John 06 Angelika Levi on, from, by

Written by Brigitte Vasallo. Posted in Angelika Levi, Interviews

These are snippets of an interview with Angelika Levi gave me the occasion of the presentation of his new movie Absent/Present , Barcelona, in April 2010. I never edit the interview, perhaps because one does not need editing.

Here are his thoughts on cinema and the world.

The displacement as a place

“I lived a year in Barcelona, and 2005. As German, I always felt tourist. Displaced. We lived in the neighborhood of Poble Nou, next to the beach, and tourists and was constantly immigrants. Hence the idea for the film”.

“At the same time a friend of Namibia disappeared. So two stories came together in the film. The Senegalese experience of returnees and my friend who always lived in the GDR but was deported to Namibia”.

“This accumulation of stories born of the Globalization, a world in which you can not look only history“.

A film intentionally uncomfortable

“Technically I wanted to make a movie uncomfortable, pieces made, without a linear discourse, I do not want the viewer to put in place of the protagonists, I do not want to be identify, because no identification possible. We are white, we are sitting in a theater, we can not really get to understand someone who goes to a boat, someone who is repatriated. I wanted to avoid that false empathy fragmented image”.

Laws and exclusion

“I am interested in laws. See how a people or a nation is a law that automatically generate a exclusion. I am interested in Other, another that sometimes I am I and the interrelationships between the inside and outside”.

Multiple Identities

“Throughout a history of colonialism and the thought capitalist, we are conditioned to see only plain: woman man, there is nothing in the middle; rich-poor (Now that the middle class is being eliminated), or are you a citizen of a country or another, you can not be in the middle; there are always these long poles that condemn us. I am fighting this bipolarity of life, because it is not certain: we have many Identities. So the two films (Story of My Life, second part and Absent/Present) talk about it. My mother, protagonist of my last film, was a person who was always in the middle, I myself am in the middle, Like Benji, the central character Absent/Present . I think this is a Wealth, I want to play something that is good, something that makes life a little harder, but is a wealth”.