We meet Maria Luisa Forenza. She graduated in Foreign Languages and Literatures, in Directing at the Experimental Center of Cinematography-Rome, with Duetto, based on Alberto Moravia's “Roman Tales”, played by Giulio Brogi. Assistant to Dino Risi, Francesco Maselli, Giancarlo Sepe, after a scholarship at the Academy of Arts in Belgrade with the Serbian director Dusan Makavejev, she mainly dedicates herself to documentaries with a historical-social slant, shot in Italy and abroad, with production and distribution Rai, Rai-Trade, History Channel (Usa-Uk), Netflix. Among these: Guatemala Nunca Mas (with Rigoberta Menchù), Mussolini: the last truth, Albino Pierro: investigation of a poet (from which a multilingual theatrical show with Agneta Eckmanner, staged in Rome and Stockholm). Conceived in San Francisco, presented and awarded for Special Mention and Best Documentary in Film Festivals, Mother Fortress is the latest result of this cinematographical journey. It seemed to us an operation as for Antonioni’s depth, a reflection on evil and good understood in a metaphysical sense, investigated in their mystery with an authentic and powerful language, a road movie in the Mediterranean light, captured with splendid photography both in its spectacular power and in the dim light of a mystical place like a monastery.
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The images in your documentary bear the date of 2017. When did you start dealing with the subject of the war in Syria?
The interest began much earlier. I was in Australia for a documentary when I saw the first images of the protests of the so-called "Arab Spring", in 2011. Upon returning to Italy I tried to understand what was happening in the Middle East, despite not knowing the Arabic language. It all started in that period, out of intellectual curiosity and interest in the news. But with Mother Fortress I did not venture into the reconstruction and analysis of the historical-political situation in the Middle East, for various reasons. Because I believe that this work should be done when the time is ripe, with the contribution of the work of historians, on the basis of a careful study of the different elements at play. What interested me was instead to talk about human resistance to war, the vitality of the Syrian people, and the Christian identity, which found itself there to give support to the population in the context of a strong risk situation. I felt that the film had to tell something that projected human beings into the future.
How did you come into contact with Mother Agnes and why the decision to tell the story of the monastery of San Giacomo?
I was in San Francisco in November 2013 and was invited by a parish priest to listen to Mother Agnes who came from Syria to tell what was happening. She made a tour in some American parishes and universities, organized by an association for peace. The Mother Badess returned in 2014, and on April 29 while she was giving a lecture at a Catholic university near Berkeley, I started filming documenting that event, which however does not appear in the film. At Christmas I joined her in Syria to get to meet her international monastic community (from Ancient and New Continent). I returned to the Monastery in 2015. Then in June 2017 I followed the humanitarian convoy of the Red Crescent (Arabic Red Cross). And again between September and October of the same year we arrived to the Euphrates for the delivery of aid in food, medicine and ambulances donated by Germany.
Let's talk about the language you used. The time of the documentary, in the first part that follows the life of the religious in the Monastery, is that of the movements, words, rituals of everyday life. But perhaps there is also another time at the same time ...
Yes, it was one of the coordinates I tried to work on, material time and mystical time. There is a chronological time made up of moments that follow one another. And there is the ‘here and now’ which is the moment of the expansion of the ego, which happens in mysticism as well as in art. You experience it in the expressive rhythm of a poem, in listening to music, in a prayer, in meditation, in an "om". It is a "being there", the moment of maximum penetration and perception of yourself and the world around you. In a Christian key it is the Kairos, the moment in which you are so much inside things ... you grasp them, you grasp yourself with such awareness, that it becomes a moment of revelation, almost of eternity. You perceive yourself as a life that flows, and everyone declines it according to their own beliefs: perception of life, spiritual prayers, or the words of a critic such as Hans Gumbrecht at Stanford University, who in a seminary made me grasp this concept through the reading of a Hölderlin poem.
You never use music, while shots are often heard in the background. How did you work with the sound?
In the shooting, particular attention was paid to recording the sound of the places, indoors and outdoors, in all possible variables. The Christian songs in Arabic and French (the main Syrian languages, also used in the monastery together with Spanish, Portuguese, English, Latin) were an original soundtrack that marked the daily cyclical nature of meditations, prayers, liturgies of monks and nuns. I placed the TASCAM recorder in every possible corner to capture the signs of the place. From the window of my room located to the east facing the city of Qarah, which was identifiable in the pitch dark of the night thanks to the row of Mosques that shone with green light, I tried to capture the litany of the Muezzìn that called the Muslim faithful to their duty daily. The film begins with the singing of the Muezzìn. The days and nights of the monastery were punctuated by Christian and Muslim prayers, like a song and countermelody that I tried to document in the film. It was a precise choice to pursue a perceptive experience, which Federico Savina, a master of sound recording, has frankly appreciated. It was like a search for the invisible. And I chose not to film the reality of war. It was my 'political' choice not to tell the war but its reflection, which becomes symbolic. Italo Calvino in his American Lessons mentions the myth of Perseus who challenges Medusa (whose gaze petrifies the observer) using the stratagem of looking at her image reflected in the shield. Perseus gets the better of the Gorgon by looking not at her real face, but at her reflection.
The images of the distribution of food are shot with the camera in the truck. When the external door is closed, the sound goes down, and at that moment, through a crack, Sister Agnes is seen in the crowd on the onslaught of humanitarian aid. It is a moment of great suspension ...
The choice to lower the sound matured because that scene for me, as it was configured, with the nun who unexpectedly enters the frame, is a gift. I think it was a destiny, or providence, so much so that I feel that scene as the center of the film. The sound was studied in the editing and mixing phase: the question was whether or not to increase the chaos, emphasizing the hustle and bustle. We tried to lower the noise of the crowd and we realized that it was the right solution: that was my Kairos. In order to be able to withstand those people who flooded us and who also put my life at risk, I knew I didn't have to get out of the truck, and so I turned around while staying inside.
Being locked up protected me, but at the same time it emphasized the violence of that fury, that hunger, and my holding my breath in the face of such human suffering. They were hours of visual and sound violence. Lowering the intensity of the audio served to represent the bubble in which I took refuge, to protect my person and be able to continue filming with all my senses wide open and with an expansion of awareness. I closed myself in my silence, which allowed me to be in contact with the world, to be present there, in my tranquility, and to take the shots that needed to be made.
In this way of telling, there is great respect for the viewer because, by not adding music, you give anyone the opportunity to feel emotion at the moment and for the reasons he wants, each in a different way.
I imagined the structure of the film as a wave of perceptions. The first part, shot in the monastery, is as I had designed it since San Francisco, the spaces and the sound were already present in the script phase. Among the different texts, the nuns and monks of the monastery study “The interior castle” by Teresa of Avila, and the poem “The dark night” by Giovanni della Croce, milestones of mystical literature. The moments of the choral songs are a Kairos, an opening towards a space that is other than that which is simply visible. Because we don't just experience what we see. The CERN in Geneva also tells us about it: we are a flux of neutrinos that flow. Science tells us that matter is not just what we think and touch. There is an ‘invisible’ that crosses us every day, so in the image there is the visible but also the invisible. A play of light and dark runs through the film. In post-production we reflected on the search for perceptive vibrations also extended to the colors of the images.
The scene in which you suffer a "live" attack, in which you run away with the camera, is also different from what you have told. It turns into a ‘metaphilm’, it becomes a moment of testimony.
On October 4, 2015 there was an attack by Daesh, in Syria they prefer to call them that but not Isis, because it is a derogatory term. Having come down from the mountains, they arrived in the village of Qarah one kilometer from the monastery, they had already killed some people. Those images really documented ... it was a dramatic moment but there was also confidence because the monastery was under control. It was a controlled risk, of course there were moments of panic because it is true that you are in a fortress (created by the ancient Romans) but you become aware that anything can happen. In the previous months there had been armed attacks on the monastery. The terrorists had managed to break through the main door and all the inhabitants of the monastery, including Muslim refugees with children, had had time to hide and lock themselves in the underground caves. Monks and nuns seriously risked being beheaded, because this was happening in Syria. The Christian religious of the priestly and monastic orders have heroically served, cared for and fed the people who remained in the country largely of the Sunni religion. Perhaps it also depended on my Christian background. I felt it was my duty, I had to go there. When the Daesh attack unexpectedly took place in my presence, in the film there are no longer monks praying, only a "cemetery" church remains. I filmed what was really there, that is the silence, we were all silent. I filmed what happened: the drama of silence. Everyone at that moment took responsibility for their own existence, an expansion that I tried to capture with empty space and with sound. In the end, this documentary was an experiment. If you catch something it means that I have succeeded in my intent. And I am grateful to Lorenza Mazzetti, and to her sister Paola, for their observations which led me to some important final filings.
Is yours a religious film?
"Religo" from the Latin 'tie together', is that energy that unites you. The religious sense rather than associating it with a canonical religion, I understand it as a belonging, which is human but also beyond the human. Spirituality goes beyond the concept of religion. I can perceive a spiritual dimension in Buzzati's story, The Desert of the Tartars, which Valerio Zurlini has transformed into a film, with Luciano Tovoli as Author of Photography. Raoul Ruiz's films reflect a spiritual quest in their poetic metaphysics and paradoxical cruelty. Then there are The Gospel according to Matthew by Pier Paolo Pasolini, and Ermanno Olmi's Meadows will return, of which in 2014 I organized a screening at the August Coppola Theater in San Francisco, together with Steven Kovacs, film historian, and Paolo Barlera, Director of 'Italian Cultural Institute. During the shooting in Syria there was a personal search for a sacred iconography ... Piero della Francesca ... I sought sacred balance in the middle of hell, trying to channel the images of reality into something that went beyond. I did some prep work for the film by writing a project that I knew would be completely upset upon arrival in Syria. Once on the field I would have had to make quick decisions, give compositional sense and meaning to the images that came towards me along the way. Every trip during that war was a race against time.
In the titles of the film you write that you were freely inspired by Francesco Zambon's "Metamorphosis of the Grail". Can you explain better how?
Currently the Grail is the cup in which the blood of Christ collected by Joseph of Arimathea was kept. Francesco Zambon, a Literature philologist, is an expert on medieval Grail tales and the book is a collection of essays. In reality, the film is inspired by the last chapter in which we talk about Umberto Eco and Italo Calvino. Both in their novels have treated the theme of the Grail as an absence, a void. The Grail, as a ghost that provokes a desire for a story that is handed down from generation to generation, material food, because the 'word' is material and spiritual. It is left as an inheritance, it is made to be learned by the child in order to educate it to grow and to rise again. In tragedy there is also hope, forgiveness, love, rebirth, and these are concepts that you pass on. When at the end Mother Agnes comes to Rome and comes to tell, to confess - this part I called "the confession" - she leaves the most important inheritance, because through the story, through the word-image, existence, the human dimension. There is the past and there is your future, for you and for those who will come.
Choose to end the documentary with Mother Agnes who tells a tragic event, but which in the film becomes a sort of parable: in the escalation of cruelty, the only thing that can be done is to stop it through forgiveness.
Forgiveness allows you to see in the other, as a physical body, those impulses that you yourself have and that you can understand. Forgiveness is the maximum understanding of the human being, which is limited but at the same time can have potential in itself. You see the other in his limit and also in his infinitude, with forgiveness you give him the hope of the infinite that is within him. This is the strength of the Syrians. I have received life lessons from them. Incredible things happen in poor countries: you go to the favelas, in Latin America, and where there is the maximum of poverty there is the maximum of vitality. It's a mistery. Even in Syria, in that total destruction, there is such a desire to live. Syria is a hodgepodge of religions, Sunnis, Shiites, Druze, Christians, and each with his own religion is trying to start over. The first thing they tell you is that they considered themselves 'Syrians', no one ever asked the other to define themselves on the basis of religion. Today, with this chaos that has destroyed a social balance, distinctions are made.
