I rewatched the film a bit ago in order to jog my memory for this interview I'm about to do. I hadn't watched it in a good while, so it was good to watch it again. Like all of my films, it's certainly a timestamp of who I was and what I was going through at the time.
The party scene in particular still makes me cringe - for some reason I tend to write these big scenes but still don't really know how to time people dancing to eventually what the music ends up being. But for 'The Return' I was able to pull this off hopefully better, since the scene is a memory.
Overall though I'm still fairly happy with THOMYG. I haven't had enough space from it still though in order for me to view it a bit more objectively. I do think the characters are solid, as well as the cinematography and production design - it was certainly my first fully envisioned film, which I can see onscreen. I still appreciate the completely non-verbal subtext of Mariana's struggle with her faith, which I hope that someone, somewhere, picked up on. It very much represents what I was going through myself at the time (once again), with Islam.
I love that the film features some of my brother Fahad's music. It makes it even more personal. I don't think either of my bros have seen the film still. I want to watch it with them, though I know that they will act like my bros and probably drop annoying comments throughout, so perhaps it's better they watch without me and tell me later what they think :-D Let's see. It's too bad that we are all spread so far apart from each other, as they would've probably seen it by now otherwise perhaps, I like to think.
This also makes me think, that it's obviously a film about family, about siblings. A very different sibling situation from mine, but about siblings nonetheless, and to some extent all sibling dynamics do share some things in common perhaps. It's also a story about loss - which I would devastatingly experience myself, just some months after shooting the film and during it's editing. It's eerie, how much the grief and loss in THOMYG foreshadowed what I was about to experience myself - in a different way obviously, but again, grief and loss is extremely universal.
Rewatching the film does give me a lot of happy memories as its director. It's strange now that I look back, how much certain things were occupying my mind and thus the film. I'm glad I spilled it all in the film though, as I think it became stronger. But it took a lot out of me. And so did the next film, even more so. My editor on the current film told me that I make films in order to understand myself and the world, and she's completely right. It's why I have to keep making films, despite all of the difficulties - I have to get whatever I'm going through, out of me, and into this form. I just wonder if there's a way to do it where it doesn't have to be so draining each and every time.
