Sundance ‘10 | Zeina Durra Explores Cultural Identity in “Imperialists”
by indieWIRE (January 15, 2010)
A scene from Zeina Durra's "The Imperialists Are Still Alive!" Image courtesy of the Sundance Film Festival.
Director Zeina Durra heads to Sundance with her first feature, “The Imperialists Are Still Alive!” The film concerns Asya, “a successful visual artist working in post-9/11 Manhattan [who] lives the life of the hip and glamorous, replete with exclusive art parties, supermodels, and stretch limousines, while she carefully follows the situation in the Middle East on television. Out partying one night, Asya learns that her childhood friend, Faisal, has disappeared—the victim of a purported CIA abduction. That same night, she meets Javier, a sexy Mexican PhD student, and romance blossoms. Javier finds Asya’s conspiracy theories overly paranoid—but nothing in Asya’s world is as it seems.” [Synopsis courtesy of Sundance Film Festival] “The Imperialists Are Still Alive!” Zeina Durra on her background and Sundance project, “The Imperialists are Still Alive!”... I’m Zeina Durra. I was born and brought up in London. I came out to New York to go do the graduate filmmaking programme at NYU, Tisch School of the Arts and stayed on to make this film. I can’t pinpoint when exactly I knew that I wanted to direct, but I grew up in a television news family and so cameras and film were always around. Perhaps, I saw how frustrated my father was with censorship of the media and thought that you could perhaps get your point across more in fiction. I remember especially one incident during the Gulf War where my father wasn’t allowed to show the aftermath of a bombing of a UN bunker which had been used as shelter for Iraqi women and children on British Telelvision and how affected he was. I’ve always been driven to get the other point of view out there since I was a young child, this probably stems from the fact that I have parents who come from rather misunderstood, tragic parts of the world, my mother’s Bosnian/Palestinian and my father’s Jordanian/Lebanese. My parents ended up in London because the Middle East News Bureau my father ran was relocated to London due to the civil war in Beirut. So, as a result I’ve always been put into situations where I had to explain or defend myself from a very early age. My first film that I made was for my tenth birthday. It was called “Murder for Love” one can quickly tell from the title that it was not a film influenced by the works of Antonioni, Godard or Tarkovsky but perhaps something more in sync with “Dynasty” and “Dallas”! I do strongly believe that art can change society and that combined with my love of writing, images and the challenge of making a film all inspire me to do this. I wanted to tell the story of a woman who is of predominately Arab descent brought up in Europe, living in New York City in the way that I see her. She is not estranged from the Middle East nor an outsider in Paris or New York. She navigates all these spaces with familiarity and confidence. The idea that Arabs or Muslims brought up in the West find themselves constantly torn between their roots and their “Western” lives, has always annoyed me since I have never related to that conflict. The milieu in which I grew up produced a different type of person; a wanderer, who views the world as their home and all the things that other people may view as contradictions are simply normality for them. As a result the “contradictions” in their lives lose meaning and are transformed into a synthesis of experience. This film is also told through the perspective of a woman. It’s something I took for granted when I wrote it, being the product of a feminist education, I never thought twice about how different this character was to the normal portrayal of women on screen. There are two main things that affect you when you’re related to the Middle East and living outside of it. The first is the threat of being suspected of being some sort of extremist, and thus facing rendition, harassment, the second is the ongoing political instability over there and being affected by war in countries where you have family and friends and the destruction of places you know and love. 9/11 and living in New York definitely heightened this sense of living in a state of dread fearing for one’s safety in the hands of being mistaken for someone else or just taken in because you don’t agree with American policy. Lebanon in 2006 and living in New York was an example of how we’ve always lived with war and worrying about family, friends, and the thousands of innocent victims that are caught up in it. These things are always present and something anyone from a Middle Eastern intelligentsia background would have grown up with so they are representative of our experience as opposed to isolated examples. That’s why I chose to have these two political incidents within the framework of my film.
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