Q

Director Introduction – Jude Chehab

I was ten years old when we moved from sunny Florida to Lebanon. I was young, eager and innocent and in love with God. When my mother proposed the idea of me enrolling in the Qubaysiat’s school, I jumped at the thought. I wanted to be part of a sisterhood, a school with my ideals, a place where if I wore the hijab I’d be celebrated. I wanted God and I thought I had found Him at the age of ten, confined in schools concrete walls. We couldn’t wear color and we didn’t see color – the students referred to it as a mental institute. Our shoes had to be black, not black brushed with a white line on them, black. We had to lower our voices while walking down the stairs, never slide away to the boys building and stand up and kiss the Anisa’s hand when she’d enter the classroom. At some point in 2008, I found myself standing before the Head Anisa, within a special ceremony held for my sister, myself and two other girls. We walked down the stairs in a line and one-by-one the Anisa removed the hoods we had on and dressed us in a white hijab bound at the chin. I was thirteen when I first wore the hijab and they were my only definition of my religion– it came from my mother, why would I ever doubt my mother?

Cinema deals with the subjective, but true cinema is a chimera; it holds the familiar, the recognizable, the immediately human and most intimatein a flash, a second, a moment, a frame. Q is a question, and it is a question which transcends the lens of its subject; like looking through a keyhole into a wide expanse beyond; it opens and frames at heart a profound exploration of love, loss, faith and obsession. This story is unique but it is not an isolated one.

The film is a responsibility. A responsibility towards the faith but also towards myself. I grew up with this group and with my mother’s understanding of our place in the world. I made this film to question her. To question the things, she taught me. Through Q, the journey discovers strange truths, difficult to express, save through the medium of cinema; maybe she had already abandoned me, her children and her husband long before I was born. I made this film to save my mother. I made this film to prove to her an alternative within Islam exists, the Islam of beauty she showed me. I made this film to remove the veil from her eyes, to attest to her greatness, to show her the God she always told me about before bed. A God that isn’t afraid of thought, movement, colors, poetry and ultimately, life.