Philippe Falardeau has started filming 1000 secrets 1000 dangers, adapted from the novel by Alain Farah. The author himself co-wrote the screenplay alongside the director. Produced by micro_scope, with André Turpin as cinematographer.
It was in New York that we found Mona Kareem for the continuation of the filming of Let the silence not prevail .
Writer and translator from Kuwait, Mona belongs to the bidoon minority - which means "without nationality" in Arabic. It was in 2011 that Mona fled Kuwait to settle in the United States on a scholarship. His chosen exile becomes a forced exile when the Kuwaiti government declines his request to renew his passport. After Boston and New York, she now teaches at St. Louis University, Missouri.
When Mona takes the path of exile, she knows that there will be a heavy price to pay: that of turning her back, probably forever, on her native country. She doesn't know if she will be able to see her family again, but she has chosen not to give in to this blackmail: she continues to write.
Even today, the hunt for writers continues. They are threatened, attacked, imprisoned or forced into exile, when they are not coldly eliminated for daring to write. Who are they? What mechanisms do the authorities put in place to censor them?
The feature-length documentary that I am co-directing with Catherine Hébert started in Berlin. Our first in a long series of meetings opened the doors to the Turkish writer Aslı Erdoğan . Arrested, imprisoned then released in 2016, the author fled her country of origin.
Today, she has the generosity to tell us about her difficult exile, the weight of her pen, the meaning that novels take on when we try to burn them.