Hind Meddeb currently works between Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East. Her first film, “Casablanca: One Way Ticket to Paradise,” tells the story of 14 Moroccan suicide bombers who killed dozens of innocent people in downtown Casablanca. Between 2011 and 2013, she directed two feature documentaries observing the Arab revolutions through the eyes of young musicians in the slums of Cairo and poor neighborhoods across Tunisia. Her film “Electro Chaabi” was selected for dozens of festivals and premiered at the BFI London Film Festival.

“Paris Stalingrad” will premiere at the 2019 Toronto International Film Festival on September 10.

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

HM: Paris, in the summer of 2016. Refugees arrive from Sudan, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Somalia, Afghanistan, and many other countries, hoping to escape war, poverty, and political instability. In the City of Lights, they have no choice but to sleep in the streets. Makeshift camps start growing in the Stalingrad district. Nothing is planned to welcome asylum seekers. 

As a Parisian born citizen, I witnessed the French state’s violence against these new immigrants. I followed their daily life, between police raids, massive arrests, and closed immigration offices. I began spending time at the camps, listening to their stories, and helping them to fill out forms to ask for asylum. I made this film to share their side of the story.

In this context, I met Souleymane, a Sudanese teenager who lost everything during the war in Darfur. We shared Arabic as a common language. We could communicate without the need of an interpreter and it makes a difference. In our discussions, when he was angry at the injustices inflicted on refugees, Souleymane summoned the colonial past of France: “All you see here, theses streets and buildings, the people of Africa built it! Who was digging this earth? Those who come from Africa,” he said. 

We spent long afternoons at the edge of the Saint Martin Canal and we met regularly at the Sudanese restaurant where his whole community goes for lunch. Whenever others denied his humanity, whenever he faced torture, slavery or abuse, whenever he had nowhere else to turn, Souleymane found solace in the one thing nobody could take from him: his poetry. For him, each poem is a way to say the unspeakable, to sublimate the violence he endured throughout his journey. 

At refugee demonstrations, police roundups, and meetings with groups of concerned citizens who come to his aid, I captured Souleymane in his Parisian wanderings, to the beat of his poetic ramblings.

With this film, I wanted to document the transformation of my city. At each stage of Souleymane’s life, I could see how much Paris was increasingly banning foreigners from public space. At the end, the film reveals a hidden side of Paris. Everybody heard about the harassment of refugees at European borders in Hungary, Bulgaria, or in Calais. But the life conditions of refugees in Paris, one of the most visited cities in the world, known for fashion, art, and literature, are still unknown to the public at large. 

In “Paris Stalingrad,”  like in my previous films, I am with those I film, in a close relationship, and this is how it becomes possible to collect stories without filter and that are given to me with confidence. In a way, with this film, I wanted to translate the thoughts of those I met, give a voice to their anger and deceptions, and expose the gap between the positive image of my city in the rest of the world and the reality I was observing on a daily basis as a Parisian citizen.

This film is about state violence against harmless people, a dehumanization process, and poetic resistance as an alternative. 

W&H: What drew you to this story?

HM: In 2016, Valérie Osouf, a woman who became one of the characters of my film, was describing on social media the terrible life conditions of refugees in the streets of Paris. We had common friends. I was so moved by her writings that I decided to contact her and asked how I could help. She told me about an empty high school occupied by refugees who were trying to escape street life and police harassment. Hundreds of Parisians came to show their solidarity with the project. I was among them. Most of the people occupying the building were asylum seekers from Sudan, Erythrea, Ethiopia, Libya, and Afghanistan. They where trying to create a collective place with common rules. But the State, who owned the building, refused to discuss any arrangement.

The affair went to court and after ten days, the police had been ordered to kick the refugees out of the building. I was there, among hundreds of peaceful protesters, in front of the building the day it happened. The police used disproportional violence against peaceful people. Attending this event was a shock. I didn’t expect that. 

Before discovering the daily life of refugees in the streets of Paris, I didn’t imagine my city could treat human beings like that. I was raised in French schools and universities where I learned about the lessons of World War II. I thought the refugee status created at that time was sacred. I deeply believed in human rights and I thought France, the country where my parents immigrated for that reason, was really a place of social justice.

This film started as a need to document state violence against the most vulnerable people: those trying to escape war and violence, those without citizenship, those waiting for their right to apply for asylum. I started to film to calm down my anger and it became my way to resist. There was almost no media coverage. I started to document daily.

Because I speak Arabic, I could have deep conversations with Sudanese, Libyans, Iraqis, Eritreans, Ethiopians, and Somalis. I started filming harassment of refugees by the police, the systematic destruction of street camps without proposing alternative shelter, the daily violations of asylum-seekers’ rights by a police force hostile to cameras, and the support of concerned citizens.

When faced with the violence my camera had recorded, I decided to make a film to show the true face of a city I had always thought of as tolerant and culturally and ethnically diverse. But also, I felt I had to record the city’s memories. Most of the places and situations I filmed disappeared, made invisible by the city itself. From Stalingrad to La Chapelle, from the Eole Garden to the city ring roads, bodies end up isolated on the city outskirts. The city of Paris succeeded in making them invisible. The film exists as the memory of a place, Stalingrad, where it was a matter of surviving together.

If the issue of welcoming migrants preoccupies me so much, it’s because, contrary to appearances, I don’t consider it a peripheral issue, but one that is at the center of our lives. It is an issue that says something about our choices as a society and that invites us to look beyond our daily preoccupations.

Faced with the terrorist threat, now more than ever, the French government defends a certain conception of identity as exclusively national. Its mission becomes defending our borders and building walls. Everything must be done to separate migrants from the rest of the body politic; hence the importance of disbanding street camps, refusing to work alongside citizens’ groups, or creating public spaces.

This film is an attempt to reform that image, to recreate a common imagination, to show the ties that invite us to “come together,” all the tiny but precious acts of resistance that I patiently collect.

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

HM: I wanted to do a film that doesn’t represent “refugees” as a subject of study or another headline in the news. I tried to abolish the distance between the viewers and the characters of the film. I wanted to avoid the absence of feeling while watching an undistinguished crowd. I tried to represent the characters of the film as actors of their own lives, not as victims, but as heroes who faced death several times before arriving in Paris.

I think dehumanization comes from the terminology we use; because we constantly speak about “refugees” as a category — we forget they are human beings, we forget we could be them, and they could be us. Even in the voice over, I didn’t use the word “migrant” or “refugee.” I just described where people were from and why they were seeking asylum.

I wish, after seeing it, people could relate to the characters of my film and could understand more about exile. Even if it’s impossible to put yourself in someone else’s shoes, at least you have empathy and feel the injustice. I will even go further and say I hope people will feel they should get more involved in their city, open their minds and doors, and start to express more solidarity and realize how much we live in a interdependent world.

The film does not aim to explain everything, but rather allow what is off frame to also breathe. This is not a survey of the refugee’s journey in Paris, but a film that shows moments spent by them: the brutal experience of a street life and the joys of friendship.

I must admit that in the face of the many acts of violence and inhumanity inflicted on these people, I sometimes thought that I was making a film committed to alert the public. But over the course of the editing, it became clear that the most powerful counterpoint to what refugees endure when they arrive in Paris is the life force that inhabits them, the extreme lucidity of their analyses, and the intellectual and poetic finesse of their writings. Finally, police brutality and administrative violence are, in my opinion, referred to in this film as a setting and not a subject; the real subject of this film is the people it takes as characters. 

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

HM: Filming people in a humiliating situation — sleeping in the street, exhausted by the trip — and still showing them in their dignity.

Before being able to film in the camp, I spent days there, chatting with people, explaining to them the desire I had to make this film, and how much I wanted to share with a larger audience the moments we had spent with them. Finally, we started filming with those who understood our approach. But it’s really difficult to film in a refugee camp without making people feel uncomfortable. So the difference between us and news is that we were not only filming; we were helping people in many ways, and even following some of them in their journey.

I still have a lot of friends I made during the shooting and they don’t necessarily appear in the film. It was much more than making a film; it was an experience that changed my life.

As I started to share time with so different people, I started to become aware of what’s happening in Ethiopia, Sudan, or Afghanistan in a very intimate way. Also, poetry was very important. It’s not only Souleymane. Most of the refugees I met gave a great importance to poetry in their lives. That’s why I organized poetry workshops, including live sessions and published translations. I created “musical poetry nights” and live performances at Le Trianon, Maison de la Poésie, and Institut du Monde Arabe, making French musicians like Arthur H and Gael Faye collaborate with artists in exile.

I think it was impossible for me to just film. I needed to share and create spaces of artistic collaboration with the people I met. It was also a way to open some doors of the city to them and make them experience something positive.

While I was editing, I created a “cinema workshop” at Villa Saint Michel, a cultural center welcoming foreign unaccompanied minors, arriving alone from all over the world in Paris. I made these teenagers create their own documentary, a kind of “self-portrait” to share their life paths, between hopes and sorrows.

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

HM: I started to fund my films with my own money. I just directed a film for TV that was well paid. With this money, I could start filming without having funds or a producer. Then, with the first material I had, I started writing and editing to present the project to foundations and institutions. I was very lucky to be supported by CNC (French National Center for Cinema), SCAM (Civil Society for Multimedia Authors), French regional cinema funds (Grand Est and Ile de France), and AFAC (Arab Foundation for Arts and Culture).

This film couldn’t be crowdsourced because the first people who would need support are the ones in the film. During the shooting, I organized a concert with famous French musicians to raise money for the Gisti, an association providing jurisdictional help to asylum seekers.

W&H: What inspired you to become a filmmaker? 

HM: Bringing untold stories into life, giving a voice to the voiceless people, showing hidden sides of societies, revealing the truth, changing minds, and mentalities. Where there is injustice, denouncing and reporting what’s going wrong.

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

HM: Best advice: Don’t wait to learn how to film or direct, just try and experience by yourself.

Worst advice: if you want to make a career, stop doing films in Arab countries; it doesn’t interest a Western audience.

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

HM: My advice would be the same for male and female, because most of the young people I meet who ask me for advice are very afraid of choosing film. They have a lack of confidence. Their parents tell them it’s not a proper job and ask they will live off it. They don’t dare to fulfill their dreams. So I just say to them: do you feel like you couldn’t do something else? If yes, then it’s the good choice, trust yourself and don’t try to imitate anyone, find your own way to tell stories, bring your eye and soul into the camera, and consider what you do as a unique perspective. Don’t try to meet a standard.

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

HM: “Mustang” by Deniz Gamze Ergüven. I love this film because the director successfully recreated this very specific moment when you are a teenage girl discovering life, desire, and love. The way she films the bodies of these girls, their feelings, the beautiful sister relationship they have, their rebellion and their resistance to imprisonment and patriarchy is very sensual without being indecent. I would call it the camera of intimacy: a camera that share dreams and desires and touches the bodies to reveal the souls.

The director seems to be the sixth and invisible sister of the five main characters of the film. I think the beauty of the film is in its ability to recreate this sisterhood feeling. The emotions of the director meet and explode with the emotions of the actresses. This creates a unique, sensitive experience of cinema for viewers. 

W&H: What differences have you noticed in the industry since the #MeToo and #TimesUp movements launched?

HM: It’s a very lonely work in the documentary field. And we are more out of the industry, as we choose to film real life and real people, and we are free to choose our field or subject.

I can talk about my female actress friends in France. I would say the pressure still continue. Having a director choosing an actress in France is, most of the time, related to the desire he has for her and if she doesn’t respond, it still will be difficult for her to get the job, unless she is already very famous. France is going slowly on that topic. We still are in a very patriarchal society. Most of the heading jobs are ruled by men. [Execs] trust a man more than a woman to direct a film. The #MeToo movement was helpful to bring stories out, but I wouldn’t say it’s already changed mentalities.