Paradise City Sales has granted Variety access to an exclusive clip from Sara Ishaq‘s “The Station,” which has its world premiere in Critics’ Week at Cannes. Variety spoke to the Yemeni-Scottish filmmaker, who received an Academy Award nomination for her documentary short “Karama Has No Walls.”
The film centers on Layal, who runs a women-only gas station in Yemen: a safe haven in a war-torn country. The genesis for the project was in 2015 when Ishaq heard of just such a place that had “popped up” in Sanaa, the capital city of Yemen. “My sisters and my cousins are all going there to queue for fuel. So, I felt that was a very unusual thing to happen. And in a place like Yemen, women always drove but having an exclusive women-only fuel station was just like an amazing concept,” she explains.
“And it felt like a bubble, a microcosm of Yemen, because it was people coming from all walks of life to get fuel for various reasons. Some of them wanted to throw big weddings, and some of them just needed the fuel to power a light bulb in order to read.”
“The Station”
Courtesy of Screen Project, Georges Films
An initial idea to make a documentary about the gas station was quickly ruled out. “Filming this would have been impossible. Just carrying a camera around in public was just not going to happen. Also, it’s a conservative society. People didn’t really know who I was. So there are all kinds of restrictions and constraints. So, as a documentary filmmaker, this was really frustrating for me.”
For about a year after she left Yemen, she sat with this idea, and then she decided, how about fiction? “Maybe this is a good way for me to tell this story. But, also, it would be a way to draw from all the other experiences I’ve had, all the conversations I’ve had, with my brothers and sisters, and kind of distill it all into this one world.”
“The Station”
Courtesy of Screen Project, Georges Films
Although Yemen has been riven by a civil war in the last decade – and this is a significant part of the film’s narrative – Ishaq doesn’t allow that to dominate the film as it has done news coverage of the country. “There’s so little known about it, but it’s so complicated,” she says. “So, what it would risk would be an oversimplification, or trying too hard to explain everything and then dilute the human story.”
In the films, the two main factions are distinguished by the colors of their armbands and their posters: blue and orange. “There’s sort of a parody there, just using these colors, because in Yemen, politics are ever changing,” Ishaq says. “You never know who’s doing what and who’s with whom, and who’s bombing where, and we’ve endured this for years and years and years, even before the last 10 years. My whole life, I’ve grown up through wars and been evacuated multiple times. So, for me, centering the war and explaining the war and the geopolitics and the history was not something that I wanted to do. I’m too exhausted with that, and I wanted to keep it focused on things that also made me quite happy and that I love about Yemini society.”
Sara Ishaq
Courtesy of Hamzeh Abulragheb
In the clip, above, we see a side of Yemini life rarely witnessed: women together, alone, behind closed doors. “The world of women in Yemen is something that is not just unseen to the outside world. It’s also unseen within Yemeni society. Usually, men don’t even get a glimpse into this world. And that is certainly the world that I know, and every other Yemeni woman knows. The veils might be on the outside, and there’s a certain image, but then as soon as you’re behind closed doors, the colors emerge and the frankincense and the laughter and the singing. It’s something that was so lively; that I witnessed and experienced the entire time I was in Yemen during the war.
“And my husband would call me sometimes when he’d hear that there was an airstrike somewhere nearby, and he would be in a panic, and he’d just hear all this giggling and cackling, and he’d see me laughing as well.
“When you’re living with this, when death almost feels imminent and things are completely out of your control, you end up kind of honing in on the trivial, the fun, the social, the gatherings, and so for me, that was something that I wanted to portray in this films: how these women are coming together, and they just have to get on with life. They have to focus on the things that will keep them going, which might, in some way, feel like a bit of a denial, but it’s a coping mechanism when you live in a war, and especially if it’s a war that goes on for years and decades, you have to survive somehow.
“I’ve heard the same stories from different people, from different parts of the world. So, it’s something I wanted to center here, and not focus on this image of suffering that war is all about being dark and ugly; the suffering can also look beautiful and happy, because these realities also exist.”
The film is produced by Screen Project (a Ta Films Company) and Georges Films. It is co-produced by One Two Films, KeplerFilm, Barentsfilm, Setara Films and The Imaginarium Films.
The distributors are Film Clinic Indie Distribution (Egypt/UAE), Paradiso (Benelux), Kalamata Film (CIS), and Arizona Distribution (France).
The cast is Manal Al-Mulaiki (Layal), Abeer Mohammed (Shams), Rashad Khaled (Laith) and Saleh Al-marshahi (Ahmad).
The writers are Sara Ishaq and Nadia Eliewat, cinematography by Amine Berrada, sound by Tarek Abu Ghoush, production design by Nasser Zoubi, costumes by Zeina Soufan, hair and make up by Farah Jadaane, editing by Romain Namura and music by Tessa Rose Jackson and Darius Timmer.
