Below, we publish a few questions addressed to director Sara Rajaei about her competition film City of poets.
Archivio Aperto explores the theme of memory and archives. How does your film intercept this theme? What elements of the film highlight this exploration of memory?
Memory is the foundation of my artistic practice. In my work, I study the notion of time by reflecting on the absence of image, memory psychology, oral history, narrative techniques, and physical/psychological space.
I began writing the story of City of Poets, inspired by a mulberry tree that was planted by my grandmother in the garden of her house. She had a strong bond with the tree; she always talked to it, sang to it, and danced in front of it. That tree gave me a sense of belonging, happiness, and wisdom. Some years after my grandmother’s death, the tree’s roots began to damage the foundations of the neighboring houses, and my uncle was determined to cut it down. However, several gardeners had refused, believing that mulberry trees were sacred.
The memory of the tree brought back other memories of my grandmother’s house that had sheltered my family for several months after we became war refugees. From the house, my mind moved to the alley in which the house was located. And then I thought of the city where I learned most of the poets’ names at the age of four. When I started writing City of Poets, the order of things changed dynamically. I wrote about a fictional city where all the streets were named after poets. And then, with each change in society, those names were replaced by new ones, gradually mapping the history of that city from within. From there, I moved to the alley, to the house, and then to the mulberry tree.
Most of the photographs and 8mm footage appearing in City of Poets belong to my maternal family archive. In addition, I used pictures of streets and urban seKngs from Fardid Khadem archive.
How do archive images influence the construction of the narrative?
Archival images aren’t my premium material. In fact, only 3 works out of my entire oeuvre are made with the use of archives.
But archival images have inspired and influenced so many of my works. Often, a picture in a photo album or an image in a newspaper or magazine has become the starting point of a new work.
In City of Poets, it became essential to connect and edit hyper-personal images (to which I was emotionally attached) into something that wasn’t personal, a cinematic image that generated new meanings and stories. The editing process was like working on a puzzle, making the role of my editor, Nathalie Alonso Casale, essential. She helped me see those familiar photographs with a detached, fresh eye. As we worked, my parents, siblings, aunts, or cousins became women, men, boys, and girls, individuals whose history wasn’t what I personally knew but what the thread of connecting them to other images recreated as a whole new spectrum of images.
City of Poets is multilayered. The main plot is written like a fairy tale, portraying a non-existent small town, like a utopia. Then, there is a hidden thread under the skin of this city about a system and its physical and psychological effect on the inhabitants. That is a shared human experience.
The archival images essentially function because they universally represent those residents’ struggles. I deliberately kept the geographical context of the story discreet for as long as I could, removing all text and street signs so that the film wasn’t geographically signified and didn’t shout its message.
Can you tell us about a sequence in your film where archive images transformed or enriched the message you intended to communicate?
I would like to mention two sequences. The first sequence comes early in the film when the women arrive in the city. A group of young girls march into the streets and gradually dominate the schools, offices, sports fields & factories.
In another sequence, after many traumatic events have happened to the citizens of City of Poets, a little boy sleeps peacefully on a flowery carpet in the house. In his dream, he sees trees growing in the city’s empty streets. Trees somehow always survive the destruction of humankind. Meanwhile, his parents sit as always in the same living room, on the same flowery carpet, and watch over him. But because of the awkward tension built up throughout the film by then, it is as if the heart of things has changed. The safe feeling of home has disappeared even if the people are s1ll there and do the same things. The essence of my film is strongly represented in a moment like this.
What found footage or experimental films have played an important role in your education?
Before any found footage film or experimental work, and long before I knew I wanted to become an artist, or even before I was able to read or write, I was introduced to the uncanniness of images (unfamiliar images) when I was about five years old. Every day around 4:30 pm, before the children’s program, the Iranian state television would broadcast a 10-15-minute program called The Lost Ones. One after one, a series of portraits would appear on the screen of people who, due to old age, dementia, or other psychological conditions, had left home and never returned.
Hoping to find them, their families would ask for their pictures to be broadcast on TV. The program had a significant impact on me. The photographs were uncanny, often faded out or damaged, turning those lost people into ghosts. I remember looking at them individually, thinking of their stories, imagining what could have happened to them if they were alive or dead.
The films that have influenced me are not experimental and don’t incorporate found footage, but they use archives. The first is Andrei Tarkovsky’s Mirror, and then Alain Resnais’ Hiroshima Mon Amour. A more recent example would be Stories We Tell by the Canadian director Sara Polley, which she made with her own family archive.