Yael Melamede talks ADA: MY MOTHER THE ARCHITECT – Yael Friedman interviews (Guest Post)
There seems to be an endless appetite for depictions of the lone genius architect, both as a mythological creature walking amongst us, and as a metaphor for just about everything. And yet one of the best movies about one may never get its due. Ada: My Mother The Architect, by Yael Melamede, about her mother, Ada Karmi-Melamede, one of Israel’s most celebrated architects, is an extraordinary film that addresses all the big questions while also portraying a human being who is very much mortal. Yael Mellamede chats with Yael Friedman about making the deeply personal documentary.
Yael Friedman: Thank you for so much for talking to us today.
Yael Melamede: Oh, my gosh, thank you for being interested.
YF: I have so many questions for you. I guess let’s start with the genesis of the film. Did you always know you wanted to make this movie about your mother, or was it something that you resisted for a long time?
YM: Neither. I did not think about it. And, and I just felt at some point that it was important in a bunch of different ways. I’ve produced so much more than I’ve directed. My first film was about a behavioral scientist by the name of Dan Ariely about why people lie. And I think he really inspired me to be much more comfortable with experimenting, just trying things out. And I think with the film on my mom, that was really the way I entered it, not knowing if it was going to be a film, not being sure that it was just the right film to make. I definitely knew that if a film was going to be made about my mom, I should be the one making it. As both a former architect, as her daughter, as a filmmaker, it just seemed crazy that anyone else would. And I understand when she talks architecture, I understand exactly what she means. And then slowly, as I started filming her, it just felt like, yeah, this is a movie. There is a movie here. But all along the way, it was surprising as and experiments. I didn’t intend to be in the movie. I don’t intend that. I want to be so personal. None of that was intentional.
YF: What was the impetus for starting to film her?
YM: I think she’s the kind of person we should pay more attention to. You know, so quiet in some ways, but so powerful. And somebody who kind of doesn’t like attention but has something to say, like, really deep to say. I just felt I wanted to bring attention to that. It just was this kind of feeling of like, there’s something special here, and I do. I mean, the films I’ve made are about people who are so obsessed with their work, they see all the magic of the world in that endeavor, and that really interests me. They solve the problems of the world through the problems of their work, like it satisfies everything. And so I find that endlessly fascinating.
YF: How did you the priorities in the movie change as you were making it?
YF: It’s not like I went out and knew how what the structure of the film was going to be. I thought it would be much more chronological, and it wasn’t, or it ended up not being that, it didn’t really feel satisfying. I felt on this film even more than others, that I was really searching for cinematic language. At a certain point, I just felt like the regular kind of more traditional cinematic language wasn’t enough. And then we happened upon this, like the vertical framing of her and seeing her in two images at the same time and having space for language on the left kind of came about through searching, not through planning ahead of time.
YF: And it revealed itself.
YM: Totally. I was working with a cinematographer, and he said, what about if we shoot vertically? And I thought it was a terrible idea. I was like, why would you do that? Why would you? Because we didn’t even know that we’d put the two images next to each other. There’s just going to be all this blank space. And I thought, why would you ever do that? But when we tested it, the portrait was so beautiful. There was something about it with that particular camera. And then the editor put the two together and I and it was really an instant where I was like, how could I not have thought about this before? This is like the perfect architectural language. How did I not think about this? So you search and search and the most obvious solution suddenly presents itself and you’re like, oh my gosh, that’s it. Continue reading on THE FEMALE GAZE
ABOUT YAEL FRIEDMAN
Yael Friedman is a journalist based in New York. She covers art and culture and their intersection with economics, politics, and history. She has written extensively about urban history and urban planning, particularly New York’s, analyzing its past and assessing its present and future. Her articles have appeared in Bloomberg CityLab, 1843, The Conversationalist, The Economist, The Daily Beast, Haaretz, Forward, Los Angeles Review of Books, and Urban Omnibus.
