Yael Melamede talks ADA: MY MOTHER THE ARCHITECT and profiling Ada Karmi-Melamede – Yael Friedman interviews (Exclusive)
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.
Filmmaker Yael Malemede
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.
Ada Karmi-Melamede
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.
Filming ADA: MY MOTHER THE ARCHITECT
YF: Simple solutions aren’t always obvious.
YM: Or easy. And structure wise, we really were searching for a while. And as we were making the film, my mother and someone in her office had written a book together called Conversations Along The Way. And along the way in Hebrew, like along the way is the same word as root. So it’s a very beautiful title in Hebrew. And everybody loved the book. They would keep picking it up and referring to it. And so I, we started looking at my editor and I started looking at the book more, which had chapters which were a little bit similar to the ones in the film, not all of them, but it was light and I think, one of the other chapters in the book that we don’t have is like on limits and borders. So that became the inspiration for chapters or like, maybe this works in chapters, and we took the ones that we thought, mirrored what she was talking about in the interviews. And then we thought, well, each, each chapter should have a building. So, yeah, it really was very much a process that revealed itself along the way.
Ada Karmi-Melamede with model of Supreme Court of Israel
YF: It’s really amazing how a lot of films about, architecture are about architecture, and this one really seems to integrate architecture into the film itself. You’re an architect, I suspect that had something to do with it also.
YM: Yeah, I think as a filmmaker I do. I’m very influenced by that way of thinking of structure and materiality and color and consistency and like, when do you branch off and when do you not? And, and I used to think much more, I think narratively in architecture more than some architects and I think that was inspired by my mother. But I think of it now a lot like, you know, you walk into a building, how does it greet you? What is it saying to you? How do you go through it? What are what are the chapters that are revealing themselves to you as you go through? And I get really disappointed in buildings that have no like, real story.
YF: A lot of movies about architecture are about larger than life figures and, you know, sort of benevolent dictators and mythic and the way you’re managed to talk about your mother and architecture and it’s believable. Excuse me, on a very human scale.
YM: Yeah. That’s so nice of you to say. I hate that image of, the all knowing, all powerful architect. I think I’m not my mother. Certainly much more than me. She does not think in terms of feminism and chauvinism. She acknowledges all kinds of sexist things that happened to her, but she doesn’t kind of acknowledge sexism. It’s weird. You know, she’s just lived through it and plowed through it. And she’s such a feminist but doesn’t see herself as a feminist. And I love those contradictions. I think they’re of a particular time. But for me, I look at it and I think those figures are really detrimental and detrimental to the work.
Ada at work
Like, I think if you start believing so much, I mean, what the beauty of architecture and of filmmaking is that they are team sports, for the most part, there’s certain things you can do on your own, but in general, they’re team sports there. I think they’re for the public. I think they have a civic duty.
And so too I love her humility about it that, you know, it’s so much bigger than she is. And she has plenty ego. It’s not like she doesn’t have an ego. She has opinions but really I think it’s a such an important image. I always say people think that I left her office because, you know, that was it was so hard to work for her and must have been terrible. And I was like, no, I left because I knew it couldn’t be better than that. And the way she works and which I try to model and I don’t know if I do, is I, I always think that she feels like whoever has the best idea wins. Doesn’t matter who had the idea. That’s what she’s looking for.
YF: Do you think that she was led partly by ideology, maybe by being a woman, maybe by being humbled by the building she’s creating? Why do you think she had that kind of humility as compared with other, maybe, you know, more ego more, you know, she’s ego driven. You have to be ego driven to have a vision and think what you do matters.
YM: It’s a good question because I was going to say, you know, she grew up at a time, she says in the film, ‘I grew up at a time when self didn’t matter,’ which I think is so beautiful because she doesn’t say it like self didn’t matter because we were nothing. It was because there was something so much bigger than any individual. But you know, my uncle grew up at the same at that time too and he had more of that sense of I am architecture, and architecture is me. I don’t know where it came from. I mean, I think her father was more like that, that he was also, I think, more easygoing than both of them. But he also was working at a time that I think was more communal. And, there was greater agreement, about everything. It was like, you know, a young country, everybody working towards the same goal. I think by the time my mother came back to Israel, there were already a lot of social fissures that were, getting in the way of every day interaction. And that is something, you know, Israel, I think things are more acute. But even here, like, you know, the pursuit of creative goals as an architect is tough. People don’t want to pay for it. They don’t appreciate it. They don’t see the value. And I think that was different in his time. So he there was an ease about him that you see in his buildings too. I don’t know where that deep modesty comes from. I’m really not, I think, I mean, on some level, I think my mother is quite it’s not insecure, but just, Yeah, I don’t know. I just don’t think she thinks of herself very much. She’s got work to do. She’s too busy to.
Ada: focusing on the work, not herself
YF. You originally did not want to make this movie about you and her relationship with her. There have been many movies about people making movies about their parents. And the movies very often end up being about the filmmaker. And in this case, do you manage to not make it about yourself at all. Tell me about that.
YM: I think I’m in it more than I would have liked, actually. I think the real reason I was there was to reveal her; that without me, she remained so closed. And so to get to know her, I had to be in it.
And, you know, I had a fabulous editor on this film. Her name’s Shauna Yaish, and she’s just an amazing filmmaker in her own right. But she really fell in love with my mother. But towards the end of the film, she did say something that I was so struck by. She said, you know, I’ve rarely seen a relationship between a mother daughter onscreen that is so filled with mutual respect. And I really loved that because she didn’t say love. And I think there’s lots of love and she thinks there’s lots of love. But I think what she thought was so different was that sense of respect. That that was not an intention. I mean, I think my mother’s the same way. You know, we walk into a building that she’s done and she’ll so often say, that’s a surprise. I never design that. I never knew it would come out that way. And some of the surprises are bad, but usually she’s more impressed with the ones that, you know, I never there’s like a reflection inside a reflection.
Ada and Yael touring Ada’s architecture
And I think the same is true in filmmaking. You know, there’s the films I’ve made that have not been so intentional from the beginning. They surprise along the way and they and it’s funny, the first documentary I worked on was, this film, My Architect, and Lou (Louis Kahn) is famous for having said, you know, the building tells you what it wants to be. And I really think films operate similarly, especially documentaries. They kind of tell you what they want to be. And this one definitely, was like that in spades, because it was also hard to be objective, along the way. So, yeah, I think it was, the intention was really as a way of revealing my mother and then our relationship, came kind of revealed itself as part of that.
YF: Did you feel empowered to bring yourself into it, or it just kind of flowed naturally?
YM: It flowed naturally. I definitely had no desire to be in it; if I could have been in the film less, I would have been in it less.
YF: So I was actually going to bring up My Architect, of course, which is an incredible movie. And, you know, of course, very famously about Nathaniel Kahn, sort of searching for his father through his father’s work. How did that film inform this one? And other movies about architecture and architects?
YM: I was working on that film just as we were starting the company Salty Features, and I didn’t intend to work on documentaries. I was very much interested in fiction films and had been working with all kinds of, very like male directors like Paul Schrader. And that film was getting made. And I just knew so much about Lou, because my family all knew Lou. My grandfather had met him in Mexico at a conference and had invited him to do some work in Israel. And then my mother actually came to Philadelphia to talk to him about designing the whole synagogue after the Six-Day War and had been in touch with him a lot, and she wanted to study with him. So I knew a lot about him and I’d gone to college where a lot of his buildings were. He was my favorite architect. So I felt like I really understood that work. But I also thought it was a film about a son looking for his father. And I thought, well, films about architecture are generally kind of boring, but this isn’t really a film about architecture.
MY ARCHITECT: Louis Kahn and Nathaniel Kahn
It’s about a son looking for his father. And as much as Nathaniel understood the work, I brought to it, a different, a different perspective as an architect, as somebody who had studied the work. And so it seemed like a really lovely combination. And it was it worked really beautifully. But I came to realize that as a result of the film being a personal story, people learned about architecture in a way they never expected. And I kind of loved that combination, that it was this surreptitious way of sneaking in architecture. I loved that about the film. I also found the film really surprising in that people view the film so differently, like people watch that film and came away from it going, what an awful father and others would tell me what an awful son. And I was like, really? But I will say that’s actually a weird commonality with the film on my mom that some people come up to me afterwards and say, I’m so sorry for the childhood you had. And I’m so, astonished. I’m like, really? I’m so grateful for the childhood I had. So that’s interesting. Anyway, so I love that you can tell this important story about work and ambition and creativity while having this very personal story.
YF: Did My Architect lead you more towards making documentary?
YM: Yeah, I love the process of making documentaries, the intimacy of filming. There’s something about the production of docs that is just fantastic. I didn’t work on huge films, but the bigger the fiction film, the more difficult it is to tame the beast during production. There’s so many things calling for attention, and on a documentary so often you can be so in the moment in a way that’s really beautiful.
YF: Are you working on anything right now that you want to talk about?
YM: I’m working on a lot of interesting films. It’s interesting, after I did My Architect, I kept hearing about films, either about architecture or about (people and) their parents. And somehow now I made this film about my mother. The next film I worked on as a producer. I came in late in the process on a film called I that’s making it on a festival circuit, but will be released this summer. It’s a son’s story about his father, and using his father’s story to look at our relationship with the estate tax. And beautiful film, very personal, with a ton of home footage from his growing up. And he filmed a lot of it. And it’s a beautiful and brave into talking about inequality. Through the experience of his family, his dad became obsessed with not paying the estate tax because he wanted to leave his family, safe and taken care of forever. And it questions that desire and what it does to society as a whole.
Then two other films that are, well, kind of early in production. One is about disinformation, how it’s increasing polarization around the world. We’re looking at an organization that is tracking disinformation and, and in parallel showing kind of three stories of from around the world of people whose lives, whose relationships have fallen apart as a result of disinformation. And that one is being directed by Rachel Boynton, who’s an amazing filmmaker.
And the second one is a film by a daughter about her father. It’s her story of her dad’s descent into dementia. It’s very hard. But I love the film because it’s that and they have a beautiful relationship. It’s intercut with scenes from his autobiographical but fictional novel. And so it kind of offers a way to give him a voice when he no longer has one. But it’s his book. So it is actually a little bit of a way for me to get back into some fiction, but I love the idea of kind of talking about something that’s very hard, but also having this kind of humanistic and very personal way of talking about that character.
YF: Before I let you go, what did your mother she think of the movie?
YF: Oh, she is so classic. She looked. I showed her the film right before we totally locked just to make sure that I didn’t say something unfair. All she really cared about was like, she would keep saying, I hope the buildings look good. I hope the buildings look good. Just so my mother. She watched the film and then she was really quiet, and she looked over at me and she said, ‘I can’t believe it’s not boring.’
Ada and Yael at premiere screening
And to this day, she just keeps (saying) she really loves the film. She loves the making of the film. And she keeps saying, you made such a lovely movie, made such a beautiful movie. And I say, you know, it’s about you. And she says, she insists it has nothing to do with it.
YF: She’s a very good subject. The movie leads with all of her talents and everything that she sees. And she seems also to be a very natural mentor and teacher.
YM: I will say something that’s come out of the film, which I didn’t realize. You know, we interviewed Doug Sussman, who’s in the film and appreciated her so much and had those books and, and I thought, wow, so amazing to find this one student who clearly admired her so much. But since the film, the number of students who have written and didn’t know what happened to her, but they remember her as this fabulous teacher. They were not trying to ingratiate themselves by sending her notes. But the notes that I’ve received about what an impact she had on their life, were just extraordinary. It has made me think if I’d realized that in the making of the film, I might have interviewed one or two more students because it has really made me feel like, wow, you know, I, I wanted to in a way make sure that the buildings, and the people know about the buildings and understand her legacy, but I don’t think I quite appreciated her legacy as a teacher as much as I do now.
YF: It comes through. The way she speaks, the way she makes the viewer understand architecture. You know, she has these, they seem like aphorisms, but they’re really just her talking about things that are very clear to her. And work on many different levels. Lessons for life.
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.