Paradise City Sales has granted Variety exclusive access to an exclusive clip of Sarah Ishak’s The Station, which will make its world premiere at Cannes Critics Week. Variety spoke to the Yemeni-Scottish filmmaker, who was nominated for an Academy Award for his short documentary “No Walls in Karama.”
The film centers on Rayal, who runs a women-only gas station in Yemen, a safe haven in the war-torn country. The project began in 2015, when Ishaq heard that just such a place had ’emerged’ in Yemen’s capital, Sanaa. “All my sisters and cousins go there to queue for fuel, so it felt very unusual. And in places like Yemen, women have always driven cars, so having a women-only gas station just seemed like a great concept,” she explains.
“And it felt like a bubble, a microcosm of Yemen, because people came from all walks of life to get fuel for different reasons. Some wanted to have big weddings, and some just needed fuel to power the light bulbs to read.”
“The Station”
Provided by: Screen Project, Georges Film
The initial idea to make a documentary about gas stations was quickly rejected. “It would have been impossible to film this. There was no way I could just carry a camera around in public. And it’s a conservative society. People didn’t really know who I was. So there are all kinds of restrictions and restrictions. So as a documentary filmmaker, this was really frustrating for me.”
She lingered on this idea for about a year after leaving Yemen, but then decided that what about fiction? “Maybe this is a good way for me to tell this story, but it’s also a way to draw from all the other experiences I’ve had, all the conversations I’ve had with my brothers and sisters, and distill it all into this one world.”
“The Station”
Provided by: Screen Project, Georges Film
Yemen has been torn apart by civil war for the past decade, and while this is an important part of the film’s story, director Ishaq, who has been reporting on the country’s news, does not allow it to dominate the film. “Not a lot is known about it, but it’s very complex,” she says. “So there’s a danger of oversimplifying or trying to explain everything too much and diluting the human story.”
In the movie, the two main factions are distinguished by the colors of their armbands and posters, blue and orange. “There’s a kind of parody just by using these colors, because politics is always changing in Yemen,” Ishaq says. “You never know who’s doing what, who’s with who, who’s bombing where. And we’ve endured this for years and years and years, even before the last 10 years. I’ve been through wars in my life and been displaced many times. So to me… So, explaining war and geopolitics and history with a focus on war was not what I wanted to do. I was too exhausted by it and I wanted to continue focusing on something similar to that.” I was very happy and felt that I loved Yemini society. ”
Sarah Ishak
Courtesy of Hamzeh Abragheb
In the clip above, the women are seen together and alone behind closed doors, a side of Yemini life that is rarely witnessed. “The world of Yemeni women is not only invisible to the outside world, but also invisible within Yemeni society. Usually men do not even get a glimpse of this world. And it is certainly the world that I know and that all other Yemeni women know. It’s a world that has a veil on the outside and a certain image, but as soon as you go inside the closed doors, you see colors and you hear frankincense and laughter and songs, and it’s something that I witnessed and experienced throughout my time in Yemen during the war.
“My husband would sometimes call me because he heard there was an airstrike somewhere nearby. He would panic and all he could hear was giggling and he would call me too when he saw me laughing.
“When you’re living with this situation and death feels like it’s imminent and things are completely out of your control, you end up focusing on the boring stuff, the fun stuff, the social stuff, the gatherings. So for me, that’s what I wanted to portray in this movie. How these women come together and how they They just have to live their lives. They have to focus on something that will propel them forward. It may feel a little bit denial in a way, but it’s true. “When you’re living in a war, especially if it’s a war that lasts for years or decades, you have to somehow survive.
“I’ve heard the same stories from different people in different parts of the world. So instead of focusing on the image of suffering that war is dark and ugly, I wanted to center here on how suffering can look beautiful and happy, because these realities exist too.”
The film is produced by Screen Project (Ta Films Company) and Georges Films. It is co-produced by One Two Films, KeplerFilm, Barentsfilm, Setara Films and The Imaginarium Films.
The distribution companies are Film Clinic Indie Distribution (Egypt/UAE), Paradiso (Benelux), Kalamata Film (CIS), and Arizona Distribution (France).
The cast includes Manal Al Mulaiki (Rayal), Abeer Mohammed (Shams), Rashad Khaled (Rais), and Saleh Al Marshahi (Ahmad).
The film was written by Sarah Ishak and Nadia Eliwat, cinematography by Amin Berrada, sound by Tarek Abu Ghosh, production design by Nasser Zoubi, costumes by Zeina Soufan, hair and makeup by Farah Jadaan, editing by Roman Namra, and music by Tessa Rose Jackson and Darius Timmer.
