A decade in the making, The Station is finally arriving at its most important destination yet: the Cannes Film Festival.
This touching Yemen-set drama, centring on a women-only gas station, marks the feature debut of Sara Ishaq, the Yemeni-Scottish filmmaker who previously received an Oscar nomination for her documentary short Karama Has No Walls (2012).
In 2016, Ishaq was living in Yemen, recording what she saw, with the country torn apart by civil war. “Obviously being a filmmaker, but also watching your own country be blown to pieces before your very eyes, was a very complicated place to be,” she says, speaking to The National before The Station receives its world premiere in the Critics’ Week strand of Cannes.
Recording images as far back as 2011, at the time of the Yemeni revolution which followed the Arab Spring, Ishaq was documenting the impact of war on society and its people. “I was doing a lot of recording indoors with women that I was encountering. I was fascinated by the way that they were surviving, the way that they were enduring, and the way that they were continuing to do things on a day-to-day basis.”
Ishaq is, perhaps, one of the lucky ones. Born in Edinburgh – her mother is Scottish – she was raised in Yemen, but educated in Scotland. The longer she stayed in Yemen, the more uncertain she was about what to do with the footage she’d shot, leaving her feeling “crippled with grief” by her own fortunate circumstances. “I can leave if I want to. I have a British passport,” she says, calling it survivor’s guilt.
Needing to “grieve my country”, she found her way through these emotions when she heard about a female-only gas station in Sanaa, Yemen’s capital city, which her sisters and cousins were visiting. “This image of a women-only petrol station was so strong,” she says. “The women, their stories, the way they were setting up businesses and were doing whatever they needed to just make ends meet. Women were really the life and soul of my time in Yemen, and I wanted to honour that somehow.”
Rather than make a documentary, Ishaq worked with co-writer Nadia Eliewat to craft a story based around Layal (Manal Al-Mulaiki), a resourceful woman who manages the station.
Of course, this is not a high-tech affair with multiple pumps – far from it. Layal doles out gasoline in jerrycans, allocating the scarce resource in the best way she can. As military planes fly overhead to the resigned chagrin of customers, the women try their best to keep body and soul together.
“The petrol stations were always a very male space and this shift happened during the war, I think, for various reasons,” says Ishaq. “One of them being to provide a space for women because they were waiting for such long hours [to get gas], sometimes into the dark, in an open public space. So it’s quite dangerous. I think one aspect of it was probably for women’s protection, but on the other hand, it was also segregation.”
The way Ishaq tells it, the male population were struggling during this time. “To be very honest, I wasn’t mixing with a lot of men,” she says. “Many men I knew had fallen into a depression. Obviously, some people were being recruited.
“But what I saw happening within the woman’s sphere was that they were just getting on with things. They knew they didn’t have a source of income any more, so they were just coming up with all kinds of initiatives like baking cookies and selling them.”
Asked if she remains hopeful for Yemen, Ashaq, who now lives in Amsterdam, responds: “A big question. Do I have to answer it?” she says, throwing her head back. “It’s a tricky one, without really going into politics. What makes me hopeful is for Yemen is the people.
“The spirit of Yemeni people is incredible, despite everything they’ve endured not just recently, but over decades. Still they manage to find joy, still they have this ability to smile and laugh about things, and to produce amazing art.”
While Ishaq returned to her birthplace to study humanities and social sciences at the University of Edinburgh, she has no immediate plans to film anything in Scotland.
“I think because Yemen has so few filmmakers, there is this sense of responsibility that if I’m going to make a film about anything or anywhere or anyone, it should be that side of my culture. There are plenty of filmmakers in Scotland who can tell all kinds of stories. For me, there’s this pull to constantly go back to the stories that are happening inside Yemen.”
