JUST TALKING 16-3-2010
An interesting discussion on the environment and how simple people deal with extreme conditions took place during the third “Just Talking”, on Tuesday, March 16, 2010 as part of the 12th Thessaloniki Documentary Festival. Participating were the directors Sandrine Feydel (The Mermaids’ Tears: Oceans Of Plastic), Sibel Bilgin (In the Shadow of the Quake) and Nikos Vezyrgianis (The List of Silence), as well as distributor Jane Balfour.
Introducing her film, Sandrine Feydel stressed that The Mermaids’ Tears: Oceans Of Plastic focuses on the damage to the environment caused by plastic refuse which is overwhelming the oceans and which, according to scientific research, is a major contributor to the destruction of marine life. Nikos Vezyrgianis noted that his film, The List of Silence touches on the great wound that is the desaparecidos, that is the thousands of people whose whereabouts are unknown, who were tortured by the Argentine junta (1976-1981), among whom are victims of Greek descent. Director Sibel Bilgin, on her part, records the area of Marmara in Turkey, ten years after a devastating earthquake in her film In the Shadow of the Quake.
“We tried to look at how these people find the strength to survive after they’ve lost everything”, Sibel Bilgin said. Speaking about her experience, she stated that the bonds of trust created between a filmmaker and her subjects are very important to the final result. “These people are happy to forget what they’ve been through for even one moment. At first we went to the area having come from an ordered life, so different from their lives, and we asked them to re-live what they had been through. But eventually, after having been with them every day, a kind of friendship and mutual trust was built between us. This is what finally made them open up to us and talk” she said.
Nikos Vezyrgianis stressed that it is very important for a documentary maker to invest time and become a part of the lives of the people he films in order for them to trust him. “In Argentina we had a hard time communicating. We had a translator with us, we went to people’s homes and talked about irrelevant every day things over coffee, and in an almost natural way the conversation turned to the brother, the husband, the grandson they were looking for, not knowing what happened to him”, the director said. And added: “Pain kept the memories alive and grew over time. You can see it in their small, simple gestures. I would say it is a noble pain”.
Asked about how they handled the intense emotions of their subjects, Nikos Vezyrgianis and Sibel Bilgin noted that they managed to find “hidden” feelings through photographs, objects, and archival material. “A photograph or an object belonging to someone they have been looking for for years and miss very much was a fortune for them, a reminder of their past life”, Vezyrgianis said. Bilgin added: “The people who lived through the quake lost their own photos, their things, everything that reminded them of who they are and gave them identity. So we showed them selected videotaped scenes shot in the area ten years ago, and drew up important facts from their memories, which they otherwise would not have been able to remember”.
The human element is also present in Sandrine Feydel’s film The Mermaids’ Tears: Oceans Of Plastic. It is not only about human responsibility for the environmental disaster caused by plastic waste. At the same time it is about human action and care of the environment. She noted that she tried to keep a balance so that her motives would not be considered “activist”. “I believe I succeeded in keeping a distance, but still have the film be a useful tool for those struggling to protect the environment. I could have made a journalistic film where the benefits and consequences of the use of plastic could have been reported, but I didn’t want to do that”, she said. Then she noted that scientific facts are presented in the film on the deadly effect of plastic on the food chain: “Scientists have found bits of plastic in the stomachs of fish, dolphins, whales as well as aquatic birds, which feed on sea life. A plastic “soup” in our oceans is killing thousands of birds and animals every year”.
Distributor Jane Balfour answered the question of whether there is a market which can absorb films about great historical events seen through the stories of simple people. Ms Balfour noted that the problem with documentaries is bad quality television. “In the past ten years, instead of television broadcasting documentaries on human stories, prefer so called reality programming, and copies of successful shows of the past. Filmmakers must keep in mind their target audience when they decide to make a documentary, so that it will be possible to include their work in television programming” she noted.
