Thinking through Naficy’s model for documentary.
My English Cousin
Karim Sayad, 2019, Qatar/Switzerland
genre: character-driven
In his study of “accented cinema” Hamid Naficy uses many documentaries as examples of exilic cinema, even if his study prioritizes fiction cinema. But exilic and diasphoric cinema is so common in festival documentaries that I’m starting to think I need to reckon with Naficy’s model for this current documentary moment.
Diaspora might inform a wide range of documentary voices, which are often enabled by coproduction and made by filmmakers living in Western European countries.
Then there are the films about exile itself. My English Cousin is a terrific example, a character-driven doc about Fahed, an immigrant from Algeria living in Grimsby England. The documentary structures itself around multiple sections, as Fahed goes back and forth between Algeria and England. The title even suggests an exile remove: a portrait about a family member living elsewhere. The director, Karim Sayad is Swiss-Algerian, and while the film acknowledges Sayad’s directorial presence at points, it is not a personal documentary, at least in the sense that the cousins’ relationship is not explored in itself. Rather, there is a commonality between the two men.
I found the gaps in the structure particularly effective. Documentaries often have ellipses, but My English Cousin foregrounds these, and uses them to suggest the irreconcilability of the two places for its main character.
And I’m seeing the way that docs about exile figure for the national remove of the co-produced festival-film funding universe.