The Calgary Herald (Alberta)
June 24, 2005 Friday
Final Edition

Sabah star understands struggles with tradition

Katherine Monk, CanWest News Service

Thinking about the “immigrant experience” is one of Arsinee
Khanjian’s favourite pastimes, especially as it relates to women. As
a child of Armenian heritage who grew up in Lebanon, and then moved
to Canada as a young woman, Khanjian has witnessed the struggle
against cultural assimilation from a variety of perspectives.

She cares about the issue of identity vis-a-vis traditional values,
and as a proud Canadian, she stands in awe at the accomplishments of
our mosaic, hyphen-happy model. That’s why she was so interested in
making Sabah, the first film from Toronto-based writer-director Ruba
Nadda, which deals with a 40-year-old Muslim woman’s belated “coming
of age.”

Sabah falls for a white Canadian cabinet-maker, leaving her stuck
between her love of family and her desire for romance.

“I’ve always felt close to the issues the script embraces. They are
issues I grew up with and I’m familiar with, like how do you adjust
as a woman in society when you’re coming from a completely different
value system? How do you balance the sense of the past with the needs
of the future? The specifics of the story are different from my life,
but the overall issues are very much the same,” says Khanjian.

Nadda was a complete unknown when she submitted the script to
Khanjian through her husband, Atom Egoyan. Egoyan’s film production
company received the script, which requested Khanjian in the lead.

“I didn’t want it to become a commentary on the whole Muslim
community. I really was looking to Sabah as a way of speaking to
issues within the family, and not as a means of judging the values of
an entire community. We spent a lot of time refining these dilemmas
so it was respectful of the environment,” she says.

Khanjian says she and Nadda decided to focus on moments where Sabah
suddenly reinterprets her reality. After living with her family for
40 years, there comes a moment when she looks back on the girl she
once was — and the person she imagined becoming. That moment of
personal recognition sets Sabah on a whole new life tangent.

She falls in love. She has sex. Yet, as joyful as most of these
events are, there are consequences to her actions that reach beyond
her own life, and into the lives of those around her.

“It’s a delicate thing as far as where to draw the lines. Even though
this is a personal story, there are larger issues that come into
play. That’s OK, I think it’s when you’re trying to make a large
statement that’s not grounded in an individual story that you run
into trouble. It’s difficult to reflect a larger, collective
experience . . . and still make a great film.”