Scene from Rana Salem's "Essay in a room". (Screenshot from the film)

Rana Salem’s film “Essay in a Room” nakedly examines loneliness through the eyes of Danish women.   She showcased her documentary at the CPH:DOX film festival earlier this month

The 91-year-old Costa Rican singer Chavela Vargas once said that women need loneliness to create without interference.  Rana Salem has certainly channeled that belief through her documentary film about loneliness entitled ”Essay in a Room.”

For one month, Rana stayed in Copenhagen under the auspices of International Media Support’s twinning program that unites Danish and Lebanese filmmakers. She lived in the apartment shown in the film for the entire duration of her stay and turns the spotlight on a series of women as they echo her own feelings of loneliness in her home away from home.

Invisible straitjacket

‘Essay in a Room’ is striking for its absence of scenery. Shots of the women in the room are interspersed with shots of Rana lying lethargically on the bed or staring outside the window. An air of melancholy shoots through the entire production and Rana commented that “this idea of traveling and being removed from the place that you are and going to another country and living in a home that is not yours…in a way, I was talking about being trapped.”

As a director, Rana even trapped the women within their own bodies. She instructed them to stand still in a specific place in the room and to look only at the camera. Part of her experiment was to see whether or not these women would challenge the restrictions placed on them and, by doing so, perhaps even challenge the restrictions that feelings like loneliness can impart.

Many of the women did in fact challenge their constraints; a young woman who claimed that she sought loneliness inched her hand slowly into the light from a window. A 33-year old woman moved her hands animatedly around her face as she confessed that her comfort with loneliness scared her.

Solidarity in the fight

Rana chose her topic after many discussions with her colleagues at the Dansk Filmskole. She noted that the personal relationship between classmates and professors in Copenhagen was in sharp contrast to her training in Beirut. Thus she felt comfortable using the documentary as a medium for emotional healing and speaking candidly about her own feelings of loneliness on camera.

She decided to do so partly because “I felt I didn’t have the right to just put these women in it; I had to be inside this film like I asked all these women to be inside the film“ but also to show solidarity with anyone searching for a way out.  In this way “Essay in a Room” reminds viewers that they have honesty and courage as weapons in the battle against loneliness.