Border Crossing Humour – an Interview with Margien Rogaar
Margien Rogaar’s film Maybe Sweden is one of the movies in the competition, describing five whites from the West on a reading holiday in Spain. Suddenly they receive a visit from an exhausted Ghanian boat refugee who has settled in the garden – a film about the confrontation with a multicultural society.
What do you expect from taking part in the competition?
Nothing really. Hmm, I don’t know. I just expect that people see the film and I hope that they will appreciate it.
What was your inspiration to do this film?
It started with the contact to the actors, because I made the film with a group of young collectives who usually don’t work with a director and are improvising a lot. I met them in 2004 and I liked the way they did their pieces, in a kind of documetary style. They interview people and develop their story spontanously out of it. So I asked them if they want to make a film with me and they wanted to. We started with just one idea: New-Romanticism, because we thought people are getting romantic again, like coming back to nature and reading books – but we hadn’t had a story yet. Our first idea was to make a story about people trying to read. That seemed very boring. We wanted to make an engagement to look at the real world, even provoking a clash with it. So we got on with a story of African immigrants.
In your film you are trying to find an answer for the question: What is typical European? Have you found an answer – or: is an answer possible?
I think we wanted to explore the different ways people in Holland react to the situation. We wanted to talk about the problem itself, like people like us respond to this clash that is in our culture. We didnt want to have one final point of view. When we get older we learn that there is no ideal world like in the childhood. Our generation is troubled and we didnt want to give an answer or couldn’t give an answer to that point.
How important do you think is the encounter of the strange in order to get to know who you are in your culture?
I think that in Holland it was clear what it was all about in our culture, very open and everything seemed okay. Since a few years there have been some changes in the way people talk about immigrants. So we came to a slippery ice situation what Holland is still about. The Dutch identity and mentality is changing, so it was important to show such a clash.
The crossing of borders and openness are central topics in your movie, but to what extent can you be open?
When we made this film we spoke with a lot of people coming from Ghana about travelling to Spain and the whole troubled thing with the boats. But at one point working with those people from Ghana didn’t explain anything to us. They were strangers to us and we were strangers to them. In the end you can’t understand each other completely.
So in the end you think there wasn’t a border crossing between you and the Ghanese people?
In Holland the way people talk about immigrants is to help them or we should do something to them. They decide what they do. You think you can help or tell them not to come but they still take this chance.
Is humour, because you are using a lot of it, a border crossing force?
I think on the set it was. It was the main connection between us and the Ghanese people. At first they really didn’t understand what we wanted to do. That was a hard part of it. In only one or two of the scenes they are the main character. People talk about immigrants but they never get any screen. It is always the white people talking about the immigrants. So in the film they were in the background as if they were the furniture of the conflict. In the beginning it was really hard to explain it that we wanted to make a film about about them, but they will never be the main character of the scene. As soon as they found out what the humour was about, we could connect to them and they could laugh about what we were doing.
What plans and projects do you have for the future?
I’m doing a film about a fisher man, that’s a funny thing, it’s a story about a Dutch fisher man, fishing every day but there is also a Polish guy fishing in Holland, where you put the fish into the water again. But the Polish guy is taking the fish home and sells it for a lot of money in Poland. So there is a sort of clash between two cultures again. I also work on a movie about fat children together in a diet camp trying to break out in order to get a hamburger. It’s kind of a road movie where they solve their own problem without talking about being fat, a funny story.
Tags: Samstag, Wettbewerb
Der Beitrag wurde am Samstag, den 26. April 2008 um 20:43 Uhr veröffentlicht und wurde unter Interviews abgelegt. du kannst die Kommentare zu diesen Eintrag durch den RSS 2.0 Feed verfolgen. Kommentare und Pings sind derzeit nicht erlaubt.
Am 8. Mai 2008 um 01:52 Uhr
nice work, brother
Am 21. Mai 2008 um 09:01 Uhr
Daria Werbowy…
I Googled for something completely different, but found your page…and have to say thanks. nice read….