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FILM

‘Les Chenilles’: A thread of liberation

Michelle and Noel Keserwany showed their film about the lives of two women in exile at the Arab Short Film Festival. It will be exhibited at the Sursock Museum until May 17.

‘Les Chenilles’: A thread of liberation

'Les chenilles': Stories of women and exile. (Screenshot from the film)

It was a full house at the Arab Short Film Festival, organized by Sursock Museum and Nadi Lekol Nass.

Michelle Keserwany wrote the film and her sister Noel starred in it. They directed it together. The sisters’ first short film tells the story of Sarah and Asma (played by Masa Zaher), two young women from the Levant in exile, who opened their eyes to the centuries-long oppression that shaped them.

“It is in the tepidness of breasts that caterpillars hatch.” This is the sentence that inspired the Keserwany sisters shortly after they arrived in France. It was taken from an article by Fawwaz Traboulsi entitled "Un amour de soie," published in L’Orient Express in 1996.

They discovered how, in the 19th century, the women of Mount Lebanon were exploited by European silk factories, particularly the Lyon ones.

“The women harvested, spun and wove silk, without ever being able to wear it. That’s where the problems started.”

At the same time, Michelle and Noel discovered the hardship of exile and met other women who had also gone through the pain of living and working in a country that was not theirs.

“We linked our story to theirs, then to the article, and that’s what made the film,” said Michelle Keserwany.

By carefully arranging images and sound, the film starts from the past to chronologically tell the fictional story of a meeting between two young women, one Lebanese and the other Syrian, both waitresses in a Lyon cafe.

It compares the manual and precarious past jobs to today’s work culture. It also narrates the stories of displaced women, like the Lebanese workers in the silk factories who appear in the photographs.

“Our experiences drove the research. While trying to find tools to express or analyze it, that’s where the research comes in,” said Noel Keserwany.

Michelle immediately added, “Can you imagine if we found these archives in France? Our stories are scattered. We needed to use images and narration to bring it all together so we could talk about our problems today.”

While the film is feminist and social, it is not didactic. Everything is expressed cinematically and poetically. The penultimate scene, for example, takes place in a museum, giving rise to a long stasis in which women’s bodies appear in sculpture or painting. Taking the female body out of the realm of paid exploitation and showing it in its intimacy is also what the film achieves through its images.

“It’s important for women to talk about their experiences as women. We know how to tune, how we want to use our bodies. We know exactly where to stop, what to show and what not to show,” said Noel.

“It’s not cerebral; it’s intimate and intuitive,” added her sister.

Michelle and Noel Keserwany at the Lebanese premiere of "Les chenilles" at the Sursock Museum. Photo Nima Salha

Throughout the film, the silk thread appears as a topographical conductor. Arabic and French images of Lyon and Beirut, of the traboules and the corniche, intertwine and mingle. It is a polyphony of several coexisting spaces showing the difficulty of weaving between two simultaneous realities.

The thread creates a link in exile, sewing images together. This is the film’s essence, which brings images together through editing. It is a montage film, with shots of often different natures, complementing each other to create a story with multiple layers. While the difficulties of exile are clearly expressed in the narration, they are also made perceptible through real poetry and visual work.

Substances and the body have preponderant influences there. Substances as a vector of memory, like the water on the coast of Lebanon or the broken glass of Aug. 4; the body is a receptacle of pain. Asma’s character recounts that she realized how much her mother had aged when she visited her last year, how much her face had wrinkled. “This kind of detail is not seen on Skype.”

Noel Keserwany explained this relationship with the body: “Living in dysfunctional countries causes bodily and emotional repercussions, shocks too. We see it with what is happening in Gaza, Lebanon and Syria. We have seen how the faces and bodies of our friends have changed.”

The thread leads us towards a progressive liberation. It also weaves this friendship in wandering, in the unexpectedness of the wandering, in their desire to stop following the classic pattern of the day.

Sarah and Asma then become independent subjects able to free themselves. They reclaim their formerly imperialized bodies to become like spiders that weave webs for survival.

One still recognizes the heritage of the musical videos with which Noel and Michelle began in the assembly of images and the voice-over. But "Les Chenilles" already shows what narrative qualities the two sisters can demonstrate.

The film's profound honesty never seems feigned. The angle of intimacy and experience amplifies this honesty.

Michelle explained that they consciously surrounded themselves with people who knew the subject, such as cinematographer Karim Ghorayeb and composers Zeid Hamdan and Lynn Adib.

The film won 'Best Short Film' Golden Bear at Berlinale. Could this be a springboard for many other projects by the Keserwanys? Indeed, the sisters are preparing a feature-length documentary together and other separate films, each an animated fiction.

This article was originally published in L'Orient-Le Jour. Edited by Yara Malka. 

It was a full house at the Arab Short Film Festival, organized by Sursock Museum and Nadi Lekol Nass.Michelle Keserwany wrote the film and her sister Noel starred in it. They directed it together. The sisters’ first short film tells the story of Sarah and Asma (played by Masa Zaher), two young women from the Levant in exile, who opened their eyes to the centuries-long oppression that shaped...