None, however, make it more intriguing than the way it compels one to describe the indescribable -- starting with Durra herself, a London-bred, New York-trained filmmaker of Jordanian/Lebanese/Bosnian/Palestinean heritage. Imperialists! presents her alter-ego Asya (Elodie Bouchez), a successful artist in Manhattan with links to both the Palestinean resistance and upper-crust Western hegemony. Negotiating between the two with her tight circle of comrades, Asya falls in love with a Mexican lawyer/Ph.D candidate (Jose Maria de Tavira) and avoids the prying eyes and ears of spy agencies including the CIA, Mossad and Mi6. Oh, and it's a comedy. (See where I'm going with this?) Or sort of a comedy, anyway -- kind of a Metropolitan for the 9/11 generation, with irony where the wealthy young entitlement used to be (Metropolitan director Whit Stillman even makes a hilarious cameo as a tipsy, past-his-prime party boy). The elements gorgeously come together through cinematographer Magela Crosignani's 16mm-camera lens, combining season, fashion, paranoia, romance, location and spirit in a completely original fusion of New York atmosphere.
I met Durra at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival, where Imperialists premiered in competition. (It opens theatrically Friday in New York, and is currently available on demand via IFC.) She walked into the Yarrow Hotel bundled in the same white faux-fur coat Asya wears in the film, her posh English accent weathered by non-stop conversation, Q&A's and chatter about Imperialists. There, she regaled Movieline with her reminiscence of assassinations, kidnappings, class contradictions and a decade of story development.
Are you OK?
[Sitting down, out of breath] I'm fine, I just... I don't know, I lost my voice. It's not even like I'm going out! I'm not partying at all. It's just like I'm talking so much about the film.
That seems like a good problem to have.
It is! It's a good problem to have.
I did really like the film, and one of the things that impressed me the most was that I didn't know what to make of it -- genre-wise, the characters' back stories...
I think "genre" is basically "auteur" work -- the genre basically becomes the auteur, right? But it's really hard when you're starting out, because you're not an auteur if no one knows your work. I reckon that the genre of my film will make more sense with the films I get to make. If you look at people I really respect, I mean... La Dolce Vita. What genre is that? [This is not a rhetorical question; Durra waits for a reply.]
I couldn't say.
Exactly! L'avventura. You could say it's a mystery, but it's not a mystery because nothing is ever solved. And in the U.S. today it would probably never get distribution.
So was that your intention with Imperialists? To make something undefinable?
No, no. My inspiration was just to make my film. I've always just wanted to make the films I've wanted to make. I really love my films.
What is "your film" this time around?
Ten years of me trying to work out what was going through my head. From film school until now, there just always been these themes. How do I get these themes out there? About living in the contemporary world, and how conflict affects us, and how my upbringing affects this, how my outlook affects people's reactions to me -- and their outlooks as well. People think, "She's paranoid." But I'm not paranoid; I grew up with this stuff. And when you really do, it's pervasive. You hear about assassinations. You hear about Mossad killing someone's Dad in the park in London. It's really normal if you're Middle Eastern intelligentsia living abroad. I know it's like, "Oh, that's so sensational." But it's not sensational; it's normal. And it's normal for a certain bracket of intelligentsia living in Europe. Especially in the '80s. There were a lot of assassinations going on then.
I do like this as a thriller, but as a different kind of thriller. Like a relationship thriller, perhaps.
I didn't want to make a thriller, because my life isn't a thriller. Or forget my life. In the life of anyone in this world I'm talking about, there's this constant pressure that will never go away until all these conflicts are resolved. For me, it's unrealistic to just do a linear thriller because that's all I was interested in dealing with. That in itself, by the end of the movie, is boxed off. I wanted to deal with this constant tension that you deal with in your daily life. That's not just Middle Eastern, but anyone from a place of conflict. So I chose a Latin Ameircan, because really, a Latin American and a Middle Eastern, when they're in America, have the same sort of experience to a certain degree. Like the issues that people project onto them, the prejudice, whatever. I didn't want to make it just about Arabs or Iranians or whatever. I wanted to make it a more far-reaching thing when you add a whole continent in there, too. So it's Mexico, Latin America and the Arabs, too. That's quite a lot of people you've got.
Is that part of the motivation for shooting in New York, where all these cultures coexist so openly?
No. New York is just because I lived there for 10 years and it was so specific. Had it been in London, I wouldn't have felt so vulnerable -- because I'm from London. But I was on my own in New York. So the film really gave me a new perspective because during the time you're on your own, the people you mix with are a vulnerable group of people looking out for one another. Especially after 9/11.
Everyone says "post-9/11," though, when dealing with films about these themes. It's such a cliché.
I hate that, yeah. I think its easy because it's a nice, defining moment. But anyone who's Middle Eastern has had these issues. 9/11 magnified them. And again, if you're on your own in New York, it's even more magnified. So I agree with you. These issues have always been there. Everything did change then, but how much did they really change? Everything just became more apparent and came to surface because people could do things with less secrecy.
It also gave us a new reason to be afraid. If it wasn't the Cold War, then it's--
The War on Terror. Totally. Because this stuff's been happening all along, but now it's just more obvious because people will support it. All these covert wars and infiltrations and coups that have been funded by America, the British, and wherever else. What people didn't realize is that all this stuff is standard historically. Now they might as well be taking the piss because everyone can be so obvious about it, you know? Using 9/11 as an excuse.
What does the title The Imperialists Are Still Alive! mean?
It's really hard to explain. I couldn't find a title that would justify the '60s kind of energy that Asya has. [In fact, the phrase is a line from Godard's film La Chinoise -- Ed.] Which again is part of the problem of being in this Middle Eastern intelligentsia as a child, because your parents often come from these '60s ideals. If you look at something like the PLO [Palestinian Liberation Organization], the PLO was a non-religious organization. Now everything's super-religious. All the movements are religious, and the PLO was this secular, quite rock-and-roll movement -- whether you agreed with their violence or not. The people in the PFLP [Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine] would get married and hang out in nightclub, which you really wouldn't see Hamas doing. So there was this whole '60s Arab nationalist kind of thing going on, and if you're a not a product of that, but you haven't lived in the Middle East, you still tend to have those intellectual ideals. That's what you had growing up.
That said, with Asya coming from an upper-middle-class background--
Upper class.
Right. An upper-class background. She's a radical conceptual artist coming from a background you wouldn't expect, and even they're radicals--
You wouldn't expect it in the U.S.. But this is the interesting thing -- and the hardest thing about making this film: People think that you can't be upper-class and left wing. But one of the best writers about socialism is Tony Benn, who's a British aristocrat. He's a aristocratic as they come; I think he's a viscount. But he's the most left-wing guy. It's a very American thing to assume that wealth takes you away from socialist ideals. It's super-complex, but when you're living in a capitalist society, you can still have socialist sympathies -- regardless of what your background is. And a lot of people in the Middle East do have socialist sympathies. Maybe not so much any more since the failure of pan-Arab nationalism, but there still is. And as an artist, most artists tend to be more left wing. There are always contradictions, but my film is all about the contradictions. Life is full of contradictions.
The first shot of the film is very shocking. It also seems to announce the uncompromising nature of what's to follow. What was your intention?
I just had this image in my head. I was like, "How do I introduce this girl?" So I decided to introduce her through her work. This is her work. That's it. I really didn't intend it to be anything else. And I never believed people when they used to say that; I'd say, "Yeah, whatever, you totally intended to shock." But I really did feel this is the way the film had to start. And as an image, it tells so much about Asya.
How did you discover these locations and little pockets of New York?
I just know them all. Most of the places I spent time in. The jazz club I go to every Saturday night when I'm in New York.
Even the Chinese gambling den?
Well, that one I made up. I was trying to... I mean, the thing about New York is that when you do go to those places, you actually do find interesting people. In most places it would just be lame people who are hanging out, especially in New York. You need to find the cool people, the interesting people. There are a lot of losers there, too, but I'm sure there were some interesting people in that bar that Asya didn't get to talk to that night. But that part I made up because I really wanted to make fun of all the complicated nights I had of getting in somewhere with codes and numbers and doors and trap doors and passwords.
What are you doing next?
I'm making my next movie! It's fully funded! In Jordan. These cousins go for a funeral, and their grandmother... I mean, they're like my family: half-European, half-something else. They find Amman really stifling, and they go on a road trip. And it's through this road trip that there's political friction. It's like this film; there's a load of nutjobs. Everyone's coming out of the woodwork on this road trip, and you get to see different perspectives and conversations and the interactions -- just the texture that you get from this kind of story and this region and these people.
Well, hopefully I'll see you back here next year.
Thank you! Did I help you with my answers?
Yes, you--
Because I really do believe contradiction is everything. The problem with a lot of cinema these days is that people are encouraged to simplify. Life is interesting because it's contradictions. That's also why The Imperialists are Still Alive! is such an interesting title. When you think about it, they're in America, and the imperialists are still alive, and it's their battle against the imperialists. But Javier and Asya are very fair Mexicans and Arabs. That's the upper classes. They themselves come from a place that subjugated people.
And I guess what I was trying to say earlier is that their upper-class families in America and Europe have benefited from that very imperialism.
Exactly, and yet they're struggling against it. That's the complexity they live with. My grandfather fought against the French and was jailed. He was really anti-imperialism and a big socialist. But I was in the airport once, and my Arabic is very bad. I was speaking English to the guys, and they could tell from my family name. They asked, "Are you Said Durra's granddaughter?" And I said, "Yes." They couldn't stop laughing, because he was so big in the education system, and had built all these schools and obviously taught these guys about being against imperialism and the French and English. And here's his granddaughter, who's this posh English girl who can't speak Arabic properly. I was brought up abroad because my father ran a news agency in London. The headquarters were in Beirut, and because of the civil war, all the television news had to go to London because it was safer. Then I end up with this English accent and being surrounded by the very people we had fought only 80 years before. I laugh about it, but that's the reality.
This is an edited version of an interview that originally published during the 2010 Sundance Film Festival.
[Top photo of Zeina Durra: Getty Images]