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| Nawelle Ewad in The Red Suitcase |
A country of little more than half a million people, Luxembourg is not known for its Oscar-winning films, but The Red Suitcase could change this. One of the strongest entries on this year’s Best Live Action Short shortlist, it’s the story of a 16-year-old Iranian girl who finds herself all alone in Luxembourg Airport, her whole future in jeopardy. Desperate to escape without being seen by the man who is waiting for her, she has to use all her ingenuity.
Director Cyrus Neshvad, producer Guillaume Levil and actor Nawelle Ewad, who plays the girl, Arianne, attended a press conference to talk about the film, and about what it was like to hear the news from the Academy.
“I guess, like everybody, I was surprised and proud,” says Cyrus. “But more proud that the visibility of the film [means] I can reach now, what's going on in Iran, to more people. And that's the main thing, which makes me proud.”
“I think I was in the bathroom,” Guillaume recalls of the moment when the news broke. “Yes, I was. He called me in the bathroom and I didn't want to believe him so I said ‘’No, it’s a joke.’ I wanted to put the phone on the floor and just stop speaking to him. But in fact it was true.”
Cyrus explains that he didn’t know when the shortlist was due to be published. “I was not intending to get the news until the next day. So I got the phone call [and] it was a complete surprise.”
“I wrote this film with Cyrus,” says Guillaume. “And it's always the question, is it possible, first of all, to write with someone, because we can't write with anybody on Earth, because the individual system of the brain is different...but with Cyrus, in fact, it was quite simple, because we have a common point. And this common bond is in all our films that we write together. And this common bond is that he went out of Iran when he was a little boy, and me in my childhood, I lived in a little French island near South Africa, which is named La Réunion. It was my childhood there. And when I came back to France, something like 14-years-old, I was like a monster, because I was not the same as people in France. And Cyrus, it was the same when he came in Luxembourg for the first time after Iran. And we had this common point. So when we did write a film, we always speak about childhood.”
“My parents are in contact with Iran,” says Cyrus. “And my mother was telling me, ‘Do you know that women telling their opinion are disappearing?’ I said ‘There's no question about that. They are even not being arrested, and disappearing. They're not coming in court.’ So I was terrified. I said ‘Why nobody's talking about this?’ And then I said ‘Look, let's begin to talk about this. Let's do a topic around this.’ And Iran is important for me. So I wrote an outline. And then I went to Guillaume to polish it.
“I moved to Luxembourg when there was the revolution. So first of all, the planes were stopped, so the airport was not working. We had a ticket for the plane, we came to the airport but all the airports were closed. So then we were there without tickets, not knowing what we could do. And suddenly, there were buses going away, and we got the last bus to get out of Iran. And just when we came out, the borders closed, and I remember still watching all the bombs falling...and today, we have the movie about the airport.”
When we first see Ariane wandering around the airport, it’s not clear why she’s behaving so oddly. She’s obviously nervous and keeps looking around her as she clutches her suitcase. Cyrus says that he felt it was important that we arrive in the space where the film is set at the same time as she does, but initially we don’t know who she is, and we sympathise with staff who are suspicious about her before we get inside her head.
“We judge her because she has a suitcase, we think perhaps she's a terrorist or something,” says Guillaume. “But we judge her and then we know that it was false. And so it is a way to manipulate the public in order to say ‘Be careful.’ Sometimes we judge someone and that isn't good, it’s not the truth.”
“We think she's a terrorist, and okay, she's not a terrorist,” says Cyrus. “But she stole the luggage, you know, perhaps – after we're with the police, we think she stole it. And then after it’s opened – you know, you always come in step by step, so that you finally when you see her signature on the poster and on the passport, you say ‘Okay.’”
That ambiguity was really important to them boith, Guillaume says, so they spent a lot of time revising the script to get it right. Being under suspicion is something which Cyrus can easily relate to on a personal level.
“Do you know how many times I was arrested or, not arrested, but taken up by the police and had a full search just because how I look and where I come from?” he asks. “A lot of times.”
Nawelle discusses her feelings about her character, sticking to French, because she’s not confident abouyt her English. Cyrus translates. She says that she immediately felt a connection with Ariane due to their mutual love of art. She’s not Irania, but grew up in Maghreb, so she has the same connection with Islamic tradition and relates strongly to Ariane’s fear of going against what adults want.
We talk about how Cyrus makes use of the setting and I observe that whereas in most films bright places are safe and dark ones dangerous, here it’s the reverse, with Ariane looking for cover wherever she can and seeking to escape into the night.
“In order that she has to get away from this, she has to cover herself,” says Cyrus. “Usually in all the movies, when you want to get away from somewhere you have to put something on you to cover. In this movie it’s the opposite. So here also, the more she's going in the dark, the more she’s safe, because she's not seen. So when she is in the trunk, with this red light, and it's dark, you know, the darker it gets in a place the safer she is.”
Guillaume nods. “It's a new way of hiding.”
Part of the process of making herself less noticeable involves taking off her hijab.
“I thought it was very important that in the movie, she's taking this away to get away, so that the man doesn't recognise that,” says Cyrus. “But for me, it was an invitation to take it away, because it's somehow the revolution of woman, so that ‘I take my chador off,’ it means ‘I don't accept the patriarchy, I don't accept the tradition, I don't accept the domination of the man. I don't accept all the stuff.’ The list is very long. You know, the woman needs the consent of the man to go abroad or to do something. And so all this is hijab. By taking this hijab off, we are going against this...And to give this message to the audience, I asked Nawelle to watch the camera. She's watching the audience. By watching the audience she's letting all the woman of the world to join in. So that was very, very important for me”
Her translates again for Nawelle: she says that the emotions in this scene came to her very easily because she understood what this meant at a symbolic level.
“It's important to hear that from Nawelle, that she used the fact that she's a woman...to play the scene,” says Guillaume, “because we wanted with Cyrus make a film about Irish women in Ireland, but in a more global system, about all the women, even here in France, or even in USA and all that. That...sometimes women are still in prison, sometimes it’s like that still. That’s why we did the film, for all the women.”
I ask about the women whose faces we keep seeing on posters in the airport, smiling and blond. What do they represent to Ariane?
“I think it's very tragic that she's so alone, so I was doing wide angle shots to show how all alone she is,” Cyrus explains. “In front of places where all the women seem so happy. All the women has so beautiful smile. The finish of the movie on this woman was having such a beautiful smile. But at the end of the day when we go close to her, she is not smiling so much. Why she's not smiling? Because she's been used to sell shampoo. Why these girls are not smiling, because we use the mouth of the girls to sell a pizza. We use the décolletage of a woman to sell champagne. We use the sexy naked leg of a woman to sell bags. So we are misusing the women – we are not respecting – to sell things. Which means that abroad, there is also an injustice done to the woman. And this also means that whatever the future of this girls, is, we don't know if it will be a brilliant future.”
I ask about the contents of Ariane’s suitcase, which provided the only glimpse we get of what was important to her in her past life.
“The inside of this luggage was very important for me,” Cyrus says, “because I know that she is poor. She cannot have a lot of things inside. It's coming from a poor family. So I went to my parents, because they are Iranian. And I went through all the stuff they had. So I said ‘If I would be that small girl, what would I have? The small bag of pistachios because pistachios are very Iranian. All the painting stuff, then the one or two small books. And then the pistachios and phone and food. And then suddenly I saw ‘Wow, the luggage is already full!’
“She cannot take more. And it was already done. And what is this luggage? It's her heart. Why the luggage was red? Because the luggage should express her heart. I told her always when I was directing her, ‘You take this luggage like it's your heartbeat. Take her like this.’” He folds his arms around an imagiinary suitcase in front of his chest. “Because the heart is there.”
Going back to the scene where Ariane removes her hijab, is that an intentional response to bigots who think of hijabs themselves as disguises?
“For us it’s very, very interesting to see,” he says. “She has to do the opposite to hide herself.It's a disguise. But what is what is really happening? What is really happening to get out is not just to take off the hijab. What is happening, it's her hair, and the hair is the woman. So the woman part in her saves her, which is the hair.”
Speaking through him, Nawelle explains that she developed a strong attachment to the suitcase during shooting, making it difficult for her to let it go. The only other thing Ariane has with her is her phone, and at the end of the film, she switches it off, because that’s part of the price of freedom.
“It's a way to say that no more trap,” says Guillaume. “She loses her family to because she wants to never go back to Iran. And when she switched off the phone, it's no more. ‘Yes, my father is telling me on the phone that I can come back to Iran, but no more. I go to the future.’”
The music is important in this film, he says, because Ariane doesn’t have a language in common with the people around her.
“It’s a way to speak, again, about the loneliness, because she's alone in this huge airport. And the fact is that in Luxembourg, they speak several languages. So it's not only a country, one language, it's a country of lots of languages. So with this particularity, she's even more a stranger.
“I don't know if a film can be important for the public sometimes. But if one thing can be said, it’s that sometimes we judge too much people... and especially we judge women.”
