ES: Your video might look like a documentary but ultimately it’s probably not a documentary. Is this a new kind of film?

RS: I don’t think that anybody has taken someone’s body of work and reshuffled it into a fiction. It was a very strong intuition that I had and it was very difficult to articulate this in writing to convince funding bodies about it. Many thought it was whimsical, to take fictional elements and create another fiction. No one believed it would work over a longer film, more than ten minutes, but I was sure that it could be done with these images.

ES: It is a film about watching films, about watching Hosni’s films. How did the work come about? Is there also a story to tell about the making of the video?

RS: The first intuition was that I could make a film with fictional elements; the second factor was the pleasure of watching the films of Soad Hosni that brought me back to Arabic cinema. The trigger of why I am devoted to Soad Hosni was the first film I saw starring her, Al-Mutawahisha [“The Wild One” (1979), directed by Samir Seif], back when I was studying. It brought me so much pleasure that I cried, I was so involved with the film. I thought it was as well written, beautiful and moving as any Hollywood film I’d seen. Why do we ostracize our own culture, and why don’t we reclaim it? I’m devoted to her because on a fictional level, she brought me back to Arabic cinema and opened this window. So when she died I thought that I should honor her and pay homage to her work.

So Three Disappearances is a kind of bio-pic. In what I call the “London part,” she is driving in the rain. You see her driving on and on. She doesn’t look [where she is going], in a very phantom-like way. And you hear the song lyrics, “Love is far from its territories.” You hear it remotely, as if it comes from the past. For me this is why she died—for lack of love, lack of loving herself and others loving her. But who knows? In reality, Soad Hosni jumped out of the seventh floor of Stuart Tower in London. In my film there is an image of somebody falling. In the original film, the one from which this scene originates, she is not the character who falls but the one who sees someone falling. The Hosni character sees Nawal who is falling and at night she dreams of herself falling. Like when she is driving during the day in Alexandria and she sees this woman hanging onto the balcony. She doesn’t know if the woman is falling or not. By night Nawal dreams that the Soad Hosni character is falling. This is where I got the image, but in my film she dreams of her death—she dreams of herself falling, she wakes up, goes to the morgue and finds herself dead.

ES: Can you discuss the film in terms of its structure?

RS: I could divide her career in three parts, so this is why this tragedy had three parts and not five. Mainly the first act is up to the 1967 defeat of the Arab-Israeli War. The second act is to the 1973 war, then the third is 1973 to the 1991 Gulf War. It organized itself in such a way because, as historical events changed the cinema, so too did they affect her career and experience. The structure followed these three important historical moments and her three important career phases. It’s a three-act tragedy with a beginning, a blossoming and a maturity. Each act is divided into scenes: the first has five scenes, the second has four scenes and the third has three, with an epilogue and a prelude. The moods of the acts vary; the first is very peppy.

ES: Like a trailer.

RS: And the second is more a kind of fan, it opens up the kind of images of women that she represented, and the third flies away. I thought the third act should be about all the sad things, all the violent and traumatic things. So it went beyond any categorization; it went into a kind of dreamy, nightmarish, Lynchian mode. She wakes up and it’s another dream and another dream and another dream.

ES: The first question I had when watching your film was: what am I looking at? Where is the footage from? Can you explain the montage of the film and your methods, particularly for the layering of image and sound?

RS: Everything comes from VHS . . . every breath, phrase, image, scratch, the music; everything comes from the body of films of Soad Hosni. The editing was worked as much on the image level as on the sound level. I edited the sound many times; I closed my eyes to hear it, to see if the scene was the right tempo for me, the right beat of music and words. For the rhythm, I wanted my breath and my tempo. I’m kind of bouncy; I wanted it to build and accelerate, settle on a plateau and accelerate again. Sometimes the images were there but I adjusted it on the sound, on the rhythm, on the breathing, on my feeling of how much I can bear, on how I like the story to be narrated. I knew the images, so I was just editing with my ears, with sound.

ES: So you cut the images according to the sound of the scene?

RS: I know what images I want. Of course they have sounds, which are synchronized or not, and there may also be music. I have the finished film, so I had to get the music from where there is music but without dialogue over it. A lot of the time the music is constructed from many parts of the film, to get the whole of the film’s soundtrack. And often the dialogue was charged with music, so sometimes I had to deal with that. Often I put two pieces of music together from different sources to get this eerie kind of music of a dream.