ﻣﺎ ﺇﺳﻤﻚ (Italy, 2008)
Experimental – Documentary
Duration 21 min
Synopsis
Maesmak is What’s your name? in Arabic.
Maesmak is a meditative exploration of one day spent in Rutba in late 2002, to plant an olive tree against the war, just before the invasion of Iraq.
Maesmak is also a metaphor about cancer, a disease consuming and invading the body of a dictatorship. Its main victims though are the ones without a name in the books of History.
Narration & Voice Over
Yousif Latif Jaralla – storyteller
Pantelis Anaghnostopoulos – traveler
William Odling-Smee – doctor
Editing
Georges Salameh - Marina Gioti – Alexandros Salame
Music
Theofanis Avraam – Victoria Taskou – Voltnoi Brege – Muslimgauze
Producer
Laura Sestito
Production/Distribution
MeMSéA
Screenings (selected)
Alternativa Film&Video Festival 2008 (Competition) – Belgrade – Serbia – (December 2008)
Punto De Vista Documentary Film Festival (Competition) – Pamplona – Spain (February 2009)
Thessaloniki International Documentary Festival (Market) – Greece (March 2009)
LIDF09 London International Documentary Festival (Competition) – London – UK (April 2009)
Hotdocs Canadian International Documentary Festival (Market) – Canada (April 2009)
Cine Pobre – 7th International No-Budget – Low-Budget Film Festival (Competition) – La Paz – Mexico (May 2009)
VIDEOEX International Experimental Film & Video Festival (Competition) – Zurich – Switzerland (May 2009)
2 ANNAS Independent international Short Film Festival (Competition) – Riga – Latvia (May 2009)
Curt.doc Short Documentary Festival (Competition) – Vidreres – Spain (June 2009)
Signes de Nuits Festival Internationale de Création Visuelle (Competition) – Paris – France (June 2009)
SoleLuna Festival Un Ponte tra le Culture (Italian Premiére – Special Event) – Palermo – Italy (July 2009)
Busho Short Film Festival (Parallel Screenings) – Budapest – Hungary (September 2009)
Luksuz Film Festival (Competition) – Trška Gora – Slovenia (September 2009)
Award: Best Experimental Film
CON-CAN Movie Festival (Competition) – Tokyo – Japan ( September 2009)
Audience Special Award
Reggio Film Festival (Open Category) – Reggio Emilia – Italy (September 2009)
Pentedattilo film festival (Competition) – Reggio Calabria – Italy (September 2009)
Docudays Beirut International Documentary Festival (Parallel Screenings) – Beirut – Lebanon (September 2009)
Aza Short Film Festival (Competition) – Thessaloniki – Greece (September 2009)
Italian Doc Screenings (Market&Library) – Trento – Italy (September 2009)
Viscult Film Festival (Competition) – Joensuu – Finland (October 2009)
Darklight Festival (Competition) – Dublin – Ireland (October 2009)
Festival du Nouveau Cinéma 38th edition (Competition) – Montréal – Canada (7-18 October 2009)
Strange Screen Experimental Film Festival (Competition) - Momus - Thessaloniki – Greece (14-17 October)
Award: 2nd prize for Best Experimental Video
Curtocircuito Short Film Festival (Market) – Santiago De Compostela – Spain (13-16 October 2009)
Fesancor International Chilean Short Film Festival (Competition) Santiago – Chile (October 2009)
Cortopotere Short Film Festival IX Edizione (Competition) – Bergamo – Italia (October 2009)
Cinemed International Film Festival (Experimental Panorama) – Montpelier – France (November 2009)
Miradas International Festival of Documentary Cinema (Market) – Guía de Isora – Spain (November 2009)
Cork Film Festival (Free Radical Film Competition) – Cork – Irland (November 2009)
Kassel Documentary Film and Video Festival (Competition) – Kassel – Germany (November 2009)
Teheran Short Film Festival (Competition) – Teheran – Iran (November 2009)
Award: Best Documentary International Competition
FIKE International Short Film Festival (Competition) Evora – Portugal (November 2009)
Blown Up A la recherche des élèves de Deleuze - Exhibition curated by Silvia Maglioni & Graeme Thomson – Paris – France (December 2009)
Cortintrecci organized by Reggio Film Festival – Reggio Emilia – Italy (December 2009)
Arab Film Festival (Competition) – San Fransisco & Los Angeles – U.S.A (October 2010)
Al Ard Doc Film Festival (Competition) – Cagliari – Sardegna/Italy (February 2011)
CON-CAN Movie Festival (Competition) – Tokyo – Japan ( September 2009)
Audience Special Award
Reggio Film Festival (Open Category) – Reggio Emilia – Italy (September 2009)
Pentedattilo film festival (Competition) – Reggio Calabria – Italy (September 2009)
Docudays Beirut International Documentary Festival (Parallel Screenings) – Beirut – Lebanon (September 2009)
Aza Short Film Festival (Competition) – Thessaloniki – Greece (September 2009)
Italian Doc Screenings (Market&Library) – Trento – Italy (September 2009)
Viscult Film Festival (Competition) – Joensuu – Finland (October 2009)
Darklight Festival (Competition) – Dublin – Ireland (October 2009)
Festival du Nouveau Cinéma 38th edition (Competition) – Montréal – Canada (7-18 October 2009)
Strange Screen Experimental Film Festival (Competition) - Momus - Thessaloniki – Greece (14-17 October)
Award: 2nd prize for Best Experimental Video
Curtocircuito Short Film Festival (Market) – Santiago De Compostela – Spain (13-16 October 2009)
Fesancor International Chilean Short Film Festival (Competition) Santiago – Chile (October 2009)
Cortopotere Short Film Festival IX Edizione (Competition) – Bergamo – Italia (October 2009)
Cinemed International Film Festival (Experimental Panorama) – Montpelier – France (November 2009)
Miradas International Festival of Documentary Cinema (Market) – Guía de Isora – Spain (November 2009)
Cork Film Festival (Free Radical Film Competition) – Cork – Irland (November 2009)
Kassel Documentary Film and Video Festival (Competition) – Kassel – Germany (November 2009)
Teheran Short Film Festival (Competition) – Teheran – Iran (November 2009)
Award: Best Documentary International Competition
FIKE International Short Film Festival (Competition) Evora – Portugal (November 2009)
Blown Up A la recherche des élèves de Deleuze - Exhibition curated by Silvia Maglioni & Graeme Thomson – Paris – France (December 2009)
Cortintrecci organized by Reggio Film Festival – Reggio Emilia – Italy (December 2009)
Arab Film Festival (Competition) – San Fransisco & Los Angeles – U.S.A (October 2010)
Al Ard Doc Film Festival (Competition) – Cagliari – Sardegna/Italy (February 2011)
Eternal Returns Exhibition curated by Astria Suparak - Athens (Feb. 2019)
A Field Guide To Getting Lost Vol.2 Exhibition curated by Amalia Charikopoulou & Christina Dilari - Aegina - Greece (Sept. 2019)
Review
LIDF09
Remembering what is already forgotten
Set in 2002 in Rutba, Maesmak is a poetic documentary that portrays a road trip to Baghdad, a go-to-death journey experienced by a Greek traveller, an English doctor and an Iraqi story-teller. All this happens just a few weeks before the invasion of Iraq.
Far from claiming to speak on behalf of people’s experience, this documentary respects the distance between the observer (the travellers) and the observed (the Iraqis). The film’s images are in a dialogue with the travellers’ discourses, but are not subsumed by them. They delineate psychological journeys of people who feel their forthcoming death, see the inevitable, negotiate what cannot be bargained. Constituting a map of emotional process of dying on both an individual and collective level, the film keeps posing the persistent question: “maesmak?” meaning “what is your name?”
Georges Salameh made a film about remembrance of what is already forgotten, what is already erased “from the books of creation, where the name and the date of birth is not there.” He builds up a story where the voice-over splits in three different voices (of the traveller, the doctor and the story-teller), the images succeed each other outside any rational sequencing and the irrationality of death and war is what binds and holds these images together. Salameh thus manages to speak about the unspeakable: death. He gives us a testimony of what precedes death and of the death’s effects developed in its shadow. As the doctor’s voice informs us, encountering death always entails a passing through stages of anger-denial-bargaining-depression before accepting the inevitable.
The film’s images run as ruins and fragments of a pre-war world that moves in-between a black-and-white and at times colourful reality, while the music reproduces a certain sense of angst about the coming event of war and death. At times images become scratched by psychological traces, blurred by memory, or clear like mirrors that reflect and accept the forthcoming event.
The film can be experienced as one-way street: what the Greek traveller wishes to do “…leaving from the same road by which I entered Iraq” is simply not possible. The road is no longer the same and the traveller himself has changed. The image cannot be forgotten, cannot be exorcised. Maesmak ends with close ups of children’s faces – shots that compel the spectator to remember how it is to smile after giving up hope and compromising with death; how it is to have a face that owns nothing but an innocent smile.
Maesmak? What is your name?
“Let us meet at the end of the day and let’s see if the books of creation have my name and date of birth”(an Iraqi child).
Knowing his coming erasure (his state of no-name, no-body) the only thing the child possesses is his capacity to smile: a living proof of his humanity before he vanishes into a total of all numbers of war victims.
After this screening the spectator cannot but remember ‘Maesmak’ as the name that will have been forgotten, since the film reminds him/her of the ethical ‘duty’ to pay homage to this imposed oblivion of the erasure of singular lives in wartimes. A remembering that takes place not through the lines of a written history, but though the visual forces of Maesmak.
Dr Chrysanthi Nigianni
Lecturer in Psychosocial studies at Goldsmiths, London.
A Field Guide To Getting Lost Vol.2
Maesmak: What's your name?
War, death and advocating for peace appear in ‘Maesmak’ that Georges Salameh completed in 2008. 'Maesmak' is an experimental documentary. The title is in Arabic and it means ‘what's your name?’
The starting point for the film was in 2002 when Salameh travelled to Iraq and joined a peace procession. During the procession, he accompanied Pantelis Anagnostopoulos- one of the central figures in the movie. Eventually, the procession would end up with planting an olive tree in Rutba in the middle of the desert, at the Western gate of Baghdad, as a symbolic gesture and a sign of peace. Strange as it might seem, the invasion of Iraq took place only a few weeks after Salameh’s voyage.
The title ‘Maesmak’ and ultimately the question ‘what is your name’ alludes to the groups of children the artist encountered in Iraq and accounts for the victims of the war whose names are never recorded. It is a fact that Salameh began to edit the film 5 years after his voyage and the invasion. Throughout the years he could not disquiet the thought of ‘what had happened to those he met in Iraq?'. Despite the turbulence, Salameh had to be sunk in thought and to let the time pass, before he would start editing.
In his effort to recreate the never-ending wounding of war, the question ‘What's your name?’ functioned as a rhetorical device that facilitated the artist to dwell on the events.
During 2002 -2007, the artist purposefully trickled to oblivion, so as to witness forgetfulness. Once he reached that end, he recovered and finally set free from mental numbness, a kind of coma that opposes to sensitiveness and liability. The whole process he underwent was a lasting practice and a lesson of learning how to recover the truth and oneself.
For the narration of the events, Salameh collaborated with the Iraqi artist and storyteller Yousif Latif Jaralla. They met in Palermo, Italy in 2007 and by that time Yousif was already in exile for more than 20 years. In one voice over Salameh recorded Yousif narrating the story he had written for 'Maesmak' in Arabic. In the film, Pantelis describes the endlessness of the desert, while Yousif talks about Baghdad as an invisible city. The two men create an instant dialogue and they alarm us for the psychological death that comes with insensibility. To this contributes the reference to the emotional process that people undergo, in order to accept death, when they are terminally ill, which Salemeh added in the movie.
The film discloses the cruelty of war that neither a humanitarian protocol can describe, nor a political speech can tackle and address transparently. It comes through that on every "grim day", we should resist to comply with forgetfulness.
Amalia Charikiopoulou
A Field Guide To Getting Lost Vol.2 Exhibition curated by Amalia Charikopoulou & Christina Dilari - Aegina - Greece (Sept. 2019)
Set in 2002 in Rutba, Maesmak is a poetic documentary that portrays a road trip to Baghdad, a go-to-death journey experienced by a Greek traveller, an English doctor and an Iraqi story-teller. All this happens just a few weeks before the invasion of Iraq.
Far from claiming to speak on behalf of people’s experience, this documentary respects the distance between the observer (the travellers) and the observed (the Iraqis). The film’s images are in a dialogue with the travellers’ discourses, but are not subsumed by them. They delineate psychological journeys of people who feel their forthcoming death, see the inevitable, negotiate what cannot be bargained. Constituting a map of emotional process of dying on both an individual and collective level, the film keeps posing the persistent question: “maesmak?” meaning “what is your name?”
Georges Salameh made a film about remembrance of what is already forgotten, what is already erased “from the books of creation, where the name and the date of birth is not there.” He builds up a story where the voice-over splits in three different voices (of the traveller, the doctor and the story-teller), the images succeed each other outside any rational sequencing and the irrationality of death and war is what binds and holds these images together. Salameh thus manages to speak about the unspeakable: death. He gives us a testimony of what precedes death and of the death’s effects developed in its shadow. As the doctor’s voice informs us, encountering death always entails a passing through stages of anger-denial-bargaining-depression before accepting the inevitable.
The film’s images run as ruins and fragments of a pre-war world that moves in-between a black-and-white and at times colourful reality, while the music reproduces a certain sense of angst about the coming event of war and death. At times images become scratched by psychological traces, blurred by memory, or clear like mirrors that reflect and accept the forthcoming event.
The film can be experienced as one-way street: what the Greek traveller wishes to do “…leaving from the same road by which I entered Iraq” is simply not possible. The road is no longer the same and the traveller himself has changed. The image cannot be forgotten, cannot be exorcised. Maesmak ends with close ups of children’s faces – shots that compel the spectator to remember how it is to smile after giving up hope and compromising with death; how it is to have a face that owns nothing but an innocent smile.
Maesmak? What is your name?
“Let us meet at the end of the day and let’s see if the books of creation have my name and date of birth”(an Iraqi child).
Knowing his coming erasure (his state of no-name, no-body) the only thing the child possesses is his capacity to smile: a living proof of his humanity before he vanishes into a total of all numbers of war victims.
After this screening the spectator cannot but remember ‘Maesmak’ as the name that will have been forgotten, since the film reminds him/her of the ethical ‘duty’ to pay homage to this imposed oblivion of the erasure of singular lives in wartimes. A remembering that takes place not through the lines of a written history, but though the visual forces of Maesmak.
Dr Chrysanthi Nigianni
Lecturer in Psychosocial studies at Goldsmiths, London.
A Field Guide To Getting Lost Vol.2
War, death and advocating for peace appear in ‘Maesmak’ that Georges Salameh completed in 2008. 'Maesmak' is an experimental documentary. The title is in Arabic and it means ‘what's your name?’
The starting point for the film was in 2002 when Salameh travelled to Iraq and joined a peace procession. During the procession, he accompanied Pantelis Anagnostopoulos- one of the central figures in the movie. Eventually, the procession would end up with planting an olive tree in Rutba in the middle of the desert, at the Western gate of Baghdad, as a symbolic gesture and a sign of peace. Strange as it might seem, the invasion of Iraq took place only a few weeks after Salameh’s voyage.
The title ‘Maesmak’ and ultimately the question ‘what is your name’ alludes to the groups of children the artist encountered in Iraq and accounts for the victims of the war whose names are never recorded. It is a fact that Salameh began to edit the film 5 years after his voyage and the invasion. Throughout the years he could not disquiet the thought of ‘what had happened to those he met in Iraq?'. Despite the turbulence, Salameh had to be sunk in thought and to let the time pass, before he would start editing.
In his effort to recreate the never-ending wounding of war, the question ‘What's your name?’ functioned as a rhetorical device that facilitated the artist to dwell on the events.
During 2002 -2007, the artist purposefully trickled to oblivion, so as to witness forgetfulness. Once he reached that end, he recovered and finally set free from mental numbness, a kind of coma that opposes to sensitiveness and liability. The whole process he underwent was a lasting practice and a lesson of learning how to recover the truth and oneself.
For the narration of the events, Salameh collaborated with the Iraqi artist and storyteller Yousif Latif Jaralla. They met in Palermo, Italy in 2007 and by that time Yousif was already in exile for more than 20 years. In one voice over Salameh recorded Yousif narrating the story he had written for 'Maesmak' in Arabic. In the film, Pantelis describes the endlessness of the desert, while Yousif talks about Baghdad as an invisible city. The two men create an instant dialogue and they alarm us for the psychological death that comes with insensibility. To this contributes the reference to the emotional process that people undergo, in order to accept death, when they are terminally ill, which Salemeh added in the movie.
The film discloses the cruelty of war that neither a humanitarian protocol can describe, nor a political speech can tackle and address transparently. It comes through that on every "grim day", we should resist to comply with forgetfulness.
Curator-Artist