CTW: Not knowing much about Myanmar before you started the film, how did you come to build the relationships that were foundational for the film. I mean,  in terms of your Myanmar collaborators and the family with whom you filmed, but also about your relationship with Magway, as a place you needed to know intimately in order to film?

STF: I have a very unusual way of making a film, I guess. It takes a long time, and it can be quite difficult and uncertain and hard to fund, which is one of many reasons I have so much appreciation for my Burmese co-directors who worked with me so patiently throughout this project.

At the start of a project, I spend a lot of time watching passively. In the first two years of filming, I just sat and watched what happened around me, and I’m not sure much of that footage is even in the film. I spent as long as I possibly could, sitting in a corner, watching things happen, and listening very carefully because representing the experience of being in a space on-screen is very challenging. I listen to the sounds in a place and how they change throughout the day. I watch how things move and how the sky changes color, and I watch the quality of the light change. That last point is important because I got to a point where I was only filming about 30 minutes a day during that short period of time between the beginning and end of sunset. It was the lighting I wanted, given the lives and the kind of labor I was seeing. I knew it represented the mood of the film, even before it was finished.

When I film, there’s no real sense of story, no sense of narrative. It’s just a process of understanding the place, the landscape, and the story that comes later.

The other reason I like to begin by watching relates to the relationships with people. I want the film to reflect the pace and nature of people’s lives. One thing I find really frustrating with the approach to films is when a filmmaker has an approach, and it’s clear that they don’t engage or consider the culture around them. They just have their vision, and they impose it upon the place and people.

CTW: Yes, let’s shift to the question about building relationships with people. Were you with the family featured in the film from the start, or how did you meet them?

STF: We only met them on our second visit, the second of eight visits over four years. I had two Burmese assistant directors and myself, and we just went around visiting locations based on rumors about where a new oil field might be, or where there might be a new rush starting. Sometimes we would arrive at places, and there would be nothing. We’d be too late. Other times, it would just have been a rumor. And then, we found the area where we would eventually shoot the rest of the film. We started with someone else, who didn’t end up in the film because  I didn’t feel the connection I was looking for with him.

But then I saw Thein Shwe, and I just felt something there. I saw him digging in the ground, looking for oil, and I just knew. I don’t know what it was, but the look on his face—he reminded me of my father. And after talking to him for a while, he said something very beautiful that really informs the rest of my film, which was: “I wonder what brought you halfway across the world to talk to me, maybe it’s because we were related in a previous life.” For me, that became the emotional heart of the film—this idea of a fairly brief existence on earth that’s full of both love and pain but part of a potentially endless process. This idea of a kind of enormous, endless cycle and line of influence has come to really structure the film, where everything feels like it has significance either because it is informed by the histories of thousands of years, or it’s going to inform thousands of years of other stories.

CTW: There’s so much there in the film, and it’s one of the reasons I was so stunned by it. There are so many nested cycles—this cosmic cycle that undergirds some of the conversations in the film, but then the generational cycle, the cycle of the discovery of oil and its end, which stands in for a kind of repeated cruelty of the boom-and-bust. Then, of course, there’s the day-to-day cycle of labor and rest, combined with the literal cyclical movement involved in oil extraction. So there’s that element, but then there’s also this dream of an emancipatory break—and in the case of the film’s plot, the hope for a pathway out for the son. Was this a theme that was there from the beginning or came about while you were filming?

STF: Early on, there was the idea of a physical cycle, just because the engine they use to dig is a flywheel, and it’s always turning. It’s percussion drilling, and so this drill is just going up and down for days and days. Then I started to see another cycle, which is that the family would drill for oil, they would reach it, collect it from the ground, and then pour the oil back into the machine to keep drilling. There’s this self-fulfilling prophecy in the search for more. It, of course, connects to the political. I’m not moralizing their lives at all because I understand that they are living in poverty and they personally have little choice, but on a global scale, it highlights the way the oil industry works as corporations—the drilling of oil, the burning of it, even though we know oil is hastening the destruction of the planet and ultimately, killing us.

I became really invested in this idea of small cycles existing within enormous cycles, and while speaking with the family about Buddhism and in doing my own research, I could see the multiple resonances. As time went on, the concept became more and more expansive for me. Some of these ideas I was familiar with from the Arab world. Of course, I’m Palestinian, and the Middle East has an incredibly rich history of folklore which have their own incredibly complex and exciting narrative structures. So much of the official history of storytelling is rooted in a European context and in Greek mythology, and that’s not the history I’ve inherited. I wanted something distinct, and I latched onto these very complicated, nested stories that you can find in medieval Arab literature, where there’s a sense of stories as self-fulfilling prophecies. I started integrating what I see as my own mythology, alongside what I learned in Myanmar about Burmese folklore and Burmese storytelling. There’s so much more to explore than the Canon of Greek drama, which has no bearing on our lives.