Daood Alabdulaa and Louise Zenker Discuss the Importance of Sharing a Story Like Walud
Walud is the kind of short film that gives a voice to those characters who are silenced in real life. Instead of letting the stories of these women die with them, Daood Alabdulaa and Louise Zenker give them the place they deserve.
By focusing mainly on Amuna’s story, the film helps viewers connect deeply with what’s happening. Where women are seen solely as wives who are supposed to birth sons for their husbands, the story digs deep into what happens when that’s not possible. What does the inability to bear sons mean for women who are seen as having no other purpose?
We spoke to Alabdulaa and Zenker about the importance of sharing this story, where the story was born, and the challenges they faced in the filming process. We also discussed what it means for these two film students to have a short film become an Academy Award-qualifying film.
W SPOTLIGHT: What was it about this particular story that you wanted to put on screen?
LOUISE ZENKER: It's a mixed thing. On the one hand, Daood is from Syria, so he grew up there and lived there until he had to flee Syria due to political reasons, and came to Germany. He has a few brothers and sisters, and one of them currently lives in Qatar as a migrant worker. So that meant that they had not seen each other for a few years, I think, up to…
DAOOD ALABDULAA: Ten years.
ZENKER: At some point, you were able to travel to Qatar and meet with her again. She shared for the first time that when she got married, she had trouble having kids, and especially having boys. It put a lot of pressure on her as a woman. It was never really looked at the man. But he [Daood] never knew, because he was quite little back then. As they met as adults and then talked about this, it stayed with him for quite a while. The whole issue of what happens to a woman in a society that will not like to look at this issue without guilt or responsibility. He came back from this travel, \we talked a lot about it, and then we sort of merged it into this storyline that uses ISIS as a vehicle to talk about patriarchal societies and structures and the pressure that could be put onto women. As soon as ISIS was part of the concept, he said he always wondered why people from the West came back to Syria and gave up all their privileges, all their safety, all the security, to fight a war that is not theirs.
W SPOTLIGHT: It feels like it's a regional topic that only applies to a certain part of the world, but you also take it and expand it to reach other audiences as well. So, how do you think that works? Or at what part of the process of creating this film do you expand to other audiences and make it a universal discussion?
ZENKER: That is more or less a result of us working together. I'm from Germany, and I grew up here. It was important to us that it's not limited to a certain part of the world. On the one hand, there was always curiosity about the political dimension of Westerners going into the ISIS sort of issue. And then for me, I felt like it's for sure we can create a story or a film that is set in Eastern Syria and highlights something that is part of a problem. I was always more interested in what sort of power dynamics and problems arise from societies where men are in absolute control. And this is something that happens all over the world. Wherever you are, you have these sorts of societies. And it's always a similar logic to some degree. The power dynamics are very comparable, so knowing that we're going to use the ISIS, it's this sort of metaphor for a power dynamic that cages women all over the world. It was important not to have a film that feels like an over there problem, but have it be something that is relatable to other parts of the world as well, because you could get sucked into it so easily from wherever you are in the world.
I think this is something that we realized once the film was done and finished. Looking at it now, the way it plays out, that the European woman is able to get away, mirrors more of a geopolitical power dynamic between Middle Eastern countries and the West. Historically, Western countries could come into the Middle East and colonize the places and then just leave whenever they're done. They have the upper hand, no matter what, just because they're from the West. It's the same with this specific storyline, that Alina, the younger girl, has the ability to leave the country and go to her embassy and return to whatever could be safety or recovery, whereas the Middle Eastern characters are just stuck there.
We are still film students, and we have a fantastic teacher who always says everything is related to everything. Can you see that? And it's sort of this feeling that even though we're placing it in the Middle East, everything might still be related globally.
W SPOTLIGHT: I was wondering, how do you create a project that's going to give voice to people, in this case, the women who are usually silenced? How do you approach it? Is there a certain way that you approach it, or is that something that you realize after the project is done?
ZENKER: I don't know if that is something that we actively decided. I think it was just that you [Daood] had this immense need to talk about the issue, because you have four sisters. Daood grew up as a girl for the first seven years of his life, because just his mom was like, “The eighth child is a boy, not according to plan. I wanted to have a girl, so he's just gonna be raised as a girl.” So, I think your primary imprint within the social world was that of a girl. You really wanted to talk about these women and share these stories that don't really get a platform. I feel in the context of anything that is related to terrorism or war, the stories that we do see a lot and that rise to a more public sphere are those that have a certain level of contrast and brutality. Especially the women in this sort of conflict, often they stand out because they are very resilient, but they're not very loud because they can't be. To find a way to highlight the strength that lies within this silence and resilience that was important to you. Especially the region where you grew up is a region where people are quite silent, in a way.
ALABDULAA: For me now, it was important to tell something about women living there. I know this is like my sister, what happened to my sister that inspired us. Then the name of the character, Amuna, is my aunt's name. When ISIS came to the house, my aunt was talking to them really strongly. There are women who really stand against the Islamic State, but no one knows them. I wanted to tell this, and to bring up what happened to my sister. She's not alone with this. It's a topic of problem that we have in Eastern Syria. She's not alone with these topics, and we bring them all together in this story.
ZENKER: But it's hard to take apart what was part of a plan, and what sort of emerged from a lot of instinct and conversations. Because when writing and creating a story, you follow along. Because we write together and then we direct together, you have these long conversations and all the what ifs, and you just navigate this world and see what's striking, or what could be interesting. It's a little bit like a detective trying to find something, and you end up with something that maybe that's why it works.
W SPOTLIGHT: Were there any challenges that presented themselves when you started filming, compared to what you imagined the process would be like?
ZENKER: We're a student production. It's not even our final film. It's something in between. We study in Munich, and it's not very common that a student production from our school would shoot outside of Europe. That was quite a challenge. Our money is pretty limited. We wanted to shoot in Morocco first, because we couldn't shoot in Syria. So we were looking for a similar place, a desert that would resemble what you [Daood] remember about your childhood and your youth. We landed on Morocco, but Morocco ended up being too expensive, so we had to reschedule and find a new shooting location. It was eight weeks prior to shooting. Luckily, we found Tunisia. We had friends who studied at the Tunisian film school, and we had a mixed crew, half Tunisian, half European.
We landed there, and everything was okay-ish. The crew landed a few days later, and all the equipment got stuck at customs. We had a shooting plan, what scenes, what days, and then we had backup camera equipment. But that was really backup, worst-case scenario. We did not have sound devices. We had to rearrange all the shooting orders to shoot all the scenes without dialogue first, because we didn't have the equipment. We didn't know whether we were going to have the equipment at some point. Luckily enough, one of our actors, who is apparently quite well known for TV shows in Tunisia, went to the airport, took a few selfies security guard, and then we finally got the equipment.
But for our cameraman, that was insane, because he literally had to tape on filters and stuff onto the camera, because the equipment was just not there. We were shooting in the desert, and it was just too bright. He really put up with a lot, but he won a camera prize now.
ALABDULAA: After writing the story, it was important to find a place similar to where I grew up in Eastern Syria, where the nearest neighbor is more than five kilometers away from you. There is this kind of silence in the place where I grew up. The silence imprints itself on the people. It shapes the people there. They don't talk a lot; they're quiet. It wasn't easy to find this place.
ZENKER: Once Morocco was out, he sat down at our kitchen table with the laptop and had this headfirst dive into the internet, trying to find a different plan. Then he came across a traveler's blog from 2007 with a tiny picture someone took of a hut in the south of Tunisia. A few days later, he booked a flight ticket to Tunisia, went down there, and met his friend. They traveled 600 kilometers down to south, where they suspected similar things to be. And, long story short, we shot in exactly that hut.
ALABDULAA: It was really funny because we were in a small village in the South of Tunisia. We had breakfast at a cafe, and I just asked the owner of the cafe if he knew where this was, and he said the other side of the mountain. He was too sure, and I thought he was leading us in the other direction. We went in the other direction but had more time when we finished the day, so we went to the other side of the mountain, and we found the hut.
W SPTOLIGHT: The movie is now a qualifier for the Academy Awards. As students making this project, what does that mean to you?
ZENKER: We're competing alongside films that are made by real grown-ups. We're in our 30s. Studying directing often starts later in your 20s, and not really when you're 18, at least in Germany. But it still feels like we're not really grown-ups, especially within the film industry. And there are all these people who have done a lot more short films and who finished film school or never went to film school. It feels like it's way out of our league. Yet, here we are, so we're just gonna take it and run with it.
ALABDULAA: I'm from Eastern Syria, and when I came to my parents the first time, and I told them I wanted to be a director, I was nine years old. My parents laughed about this idea because what child from the desert wants ot go to Hollywood? So for me, studying film is the dream. In Syria, at that time, there weren't film schools. Studying film for me is living that dream, because I really dreamt about having a place in the film school. And now to be qualifying for the Oscars with this film, it really means a lot. We're really happy about that, and sometimes we don't believe it.
ZENKER: We're both not from film families. We were just these kids who thought that would be cool, and never could let the dream go. We both studied something else before, and then never could really let go. So we ended up in film school, and then we met there. If you're not coming from that background, either financially or in terms of what your family does, it feels unreal to even enter the room.
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