Qumra Master advises young filmmakers to have original cinematic voice

Qumra Master Jessica Hausner, the renowned Austrian filmmaker who had her breakout moment with her second film Hotel, which screened in the Un Certain Regard section at the 2004 Cannes Film Festival, likes mystery to linger in her films. The sense of the unknown, the unanswered questions and an almost deliberate effort not to tie up all those knots – a conventional film approach – make her films ideal lessons for emerging filmmakers. The quest for questions indeed was a recurring element of her masterclass at Qumra, the Doha Film Institute’s annual talent incubator for Arab cinema. Being open-ended, being unpredictable, not knowing it all, she says, is also what life is about.

But it is not a visceral approach to human frailties and fears that make her films standout: it is in her approach to visuals, structured almost like the paintings she would see at museums with her painter father, Rudolf Hausner. She recalled studying a painting on a vacation to Madrid with her father detailing the different layers and dimensions, revealing almost ten stories in one illustration of a battlefield. “I think my whole attraction to composition was probably formed back when I was a child. Art shows an alternate perspective on reality and makes normal things look different. The whole story-telling lies within the composition and colours of those frames.” Hausner brings out the same flourish in her frames, such as in Amour Fou, also screened in the Un Certain Regard section at the 2014 Cannes Film Festival, and in Hotel. She was also inspired by the conversations at home about cinema and art, with her father introducing her to the works of Ingmar Bergman and Akira Kurosawa. “My father loved the visual elements of Kurosawa’s films, who was a painter himself in the beginning.” Taking a leaf from Michael Haneke, her advice to young filmmakers is to “have an original [cinematic] language of your own and find a way to make it accessible to an audience.” She realised this with Hotel, about a young woman who goes to work at a deserted hotel where her predecessor had disappeared mysteriously.