VINCENT GONNEVILLE
CINEMATOGRAPHER
WHO DO I BELONG TO.
A CINEMATOGRAPHY SUMMARY
It all began with a chance encounter: two red-haired teenage shepherds standing alone in the middle of northern Tunisia. They were herding a flock of sheep across wide green plains. The younger one was named Chaker, the older, Malek. Both were shy and didn’t want their picture taken, so we continued on our way, greeting them politely. That image left a deep impression on Meryam, the striking contrast of their beautiful, freckled faces against the green landscape, something rare in that part of the world. At the time, I was scouting locations across Tunisia for a feature film directed by my friend Meryam Joobeur, an entirely different project that had nothing to do with those two freckled boys. Little did we know that a few years later, we would be standing at the Oscars, nominated for Brotherhood, a short film starring Malek, Chaker, and their younger brother Rayene, who revealed themselves as three remarkably talented, natural, and disciplined first-time actors. Even less did we know that, a few years down the road, we’d be presenting the feature-length version of that short, Who Do I Belong To, in competition at Berlinale 2024, with the same family at its heart. That’s part of why this work is so addictive: a random phone call, an unexpected email, or a right turn on a dusty Tunisian road, and your whole life takes a completely different direction.
The Full-Grown Tree
Brotherhood tells the story of a rural Tunisian shepherd family whose fragile unity is disrupted when the eldest son, Malek, suddenly returns home after disappearing for a year, accompanied by a mysterious young wife wearing a niqab. Haunted by the fear that his son may have been radicalized while fighting for Daesh in Syria, Mohamed (played by Mohamed Grayaâ), the father, wrestles with anger and suspicion as tensions within the family quietly build toward a breaking point. The short explored themes of generational conflict, grief, and the emotional scars of extremism within an intimate rural setting. If Brotherhood was the seed, Who Do I Belong To is the fully grown tree, expanding the narrative into a broader family portrait while shifting the emotional center to the mother, Aïsha (played by Salha Nasraoui). Expanding a short film into a feature is a path often taken by filmmakers who sense that the world they’ve created holds deeper narrative potential. Films like Damien Chazelle’s Whiplash or Andrea Arnold’s Wasp serve as precedents. But Who Do I Belong To takes a different route. Rather than simply scaling up, it transforms the genre and aesthetic DNA of the short into something altogether new.
Wide Open
Let’s rewind just a bit. There’s a scene in Gods, Weeds, and Revolution (2012) the first collaboration between Meryam and me, where we filmed her grandfather walking from his bedroom to the kitchen for breakfast. He was helped by Meryam’s aunt, his legs trembling, hands gripping whatever surfaces he could find to stay upright. Her grandfather was already in the advanced stages of Alzheimer’s disease. He sat on a plastic chair and ate a clementine with the quiet grace of a child. We shot the whole scene wide open at T1.4 on a Canon 85mm lens with a 5D Mark II camera. I was mesmerized by the soft, out-of-focus textures that somehow made you concentrate even harder on the image. Faces became multilayered through shallow depth of field and you could tell a different story depending on whether you focused on a cheek, an eye, or the mouth. Back then, I knew almost nothing about cinematography. I was originally brought on as the sound guy, but when the DP dropped out, I suddenly found myself doing both jobs. Meryam and I were discovering every step of the film process side by side. I remember having this naïve question in my head: why had I never seen an entire film shot like this? T1.4 - A single 85mm lens - Full-frame sensor - Handheld. There’s an entire world living inside T1.4 and around it. It’s not just a technical choice, it’s a different visual philosophy and method. Shooting wide open often means working in setups so dark they look absurd to the eye, but on screen, subtle textures and hidden details emerge. The same thing happens outdoors in full daylight, a simple medium shot of a farmer in his field transforms into a swirl of bokeh and soft edges, where you immediately sense that something more is happening beyond the frame. Who Do I Belong To was built around that approach, though by then, the Canon 85mm had become a Leica-R lens, and the 5D Mark II had given way to the Arri Mini LF.
Emotional isolation
The difference between shooting at around T1.4 and at T2.8 or T4 is like the difference between Jiu-jitsu and Kickboxing, two similar but different languages and styles. On the practical side, what you have to fight for with gear and tricks at T4 often comes naturally with a fast aperture. But more importantly, the emotional quality is different. Shallow depth of field isn’t just aesthetically beautiful, it’s emotional isolation. Depth of field becomes depth of feeling. Combine that with a single 85mm lens and a 1.37:1 boxy aspect ratio, and you have the perfect film language for telling a story about characters who are disconnected from themselves and the world around them. Aurélien Mouveau, my amazing focus puller, somehow kept pace with these impossible, improvised shots all day long. He used a 1/4 diopter for most scenes. It made proper distance marks impossible, but it gave just enough sharpness to make focus pulling manageable when the depth of field was barely a centimeter deep. As a bonus, it added a subtle glow to the Leica’s already beautiful bokeh.
Larry Towell
All of our visual inspiration came from still photography. We gathered around 400 images, pulled from books and online archives, and organized them into a visual bible structured by themes, Motherhood, Brotherhood, Fatherhood, Sisterhood, Patriarchy, Lovers, Magical realism, and more. We studied that collection relentlessly until we knew every image by heart. Among all the photographers we explored, Larry Towell resonated deeply with the themes of the film. His books The World from My Front Porch and The Mennonites are, at their heart, profound studies of family life. The World from My Front Porch captures his own family with tenderness, showing how the smallest domestic moments, kids playing, a partner resting, the mess of daily life, can reveal a quiet, universal beauty. The Mennonites, meanwhile, showed how to approach the portrayal of family as both a source of belonging and confinement.
When in Doubt, Go for a Close-Up
"If your pictures aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough." That Robert Capa quote became a guiding mantra for both Brotherhood and Who Do I Belong To. Meryam and I adapted it into our own version: When in doubt, go for a close-up. Anyone raised on cinema subconsciously knows the predictable rhythm of classical filmmaking, the “factory setting” of cinema: establishing shot, shot/reverse-shot, wide, medium, inserts, close-up, etc. So how do you break that rhythm? How do you make the viewer really look at what’s happening in the frame instead of slipping into passive consumption? You introduce discontinuity. You go tighter when convention says to go wide. You stick to a single focal length. You use a lot a negative space in the frame, or none at all. You shoot from behind or from the side when a frontal shot is expected. You let the camera behave like a restless dog, sniffing for the frame rather than arriving with it perfectly composed. Altogether, these choices create a heightened sense of awareness and psychological unease. It pushes the viewer to engage with the frame, with both what is shown and what is withheld. After the screenings, we could feel the polarization. For some viewers, this atypical aesthetic pulled them deep into the world of the film, fully immersed for the entire two and a half hours. For others, it was just a big claustrophobic headache. If everyone agrees on a film, maybe it didn’t take enough risks.
The Salad Bowl Method
Two days before the shoot, I was still searching for inspiration for the film’s aesthetic. Walking on a Tunisian beach with my gaffer, Jaden Scholes, and my key grip, Vincent Plourde Lavoie, we noticed the sheer amount of garbage scattered across the sand, plastic, fishing nets, broken chairs, bottles, scraps of all kinds. Then came a stupid but brilliant idea: what if we used the trash to shape and give movement to our light? Anything with an interesting shape was fair game. A broken salad bowl, a fishing net and a barbecue grill became key elements in our lighting setups, adding texture and movement to the light. It looked beautiful on camera, but the moment you stepped outside the farmhouse, it was absurd, bits of junk flapping everywhere on C-stands. It echoed the reality of the farmers living just steps from the Mediterranean sea, surrounded by that constant wind rushing through every window, door, tree, and crack in the walls.
The Art of genre blending
Brotherhood was rooted in social realism, while Who Do I Belong edges into light horror and psychological thriller. When your story flirts between social realism and the ghost of a dead girl hypnotizing violent men to jump off a cliff, the risk of cliché is real. So we avoided exposition. We kept the mystical quiet, always felt, never explained. The film draws from North African oral traditions and rural beliefs in spirits, omens, and ancestral hauntings. In these communities, the supernatural is as real and tangible as the computer I’m writing on. That’s why we chose to depict these elements with the same matter-of-fact tone as the rest of the narrative. For example, during rehearsals, Salha and Meryam found a beautiful, simple gesture for the moments when Aïsha accesses her son’s darkest memories: pressing her eye gently against his in a soft, deliberate movement. It cost nothing, required no special effects, and felt intimate, strange, and new. All of her supernatural abilities were conveyed this way, through subtle body language, color shift, camera movement, or odd camera angle, like in the scene where she reads blood in the coffee cup of her sister.
For the ghostly presence of Reem (Dea Liane), we took inspiration from the ethereal photography of Sally Mann. There’s something haunting and atmospheric in her images, almost otherworldly. We adopted a similar approach when filming Reem to evoke her lingering presence. We also used an American night effect for the scenes where she leads the men through the desert at night. This technique created a surreal feeling perfectly suited to those moments. It was relatively easy to achieve: we shot the scenes about two stops overexposed and around noon under bright sunlight. Then, in post-production, we underexposed the image, applied a blue tone, replaced the clouds with a starry night sky, and adjusted the shadows on the ground to enhance the effect.
Truth Over Beauty
Some projects call for a more traditional lighting approach, where actors are often boxed in by lights, diffusion, bounce, and negative fill. Often, they’ll be delivering a tragic monologue with a piece of white bounce rigged just two feet from their face. While this setup does yield beautiful and controlled compositions, it often sacrifices authenticity and spontaneity in the performance. We wanted the opposite. We lit most locations from outside, leaving spaces free for the actors to move naturally. No tape marks on the floor, no rigid blocking. We covered scenes organically, improvising angles as performances evolved, and sometimes jumping back and forth, then back again, within a shot/reverse shot. No two takes were ever the same and each one began and ended slightly differently. Every shot functioned as a master, which was crucial for grounding the actors in the world of the film with each take.
Tenebrism
Most of the film takes place within the confines of the farm, its cramped kitchen, barn, and living spaces. The small 2-by-2-foot windows and the narrow doors played a crucial role in shaping the film’s mood. They naturally lent themselves to Tenebrism, an extreme form of chiaroscuro where darkness dominates the frame. This style is most famously associated with the painters Caravaggio and Georges de La Tour. With such tiny windows, the light-to-shadow falloff was naturally strong, and we enhanced this effect by supplementing with direct and bounced HMIs to maintain lighting continuity. The result was a series of moody, dramatic images that intensified the film’s oppressive atmosphere.
Empathy Shift
Like the 180° rule or the rule of thirds, cinematography has its own unspoken “two-eye rule”: always show both eyes of your actor for emotional clarity. It’s generally good advice, but if you follow it religiously, you miss narrative possibilities. For example, filming the father from the side gave his face a sharper, more angular quality that felt quietly threatening. So for most of the scenes where his presence creates tension within the family, we kept him in profile or filmed him from behind, forcing the audience to guess his next move. The same technique also applies to sadness. During the funeral scene, we framed him in profile again, even the tears sliding down his cheek felt more striking than they would have in a frontal shot. But more importantly, that framing shifted the viewer’s empathy, not distant, but intimate, like standing beside a relative at a funeral. That’s the real power of filming someone from the side: it mirrors the perspective of someone who’s present but not part of the story, triggering a different kind of empathetic response.
Outpost
Colorist Martin Gaumond at Outpost MTL was in charge of bringing all these beautiful colors and tones to life. He had previously done an outstanding job on Brotherhood, where he developed his own recipe to emulate Kodak 5207 35mm in a way that was shockingly true to the original stock and slightly more grainy. For Who Do I Belong To, we leaned into colder tones to make the sinister feel even more unsettling.
The film within the shot
Meryam’s approach is entirely her own, I can’t think of another filmmaker to compare her to. Her work is guided by intuition and deeply shaped by her personal journey. She’s a master at orchestrating visceral cinematic moments, constructing and deconstructing her films in unexpected ways, almost like composing a documentary. As her cinematographer, I rarely know where a particular scene or shot will end up in the final edit. That uncertainty makes it essential for the film’s identity to live in every single shot. In a pragmatic yet philosophical sense, every shot, whether a close-up portrait or a quiet cutaway of herbs swaying in the breeze, must hold the essence of the entire project. It’s a simple but profound question for anyone behind the camera composing a shot: Does this shot carry the whole film within it?
With Who Do I Belong To, the goal was not to make a visually impressive film, it was to make an emotionally immersive one. Every aesthetic choice, every focus decision, every broken piece of plastic shaping the light served one purpose: to draw the viewer uncomfortably close to the characters’ emotional worlds. It’s an approach we’ll continue exploring in our next project, this time, trading the coast of Tunisia for the shores of Sicily.
Technical specifications
ARRI Mini LF (Cineground)
4.5K (1.37:1)
Leica R (Maison de Verre)
