Five-Dollar Moviemaker
Making films in a single afternoon, which she's shown in 30 international festivals, Syrian-Palestinian-Canadian Ruba Nadda gives new meaning to the term 'independent filmmaker'
Sheli Teitelbaum Toronto
SYRIAN-PALESTINIAN-Canadian filmmaker Ruba Nadda may not look much like the youthful Judy Garland. Her style of filmmaking, however, owes more to Garland and Mickey Rooney's backyard musicals and their "Hey gang, let's put on a show" credo than to the clique-ridden bureaucracy that currently sets the pace for Canada's independent film scene.
During the last three years, Nadda, 27, has completed 11 short films and one 90-minute black-and-white feature, "I Always Come to You," earning her a burgeoning reputation as the doyenne of Canadian independent filmmaking at the 80 or so film festivals worldwide she has attended. In Canada, though, she remains largely unknown, mainly because she has avoided the indignity of elbowing a place for herself by the funding troughs of the Canada Council for the Arts or the National Film Board. Instead, she has financed her movies with the meager proceeds of a full-time job as a data-entry clerk with Ontario Power, the provincial electric company.
This, she tells The Report, has not only earned her the enmity of an insular filmmaking community prone to dismissing her as a purveyor of "five-dollar movies," but also of her co-workers at Ontario Power. She even suspects there are attempts underway to fire her because of her moonlighting.
More mindful of the late Stanley Kubrick's dictum that if you want to make pictures, you need only pick up a camera than of the niceties of the workplace, Nadda has largely ignored her detractors. She understands, moreover, that in Canada, as in so many other small countries, validation from abroad will often open spigots that would otherwise remain fused shut to locals.
And so, suddenly, earlier this year, the Canada Council coughed up $ 60,000 ( $ 40,000 U.S.) for "Unsettled," a color feature that she hopes to complete by December. When I asked her what kind of a film anyone could make with such scant funding, she laughed: "You just watch me."
Nadda's movies are about the travails of young Muslim immigrants and first-generation Canadians torn between family, culture and religion in a society that, until very recently, took a dim view of multiculturalism.
Think of the kind of Arabic potboilers that generally come out of Egypt, and which deal, in soap opera fashion, with the strictures that society and religion impose on virtually every facet of life in Islamic countries. Set them in a modern North American city, remove the ban on scatology, overt acts of rape, premarital sex, and the like, have the characters speak English, and you begin to get the idea.
In "I Always Come to You," for instance, Ruba's 14-year-old sister, Fadia, plays a young Muslim girl in Toronto by the same name who suddenly and inexplicably finds the doors to her mother's home barred to her. She begins searching for her sisters, one of whom is locked in a destructive relationship with an ex-con, the other of whom is a hooker. Needless to say, idyllic reunions do not ensue. The film ends with the abandoned girl shuddering in the dank halls of Toronto's central train station, alone and still unable to fathom why she should be bereft of family.
It's an example of an intensely personalized form of cinematic scab-picking fueled by family members whose lives have been spent wondering if, when and where to establish roots.
Nadda's real-life mother, who though not seen, takes top emotional billing in many of her films, fled the Galilean town of Safed as a child during Israel's War of Independence, eventually ending up on the outskirts of Damascus. She met her husband to be, a computer programmer, in Damascus in 1964, and the couple moved to Montreal in 1971, where they married and had three daughters.
"In my mother's need to find a home," Nadda told The Report over drinks at Toronto's landmark Royal York Hotel recently, "she ended up dislocating her children. They'd sell everything and move back to Syria. It didn't work out, we'd be failing in school, and they'd pack up and return to Canada. They were never happy."
Ultimately, the Naddas would make four separate forays to Syria, finally, after the Gulf War, settling down permanently in Canada. "Off and on," she says, "I spent three years living in Syria. The first time was neat - men would show up at my parents' door making offers for me, and I was flattered. When I was 16, though, I was appalled - obviously they thought I was a piece of meat. Fortunately, my mother and father weren't having any of it." By the end, she says, "we all saw our lives sort of going down the drain if we stayed."
The family, though, didn't have it much easier in Canada: "We lived in small towns both in the East and West, and we were treated like outcasts in all of them."
A PETITE WOMAN WITH STRIKingly dark eyes, this waif-like beauty in a perky sundress comes across like a Syrian Holly Golightly. According to accounts in the local press, though, she is headstrong, quick-tongued and fiercely protective of her sisters. When a cameraman allegedly admonished 14-year-old Fadia, before a take, not to screw up her lines, Ruba, according to reports, tore into him, letting him know she had a longer and more accomplished record in film than did he.
She began writing, she says, at 12, fabricating, in her native English, elaborate romances that embraced the small-town virtues of Canadian life she and her sisters, because of their outcast status and their parents' opposition to associations with non-Muslims, could only dream of.
"Then, when I was 20," she recalls, "I started writing about the stuff that most mattered to me. The first serious story I wrote was about a Muslim woman who was having a little tryst - it got published in a Toronto magazine called Borderlines. Suddenly, I came into this whole Arab voice. The one thing I didn't want, though, was to write political stories."
As the eldest, Nadda says, she certainly suffered the brunt of her parents' strictures. Pressured to immerse herself in Arabic culture, she rebelled, she says, adamantly rejecting her mother's efforts to teach her to read and write in Arabic. Although she speaks the language, she still can't read or write it.
Nadda eventually attended York University in Toronto, where, to her mother's great chagrin, she majored in English literature. At college she couldn't date, but upon graduating, Nadda moved out on her own and assumed an independent, thoroughly Western lifestyle.
"Sometimes I couldn't believe how lenient my parents had become with my sisters," she says.
Nadda's "five-dollar movies" are seldom seen in a city that takes great pride in an annual film festival now renowned as a launching pad for Oscar contenders. Indeed, prior to a June 1999 showcase of her work at Toronto's Bloor Cinema, her films had never been screened in Canada.
"We need more people with that kind of initiative," said theater manager Carm Bordonaro, justifying the showcase. "People who aren't going to wait for the system to say it's okay. They'll just go and do it."
"I have been told," Nadda herself once told the Toronto Star with respect to her decidedly un-Canadian get-up-and-go, "that I intimidate other filmmakers. I don't give myself any excuses. I make the film with or without money."
Prior to that retrospective, though, her films had shown in over 30 film festivals internationally, garnering critical acclaim as far afield as the U.K., Turkey and India. In 1999, Nadda's eight-minute prelude to the sexual fall of a 12-year-old Muslim, "Wet Heat Drifts Through the Afternoon," picked up a hat trick of awards for best dark drama, best avant-garde film and best original dance, at the Spokane Film Festival, in Washington. That year also saw Nadda's "Do Nothing" (in which the olive-skinned 12-year-old Fadia drives Toronto's notoriously oblivious pedestrians to distraction by pulling them aside to ask if she meets their definition of beautiful) pluck a bronze medal for best short film at the Kelibia International Film Festival, in Tunisia. And at the annual Arab Film Festival in San Francisco, Nadda walked off with the best director award in response to no fewer than five films she premiered that year.
Her films have been described as "kitchen sink cinema verite," little five- and 10-minute outtakes from the troubled lives of various Muslim women living in the big city. They are unpolished, raw, awkwardly paced, deeply subversive, and as a result, oddly memorable and disturbing. The Toronto weekly Eye has characterized them as "fun stuff, highly reminiscent of the kind of semi-surreal docudramatic work being done by acclaimed Iranian directors like Mohsen Makmalbat ("Gabbeh") and Abbas Kiarostami ("Taste of Cherry")."
Recognition abroad has attracted money to Nadda's one-woman cottage industry, most recently in the form of her Canada Council grant for "Unsettled." A film about a young Muslim girl's unrequited love, the movie will be her first color feature.
By relying on her sisters and friends for acting, as well as on fellow filmmakers, who provide equipment and services gratis, Nadda has been known to complete films in a single afternoon for as little as $ 1,000. Still, even Nadda would admit that the charms of such seat-of-your-pants productions are, Garland and Rooney notwithstanding, vastly overrated. "For the moment, I'm only hoping that "Unsettled" gets picked up. Maybe then I'll get some serious money for the third. At which point, who knows, maybe there's a place in Hollywood for someone who can turn them out quickly, cheaply and on time?
"It's funny. A Lebanese guy I once met said that would never happen, because the Jews in the industry would take me down. I told that to my mother, who bears no small enmity toward Israel, and she laughed. She said that sounded even more paranoid than she was.
"The fact is, I'm always being mistaken as Jewish - even by some of my Jewish friends. It can't hurt."