garde of documentary filmmaking and hybrid cinema. It is great to see Nour Ouayda back so soon after Towards the Sun (2019), which Mads B. Mikkelsen (Head of Programme) put on his ballot for the Sight and Sound 2022 poll of the Greatest Films of All Time, and which Skuelyst had already covered very enthusiastically.
On the occasion of the premiere of The Secret Garden we invited the Lebanese filmmaker to an interview about storytelling, her filmmaking process and the relation between real-life events, myths and tales.
by Nick Bruhn-Petersen
THE SECRET GARDEN
Nour Ouayda, 2023
The Secret Garden is presented at CPH:DOX - a documentary film festival – and while the images and sound follow a documentary mode, then it is also the most direct narrative work I’ve seen by you so far. It plays like a dramatic noir mystery. How did this film, story, and characters come to you?
“In the beginning, was the image of a plant at night illuminated by a flashlight. The light would flash intermittently, move up and down, left and right, as the plant appears and disappears again and again. This was the first image that came to me and around which the film was built. I started recreating this image with my camera phone, photographing plants in the streets at night with the flash on. This activity seeped into the day and my curiosity about these plants grew as I started to notice them everywhere around me. I realized that they sprouted in the oddest places, some of which seemed unreal. The more I stared at them, the stranger they became. All of this cultivated a sense of strangeness and mystery that would infuse the film during the various stages of its making. The feeling that I think was crucial for me is the friction between the familiar and the strange; how the plants I saw every day can suddenly appear alien.
To go back to that first image, the movement of the flashlight had me imagining a story, that of two friends roaming around the city at night searching for their lost cat in between plants, trees, and bushes. And as the project developed, the cat became a magical creature, and the plants, trees, and bushes, mysterious beings with dubious origins. As for the characters themselves, Camelia and Nahla, they have been accompanying Carine Doumit (co-writer and editor of the film) and me in multiple stories, texts, and films. So, it was obvious to us that they would be the protagonists in this story.”
In the film, the story of the garden will only be revealed in myths and tales. In the era of superhero movies, “serious” cinema seems to be moving away from the fantastical. Are you purposefully pushing against the current, or is your vision of Cinema inherently gravitating towards tales and storytelling?
I would definitely say that I am gravitating toward tales and storytelling. In Towards the Sun and one sea, 10 seas (2019), I think I was shyly experimenting with that tone. But something in how surreal the events of the past three years have pulled me closer to that mode of telling stories. I played with it more directly in my contribution to the collective exhibition At Edge of the Forest, A Garden (2021) and in the video Not All Things That Shine Are Beautiful (2022). I would say that my desire to write stories matured with this film. The realm of tales allows for the possible and the impossible to occupy the same territory and to be in close contact. The limit becomes blurred and the supernatural and the magical can appear, and that’s very amusing and stimulating to me!
Image, sound, and story weave together eminently in The Secret Garden, but at the same time they are also clearly discrete and separate elements: The images don’t just illustrate the narration, sometimes the narration seems to want to understand the images. And the audio always works in sync with the visuals, but the sounds seem to come from a million different real and unreal places. What was the process of writing and shooting the film? Did the story come first and then you shot it, or was the narrative written for the images?
“I shot the film over two years (late 2019 until late 2021). We had not written the story per se, but we had noted down the following premise that later on became the story of the film: After the mysterious explosion of a forbidden garden in the city, two women wander in its remnants searching the plants scattered all over the city for a feline creature that is said to have inhabited it. They are guided through this new flora by illustrations from the notebooks of a botanist, the only person who ever entered this garden.
“I find that the playfulness feeds the potential of magic and strangeness contained in the different elements of the film.”
I knew that I needed to film for Carine and me to start developing the story. I also knew that I would not film people and that I will only film plants. The characters would not be embodied by actresses but only exist through the voice that narrates them. I started noting down locations and plants that I encountered as I moved through the city. I went out filming mostly by myself with the camera and one roll of film for each excursion. I filmed one roll only in each location. It was the first time I shoot on film. So, I was exploring my body’s relationship to the space with these cameras in hand. I shot with Bolex (16mm) and Nizo (Super8) cameras. Both cameras have the option to shoot frame-by-frame and time lapses at various intermittent speeds, allowing me to experiment with in-camera editing. It was a way to carry onto the celluloid the pace of my breath and body as it moved in various locations. I wanted the film to be infused with the energy of the place, and my body was an important carrier of that energy.
Carine and I had a lot of conversations and walks during the whole time I was filming. So she accompanied the process closely. As for the story itself, we wrote it as we were editing. But I would not say that it was written for the images but with them, in the sense that the story shaped the images, and the images, in their turn, shaped the story.”
The sound design in the film is incredibly detailed. For instance, you sometimes hear the wind hiss in the mic from field recordings – sort of breaking the fourth wall aurally – which feels like the sounds of nature cannot be contained within the recording tech, similar to the way the trees and plants create cracks in the city concrete. What were the ideas and thoughts behind the sound design?
“The images were shot without sound. Synchronicity was not a concern when working on the soundtrack. All the sounds used in the film, except for the voice-overs, are recycled sounds. Tatiana el Dahdah (sound engineer) and Ghassan Salhab (filmmaker) gave us access to their sound libraries, which contained mainly ambient sounds as well as a few more precise sounds, easy to isolate. We also used some sounds I had recorded with my phone while walking in the city. I think these are the sounds you are referring to, where we hear a lot of handling of the phone as well as the distortion of the wind. The film’s edit didn't take shape until we identified two or three specific sounds that anchored the images. This was the case with the sound of the birds, the high-pitched squeaking sound of a wheelbarrow, and the horn which were central to the construction of the first two chapters of the film. These strident sounds contributed to the strangeness that the story carried. As for the choice of atmospheres, we wanted to have a multitude of soundscapes to mark the movement of the characters in the city.
The electroacoustic musician, Kinda Hassan, created the film's soundtrack. She also drew from her sound library, working mainly on the transformation of acoustic recordings into electronic sounds. Her intervention on the sounds echoes the overall gesture of the film: that of the gradual transformation of a city and its inhabitants following the sudden appearance of mysterious plants in the streets. Kinda also worked a lot on adding layers of sound, almost imperceptible at times, which created a continuous flow that grew in weirdness as the film progressed. Furthermore, it is the soundtrack that mainly brings a playful tone to the film. It is carried at the same time by the voices, the music as well as the multiple electronic sounds which recall the soundtracks of sci-fi films. I find that this playfulness feeds the potential of magic and strangeness contained in the different elements of the film.”
Watching the film, I was transported to a tradition of experimental filmmaking that personally has meant a lot to me, but doesn’t get cited that often anymore, some of which were Peter Greenaway’s early films featuring the fictional, elusive character Tulse Luper, and more obviously Stan Brakhage. This was no doubt due to you shooting on film, rather than digital, but my question for you is rather, what did you consider to be your personal references for the film? Did you have any immediate influences?
“As part of our continuous exchange and conversations, Carine showed me digital transfers of some films by Helga Fanderl. I remember watching Kakibaum (2009) in which she films in B&W birds on a persimmon tree. It had this frantic quality to it due to the short bursts of exposure she filmed in. There is a shot in my film that I think was a direct copy of that! The one with the birds flying around a tree against a blue sky. This shot was filmed frame-by-frame which gave it a similar agitated feel. Malena Szlam’s Lunar Almanac (2014) and Altiplano (2018) were also on my mind when I was filming. Both filmmakers work with a kind of in-camera editing that has influenced the way I use film cameras.
“The film is not about a specific event, but an attempt to articulate the transformations that occur after such disruptive events. I see this film as a record and a carrier of these changes.”
Other works that fed my imagination were the films of Myriam Charles and Olivier Godin and the writings of Jorge Luis Borges and Henri Michaux. They all work within this realm of magical realism, blurring the lines between fantasy and reality. I consider The Secret Garden to belong to that universe.”
This is your first film after the Beirut harbor explosion in 2020. The film also depicts a sudden event in a city, which then has lasting effects on the place and people. Did the horrible real-life event consciously influence your filmmaking and was this story a way of processing trauma? Or was the comparison never on your mind, and is it important for you to keep your art and life separate from each other?
“The original story of the explosion of a forbidden garden in the city was written in 2019, a year before the port explosion. Incidentally, the port explosion happened a couple of hours after finding out that we received a grant to make the film. The story of the film became a prophecy that materialized in a very terrifying way that day. The port explosion is, for me, one of many disruptive events that took place in the past couple of years alongside the economic collapse, the pandemic, and the uprising. All these events have reshaped how we understand our reality. They have shifted our references. The film is not about a specific event, but an attempt to articulate the transformations that occur after such disruptive events. I see this film as a record and a carrier of these changes.”
My last question is about the ending of the film. In the final chapter, a new plant is described. All at once it sounds terrifying in the vein of Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956 and 1978), and like a glorious potential, perhaps similar to new psychedelics or medicine. What is this new plant to you? A sign of hope or terror?
“This plant is at the same time a foreign body (like the pods in Invasion of the Body Snatchers) but also symptomatic of the landscape of the city described in the film. It is both outside and inside. It is a sign that the strange and the supernatural are no longer in the realm of the impossible but are engrained in our day-to-day life. I guess that there might be something threatening in that but I wouldn’t see it as terrorizing. I see it as an expansion of the limits of what is possible. And I don’t know if that’s a comforting or a dangerous thing. What I am sure of is that it is prophetic of the change to come.”