Mount Qaf is described in Arab literature as the highest of the mountain ranges supporting the Earth, and it lends its initial letter Q to the title of Jude Chehab’s family portrait stretching over three generations: her grandmother, her mother Hiba, and herself.
All of them were at one time linked to a charismatic Islamic teacher known as “the Anisa”, whose cult-like legacy is explored in intimate and often fascinating detail. But the highly personal nature of the film makes for a wobbly point of view and opens up multiple interpretations of the engrossing protagonist Hiba. It has won the Lebanese-American filmmaker the Albert Maysles Award for best new documentary director at Tribeca, as well as a grand jury award at the Sheffield DocFest for Best First Feature. Its screening in Egypt at the El Gouna Film Festival drew large, curious audiences.
Wearing numerous hats as director and producer, screenwriter, D.P. and one of the leading characters, an off-screen, camera-wielding Chehab goes at her family members (who include her pensive father and a religious-student brother) with cheerful insistence as she pries into their past. Although they have all given their consent to be filmed and are theoretically willing to discuss the effects of the sect on their lives, Chehab is not above bullying when her dad, for example, starts glossing over his dislike of “the Anisas”. Certainly they have left scorched earth behind them in the family, after the grandmother took her leave and the mother, Hiba, was traumatically kicked out, apparently for carving out too independent a place for herself.
All three women wear strict Islamic dress and tight head coverings, in contrast to their Western-style clothing when they were young in grainy home movies and wedding portraits. Hiba’s youthful beauty in a high school play is still intuitable behind her big glasses and hijab, and her calm face beams with the unstudied joy of a lay nun. She gave up her medical studies when the Great Anisa told her mother — then an initiate – that the world is full of doctors, but spreading God’s word is a higher calling.
This is an early hint that something wrong with the group that for many years became her priority, and indeed her whole life. She is called Dr. Hiba, presumably for her great learning, and when she holds religious classes her passion is capable of igniting all those who listen, even stirring the film audience. Watching TV on the bed with her amiable husband Ziad, she casually flips from banal domestic topics to suddenly reciting Qu’ranic verses together. Yet the filmmaker’s probing questions force Hiba to confront the things she once hid from Ziad – letters and poems to the Great Anisa, or the lies she told him about no flights being available to the U.S. during a critical moment in Lebanon’s civil war, so she could keep seeing her mentor in Syria.
In one unsettling moment, Hiba reads from notebooks written by the Anisa, with chilling passages like “there is no religion without a group; there is no group without a state; there is no state without obedience” and “we are followers, not innovators.”
Yet despite all, the Chehab family seems fairly normal and resilient, the 30-year marriage of Hiba and Ziad seems likely to outlast the film’s shocking revelations, and the loss of the group Hiba once fervently embraced appears to be a wound that is healing with time.
Most impressive because they are so unusual on screen are the scenes – there are several – of Hiba seemingly lost in a mystic trance. The idea of a transcendental Sufi-like Islam takes shape when she lectures on how there is no “I” anymore and “you just disappear into the Anisa.”
This very fine character study of a truly spiritual woman is undermined, however, by a slapdash approach to story-telling that obscures nuances and makes deciphering the filmmaker’s voice and opinions almost impossible. A loud and insistent musical commentary dominated by a forbidding drumbeat is far too suggestive of the dark side of religion, particularly when it is paired with highly theatrical black-and-white images of undefined symbolic import. But Chehab shows she has an original voice in this intimate drama of religious convictions and a talent that should blossom under more structured circumstances.
Director, producer, screenplay, cinematography: Jude Chehab
With: Hiba Khodr, Ziad Chehab, Doria Mouneimne
Editing: Fahd Ahmed
Music: William Ryan Fritch
Sound: Tom Drew
Production companies: Chicken & Egg Pictures
Venue: El Gouna Film Festival (Feature Documentary competition)
In Arabic
93 minutes
