Lebanese director Zina Daccache has always paid attention to minute details, especially in the documentary "The Blue Prisoners", as it conveyed the issues of contemporary Lebanese society, by shedding light on prisoners and rebuilding the image of prisons by monitoring a series of stories and tales related to the Lebanese reality.

Although the Arab viewer has known Zeina Daccache as a theatrical face, her recent daring documentaries have managed to draw the viewer's attention, and make him visually immerse him in a world where politics overlaps with society as well as law with individual rights.

As her works technically transcend the complex template that some cinematic experiments resort to to present their artistic material, Daccache adopts a smooth method based on work through the montage element, and reconstructing the material element documentaryly through the sequence of images in a way that makes it flow quietly.

About her unique documentary experience, Al Jazeera Net had this dialogue with the Lebanese director and drama therapist Zina Daccache.

  • How do you combine acting, cinema and theater?

    And where do you find yourself most attached to artistic work among all fields?

I studied theater and acting, and after that I studied the so-called drama therapy, so I always feel that theater helped me to express, as it is supposed to integrate with psychotherapy.

Theater helps anyone express himself, and indeed it was my choice to go to the United States of America to combine being an actress and theater director, but also as a psychotherapist in drama.

As for the cinema, I came to it after filming about 250 hours between 2007 and 2008 in some prisons, as part of the "12 Angry Lebanese Project", and with the advice of some colleagues, I made a documentary film, and that was their encouragement.

  • Besides cinema, you work in the field of drama therapy, what does this science mean?

I am a drama therapist before working in the cinema. I founded the Lebanese Center for Drama Therapy, where theater and psychotherapy techniques are combined in order to express and search for horizons and the possibility of application with marginalized people, who express themselves, and therapeutic sessions can lead to theatrical work and vice versa. It can only end with group or individual therapy.

  • You say that your third documentary film "The Blue Prisoners" came to defend the rights of prisoners, to what extent in your opinion can cinema reveal the reality of Arab prisons and re-create more human relations within the cinematic image through this space?

This film, like the rest of the films, came to convey the voice of the prisoners to certain issues. In "12 Angry Lebanese" they called for reducing penalties and the reality as a whole, as women talk about marriage and domestic violence.

And my documentary “The Blue Prisoners” focused on people who suffer from mental illnesses or perpetrators of crimes, so that the film reveals the nature of their reality, because in all my films I work to expose reality and revolutionize it aesthetically, but with proposals for solutions not only to pressure the wound, but also to provide solutions to a certain phenomenon .

The documentary "Blue Prisoners" focused on people suffering from mental illnesses or perpetrators of crimes (communication sites)

  • I worked for years in defending the freedom of prisoners and their right to a decent life, but how did the idea of ​​transmitting these stories and tales come to the world of cinema?

I am working on archiving therapeutic theatrical work. If it reached a movie, it was great, and if it didn't, I don't work on any movie, but some good luck led to the production of 3 movie projects.

But the film comes to complete the sound that started theatrical, as it sheds light on a group of things, then my role as a director comes from the cinematic side, so I take one or two things and highlight them, because cinema affects the laws and travels a lot and far from the theater, and this thing helps in terms of influencing the Laws are to be changed and amended, and prisoners become more aware of their problems.

I also did not work with prisoners only, but with domestic workers who come from Ethiopia to Lebanon, and we also had work that lasted for 3 years in a psychiatric hospital, focusing on a good theatrical show that led to the production of a movie to convey the voice of psychiatric patients who stay in this hospital. As a definition of the nature of mental illness and schizophrenia and how they live daily.