How Filmmaker Tonia Mishiali Tackles Immigration, Patriarchy and Women’s Resilience in ’The Lion at My Back’

Cypriot filmmaker Tonia Mishiali tackles immigration, the patriarchy and the strength of women in “The Lion at My Back,” which is playing in the Crystal Globe competition at the Karlovy Vary Film Festival.

The feature follows the bond that grows between Senegalese immigrant Mariama (Sokhna Diallo) and Stella (Elena Kallinikou), a woman who works at a Cyprus immigration center who is trying to rebuild her life.

“Each has their own issues, their struggles,” the director says of her second feature. She wanted to build on what she had created in “Pause,” her first feature. “So I thought, OK, two parallel story lines. I follow one, then when they meet, I transcend to the other one, and then every time they meet, I started to build their relationship more and more and more to come more organic in a way.”

Mariama, despite facing limited job prospects and racism, is happy, almost joyous about life, while Stella is bitter and cynical but clings to hope — and Mishiali subtly doles out the backstories of the characters, building fully rounded women that a patriarchal society has used and abused them (but she doesn’t deal in polemics — she skillfully creates well-round portraits of male characters, too). But Mishiali refuses to have them give up, which tracks: she centers her films on social justice and women’s issues.

But the film is also about motherhood, as Stella is fighting to regain custody of her young daughter, and begins to treat Mariama as a daughter, too. “I wanted it to be a note to motherhood. I have a teenage daughter — well, when I started writing the film, she was a teenager. I wanted to write a film about the complex relationship between mothers and daughters, because I think it’s very special, but it’s very complex at the same time.”

She also wanted to write a film about refugees, having been one herself when she was a child during the 1970s after Turkey invaded Cyprus in 1974.

“We were forced to flee our homes, I was just 1 year old, I don’t remember much, but this was a trauma that my family carried all these years. We were thrown out of our homes, and we carried this ‘refugee’ feeling, and the bitterness. But then I met all these African women, these asylum seekers in Cyprus, and I couldn’t believe how positive these people were,” she says. “They were always looking at life positively, they were grateful for managing to be where they are. Everything that is a struggle they don’t see it as a struggle. They’re very resilient. So I wanted to kind of combine these two stories, and that’s how I came up with the idea of Mariama and Stella.”

She’s had a passion to spotlight the stories of women who are sidelined by society, and framed her characters within a world in which they are not respected. “I wanted to position these two characters within this culture … there’s patriarchy still there and I see it every day, I witness it every day, and as also a female filmmaker, we have struggles, and also to be trusted and to be respected,” she says.

Asked about her cinematic influences, she singles out Chantal Akerman and her film “Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles.” “In my opinion, it remains one of the most important feminist films ever made and it was one of the first films that inspired me to embrace a female perspective in my own filmmaking,” she says.

The film is produced by Bark Like a Cat Films (Cyprus), co-produced by Iris Prods. (Luxembourg) and Avalon Films (Greece). Yellow Affair is handling international sales.