Creative Fellow Alex Nezam on exploring belonging through film
Alexander Nezam is Toward Belonging’s inaugural Creative Fellow. An experimental filmmaker who aims to use the power of filmmaking and participatory design to build belonging, Nezam will facilitate a long-form “participatory filmic poem” created by immigrant communities in Verona, Italy. Toward Belonging’s Sara Grossman interviewed Alex about what he’ll be working on during his creative fellowship and how he is approaching that work.
Hi Alex, you've described yourself as an experiential filmmaker trying to break down traditional power structures in the world of cinema. What are these traditional power structures and how are you breaking them down in your filming process?
Cinema is a strange artistic medium because it requires so much capital. It’s an industry before it’s a medium. So whatever your goals are as a filmmaker, they are secondary to the goals of the financier. Financiers are holding the keys, and they have a set of priorities that are in part determined by class, (and therefore race). And when we talk about film as a facilitator of public discourse, holding the keys to that medium is a position of enormous power and control. Now we can make films on the cheap, but distribution and outreach cost money too, so on some level you have to accept the limitations that come with circumventing investors.
Below that, there’s the power imbalance between those behind the camera and those in front of it. When making a film about vulnerable populations for example, the filmmaker has an enormous responsibility that audiences and certainly financiers tend to ignore. So I want to allow subjects of my films to participate in developing their own depiction as a way to oppose that structural problem. This approach gives agency to the subject, and I think it elevates the film artistically, but it’s definitely not without its challenges.
How did you get into filmmaking and when/why did you start reconsidering how you approach the filmmaking process & collaboration with subjects?
I was about 18 when I saw The 400 Blows by Truffaut. Blew my mind. I think that was when I started to really watch films. I started to read film criticism and take cinema seriously as a historical and cultural document. I became a bit obsessed really. These were the days before streaming services were everywhere, and Netflix was still delivering films in the mail. I didn’t have much money and I remember systematically abusing their free trial offer to get access to some of the classics that weren’t at blockbuster or at the library. I later decided to study film production at university, and started making films that way.
The collaborative approach began in Athens in 2017, where I had been volunteering for a few months after the closure of the European borders to the flow of migrants. I had read so many articles and seen too many videos about the situation in Greece that offered a sensational depiction of the people that I was working and living with there. That’s the way it usually works: large media companies swoop in and sift through the chaos for a good narrative, then they take that story back to London for a good headline. But the immediate and long-term effects of that media portrayal are felt by the people depicted, not by the media organization. So I decided to make a collaborative film to give a bit of agency back to those who had lost so much control of their lives and their public representation. This felt necessary for the subjects of the film, and for the sake of the public conversation that had been lacking their voices.
Your most recent documentary, We Are Not Together (2019), explores refugee and immigrant communities trapped in Greece after the closure of EU borders in 2016. What does the title refer to?
It’s a direct a quote from Junaid, one of the characters in the film. He had only been studying English for a few months, but he was eloquent and poetic in his way. I prefer not to think of the title as an assertion. In the context of European migration, I hope it instead poses questions. Who is ‘we’ in this situation? And who is not encompassed by this word? And what is meant by ‘together’? It’s an examination of the platitudes of ‘togetherness’ and ‘solidarity’ that we hear so often in the human rights and non-profit sector which tend to play on emotion and discourage critical thinking. And for me, the entire film works in this way.
Who were the main subjects in that film and how did you collaborate with them to shape their own stories? Where are they now and have their situations improved?
With the little money we had, we decided not to get high-end gear. Instead, we invested in a few action cameras that could be durable and easy to use for characters on their own. The collaboration was different for each person. Some people were happy to take a more hands-off approach and just have a conversation. Others took the camera into their own hands and shot footage with their own narrative in mind, and in their own cinematic style. The ways to collaborate are infinite, and different people offer different competencies and proclivities to the project.
Most of the characters in the film have been relocated to other countries, though some remain in Athens. But all of their situations have improved over time. We can be thankful for that because it’s not always the case.
In your project as the Toward Belonging fellow, you will be facilitating a long-form “participatory filmic poem” created by immigrant communities in Verona, Italy. What is a filmic poem and how will it differ from an ordinary narrative film? Who do you hope will see this film?
If we think of a novel as similar to a narrative feature in terms of structure, perhaps we can view this film as a collection of poetry. And like a good collection of poems, there are recurring rhythms and motifs that give a cohesive identity to what might otherwise feel like a disconnected mess. Though I guess there’s nothing really wrong with a mess either. In the case of this film, I hope to capture these rhythms as they are naturally recurring in the city, and in the immigrant communities that help shape it.
I think this film can be valuable to people in Verona, Italians, Europeans: everyone really. The subject of migration isn’t only relevant in Italy. This is a topic that touches everyone to some extent, and there are issues here that everyone will need to confront. They are unavoidable. And in my opinion it’s important that the issues aren’t framed in purely political terms. That’s why I think art is so fundamental, and why I really enjoy this process.
Why did you decide to center this project in the city of Verona? Are there any parallels you see between the situations in Athens and Verona?
Both Greece and Italy are at the forefront of the current debate on the movement of people into Europe. It’s a debate that has civilizational implications, wherein we have to reevaluate some bedrock notions about what kind of society we want to share. And Verona is a city of civilizational importance to Europe and to the ‘West’, with cultural roots that stretch deep into our shared history.
Despite being one of the most touristic places on earth, It’s also a very culturally homogenous region that has proved particularly hostile to migrants in recent years. I’ve lived here as an immigrant for 3 years, and I view it as a microcosm of the competing political philosophies that we see in response to increased migration internationally. This strikes me as fertile ground for a good film.
What is interesting or compelling to you about the concepts of othering and belonging, as related to your own work?
‘Othering’ and ‘belonging’ seem like pretty malleable concepts to me, but in the context of borders they are instructive. We are great at creating tribes. They have been to our evolutionary advantage in the past, and they are a fundamental aspect of our nature. And we know how aggressive tribes can become and how bloody it can get. I think ideas of othering and belonging color that tribal mentality. To ‘belong’ in a place or society really implies that you don’t belong outside of that society. And that creates room for the notion that some people don’t belong in your society, and instead belong elsewhere. So I think even the desire to belong comes from the tribal instinct, which is necessarily ‘othering’.
In terms of a global society, these concepts are daunting, and we’re still figuring out how to manage such basic human desires. In my opinion, cinema is the most effective way—aside from pure human interaction—to transcend the tribe mentality, or at least to expand the tribe. I’m interested in exploring different ways to do that.
As a storyteller documenting life in European cities (and a resident of Europe), are you seeing any new narratives of belonging or solidarity in the region that give you hope or reason for optimism?
Acts of human kindness and selflessness always inspire me, and are somehow always surprising. I think that’s because we’ve erected social structures that create incentives for people to exploit and cheat each other, rather than to help each other. Now I think young people are starting to wake up to the power of structures, and they are doing what they can to oppose them from within, often at their own expense. What an incredible task that is. Though I’m in awe of that cause, I also see structures as instruments of social stability, and without them things tend to fall apart much more easily than they come together. So if we agree that ‘dismantling power structures’ is the way to go, then we’ve raised the stakes incredibly high.