Interview by Youssef Rakha Born in the village of Korba, near Tunis, in 1948, Nacer Khemir, or, as he insists on being called in Arabic print, Mohamed Al-Nasir Al-Khumeir -- poet, sculptor, story-teller, better known as award-winning filmmaker -- is the auteur of Le collier perdu de la colombe (The Lost Dove's Necklace, 1990), in which the bygone glory of the Arabs takes the form of a book, one partially burned page of which propels the young protagonist forward on a journey that turns out to be more inward than outward. Yet, though he finds a complete copy of the Andalusian writer Ibn Hazm's famous tract on love, The Dove's Necklace, only to lose it, this calligrapher's apprentice does transcend the state of moral disintegration and impending civil war with which he is surrounded, broaching a magic world not only of imagination but, crucially, of memory. Like many intellectuals of the Arab West, the French-educated, Paris-based Khemir has an equivocal relationship with his cultural identity. In a sense, indeed, he is a committed Arabist who obsessively collects and peruses the literary canon -- the legacy of better times, clearer thinking and greater civilisation. At the same time, impatient with the ephemeral antics of present-day cultural spheres and deeply resentful of their futile politicisation, he is a self-professed Francophone, French being the language in which he does most of his writing and thinking, and through which he reaches out to audiences throughout the world. This love-hate relationship with Arabness is reflected in his feelings about Egypt, the Arabs' supposed cultural locus, which he had not visited in over eight years when, succumbing to the persuasion of a fellow Paris-residing Tunisian, he agreed to attend the independent festival Cinema Tunis -- held in the period 29 March-4 April in the Townhouse Gallery, the American University in Cairo's Falaki Theatre, the Filmmakers' Association and the Opera House's Creativity Centre -- in which three of his films were being screened. Khemir, who had rejected the invitation of the government's large-scale Cairo International Film Festival, used this as an opportunity to express his anger with the country which, he said during the first of several talks, had promised Arabs everywhere to nurture and promote their intellectual work, only to desert and exclude them. Though screening to a more or less full house, the Falaki Theatre double bill of Nacer Khemir's films, Les baliseurs du desert (1984) and the aforementioned Le collier, left a sizable portion of the audience inappropriately nonplused. Incredibly flowery costumes, unremarkable classical Arabic dialogue and claustrophobic, low-budget sets aside, the acting seemed somewhat simplistic, the pace crawling, the subtle message progressively lost in an ever more complex phantasmagoria of love, loss and spiritual journeying. In contrast to the earlier Les baliseurs (Desert Wanderers), this, as Khemir himself describes it, is the director's homage to Arab culture; those who are familiar with the depths and breadths of the language, its literature and civilisation will instantly latch onto the signals it transmits. Yet one cannot help feeling, in this connection, that what the viewer is offered remains in essence an outsider's viewpoint, open -- admittedly like much Tunisian cinema -- to accusations of Orientalism. This must be a result of the filmmaker's failure to engage with the Arab present -- a point he vehemently contended in response to one question after the screening. Abstracted though they might be, he said -- always with an aesthetic end in view -- his films deal fundamentally with present-day Arab dilemmas. The wanderers of the first film, for example, a work he describes as the Western face of Le collier (those steeped in Western culture will readily interact with and assimilate it), symbolise the Arab future -- lost in motion, away from home and family, purposelessly scaling the derelict plains. Yet it is arguably Khemir's divorce from day-to-day realities of life in the Arab world that makes for a negative impression of distance. It is rather with his own individualistic message that Khemir is concerned: an orphan in the backwater of Arab civilisation yearns for the great Andalusian city across the Mediterranean sea: Cordoba or Granada; or else, as in his latest film, Baba Aziz (2005), a Sufi crosses a vast expanse stretching from the Atlantic shores of the Maghreb all the way into Iran. Baba Aziz, Khemir says, was his way of combining both perspectives, Arab and Western. Driven by the desire to relocate his religious heritage in an increasingly hostile world, the film is an attempt to, as it were, "wipe the mud of the face" of Islam: "Suppose you were walking with your father on the street and he fell and got mud on his face. What do you do then? You help him up and wipe the mud off his face." More generally he described his approach as a tip-of-the-iceberg mode of narration: "Narrative, for me, is transcendent. It becomes transcendent through abstraction. It's a kind of Islamic thought, too. When I point to something, I am indicating 10 times that thing, but nine out of 10 parts of the whole remain invisible. A kind of Islamic thought, as I said, and a way of confirming the cultural density my viewpoint..." Khemir speaks softly, distractedly, in the lobby of the Pyramisa Hotel. A lean, dark man with a beret-covered splash of light grey hair, he is always complaining about the need to revert to French even though he is more than adequately articulate in Tunisian Arabic -- a dialect he made no effort to temper for his largely xenophobic audience. Even this, he accounts for by reference to Egyptian-centred Arab failure: so much more attention is paid to his work outside the Arab world that he has not had enough experience of, hence training in presenting his work and career in that language -- especially not in the dialects of the Mashreq where, he feels, his efforts, though worthy of being reckoned with, have been largely ignored. Reader and conversationalist, Khemir is clearly, also, auteur : even his closest friends will readily attest to his being "an artist" who expects to be treated as "the centre of the universe". Yet there is something deeply disarming about the passion with which he dismisses the unduly limited space he occupies in Arab intellectual spheres as well as its intellectual surroundings, let alone the annals of popular culture that proceed alongside it. The same is true of his tirades against the writers and thinkers of the day: to his mind the politicisation of art and literature trivialises and devalues the sublime; it is but a symptom of the general malaise. Ironically, of course, Khemir's own perspective is, at a deeper level, fundamentally political, in the sense that it not only questions the power structure governing Arab culture but takes issue with the oppressive, largely inadequate regimes in control of it as well; even more crucially, it is a stance that constantly attempts to dislodge -- "transcend" -- the historical moment, often through placing it in a far broader geopolitical perspective: the shifting fortunes of civilisations... That said, Khemir is also, somewhat anachronistically -- and although he provides no definite proof of this -- a religious man, a latter-day Sufi (minus the cult- like appendages) who sees filmmaking as a form of necessary testimony, a document and a statement before it can be an object of beauty. Of all the praise he has received for Baba Aziz -- and that is considerable -- he singles out the responses of Arab expatriates or marginalised members of Arab societies who, on coming out of the screening, spoke of a sense of reclaimed dignity, a retrieval of lost pride, often accompanied by tears. Arab "by virtue of the language", Khemir yet addresses humanity at large: "I do not address myself to anyone. People who have absolutely no connection to Arab culture and committed Arabs alike have responded to my work." He started out as a painter, after all -- Khemir continues to exhibit paintings and plaster statues in Tunis, Paris and elsewhere in the world on a regular basis -- and he describes the shift from the plastic to the audiovisual as a kind of disillusionment: "At first, when I was painting, I was expressing a universal feeling, a pure and innocent sense of being. I felt alive, that I could live in a secure country, that I had a homeland and a father" -- an important point, the latter: the loss of his father was hugely disorienting for Khemir -- "and that the world was a safe place. When I became an orphan I understood that I was at the centre of a whirlpool, that I would never know comfort. I felt it was necessary to start expressing that..." There is about his recollections a sense of inevitability: "When my father died I experienced an intellectual transformation. I felt that a true human being had to give testimony, to be able to express his capacity for having been witness -- otherwise the most valuable things are annulled." The urgency may have been compounded by his attending boarding school -- he comes, he says, "from an aristocratic but poor family" -- which, in the form of a weekly film screening, also afforded him his first encounter with the liberating power of the screen: "Once they switched off the light, I would feel as if I was released from a prison." Perhaps Khemir is better understood as a modern-day Renaissance man -- multimedia artist, performer, commentator, amateur manuscript editor, writer and theorist -- whose calling has less to do with film technique as such than with expressing an individual and collective identity against the odds. "I have no choice," he says. 'I've had to adapt to reality." On coming back from Paris, where he attended university, he therefore "went and sought out funding from Tunisian and French parties". He had already made an animation film about a mule cart driver who, on having an accident, discovers that the mule is more important to his employers than him, the drawings for which he executed himself. Through the 1970s he made three films combining documentary with feature techniques -- his way around limited resources. Since then, in addition to his three better known films -- Le collier, for one, is widely regarded as a classic -- he has performed as a story- teller in, among other major venues, the Theatre national de chaillot, published four books, notably Le chant de genies (The genies' song, 2001) with Acte Sud and worked with Swiss, French and Tunisian TV.
