Three Great Things is Talkhouse’s series in which artists tell us about three things they absolutely love. To mark the current release in theaters of the new drama Atonement, starring Boyd Holbrook, Kenneth Branagh, and Hiam Abbass, award-winning Palestinian actress and director Abbass shared some of the things that are most important to her. — N.D.
The Prophet
The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran is a book that I read when I was very young, a book that initiated my freedom. When I was a teenager, I used to sleep with it under my pillow. Through the book’s poetry, I was able to project towards a life that I didn't previously know, ideas that I didn't previously know, images that I didn't previously know that the book allowed me to imagine. And I created a whole imaginary world which helped me realize, “Wow, there's something else that could exist that is not reachable physically for me as a kid, but it is reachable because I decided to create it here.” I talk a lot about The Prophet, because it's something that has followed me in my life. Later, I found it to be more religious, but still the spirituality of the book is something that really allowed me to turn into the person I am now.
One of the things the book opened up to me is freedom. It made me ask myself, "What is freedom like knowing where you come from, knowing that you come from a background of wars, of conflicts?" Palestinians inherited the Nakba, inherited whatever my grandparents gave me and my parents, because they physically lived it. The book made me think there might be a world where we can be free to respect the freedom of others and give each other a space of being together, a space where maybe we could end wars, end conflicts. This is what I was thinking about as a kid. I was born in Nazareth, but I grew up in a village north of Galilee, in the mountains, with trees and animals. At that time, I think The Prophet permitted me to have all these layers of imagination in my head, because everything was more free in that poetry than in the life that I was living then.
Another thing that Kahlil Gibran talks about is love. Not in the sense of romantic love or love between couples, but human beings loving each other – Love with a big capital L. And what does love mean? The philosophical concept of love meant a lot to me. And specifically, it meant if love is there, then there is no hate. As a teenager, I would do anything to replace hate with love, but not in a simple way. There’s a line in the book that says, “Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself. They come through you but not from you, and though they are with you yet they belong not to you.” Children teach you to be a mother, a father. We bring them to life and try to make them what we want them to be, but that's another space of freedom where you prepare them for life, and then they have to make their own way. And because you love them and because you love life, you have to let them go. You have to free people from your own kingdom.
Jorge Semprún
Recently I worked on a theatrical adaptation of the book Literature or Life by a Spanish writer (who mostly wrote in French) called Jorge Semprún. In 1943, at the age of 19, he fled to France from Spain because of Franco, then joined the French Resistance, got arrested by the Gestapo, was tortured, taken prisoner and ended up in the Buchenwald concentration camp.
Buchenwald was a huge camp where countless people died through forced labor. Semprún, however, was able to survive and later wrote the memoir Literature or Life, where he says that writing basically saved him. But it took him a long while to write, because it was so painful to revisit and put into words his experience in the camp. The book is written in such a way where it's very easy to connect with the words, because it's almost a testimony of daily life, but in beautifully written French.
Because of Semprún, I got involved with a very special project, which leads me to my next thing …
Youth
I have a very strong relationship with young people, because part of my work when I'm not making films is to work with young people, specifically from harsh places where they feel excluded from the cultural field of theater, cinema, etc. I like to organize projects that can maybe help them find what I found in The Prophet, a future that was waiting for me but I didn't know about before. Today I am where I am because of that book, so I have to think about these youth in order to help them change the way they see the world.
With Jean-Baptiste Sastre, my partner in life and in art, I found a group of youth that had very little interest in art in any form, because they were never offered the opportunity to really connect with it. But we created a theatre piece around Semprún’s Literature or Life with these kids, and every one of them was just excellent. In that group, we discovered a writer, a singer, a painter, a visual artist, and actors. We had a residency of three or four weeks at Buchenwald and lived with the kids there. They were able to say the words of Semprún amongst the traces of his past life, in the place where he was forced to be for more than a year and a half of his life. When he was almost exactly their age, as they are between 18 and 25.
What's really incredible is that when young people suddenly connect with literature or the experience of others or the life testimony of a person who had such a harsh life, it makes them realize the importance of doing something with their own life. We helped them go through that process, and now we have another project that we want to develop with these kids. Also, the young man who we discovered is a great writer is writing a play now. And when you read his words, it is incredible writing. These are opportunities we created that cost nothing except a little time that we gave to this new generation, helping them stay authentic to their journeys in order to make something of their life. So, that's why my relationship to youth is still very, very important.
