ARAB FILM FESTIVAL: Mahmoud Kaabour’s documentary Grandma, a Thousand Times is a loving portrait of his grandmother, 83-year-old Teta Kaabour, a lioness of Lebanon.
While there are plenty of references to the local culture and history, the illuminating doco touches on universal themes including ageing, loneliness, loss, the importance of family and death.
The Beirut-born, Canadian-educated Kaabour switches seamlessly between being the director, interviewer and on-camera participant as he focuses on a woman who serves as a bridge between her country’s often troubled past and modern day life.
Teta is unfazed by the camera or her grandson’s gentle questions, revealing a strong spirit, pride as a mother of six children, a quick wit and undiminished sadness over the death 20 years earlier of her violinist husband, also named Mahmoud Kaabour.
A product of what we might call 'old Lebanon,’ she’s illiterate after being kept at home in her childhood to look after her sick mother. But she proudly declares, 'I raised six children and I raised them well."
She rarely leaves her Beirut apartment, lists smoking tobacco through a pipe known as an Argileh as her only past-time, and is lonely despite having a live-in maid. Touchingly, she says she dreams about her husband nearly every night and laments that in these dreams he never speaks to her.
Echoing the concerns of elderly folk of any nationality, she says, 'When I go to bed I wonder when and how I will die. I’d like to die suddenly without pain. I wish I will die from a heart attack without troubling anybody."
To the director’s credit, his portrait doesn’t gloss over his grandmother’s blemishes. She can be judgmental, as when she tells him, 'My boys are much better than the women they’re with."
And she’s hypocritical, on one hand telling his then-fiancee (and executive producer) Eva Star Sayre that she loves her as much as her grandson, and on the other hand complaining that Eva is a Westerner and wondering why Mahmoud didn’t choose one of the thousands of Beirut’s 'dark-skinned girls.’ Also she has a salty tongue, as when she upbraids him for staying in a hotel rather than her apartment.
To be fair, when she reflects that 'in my youth I was a beautiful lady," it sounds more like one of the regrets of growing old than boastful. She shows her various medications including blood thinner, anti-depressants and pain killers, and complains of pains in one arm.
While the doco is shot mostly in Teta’s apartment, the director, who lives in the United Arab Emirates, opens up the narrative by filming his grandmother and himself visiting her husband’s gravesite; briefly recording the festivities at his wedding; and talking to a friendly neighbour and shopkeeper.
Also, he imaginatively uses animation, black and white photos of his grandfather and other relatives, home videos and archival footage of the Lebanese civil war to illustrate the story.
Music is a recurring motif as Kaabour plays an audiotape of compositions played and recorded by his grandfather in his bedroom.
The war is touched on only briefly, perhaps a missed opportunity to quiz Teta about how it impacted her and her family. Despite the crisp 48 minutes running time, there are a few boring bits: did we really need to see Teta preparing a meal with one of her daughters or hearing what she likes to eat?
And for a doco which mostly avoids milking the sentimentality out of Teta’s stage in life, Kaabour resorts to a device at the end which some may judge to be a cheap trick.
