Annemarie Jacir Talks about her Year as a Rolex Protégée
What has the Rolex programme meant to you?
I’m so lucky. Rolex has given me the chance to work with Zhang Yimou, passing knowledge between generations of artists. That’s a very rare privilege.
How was your first day working with Zhang Yimou?
At first I was terrified. Now I make fun of his solar-powered jacket. And he laughs. He even gave me a cool Star Wars laser pointer that he uses. We have different ways of working and different techniques with actors, monitors [screens], budgets and so on, but we have really similar ideas and goals.
What do you most admire about him?
I admire his modesty and his work ethic. He never sleeps!
Zhang Yimou is a great artist who’s constantly questioning himself and his work. I really respect that. And he’s such a perfectionist. He knows exactly what he wants out of every actor, every shot and every scene, and he’ll shoot and shoot – maybe 100 takes – to get what he wants.
For him, film is not about huge cranes, huge crews, super special effects and fancy post-production. I agree with that. It’s the way he tells his stories. All the rest is fluff. If you took everything away from him tomorrow and just gave him a camera, he’d still make a fabulous film.
How relevant is his current film on the Rape of Nanking, to your own work?
It’s on a totally different scale. His budget is almost 200 times bigger than mine. I shoot for five weeks; he shoots for five-and-a-half months. And his set is amazing, the most beautiful I’ve ever seen.
When I first joined him on location, I thought: “Wow, what a privilege to make a film about your own history, your own people, and your own life in a way that’s true to the real event.” And yet it’s still cinema, alive and magical.
His film is one small story within a huge historical event: the Nanking massacre. The scale of the massacre, when 300,000 people were slaughtered, is often denied. I relate to this as a Palestinian because much of our history is also denied. So we’re both telling stories about us, our own people.
You are shooting your second feature film, When I Saw You. How does it fit into your own work so far?
It’s different from my first feature, Salt of this Sea, which was for Palestinians, for us. The main female character is politicized and angry, and so she’s perhaps difficult to relate to unless you’re Palestinian or you’ve been to Palestine.
When I Saw You is more universal. It’s set against a springtime landscape in the 1960s, a period brimming with hope. The story is a coming-of-age saga for both a mother and her 12-year-old son, Tarek. It’s from the boy’s point of view. He is naïve, curious and open, refusing to become a refugee. Tarek meets a group of people who change his life and his mother learns to live again through him.
Where to from here, Annemarie?
Well, I’ll join Zhang Yimou again during production and post-production of his film. And he will read my script and see the rough cut of When I Saw You. We’re shooting in parallel and we finish at about the same time. Maybe we’ll meet at the same film festival. I’ll go to his screening and he’ll come to mine.