An operatic saga of father-daughter tensions, cultural exile and buried trauma, From Abdul to Leila is a beautiful hot mess of a film. Despite its defiantly scrambled collage style, which features musical interludes, hand-painted visual artworks, still photos, lo-fi travelogue reportage and time-jumping footage shot across 20 years, Leila Albayaty’s personal passion project is one of the more emotionally powerful documentary competition contenders screening at El Gouna Film Festival in Egypt this week. Indeed, at the Q&A session following the world premiere, director and audience members were in tears as they bonded over shared psychological wounds.
Albayaty is a Berlin-based French-Iraqi musician, artist and occasional film-maker whose slender body of previous screen credits includes the semi-autobiographical docu-drama Berlin Telegram (2012). Music is her main medium, and runs through this film like water, whether as fully composed songs or in poetic fragments of voice-over narration that she softly croons over a background wash of guitars and electronics. “I prefer to sing rather than speak,” the director explains, an opaque statement that makes more poignant sense as her knotty story unfolds.
An unusual blend of docu-musical and emotionally raw therapy session, From Abdul to Leila has an emphatically arty style and intensely solipsistic tone that will limit its mainstream audience potential. That said, those very same flavoursome qualities should give Albayaty’s film traction with more adventurous festivals, and with viewers drawn to confessional culture-clash stories, especially those exploring the complex post-colonial love-hate relations between Europe and the Middle East.
The Abdul of the title is Albayaty’s father, an exiled Iraqi who once fought for democracy, socialism and women’s rights in his homeland. Still a dapper and charismatic patriarch in old age, Abdul’s painful back story includes jail, torture and even a spell on the run with Saddam Hussein when the formerly progressive Ba’ath party split into violent factionalism. After fleeing to France more than 50 years ago, he married a Frenchwoman, Leila’s mother Simone, following an amusing first encounter where he proudly rebuffed her charitable offer of a free sandwich. Though now based between France and Egypt, Abdul remains deeply invested in political events back home in Iraq, especially after the horrors of the two Gulf Wars.
Leila’s fraught relationship with Abdul is the main narrative thread running through Albayaty’s film. Although her father refused to teach her his native Arabic language as a child, and even banned her from having Arab boyfriends in her teens, the director later became fascinated by her Iraqi heritage in adult life. She is now learning to speak and write in Arabic, and collaborating with Abdul on lyrics to her latest batch of songs. As much about repairing family rifts as creative self-expression, these mournful, sultry, heart-tugging chansons figure prominently in the film.
As From Abdul to Leila develops its non-linear zigzag narrative, Albayaty’s resurgent interest in her Arabic roots begins to appear obsessive and unhealthy, an ill-advised attempt to fix some broken part of herself. It certainly comes from a place of trauma, which the director initially hints at before piecing together the details from her own fragmentary memories. In 2004, galvanised by the second Gulf War, she insisted on making a sentimental pilgrimage to Iraq, against the advice of her family. There she witnessed lethal violence at close quarters that has haunted her ever since.
Soon after her return to France, Albayaty was seriously injured in a hit-and-run accident which, she hints darkly, may have been partly deliberate recklessness on her own part. The amnesia she suffered erased some of her scarring Iraq memories, but they resurfaced a decade later, apparently triggered by the 2015 Islamist attacks on the Bataclan concert hall and other Parisian sites. In common with her father, she now exhibits symptoms of PTSD. Indeed, on some level, this film is clearly an attempt to process long-buried trauma.
From Abdul to Leila is not structured as a conventional journey towards redemptive, healing closure. Indeed, it feels barely structured at all in places as Albayaty jump-cuts between past and present, art studio and recording studio, Berlin and Cairo, Brussels and rural France, guided more by a random collagist aesthetic than storytelling clarity. While anyone expecting formal journalistic rigour will find this Abstract Expressionist approach maddeningly untidy, more charitable viewers may find if thrillingly loose and punky. It is certainly a rich sensory mix of sounds, moods and locations.
Even if her wild mood swings demand a generous measure of patience and indulgence, Albayaty does focus long enough to gather some positive conclusions at the end of her sentimental journey. Learning Arabic enables her to chat with Syrian refugees in her Berlin neighbourhood, whose grisly accounts of state torture and murder put her own relatively minor trauma into sobering perspective. Co-writing songs with her father also feels like a successful exercise in reconciliation, a touching way to celebrate their shared cultural roots. In the film’s closing scenes, Abdul even concedes that the political landscape appears to be finally improving in Iraq, with cautious advances in democracy and gender equality. A hot mess of a film, sure, but real lives are messy sometimes.
Director: Leila Albayaty
Screenwriters: Leila Al Bayaty, David Deboudt
Leila Albayaty, Abdul Ilah Albayaty, Hana Albayaty, Simone Albayaty, Dalia Naous, Gaëlle Balthasart
Cinematography: Jonathan Bricheux, Leila Al Bayaty, Zoé Nutchey
Editing: Barbara Bossuet, Zoé Nutchey, Leila Al Bayaty
Sound: Nicolas Pommier, Gabor Ripli, Mikaël Barre, Leila Albayaty
Music: Leila Albayaty, Amélie Legrand, Maurice Louca, Wassim Mukdad, Hassan Al Hanafi
Producers: Michel Balagué, Julie Freres, Leila Al Bayaty
Production companies: Dérives (Belgium), Volte Films (Germany)
World sales: Dérives, julie@derives.be
Venue: El Gouna Film Festival (Feature Documentary Competition)
In Arabic, French, English
92 minutes
