Faris Alrjoob's The Red Sea Makes Me Wanna Cry is now streaming exclusively on MUBI in many countries.
Location scouting photograph for The Red Sea Makes Me Wanna Cry (Faris Alrjoob, 2023).
Writing this feels like a vernissage of sorts; the film is finally arriving, or rather departing, into the world.
Let me set the scene. The night before the first day of shooting. A group of us are gathered in our cinematographer Mahmoud Belakhel’s hotel room in the south of Jordan—a space that seemed suspended in time, somewhere in the 1970s. Mahmoud and I are crammed between the edge of the bed and a small desk. Alina Musiol, our production designer, stands by the balcony door, looking at us. Luma Al Hamarneh, my producing partner, is on a call (she had two phones at the time that were always vibrating). A slow knock on the door—Leen Hamarneh and Mahdi Abu Salma, our 1st and 3rd ADs, respectively, arrive. We had called and woken them up.
This was a crisis meeting, a few hours before call time. We had to cut budget, cross off equipment (including my then-beloved dolly), rewrite a scene for a new location…etc. The usual. I thought we wouldn’t be able to make the film I’d been promising everybody, but I kept that to myself.
Location scouting photograph for The Red Sea Makes Me Wanna Cry (Faris Alrjoob, 2023).
Walking back to my room in a 2 a.m. June breeze, with a sunburn that still hasn’t entirely gone away, I could hear the Red Sea but couldn’t separate it from a sky in indigo. I secretly wished we could cancel the whole thing. I felt a loss, and I was daydreaming (can one daydream at night?) how I would break the news to everyone and ruminate on their disappointment, alone, back in my flat in Berlin. As my keycard beeped, Leen Demashqieh, our set designer and an old school friend, opened her door across the hall. I’m not sure what woke or kept her up, but she said something that meant it was going to be okay, and that we were all making this film together—my secret was ours now.
In retrospect, I understood this is my usual pattern (my therapist would like my noticing): the exhaustion catches up right before the final push, and I panic for a few hours. Fortunately, my team knew that too, for which I am grateful. Luma convinced me to shoot the first day, and said we could stop after that. She knew, of course, that we wouldn’t. With the first call to action, as Clara Schwinning moved in Ida Fehrmann’s cowboy boots toward the hotel reception, I was hooked, and eight days went by like a dream.
Location scouting photograph for The Red Sea Makes Me Wanna Cry (Faris Alrjoob, 2023).
Some months later, and to my surprise, the Quinzaine des Cinéastes chose to program our film—a call from Julien Rejl at passport control (I was en route to visit my parents) changed my life. The night before the official announcement, I couldn’t sleep; that familiar panic. I sent an early-morning text message to Matthew LaPaglia, my co-writer and first partner on this project. About five minutes later, he replied:
Makes total sense, and in many ways is an expansion of that initial opening- this is the first time something that has been so close and solitary for so long is going to be in the world, of the world (or at least a demimonde of film enthusiasts). and it's a rescinding of possession that I'm not sure ever goes away when making art, letting your thing be everyone else's thing. but also, what a truly awesome thing to have nurtured something that is about to be folded into the consciousnesses and emotional landscapes of many other people- it's an intimacy, maybe one of the truest, and that is a scary thought, but also a beautiful one.
I hearted his text. A few minutes later, he sent an afterthought:
In a funny way, this is the exact conversation that we jettisoned a long time ago about the milk. the contrary ideas that the more you share something, the smaller it becomes, versus the notion that the more people that cohabit something, the fuller it is. sharing this film could feel like there is less of it for you, but it could also-and surely, soon, will- feel like there is an entire latticework of mutual understanding, appreciation, devotion to this thing we've worked so hard to say.
Location photograph for The Red Sea Makes Me Wanna Cry (Faris Alrjoob, 2023).
I mention all of this to give accuracy to the sentiment that this film exists in shared possession of all of the people who helped make it, and eventually, those who chose to project it and project their own secrets onto it.
As for the work itself, I now accept that some of what is filmed is true, and some of it made up—deliberately, technically, or otherwise. Sometimes the visual language failed me, and other times I wasn’t able to completely shed the veil of an ego that continues to persist. There is a cruelty to some texts and a cowardice in others. What is consistent throughout, however, is a search, a longing, and a desire to arrive at a precision, not of language, but expression, and eventually, to confess.