Maya Sanbar On Using Animation to Reflect Social Awareness in ‘Footsteps on the Wind’

Maya Sanbar is a film producer and director who uses the medium of film to spread social awareness. Her new animated short Footsteps on the Wind was inspired by Sting’s song “Inshallah,” which appears in the film. Sanbar’s passion for art and what it infers about the world is reflected throughout this conversation with Awards Daily. Here, she dives into the origins for the short film, and the collaborative process that helped create it.

Awards Daily: How did the song Inshallah by Sting come to inspire this film?

Maya Sanbar: Inshallah is an Arabic word that means “In God We Trust” so, if God is willing, things will happen as we hope they will happen. It is like putting yourself in the arms of God. When I heard the song it was really inspiring to me. It has a hypnotic melody as well as this repetition in the rhythm of the song that reminded me of the footsteps of refugees as they walk, not knowing where they’re going. I have been wanting to make a film about refugees for quite a while. It was only after hearing Sting’s song that I realized it had to be a short film, and I chose animation because that’s the way we could transgress what you see on the evening news and make something much more emotional and also universal so it is not just about one individual person.


AD: What was it like directing your first animated film?

Maya Sanbar: I had some drawings that I did with an illustrator and they were beautiful drawings, but when it came to animating them it became quite difficult because of the way they were created. Then I found Dirty Work animation studios in Brazil during lockdown and we came through creating this virtually, which was a very difficult process. We had to touch base all the time with meetings on Mondays and Fridays. In between would be drawing and sending each other images trying to decide what the characters look like and creating that universality around those images.

I should tell you about the animation: why we chose animation and made it so colorful. Part of the reason why we did that is when I was creating the storyline and doing a lot of research with refugees. When I showed up at refugee centers I did so with lots of colors, sparkles, and pom poms, thinking I would be dealing with little children. But when I got there I noticed a lot of them were actually 14 to 16 year old boys. And I thought, oh, my God, nobody is going to use my sparkles or my colors. But they really went for it! The way we did it was we had them draw around their feet and then they would either draw their experience inside the feet or just decorate them. Then we would end up creating images that were linked to those stories that they gave us but we also worked really hard in creating symbolism within the animation.

So what was great about the medium of animation is that we were able to create shortcuts. For example, the orange has its own journey. At the beginning at the home the father is picking oranges from the tree, but after losing their father they still have the oranges. (Even after they eat the orange, which was itself an important scene but a difficult scene to have, because you do not want it to be traumatic so we made it into a dream sequence.) They keep the seeds in their pocket and at the end of the film they plant these seeds, creating a tree like at the beginning, but it is a new tree. Animation was very important creating symbolism like the talismans. One thing we really felt from working with the refugees was that they carry things from home with them. They become these talismans of their home world and their memories. So, a big treasure hunt within the film of symbols and talismans.

The color palette ended up being very bright and beautiful and after it came out many people compared it to Studio Ghibli, and that is a favorite of all of ours so we think it might have come into us subconsciously. I think that a lot of different styles came into play; I quite like the double meaning in animation. We wanted this to be for both children and adults. Like with Tom and Jerry where you have the jokes for adults and other moments just for the kids. Like in that scene with the octopus. For the kids is just the octopus, but to the adults we get these black inky hands that remind us about child abduction/abuse and the money that motivates them. This is symbolism that adults subconsciously take in. We have workshops around that and an education pack that you can find on our website, which is also with our schools program about awareness.

We made this film for many different reasons. One of them is an awareness-raising tool and secondly as an educational tool for children. But most importantly it is a therapy tool. I’ve been using it in refugee NGOs in Greece and France and showing it to kids and getting the kids to draw their favorite scenes or talk about the film in an impersonal way. That is why animation is so important because it allows you to displace yourself from yourself because it is not a human child on screen, it is the idea of a child on screen. It is like the dark fairy tales we had growing up like Hansel and Gretel, and you project yourself subconsciously onto it. We have seen children that have arrived and who couldn’t speak in the beginning start speaking through this, because it’s a film that relates to their experience but isn’t exactly their experience. It touches on it, and allows them to talk about their favorite scene. Through that they are able to talk about something that happened to them. But only if they want to, because it’s not pushing people to talk about it, it’s more about allowing an opening.

The audience that I am most worried about and afraid to please is the child refugee. That is who I’m most nervous about when I’m showing the film and seeing how they react to it. More than when I show it at the Serpentine gallery or any museum that we’ve shown it at or film festivals. I do love showing it at film festivals. You have amazing reactions to the film there. But the thing I’m most worried about is, did we get it right for the refugees, does it represent them tonally? Because my background is a family history of refugees. My father is from Haifa originally and in 1948 we lost our home and then we went to Lebanon, and then there was a war in Lebanon and we left thinking we would be back in a couple of weeks and then weren’t allowed to come back and became refugees. Then we came to England temporarily, thinking it’s just a few months, and I never went back. So it is this idea of displacement that is very much within my own personal experience. But I really wanted the film to be a modern day experience of what’s happening today to kids. Making certain that is tonally correct with the kids up today because we really wanted to tell the story from a child’s point of view. Because people really don’t see it from a child’s viewpoint. When you see the news you just see people reacting or being angry but you don’t know what’s happened to them to get to that place. Or that where they came from was a place where they were very happy, that they didn’t choose to leave, was also part of the messaging. So there are lots of layers.


AD: I saw you were a graduate of International law and diplomacy. What attracted you to those fields?

Maya Sanbar: To be honest I wanted to do psychology when I was 18. I’m interested in how the brain works and how we all act in society. I have an older brother who has autism, so I grew up wondering what is normal and what isn’t normal. But my parents said to me, you are too complicated already, and law is a better idea. They convinced me that law is the psychology of society. The trade-off was I could do it in France and I was interested in law because it’s the workings of our society. I’ve always been interested in diplomacy and international relations and I always wanted world peace and wanted to spread good messages and thought I could be prime minister of a country. I was that kind of a child; I thought I could do great big things. Then I got disappointed afterwards because there’s such a great big machine in place. Even working at the UN, it’s a wonderful organization but they have countries that veto, and it’s such a complicated structure. So international law and diplomacy was very helpful in understanding what makes things tick in the world and how we ended up in different situations. But also realizing everything is always motivated by special interests. Countries do things for self-interest, economic interest, and lots of people suffer along the way. It’s the people that are forgotten with all these invisible voices that made me so furious. When I was 21 I was studying international diplomacy in the European division at UNESCO as an intern. I studied about Kosovo before Kosovo happened. It showed that all this research was there for governments for all the wars to come. There were warning research papers that showed that you shouldn’t do this, but governments will always do what they think is more interesting or more electable for them. I just found it frustrating, so I felt for me the medium of film was much more powerful to get points across without having to argue with people constantly. I’m just going to make a film about it and people can see and feel what they want from it.

That is where art came in. I got hired by an HSBC that was doing a takeover in Brazil and very quickly I went from law to communication because I naturally learn languages quickly. I speak six languages so I ended up doing a lot of PR and marketing and I ended up doing their advertising. I realized with advertising what you could do in two minutes to convince people to buy a product. I realized that was a really good talent so why not use it for good? That’s what I ended up doing later down the line to try to use it to get my message across. One of the first ones that I did was in 2006 when I did a documentary about the Palestinian football team trying to qualify for the World Cup. It was my way of showing the life of the Palestinians because they were always so badly described in the press; where they were always the bad guys in all the action films. I wanted to show we’re not all so bad, even trying to put together a football team. We couldn’t even do that because there is the West Bank and Gaza and we couldn’t even train together. The football team became a metaphor for Palestine trying to be a nation but not being able to be a nation. The coach was Austrian, representing Europe trying to understand what’s going on but not being able to. They couldn’t have home matches, they had to have them in Qatar. There was really a lot of symbolism in that film too.

After that I decided to go back to marketing and make a living but I didn’t. I just kept going from one film to another. It really was a beautiful journey of filmmaking, which doesn’t pay as much but it fills the soul and lets you feel like what you’re doing is meaningful. This film Footsteps on the Wind in particular has been a really important film for me because I love that I can make it in this short format and that a short film has this much of an impact

Sting wrote the song in reaction to the Syrian crisis, which is about conflict refugees. Plus others have seen it as a film about the climate issue with all the natural disasters. In the film we make it both nature and conflict influencing the events. When the earthquake happens you can hear gunshots. This is again the symbolism of the earth shaking; it is anything that shakes up your life. Then in the film everything floods because water acts as a separation as you get separated from your families.

The red scarf has a very spiritual element. It is representative of the mother after she disappears and the children hold on to it. While at sea the mother is still watching over them with the scarf keeping them safe. When they create the sail to move the boat it is a patchwork of cloths that they find along the way. (I really love the American tradition of patchwork, making something out of old things and making something new.) It is the red scarf that makes the sail complete. That is a really beautiful moment for me as well, where the mother watching over them in that little bit of the red scarf pulls together the whole patchwork of things they have picked up along the way. It has helped them to sail to safe land, but we don’t know in the end if it was a good journey or bad. It is hopeful and we know they are safe currently but have no idea what the next stage is going to be. When I went to refugee camps two to three weeks ago in Calais and Dunkirk, taking tents and toys for kids, I saw they believed that in coming to France that everything was going to be better and, it’s not. So there is no promised land, and then they go to England thinking that might be the promised land. They risk their lives coming here and I felt so gutted when I got on a ferry back to England thinking I have an acceptable passport. I used to just have a Lebanese passport but now I’m lucky to have a French passport and an English passport. It’s not fair that I have them and other people do not. I am on this ship but other people are going to die trying to get to the other side.

I was really touched in Glasgow to see scientists and policymakers react to the film in a very positive way. I’m really happy to create a film that resonates with both children and adults on many different levels. Also by many different races. We worked really hard on the characters. The father is likely African and the mother is likely to be Hispanic or Middle Eastern; the children could be from anywhere. It’s this idea of cross boundaries–that’s why we called it Footsteps on the Wind. It’s this idea of what happens to our footsteps, or what happens to the marks that we leave along the way. Like when you go camping you sleep on the ground and leave a mark on the grass when you pack up. I was always thinking about what happens to that mark and well, it disappears in the wind after a while. As in the film another symbol is the footsteps fly up and that’s a wink to the workshop that we did with the refugees where they drew their footsteps on papers. In the film the footsteps get carried by the wind under the water and turn into dandelions. The flowers that you can blow on and the seeds go everywhere, which we call wishing flowers, represent the children’s dreams and wishes.


AD: You answered most of my questions before I even asked them, so is there anything you want to leave us with?

Maya Sanbar: I just want to say it’s a really big team effort. In writing the story it’s nice to mention Sita Brahmachari and Onjali Q Raúf, who developed the story with me with the refugee workshops. Also Pedro Paulo de Andrade, who I adopted for animation, as well as my co-directors Gustavo Leal and Faga Melo. It was a great collaborative process working across borders and that the way that we made the film is cross-borders virtually, in that sense on the wind. That the title of the film is very much linked to how we made it, across borders with our producers in America. And we did it across borders during lockdown in a way symbolic of bringing down our emotional borders just as much as our physical ones.