INTERVIEW: Anne Sobel, author of Asra & the Black Moon Army

Endowed with several talents, Anne Sobel is a Film Production Professor at Qatar Foundation’s Northwestern University, who uses her abilities quite innovatively. 
Keeping with her professional competence, she has quite a few short films to her credit, some of which have made it to international film festivals while others have garnered more than two million views on social media and YouTube. 
Anne has also directed music videos that have been distributed by major record labels, including Essay Records, Planet-X Records, and Mint Records. 
As a writer, she has to her credit, pieces that have been featured in The Huffington Post and the Chronicle of Higher Education. 
But what has been attracting a lot of attention lately, is Anne’s work on a two-volume graphic novel series, Asra & the Black Moon Army, the first of which is due to hit the stands in 2017. Asra is a female, Arab, teenager-turned superhero. 
Watching the enthusiasm and excitement of players in a women’s basketball game in Education City was the seed of inspiration that gave birth to Asra. The characters in the book are influenced by her intrepid, hilarious, and brilliant young women students. Through her narrative, Anne also interestingly interlaces stories of women achievers of the past, from this region. 


Share with us your graphic novel series featuring an Arab superhero in a nutshell 
Asra and the Orphan Moon is about a young girl who is turned into a statue by a nefarious sorceress, Umm Al-Lail. On breaking free from her statue forty years later, Asra discovers that her country has been destroyed by Umm Al-Lail, who has spent the last four decades turning women to stone. Asra travels throughout the land helping break other women free from their statues, and with each woman she frees, she learns stories about women in the past — from Bedouin botanists in the 1950s and seamstresses in the 1940s to female pearl divers in the 1930s. 
Keeping the momentum for creative projects like Asra going despite all the adversity has been a real challenge as there is so little financing for things like films and graphic novels when you are just starting out. I’ve been working on Asra for about four years and there were times when I felt the book was never going to get completed. However, I just saw the draft layout of Book 1 and nearly wept. It was well worth the wait. Now I’ve lived with this character for so long I feel like I know her, and feel an obligation to bring her to life.


What got you interested in such a project?
After watching a women’s basketball game in Education City, I was interested in telling a story about a fun, athletic heroine. However, the more time I spent in Qatar, the more interested I became in the other interesting work and hobbies that women here pursued in the Arabian Gulf. 
There is a rich tapestry of contributions to society, but they aren’t yet well documented. This is historically true of women’s work around the world. Only now is the West beginning to teach more of women’s history to students. 
I picked up an amazing book called Gulf Women, which was commissioned by Her Highness Sheikha Moza bint Nasser. It includes an abundance of historical information on women in the region, and after reading it I had several ideas for the characters that Asra could encounter on her journey. It was a great way to weave Asra’s story in, with the fascinating histories of women in the Gulf that I learned about, during my time in Qatar.  
I also feel like the texture and landscape of the Arabian Gulf is a dramatic and brilliant setting for a graphic novel. There are a lot of great, cinematic qualities about the region — both in terms of visuals and narrative — that I really wanted to bring to life through imagery. It would have been easier to write a more traditional, young adult novel, but I think this region can be so visually striking and it was something I wanted my friends at home to see.


You’ve had a successful stint with making short films, which is your favourite?
That would be Laish La, the short film I made for Lipton Iced Tea. The actors were fantastic to work with, and it was such a unique experience to shoot a film in the Middle East. Also, we had our original script translated to Arabic and that was a great learning experience. Every time I make a creative project in the Gulf I learn more, and what I learn goes into the rest of my work. 
One thing my husband and I love about living in Qatar, is that we get to work with people from all over. Our crew was a mishmash of people from Lebanon, Kuwait, India, etc., and everyone had a slightly different way of approaching a film set. That was such an education for us because we learned things such as how Bollywood films sets run while discovering a new web series being shot in Lebanon that our cinematographer worked on. It makes going back home a little more boring because everyone comes from a similar background.


Of your various projects which has been the most interesting?
I learned the most, by making Asra & the Orphan Moon. I spent about five or six years just observing and doing hard research. I went through dozens of photo archives to make sure the details of the world — the architecture, the clothing, etc — were accurate. While it’s a fictional fantasy story about a superhero, and you have to break from some constraints of reality, you still want the foundation to be very authentic. This is a chance to offer readers outside the Middle East the opportunity to learn more about the world, while for those living in the region, this is a chance to see things familiar to them represented in a graphic novel. 
It’s complicated because I’m an outsider — a white, American woman — who likes to tell stories about worlds different from the one I live in. Outsiders get things wrong way too often, so you need to work twice as hard to get it right — and even then it will never quite be the same. Still, I don’t plan to stop telling these kinds of stories. I’m tired of reading about, and watching the amount of stories that take place in New York, or those that feature white men in the lead. 
I want to push for more stories that take place in different cities featuring different types of characters — I don’t care who’s writing them. There are so many great stories to be told, but if you count the number of mainstream stories told in New York, you’d think it was the only place on earth that exists or is interesting.
Which one has been your most challenging project so far? 
I’ve tried to make a few other short films in Qatar that never came to fruition. I never really found my groove here making movies, which is the medium I originally started out in. I was unable to find the support to complete some of the projects that I wanted to do. It was disappointing, but it freed me up to do other things — like Asra & the Orphan Moon, so in many ways it was a positive thing. 


Of your many achievements which do you consider most important? 
I think connecting with my students and watching them bring their stories to life in my film classes. Over the past six years I’ve had the chance to watch really talented students create amazing films and works of art. As a college professor I “teach” them things, sure, but I’m really just there to facilitate talent that already exists. I basically give them a space to create for 16 weeks and they do the rest. So it’s not a singular achievement, but the satisfaction I get from teaching is tremendous. 
To know that my students in Qatar — who are from all over the world — are getting the chance to tell their own stories is the most exciting accomplishment. I feel like I might be the tiniest bit responsible for helping ensure there is one less story about a white guy or girl from New York in the world, and that makes me very happy.