Een jaar later, toen de Duitsers de oorlog hadden verloren en de concentratiekampen waren bevrijd, fotografeerden en filmden de geallieerden de complexen, de overlevenden en de sporen die wezen op miljoenen vermoorde mensen. Vooral de beelden van stapels schoenen, brillen en kunstgebitten en de bergen afgeschoren haar maakten een diepe indruk. Misschien moeten er eerst beelden zijn vooraleer iets wat nauwelijks voorstelbaar is indruk maakt, fotografische beelden, afdrukken van de werkelijkheid op afstand.

Conversely, I try to find my words on the editing table. I have both my typewriter and my editing table in one room. It is connected to this question of writing and filmmaking, because it is also very evident you cannot make films the same way you can write a text. For the text you need to go to the library, but 80% or so of them are created in the room, or if not created, then at least the final version is made indoors at your desk. That is also the last stage of the filmmaking, the aspect where writing and filmmaking come together. People ask me, why don’t you write anymore, and I realise it is because I have succeeded in making a form of writing out of my filmmaking.

Les surréalistes de la première heure, encore confusément habités par l’état d’esprit dadaïste, faisaient feu de tout bois et mélangeaient allègrement les disciplines pour stupéfier les spectateurs. Si l’écriture, le théâtre, la musique ou la peinture trouvèrent vite les moyens de s’épanouir, l’utilisation du cinéma resta longtemps plus laborieuse, en Belgique plus encore qu’ailleurs.

« Les ouvriers mineurs remontent de la fosse. Ils s'avancent dans la rue, le visage noir, le casque de cuir bouilli sur la tête, la lampe allumée à la main, en rangs serrés qui prennent toute la largeur de la rue. Ils s'avancent sur un rythme implacable, en chantonnant une chanson murmurée, douce et puissante, précédés d'un nuage de poussière noire. »

“I began by making film reports, documentaries, and I didn’t come to fiction until much later. The boundaries between the two aren’t very clear-cut, however, and there are often documentary elements in fiction films and vice versa. At the time, there was a fabulous reporting tradition, with film crews in conflict zones that didn’t hesitate to take risks and demonstrate a certain situation by bringing us the footage. Resorting to cinema, especially to documentaries, in order to provoke or accompany social change, to denounce or to provide a basis for action, all this was very much present when I started.”

There are encounters that withstand long separations because they happened at a particular time. That goes for you, who I lost sight of for a long time, and who I met in the liveliest days of our lives. Are there lives outside of lively days? Alas, yes. Many years later, we ran into each other and caught up in the queue for a plane from Paris to Cairo, and then in Alexandria we met again, and... since then, we met again where we had parted, in the intimacy of History, the Tunisian revolution had just broken out and our hearts were cheerful.

I would also like to express my affection for Jocelyne. On the strength of her films and the way she has lived her life to date, I consider her one of the bravest, most intelligent and above all freest spirits I have ever encountered – though her freedom of thought and behaviour has sometimes cost her dearly and even put her life in danger. Few other people have suffered so much to preserve their self-esteem and survive in a meaningful way in a world as hostile and indifferent as ours.

“This documentary phase wasn’t only linked to my personal history; it was determined by my country’s political situation and Lebanon’s cinema history. My trajectory is a bit like that of other Lebanese filmmakers. If I decided to move to fiction it’s because, after speaking in a “militant” manner, I now want the image to speak as much as possible.”

Élie Faure tells us that the aging Renoir, when he used to refer to this light in Women of Algiers, could not prevent large tears from streaming down his cheeks. Should we be weeping like the aged Renoir, but then for reasons other than artistic ones? Evoke, one and a half centuries later, these Bayas, Zoras, Mounis, and Khadoudjas. Since then, these women, whom Delacroix – perhaps in spite of himself – knew how to observe as no one had done before him, have not stopped telling us something that is unbearably painful and still very much with us today.