Hala Alabdalla is a Syrian filmmaker living in France. Alabdalla has directed and produced numerous documentaries and feature films over the past 30 years. Her directing credits include “Hey! Don’t Forget the Cumin,” “Venice 70: Future Reloaded,” “I Am the One Who Brings Flowers to Her Grave,” which was named Best Documentary at the Venice Film Festival in 2006, and “As If We Were Catching a Cobra,” which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2012.

“Farouk, Besieged Like Me” premiered at the 2016 BFI London Film Festival on October 7.

W&H: Describe the film for us in your own words.

HA: The film is made in a very simple and direct way [in order] to speak about a very complicated and confusing cause. Farouk, the protagonist, with his wisdom and his simplicity, attempts to dissipate the fog around Syria. He pays tribute to the Syrian people’s resistance, while cooking for his guests and talking with them during the meal.

W&H: What drew you to this story?

HA: First, I decided to make a film addressed to the European audience, to try to break the wall built up between them and Syria. I wanted to make a film for an audience who stays indifferent and mute in the face of the Syrian tragedy. As I’m not allowed to go back to Syria, I had, for the first time in my life, to find my way as a Syrian filmmaker and to link it to France. I decided to make this film with Farouk in 2012.

In fact, before the revolution began in Syria, we Syrians from Paris often used to attend Tunisian and Egyptian meetings. One night, at the Place des Innocents, we were at a support group meeting for our Egyptian comrades. Farouk rarely joined us for those meetings, but that evening he was present. We Syrians were all very divided in our predictions: “Things are going to change in Syria.” “Nothing’s ever going to change in Syria.”

Farouk, as always, quiet but attentive, leaned over to me and said, “Yesterday, I was sitting at my computer, absorbed in the images of Midan Al Tahrir in Cairo when my son, Fouad, tapped me gently on the shoulder and said, so lovingly, ‘Dad, stop watching that. Stop crying, Dad.’” At Farouk’s words — and at the sight of his stooping back, his shiny eyes, and his quivering lips — I broke into sobs and I thought to myself, “I want to make a film with Farouk.”

W&H: What do you want people to think about when they are leaving the theater?

HA: I’d like for nobody to ever forget Syria and the Syrian people after having seen the film. The Syrians are struggling for their freedom and their dignity. They are resisting against two tyrannies at the same time: the one of the Syrian regime and the one of the Islamic State.

I’d like this film to change and cancel — even if it is just a little bit — the image that is spread over the world because of the mediocrity of the media, and describes Syria as a game between the Syrian regime and the Islamic State. I’d like the audience to fall in love with these people and send them, from their country, positive vibrations, so the Syrian people wouldn’t feel abandoned, neglected, and alone in this struggle.

W&H: What was the biggest challenge in making the film?

HA: It’s the first time I’ve made a film to defend a cause in a clear and direct way. My biggest challenge was to listen to my heart and to the scream inside me, and leave my poetic research aside, the visual research I’ve been [collecting] for 10 years and that I’d like to follow.

How could I make a film with a linear narrative structure without falling into something tedious and monotonous? The challenge came from this: how to be clear and straightforward, without being flat and without betraying the visual research I started such long time ago.

W&H: How did you get your film funded? Share some insights into how you got the film made.

HA: I started to make the film alone, with some close friends around me, then Nathalie Combe came onboard with Cosmographe Productions. The film exists in two versions; that helped us raise the money necessary for the whole process, even with a very small budget.

We got support from the French National Center of Cinema [Centre national du cinéma et de l’image animée], from Organisation de la Francophonie, and from awards we received in the festival of Carthage, where the feature version was shown in post-production. The Occitane region, also.

W&H: What does it mean for you to have your film play at LFF?

HA: My previous films were screened throughout the world, in many international festivals, but I was never selected for the London Film Festival. For me, it represents a festival with a very wide range of films and a very wide audience that is difficult to reach.

[It is] a very nice opportunity for me to reach a new audience, in a [difficult] city where people are tempted to keep their distance and close their doors to foreigners. So, it is a very good opportunity that the festival offers my film, in this very hard period for us — Syrians — and this complicated period for the English people.

W&H: What’s the best and worst advice you’ve received?

HA: The worst advice was to integrate some images of the massacres in Syria into the film to attract people. And the best advice was to stay relaxed, and to go on thinking about the Syrian people, and presenting them in this unusual way: with their thoughts, their calm, their clever resistance.

W&H: What advice do you have for other female directors?

HA: Let’s always move upwards in our work. Let’s be free and never stop because we’re women. We should never believe that men’s films are better, obviously.

W&H: Name your favorite woman-directed film and why.

HA: During these last few years, women have done an amazing, distinguished, and courageous job with film content and visual approach. I love the sensibility and the mature approach of the Egyptian filmmaker Hala Lofti. I love the poetry and the cinematic madness of the Palestinian director Mais Darwazah. I love the way the Lebanese director Rania Rafei chooses to “re-read” history, and her will to destroy borders. The list of my favorite films made by women is very long.

W&H: Have you seen opportunities for women filmmakers increase over the last year due to the increased attention paid to the issue? If someone asked you what you thought needed to be done to get women more opportunities to direct, what would be your answer?

HA: I don’t see [the situation in] this way. Women are not children, nor people who need special opportunities to help them. We have to support them in their struggle.

When I talk about women, I tend to talk about women in the Arab World, because it is three times more complicated to be a woman and a director there than to be a man and a director. The Arab filmmaker has to struggle against the political regimes, against the patriarchal society, and against some religious people who are paralyzed in their vision of the world. So, an Arab female director still has a long way to go to reach freedom in her creation and her life. She is the only one who can make it. She needs to supported.