I met Dan in Paris while he was at the Récollets and I was attending the Ateliers Varan. I wanted to make a film about the relationship between the contemporary art scene and society, and I felt Dan and his art to be a paradigm of the critical sense applied to these systems.

When I first began to discover his creative process I thought we could collaborate on two different “rough materials”. He was working on the level of information (press, internet etc), and I would develop the narration through his actions, and at the same time I could work upon the level of the common reality that surrounds us, with some intersections that interrupted the narration.

In the space of the film we could somehow return the man to the centre of things, at least in the imaginary axis of the sight. I think that this was our central point of contact.

2. I love the way you mirror Dan’s interest in the little things that often get over looked, the beauty in the tiny details, through your patient way of filming. For example, lingering on the way a person walks or drinks, that captures their character beautifully. Did you find on being with Dan, that you were looking at things around you in a different way?

Dan’s interest is beyond the things themselves. For example when you see him looking around, you could never know what he is really looking at. That’s why when you compose the frame around what he sees, this frame should be introducing a question. Because the amazing thing happening there, is not in front of his eyes but behind them.

We each see the reality around us in different ways. Dan revels the inner paradox of human systems. Regarding this film, I desired to practice a gesture of empathy.

3. How does Dan see your film? As an extension of his art, the creation of an entirely new piece of art, or as something very different altogether?

Dan really accepted my film happening, without any control and I deeply appreciated this.

4. If you could pick anyone, what other artist would you most like to make a film about?

I would never make a film ‘about’ anyone, it would be impossible. I would make a film ‘with’ someone.

1. Did you have an aim, or a specific point of view you wanted to get across when you decided to make Cropsey? If so, did this change at all when you began filming?

We had always wanted to tell the story of these events that affected us growing up on Staten Island as residents of a community…the facts behind jennifer’s disappearance, and then the discovery that other kids that had gone missing before her, and of course Rand’s connection. A very cut and dry, but engaging whodunit about our hometown. However, it was also important for us to tell this story in the context of the fiction that pervaded these cases, the local legends, the folklore, the whispered rumors that taint any crime – because this is where we connected with the story emotionally. We wanted to frame these crimes in the context of a ghost story because that’s how we rationalized them as children growing up. On top of that, I think we wanted to show how the two, the fact and the fiction, overlap in any crime, especially in a small town like Staten Island. As we were editing, we slowly began to pull out the fiction, but by the end of the film, we threw caution to the wind and decided to put it back in. The response has been interesting from both sides. Some people think it really adds a creepiness, and other people think it takes away from the crime story. Personally I love it. Its like the opening scene in Blue Velvet….Who knows what evil lurks beneath the surface of suburbia.

2. When you began your investigations did you believe Andre Rand to be guilty of the crimes he was accused of? How did you feel at the end of filming?

Its interesting. Barbara and I had different opinions about Rand, whether he was guilty or not. During the course of the filming, we both changed our opinions. I think that helped us remain neutral, or at least consistent in our portrayal of Rand.

3. You were exchanging letters with Rand during filming, was there any further correspondence between you after the last rather frightening letter we see towards the end of the film?

Yes, in fact there have been quite a few correspondences with him after the case. In one letter he was quite angry that we had missed some important “facts” about the case. Once the film comes out theatrically, I hope the District Attorney and the Prison Warden allow us to show him the film. I’d like to get his opinion.

4. Have you had any feedback from residents of Staten Island? How do they feel about how the film turned out?

A good question. I think people really liked the film, and the portrayal of Staten Island – warts and all. There’s no doubt that we are a bit harsh about the Island, but I feel it’s justified, and more importantly we have license to do so – after all we spent 20 years of our lives, growing up there. It’s not easy to forget that you lived next to the largest garbage dump in the world at one time! As for the people portrayed in the film, I think dealing with these missing children was one of the most intense experiences of their lives, so I think they were happy to finally see someone telling their story.

5. The most unsettling thing about the film to me was the footage from the children’s psychiatric unit as it brings to light all that we, as a society, try to cover up- anything that is not beautiful or ‘normal’, and it seems as though Rand’s experience with this under-belly has been a large factor in shaping him into the person he is. What would you like, if anything, viewers to take away from experiencing this reality?

That footage is by far one of the most disturbing things I have ever seen. And it was proof, at that time, that as New Yorkers, we failed in adequately caring for the mentally ill. We knew better, but it was easier and better for the community as a whole, if we dumped these people in Staten island, and threw away the key. Yet, we reap what we sew, and it seems to me that Rand, if you presume he was guilty, was the physical embodiment of fate coming back to take our children. Unfortunately, Staten Islanders  had to endure the tragedy of those decisions made by politicians generations before them.  I’m really fascinated by urban politics, and it makes total sense in the context of history that, as a major and overcrowded urban centre, you ship your mentally ill to the “country” – Staten Island was the country at one point. The Island also had one of the largest sanitariums in the world and where they cured Tuberculosis. Before that, one half of the island was a walled quarantine for immigrants coming over from Europe before Ellis Island. And as mentioned previously, it was one of the largest dumps on the world. Now one might say its overkill for one place to become such a ground zero for dumping, but that’s the past. The problem I have is when politicians try to gloss over the past with asphalt and strip malls as they have done today. You have to adequately recognize the past before you can move on, or the mistakes will only be repeated. Its like Poltergeist, where the developers removed the headstones, but never removed the bodies.

6. Do you think your film will add to the legend of Cropsey or diminish it’s impact?

Haha. We went back on Halloween night to one of the abandoned buildings just for kicks, and met some kids who told us a new urban legend – one that involved a documentary called CROPSEY, and all this “stuff” that went on in these buildings that they never knew about. One of their friends had gotten a “bootleg” copy of the film and so although they hadn’t seen the film, they had come here to check it out – to legend trip.

That’s happened to us quite a bit. It’s the same urban legend, all we did was add another chapter to make it more contemporary, more believable. Or maybe all we did was make the monster seem more real.

Patrick Hazard (director of the LIDF) talks with Don Boyd.

PH: This retrospective of your work at the LIDF is the first to focus upon your work as a director of documentaries. Emphasising this is to beg the question of what you see as distinctive about documentary film?

DB: From a practical point of view, as distinct from the hullabaloo of making a feature film?

In contrast to the often unwieldy size of a movie crew, I love working with a tiny team of committed film-makers who want to use their skills to show something unique.

From an editorial point of view? In my case I have had complete freedom to create images as powerful as those that are constructed for fiction films. No scripts – often in my case a few paragraphs to describe my mission. No actors. I don’t think recreations or biopics can really claim the ‘holy ground’ as proper documentaries, however good they are as film entertainment.

An inevitably inadequate personal definition? The unique unmanipulated, subjective, but honest representation of our world as recorded by cameras and microphones which, when edited, give audiences the impression that they shared much the same experience as those who were there to ‘document’ it. As far as the people in my films are concerned I have always wanted to provide them the opportunity to present themselves as they would want to be presented, allow them their dignity, and yet provide that ever watchful extra perspective which gives them the context a member of the audience might pick up if they had been around at the time.

Subjective? Yes. All documentaries are inevitably subjective – especially when it comes to the choices. The cameras used. The lens. The shots. The movement. The order of presentation. The rhythm of the editing. How could anyone really argue that any of this represents objectivity in the final analysis. Even great anthropologists like Claude Levi Strauss recognized this. Some people might argue that we change people when we look at them through a lens.

Documentary film in the world of broadcasting has become such a loose corrupt phrase. Television journalism has hi-jacked what was once a great art form and uses the word documentary to describe what is also loosely called ‘factual’ or ‘reality’ television but is fact just bastardised cheap forms of manipulated invariably mendacious amateur entertainment masquerading as an honest representation of reality.

What is distinctive about documentary filmmakers as I would want to describe them? The great documentary film-makers use the art of film making to enlighten and stimulate their audiences with unique images and sounds captured and edited to reflect truthfully what they experienced and discovered in front of their cameras and tape recorders, without artificial distortion or cunning manipulation.

Their point of view is clear. They respect their audience as much as they value their almost obsessive desire to provide moral perspectives and so protect the dignity of their subjects with modesty, and without self glorification. (By the way, I hate this TV trend to use celebrities as the conduit to the truth under the guise that they are documentarists or filmmakers.)

Stylistically: This work can be as brutally realistic, as it might be abstract and poetic. Stylised visually with lenses or crude immediate representation, real images are the evidence of a film-making witness.

PH: Do you feel there is a different set of skills or sensibilities at play, as a director of documentaries then there would be as a director of narrative fiction?

DB: Yes, but a brilliant filmmaker will have no problem adjusting. Terence Davies is an example. His brilliant recent film about his childhood in Liverpool and that city’s metamorphosis, Of Time and The City, is an example of that adjustment.

Michael Apted’s work over 30 years on the 7 Up series is another – he makes feature films but also brings his special skills as a film director to the documentary environment and with a series of great filmmakers has fashioned an iconic body of insightful work which will provide a unique insight of the world we live in for centuries to come. Nick Fraser the great and enlightened commissioning editor – (I directed 8 documentary films for him both at Channel Four and at the BBC) – described documentary directors as the ‘mendicant priests of the modern world’. Constantly begging! Begging for subjects to immerse ourselves in.

Begging for the means and resources to explore them – often meagre in the extreme when doled out. Begging for the opportunity to reach audiences with our work. And I would say that we should be constantly ‘begging the question’. Especially in the context of the 21^st Century media environment which is full of mendacious executives, the popes and cardinals of the commissioning and scheduling tyrannies of tv broadcasting.

PH: Everyone, it is said, has one novel in them – we all have one story to tell. This attitude has been reinforced somewhat by TV documentaries’ recent focus on confessional or diary-type documentaries. The problem is everyone seems to tell more or less the same story (perhaps due to susceptibility to influences – sparkling unoriginality, and/or a change in priorities of commissioning editors linked to market pressures). This emphasis has been helped also by new technology. Do you believe this so-called ‘democratizing’ process; this telling of everyone’s story, is what documentary should aspire to?

DB: I think the word ‘democratizing’ is somewhat misleading in this context.

The printing press took information and the spreading of filtered, highly contentious information out of the hands of the priest and into the hands of anyone who could wield a pen, and have access to a printing press – however crude. A similar revolution is happening with the use of audio visual technologies both in the arena of ‘capturing’ images and sound, and in the arena of making it available. This gives everyone the opportunity to create. If it gives more people the opportunity to make documentaries, I think that is wonderful. And if it help them tell their story truthfully, however familiar their stories are, that has to be good.

Great documentaries will come out of this revolution and in some cases these will be films which are as autobiographical as the confessional novel, or the published diary. Sometimes the insight that comes from a two minute clip made by an amateur and published on You Tube can be as poignant and powerful as the long form celebrity ‘portraits’ which proliferate television schedules.

PH: In this year’s LIDF we are including work that very clearly straddles the line, if not veers across it, into fiction. Your career has crossed this line, as have individual works. Do you welcome the introduction of fictional elements into documentaries (I don’t mean dramatizations), I mean creative reworking of material?

DB: Fiction is not an option in documentary film. Reconstruction equally dubious. In my career the line is clear between the work I have done in these two fields. I do not like reconstructions in documentary, however well done they are. They fudge the truth and are manipulative inevitably. But creative reworking of material – that’s called good editing. And is essential in any great work of art. If you mean the distortion of the material technologically – if the context is clear that can be ok, but in general I hate that too. For example an otherwise excellent and prescient documentary called Starsuckers employed very flashy techniques and audio visual gift wrapping to deliver the brilliant material it had garnered about our capacity to be manipulated and conned by the media corporations and yet it fell into the same trap in presenting its own arguments with a sexy, ironic sugar coating, editorially and visually, which in my case made me feel uneasy about its mission. When it comes to documentary I suppose, using a metaphor, I prefer the straightforward ‘missionary’ position! Having said that the exquisite use of archive film in the hands of masterful film makers like Adam Curtis or Kevin Brownlow demonstrates the value of manipulation, but then some might argue that in Adam’s case he is presenting an essay, and not a documentary. I think he ranks with the very greatest of television makers.

PH: The media landscape has changed a great deal since you set out. Good things have come and gone as well as bad things. The line into the future is not straight or even coherent, but are there any key delineating features, trends that you think are so persistent, insidious, or beneficial that you believe they will continue to determine, to a lesser or greater degree, the possibilities and opportunities for young filmmakers?

DB: Digital technology, as a means to create and as a means to distribute and exhibit has begun to provide young communicators with the same revolutionary opportunities that came for everyone when the printing press arrives 600 hundred years ago. With the privilege of access to the history of the development of film as an art form in their grasp, young filmmakers have unique exciting expansive possibilities which are still very much unexplored. And the same applies to beady old codgers like me! We can’t believe our luck! Mendicant? We won’t have to beg! And we can now ignore all those medacious patronising ‘popes and cardinals’ who have guarded the gates of access to audiences with provocative truthful films, who have denied us the opportunity we now have to express ourselves powerfully in the most powerful medium of our age. Sharp alert eyes, ever listening probing ears, inquisitive insightful provocative brains, cameras of all kinds, editing devices to analyse and construct, simple means for delivery, screens everywhere……. Great documentaries.

Read More information on the Don Boyd retrospective at the LIDF

Kate Vlckova talks to J P Olsen and Luke Walden about their film ‘The Narcotic Farm’.

Kate Vlckova: The film uses unique government archives, captivating music and interviews that make the story very vivid – how long did the research last? Have you encountered any challenges trying to get hold of some of the footage?

JP Olsen: Luke and I spent two and a half years, off and on, researching “The Narcotic Farm,“ finding photos and documents and film. When we started there was no central archive to go to, everything was scattered all over the U.S. among dozens of different public and private archives. We got material from people who worked there or were imprisoned there and we also found rare material at the Kentucky Historical Society, which, incidentally, told me they never had anyone ask for the Narcotic Farm’s archive, even though they’d had it sitting there for two decades. The biggest challenge by far was getting the films of human experimentation that went on at the prison.

KV: Why return to this subject 34 years after the Narcotic Farm was shut? What inspired you to make a film and write a book about it?

JP Olsen: Several years ago I worked on a documentary on drug abuse and my research included interviewing long-time methadone patients. A few people I interviewed were in their late 60s and early 70s. In every case these old-timers either knew about or had spent time at Lexington. I didn’t know what Lexington was at first, but one guy in particular talked about what a great place it was with this great jazz band and how LSD was tested there and how you could get free heroin and that people were put to work on this big, beautiful farm to milk cows and so on. I thought, well, if he’s telling me the truth, this is an incredible American story and I’ve just got to do this. I felt very passionate about saving this story because it was clear to me that this project would be centered around a population that was dying off, and dying off very quickly. And, in speaking with people at these clinics, frankly, I liked them. They were all characters. The book came about completely by accident. Wayne Kramer’s wife – Wayne is our film’s composer and narrator as well as a former inmate – saw the photos that Luke and I were collecting for our research and said we should try to get a book contract. She put me touch with a book agent, I wrote up a proposal, and to my surprise he told me he could sell it. And then, to my amazement, he sold it. But that excitement wore off quickly when we had to figure out how to make a film and write a book at the same time. That’s when Luke and I called historian of science Dr. Nancy Campbell for help because she knows as much as anyone on the planet about Lexington.

KV: One of the former inmates featured in the documentary mentions the shock of coming to a farm from New York City. Why did the authorities consider treatment at a farm to be effective?

Luke Walden: The Narcotic Farm’s founding precept in 1935 — that farm work could cure drug addiction — illustrates how little was known about addiction in the early 20th century. The idea was a vestige of a 19th century medical theory called moral therapy, which was motivated by an agrarian nostalgia that concluded that “urban“ diseases such as tuberculosis, mental illness, and addiction would be cured by convalescence in a healthful, rural setting. The idea at ‘Narco’ was that fresh air and sunshine would reinvigorate addicts, farming the institution‘s 1,000 acres would teach the virtue of hard work, and this newfound work ethic would sustain abstinence from drugs. By the early 1950s it was obvious farm work didn’t cure drug addiction. But the farm continued to be part of the institution, providing inmates with healthy food and exercise that helped return them to physical health even as it failed to improve their prospects of staying clean permanently.

KV: According to the film prisoners volunteered to participate in the drug research programme – was there any cases of forced participation?

JP Olsen: The short answer is no. I never heard anything like that from former prisoners. These were hard-core junkies and the idea of getting free drugs was a dream come true, so I don’t think any arms were twisted to get people to sign up. There were enticements. You got better food, your own room, a television, that kind of thing. But all signs, including internal documents on the patients in the drug program, pointed toward free drugs as the prime motivation. Also, more than a few inmates felt that being in the program was a way of getting one over on the government for locking them up in the first place. That came up a few times. Today, of course, we look at this issue all very differently. But the practice of giving addicts drugs for research exists in the U.S. today, right now. I know of one program in Manhattan that gives out free crack. To me the only fundamental difference between that practice and Lexington is that people who volunteer for these crack studies are not in prison, but walking around freely, doing this on their own accord. That’s considered ethical now because a cure for crack addiction could really help people out, so that’s the deal society is willing to make for now. But who knows whether this will be considered ethical in 25 or 50 years? I think ethics are a moving target, and that’s part of why we made the film the way we did. We wanted it to exist as a record of its time, not a comment on the time. Luke often said our film would be used as text that would help generate discussion about research ethics. I really hope that’s the case.

KV: Why did recovered addicts volunteer in experiments which would put them back into the misery they know so well? What was their reward in return for the participation?

Luke Walden: Overall the reputation of the research program among the inmates at Lexington was very positive. Bernie Kolb, a volunteer patient we interviewed who worked as an aide in the drug research center remembers the researchers as caring and committed; “I liked it there because the doctors were trying to help addicts. My feeling about them was that they really came there to do some good.” Regardless of the researchers‘ intentions, however, is it undeniable that the primary motivation for participation was, as former test subject Edward Flowers remembers, “to get some drugs.” So there was always a long list of inmates eager to get high on narcotics for the duration of a research study, whether that was one day or one whole year. An added bonus was that until 1955 research subjects were paid for their participation in extra doses of their favorite drug. This is one practice that really got the institution in hot water when it was re-examined in the 1970s.

KV: Major US papers covered the research in Lexington from the 1930s onwards, yet no-one questioned whether drug testing on human guinea pigs was unethical. Why was so?

JP Olsen: I think the simplest way to explain why the media didn’t question Lexington in a negative way is that it wasn’t considered unethical to use prisoners for research until – at least – the mid-1960s. That’s not to say that somebody, somewhere wasn’t wondering to themselves about whether this was ethical or not. But neither Luke nor I ever ran across anything like that among the hundreds of newspaper and magazine stories we read during our research. And it’s clear that doctors did have ethical guidelines, so they did think about it, they just didn’t think about it in the way we do know. To get a sense of how differently people thought about giving drugs to drug addicts, in the 1930s and 40s Lexington only allowed white people in the program because the drug program was seen as a good thing, a desirable thing that should be afforded to whites only. That, I think, underscores just how differently this was thought of back then. I think the turning point in the thinking about research ethics in the US began to change in 1966 when a social worker named Peter Buxton questioned the Tuskegee syphilis experiments. In my opinion, and this is the opinion of some others who have looked at this, Buxton brought into question the whole way the U.S. Public Health Service did business then, particularly how it relates to what are now considered vulnerable populations such as prison inmates. That’s when changes in ethical thinking started happening around this issue. And of course, we’re talking about the late 1960s in America when many were rethinking basic assumptions about our society and openly challenging them.

Luke Walden: Medical research on prisoners was legal and common across America in the 1930s through the 1960s. At that time a common attitude held even by some prisoners was that by participating in research inmates were making a noble self-sacrifice, a repayment of their “debt to society.” This was especially true in the case of research that was obviously for the public good, such as research on malaria conducted on inmates in other prisons in the 1940s. For the doctors at Lexington, and evidently for the public at large, the quest to solve the puzzle of drug addiction was in the same category. The research was considered a worthwhile endeavor and the inmates participation as guinea pigs was considered a worthwhile sacrifice because it was unquestionably for the public good and would also eventually be for the good of the specific population involved — drug addicts themselves.

Essentially what we’re dealing with here is a story with no real bad guy, and to me it’s a really interesting example of the historical contingency of ethics in general. We’ve decided now that the practices of the ARC would be unethical today, and research on federal prisoners is no longer allowed. So in retrospect the ARC’s practices seem like they were unethical all along. But in fact, the ethical climate was so different then, and the program seemed to make so much sense to so many people, that even many of the former inmates of Lexington whom we interviewed still have no ethical problem with what went on there. So my view is that while we are glad this kind of research no longer happens in prisons it’s pretty hard to be too critical of the doctors who carried it out fifty years ago.

KV: The Narcotic Farm became a true meeting point for a number of great musicians. Is it true that some people not addicted to drugs volunteered to go to the Narco Farm just to be able to play and practise with top-class jazz artists?

JP Olsen: I first heard that from Phil Schaap, a very informed jazz radio host in New York who grew up with jazz musicians all around him. He spoke at length about this. He told me stories about people going there for exactly that reason. I heard these kinds of things from jazz musicians too, that people in the jazz life would show up at Lexington, some hoping to kick, some just looking for a bed, many of them expecting – deluded in their thinking or not – to sit in with one of the greatest jazz bands in the world at the time.

KV: Were there any positive outcomes of the research?

Luke Walden: Over its 40 years the Addiction Research Center at Lexington advanced major fundamental discoveries about the biology, psychology and pharmacology of addiction and addictive drugs. Researchers developed methods to measure the severity of drug dependence and the intensity of drug withdrawal. They theorized the existence of opiate receptors that heroin and morphine stimulate in the brain. They also put forth a theory of cues and conditioning to explain why relapse is so common among recovering addicts, a theory now integral in drug treatment programs. The research center demonstrated – for the first time – that alcohol withdrawal was a genuine physical condition and not a psychological delusion. They proved that barbiturates, once prescribed with little concern over their safety, were highly addictive and have a dangerous withdrawal syndrome and successfully recommended controls for medications that would have clearly caused widespread addiction and abuse if released on an unsuspecting public. In the mid-1970s, shortly before the lab was closed, Lexington’s drug research lab also pioneered buprenorphine, the current great pharmacologic hope to treat opiate addiction medically. But among the lab’s most important contributions is the idea that addiction is a chronic, relapsing disease. This was the reigning philosophy among Lexington’s researchers long before it became the accepted belief that it is today, at least in the US.

KV: How far has the understanding and research into drug addiction progressed since the Narcotic Farm closed in 1975?

Luke Walden: It’s difficult to assess and different people will give different answers. Nora Volkow, the head of the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) in the U.S., might say that with current advances in brain imaging and the science of genetics a biological cure for addiction is within reach. Former head of NIDA, Robert DuPont, on the other hand, thinks the government has been throwing money at researching this problem for 70 years and we still have no cure for addiction. The current NIDA budget is over a billion dollars per year and the obvious question to be asked is whether a billion dollars a year is money well spent or whether that money might not do more good if it went to woefully under-funded treatment programs that have already demonstrated success, such as 12-step programs. The obvious rebuttal to that question is that the research, including Lexington’s research, is what has yielded the detailed scientific understanding of addiction we have today, which is a long way from the fantasy that farm work can cure drug addiction.

KV: It may seem that one of the main reasons for the closure of the Narcotic Farm was triggered by the controversial LSD study between 1932 and 1972 on African-Americans suffering from syphilis. Was this the principle reason for closing it?

JP Olsen: I think more than anything Lexington closed because it cost a lot to operate and its “cure“ rate was poor. So the question became, why are we keeping this open? It costs a lot to operate, it’s not working that well, and other forms of treatment – methadone and therapeutic communities in particular – are doing as well or better in keeping people off heroin and doing it for much less. Also, culturally, by the late 1960s Lexington was totally out of touch with what was going on in terms of drug treatment. They were the old guard and they had old guard views, including the fact that they fought against federally funded methadone maintenance despite the fact they pioneered the use of methadone for detox. That’s part of it. They were old and in the way in the eyes of the new guard. But there is no doubt – despite what some from the institution will tell you even now – that the revelations of CIA money flowing through Lexington to test LSD on inmates to find who-knows-what, hurt the institution deeply. It hurt their standing in the eyes of their contemporaries.

Luke Walden: Just to clarify, the drug research at The Narcotic Farm in Lexington, Kentucky, and the Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male, which took place 500 miles away in Alabama, were completely separate and unrelated research projects. The one thing they have in common is that they were both conducted under the auspices of the U.S. Public Health Service. The similarities stop there, at least in our opinion. But these two things were joined in the public mind in large part because that’s the way the media portrayed Lexington when news about the CIA connection broke in 1975.

KV: The film appeared in TV stations across America since November 2008. What has been the response so far?

Luke Walden: By far the most impassioned response has been from people who are either in recovery from addiction themselves, have a friend or family member in recovery or who work as professionals in addiction treatment. In the US this is actually a very large population. We’ve shown the film in prisons and film festivals and colleges and on American TV and the general response is, “I can’t believe I’ve never heard about this place.“ Many former addicts have told us that they are grateful for the objective and sensitive way we portray the addicts in the film, neither as blameless victims nor monstrous dope fiends.
Several former inmates and staff members at the institution have gotten in touch to let us know that we got the story right, which is gratifying especially as getting it right meant taking a stand for historical objectivity that has been challenging for some. I think many people – including us as we began our research – might hear the broad outlines of the story and assume that the film will have a clearly critical point of view about the research program. However what we actually learned in our research simply didn’t justify that approach and so we decided to present the story as an objective history rather than an expose’. We want to leave it up to viewers to debate the ethics and reach their own conclusions. This approach has had its detractors. One public television programmer in the US told us that the film was “too balanced and objective for public TV.” We are glad it was aired nationally anyway and that we’ve had a chance to show it in London at LIDF and Raindance film festivals and are especially honored to have it shown at The Barbican.
The film will screen at the Radar Hamburg Film Festival in the first week of November and we hope to continue to get it out to audiences across Europe.

Katerina Vlckova talks to Gustav Hofer about ‘Suddenly, Last Winter’

KV: What prompted your decision to pick up a camera and make a documentary?

GH: When we started to make the doc we wanted to document a historic moment for Italy. We were optimistic that finally, with a centre-left government, Italy too will finally give some rights to same sex couples. We wanted to film that moment of hope for so many people. But with the ongoing discussion, the intrusion of the Vatican and the reporting of TV it became clearer day by day that things might not turn out as we thought. So instead of making a film about a step towards a more open and equal Italy it became a film about a defeat.

KV: Was it always your intention to use documentary film as a campaigning tool?

GH: We could not imagine that the film would get so much attention and that it would be able to speak to so many people. It was all above our expectations.

KV: Why the title ‘Suddenly, Last Winter’?

GH: There are two reasons: For us it was homage to Joseph L. Mankievicz film based on Tennessee Williams play “Suddenly, Last Summer”, a movie we both love very much, which actually is a film about homophobia.  On the other hand all this wave of homophobia hit us suddenly, during the winter 2007.

KV: Can you give us an idea of what sort of difficulties homosexual couples have to face in Italy? How does that compare to other countries from what you’ve heard or  experienced?

GH: The situation over the last few months has got worse. Almost daily we read about violence again gay men and women. So there is the physical and psychological difficulty. Many homosexuals in Italy don’t dare (or care) about coming out, because there is always an old aunt or uncle who they don’t want to shock. They are ashamed of telling anyone and say “It’s nobody’s business with whom I sleep”, pretending that being gay is just about sex and not about your identity. On the other side there is the legal discrimination which obviously you are not aware of until the moment you get into certain situations, like being refused to visit your partner in hospital, to decide about his treatments, questions of heritage, etc. Luca and me have been together for almost ten years, but for our country our relationship has never existed. To the State, Luca and me are total strangers who just happened to pay the phone bill together. It’s quite humiliating. That makes Italy one of the only EU countries which has no law for same sex couples. In almost all other countries there is some kind of recognition: gay marriage or civil unions. Even Albania is now discussing a law on gay marriage!

KV: If you were a politician and could draft a bill on gay rights, what would the perfect law look like?

GH: Give the same rights to all citizens to decide how they want to regulate their relationships, independently of whether they are straight or gay. Give the option.

KV: Would you say that obtaining rights for gay couples is just a question of time and campaigning or do you fear it could become a never-ending struggle?

GH: I think that history does not develop progressively but in circles. Italy probably was more open and progressive in the 70s when important rights like abortion or divorce were achieved. We are going through very conservative times where the Church is very strong because politics is very weak. We don’t have politicians who dare to oppose the dictates of the Vatican. If we don’t have strong parties which are clearly secular and don’t accept interference from the Church, things will not change in our country.

KV: What sort of reception has the film received to-date in Italy?

GH: This year we got a very important award for Italian cinema. We won the Nastro d’Argento for best documentary, it’s the award from the Italian film critics union. The reception has always been very enthusiastic; not only from a gay audience but even from Catholics who saw the film. We have received nice emails and compliments. Many of them said that watching the film made them understand how they have been used by the Church for their propaganda.

KV: What is interesting about this film is that combines two genres: a political documentary and a personal diary/human interest story. Could you say something about the decision to ‘cast’ yourselves. Did this seem a necessary and unavoidable condition?

GH: For me it was fundamental to make it personal, the story needed two faces to make people understand, that a law would make life better for people and that it is not an ideological question. I think that the personal is political and as a filmmaker I wanted to underline it. It was also a way to lighten up the mood on a topic which otherwise could be heavy.

KV: The film shows that even today certain groups within society face intimidation and exclusion in one way or another. Why do you think Italy appears to exhibit a greater intolerance to homosexuality than many other European nations?

GH: There are many reasons for it. One is, as I said, the Vatican. Another is the way especially TV is talking about homosexuals. But it is the tolerance level of homophobia which has got higher and so people feel that they have the right to discriminate, not only homosexuals but also immigrants, for example. With the Lega Nord we have an openly xenophobic and homophobic party within the government, which insults minorities continuously. So if the government can say certain things why should people not do the same?

KV: When you think of the suffragette movement in the early 20th century for example, women had to flight for equal rights for decades. Today, women hold top posts in politics and business – something unimaginable only half a century ago. Do you draw optimism from examples like this one?

GH: Actually the situation for women in Italy is not as rosy as you might think. We have very few women in high positions or in politics. On TV shows women are just there to seduce men, dancing almost naked. Italy is still today a patriarchal society run by men and especially old men sticking on their power. I hope that Italian women will soon start to protest about their situation and about how they are represented and that together with the gay movements they will become a movement of social and political change.

KV: You have said that before making this film you lived in a relatively safe urban ´microcosm´ surrounded by your open-minded relatives and friends. When did you first realise the extent of the intolerance around you?

GH: Lucky enough we lived in our microcosm! It wasn’t really fun hearing people say that you homosexuals are sick, perverts and paedophiles. But it was a big surprise for us to see that so many people still think that way or repeat what they hear on TV or in church.

KV: Are you optimistic about the ability for a documentary film to change society, particularly given the dominant role of television? How is this film being used within a broader campaign?

GH: I think the film should help Italians to see that on this issue we are talking about civil rights and nothing else and it could help to change the situation. The problem is that no national TV station will broadcast it as it is too critical about politics, the Church and the media. “Suddenly, Last Winter” will not be on Italian public TV any time soon. If it happens it would be a sign that Italy has changed. So we will continue to show it around the country with the help of local cinema owners, cultural associations and motivated people. Thanks to doing this we meet other Italians all over the country, those who don’t agree with what is going on and who show a great deal of solidarity.

KV: In the film, you have expressed what most Italians would probably call, radical views on religion and the Vatican. Has this caused you any particular problems or made life difficult for you in any way?

GH: We did not make a film against Catholics but against the invasion of the Vatican in internal Italian affairs. Of course, without all the criticism, I am sure that the documentary would have been broadcasted.

KV: Italian film distributors have been, up to this point, reluctant to pick up the film. Now that you have had international success at numerous film festivals across Europe, do you believe this might change?

GH: Unfortunately I don’t think so. It is hard anyway to get distribution for a documentary and of course it is even harder for a film which does not please either the left nor the right.

KV: What do you plan next – more films, more campaigns, or other forms of political engagement?

GH: About that issue we have different points of view.

Luca: I’m quite worried about the idea of making a second film, maybe I will go back to my previous life as a film critic. We’ll see.

Gustav: We will make another film and we will keep on asking for our rights.

Photo: zacgoldsmith.com

Coming up is our first DocSpot screening which features Pig Business. Kate Vlckova talks to Zac Goldsmith about raising people’s awareness on the subject of food-processing and animal welfare as well as his fascination with the film.

Kate Vlckova: Pig Business is a shocking, but, at the same time, revealing film. It certainly provokes discussion and makes one think about where meat in our supermarkets comes from, how it is processed and how much pollution factory farming meat production affects our environment.  How can we use films like Pig Business to engage the public in discussion? It must be extremely difficult coming across indifference, corporate greed and comfortable mass consumption?

KV: We have seen celebrity chefs launching nationwide media campaigns drawing the public’s attention to animal welfare. To what extent would you say this film is different?

ZG: I love it that celebrity chefs are raising the issue of animal welfare and mobilising lots of people, and that’s part of the story. What this film does very effectively is show that when we talk about cheap food it’s not actually cheap. We pay for it in a number of different ways. If a company is producing food but exhausting and polluting the environment the taxpayer pays for that. The food is then paid for again over the counter. So the only reason it’s cheap is because we pay twice for it. That’s not the case with more localised, organic agriculture so there is a kind of indirect subsidy there. The film raises this issue and I think that is what makes it different. There is another thing that makes the film different. It shows there is unfairness in the system. Take Britain, we have relatively high animal welfare standards and what we’re saying to our farmers is ‘you have to adhere to these standards but we’re still going to buy junk from the world’s markets’. The fact is that we are really just hampering our own farmers. Either we have to say ‘we’re not going to have high standards in this country’, which I don’t think anyone wants, or we have to say ‘we’re going to keep the standards that we have here but we’re going to impose the same standards on products we buy from abroad.’  That is what I’d like to see happen.

KV: Supposing the Conservative Party comes to power, do you have an agenda on how to put what you’ve just talked about into practice? The EU works as a single market and it is difficult to stop all cheap imports from countries where welfare standards are not adhered to. What can we do?

ZG: There are things that we can do immediately and there are things that may take a bit longer. We can, for example, require honest labels on food produce. The labelling regime in this country is mad. Products look like they had been produced in Britain, but in fact they may have been produced in other countries. The result is that consumers are given a false choice and they are being misled. An honest labelling campaign is something we [the Conservatives] are doing and something we would put into practice if we won the next election. We also need to start to make better use of public money. We spend about £2 billion a year on food for schools and hospitals and instead of buying the cheapest junk on the world’s markets we could invest the money in sustainable local producers. We would be pouring money into the rural economy, we would be cutting out our use of oil because food would be travelling shorter distances, and we would be giving children and patients much better quality food. That can be done even within existing rules.

There are two other things that we have to do but we are not there yet. First, we must recognise that there is an imbalance of power. Supermarkets control so much of the market and companies like Smithfield absolutely dominate. In my view, the consumer and the small farmer have no bargaining power, which is why the government needs to step in and say: ‘we’re going to balance the market’. That requires strength, which at the moment is lacking.

KV: The Ecologist magazine has set up its own film unit and it intends to make documentaries about some of your journalistic work. Would you let us know why it was set up and how you intend to use the unit most effectively?

ZG: At the moment we are teaming up with lots of different people but we will make use of films that are being made by others. So, for example, if this film (Pig Business) is turned into a 5 or 10-minute film suitable for the Internet we’d put it up on our site and we’d promote it as heavily as we could. I think there are lots of young people out there with good ideas but have no real way of breaking into this world, so we want to encourage competitions and get people to make films for us. For example, what is progress? What is cheap food? Is cheap food really cheap? These are the kinds of issues which need to be addressed. We want to create some very exciting competitions which will hopefully draw in lots of talent, and out of that we hope to be able to find good, reliable long-term partners. There is a huge amount of work that can be done on the Internet. I am sure you will remember ‘The Meatrix’, an extraordinary cartoon made by an American NGO looking at the story of food production. It was downloaded and viewed by 20 to 30 million people. I think there are other people out there with the same skills who can put these incredibly important issues into a format the mass market can understand.

KV: What are your views on animal welfare in intensive farming is the situation as hopeless as it seems?

ZG: It’s difficult, as we’ve got these enormous businesses with incredible power. We see that they provide money for politicians all around the world and they are very good at influencing policy. Our politics has been contaminated. The regulatory system is very weak and easily manipulated. That really is a core problem that we have to deal with, but the good news is that people are waking up. There are lots of incredible campaigns, some of them are grassroots, others are more systemic campaigns, and they create a change in food policy. The consumer is becoming more and more aware of where we are, what’s wrong with where we are and where we need to go. I think it will happen. We are going to move in the right direction but the question is how long is it going to take?

KV: Perhaps catastrophic pandemics, possibly swine flu, could wake people up?

ZG: I think it’s a series of problems, including perhaps swine flu, that will force us to rethink the modern global food economy. Right now people don’t take the issue of food security very seriously, but I think that will change. If climate predictions are accurate, if even the most conservative ones are accurate, we are going to have real problems. The world’s breadbaskets are all shrinking and serious water problems affect many countries. All these issues are combining with a rising population and the possibility that we are going to run out of oil at some point – which is obviously the key for getting food from one side of the world to the other. All this adds to our problem with food security.

Food security will become the defining issue in relation to food policies and after that we are going to have to do some serious re-thinking. One of the things we will have to do is to work out how to support our domestic, small scale, diverse family farmers who, at the moment, are going out of business. On top of this young people are not interested in getting into farming because they see no future in it and that has to change.

KV: It is very disappointing that the corporate takeover of the meat industry is accelerating. Take North Carolina, for example, where 27,000 independent family pig farmers became 2,200 pig factories. Our current situation seems insolvable when people are demanding more food in a more comfortable way.

ZG: I agree with that but there is a shift at the same time. The trends at the moment are all heading in the wrong direction, but there is something happening.  There is a resurgence of local food campaigns; school farms are being built; farmers’ markets are becoming more popular; the local food sector is growing, not just here but in other countries as well.

And something bigger than that is happening and this is where the debate is changing. For example, a few months ago a report was released by UNEP (United Nations of Environment Programme), UNESCO and the World Bank. They now accept that the small diverse traditional farm is more productive in terms of the land use than big intensive industrial monocultures. They are less productive in terms of labour because they require more people but that’s not a bad thing given there are so many people without jobs. For 50 years they have been pushing the opposite, so this suggests real U-turn.

KV: Can I just briefly touch on the subject of Smithfield expanding in the UK market? What can be done to avoid it? Can such a situation be avoided at all? In the film, we have seen Smithfield also taking their operations to Central & Eastern Europe, in particular to Poland and Romania.

ZG: The key is to protect the standards we have here and increase them. We need to become much tougher. We should be able to say that if imports don’t meet our standards we won’t accept them. That technically is not legal under the EU law but my view is that if the law makes common sense a crime then it is the law that should change not common sense. I hope the Conservative party, once we have won the election, will be strong enough to do that. It’s not a manifesto commitment but I will do what I can to ensure that it becomes a commitment. If we want our families to survive, if we want animal welfare standards to be maintained, and most people do, then that’s what we have to do.

KV: What do you think is the most effective model to satisfy both global economic and environmental demands?

ZG: I think small farming in a localised economy is the answer. It’s more productive per unit of land; it’s good in terms of creating jobs and livelihoods and in terms of protecting the environment. It is clear that there is a difference between sustainable agriculture and non-sustainable agriculture. The model that we embrace has to be one that does not exhaust its own base. It can’t exhaust the soils, it can’t exhaust knowledge and it can’t exhaust water. If it does then it is the wrong agricultural model.

KV: Which country in Europe, or internationally, in your opinion, pursues high standards of meat production and how can we learn from them?

ZG: There are pockets of wonderful examples all around Europe, many wonderful producers. In terms of international standards, none of the countries, I think, are where we need to be. I think, Britain is not in a bad shape, but we need to go much further. The reality is our own standards are already being undermined by imports and that’s where we have to start. But I think there is a lot to be said for British agriculture, we have great farmers and our produce is often very good quality. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t improve our standards – we should – that’s what people want but we can’t do that unless we address the unfairness of the system allowing local farmers to be out competed by cheap imports of much lower standard.

David Teague. Photo by Cattleya Katie Jaruthavee

In Intifada NYC David Teague films a controversy around opening the United States’ first public Arabic language school in Brooklyn. He talks to Kamila Kuc about the perception of Islam in New York after the 9/11, the power of media and how the film exposes racism and xenophobia in some Americans.

Kamila Kuc: Your film tells a story of Khalil Gibran International Academy – the first public Arabic language school opened in Brooklyn in 2007. Needless to say, the issue caused a lot of controversy in America. Why attracted you to the subject?

David Teague: At first, the announcement of the school was only mentioned in our local papers in New York. The school was very near my apartment in Brooklyn so I had heard about it but didn’t think too much of it– we have a number of dual language schools here and friends of mine have taught at them so it wasn’t something out of the ordinary. But then I turned on CNN one day and was shocked to see that the school had become the center of this massive controversy and that people were saying it would teach Islam and could create terrorists. What compelled me to pick up my camera was the way the news media treated the issue. When the attacks on the school were made, most of the media didn’t do any real investigative reporting. If they had, they would have found that the school was clearly a regular public school that also focussed on teaching a foreign language. Instead, the issue was shrilly presented as a “he said / she said” fight as if whether the school was going to be a terrorist incubator was a valid debate. So I wanted to make a film that provided a journalistic, extremely factual account as an antidote to how CNN, Fox News, and others handled it.

KK: Many Americans were opposed to the idea of opening the school, as they believed that the teaching of Arabic culture is a façade for encouraging terrorism… What are your thoughts on the American Islamophobia?

DT: After an event as traumatic as 9/11, stereotypes and prejudices can become more prevalent and pernicious. There are certainly parts of the US where the only experience people have with Islam comes from movies or the internet where stereotypes and gross misconceptions are rampant. In popular culture, people are used to seeing Arabs with bombs strapped to them, and most people who speak Arabic in movies and TV are plotting to assassinate the president or blow up Los Angeles. People start to conflate the actions of a specific group like Al-Qaeda with an entire religious or ethnic group. In the film, one young Muslim woman talks about how after 9/11 someone on the street yelled to her: “Go back to your country, Osama bin Laden!” To combat this perception, I think that persuasive argument is a start but personal experience has the strongest impact. The more Muslims and non-Muslims work together, live together, learn together and learn from each other, the more we will see prejudices fade over time. Education and experience have the potential to change attitudes, but the reality is that this is a very slow, gradual, even generational process.

KK: The whole film exposes a high degree of racism and xenophobia in the US and it seems to be more about the state of mind of the Americans’ than anything else. Was that your intention?

DT: It’s important to keep in mind that the film is about the state of mind of some Americans, and how those views were taken seriously and amplified by the media. The film does not argue that Americans in general are xenophobic, and in fact argues that the varying reactions to the school show that Americans are far more diverse and complicated than that. While the school provoked hostile attacks from some people, it was welcomed and embraced by others. The bigger issue is that the establishment media in the United States does not reflect this diversity and complexity at all. Most of our news outlets, especially cable TV news, are dangerously irresponsible. For many people who don’t have the time, interest, or ability to seek out news beyond channels like CNN or Fox News, the information about the world that informs their opinions is simplistic, often wrong, and sensationalized. This in turn spreads rumors, untruths, and fear. After something like 9/11, this fear can easily find an outlet in prejudice. I think the film captures this process at a particularly raw moment in our history.

KK: There is a brilliant moment in the film, when a TV presenter says that America indeed needs Arabic schools because Americans need to know the language of the people they fight with…Is this a commonly shared view?

DT: This is Glenn Beck, who is a very successful conservative TV and radio personality in the US. He’s a very polarizing figure, and while he has programs on “news” channels like CNN Headline News, I would classify him more as an influential entertainer in the style of Ann Coulter. But even outside of the extremism of his rhetoric, I do think that with the US’s bigger footprint in the Middle East over the last eight years, much of it military, the idea of learning Arabic is suddenly more popular. Because the US is a strongly monolingual culture, language learning is usually thought of in terms of a particular need, often for a career choice. I interviewed a number of parents who wanted to send their children to the Khalil Gibran school because they felt learning Arabic would help their children get a higher paying job, for example, as a military translator. So our foreign policy in the Middle East has certainly made learning Arabic more attractive to people.

KK: Your film also highlights the power of media manipulation and people’s lack of resistance towards being brainwashed. Why do you think this happens in America to such a degree?

DT: I think it happens everywhere, but there is an especially strong urge in American media to entertain more than to present factual news or thorough analysis. Much of this is due to the profit motive of the news corporations, so sensational stories that create and embellish conflicts to keep an audience’s attention rule the airwaves. In this case, the film looks at how ratings-hungry news outlets exploited post-9/11 fears by running stories like “a terrorist public school.” Instead of reporting, the media created a culture war and fashioned two sides to fight it out for the viewers’ outrage and amusement. I wanted the documentary to look this head on, to examine the way it works and to show the consequences. I think one reason the Khalil Gibran controversy got so out of hand is that a story about a taxpayer funded terrorist school for sixth graders is really going to grab people’s attention. So as marketing for your TV show, it’s a slam dunk. It’s unfortunately this kind of criteria that decides what gets air time and how the stories are told. I’ll add that it is no accident that our publicly funded TV channel, PBS, provides the most thoughtful and serious news of any major outlet on television.

KK: Interestingly, Intifada NYC highlights conflict between Arabs and Jews – the issue which constitutes the subject of many films at this year’s LIDF. You portray a few Jews who supported opening of the school and who encourage multiculturalism. How were they perceived by other Jews? Has this caused any tension among them?

DT: I think the film demonstrates something very important here –  that the real divisions between people are not ethnic or even religious, but are political. So in the film you have Jews who support Palestinian causes, you have right wing Jews who argue for an American “national existence” based on “Western values”, you have Jews who support Zionism AND the Arabic language school. So indeed, there is certainly tension between different Jews in this documentary, because the lines are drawn politically right though identity. There is a moment in the film where one of the school’s critics condemns what he calls “Jews who claim to be Jews”. I think what he is saying is that to be truly Jewish requires allegiance to a certain ideology. I think what we see in the film questions this notion.

KK: Intifada NYC follows a battle of the school’s principal, Debbie Almontaser, who after being accused of promoting terrorism (through printing T-shirts ‘Intifada NYC’) was forced to resign. Needless to say, she did not print these shirts or know about them before the controversy…She refused to give up and the battle still continues…What do you think it is going to happen?

DT: Debbie Almontaser’s ‘freedom of speech’ court case has not been finally decided yet, so everyone is waiting for that decision. Her case is as interesting as it is complicated: a tabloid newspaper in New York published a misleading article that connected her with a T-shirt reading “Intifada NYC” even though she had actually never seen the shirts and had nothing to do with their creation. Almontaser was forced to resign as principal because of this and the outrage it provoked. After that, she filed a ‘freedom of speech’ lawsuit against the Department of Education and attempted to get her job back. The Court of Appeals denied the request for her to become principal again, but did say that the ‘freedom of speech’ claim should be re-examined by the lower court. As of now, that case is still pending. There’s no way to know when or how the lower court will rule, but Almontaser has continued on by speaking out frequently at events, conferences and schools about her experience.

KK: Arab Women Active in the Arts and Media organisation depicted in the film was painted as an extremist Muslim organisation…Intifada NYC exposes a lot  of insecurities and paranoia in America in general, especially after the 9/11. Many Americans told me that the city has changed ever since the attack. Would you agree? And what do you think has changed the most?

DT: Even though it has been almost eight years since the shock of the attacks, it’s very hard to say what the long-term effects will be. I’ll just say this– New York City is constantly and rapidly evolving, a place that somehow, remarkably, keeps working and sputtering forward. The city’s incredible diversity of peoples and cultures is a big reason for this. Right after the attacks, the city did feel different and displayed traits it usually doesn’t: fearful, weary, sobered. But I don’t think this was a permanent condition and honestly not something the city dwells on too much now.

KK: Can you tell us more about the music you used in the film?

DT: For the music, I worked with composer Richard Marriott, who beautifully scored my last film “Love Suicides”. Richard has an incredible musical vocabulary and can shift effortlessly from Western classical to Middle Eastern and Asian styles. Besides his own compositions, mostly performed by a string quartet, he also brought in Amir ElSaffar, a fantastic Iraqi-American trumpeter, and his Two Rivers ensemble, to riff on some of their own pieces under Richard’s direction. We wanted the score to reflect the cross-cultural themes of the film, as well as the diversity of Brooklyn, and the mix of jazz, classical strings, and Middle Eastern rhythms brought this out.

Gianfranco Pannone’s Red Sunrise was bound to be controversial in Italy. Considered offensive by the Italy’s Berlusconian Minister of Culture, the film had a little distribution so far.  In this interview the director talks to Kamila Kuc about the Red Brigades and why he decided to make this film now.

Kamila Kuc: Red Sunrise is an extremely fascinating and important documentary about one of the most dangerous terrorist organisations in the European history – Red Brigade, founded in 1969 by Renato Curcio and Roberto Franceschini in Reggio Emilia (Italy’s reddest district). Why did you decide to make this film now?

Gianfranco Pannone: For a long time Giovanni Fasanella, with whom I share the credits of Red Sunrise, and myself wanted to make this film. The reason cannot be easily explained but basically, we believe that there is still much to be told about the origins of the Red Brigades. In Italy, for too long we have been led to believe they came from Mars, while, alas, they are part of our left-wing family picture book. That’s why we thought of Reggio Emilia, the reddest city of Italy, the city of Communism, with a human face and the one that resisted Nazism. To us making this film meant breaking a taboo.

KK: How long did it take you to research the material for the film and shoot?

GP: The work on the film has taken very long, as we wanted to do proper research, look for appropriate witnesses and approach them one by one. This was the most time-consuming part, as we believe that a documentary only begins to live its own life when you gain the trust of your subjects. And of course, not all Reggio militants and former militants were waiting for us with open arms. People were not sure whether we were really doing what we claimed we were and until the very end we were not certain we could begin shooting.

The shooting took just over four weeks all together. The editing, however, lasted a few months, perhaps a little more than expected. We wanted to make sure that we are understood and so are our subjects, who often talk about their fathers and other family members. So we experimented with the form until Erika Manoni, the editor, Giovanni and myself, found a way to present it all, which we hope does not affect the truth of the testimonies.

KK: Most of men represented in the film now hold safe positions working for local councils etc. Some of them, on the other hand, ‘suffer’ from some kind of amnesia and ‘really cannot remember’ what happened then. These also remain anonymous in your film…

GP: Yes, in Italy most of the 70s generation seems to be suffering from amnesia. Or rather, prefers not to remember. On the other hand, many young and active in those years, or close to the ’68, are now occupying positions of power in politics, press, culture, cinema… and prefer to forget what’s most unspeakable about those years… Why unspeakable? Because around the Red Brigades there was much more consensus  than they want us to believe there was. A dear friend of mine, who was no terrorist, told me that the day of the kidnapping of Aldo Moro, he toasted and drank champagne with some of his companions, even though five policemen had been killed in the ambush!

KK: Next to films such as Baerbet Schroder’s Terror’s Advocate (2007), Red Sunrise constitutes a great contribution to our understanding of one of the most complicated moments in European history. I feel that the complexities of the 60s and 70s terrorist groups, such as Red Brigade or Baader-Meinhoff are yet to be fully unravelled. Would you agree?

GP: The truth is that in Italy many wounds dating back to the 70s are still bleeding.   And the ones who tried to heal these wounds were isolated, marginalised within the limits of bullying. Terrorism in Italy is a complex story, but this shouldn’t cause us to give up. On the contrary, I think that my generation, who are now forty, and those who follow, should rebel against this regime of silence which is common to the right and the left.

KK: The period between the late 1960s and 1980s was a dark period in Italian history, with many bombings and murders, later attributed to far-right, far-left and secret services’ actions. At that time, in 1975, one of the most prolific Italian filmmakers and a socio-political activist, Pier Paolo Pasolini, was brutally murdered for being a ‘dirty Communist.’ I recently found out that three years ago Pasolini’s murder case had been re-opened as there has been new evidence discovered. It seems that this part of history is very much still alive in Italy…

GP: Much has been said on Pasolini, perhaps too much, but one thing is certain, he was not killed by a single person, namely the young Pelosi, but by a group. Why was this truth kept hidden? Pasolini’s statements were uncomfortable for many, a recently published book insinuates a connection between his death and his last unfinished novel Petrolio (Oil), where he refers clearly to men of power in “flesh and blood”. Weather it is true or not, the death of Pasolini, the most unconventional of our intellectuals, remains one of the many, too many, mysteries of the 70s, like Piazza Fontana massacre in Milan in 1969, or the railway station of Bologna in 1980, which have a  fascist matrix. But generally, there was a terror climate, a civil war violence and not knowing what really happened, I think that is simply unbearable!

KK: The Red Brigade members represented in the film were imprisoned for almost 20 years and most of them have not visited Reggio Emilia since the 70s. For some of them, like Tonino, this brings back bad memories, as after 30 years he still finds it difficult to deal with the consequences of the armed struggle he was involved in…This moment in the film seems quite uncomfortable for the rest of the group as well as the viewer…

GP: The bitter tears of Tonino Loris Paroli, a former Red brigadist who has given his testimony, seem selfish, because he weeps for a battle companion who was killed by his mates for being a traitor. In fact, I think that his crying is also the defeat of a whole generation who believed in armed struggle. Yes, this crying embarrasses all comrades at the table, both the former terrorists and those who were not involved in any undergoround activities, because it weighs on their conscience, as they have not yet come to terms with those years. And what has disturbed some conformists is simply that all five of the diners seem to be in the same boat, revolutionaries or reformists it does not matter. One day a friend told me that Red Sunrise is the funeral of the entire left, not only of the Red Brigades. Perhaps so… And I say this with regret.

KK: Can you tell us more about the band that features in the film?

GP: The Offlaga Disco Pax is a group from Reggio Emilia, this is also why I have chosen them; they are loved by young people, from both the north and the south of Italy. One day a young friend suggested them and, once contacted, it seemed interesting to give the group the role of chorus. The chorus of a generation who, like me, just barely brushed the seventies or heard about those years from older brothers. An affectionate chorus, but distant from the myth of “The Red Sunrise”.

KK: These black and white photos at the end of the film are very powerful… I pressume these are of victims murdered by the Red Brigade…

GP: Indded. The photos that follow one another at the end of the film portray lawyers, journalists, workers, politicians murdered by the Red Brigade. To Fasanella and myself it seemed necessary to establish our distance from some of the witnesses that we interviewed during the shooting and that sometimes justified their choice to be violent. We did it by choosing a limited but highly representative number of those killed from the seventies til the present day by the hands of leftist terrorism.

KK: Have you screened the documentary in Italy yet and if so, what was the government and general public’s reaction?  Are you afraid of any reactions from the Italian authorities?

GP: In Italy, Red Sunrise was distributed as a limited number of copies both theatrically as well as on home video. We paid a high price! After the intervention of the Minister of Culture, a Berlusconian, on the eve of the Locarno film festival, little by little we lost all the distribution opportunities, many theatres in the official circuit, and the public TV deal… You know why? Nobody wanted to annoy the Minister, who   considered our film offensive and against the memory of the victims of terrorism and their families. As you know, Italian cinema survives largely with public funding. The fact is that most of the critics and the audience, especially that of the province, reacted well and the film is still circulating in the theatres, in particular in the art-house cinemas, often with the participation of Fasanella and/or myself.

No, I am not afraid, although I admit that at present I feel somewhat ‘isolated’, bewildered. And not only because of the interference of politics, but due to the silence of some colleagues, that have not shown any solidarity towards Fasanella and myself. In the world of Italian cinema there is a lot of frustration that surprises many people, as censorship has been replaced by self-censorship. Before making a courageous film, many directors ask themselves whether it is convenient or not. They chose a subject, think it over and often decide to explore more innocuous themes. In short, there is little courage and it is a real miracle that a film like Gomorra has been made. Don’t you think?

To read what Roberto Purvis, independent filmmaker and documentarist, says about Red Sunrise, click here.

Roberto Purvis is most well known for his documentary Walking with Pasolini (British Film Institute) and his work with Noam Chomsky. LIDF invited Roberto to join our post-screening panel discussion on Gianfranco Pannone’s Red Sunrise, which screens on Wednsesday 1 April, 21:00 at Curzon Soho. In this interview, the director talks to Kamila Kuc about his reaction to Red Sunrise and his new film about Pier Paolo Pasolini

Kamila Kuc: How would you best describe Red Sunrise?

Roberto Purvis: The documentary Red Sunrise is an attempt to have former Red Brigade members reflect on their decisions, actions and logic in forming the group. There is always so much one can do on the topic of “terrorism” in Italy, and understanding the former members’ logic in reacting to the betrayal of the PCI was interesting to hear as an observer to their informal interactions. Their struggle, as we know now, was in vain as Italian sovereignty was already lost upon its defeat in WWII and under absolute control of the US. They were fighting a losing battle from the onset, as modern day Italy shows us today.

It was encouraging that the documentary brought up the Italian embrace of consumerism, and the PCI [Italian Communist Party] attempt to form some rapport with the corrupt US client party the Christian Democrats. However, interestingly and blaringly absent, whether by their own volition or directorial choice, was the notion that the Red Brigade organization was manipulated by the secret services as their movement attributed to discrediting the left in the eyes of the Italian electorate. I believe Franceschini [Alberto, one of the founders of Red Brigade] has been the only member to speak about such a concept and its probability. Many members refuse to entertain the thought, and understandably so. It would be crushing to know that your principles were used against you and the years in jail were all in vain, all for the benefit of those you were supposedly fighting against. Playing into your enemies’ hands is a timeless concept that continues even today – i.e. “terrorists” reinforcing US foreign policy. Makes you wonder who is on whose side in any conflict really.

“Left-wing” terrorism was a reaction to the PCI betrayal, the Christian Democrats corruption and subservience to US interests (NATO), and the secret war the government lead against its own citizens in supporting right-wing terror. What happened in Italy from post-war to the era of the Years of Lead (and even today) was a direct result of US foreign policy and control. The PCI was never to govern at the national level as dictated by National Security Council Memorandum 1. Means to halt the PCI electoral rise in the late 1960s and into the 1970s became a dire mission for the US, thus the US “supported and sanctioned” state terrorism that began in 1969. For this reason, in essence, the Red Brigades were just another pawn in protecting US interests, although indirectly and unintentional on the part of the Brigatisti.

KK: Your new film is about Pier Paolo Pasolini and the subject is very much related to Red Sunrise…

RP: Yes, that is what I am working on now. My next film is going to raise these topics and challenge many notions not readily spoken about in any debate. Incorporating Pasolini and his last film Salò or the 120 Day of Sodom will be a challenging, but it will offer an interesting story line to the focus of the film.

KK: Tell us more about the film’s production. You chose Patrick Hazard, the LIDF Director, for your UK producer…

RP: The production of the film is essentially an EU project with US participation. Yes, the UK producer is Patrick Hazard, Director of the London International Documentary Festival. He was approached via the US producer who has signed on recently, Yaron Schwartzman. I met an associate of the LIDF Michael Gibson in the US, who in turn contacted Patrick. Given Patrick’s interest in not only the subject matter of US sponsored terrorism, but in the Pasolini angle as well was of extreme interest to me. Patrick has a great knowledge of international dynamics and has a grasp of Italian history. He was a perfect person to fill the role of Executive Producer.

Premiere Heure, the French producers, have obtained Capa TV’s support, which is a tremendous contribution to the direction and success of the documentary. Difficult to obtain is an Italian component. I have spent time speaking to producers and filmmakers in Rome and there hasn’t been any response, which is not surprising. It is very indicative of Italy’s current socio-political situation. Very sad…

KK: Tell us more about your interest in Pasolini…When was the first time you saw Salò?

RP: Pasolini was the most outspoken critic of the “democratic regime of consumerism” that was destroying Italy. He actually had the means to talk about it on a national platform, and the artistic means of raising these points in films, writings, poems, etc. His politics influenced me tremendously at a young age, but unfortunately after I finished high school. The anger and frustration I felt as a teenager was vented in music as school was torturous for me, and it was punk music precisely that had a great impact upon my teenage years. In the US, no one spoke out against what was being taught. I was labelled a communist, a ‘pinko.’ I was threatened with being shot by fellow students, etc. all to the amusement of my history teacher. And this was New York. In no way do I adhere to the false stereotype that New York is a bastion of liberalism and openness. It was very isolating to someone who actually thought about issues and their relevance.

I remember seeing Salò the first time in New York. I was 19 and with a friend of mine looking for anything Italian to watch. I heard of Pasolini (I saw Mamma Roma) and the cover looked interesting. Well, I wasn’t prepared for what I was about to see. I couldn’t eat for a week and my libido as a 19-year old was reduced to nothing in a matter of two hours. I laugh now because I didn’t understand immediately what I saw. But I watched it again and did research on the film, and it changed my life forever. I suddenly did not feel alone. It is very liberating, but also destabilizing because suddenly your belief system collapses. Mind you, I had a hard time letting go of the education and belief system that was drilled into my head, even in its subtleness. That’s the efficiency of a US education.

Pasolini helped me realize that there were others who thought outside the box of what was deemed “normal” in any political or social discourse. Being an Italian – American and identifying with an Italian like Pasolini, was monumental as well. It gave me more of an identity and allowed me to embrace my heritage in a quite fanatical way, thinking “this was Italy”. That was until I moved to Italy upon finishing high school and witnessed first hand how Italians betrayed their identity and history for anything American. And they’ve become progressively worse over the years, which has be attributed to TV, film, Berlusconi, etc., but I will not go into that now.

KK: You previously worked with Noam Chomsky and he will also feature in your new documentary…

RP: Chomsky entered my life much later. I remember speaking my mind (as I did to anyone and anywhere I could), while living in Stockholm over a decade ago. A friend from Australia just handed me a book Chomsky wrote and since then, I’ve become enveloped in his writings and I espouse his views. As if foreshadowing my future, I would speak out and challenge what was being taught at Johns Hopkins (where I received my Master of Arts in International Affairs) with concepts raised by Chomsky, only to find out Chomsky already wrote about them, and obviously in a more coherent and organized manner.

Since then we’ve developed a working relationship in that he participated in my last documentary Walking with Pasolini I did for the British Film Institute, and he is a mentor of mine as I am writing a book on NSC 1 – National Security Council Memorandum 1 I just spoke about regarding the first covert CIA operation which took place in Italy. Chomsky will be fundamental in my next documentary on Pasolini, as his views will not only be pinnacle, but will bridge the film’s concepts brilliantly.

KK: Pasolini was brutally murdered by a young hustler. What’s your theory on it?

RB: I cannot speculate on Pasolini’s death. Without any secret files from the CIA or SISMI/SISDE (Italian secret services) anything would be conspiratorial. However, I do accept the probability Pasolini was murdered by more than one person, and the investigation on his death was mismanaged and thwarted purposely by the State. Pasolini spoke out against what was happening, and even alluded to “secret armies” in Italy that worked with NATO. People thought him out of his mind for making such statements, but on August 2, 1990 then Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti outed and confirmed in front of Parliament the existence of NATO secret armies in every Western European country. In Italy, it was called GLADIO. Their objective was to discredit the left by any means and not halt a Warsaw Pact invasion as originally orchestrated. Pasolini was right. He was eliminated. That is not a stretch. It is probable. Unfortunately Andreotti mentioned this the day after US ally Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait and the international press was occupied in reporting how such a dictator could carry out such an anti-democratic attack on a sovereign country. The ironies and contradictions are beyond words.

KK: Pasolini’s murder investigation was re-opened 3 years ago…

RP: Walter Veltroni, the former mayor of Rome, requested the investigation into Pasolini’s death to be re-opened. This was June 20, 2007. Since then, a self-proclaimed “neo-fascist” center-right mayor has entered office and I do not know what has happened to the new investigation, if there ever was one. Given the new mayor’s supporters greeted him at City Hall with the fascist salute and cheers of “Duce, Duce”, I do not believe it will go anywhere. No. Something tells me it won’t.

KK: Why do you want to continue making political documentaries?

RB: To keep sane…

To read our interview with director of Red Sunrise, Gianfranco Pannone, click here.

For six months Alexandru Solomon followed five drivers in Bucharest, sat in their cars with them, listened and filmed them driving around this busy city. But Apocalypse on Wheels is not really a film about the traffic. The director talks to Kamila Kuc about cars, consumerism and contemporary society in Romania

Kamila Kuc: The film begins with some wonderfully experimental camera angles and then you join various characters in their cars for a hectic drive around Bucharest. After the first half an hour I was sick of this whole traffic business in Bucharest…

Alexandru Solomon: I wanted from the start to convey this claustrophobic feeling, because driving forces us to spend so much time alone in this capsule that is the car. So I didn’t want to get out of the car for 52 minutes, except for the beginning and the end. It was a tough decision; because of course this would set up a certain limit (you don’t get too much of the context of traffic in Bucharest) and a certain risk: maybe some viewers would get bored. I have followed my characters, or, let’s call them companions, for about four months, and of course this was a decision. As an element of contrast, I wanted the film to start with this crane shot, above the city, suggesting somehow that this world has completely turned upside-down.

KK: Yes, it worked perfect… In Apocalypse on Wheels traffic is not just about crowded streets and cars…It is about people and their attitude towards each other. Were you aiming at constructing a greater metaphor of a contemporary Romanian society.

AS: Sure. This is not a film about cars and traffic. I think traffic is a metaphor for a society, it shows how people interact, how they negotiate their common space, the public space, but also how does a society manage to regulate this interaction, through law and social values. Traffic in Bucharest shows perfectly that human interaction in our society is distorted, that usually individuals don’t care too much for the lives of others, that law has little authority.

Of course, the film is intentionally a sort of moral fable, that’s where the chapters come from. On the other hand, through the character of the delivery boy, I think one can understand that – in a chaotic environment, with poor resources – we are all conditioned to act not against the law and the others, but maybe outside the law and taking advantage of the others.

KK: Traffic is an inherent part of a city life; one thinks of a famous traffic in Naples or Rome. What effects does it have on you? What does it turn you into?

AS: I’m as nervous as any other driver in this city, I just try and control more. What is very bizarre in these circumstances, is that your lowest instincts surface and you feel that driving around becomes a life and death problem. I have seen apparently decent people, getting out from their cars in their tie-and-suit and starting to hit each other. You don’t argue with the one next to you in the car, that one is part of the „team”. But all the others are your enemies and you start hating them.

KK: One of the drivers says ‘This city turns you into a wreck’ and we learn that there are 130,000 new cars in Romania each year and that every 1 in 3 car accidents in Romania ends in death… I have not even seen any bikes in the film, just cars all over… A Peru born mother states that in the past few years the country witnessed a greater consumption for cars and cigarettes. Another man mentions that few years back many shops would not even open by 7am, now the business functions from 6.30am each morning.

AS: As you say, or as Gina says in the film, Romania is enjoying consumerism, after decades of communism. Before 1989, having a car was pretty difficult, and the only possible car was the Dacia, the Romanian brand. So cars are a symbol of social status, more than a house. Also, public transport in Bucharest is not something that has been developed at the pace of the growth of the city. Parking spaces are rare. It has become a city were one cannot walk (there are cars parked on the sidewalks), driving a bike is suicidal in these conditions.

Consumerism is a phenomenon that has more to do with our post-communist situation than with the accession to the EU. I have met people who own a 50,000 euros car and still live in a horrible appartment block from the 70’s. And of course, traffic in the city has a lot to do with this new way of life, where people work long hours, sometimes having not one but several jobs and many of them come from the province to work in Bucharest. I wish the film should not be read as a stance against consumerism in itself, it is more about values being turned upside-down. Owning a car is for some people a passport to run over their fellows.

KK: The Apocalypse on Wheels subtly touches on the issue of corruption, which made me think of films such as 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days by Cristian Mungiu.  I cannot help thinking that your film is a call for action to implement a change in the Romanian legal system…

AS: Of course, this is a huge problem. The problem is that – not only are regulations too soft – but that they are seldom implemented by a weak state, by a weak judicial system. One can see that the policeman in the film is reduced to watching helplessly the spectacle of chaos and has very little authority upon it. Maybe it is normal that everybody wants to get away with the consequences of an accident. In Romanian society, from older times, each individual tries to solve personally, by corruption, his problem, in a confusing, deregulated legal system. But the problem is that this way the society in its entirety suffers and finally each Romanian gets his share of injustice from this. Human life has little value in the end.

KK: How much material did you have before you started cutiing it?

AS: I filmed about 30 hours of rushes, so it wasn’t that difficult. The main stress was that I had this impression that most of the things that I was noticing while I was filming didn’t happen in front of the camera. I was constantly frustrated and my companions kept telling me that while I wasn’t there they witnessed this or that remarkable traffic event.

KK: I liked the music in the film. Can you tell us more about it?

AS: I wanted a piece of rock music to open the film, to accompany the crane shot. While talking to the editor and the commissioning editor from HBO on the music issue, this idea of Einstuerzende Neubauten came up. I think it’s an ideal fit and I am glad we managed to get the rights.

KK: You dedicated your film to Cristian Nemescu, who made California Dreamin’ and Andrei Toncu, who was a sound engineer and both of whom died in a terrible car accident on the 24^th August 2006…

AS: Nemescu and Toncu were ones of the most talented and most promissing filmmakers from Romania. Almost 3 years after their death, the court hasn’t reached a final verdict, the sentence for the author of the accident keeps getting smaller and smaller, while that driver was set free. It goes the same for Bianca’s case, the daughter of one of the drivers in my film. There is a very disturbing sense of injustice and helplessness, which is one of the reasons why I wanted to make this film. When I think of these stories, it seems to me again that Apocalypse is a very adequate word for what we witness.