THE DREAM FABRIC

The fantasies and mutations of young Syrian girl just before the bomb rain. Gaya Jiji’s first movie, « Mon tissu préréré» destructs one by one every cliché of the Arab cinema.

The story takes place in Damas in 2011, right before the civil war. The director is a young Syrian woman formed in France and winner of the 2016 Women in Motion Prize. The casting is 80% feminine, and lead by the gorgeous Manal Issa playing Nahla. It’s hard not do remake the movie in one’s head which such an affluence of converging signs and thanks for the conscience whitening regarding the most horrible and badly understood conflict of the area. But Mon tissu préréré isn’t that movie. The space given to the real is minimized to «stolen» images from Youtube showing Damas before and after the bombing by the pragmatical and inspired director, the rest, diametrically opposed is purely mental. That of an inner war roaring louder that the one outside, a war of oneself against oneself, necessary to the transformation- erratic and dangerous- from a girl to a woman. Nahla is nothing like the martyr character vowed to give us a lesson trough tears, neither is she the resistant heroin calibered for identification: she is a mystery, a endless pit of contradictions, a constantly redefined universe (sexually, sentimentally, morally). Witch and prey at the same time, fragile and mean, yet she believes in the charming prince but already loves scaring the men approaching her. It’s her dreams that make it cinema, shaking our perceptions and remodeling the world at its fragmented image. « We always expect the same movie from Middle-East directors, it revolts me and I wanted to destroy that idea» Gaya Jiji told us. It’s also what we secretly hoped for.