INESCAPABLE written and directed by Ruba Nadda, with Alexander Siddig, Marisa Tomei and Joshua Jackson. Screening September 11, 6:30 pm, Roy Thomson Hall September 13, 5 pm, Scotiabank 1. See listing.
It’s taken six years, but Ruba Nadda is ready to sign off on Inescapable.
“We just finished the [sound] mix,” she says when we meet a few weeks before her film’s scheduled TIFF world premiere. “I’ve held my breath with this one since 2006.”
In contrast to her previous features Sabah and Cairo Time, which focused on the budding relationships between people from different cultures, Inescapable is a political thriller about a former Syrian intelligence official long since relocated to Toronto who must return to Damascus when his daughter disappears there.
“The big picture is not just the theft of his daughter, but the theft of this Arab man’s identity,” Nadda says. “I’m the product of immigrant parents, so I know when people come to Canada they leave so much behind. You come here and you’re forced to start over again, and this man, this is his past and he’s ashamed of it. He thinks he’s started over again, but his past catches up and he has to go back and reclaim it.”
Nadda could only imagine one actor in the role – her Cairo Time star Alexander Siddig. She gave him the Inescapable script while they were shooting in Egypt in 2008, and he immediately said yes.
“He is the quintessential Arab man,” she says. “He’s very masculine and very hard, very contained and explosive. I don’t know how he does it.”
Shooting in Syria was out of the question. Not only is moviemaking virtually impossible there, but Nadda – whose parents emigrated from Syria, and who lived there in her teens before the family moved back to Canada – is terrified of returning.
“I know what it’s like to have lived in that totalitarian regime,” she says. “I still have nightmares of what it would be like were I still living there. When I go back to the Middle East, I’m scared to death that they’re gonna put me on a plane and send me back [to Syria].”
The original plan was to substitute Cairo for Damascus, but the political explosion there made any Middle East location risky. Producer Daniel Iron suggested Johannesburg, and after a scouting trip there, Nadda decided she could make it work.
“All I needed was history,” she says. “I needed decay. I took all my childhood photos of Syria and I just duplicated it for the scenes. And it was safer for me.”
While Nadda aimed for a snapshot of political realities in today’s Syria – or, better, Syria before the start of the current conflict – she stresses that Inescapable isn’t a documentary.
“I would love to just get all this information into the movie, but Syria’s very complicated,” she says. “I know that as a filmmaker I can shed light if I just [tell] a personal story that people can connect to. Then I can give a sense of what’s happening there now.”
Interview Clips
Ruba Nadda on the Syrian mindset:
Nadda on landing Joshua Jackson for a supporting role – and what it means to be “a blond, blue-eyed man in the Middle East”:
