Noor Whoop
Password: Nooor

Making the films in our class allowed me to attempt to penetrate the soul of the people that I make films with. Most of it has to do with Tony's aura that pervades through the class, I think it's ridiculously contagious, I get high off it. He sees an alien unique quality to every person that most people are blind to (especially themselves), and that really rubbed off on me. As if each person is a universe in their own rite, and it has made me make films in this way. For this film, everything (a formation of rocks, swaying trees, cars passing, Noor's existence, her feet, her love, her accordion), they are all equally important or maybe unimportant depending on how you view life. The power of the film is how it can open you to feeling a sense of importance...human life is composed of rituals.

While Noor and I were preparing for the film she told me a story (she's PACKED to the brim with the most amazing stories(I get emails that I don't respond quickly enough to(soak))), that her mother went to the beach one day and started yelling in Arabic, "WHAT IS THIS?! WHAT IS THIS?!"...that was the jumping off point (pun intended) for the film for me. I was there to capture the soul of everything that is Noor, her mother included, everything included. The only thing I told her to do was to speak in Arabic to herself as she walked along with her Box. There is a ritual here...and I didn't even realize what this ritual stood for, other than it was true while making it (it was true while making it), and that's all that mattered. THEN, Tony, right after screening the film comes up to me and whispers, "I really felt the existential quality of the box Kouros...", and it couldn't have hit closer to truth...especially because while making this film, this existential BOX CARRYING was fucking aggressively hurting the soul of me, for weeks upon making this...I've been feeling like I'm dying every single second lately(and this feeling isn't true enough for me, another distraction)...right before making this I blacked out at 5AM while peeing (nyquil), and woke up laying on the floor minutes later to a concussion...
It's an interesting film, and it's my favorite of the bunch I've made as A FILM. On a simple level (unconsciously) I took the sensual cacophony of the films of the first half of the semester and mixed them together with the raw, still framed humanity of the last half. The previous films were experiments on opposite ends of the spectrum leading here...
Still, I have reservations of it. I'd like to perform this ritual with Noor again, under less time restraints, and make it more finely crafted if that is possible. Maybe it's not though, maybe that moment was a moment that cannot be reproduced.

I loved being able to explore my friends in our class, and to find out how they can just "be". I felt like Alan Lomax. It was a completely rewarding experience on so many levels, and has changed the way I'm approaching the moment-to-moment method of shooting film. I really feel like this semester freed me in this aspect.