Yemen Scottish filmmaker Saraishak, who was nominated for an Oscar for his short documentary “Kalama is No Walls” in 2012, is a post-production for his fiction feature debut “Station”, and the director takes him to the final cut workshop at Venice Production Bridge.
The film focuses on a women’s only fuel station in a segregated, war-torn town, and continues with Leial. The brotherhood relationship is tested when Layal’s estranged sisters appear unexpectedly in a proposal for him.
Featuring a cast of almost non-professional Yemeni actors, “The Station” is written by Ishaq and Nadia Eliewat and produced by Screen Project and Georges Film, and is co-produced with one two films, Kepler Film, Barents Films, The Imaginarium Films, Setara Films and TA Films. Amman-based screen project Eliewat is the lead producer. Paradise City sales deal with global sales rights.
“Station” – Ishak describes as “Ode Ode to the Yemeni people,” but presents the latest film chapter of the director’s long-term relationship with the country in which he was born. Ishak grew up in Yemen, but at the age of 17 he left to live with his Scottish mother. The Arab Spring exploded in 2011 as she was there and worked towards the MFA for filmmaking in Edinburgh. She quickly booked a flight to Yemen and arrived on the day she protested in the capital, Sanaa.
She will work with the crew of foreign press and documentaries reporting the revolution, but Ishak felt their perspective was inevitably “far from reality.” She had been making films in Yemen since 2007, but was determined to capture more subtle and complicated portraits in the country. “There’s always this other thing that happens (with foreign observers), even if it’s careless,” she said. “So, for me, it was very important… it was important to try and tell these stories from within.”
That resolve led to Ishak’s debut short documentary, “Kalama is the No Walls” (2012), which earned Bahta and Academy Award nominations for the 2011 massacre of peaceful protesters in 2011, and the feature-length documentary, “Mulberry House.”
“The Station” was inspired by the real event that occurred when Ishaq returned to Yemen in 2015. There, she came across a female-only gas station in the heart of her hometown Sanaa. It was home to women from every step of the country and every corner of the country to “follow with one common goal” to maintain and support the family.
“We probably never saw anything like that before,” Ishack said. “Women have always played a big role in (Yemeni) society. But at this particular point, men were either fired from their jobs or were drawn to the battle. Women have really come to the forefront.
While waiting for rare fuel, which was the “lifeline” of the war-torn masses, the director said, “women chatted through the car windows, shared food and drinks, swapped children and swapped stories “at the car school.” Despite the occasional controversy, the mood was lively and communal, and Ishak described it as “the utopia of this dystopian world.”
“The Mulberry House” premiered at IDFA in 2013.
Provided by IDFA
The director originally wanted to film “Station” as a documentary, but there were too many practical obstacles to overcome. The battles between the various factions were often too dangerous to leave the house, but many Yemen were reluctant to appear in front of cameras. Ishak cited a commonly used expression in Yemen during the revolution. “Caring a camera is more dangerous than carrying a gun.”
She returned to Scotland with material she had struggled to understand. Meanwhile, news reports from Yemen gave a very different image of the country she knew for its heartbreaking complexity. “The focus has always been on poverty, destruction and devastation in Yemen,” she said. “It wasn’t about people, their humanity, their strength, their resilience, in the context of a beautiful country that is not actually at all poor, but it has been exploited and impoverished for decades.”
It would take about eight years for that vision to find its shape in a feature length script. Ishak demands that he abandon much of what he has learned as an award-winning documentary filmmaker. However, although she managed to overcome the “creative paralysis” that comes with “documentary thinking,” the director discovers that it frees her experiences from distilling into fictional stories, “creating something completely different from my documentary style.”
“The Station” is what Ishak describes as a “speculative space” and is a universe that acts as a “micrograph of Yemeni society” but nevertheless “unbound to a particular time or place.” Based on the country’s past and present, it reflects “the gradual dismantling of social fabrics” in places fractured by war, foreign invasions, and internal political conflicts, but refracts its history as “sharing in an absurd, sometimes exaggerated parallel world.”
“To the heart, the story is not about politics. It’s about people, their relationships, their contradictions, their resilience. It’s about making people, not just Yemen,” Ishak said. “It’s an ode to the people of Yemen who survived and survived years of war with dignity, humor and strength.”
