In her most recent film, French filmmaker Aminatou Echard takes up the eponymous heroine of Jamilia, the 1958 novel by Kyrgyz writer Chinghiz Aytmatov, as a cultural meeting point between herself and Kyrgyz women of today. A modern classic of remarkable popularity and familiarity in Kyrgyzstan, Jamilia tells the Second World War-set story of the eponymous free-spirited heroine who falls in love with a wounded and solitary young man, Daniyar, while her husband is away on the front. Eventually, tremendously, the two run away together.
In a society where female liberation meets powerful patriarchal resistance and where the kidnapping of women in order to force them into marriage is still prevalent, the discussion of topics including the hopes, desires, disappointments, fears and freedoms of women is relatively taboo. Rather than address such issues head-on, Echard, in her feature debut also titled Jamilia, asks women of different ages and backgrounds about Aytmatov’s novel, and what they think of the character and behavior of Jamilia – a resilient but controversial model for female passion, individuality, and freedom. In their candid answers, recorded in audio interviews separated from the film’s images, we hear the Kyrgyz women variously projecting themselves into the heroine, longing to be her, or criticising her flouting of morals and traditions. Meanwhile, Echard’s images, shot in warm, grainy Super 8mm, provide diary-like portraiture of each interviewee and her surroundings.
The decision to separate image and sound gives Echard’s Jamilia the confessional intimacy of home movies, a lyrical samizdat of literary affinity. Through the capture of these personal reflections, interpretations and associations the film speaks of the influence and interpretation of a feminist model across decades of the nation’s history and into the post-Soviet present.
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ANOTHER GAZE: Can you tell me about your relationship to Kyrgyzstan and when you became interested in going there as an artistic project?
AMANITOU ECHARD: I went there for the first time in 2006 and it was a coincidence. I wanted to go to Kazakhstan but I had to have a visa and I had no visa, but you can arrive in Kyrgyzstan without a visa – so really it was just a coincidence! The images in Jamilia of the woman walking through the woods were shot in 2009. We did the first interviews with her to see whether it was really true, that everyone knows this story Jamilia. So I kept coming back.
AG: But at the beginning of this film project was the heroine from Jamilia the focus, rather than the Kyrgyz women you interviewed?
AE: Yes, that was the starting point. A friend of mine gave the book to me in 2006 before I went [to Kyrgyzstan] for the first time – I read it and liked it. It was when I started speaking to people that I realized everyone knew Jamilia. When I first asked I was in the bazaar, searching for actresses to play Jamilia, because at first I was thinking of using her as a figure in my first film shot there, Broadway (2011), and a lot of young girls said, “Oh! You are searching for Jamilia, I want to be Jamilia!” It was really amazing. But it wasn’t appropriate material for Broadway, which was about dictatorship, censorship and political things people couldn’t openly talk about. With Jamilia, I knew that I could speak with women and that was the departure for this new film. I also like the way the book is written. It’s something Kyrgyz, I feel – the interior, intimate stuff described. It is really amazing to see how even women from the country who have worked all their life in the fields can speak with these philosophic and poetic words about Jamilia and the book.
AG: Did this film start for you with images or with sounds?
AE: That’s a good question! It started from both – I think because I filmed in Super 8. I like this format because the image and sound are two separate elements. It gave me the idea that I can be in situations, in places, and the relationship with people is with sound, only sound. Or only with finding good images. Super 8 is also about duration. I try to get the whole duration; I’m not cutting anything. I’m trying to feel the duration of the film and create something in the relationship between the images and the prescribed duration of the film roll [three minutes]. When I film in Super 8 I know that I cannot film for that long.
AG: Is that a constraint that you like? That duration is dictated by the camera?
AE: Yes, the roll is so short: It has a duration itself and I feel it when I’m filming. Super 8 is really strange – I like it. It’s an old camera, a very small one I have. When I met women for Jamilia my interpreter explained what I was doing and that I would not be filming for long. This camera gives me a different presence. In the relationship with the women, they could understand that I wouldn’t film as much as someone shooting video might. They learned that I didn’t want one image in particular. Then they could start to relax and be in the moment, have a real presence. Some told me, “I don’t want to be filmed,” because they were afraid, but after the explanation and seeing my camera, in the end they told me, “Okay”.
AG: While the Super 8 camera is less invasive, the choices you’re making as a filmmaker are very obvious and specific: suddenly you’re shooting this, suddenly you’re shooting that. The interview subject may be even more conscious of the act of filming.
AE: Yes, I had that sensation, but very often it was really great because it’s so precious and so rare – really it’s like symbiosis, something that is happening in the moment. But I know that with a video camera they would have never spoken with me so easily, because they are afraid of the camera’s eye. If you have only an audio recorder it’s not the same relationship with the person – they can really forget and maybe they also forget what I represent. Because I’m occidental and I’m making films, they imagine it’s for TV and they know about TV and the idea that the occidental people will transform what they say, will judge them. Without the camera I’m not in this position. I don’t have a lot of stuff with me, and so they don’t need to ask permission from their husband or their family to speak with me. It’s only me, and I have this old stuff – so I’m not ‘really’ a professional, I’m not ‘really’ a journalist. I’m someone strange, maybe more an ‘artist’. With the video camera I would have been in this position of the foreign journalists, and to speak with me would have been more difficult. Most of them I saw only once. I had to knock on the door and then if they were free, go in, and then we’d sit and speak. It was hard, because it could have been dangerous.
AG: Did choosing this book as a subject act as a key for these women who you didn’t know how to talk about these things with? Like, if you just said, “Tell me about your marriage…”
AE: No, they’d never talk.
AG: …but if you say, “tell me about Jamilia,” then Jamilia becomes a pretext through which to talk about their lives.
AE: Yes, and in a really good way. The first time I came I was not sure of how to introduce myself and explain the project. When I was doing the preliminary research, I was thinking, maybe I can directly say I’m doing a film about women. In Kyrgyzstan there is this kidnapping tradition, and almost all foreigners want to talk about this. And so the women often stop the interviews right away and say, “No, you are just interested in kidnapping”. They have two sentences ready on the subject and after that you can’t have anything. But with Jamilia you can have everything! If you just say, “I just want to speak about Jamilia” then it’s “Okay! Now we can speak!” But not in a direct way. Every time we would arrive at this tradition with the kidnapping – because a big proportion of women are still kidnapped, if not them or their family, they know people – and they are not stupid, of course, they know that they are speaking about the conditions of women. But after they can say that they had spoken with me about Jamilia and not about the conditions of women. We were protected by Jamilia, they and I. Once – it’s very funny – I was in an area near the border of Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan and it’s a very tough location, you have to pay attention to what you say and where you are. I forgot my passport, it was really stupid, and I was there in the park speaking with the women, and after ten minutes a military guy shows up and all the women said, “No, no we’re speaking only about Jamilia”, because you can be seen as a spy in this particular place, it’s really not a good place to film. The guy was angry at the beginning, but I told him, “Just listen and you will see we’re speaking only about Jamilia.” And so he started to listen, and then he was suddenly a really nice guy: “Jamilia, that’s great! I know it, I can say some stuff about Jamilia, too!” And I had to say, “No, only women!” It was really so funny! And so he let me leave, which never happens in this place: a foreigner without a passport and filming! And it’s just crazy, because of Jamilia! But Jamilia is like an open door… to everything.
AG: It almost seems to me like this book is a national myth, everybody knows it and everybody has their own version of it.
AE: Yes! There may not be many books in the world that play such a role in a country like this, it’s really crazy, really amazing. It’s been in the school curriculum for a long time. Now, things are changing – because she’s a transgressive woman, Jamilia. Now they say to the teachers, “You can choose [a Chingiz] Aytmatov book, there is Jamilia but there are others too.” So it isn’t always Jamilia now. But she’s still in the program because she’s so famous, it’s impossible not to have her. Also, in the Soviet period, everybody went to school – even girls – and so the relationship to reading…
AG: …It speaks of a really widespread literacy, they’re not talking about a story they’ve heard about, they’re discussing a story they’ve all read.
AE: Yes, that they read, so you still have still this feeling, this relation to books. Now we’re losing this everywhere in the world, but also in Kyrgyzstan because girls don’t go to school for as long now, they get married sooner – it’s changed. Some teachers maybe prefer some other books of Aytmatov, but in a way, it’s activism or a political gesture for a teacher to choose Jamilia, because they know that they will have to speak about hard subjects with the children, and sometimes parents. Still, Jamilia is known everywhere.
AG: Can you talk about how you found these women and where they’re from in Kyrgyzstan?
AE: They are from two regions. I went first in the Fergana Valley, in the south, which has the city of Jalal-Abad. I stayed there for one and a half months, in a very small village in my interpreter’s house. We went to meet some women in her neighbourhood, and also other women I met when walking. And then I went up to the Talas Region – the region where the book takes place. I really love this region and the people. I liked the idea of staying in one place so that I could walk around and people could see I was there and maybe, after some time and they had seen me, someone might approach and ask what I’m doing, saying, “Ah yes, maybe I can speak about Jamilia.” I had a young woman come to me like this. She was very shy and it took some time for her to come. But I also liked the idea of moving, of travelling, of taking a nomadic route to find women on my way to this village of Jamilia. In this way I could meet different women, of different generations, from rural places and from small towns. I didn’t want to meet only intellectuals or professionals, like teachers or those who had high levels of education. I wanted to reach everyone.
AG: And once you found women, did you have trouble speaking with them?
AE: With this nomadic idea of filming I could reach a lot of different sounds and voices. I was working with two women translators to do the interviews. It couldn’t have been a man with me. But to make all the translations, I had a guy, a really great translator, but he’s a man! They’re two separate worlds, really. In the work of translation you interpret also what the person is saying. When you are a man in Kyrgyzstan you interpret in a specific way; when you are a woman you give another interpretation, of course. It was very interesting. Sometimes, I asked for confirmation from the other women – and sometimes the translation was different from what they thought it should be. For example, for “kidnapping” the guy would have said “she was married” but it was actually “she was kidnapped with force” – the word for “kidnapped” and also the word for “force” were there. It was very interesting for me because I hadn’t thought it was such a political, engagé film, but the translations made me realise that the women were really speaking about freedom, political acts. There was a woman who said, “I want more time because, yes, I want more freedom”, and – this really is a lot! – the translator was laughing, “Oh, she wants more freedom!” But how can you laugh at this? He found some words very disturbing. I hadn’t thought it was such a feminist film. It’s not radically feminist as in an occidental way, but for him, to hear those voices, women who are saying, “I want to work, I want to have my own choices”, it was something really… It’s like starting a war – well, no – but it’s really strong.
AG: Can you tell me more about ending the film with these two young girls?
AE: That was in Bishkek, the capital. I had heard about this young collective – really young, made up of, like, 14-year-olds. Then I read an article about them and thought I should meet them. It was a bit complicated: they are feminist-activists, but it’s not so easy to be open about it. Still, I wanted to reach them, because the film is about young girls! And then even the elders think about the young generation and how things can move. Very slowly, but things move. I think I knew I wanted to end the film with them when I was recording their song. It was really great. I had this idea that I would like to finish with image and sound synchronised, because that way the film could finish on a movement towards the present, towards the young generation. It’s something related to hope, in a way –something positive. We are going towards something positive.
