Diving for Pearls
Director's statement
I had just gotten home, after a fairly decent night surrounded by good people. Ready to wash off all the niceties, I head for the shower. I take off my clothes and wipe off my makeup. A pair of pearl earrings are the only thing I have on.
I reach for my ear to take the first one off. I can’t help but inspect my face; the longer I look the stranger the woman staring back at me became.
That is the story of how Diving For Pearls came to be. A story that is first and foremost a tale of disillusionment. Or so I thought. But despite my best efforts, I found myself writing something’s as sweet as I believed it to be bitter.
As an Arab woman, I’ve grown up in a world that has caricatured, misunderstood and even vilified my people, my culture and my gender. When in want of connection or belonging I would turn to films. They stripped me of all labels except for one: human.
I knew that’s what I wanted to do, humanize the different. And what is more universal than disillusionment?
We all belong to the same cycle of life, born with an inherent naivety that we gradually lose as we sell parts of ourselves in order to survive in this world.
I wanted to allow my viewers to peak into a moment in the lives of these characters. A moment of nostalgia and recognition that no matter who you are, you are now connected through familiarity. Familiarity of a tender moment between a mother and her child, familiarity of a first love, familiarity of looking at a stranger in the mirror...
This slice of life isn’t conventional, the story is not wrapped up in a little bow for you to understand. There is no beginning, middle, or end to the story, because it will repeat itself. Explanation kills art, so I will let you extrapolate what you will. The one thing I will say is that no matter how disillusioned we become, and no matter how much of ourselves we sell, we are all looking for the moments that make life worth living, in other words: we are all diving for pearls.
Samar Abu-Ghazaleh