I never wanted to write this story. But as a Muslim, I try very hard to do everything for God alone, even when what He wants for me is not what I want for myself. I didn’t want to write this story but I did it anyway. After having endured its personal and painful writing, I want to be a screenwriter– insofar as someone can aspire to do that which they are commanded to be.
But before I knew all that, all I knew was that He asked me to tell you this story– a screenplay called To Jacques in which a dying daughter retells her parents’ love story through its abject cruelty, for its miraculous forgiveness.
The love between her parents is not an easy thing. It isn’t pretty. It is a true thing, an inescapable thing, but it is also difficult and often ugly. They treat each other cruelly. They do it on purpose. It hurts their children. And it is still true love and it never ends. It isn’t pretty. But I do find it beautiful, in some deeper, stranger way.
This story grapples with serious questions—about love, malice, and, most of all, forgiveness. They are the questions that Elie is grappling with on her deathbed and her answer cannot be put into words. She could only put it in this film. I’m grappling with these questions too. I’ve been putting them in this script.
But it’s mostly bad news: that love is cruel and it never ends. That love will turn even good people cruel and nothing can stop it. Not marriage. Not death. But if I must tell you this, I want to also offer you some strategy for reckoning.
And it seems to me that, if we’re going to be hurting each other forever, we need to forgive each other for all that infinite pain. There is no “or else.” And it is very, very hard. And I myself have no idea how to do it.
But I do know these people– a bookish couple, a mediocre filmmaker, a disappeared son– who have figured it out. They treat each other cruelly, on purpose, hurt their children– and they forgive each other. Every day! A hundred times a day! A thousand times a minute. It’s a mystery. It’s a miracle. It’s all I don’t know about how to live and also love.
This story is about that, but the choice is yours.