The Austrian filmmaker Hubert Sauper shared experiences from his career and secrets of his trade with the audience of the 17th Thessaloniki Documentary Festival, at an open discussion which took place on Friday March 20, 2015 at the Pavlos Zannas Theatre, in the presence of the TDF director, Dimitri Eipides.
This year’s TDF pays tribute to the work of Hubert Sauper. At the beginning of the discussion, the moderator and curator of the tribute, Dimitris Kerkinos mentioned that the Austrian filmmaker is an old friend of the Festival, since his film Kisangani Diary was screened at the very first Thessaloniki Documentary Festival.
Sauper expressed his joy for being in Greece for the first time. He referred to the Thessaloniki Documentary Festival as “a celebration of cinema” and thanked Dimitri Eipides for the invitation. “People must think I’m old, because lately they have started paying tributes to me at festivals”, he said jokingly. When asked what had motivated him to start making documentaries, he said that he made films in order to not feel alone amid everything that surrounds him in life. He explained that documentary filmmakers have the great privilege of communicating human passions and circumstances in a dynamic way as well as of creating an emotional connection with people’s questions. He also talked about the necessity of sharing what one experiences, from joy to mourning, “celebrating” everything that happens around us, along with other people.
“Today we are bombarded by a plethora of images which are not fictional. Online and on televisions, there is a terrifying avalanche of stimulants, so many that it isn’t easy to make sense of things. A film tries to understand and find meaning in all these things. It may not always manage to do so, but in ideal circumstances, you can create a spark between the film and the audience. It’s a beautiful convention”, the director pointed out. Sauper has found international acclaim for the documentaries that he has made in Africa. When asked if his films have been viewed outside of the African continent, the director said: “My films don’t concern Africa. European and African history have a two-way relationship; they are indelibly linked in three stages: the slave trade, colonialisation and globalisation. These are three very painful stages of history which are very humiliating for Africa.” The director also referred to a new form of colonialization, which is taking place in Africa on behalf of Europeans and the Western world: “When I made Darwin’s Nightmare in Tanzania, I focused on two areas: the arms trade and fishing. The guns made their way down, from the north to the south, while fish travelled in the opposite direction. The film We Come as Friends speaks about the new forms of colonialization.” As he explained, in reality borders are drawn along the lines of where oil reserves exist. “I wanted to make a film about an important subject, at the geographical point where today China and the US are clashing, at the exact same point where years ago France and Britain were fighting. It’s like a very bad joke that keeps on repeating itself. We say that in Africa people are uncivilized, that they kill each other and that the United Nations must intervene, but in reality it’s a war being fought by the representatives of big oil companies”.
With regards to his film Darwin’s Nightmare, the filmmaker said: “When the film received attention, especially after it was nominated for an Academy award, I was invited to the office of the president of Tanzania. Of course he didn’t like the film and he turned against it and against all the people that appeared in it. The ‘guns mafia’ pursued me and I spent three years in courts trying to prove that what I had showed in my film was true. He campaigned to discredit my name, I received death threats and other people that had talked in the film were either jailed or persecuted”.
He connected the film to his new project titled Autopsy of a Nightmare, which will be released after he can guarantee the safety of the people that appear in it. “In Darwin’s Nightmare the people that were prosecuted were the ones that had talked about their participation in the war. They didn’t make complaints. Anyway, nowadays I don't actually use the real names of the people who I speak with, for fear of them being persecuted, but when I do speak to someone corrupted that strikes deals to buy Kalashnikovs, I don’t care about his protection, and in those situations, the camera is like an anti-gun of destruction”.
Speaking about ethics in the creation of documentaries, Sauper said that it was a complicated matter. When the director admitted that some of his films may include “terrible” scenes, which may not make the final cut, because they are like ‘timebombs”, but which he holds on to, to release at the right time, audience members were eager to find out if he censored himself.
Can a filmmaker face these kinds of dilemmas? “He must”, Sauper replied. According to the director, journalists self-censor themselves quite often, by aligning themselves with the views of the media they are employed by. “I have hundreds of journalist-friends that are stressed because they have to go along with the views of the media they work for, in order to satisfy the expectations of their ratings. Today the creative documentary is the ultimate platform of free speech. In the documentary I am free to say whatever I want”, the directed observed.
Commenting on his documentary We Come as Friends, Sauper explained that “there are two scenes with Hillary Clinton, and what she says isn't very flattering. Can you imagine if I were nominated for an Academy award and she was the president of the USA? I think I would have a problem”.
Right now, apart from preparing his next documentary, the director is also preparing a fiction film, which is based on real events. As he said, during the Vietnam war, fighter pilots would vacation at his parents’ guesthouse in Tyrol, Austria. “These were the pilots that dropped napalms in Vietnam, and I was growing up around them. I would receive hugs from the men that bombed 12 million people with explosives. Because so many years have passed since then, the film could only be told as a fictional account. I’m currently writing the screenplay and it’s a very stressful experience, witnessing places that were bombed”.
