The Tower is a unique animated feature film about a young girl named Wardi, 11, who lives in a Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon and collects her extended family’s memories and stories.
We spoke with director Mats Grorud in advance of its screening as our Closing Film about why he wanted to tell this story, why he chose animation, the years-long effort it took to make the film, and its ongoing reverberating worldwide impact.
BPFF: How did you get into filmmaking, especially animation? Did these interests develop together, or did one lead to the other?
MG: No, I was always doing animation actually, since I was about 19. I became fascinated by this ability to build a world and tell stories—to craft, to just build things. I think this was how my fascination started, more with building than with storytelling.
I went to school in Denmark when I was 19, and then I continued [with animation], and I haven’t stopped. So I’ve always done animation. For The Tower, which is an animation film, it was never really a question whether I was going to make it in animation or with regular actors. Animation is what I do. [The question I faced] was more how to tweak the subject in a way that it would work with the animation, not whether I should do it using this or that technique.
BPFF: So you’ve always then been into the idea of building worlds and animation. What sparked your interest in putting that on the screen as film?
MG: You start playing around with very, very short films, just experimenting, crafting things and making them come alive, and then slowly you build on that and move into creating narratives and stories. It grows on you, and as you get better at it, you get more satisfaction from making something that moves or informs. But I am very much into the creation process. That’s the most fun part, actually.
It’s also quite new for me, having written and directed this [feature] film. Because short film is the usual format in animation, and normally you are very normally, you are very hands on on a short film. A feature film is very, very big. This project took eight years to make. Your average animator would make a short film.
BPFF: You work in Claymation? [Ed. Note: Claymation is clay animation, which is software that combines individual photos of still clay figures to create the impression of motion.]
MG: Yes, it’s Claymation, and there are some historical flashbacks in the film that are done in 2D [two-dimensional footage]. There’s also a mix of real footage and photos. There’s a mix of three different elements in the film.
BPFF: Its clear from watching the film that it was a massive undertaking.
MG: The animation itself—the editing and recording of voices, etc.—took a couple of years. So that’s not extremely long. But it took me a really long time to write the story. It’s also because I lived in the Palestinian refugee camp (Burj al-Barajnah, in Lebanon) for a year, and I grew up with these stories from my mother who worked as a nurse in Lebanon during the war. I tried to be as respectful as I could to the people who were telling me these stories, so that when the film was finished, I wanted the film to feel true to the people in the camps. So while I was writing the script, I spent a lot of time going back to Lebanon or discussing with Palestinian friends in Sweden and Norway if this felt right or true, if it resonated with how they see the camp today and how they see their past. That took a long time.
BPFF: You mentioned that your mother was a nurse in Lebanon during the civil war when you were growing up. How did you become interested in Palestine?
MG: I was born in 1976, and my mom worked in Lebanon from around 1984-1985. I was like nine years old, and she would come back after three or four months, six months working there, and show slides to me and my small brother and sister.
BPFF: Were those some of the photos that we see in the film?
MG: Yes. Half of them are my mom’s pictures, some of the images I grew up with, and the other half were from the private photo albums of my friends from the camp.
I guess as a kid, being we, 13, it’s the age where you open your eyes to the world and see that there is more happening than just your garden and your football team. At that time, in 1989, we moved to Cairo. My mom was working then at the Palestinian hospital in Cairo. And we also went to Rafah in Gaza and to Jerusalem at that time. It was also the end of the first Intifada and being a 12-year old kid seeing all these other kids running around the street corners with the “V for victory” signs with their fingers left a big impression on me.
When I was 19, I went for the first time to Lebanon, to the refugee camps, when there was peace. I got the chance to stay in the camp later. So, this was my childhood, sort of. It didn’t have to have this effect on me, but it did. My mom told me that in life I could choose whatever, on one condition, that it involved Palestine. So, I am a good boy; I adhered to my mom’s rules.
BPFF: The title of the film comes from the name of the camp, Burj al-Barajnah (in Arabic, Tower of Towers). Can you explain a little about Burj al-Barajnah and its place in in Palestinian history, and Palestinian history in Lebanon in general, and how your film frames this?
MG: Burj al-Barajneh is one out of twelve official camps in Lebanon that were established after the Nakba in 1948. Burj al-Barajnah is one of three camps in Beirut, and it’s the largest one. You also have Sabra and Shatila, which is the most well-known camp, because of the massacre [of thousands of Palestinians in September 1982], and there is another smaller camp as well. Burj al-Barajnah is near the airport, and when I lived there in 2001, there were 20,000 people living on one square kilometer. Since then, a lot of people have left. If people get a chance, they leave for Europe or Australia or Canada. People do leave, if they can work, leave illegally, marry, any which way. But also, a lot of new people have come from Syria, both Palestinians and Syrians. Today, I think the camp houses about 35,000 to 40,000 people, still living on one square kilometer. It cannot grow sideways, so it always grows upwards. It is about eight stories high now, most of the houses, the “towers.”
The name of the film in Arabic, al-Burj (The Tower), is what people call the camp. The name Burj al-Barajnah itself means “tower of towers.” For me, it’s both: These tall towers that just keep rising, as now it’s the fourth generation growing up in these camps. So on one hand it’s a symbol, a physical structure that reflects the tragedy of Palestinian history after they were expelled. But at the same time, I think it also shows the persistence, how people persevere, how they manage somehow this steadfastness, the صمود Sumud that Palestinians are famous for. Being able to continue, being able to keep some form of hope alive somehow, that’s what I was interested in when I made the film—that despite everything that’s happened and everything that is happening, people still find different ways to go on. That’s the mystery of human behavior, I guess.
BPFF: You kind of present the film almost as an oral history of the Palestinians, especially those who have been expelled and became refugees in Lebanon. Different characters in the camp relive their generational experiences. Were those real people or combinations of people? And what about the events they describe?
MG: For the flashbacks, it’s more, because I was not in the camp as a journalist. I was teaching English to kindergarteners. The people I interviewed were my friends and their families. To be honest, the harsher things that happened in history, especially with the parents’ generation, I didn’t have as much information from people in the camp, because I was reluctant to ask unless people told me. I felt bad diving into this pool of darkness—to be a tourist in misery. Because it is very hard for people to talk about such grievous losses. So for the flashbacks in the film, I read the book What It Means to Be Palestinian, by Dina Matar. I would rely more on outside sources, such as interviews that were transcribed, and I used that as inspiration for the different stories. Some of the stories in the film are also based on my friends’ stories, especially from the 1980s.
A lot of the history in the camp is oral, so even if it is written, it is based on interviews where people talk about their lives. Oral history is an important part of Palestinian history.
BPFF: What did you learn about the ideas of memory, hope, and return in Palestinian culture, which were a large part of the film?
MG: I found that a lot of the stories were in a sense shared. There was like a communal or shared sense of history, and it seemed to me that certain stories were told and retold and retold, perhaps in different ways or versions, and somehow these became collective. For example, the story in the film of the kid who gets shot, my friend Abu Hasan told me this story, and how he was playing with his friend Bilal. I’m not entirely sure if this actually happened to Abu Hasan or if it happened to another friend. But it becomes a collective memory of a situation and a scene, and something that happened that felt true, that feels true to a lot of people. This I find interesting. I’m not an intellectual in the sense of being a historian, but it’s also the way you live in the camp, because you sit a lot and you drink coffee and you smoke cigarettes, so storytelling and sharing stories is a very large part of how people live. Actually for the film, it started out with all the jokes my friends would just have these endless jokes about how they grew up, about the bomb shelters, about being kids in this war situation, a lot of funny stories but also very tragic.
This was actually how everything started, when I wanted to make the film. Then it kind of changed slightly, it’s maybe more dark now than I hoped it would be at the beginning, but it was really all these jokes and all these stories that people were telling about their childhood that sparked my idea to make this film.
It’s also about 1948, which is not first-hand information, but stories. The story of Sidi in the film, it’s actually the story of my friends’ grandfather, and how they would recount and retell the stories they heard from him and from others about his life in Palestine; how they left; and life in the village. There are certain themes that are repeated—like the orchard, the importance of nature, the importance of the earth—that I found fascinating and interesting. When you see in the film that people do have all these gardens on the rooftops, that’s not a symbol—that’s reality. It’s the same with the keys: It’s not just a symbol of return; it’s the reality. It’s the physical thing that people still have—the key to go back to their homes, and the rooftop gardens that resemble the nature they left behind. I hope this makes sense.
BPFF: It does. As a filmmaker who is creating this world on the screen, do you feel pressure to present the film in a way that correctly represents the Palestinian people? As you said before, you are Norwegian, not Palestinian, so you come at this from the outside looking in. How do you step into that role as a filmmaker of telling stories correctly?
MG: Living one year in the camp is not that long, but it also gave me the weight that I could sense a few things or have a gut feeling of what was right or wrong. It was really, really important for me to try. I did not want to make my own version of either present reality or the past. Even if I made the film, it was very important for me that the film in the end would feel true to my friends and their families and the people in the camp. That’s kind of an impossible goal, because each person has their individual perception, but some things ring true to a lot of people. My goal was to go and discuss the script and then get the feedback where people feel “this feels right and this feels true and this feels like the real camp and how we live,” and that the characters in the film are true characters whom they feel they know. It’s their grandmothers, or their uncles. I spent a lot of time to actually go and discuss the script. That was very important to me, really, especially since a lot of these things are traumatic.
I had two small challenges when making the film. Halfway in the project, I read this book by Diana Allen, she’s a professor in the US or Canada, and she runs the Nakba Archive in Beirut with Mahmoud Zeidan. She wrote a book, Refugees of the Revolution that was really interesting where she talks about the kind of national narrative of the Palestinians and this cloak of victimhood and that the Nakba and the right of return kind of overshadows every other story of survival or resistance which might not be as heroic as the national narrative of persistence, and return. So even though all these things are very important, there are so many other things that people hope for and work for and have in their daily lives which is not always about this big dream of return. Do you get what I mean? So halfway into the film, I found myself wondering if I was just repeating, “Oh the Palestinian victims of the Nakba, all they want to do is go back.” So I tried to be sure to include other voices, other hopes, and other aspirations, not only this one national narrative.
It was also quite hard for me, because it started out as an animated documentary, where I tried to be as true as possible to the sources I had at hand. But I was writing the script in Norway and people were in Lebanon or elsewhere. So I didn’t have access to the people who had written the stories or told the stories, and I had to free myself slightly by using the documentary sources as inspiration but telling a fictional story, so that I could make something that could work on film. That was quite hard also because it was my first feature. I tried to be as respectful to the truth as possible while making the film, because I didn’t want to get it wrong.
For example, in the film, looking back, I might have wanted to change one of the flashbacks to have a female story, because there’s all these stories from the camps about how the women played a very, very important role. But at that time in the story, in the scriptwriting, I was so connected to what I had, where I had a source. So, I didn’t feel I had enough to just make up a story. I didn’t want to make up anything. Looking back at it, that’s one thing I would have liked to have had in the film is another flashback from the female perspective. But I didn’t feel I had the source to do it and I couldn’t just make it up. That’s the challenge of being a Norwegian filmmaker in Lebanon.
BPFF: How did you create the script? Did you write it in Norwegian and translate it? Because the film is in the Palestinian dialect, correct?
MG: I wrote it in a mix of Arabic and English first, also because the crew was mainly European, and then it was dubbed into Arabic after. I would have wanted it to be in Arabic first, but also we had the funding to do this in Sweden, and the whole team was European, so in the end we did it in English. But the lip sync for the film is quite crude, so it’s very easy to dub it into different languages.
BPFF: Claymation lends itself to that?
MG: This sort of Claymation does. You have a lot of animation that is much more realistic, and then you would have a problem. But this lip-sync is crude, and that works well for doing it in different languages.
I had Palestinian friends here who are from the camp, so they would help me check. This was a very nice part of the film actually was that we did the Arabic voices in Haifa. So, it’s Palestinian actors from inside Palestine playing their brothers and sisters on the other side of the border in Lebanon. This also gave the project another dimension for me, including Palestinians in Lebanon and Palestinian actors inside 1948 Palestine. Then I had help from my friends in the camp just to check if it wasn’t too different from their dialect.
BPFF: How did you go about searching for people to voice your characters?
MG: I’m not an expert on Palestinian cinema, so I had a director friend, Salim Abu Jabal, who helped me in the casting, and we also worked with a Palestinian production house in Haifa called Qumrahouse. Ahlam Canaan did all of the casting. And they found the “A” actors, Palestinian actors. In two weeks we had a full cast and we did the recording, so that was fantastic. But for the English version, I had Mohammad Bakri and Murad Hassan and Najla Said who recorded in New York. So I already had access to Palestinian actors for the English version.
BPFF: From the credits, it seems like quite the international production—you have people from France Norway Palestine, etc.
MB: Yeah, it is a very international film, even if it’s kind of small scale. When I asked people if they wanted to be part (of the production,) they were very positive. It was a big puzzle of knowing this person, who would know that person who could ask that person and in the end, getting all these people.
BPFF: Did you work solely on this for eight years, or did you produce other movies in between? How did that process work as far as getting everything done?
MG: We worked straight on for like eight years, but I do workshops in animation as well. You know, you’re not paid for working eight years on such a project, so you need to have some income doing other things. I would mostly teach kids and youth, and then in this way I could continue working and, when we had funding, we could include more people. Slowly the project grew, and we could include more and more people until we finally could produce it in France or do the animation in France. So I didn’t do any short films or anything in this period, I worked on The Tower, and I was teaching. That’s the luxury of Nordic countries and having a good school system where they employ artists.
BPFF: Is teaching animation a passion for you? Are you teaching primarily young people?
MG: I do mostly workshops, which are physical. I don’t teach about animation; I do animation with the kids. I’ve been doing this since I was 25, so it’s about 15 years. It’s nice, because we work a lot in solitude as well, writing, so it’s really nice to get out to meet people, to meet kids. It switches your head a bit and your body to do things differently. For me, it’s a really nice combination. It leaves me a lot of space to work on my own projects and have a minimum income.
BPFF: Tell us a little about some of the traveling and festivals you have been doing, and how the film has been received.
MG: We premiered the film in 2018 in Annecy, (Annecy International Animated Film Festival) in France, which is the largest animation film festival in the world. And this was also our long-term goal, to be able to finish the film for the 70-year commemoration of the Nakba. That was one-and-a-half years ago. Since then, it’s been in more than 150 festivals from Australia to Korea to Japan, the US, Europe, Africa. It’s been in cinema release in nine countries—Tunisia, Lebanon, Jordan, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Canada, France. We have it dubbed in Arabic, French, Norwegian, and English. It’s been a lot of traveling with the film.
The film is not this side and that side; it’s very clearly a Palestinian point of view in the film. So, I was (a bit concerned), because my position is quite clear: I think it’s a shame what has happened and I do think the refugees should have the right to return as they have the right to under the UN. I am clearly taking a side, and I am telling the Palestinian story and point of view. I was wondering how the reception would be, but in Norwegian media, French media, Swedish media, it’s been very, very positive. They are not saying that this was a propaganda film, which would be a nightmare (for me) if that was the feedback.
BPFF: Do you feel a difference in how the US sees a film like this vs. how Europe sees a film like this?
MG: I don’t know! It’s been in a children’s film festival in Boston, where it won two awards last year. Other than that, in the US it’s mostly been in Palestinian film festivals. So, I don’t know, to be honest. We’re going to screen it in Los Angeles in November; it will be very interesting to see how it’s received there. But in Europe, or worldwide, like Germany for example, their relationship with Israel is such that they don’t want to criticize anything that Israel does. So, the feedback in Germany, where we showed it at an Arab film festival in Berlin, was that such a film would be very hard to screen in the schools. But in the Nordic countries, it’s part of a UN program. In Norway we screen it to like 15,000 children in the schools. They made an educational package in Norway, Denmark, and also in France actually, teaching kids about the Nakba and what happened. So it differs from country to country, if it’s perceived as too politically difficult to bring into classrooms. But mostly it’s really, really warmly welcomed.
BPFF: Thank you so much for talking with us.
The Tower closes the festival Sunday, October 27, 2019 at 3 pm at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, with director Grorud attending. Co-presented with the Center for Arabic Culture.
View the full festival schedule and buy tickets here.