"A Letter to My Children": An Interview with Rabie Mustapha

An interview with Rabie Mustapha on his film, The Cities I Live In.

The Cities I Live In (2022) is an ambitious film. In less than 10 minutes, it moves between three cities, Belfast, Beirut and Damascus, across several years and instances of violence and calm. And yet it is also a deeply introspective and focused film, a speculative remembrance and a love poem, addressed from the Palestinian filmmaker Rabie Mustapha to his young children, Adam and Lara, both of whom were under two years old during its making.

This film-letter flits back and forth in time and space. Moving mainly between the tender but tentative domesticity of Belfast in 2021 and 2022, to Beirut of 2019 and 2020, during an uprising and the devastating Port Explosion of August 20th. The instability of this "city which can turn into a beast at any moment" is manifested in shots that heave and spiral into shape unpredictably. A shot of apartment blocks slowly spins on its axis, as if the world is folding in on itself, and the aftermath of an explosion is rendered as a discombobulating haze of broken glass and masonry and diffuse focus. There is beauty in Mustapha’s portrait of this wounded place too, such as in a trembling, night-drenched long shot, taken from a boat, of a skyline which has had to reassemble itself over and over.

The few, fleeting images of Damascus, shot in 2007 by members of Mustapha’s family, matches the intimacy of the Belfast’s scenes and yet feel more elusive, as ghostly glimpses of Mustapha’s youth. Shot on DV, the format’s fuzzy texture strikes, in contrast to the stark high definition digital of the scenes closer to the present, as the broiling medium of nostalgia. Nostalgia in a more literal sense of the word meaning a remembrance that is filled with longing but also pain. The lightning rod of all these careening places, images and emotions, is Mustapha’s own voice and text, which is quiet yet propulsive, metaphorical yet deeply personal, even confessional.

Near the end of the film, Mustapha worries over whether his children will be rid of the “curse of living in collapsing cities"? Events not only preceding but occurring around the conducting and publishing of this interview would seem to assure this fear.

During the week that Mustapha and I spoke, Belfast was hit by an outbreak of race riots. The violence, directed at people of colour, immigrants and refugees, which left several injured, homes attacked, and businesses burnt out, was led by British and Irish fascists and loyalist paramilitaries. However, this powder keg was assembled by the state with their responsibility for, and refusal to remedy, many debilitating social ills, such as the city's lack of affordable and public housing. One could blame the maintenance of such deprivation and the scapegoating of those most precarious and disenfranchised, on plain top-down incompetency, corruption and laziness. And yet Belfast was and is a segregated city by conscious design, and it is in the best interest of those in power not only to keep those divisions in place but extend them.

In the weeks following the interview, the Zionist settler colonial state intensified its assault on Lebanon with a ground invasion and heaving bombing up and down the country, including Beirut. Now, we are in 'ceasefire' against which Israel continually chips away. The publication of this interview also comes shortly after the sudden fall of Bashar al-Assad and his rule in Syria. This hopeful moment of the fall of a dictator, of prisons opened wide and long-awaited reunions, seems to teeter on a knife edge, for imperialism has seized the opportunity to further constrict, kill and steal. Israel has increased its bombing of Damascus and is in the process of retrenching and expanding its occupation of the Golan Heights. Turkey too ramps up its invasion, bombing and ethnic cleansing in the north of the country, with the US and NATO’s diplomatic and military support bolstering both land grabs. All the while, the genocide in Gaza and Zionist settlement of the West Bank continues unabated.

In short, displacement, mass violence and uncertainty seem to be order of the day and tomorrow. And yet in response, it should only increase conviction that one must not only hope for but work towards dismantling this violence and displacement and the systems that produce them. The Cities I Live In is a beautifully direct and poetic expression of past and present fears and overwhelming loss, but also a firm tenderness in the face of now and for the future.

I spoke with Mustapha in his Belfast home about the conception and making of the film, the influence of his background as a journalist, the filmmaker Ghassan Salhab, a film he is currently making about a diverse school in West Belfast, and more.

A note and a reminder: This interview was conducted on the 22nd of August, 2024.

Ruairí McCann: I read a short interview where you said you didn’t originally intend for the film to be so personal. I find that interesting given that it is not only about three cities, Belfast, Beirut and Damascus, that you have lived in, but it is so rooted in your own state of mind and perspective and driven by this first-person address. I’m curious, if maybe there was a different film that you had in mind originally, what was it? And how did this very personal, letter-like film develop?

Rabie Mustapha: Yeah, it was much different originally. So, The Cities I Live In was produced for this development program, Bridging the Gap, with the Scottish Documentary Institute. The original idea I pitched for it was something about my experience of three cities that have experienced violence or civil war of some sort, of different degrees or extents. The point of view at the beginning was me looking at these cities from the outside, historically and current.

I actually had the idea, I think it was there in the original pitch, about doing something about three cinemas in the three cities. In Beirut, there is this huge building called The Egg which was built in the 1960s as part of a commercial complex, and it was supposed to be a cinema, [but] was never realised. The project didn’t finish and then the civil war happened in Lebanon and The Egg was ignored and became vacant. Noone used it, until an uprising, first in 2015 and then in 2019, [and then] people could enter The Egg and started doing things. I was involved in one film screening in that building, which is not very safe [laughs] but yeah that was one cinema. And then here in Belfast, after moving to the house I’m living in, and where we are now, I realised I live near a building that was a cinema, the Curzon, which is now an apartment building. And then in Damascus, there was a cinema in the area where I lived in, which was where I first experienced cinema, a weird place where you go watch films with rats [laughs].

So, the film was originally about those cities from the point of view of those buildings, their histories and [how they] all shared the fact that they are not really functional as cinemas but people still experience them, or remember them in the case of Belfast, as cinemas. Then through the development program, I started changing and moved towards me actually being in the film, which is really something that I thought I will never do; a film about myself or with myself at the centre.

Is there a particular reason why you went in that direction?

Yeah, when I was making the film, I was becoming a father of twins. It became obvious to me, in a kind of organic way, that I should be there in the film. And further on, [the original idea about the three cinemas felt] a bit hollow for the feelings that I wanted to actually express, and yeah, it became a letter from me to my children. I think that other film is still there. It might be made somehow, in other ways, at some point, but I think at that time I needed to tell the story from that perspective of a father.

I was curious too about how the structure of the film came into shape because the film jumps across quite a lot, mostly between Belfast and Beirut, and different times, 2019, 2020, and then you see footage from 2007 from Damascus. It doesn’t stick to a very linear path and there’s a lot of matching and mixing together of the architecture of the different cities. I’m curious did that develop in the shooting or was it more in the editing that this very prismatic structure came to be?

No, this film was made in the editing. Anything that’s from Damascus is personal archive from my family that I had some of but then while working on the film landed on more. Anything I had from Beirut was stuff that I was filming from other projects and so wasn’t planned for this. [Before The Cities I Live In], I had actually wanted to do a film about The Egg and the experience of Beirut from the uprising in 2019 to Covid, and how Covid impacted the uprising and shot it down because everyone needed to go back home and being in public space was not possible. And then an explosion that happened in Beirut [on] the 4th of August, 2020, that was something I was working on, so I have footage from that. The only, what they call, ‘production’, the only thing filmed for this film, happened in Belfast and that’s when I knew that it’s got to be about a letter from me to my children. I started filming me and my children.

I think text, the voice, the letter itself determined the footage, so I actually started from the text and then edited over the text.

Yeah, cause you do feel while watching the film that the guiding principle is more your voice. The rhythm of it feels very musical and the sound is important in terms of finding, or creating, this bridge or a feeling of rupture between places. Like, for instance, the opening with the call of prayer played over images of Belfast.

Yeah, but also sounds from Belfast as well. The sound design was very important to work on and I, miraculously, landed on Victor [Bresse]. We still didn’t meet in person, which is a weird thing, but I worked with an editing consultant, Carine [Doumit]. I was editing the film, and then at some stage I was like ‘I think there’s need for a sound designer to be involved’. Because I knew the sounds, the soundscapes, I had in mind, but I didn’t know how to merge them and how to have them be expressed as one thing, not something that’s ruptured. Carine suggested reaching out to Victor and that was a really good choice because I think I spent much more time working on the sound design with him than even editing. We spent a lot of time on sound. And yeah the idea was to have the soundscapes merge and emerge from each other.

It definitely comes across. There’s that shot, filmed here, of the plane going ahead with the roar of the plane, and then you get the images and sounds of Beirut from, maybe, the port explosion. Also music as well, towards the end of the film there’s the folk song, The Ballad of Springhill, about the Springhill mining disaster. Was that another moment you captured off the cuff or was it something that was very specific that you wanted to put in?

[When] I captured that moment of Adam, my son, and Dearbhla, my wife, singing to him, I knew that Dearbhla and her voice needed to be in the film as well. The plan was that she would be involved in music or something, but I captured that moment and yeah like the song itself and the lyrics felt organic to the project. So, we built from there as well in the sound design. We used that moment and built a little bit on it. There is humming in the film that Dearbhla did as well but the starting point was that song.

When I first saw the film your children were present at the screening. I remember them running around. They’re quite young in the film. Maybe about one year old?

Yeah, yeah. One and a half I think.

I’m curious if they have any thoughts about the film itself?

No [laughs], not yet. That screening was the first time they would come to see the film, and they’re very small. They’re four years old. I don’t think they even realised they were on the screen, because they were busy doing other things, and then I needed to bring them out because people were like… [laughs] It was confusing. They were on screen and their voices were in the place where we were screening it. I thought maybe it would be better for everyone that they go out, so they didn’t see the film. I have a lot of thoughts about whether it's ethical even to be doing this film and having them on screen at all, but I always thought that there is a bit of fragility that I’m expressing in this film that could match the fragility of their images and of their being. I don’t know if that allows me the right to have them on screen but that’s what justified that I could carry on making this film.

The way the film ends: dedicating it to them and stating that it’s a film for them for later.

I think that also happened quite late, but it felt very natural. When I was finishing the editing I think that was the last thing I did. More recently I’m thinking, more of the fact that there is much more that they need to know as well. Everything changed since this genocide in Gaza. I feel like what they will know from the film is little and I will try to tell them more, try to comprehend what is happening myself and try to convey it somehow. I think the film doesn’t tell them much about the history of the region. It tells them a bit about the history of their father and about moments that were crucial for both of us; me being in Lebanon, them taking shape in Ireland, the separation and then the meeting here in Belfast. I think on a personal level it tells them a bit about our shared history but on a larger context, there’s more that I want them to know.

Just reading about some of the other work that you have done, including work as a translator and a journalist in Beirut. Given that the film is driven by a text, I’m curious about in what ways these other pursuits have informed you as a filmmaker.

I do think of myself as a writer and a filmmaker, and I think I always want to have text as something that’s present in the films that I want to make. Sometimes I feel that’s a burden, that I actually want to think as a filmmaker and just think of things without relying on text but I have to agree with myself that I’m a writer and a filmmaker and go on and have them together. I think more recently I’m accepting that I will be having text as part of any film I do and films will not be ‘pure films’ in any way.

Well, I’m not sure about the notion of a ‘pure film’ anyway.

Yeah. So, the previous things I did, translation and journalism, were all-the-time jobs. I remember sitting in a masterclass training on film with a Lebanese auteur, Ghassan Salhab. We had to introduce ourselves and I said that I worked in journalism and I’m a filmmaker, and he said that you have to remember that film is different from journalism and that’s something that I always remember. Like when I’m making films, I’m not telling a story like a journalist and I think that’s something I’ve managed to separate [from filmmaking]. I hope I’ve gotten rid of the journalist.

I think with The Cities I Live In, in terms of it being more speculative and first-person, a very personal account, rather than a history of these cities. Journalism can mean many different things but maybe someone who is a journalist first and a filmmaker second would be more interested in being didactic.

And factual, that’s what I don’t want. I think there’s an interesting conversation about the relationship between documentary and journalism. Some people sometimes think that they are the same, and that if you are making documentaries you are a journalist of a sort, but it’s not true. With all respect to journalists, documentaries is a more expansive, I think, way of telling truth.

The director you mentioned, Ghassan Salhab, he directed a film called Phantom Beirut.

Yeah.

One of the things that stands out from that film is these talking head interludes, where he interviews the cast members and they are talking as themselves not as their characters. It’s interesting. It’s something like almost a journalistic technique but being used in this unusual way..

I have to go back and check with Ghassan Salhab if he actually did journalism at some stage because yeah, I think that advice might have been coming from personal experience. He has one of his films [1958 (2009)] where he interviews his mum. He did something great with that film. He played music that he knows that she loves and then she started humming and it broke the factualness of that interview.

I would like to talk about a few of the projects you are working on now. One, for instance, is about a multi-ethnic school in West Belfast: St Mary’s Primary School. Given that the film we have been talking about is about your children, it seems to be expanding similar ideas to a wider community.

Yeah, this is a short film. It will be about this very diverse school in West Belfast which was founded originally by mothers of Irish travelling kids who didn’t have places to go for education during The Troubles. The mothers found this school and through its history more and more people started coming. At this moment, people from everywhere like, Arab and African countries, people from the Roma community, from the Irish travelling community, and the working class of West Belfast go to that school, so it’s an unique school. The idea of the film is to work in a participatory way, where we will hand cameras to the children and they’ll film, we’ll film and maybe we will film each other. It will be an experiment.

It’s two things, first I feel like since coming to Belfast, and I came to Belfast by pure chance, just because I needed to be in Ireland. I couldn’t come. The visa thing was easier to come to the UK and that’s why I’m in Belfast. But yeah, before coming here I didn’t know much about Belfast, I think the only knowledge of Belfast was [from] watching The Image You Missed by Dónal Foreman. And then I had to move here and my notion was that, I’m coming to a place where I will be the only Arab, the only non-white person [laughs] coming to the city, and that wasn’t true. I learned later on, the way Belfast is now, more diverse, more people from different backgrounds, is a new thing, and I want to explore that moment of a city becoming diverse. It’s more relevant now with whatever happened the past month [the race riots that took place in Belfast during the week of this interview]. I think there’s an othering of those who are not white and I feel there needs to be stories about us, by the ones who are not white. I don’t know how else to describe it. To tell our own stories and not be talked about by others or have others come and tell our stories, so that’s why the children will be handed cameras to tell the stories of different communities from the point of view of the communities.

The other thing is that looking at the world in general, and Belfast in particular, from the point of [view of] children is something I started thinking of since having children, and thinking of how do children see us? How do they see this world? It is a scary thought, to think of what kind of world, in my case as a father, what kind of world I’ve brought my children into. I suppose this film will be going into that question, what kind of world we have? And how do children see it?