HALIMA OUARDIRI is a Swiss-Moroccan writer and director is a graduate of the Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema in Montreal, Canada. Her first short film, MOKHTAR, screened in the top festivals around the world. CLEBS won the Crystal bear in Generation at the 2020 Berlinale. She is currently developing her debut feature film, THE CAMEL DRIVING SCHOOL.
What filmmakers inspired you to be a filmmaker?
To be honest, I came into cinema quite late, and also I was not really a cinephile before. I came to cinema through documentaries, in fact. So I started discovering filmmakers who directed amazing documentaries. I remember one, from Nicola Philibert, To Be And To Have, that I was completely amazed by the camerawork, the protagonists and all these real people. I was curious about how they did this, how they worked with the real people to achieve such intimacy. The film happens in a classroom with different children from different ages. So more and more, I started watching different documentaries, mostly auteur documentaries.
I was studying political science, while on the side, I was watching more and more cinema. And then I decided, this is what I really want to do, I want to tell stories and I want to tell stories that are not very much told yet. I think I can do this. I started doing it with my own camera, filming my family, filming around me, trying to put those images together with the editing. Then I applied to a cinema school in Montreal.
So lots of filmmakers inspired me, but I have many. I'm watching a lot of different filmmakers, a lot of different cinema. And I'm still really being inspired by the younger ones.
What advice would you give to an emerging filmmaker, if they were in your shoes at the beginning?
I would tell them to tell stories that are close to them. Because it takes time to make a film, and it's a lot of effort. Having a subject that is very personal or at least that you know well, would be easier, I think, to get close to it and to be able to also give it to the public. You know exactly what you're talking about. It’s easier to start with than some other subject that is exciting and might be very modern or interesting to an audience, but it's not so close to you.
Still from The Skates
I want to lean into this idea of telling stories from your own memories and stuff. And I know The Skates in particular was coming from your own memories. The acting in this film is chef’s kiss. What are your essential tools in terms of casting and what are some things that you do that you have seen other directors not do in terms of getting the right actor?
Follow your instinct. When you're writing a piece, you have initial ideas of actors that come to mind. Stick to those ideas. Ask around what people think, but always go back to what you really have inside of you as the first instinct. And for the little girl in this film, I knew exactly what I wanted. So perhaps my description to an agent was clear, age, what she looked like, her overall emotion. I was very lucky also to have a person that understood me very well and gave me a name, Ines Feghouli. And that was it. It was her. She understood the role perfectly. It took a while before the film was financed, but I stuck with her the whole way through. I didn't do any auditions with other actors because it was the obvious choice.
Sometimes you can doubt yourself and be like, oh, should I do auditions and try to find this actor that no one knows yet? Inez has already acted in numerous other films and TV series, but for me, it didn't matter. I didn't need to find a new actor, I needed her.
And for the father, I had seen his performance in cinema, and I had seen him in theater. Then people reminded me, you know, there is this actor, Mani Soleymanlou, I think you guys, we should work together. It came at the right time. I also recognized in him the ability to play both the charming dad and the reverse.
His wife is Sophie Cadieux. So I said if they didn’t mind playing in the same movie, then she’s a wonderful actress. I needed someone really expressive with no words. I thought it was just simpler that way to keep it in the microcosm of their own.
So the mom was played by his actual wife?
Yeah. They’re a very happy couple. They usually never accept acting together because they want to separate private life and work. But in that case, because they didn't really share the screen, she said yes.
That's what I was saying. I'm coming from documentaries. So sometimes I'm thinking in that way like, oh he's married to this wonderful actress.
To finish, 90% of the directing is in the casting. Because they are amazing actors, my directing was really in small details or discussions in prep. On set, it was very minimal because they were cast appropriately for the script.
Still from The Skates
I wanted to go to the moment when the mom comes in. Nina looks at mom. Mom is like, “where's your skates?” And Nina repeats what her father says: It's like it's not even a good sport, spinning on ice like idiots. That stuck out so much because it was such a powerful echo of internalized memory. Looking back, is there any aspect of your own experiences that felt similar to this particular scene, and did that influence the way you approach putting this film together?
It's something I've experienced, unfortunately. That's what I mean by know your subject intimately, then those subtleties come into place in the script.
I did not base this script just on my own experience. I also researched around me and this film came back to me, this story, this anecdote that I made into a fiction film. It's not my life at all. It's an episode of it that I translated into a fiction. It came back to memory when a friend of mine was going through a very difficult divorce, with a child curled up in the middle and everything she was telling me about it woke up this memory of my childhood with this same kind of mechanism.
It's a phenomenon that happens, widely, but that is very difficult to see when people are a victim of it, those are such minor events. It's hard for them to say, this is what happened yesterday in my family because it's not much. It's almost irrelevant. But when you add up all those little, mean events, they become huge.
There was something so spectacular about the relationship between the daughter and the father, but there was something so mean about it too, because he's not over this divorce and he's taking it out on this kid who adores him. There's something about parents who take these little mean acts of, I would say, violence towards the children.
Yeah, it is violence. The father is not just mean, it's more complicated than that, and that's the problem in this situation. Love is in there, and also cruelty and violence.
Still from The Skates
How much did your memory or the conversations that you had with your friends going through these difficult periods really inspire you to decide on shot compositions? How did you think about every detail to put this film together?
I didn’t want to stylize it too much. I wanted the film to be very clear and straightforward in a way that those little, very subtle things are coming through, and that the style was not coming in the way of the story I was telling. I thought it was the story that had to be the star of this film. The form was just there to make it happen, and to make the story really clear and efficient. I didn't want it to be less accessible to a wide audience and a young audience as well.
Interview by Breakthroughs Board Member Sunita Miya-Muganzar
*This article has been edited for clarity