TREATMENT

Working Title: Adonis

Length: 52-58 min
Format: HD
Languages: Arabic, French, English
Locations: Paris, Beirut, Qassabin, Oslo, Skärholmen, Malmö
Stage of the film: Postproduction

THE FILM
Story
The film portrays the encounters and relationship between Ninar and Adonis, the eminent Syrian-
Lebanese poet and intellectual, the father Ninar hardly knew.
Ninar passionately challenges Adonis on subjects ranging from fundamentalism to animal rights,
from feminism to aesthetics; Adonis responds with amusement and wisdom and reveals the
contradictions of a patriarchal humanist libertarian. On Ninar's side, the distress of growing up
without a father becomes a drama with Oedipal overtones. We encounter the gender and age
problem. Here we meet the patriarch versus the feminist. The old versus the young.

There are several levels to the Adonis-Ninar relationship. After the father-daughter level, we
encounter the artistic level: the poet versus the video artist, Ninar, his most passionate critic and his
greatest creation. In the words of Adonis: “Ninar, you are the most beautiful poem of them all”.
Here is the level where the two performers meet. Ninar has everything to prove. She is a good artist,
worthy of shining with her own light and not being overshadowed by her father, the poet.

Finally, these intense one-on-ones are at the same time representative of many contemporary
displacements. Comparing their experiences of war, exile and cultural rootlessness, two individuals
differently marked by Middle Eastern history seek a common ground in Paris. An intimate,
passionate, uncensored and ultimately unresolved search for communication and forgiveness.
Characters

ADONIS

Few authors have been named with such respect and appreciation in the past decade's Nobel Prize
speculations as Adonis. The Syrian-Lebanese poet and essayist born with the name Ali Ahmad Said
Asbar adi s-sacîdi, who turned 80 this January.

Adonis is a pioneer of modern Arabic poetry. Together with most of his Syrian contemporary
writers facing the threats of persecution or imprisonment, Adonis had to make a choice of living a
life of artistic freedom in exile since censorship was brought about in the 1966 coup.
He is often seen as a rebel and iconoclast who follows his own rules. Always against intellectual,
political and religious conventions of the modern arab society, his works range a variety of topics
within the social criticism in which a deep knowledge in the history of arabic literature and modern
arab society is also manifested: injustice, dictatorship, war, misery, etc. He could be considered as
one of the greatest living poets of our times. His work comprises over thirty books of poems and
critical essays, of which over twenty are written in Arabic. His body of work represents in its
entirety one of the most condensed and fertile experiences of the contemporary Arabic literature.

The first part of his latest work, Al-Kitab (The Book), that came out in a Swedish translation in
recent years, is a tribute to the 10th-century poet al-Mutanabbii, who felt that poetry should never
serve politics but rather politics which should serve poetry.
The eighth-to-tenth century Arab poets are much better known in the Arab world than the 19th-
century western authors are known to us. It is therefore necessary for contemporary Arab poets to
address the ancient literature if they are to be taken seriously. Al-Mutanabbi became Adonis's alter
ego. A companion in his journey through the Arab history.

Adonis's own journey began in Syria, in the tiny village of Qassabin. Poetry, like religion, was a
natural part of young Ali Ahmad Said's upbringing in the 1930s. At the age of 16 he sent a poem to
a magazine under the pseudonym of Adonis.. His poem was published and from then on, Said has
been known by his pseudonym. Through his pseudonym, Adonis did not just adopt a name from the
Greek mythology. He distanced himself completely from his national identity and became a
universal poet.
His self-imposed exile – first in Lebanon and later in Paris, became his way of dissociating himself
from all forms of nationalism, both cultural and political. The concept of homeland is a constantly
recurring theme in his poetry. One's homeland is not just about language, culture or birthplace.
When asked which of his three countries he considers his homeland today, he says, "I could not find
what I need in Syria or Lebanon. The homeland you belong to must also belong to you. It must
belong to you in the sense that it can give you liberties and opportunities that let you open your
mind to others. Humanity and language are my homelands.”

Adonis has two daughters, Ninar and Anwar. Anwar is a successful 49-year old career woman with
a family.
Adonis was considered to be a candidate for the 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008 and 2009 Nobel Prize in
Literature, but the awards went to other writers.
In 2007 he was awarded the Bjørnson Prize in Norway for his contribution to the understanding
between cultures and freedom of expression in the Arab world through his work.

NINAR

Adonis’s younger daughter. Ninar, was born in Beirut in the period when Adonis was a member of
Lebanon’s intellectual elite, constantly involved in the political debate and already a prominent poet
and debater.
Ninar never had the opportunity to get close to her father. When the Lebanese war broke out in
1982 Adonis decided to stay put in Beirut. With a stark visual image of her father disappearing out
of the door with a book under his arm, then 11-year old Ninar could only associate books with the
absence of a father figure. Later, when the bombs fell over Beirut and the family spent ages in a
shelter with its book-lined walls, their symbolic value changed for Ninar. The words they contained
became an additional sheltering wall around the young girl.
Today at 39, Ninar is unemployed and lives in Paris, getting by on various artistic projects. In her
small central flat, hundreds of books fill shelves along the walls. But she still has trouble bringing
herself to read any of them. She is viewed as the black sheep of the family. Her relationship with
her father is still distant, though she is constantly searching for ways to spend time with him and to
get his attention.

Ninar recently wrote a book based on an interview with her father, in which she tries to understand
their similarities and differences. At the time she had never read a single one of Adonis’s works.
Now she wants to take the next step – she wants to understand her father’s poems, see the places
where he has lived, meet his friends and do the things that her older sister has done with their father.
After having met Ninar and Adonis in Paris, we clearly saw that despite everything Ninar, like all
daughters, still holds a special place in her father’s heart.

Ninar Esber is an artist. She builds her own monumental structures. Often situated within these
architectural spaces, her performances, photography, and videos rely on the centrality of the body.
Her work is consistently imbued with a performance touch by her use of real-time filming,
deliberate artifice, and her incarnation of characters such as Marilyn Monroe, a super-hero Female,
or various mythological figures.
She has had solo exhibitions at L’appartement 22 (Rabat), the Centre Pompidou (Paris), and
Silpakorn University (Bangkok), and written the book "Conversations avec Adonis, mon père"
(Seuil, 2006).
Places

The film is shot in several locations.

In Sweden we film Adonis' encounters and debates in both Skärholmen and Malmö.
In Norway we follow Adonis and Ninar on a short journey to the north where they are faced with a
different landscape and awarded with the Bjørnson Prize.
In Syria we travel through Adonis' youth and see him as the child when meeting his one hundred
year old mother.
In Lebanon we learn about both Ninar and Adonis' background, their circle of friends, their work
and their culture.
Finally, in Paris, we see the place that has given them the homeland in Adonis' terms, of liberties
and opportunities.

Themes

social criticism, injustice, dictatorship, war, misery, vulnerability of men, east/west, sexism,
feminism, Family relationships, culture.

Style
In a musical work one can find distinct melodies for each instrument or character. The film-making
equivalent, in this case, is the use of different styles to portray each character in depth. A realistic
style will be used to show the Ninar-Adonis relationship, whereas a more poetic or abstract style
will be shown to portray Adonis and Ninar's work.

The film is constructed with a mixture of styles, in which realism, poetry, and fine art meet.
The realistic everyday life scenes where father and daughter meet are entangled with Adonis'
poems, extracts of the book “Conversations with Adonis, my father” as well as with Ninar's video
art.

The meetings of Adonis and Ninar in various spaces such as the home, the street, bars, cafes, at the
beach, at the studio, at work creates a special bond with viewers as they get to know their strong
and charismatic personalities and understand their relationship.
When Ninar interviewed Adonis for the book, she also kept a record of image and sound. This
footage is filled with intense dialogues between her and her father, where no questions are
forbidden and no answers satisfy Ninar's curiosity. The conversations will be shown in our film as
voice-overs and illustrated with images from contemporary home scenes and street situations from
Beirut and Paris, and images from nature and oriental deserts.

We wanted the poetry to be a very natural part of the film. In this way, when Adonis reads his
poems it is always in real life situations and not depicted with other images: he reads to his
centenary mother, he performs in front of audiences in Stockholm, Skärholmen and Oslo and reads
in a studio in Lebanon, where Ninar is recording him reading all of his poems.

There will also be some of Ninar's performances, portraying Ninar as a full character, not just as an
interviewer.

Intentions

This film is the joint work of the experienced documentary director Ryszard Solarz and the young
film maker Gry Jansen.

Ryszard:

“Adonis was in Stockholm reading and talking about his poetry in Skärholmen. I went there and
thought both Adonis and his poetry were fascinating. It was the first time I had heard an Arab
intellectual raising the questions of freedom of speech and expression in the context of the Arab
history. He talked about the mystic poets before religion came in.
The film took off when we met Ninar.
I felt that there was a lack of films about Arab culture or Arab issues in general, where one meets an
Arab intellectual and hears him speaking freely and with the knowledge he uses to refer to religion,
history, etc.
At that time it was astonishing for me because it was a time when 'terrorist actions' where quite
current, and he was speaking without any fear, criticising terrorism. I thought I had just met an
Arabic Salman Rushdie, but it was something else.

We are making this film in order to tell or to understand which is the role of the intellectuals in the
Arab world. To contribute, to advise. Maybe to help secularisation.”

Gry:

“Adonis is charismatic and has a nice personality. When we started researching about Adonis we
found that Ninar was writing a book about him at the same time, the book Conversations With My
Father. We read the book a year after it came out.
The idea was to give a different perspective of Adonis by using someone close to him and that
would have the freedom to ask whichever question. Also the relationship that she had with her
father was very special.
Adonis has been known as a character that is difficult to access because some of his literature is on
a very high intellectual level. We wanted to discover such a poet and person from a more familiar
point of view, to make him more available to any kind of audience.

We think that making the film together will give us a better access to the characters and a better
perspective from both parties, the relation of an older man and a younger woman.
 PRODUCTION MATTERS
Target audience
An audience generally interested in issues concerning poetry, art, islam, freedom and equality
between men and women.

Coproducers
We already count with the support of SVT and YLÖ

The crew
Ryszard Solarz

Born in Wroclaw, Poland, in 1953. In 1970, Ryszard emigrated from Poland to Sweden, where he
studied economics at Stockholm University. In 1975, he made his first short feature film, Elevator,
and embarked on a course in still photography. The following year, Ryszard continued his studies at
the London International Film School. After graduating in 1979, he started his career at Sveriges
Television, SVT, where he worked for seven years as an editor and camera operator for the news
and documentary department. In 1986, Ryszard started his freelance career as producer/director of
his own production company, Direkt Film & Media (www.direktfilm.se). Since then, he has
produced and directed over 30 documentaries for Swedish and international broadcasters. Many of
his films have been awarded prestigious prizes around the world, films such as Salins Woman (third
prize Prix Europa) and The Star (finalist IDFA). One of his latest documentaries Necrobusiness,
which he directed together with Fredrik von Krusenstjerna, is an internationally acclaimed co-
production between several major European broadcasters (BBC, ARTE, etc.). The film was also
supported by MEDIA and was awarded the prize for best Swedish Documentary 2008. Ryszard
also codirected the film The Last Cod with Folke Rydén.

Gry Jansen

Since 2004 Gry has worked on several documentaries as a director, camera operator and editor.
Adonis will be her third project in conjunction with Ryszard Solarz, after Tax for Sale and The Last
Cod. She has also worked closely with Ninar Esber in some of Ninar´s own art projects such as La
Estrella.
Gry's socio-anthropological and moving image studies have lead directly her to work in
documentaries. Earlier university studies in Paris have also allowed her to participate in diverse film
projects in French speaking countries such as Canada, France and Lebanon. She has also lived and
worked in Japan.