EN
Lujain Benatia: Revolutionaries Never Die is very visually beautiful and visually fluid as well. What inspired your aesthetic choices in the film, especially those overhead shots of the boxes, the personal items, the archives.
Mohanad Yaqubi: Working in a research environment and in a laboratory environment. It’s a very lonely process. It’s a long time spent with the material, and you’re playing with the splicers and touching the material all the time. Filmmaking is about being honest to what is surrounding you. And that becomes my aesthetic choice because this is what is in front of me. This is what I deal with. In research it’s all about ways to access information. So how to know about the film is not only to watch it but, with these 16-millimeter films or older films, it’s about what has been written on the box itself, what has been written on the negative itself, the type of the negative. Whether it was Fuji, Kodak or Eastman. Because film came from different factories, and different factories represent different economical structures. Working with this kind of 16-millimeter format, it’s a very material format. The narrative is coming from the materiality, so the aesthetic should too. In Arabic we say to ‘cook something in its own oil’, which is kind of what I’m doing.
Lujain Benatia in conversation with Mohanad Yaqubi
