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>>> 23-03-2007
| PRESS CONFERENCE ELIZABETH ROCHA SALGAO HARRIE TIMMERMANS, ALEXANDRE LEBORGNE |
PRESS CONFERENCE ELIZABETH ROCHA SALGAO, HARRIE TIMMERMANS, ALEXANDRE LEBORGNE
A joint press conference was held on Friday, March 23 by the directors Elizabeth Salgado (The Way It Is / Dutch Documentaries), Harrie Timmermans (Children of Stalin / Dutch Documentaries) and Alexandre Leborgne (Out of bounds / View on Asia) in the context of the 9th Thessaloniki Documentary Festival - Images of the 21st Century.
“Children of Stalin may be a film featuring the patients of a mental hospital in Georgia, but in essence it is a film about time. I wanted to show the slow passage of time in a hospital, using the language of images”, declared Harrie Timmermans. Timmermans got the idea for his documentary while working as a photographer. He had visited many psychiatric hospitals in Europe and as a matter of fact had held exhibitions with photographs taken during his visits there. “But in those images the slow passage of time could not be shown. That is why I decided to finally turn to cinema. So I went back to the mental hospital in Georgia after ten years in order to shoot my documentary”, Timmermans added. He then explained, as to how he managed to develop bonds of trust with the patients, that: “It was something relatively easy. From the moment I got there, each one came up to me, gave me his hand, and started telling me his stories. Maybe I didn’t always understand what they were telling me, but what was important, what they were thirsting for, was to have someone who listened to them. I didn’t think of them as a group, but isolated personalities. Actually, some of them remembered me from my last visit ten years earlier”, he stated.
“The basic goal of my documentary was to show an alternative correctional system that perhaps many societies can adopt”, declared Alexandre Leborgne, speaking about his documentary Out of Bounds, about a rural prison in the Philippines, where the inmates can live with their families in a semi-free area roughly 380,000 acres. “Many of them were there because of a mistake they had made many years ago, almost out of bad luck. But in the Iguahing prison they could live with their families and obtain a good chance for a smooth integration in society. It is a system that benefits both them and
society”, stressed Leborgne. About the difficulties approaching the prisoners, Leborgne noted that what counts more than anything is sincerity. “But I believe that we had a bigger problem approaching the guards rather than the prisoners”, noted Leborgne.
“While searching for the leading character of my documentary among acquaintances of friends who had farms in the country, I immediately picked out Jan, a solitary man who had never married”, declared Elizabeth Salgao about her documentary The Way It Is. “His relationship with the magnificent nature that surrounds him has made him look at life in another way. He is possessed of a calmness, he never gets anxious about anything”. As Salgao explained, the documentary was her graduation thesis when she was a student at film school in Holland, and it had to have a relationship with the country. “The documentary is based on images, because the leading character didn’t talk much. It was very difficult to get something out of him, many times you had to ask him up to three times in order to get an answer”, Salgao admitted.
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