KAOUTHER BEN HANIA
Kaouther Ben Hania is a Tunisian director. Her film Beauty and the Dogs, premiered at the Cannes Film Festival’s “Un Certain Regard” official selection in 2017, and was the Tunisian entry at the 91st Academy Awards. Her most recent feature, The Man Who Sold His Skin, was selected in the category Best International Feature Film at the 2021 Oscars and part of the official selection in Venice. Her short film I and the Stupid Boy, which is the latest in Miu Miu Women’s Tales short-film series, will premiere at the Venice Film Festival in September.
Interview by TANKPortrait by Brigitte Lacombe
TANK How did you become a filmmaker and did you always know that you wanted to be a director?
Kaouther Ben Hania I wanted to be a writer. Nobody in my family was linked to cinema in any way; cinema was something that came from elsewhere. The most accessible dream for me as a teenager was to become a writer. I loved telling stories; it was something that made me happy. When I went to university I did business studies, which had no link with my passion, but there I discovered an amateur cinema group that tried to make amateur films, and I discovered my calling. I thought to myself, “This is great.” I’m a very visual person, I don’t really have a style as a writer, and I tend to write in the present tense to write what I am imagining. So I started writing screenplays and tried to change my career. Then I went to Paris to do screenplay writing and there I started making movies.
TANK You write all of your films? It’s interesting because your films are so visually arresting. Watching them I was aware that they were made by someone interested in the language of cinema and what its visual messages mean.
KBH Cinema is a kind of writing with images. Before you write the movie as a screenplay, you imagine it visually. It is a collaborative work, of course, but you are in a way – and this is the job of a director – the guardian of this vision. You ask everyone to collaborate in order to realise what you saw when you were writing the screenplay. So it’s a kind of writing, a visual writing, and since I’m directing, I’m very interested in the visual aspect. This is what draws my interest.
TANK In both Beauty and the Dogs and The Man Who Sold His Skin, you look at these institutions – whether the police or the art world – in an almost anthropological sort of way.
KBH Those aren’t the starting points – I don’t tell myself, I’ll do a movie about the art world, or about the police. But since our life is organised into institutions – for example, I am in cinema, and it’s a system, something with rules – nothing in all those spaces is natural, each is a constitution of a human imagination. When I start giving work to my protagonists, I start thinking about the implication of their place in society and the institutions they are moving in, and I realise we are more like our work than we think. When I meet other filmmakers, in a way we speak the same language even if we don’t, literally, speak the same language. To make it short, I’m fascinated by institutions. It’s not the first thing that inspires a story. When I have an institution I really like, I want to understand how its mechanisms work, and use them in the story in a way I can make meaningful and discover something. I am passionate about art, but I don’t know so much about the art world, so when I started to think about this movie, it gave me the opportunity to think about and discover how this world works, why works of art are so expensive, why artists can’t be on the same level, what the art market is, the link between art and power. Whether talking about art or the police – I’m fascinated by power and the relationship between the dominant and those who are dominated. This is something that has fascinated me in almost all my movies.
TANK In The Man Who Sold his Skin, the main character has a Schengen visa tattooed on his back as an artwork. It was such a clever way of exploring how art and value moves around the world and how that does or doesn’t relate to flows of people and migration. How do you think about the relationship of your work to politics?
KBH Movies and storytelling are political. If you choose to create abstract expressionist work, it’s a political posture. When you start telling a story, you are telling the other person, I have something to say – and this is already political. It’s a huge responsibility. Artists are mainly trying to give meaning to things because we live in a chaotic world in which we are always looking for meaning. The character of the artist in the film is close to me because despite this facade of coldness, he knows very well what is happening in the world and he is using this as a way to provoke the art market. At the end, he says he is part of the system, he can’t escape the system. When you are an artist – especially in the cinema – you need money to do your movies, so you are linked to a system. You have to find money to make what you want to say in a work of art. It’s a complicated posture being a filmmaker especially. Working in this system and understanding it while thinking about what the meaningful thing you will say to people for them to share or refuse – a lot is happening. There’s a lot of storytelling in the world today. Everyone is looking for meaning, and as my character says, “I sell meaning.”
TANK Would you say that you sell meaning?
KBH Do I sell meaning? I went to business school, but I hated it. My film is not a critique of the art market; it is a critique of capitalism in a larger way. I am seeking meaning; I am looking for meaning. In the movies, those who sell are the sales agents; it’s a job and they make a lot of money. What I try to do is search for meaning. When I understand something and I think it’s deep, I want to share it, in a story. I will say I am a meaning seeker. If you do ready-mades you are still looking for meaning. The process of making art, this is what I love the most, the journey. When you finish it, it’s not the same joy, because everything is possible in the creative process.
TANK I loved the cinematic language in I and the Stupid Boy. It seemed to me when watching it that you were consciously borrowing from genre films, whether horror or comedy. How do you think about cinematic language?
KBH I love genre cinema, and I think that sometimes when you do a lot of genre movies you finish with a cliché. To me, clichés are very interesting because you can borrow them and use them to play with the audience, because the audience has seen so many movies when you show them the first scene, unconsciously or consciously, they understand what the movie that they are watching is – is it a romantic comedy, a horror film or a western? They understand it immediately. When I worked on this film I decided I would do three movies in one short movie, and I relied on the psychological feeling of my main character to draw those three together. It starts in the vein of a romantic comedy, or something very shiny with sun and music and make-up, and then we go to something more realistic, more street, almost a documentary about a confrontation between a guy and a girl – going out of the bubble of dreams and confronting the reality outside, which can be mean. This tough reality can draw you to something darker – the final scene in the basement. Now we are in something darker and more manipulative. So I created this triptych.
TANK You feel like you know this girl, but the end reveals hidden depths in her response to her frustration, anger and desire for revenge, which is challenging.
KBH I think that’s true in life. When you are out of your comfort zone and confronting a difficult situation, you are in survival mode. There is something very deep inside you that you might not even know, which pushes you to act in a way that may even surprise you. With this survival mode, she is discovering something inside herself, because of this extreme situation, in which we see the real character. You have the character and the person: the way she shows herself to others and then what is deep inside, which only shows in difficult moments.
TANK The Man Who Sold His Skin has a clear reference to Faust. As someone with a background in writing, what is the importance of literature to your work as a director?
KBH I love literature. I’m still a big reader; I read a lot of fiction, but I came to realise that literature and cinema are really, really different. The main connection is storytelling, but when you deal with words, it touches something more imaginative and intellectual. When you deal with images, it touches something more emotional, more primitive in your brain. It doesn’t address the same brain region, and that’s why I think books should be different from screenplays. With screenplays you need to have a plot and there are many rules because you always need to catch the attention, and the feeling, of the audience. Cinema is very emotional; a book is emotional also, but it’s more something that opens your imagination and the intellectual parts of your brain. That’s why I hate adaptations – the books are always better than the movies.
TANK You’ve said that you find documentaries more freeing than films. People might assume it was the other way around.
KBH It’s not true because people think that reality exists, but there is nothing called reality. It’s a horrible thing: what is reality? Is it a surveillance camera showing the same scene all the time? In documentary, you always have a construction, you have a narration, a story, which you extract from this very boring and chaotic reality, but you have authentic people. It’s the way in which you tell their story that is interesting, and you can experiment. What I do in fictional films I owe to documentary. When I direct actors I always have in mind how people react in reality. You have also the economic side – documentaries are the orphan of cinema. You don’t have stars or big budgets, but it’s a freedom because you can do a movie with three people. In fiction, you have huge crews and tight budgets. Documentary is a way of getting rid of the hierarchy that you need for a fictional film. It’s really a space of freedom. In documentaries, you have time. ◉