Ebrahim Nash’at on ‘Hollywoodgate’

Hailing from Egypt, journalist turned filmmaker Ibrahim Nash’at now calls Berlin home but his lens travels beyond borders. Nash’at crafts narratives with the finesse of a storyteller, honed by a master’s degree in documentary filmmaking from Met Film School.

Having made short films and served as an editor on Under the Sky of Damascus, he takes center stage with his feature film debut, Hollywoodgate, which premiered at Venice Film Festival and is now screening at El Gouna Film Festival.

Can you tell us about the project’s evolution? I understand this documentary idea came to you after another project called fell through?

So, originally I was supposed to go and film a documentary called Shura… the Arabic or the Farsi and Pashtun word for the counselling place, which is like the Taliban team that decides and makes decisions.

So, naively I thought that I was going to be able to approach them and make that film, because they were saying that they are different, we are now going to let women be out, and I wanted to be part of that decision-making. Are they really going to do what they claim to be saying in the beginning or not?

So, I got the permission to go there and film that movie, and when I arrived, the fixer that was helping me get access disappeared. I called him from a foreign number. The moment I said my name he hung up, so I knew that my access was gone. I asked the same fixer to set me up with a Taliban guy that speaks Arabic that can translate for me, so he put me in contact with that Taliban guy, and I was with him 24-7, so they can feel okay for me to be among them. I was paying him every day, every day, every day, and after two weeks, we tried to go to the leadership and they refused to even meet us. One soldier hit me and kicked me out of the office, so I knew that my mission had failed.

I told them “hey man, I’m almost running out of money, the money that I borrowed from the people, I’m wasting it, I’m going to leave”, and he’s like “okay, but maybe you can film something small before you go. My cousin has been relocated into the airport, if you want to come and film with him, so you film with the younger ones, why do you always want to film with the big guys?”

So, he took me into Hollywood Gate, and the moment I entered Hollywood Gate, I knew that this is the place where culture passes, it’s a much stronger documentary, and it showed what I wanted to show in the short documentary, in a deeper level, and the story of the weapons and all of that, I never expected to be happening, it just kept unfolding in front of my eyes.

Did any documentary serve as a reference or inspiration for the underlying concept of Hollywoodgate?

Definitely Talal Derki’s documentary Of Fathers and Sons was an inspiration to me to be among this kind of people and film with them. There were a couple of other documentaries, Durakovo: Village of Fools from Nino Kirtadze, she was also embedded with a group of religious leaders within Russia, and how they tried to make everyone kind of worship Putin’s ideology.

I wanted to make a movie that is the same genre of movies from Friedrich Weizmann, something that’s purely observational, that does not include any participation or any input from me as a filmmaker. It’s rather what I saw is what I filmed, what I shot, and definitely the people that I worked with were all inspiring to me through the process, they did Edge of Democracy, Honeyland, Navalny, all of these movies. Through the process they would show me these movies, or I’d seen these movies, and they kept inspiring me to go towards creating observational cinema, rather than changing.

More of a purity?

More of a purity, I don’t like the word vérité, because my point-of-view is not really vérité, this is my perspective of what’s happening, but it is called vérité, the genre that I created the movie in.

How did being a journalist give you an edge in putting this documentary together?

I think being a journalist in the first place has helped me get access, because they accepted me as a journalist, and they didn’t really know what is documentary filmmaking. They knew that the journalist was staying longer to make a longer story, and I kept saying “hey I’m not a journalist, I’m a filmmaker”, and they’re like “oh yeah, he’s a journalist that’s making a documentary”, but they would never call me a filmmaker, it was really annoying after a while, but it really helped me also widen my perspective. Being a journalist for so many years has made me see things, watch things, read about things, whenever you try to either write something or create a social media video or whatever format that I worked on.

You’re always on the run, finding more about what’s happening in my understanding of the world, rather than thinking that when I was younger I always wanted to be a filmmaker but I had an empty pot, and journalism has filled my pot with information that would lead to me being able to understand the situation that’s happening around me and not be too blind to see the good things, the important things that happen around me because I’m ignorant.

Are you still keeping one foot in journalism or are you going to continue in filmmaking?

I’m happy I’m a journalist but I don’t think I will go back because it has led to me… once a journalist, always a journalist. You have this tool that you can use as a research tool within documentary, but I definitely want to continue in documentary. But you never know, you never know what you’re going to do tomorrow.

They both help each other?

They both complete each other definitely, the only difference is that in my side in journalism I would rely on the words and in cinema I rely on the image.

And being in such close quarters, how are you able to remain detached from the subjects?

Therapy, a lot of psychological therapy throughout the whole process. Of course they are humans and nobody is pure evil. Hollywood is the only place where America is capable of creating heroes and the rest are evil, but the reality is that no one is pure evil and of course you get to a moment when you start to feel something, but I had a list of questions that I would always ask, which are ideological questions and things to directly separate me from them again.

So whenever I felt that I’m leaning towards something that is affecting my psychology, then I would directly ask those questions to say “yes we are humans and yes we had a good moment but we are different.” And of course my background growing up in a religious family and around a conservative society that has already taught me the difference between being religious and respecting religion and being a megalomaniac.

And speaking of the humanity that you were obviously seeing in that situation, was the comedic undertone always a consideration going into the film or did that come naturally?

I was always haunted by the futility of the material that I’m filming because I couldn’t really show the suffering visually until a very late stage I was always afraid that the movie would not make you feel the daily suffering of the Afghans and it really started to shape maybe after Rough Cut 15 or 16. We started to feel the suffering because before more of an observation of the Taliban without really feeling the others and I was always haunted by the failure of not being able to transfer the emotion of the people but also cinema is a great tool because it’s not what you see, it’s what you feel. You could see something and it brings to a completely different emotion and a different feeling and that I learned with the team also that we’re capable of doing that within the material and that problem was solved over time.

And the absence also creates…

The absence creates the presence for a woman and for the people. So for me the shot of the airplane… you can see a lot of things that are happening to the people that you have seen before in news reports and things like that. You could feel it when you’re just watching the city with the music and this is the beauty of cinema.

Were there any close calls when you were staying in such close proximity and have you had any threats in response to your film?

I’ve had the approval of one or two people but they are a big group. Most of them don’t like my presence or they would have made fun of my presence. They would call me names and I’m an outsider. Whatever you do you’re still being an outsider sitting in their comfort zone.

So there was always constant fear but at such stages and in such places, especially with me being there on my own sitting with my head down the whole time, fear becomes a tool to move forward rather than something that hinders you.

You opened and closed the film with narration. Was there ever a version of the documentary where you took a more active role as narration?

Yes, but I was completely against that because in building the narrative structure a movie should have a protagonist and making a movie only with antagonists is very rare.

And we tried in many versions, we said we will first build the actual right structure and then we start to drift away from the structure to the level that we reached that I’ve become a vessel, which is what I wanted from the beginning because this is not about me.

Me being a protagonist going there takes away from the reality of the people so I just became a tool to deliver the fear and what the people are feeling there every day rather than thinking about me. And there were some versions where it had five voice overs which we all hated.

You shot this documentary over the course of a year, I was quite interested to know how much footage you ended up with and tell us about the editing process?

We had around 220 hours of footage and we had two brilliant editors, Atanas Georgiev who did Honeyland and this year he did Against the Tide. Honeyland was nominated for Oscar 2019 and Against the Tide won the best vérité award in Sundance this year.

And also we have Marion Tuor who did a lot of movies… we were co-editing Talal’s Under the Sky of Damascus and we would split into computers or work with each other. I originally come from an editing background, so it started with the three of us and then later the whole team was sitting there, six of us, stuck in one room… when we started to have the rough cut that looks like a movie.

Then later we would get visits from Sahraa Karimi our executive producer who is Afghan and then we would always try to find the right narrative and it was very collaborative. Even for Atanas he would say, “I’ve never had a movie where six-seven people sit in one room and are able to agree on something.” But the outcome is a trauma, it is the trauma of all of us suffering from war… from different sides.

The Americans felt their trauma within the film being represented, for the Middle Eastern we felt our trauma being represented, Atanas from the Balkans felt his trauma being represented and of course Sahraa is from Afghanistan and she felt what’s happening in her country within the footage and this was the only moment when we all knew we have a film.

The Taliban have developed a very strong reputation for their radical views… how would you say Hollywoodgate has changed this representation?

It did not change it, it’s strengthened it in a different way. It shows that their radical views are not based on their true beliefs, it’s based on power-loving. So they claim to be religious and they claim to represent religion but actually what they care about is power. This is number one, that they feel powerful and they feel strong and they keep bringing young people and traumatized people to support them because they claim to represent something.

For me the strongest sentence in the whole film is when the young soldier says, “I hope that our new law does not contradict with the Sharia law” because he has no idea what the Sharia law is. It shows who they really are, which is power loving people who are led by warlords… that are no different from warlords in other places.

Even if warlords would claim that they are representing democracy or they are, even Trump at a certain stage was a warlord in many situations. What he’s doing now is an action of a warlord. And we people, citizens, we get lured into the propaganda of war without realizing that actually we are just helping those warlords fulfill their lack of personal satisfaction by giving them more dopamine, by clapping them on and giving them this image or an esteem that makes them feel fulfilled because they are all at the end traumatized kids that never in a way or another solved their own issues.

Having been through this whole production, if you had to do it all over again would you do anything differently?

No, having the knowledge that I have now? I don’t know, before that journey I was someone enough for the journey, someone else, you don’t make movies, movies make you.

So I actually can’t think I could go now and do it again. Like the way I evolved and the way that I developed and the way I’ve been through therapy and fixed a lot of my own issues. If you tell me to go now and do it again, I don’t know, I would need to think about it.

The person who took the decision and the person who was brave and did all of that, that’s not who I am today. I am who I am with what I learned out of this experience and I’m very thankful for it. But what I want to do next is something that is not the same.

What was your biggest surprise in terms of culture shock over the course of this film?

That they are liars. It was a huge shock to me that Taliban would miss prayers. Prayers, I’d come and the next prayer passed and I’m like, these guys didn’t pray even. Like the basics, they wouldn’t, they make people pay money if they don’t go to the mosque and pray in the mosque and then some of them even would miss the prayer. So that was for me a big shock that it’s all about the cause and the big slogans without really patriotic totalitarian regime, not really what they claim to be.

So… some hypocrisy and double standards slipping in there…

Yeah.

You’ve spoken a lot about what you’ve taken away from this film personally. What message or takeaway would you be hoping to leave with the viewer?

I hope that the film shows that the forever war mentality is a failure, and the idea of fighting ideology with weapon only make the ideology grow stronger. I hope to let world know that Taliban understands propaganda and these extremist groups have learned from Hollywood how to make themselves here too.

And they are using this narrative among their own people to become stronger. And the increased rise of the extreme right wing in the world is now making it go worldwide. And yeah, hate will only bring hate and will cause more trauma and war will beget war. War begets war begets war. It’s endless.

Yeah, it’s like what you said at the end of the film, the closing comments. I found that very powerful.

Thank you so much.