Y.N: Well, I think for me, cinema is life. It’s our story, it’s the ending, the beginning, what you do in between. And, you sort of know from the beginning – that it’s going to end one day. You go to see a movie, you know that it is only two hours! Two hours, or three hours, or one hour and a half most of the time and it’s going to end! And that’s the whole thing about life for me…I hope my movie is not a short one and that it’s not going to end soon. But when it’s going to end, it’s just going to end. And it’s crazy, as a discovery, for me.

Y.N: While watching TV. When I was a kid: I used to go home from school and watch TV. And I would watch TV while having my lunch, and I’d watch TV when I was doing my homework, and then I would sleep in front of the TV. (laughs)

Y.N: It was TV, TV, TV all the time. Watching all of these dramas and Egyptian old movies and stuff.

I used to pray all the time to God that I want to die first, and I don’t want to see anyone I love dying

Y.N: Actually I wasn’t exactly more interested in this, it was more like any old movies. The point is that I was introduced to a lot of ideas through TV. And as a kid I was always asking my mother bisexual chat cam, ‘Who is she, and who is he, and where are they now?’ All these kids’ questions. And most of the time, the answer was like: ‘They’re all dead.’ So, it was a shock for me.

And I think it did something to me subconsciously. It was a horrible discovery, actually. I never really recovered exactly from it. Not that actors are dying, but the whole idea that one day it could finish, and it could happen to anyone.

It’s sexual

Y.N: It happened for me when I was like five or six. But I think also that it’s personal. For me, it was actually something that opened my mind to other ideas too early maybe. I was thinking about it all the time. And I started imagining that I could lose someone in my family.

K.W: But also, I mean, this thing about watching people sleep which seems to be another theme. in your work. That’s a thing about dying as well, isn’t it?

Y.N: It’s related to dying. I don’t think we just go to sleep and that’s it. I think we travel, we go somewhere. I think when we die it’s going to be more or less like this. We’ll be here but we’ll be just somewhere else. It’s like being in a house, and instead of being on the third floor we’ll be on the first floor, or in the basement or something. But you’re still in that house.

Y.N: So I think when you sleep (laughs), we definitely go somewhere. For me, sleeping is a metaphor for death. .. people look very at ease when they’re sleeping. They look innocent.

Y.N: At that time I had already read so much about her, and seen so many pictures of the houses, that I was a little bit disappointed. I mean, by the fact that they turn it almost into a Disneyland, you know.

Y.N: Keep the house going, have some money coming, et cetera. But the thing is that you know all the pieces are not exactly well kept. There’s no security really. I was visiting it with a friend of mine, and she wrote the essay of my catalogue there and she’s the second important biographer of Frida Kahlo, her name is ora. Martha actually met Frida Kahlo. when she was like four or five. And just a year or something before she died, she was in school and they went to visit Diego Rivera – while painting.