Recently, Mubi has added a short film that showcases the immense talent of multidisciplinary artist Faris Alrjoob, who works in the fields of cinema, video, art, and performance. Based in Berlin, after directing The Ghost We Left At Home in 2020 – which was featured in numerous international festivals – his latest film made its debut at Cannes (Quinzaine des Cinéastes) last year, as one of the first Jordanian films to be presented at the prestigious French festival. The Red Sea Makes Me Wanna Cry is set between Berlin and a small port town in Jordan overlooking the Red Sea, with a rather complicated history (“So they had these big plans in the 60s to turn it into an industrial hub, a free trade zone. And then the civil war happened, and black September, and everything shifted. There’s a factory, and an abandoned military base, but somehow it just feels so far, lost in time and space. They call it the Island of Dead, because of its history, a ghost town”). It is here that the young German protagonist, Ida, arrives to reconstruct the accident that took the life of her partner, the Jordanian Ismail. We mostly hear his voice in the voice-overs that accompany the minimal narration, and we see him in a scene that we can’t quite discern as a reconstructed memory, a melancholic dream, or an impossible reality. Like Coppola’s Vietnamese Mekong, the shores of the Red Sea are a funnel that sucks in the protagonist and holds her (“This place, the mountains, they won’t let you leave. This place is for the dead”), as she tries to piece herself back together and once again sense the presence of her partner in his very own land. Perhaps she finds him in the smells, the flavours, even as she eats french fries, in the cigarettes smoked on a warm terrace, in the cool drinks, in the sounds of the city, or in the heart-wrenching final song that closes the film. It ends just as Ida is about to cry when the scene gets cut, and from her composure, her inner pain is about to manifest in its most familiar phenomenological form. Despite the title, she doesn’t shed a single tear on this Red Sea, perfectly in line with the film’s tone.
Faris Alrjoob’s work is in fact composed, delicate, minimal. There is no excess gesture, no excess word, no excess emotion. Yet we feel all the injustice of an untimely loss and we journey through Ida’s soul as she struggles to stay afloat while exploring the meaning of loss, or rather, allowing it to explore her. The Red Sea Makes Me Wanna Cry rests on atmospheres and sensations, so tangible and tactile and almost sensual, just like the slightly faded 16mm film on which it is captured. It relies on the languor of a landscape that seems healing but hides a wound within itself, on the grace of the people, and on the intensity of the unspoken and untold that seep through every pore of actress Clara Schwinning, certainly a rising star of German cinema.
It is difficult to hit the mark in twenty minutes with such a sparse screenplay, yet Alrjoob manages to do so and leaves the audience with a bittersweet sense of beauty, pain, disorientation, and rediscovery.
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