On Thursday, June 26, the West Newton Cinema held a screening of two films by award-winning Japanese American filmmaker Eimi Imanishi: Battalion to My Beat, a short film released in 2017, and an excerpt from Imanishi’s upcoming feature, Nomad Shadow (earlier title, DOHA: The Rising Sun).
The event was part of the Cinema’s Producer’s Circle series, which aims to bring filmmakers together with potential producers. The Cinema invites filmmakers to showcase a selection of their previous work as well as a work-in-progress presentation of a current project, and those who attend are then given the opportunity to help fund the completion of the film.
Both Battalion to My Beat and Nomad Shadow are set in Western Sahara, a region home to one of Africa’s longest-running current conflicts. War first broke out in 1975 after Spain first gave up control of the territory. While the area was initially divided between Morocco and Mauritania, the Algerian-backed Polisario Front has long sought recognition of an independently governed Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic.
The films may share a setting, but they tell two very different stories. Battalion to My Beat follows a young girl, living in the refugee camps of Western Sahara, who runs away in an attempt to join the army and the fight for independence. Nomad Shadow, on the other hand, depicts a young woman, Mariam, and her life in the aftermath of her deportation from Spain to Western Sahara.
Following the screening, the Cinema hosted a Q&A session with Imanishi, during which the filmmaker reflected on her career, shared her process for making both films, and expressed her hopes for the future of Nomad Shadow.
Imanishi said that she first learned about the conflict in Western Sahara after moving to Spain, but that the events of the Arab Spring made her “emotionally hooked.”
“[I realized] that these people really didn’t have a voice. You probably don’t know — I didn’t know, either — that the first place the Arab Spring actually happened was in Western Sahara, in the occupied territories, but there was zero coverage,” she said. “That’s when I started to feel really angry – this feeling of, ‘I need to express something.’”
Imanishi decided to visit Western Sahara with a photojournalist friend and her husband at the time, but she quickly learned that making a film about the region would be much more difficult than she had anticipated.
“The secret police followed us, they blackmailed [my then-husband’s] family,” she said. “I just realized how naive I was and how big and powerful Morocco is.”
As a result, Imanishi decided to explore the possibility of making a fictional film instead of the documentary-style picture she had been planning.
“I really had to rethink what to do, and that’s when I turned to a fictionalized version of what’s happening there,” she said. “[It gave] me a little bit more bandwidth to be able to express some things without the fear of repercussions against my family and loved ones there, in Western Sahara.”
Accordingly, Battalion to my Beat was shot in the refugee camps of Algeria. The majority of Nomad Shadow was shot in Algeria as well, although Imanishi was able to capture some B-roll footage of Western Sahara that was incorporated into the film.
While Imanishi and her team have been working since 2017 to finance Nomad Shadow, there is still much work to be done. She said that they have faced a variety of obstacles in securing funding and that the film is still in need of financial support to get it through the final stages of development.
“Because it is about a region that doesn’t really draw that much attention in the world, it is extremely hard to find financing because people don’t really know enough about the place, often, and the interest isn’t really there,” she said.
Despite the challenges, Imanishi said that above all, she hopes that the finished product will leave a lasting impression on its viewers.
“What I want them to take away is this sense that Arabs – and Arab Muslims as a whole – are not the other,” she said. “They’re not stranger than us; they have the exact same scope of feelings and emotionality and experiences as we do. And that’s it. That’s the bottom line.”
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