After winning a grant from Safar Program, Producer Mustafa Yousef travelled to Yemen, where he worked with Director and filmmaker Sara Ishaq to complete shooting her long documentary The Mulberry House.

The Mulberry House is considered highly prominent within the art circles and was selected in the list of documentary cinema for 2013 and classified under “top talents”. The film was presented in Amsterdam and Dubai, and was selected among Al-Muhr Arab Documentary in Dubai International Film Festival held in December 2013.

Over two months, Sarah filmed family discussions that address many current critical issues in Yemen. One and a half years after the Yemeni revolution, personal freedoms and equality issues became apparent on many levels.

The Land of the Fathers film, according to the portrayed discussions, does not provide solutions, suggestions or preconceptions except for those presented by the characters that are affected by the situation.

Sarah started the film with an attempt to face and renounce her people "the Arabs", in order to get her “Western” freedom. However, today she is struggling for her freedom as a modern Yemeni woman, in a country which is changing and evolving.
Now she realized, more than ever, that her combined identity impose her role inside her home country, Yemen.

Hence, the journey made through the film is a journey for reconciliation and change, rather than confrontation and migration. This journey, as well as her relatives struggle for a new Yemen, brought Sarah closer to her people, instead of leading her away from them.
Sarah Ishaq, whose first film “Karama Has No Walls" [Karama is Arabic for dignity] was nominated to the Academy Awards for the Best Documentary Short film, documented her biography in The Mulberry House after 10 years of absence, from –her homeland, Yemen.

In this film; Sarah Ishaq, a Yemeni-Scot filmmaker, flies back to Yemen in an attempt to regain the links she had with her roots. In a statement, Ishaq declared that The Mulberry House is a fifty percent biography, but she also sees that it “highlights the social and political situation in Yemen through a family experience as a whole, and her cousin, who was imprisoned during the revolution."

She added that "this biography underpins the return to my origins in Yemen after a long absence, as well as the evolution of my relationship with my father".

The film crew faced an obstacle that almost cancelled the film when the women of the family refused to show before the camera as it is a taboo among the local Yemeni women, yet Ishaq managed to convince them so that the film is completed.

Despite that the filmmaker announced that she did not intend to send a political message in this documentary, it is naturally clear that the Yemeni revolution against the former Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh did not succeed in eliminating the corruption in Yemen.

The film’s name was chosen when Ishaq started filming in her family’s house in February 2011, which is the berries blossom season. She says "the mulberry tree in my grandfather's house resembles continuity. The berries blossom and picking the fruits later on is like a family joining the revolution and enjoying the accomplishments of the Arab Spring in Yemen".

She adds that "the mulberry tree stops bearing fruit and remain barren for three seasons until it blossoms again in the spring. I think that Yemen is currently infertile, but I think that the tree of life will bear fruit soon."

For more information about the documentary, please check: 
https://www.facebook.com/MulberryHouse2013