More About Film
Director Jude Chehab’s decision to use a single letter as the title of her documentary debut, Q, is a gesture of deliberate ambiguity that reflects the film's own elusive narrative. The film's story is set in Chehab's own childhood home, where her mother and grandmother belonged to a religious group that encourages Muslim women to join their secret organizations and spread their teachings and values. The group's leaders remain anonymous, and they are referred to simply as "Miss."The painful end of her mother's experience with the "Miss" had a profound impact on Jude Chehab in her youth. She dedicated all her efforts to please her mother and conform to her behavior. This left a deep psychological scar on her, after the leader changed her mind about her and forcibly expelled her from an organization that she always believed in and worked to spread its ideas in her American exile and in her homeland, Lebanon.To uncover the mysteries of the relationship between her mother and the “Miss”, Jude alleges she is making a family film about three generations of women in her family (her grandmother, mother, and herself). She understands that the key to understanding the organization lies in these women's stories.Gradually, Chehab's documentary tabs on critical points that go beyond this. Through her mother’s pain, she explores the difference between healthy religious faith, and the other that is linked to organizations that have their own agendas turning individuals into followers, devoid of will, and as soon as the attitude of its leaders towards them changes, they get expelled from its ranks; left behind to their confusion, feeling torn by doubts. Chehab works to convey those feelings that have seeped into her mother's soul, and which leave their painful marks on the rest of her family, hrough a masterful cinematic work, saturated with he honesty of documentation, free from pretense. It transforms the cinematic achievement into a study of the personal experience that gets revealed as it unfolds.Kais Kassim