THE BELLA VISTA / BEYOND WRIEZEN / WAVUMBA / GRIOT
As part of the 15th Thessaloniki Documentary Festival, a Press Conference was held on Tuesday, March 19, 2013. Participating were directors Alicia Cano (The Bella Vista), Daniel Abma (Beyond Wriezen), Jeroen van Velzen (Wavumba) and Volker Goetze (Griot).
The films take us to different parts of the world. In Griot, Volker Goetze goes to West Africa to look at the life of famous Senegalese songwriter and “Griot” (guardian of his country’s epic tales), Ablaye Cissoko. His own interest in music was the inspiration for the director. “I studied music in Cologne and then New York and I had the opportunity of discovering the parallels between traditional music and jazz/folk. Africa has a fascinating musical tradition and I wanted to explore the subject up close. On the way I realized that we musicians who come from Europe to Africa are “loaded” with academic knowledge. This is not the case over there. In Africa music is an experience, it plays an important role in society. So there I learned to approach music as the locals do, to surrender myself”, the director said. During shooting, he found that the griots, who are gradually getting scarce, are also confronted by contemporary society which imposes rapid changes to age-old traditions. “In the past, the griots would tell the stories of villages or the adventures of kings. Now they themselves learn the news from the media, and tell the stories of events around the world. Globalization touches even them. Also, they refer to personal events, something they didn’t used to do. For example, a griot would never speak about his daughter”, the director said.
Jeroen van Velzen’s Wavumba also takes place in Africa, but this time in Kenya. The film focuses on the spirit world. As the director explained, the title of the film means “fish”, and refers to a small tribe of fishermen living on an island in Eastern Kenya. Asked how he decided to film such a story, he answered: “I grew up in Kenya and had wonderful memories from there. When I was a child I had gotten to know a fisherman who told me stories about the spirits of the sea. I was enchanted. When I returned there a few years ago, I wanted to rediscover the magical world of my childhood. So I discovered a fisherman who reminded me of the fisherman of my childhood and yet another time I had the opportunity of hearing amazing stories”. According to the Dutch director, Mashoud, the protagonist, reminds one of the hero of Hemingway’s “The Old Man and the Sea”. “Mashoud spoke to me about gigantic fish, about a shark bigger than his canoe, which weighed more than 400 kilos. He told me that once he had to wrestle with such a shark all night. At dawn, after winning the fight he tried to get it into his canoe, which he had to fill with water. I don’t know how much truth these stories contain, but I think they are fascinating. Mashoud and I went fishing and I was impressed by his knowledge of the sea so I decided to tell his story”, the director noted. The relationship between man and nature is central to the film. “In Africa, people’s contact with nature is different from that of us, in Europe. The sun is strong there; the wind is hot. At night the imagination of the fishermen who go out to fish goes wild. Everyone speaks of spirits that run on the sea and as you see its surface gleaming, you can’t help asking yourself if there is actually something more there than meets the eye. And this is something that moves me”, the director noted.
In a totally different backdrop, at a village in Uruguay, Alicia Cano’s The Bella Vista records the unusual story of a house that started off as housing for a football club, then became a transvestite brothel and ended up operating as a Catholic chapel. The story is based on a real incident, about which the director learned from a newspaper article. “I read that there was a brothel which became a place of prayer. I thought it was an interesting story and when I went to the village to research it I discovered that a football club used to be in the same place”, she explained. The film is a combination of fiction and documentary. Asked about how the audience perceives this element, Ms Cano noted: “Since I didn’t have archival material, I decided to get the protagonists to act out the story instead of simply talking about it. This is because I found that these people use their bodies, move in a specific way. Audiences in Uruguay are familiar with such subjects and found that the story is not far from the truth. In other countries, the Czech Republic for example, the audience asked me if the people appearing in the film were actors. Actually, only one actor is in the film, the rest are real people”. Aside from the obvious, the director’s cutting commentary on hypocrisy and prejudice is hidden behind the first level of this entertaining documentary. “Other things happen at night, and other things in the daytime. The same people who go to church in the morning are the ones who go to the brothel when night falls”, the director noted.
Daniel Abma’s Beyond Wriezen tells the story of three delinquent adolescents three years after they were released from a Brandenburg reformatory. Through their eyes, as they try to reintegrate themselves into society, the film reveals their hopes, their pride, their thoughts and their fears. “I worked as a volunteer social worker at this institution, and I decided to follow the stories of five inmates. I convinced them to do it, I finally decided on four of them, but three appear in the film since one didn’t give me permission to use the material I had gathered”, the director said. Reintegration into society is not an easy process. “When I began making the film, people told me that out of the five men at least three would return to jail. Perhaps naively, I saw these people who wanted to start a new life, were enthusiastic, and for this reason I wanted to research what obstacles are faced by young people who are released from prison”, he noted. Finding a job after jail is hard to do. “One of the protagonists finds a job at a pig-farm and is happy about it, even though it is a very dirty job”, Mr. Abma noted. He added that his goal was not to give answers through the film, but mainly to show that the social welfare system does not function effectively. Asked if he feels bitterness or sadness about the way his protagonists’ lives develop, he answered: “As a filmmaker I tried to keep a distance from the story, to play the role of the observer. However there were times when I couldn’t avoid involvement. When at one point I saw them taking drugs I told them: “maybe you could cut down a bit”? I understood that they were surprised and I resolved to just be a filmmaker and avoid the role of social worker”.
The films are part of the 15th TDF program, which is financed by the European Union’s Regional Development Fund for Central Macedonia, 2007-2013.
