Interview with Kim Longinotto
December 10th, 2006 by Zsofia
Kim Longinotto’s highly acclaimed film “Sisters In Law” was shortlisted for Oscar consideration this year. Made in Cameroon, it follows two women, a judge and a state prosecutor, as they deal with cases of domestic violence, child abuse and divorce in a deeply traditional community. She gave this interview to the One World Festival in Prague in March 2006.
Q: Compared to some of your earlier films, the stories in Sisters In Law seem a lot more universal: they are situations which arise in every community…
KL: I suppose The Day I’ll Never Forget is the closest I’ve ever made to being an ‘issue’ film, because it’s about a specific thing. But I think that Shinjuku Boys, for example, is very universal. It’s all about sexual confusion, and women who want to be more like men, men who want to be more like women, and women who like men who are women… that seems very modern and universal to me. I think that in the 21st century, a lot of what we think about being male and being female will be modified. For example, women are meant to be intuitive and sensitive and caring, and maybe men will take on a bit more of that. And men are meant to be practical and adventurous, and more women are becoming those things. Maybe we’ll swap over a bit more. I think that’s definitely happening, because with technology everything’s getting smaller, and there’s not this emphasis on physical strength anymore. It is all equalling out. What I find interesting about Shinjuku Boys is that Gaish, who was my favourite character, in England would really just have been a woman living with women, but because he was in Japan in this kind of transitional time, felt he had to be a man to be who was he was. He was very confused about what identity he wanted.
Q: How do you persuade people to open up on camera about such deep and personal issues?
KL: What’s quite extraordinary is that on the whole, people really want their stories to be told. One thing that really struck me when working on both Shinjuku Boys and The Day I Will Never Forget was how keen people were to open up in front of us. It was almost like we were witnesses, and this was their chance to speak. For example, the little girl who reads that poem in The Day I Will Never Forget, she really hounded me to go to her home, and I kept saying ‘It seems really weird to me to film a girl reading a poem’, I thought it wouldn’t fit and it’d be peculiar. I don’t really do films like this. She really set it all up, a big confrontation with her mother. And I think that sometimes filming things reverses the balance of power between people, and enables weaker people to be stronger. Going back to Shinjuku Boys, for example, there’s a scene in Gaish’s bedroom when his girlfriend starts asking him about who he is. She’d never done that before. But she got the strength to do it because we were there, and she knew he wouldn’t be rude to her on camera. It was kind of a safe situation to ask fairly forbidden things that she hadn’t dared to ask him before. And you could see his insecurity, but also him enjoying opening up to her as well.
Q: Do people get advance warning that you’ll be arriving on the scene
with a camera?
KL: I don’t just arrive somewhere with a camera, that’s not how it works. I spend a lot of time with people, and I always have the camera with me. By the end of the second or third day the camera ceases to be a thing in itself; it’s just a part of the environment. A very safe environment, in fact.
Q: How many people do you normally have in your crew?
KL: If everything’s in English then it’s usually just me and Mary Milton, the sound person. If it’s in another language, for example the films in Iran, then we work with our collaborator Ziba who speaks Farsi. We work very closely with her, she lets us know which bits to film, because we’d be lost otherwise. But a lot of Sisters In Law was just Mary and I, because it was in English. I’ve done my last four films with Mary, and she’s wonderful, we really get on well. We can anticipate each other’s movements, so if I move somewhere I know that she’s not going be in the shot.
Q: How did you get permission to film in the courts?
KL: That’s where Florence [Ayisi – codirector] was really brilliant. I’m really grateful to her, she really worked hard to get that permission. What also helped us is the fact that we were filming women lawyers and women judges. The government of Cameroon is quite proud of the fact that they have all these women lawyers and women judges.
Q: What about filming inside the prison?
KL: That was down to Vera, the judge in the film. She was going to visit an inmate whose trial we’d filmed, and she sort of swept us along with her. She’s been visiting that prison for ages, making sure that people have enough to eat, and that people who’re there who shouldn’t be there get let out… she’s amazing. People are very fond of her there, and in awe of her as well, I think. So I think there was no way that anyone there was going to tell her who she could or couldn’t bring in with her.
Q: Not for the first time, you also managed to get your camera into a traditional Islamic court. How do you do it?
KL: It took two years to get that permission, and at many points we thought we wouldn’t get it. Zeba, my Iranian friend who helped us film Divorce, Iranian Style, was the one who really kept at it. There’s a scene in Divorce, Iranian Style where a little girl is pretending to be the judge, and I remember Zeba looking very wistful and saying ‘wouldn’t it be lovely if we had women judges in Iran?’ So I’m really happy to have gone somewhere where they have women judges, and to have filmed that.
Q: Are you planning on doing more explorations of the Islamic world?
KL: Oh yes. I absolutely love Ziba, she’s one of my best friends, and I love Iran and I love filming there. We’ve made two films in Iran, and we want to go back and do another one. I think it’s quite a tricky time to go to Iran at the moment, so we’re leaving it for a while and then we’ll go back in a couple of years. Who are your main influences as a filmmaker? I like Nick Broomfield’s early films – Soldier Girls, Tattooed Tears…Observational kind of films, which I loved. Soldier Girls is set in an army camp, military training. They’re quite tough films, they’re lovely films, I really like them. And I think Life and Death of a Serial Killer, is wonderful, his more recent film about Aileen Wuornos. It’s a very powerful film – even though she was a serial killer, I think it’s very hard to see that film and still support the death penalty.
Q: Nick Broomfield is always a highly visible presence in his own films. Conversely, you never appear onscreen in your films. Why not?
KL: I’ve got no interest in being in the films. What I hope, really, is that people watching the films are not thinking about me at all. The way I film things, I try to have it as if the viewer is actually standing there, in the position of the camera. So they’re where I am, seeing things through me, but not at all aware of me. I try and make the camerawork very simple and very slow, so you’re not really thinking about camera movements. I want to make people feel they’re actually there, and watching things happening.
Copyright One World. http://www.jedensvet.cz/ow/2006/index_en.php?id=197&idp=398
