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”.

This work is licensed Brigitte VasalloCreative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Spain License.

Angelika Levi a woman is atypical, with an impressive history and a work out of the ordinary. An artist could have done show, but, however, has chosen to make life.

Absent/Present is the new film Angelika Levi, a creative documentary, a nonfiction almost poetic journalism and certainly on migration. The main storyline is the story of Benji, a Namibian filmmaker friend welcome in the German Democratic Republic as a refugee at the age of 4 years and repatriated (abandoned) ten years of Namibia, at the time of German reunification. Benji's struggle to reach back a Europe that recognizes their home, his survival later in the reunified Germany as undocumented, the eventual loss of all possible nationalities and status of stateless link to one of the obsessions of Angelika Levi: loss of citizenship rights, the state and sudden enemy their subjects.

“It's a bit of a power system study -says the director-. I am very interested in the mechanisms that lead suddenly to the subjects of a state to fall outside the law and become enemies to be killed; at the same time, I want to see how people organize to resist these power systems. This fall outside the law is what happens to Benji, I met years ago in Namibia. I discovered the Herero genocide, as something I did not know German at all and I was very impressed. How the Herero were colonized and turned into subjects of Germany to suddenly stop being considered as such and become enemies. Same thing happened to German Jews during the Nazi“.

Namibia to Barcelona

From the filmmaker stay in Barcelona, where he lived in 2004, The second storyline emerges: tourism.

“Here (Barcelona) I always felt tourist, displaced. And lived in Poblenou veíamos tourists and migrants in the playa, saw how they communicated. I spoke with each other. At the same time, a friend from Germany, Benji, disappeared. So two ideas came together in the film”.

Here comes the second strand of this complex film, facing the world unmitigated tourism, the world of immigration in its purest: the Guiria with the boats off the coast of Tenerife. Spain appears here as a recipient of German tourists (Levi challenges to their identities) and as receivers of immigrants: the refugee camps awaiting repatriation Levi insists on calling “Travellers”, it is the word, says, the Senegalese used to do: not undertake immigration, they undertake The Journey: volunteer travel; conscious travel; unavoidable travel; vital travel; the search, the survival, the output, the arrival.

She compared herself

This comparison reveals the game looks Angelika Levi, that sits in front of a cluster of mirrors. And that is to understand the complexity Levi's work, we know its history:Angelika Levi it German, Jewish and lesbian, not necessarily in that order. His family survived the Holocaust and later went into exile in Chile, where the mother Angelika, Ruth, became a famous biologist studying, what a paradox, plant survival in extreme conditions. And when life seemed to regroup in America, Ruth returned to Germany. Why? It is not known. To finish something, to continue living, because Germany, finally, their place in the world, their homeland in the emotional sense of the term. And in Germany he met a young aspiring priest to be married, after converting to Christianity, started a family and mad. He fell on his own schizophrenia and schizophrenia in the world who had lived through. This whole journey back and forth from one world to another, from one life to another, from one identity to another is reflected in the masterful film My Life Part II (Part of my life 2), the Levi.

Angelika Levi is situated in the center to look at itself and from there look at the world. Without self-centeredness, opposite: with Empathy arising from self-knowledge. So, in his trip through Africa and the African immigrant Levi colonized experiment with multiple forms of identity: it, against that other, is European, the white, la colona. But it is not always: in Germany it is the Jewish, among whites it is the Semitic, minority in any case, often oppressed. And more: women, she is a lesbian, which gives yet another otherness against femininity majority.

Is looking, because his last two films when they can understand the depth of the eye Levi. And more: Oddly enough the title of this book Absent/Present is the name that is known to and Palestinians who were expelled from their homes in 1948 but remained within the limits of what is now Israel. Perhaps unconsciously, and we say of an author who cares for every detail to a minimum, Levi and has an eye on another branch of itself: Palestine and Israel.

The center, the periphery

The wonder of Angelika Levi is that all this life journey makes no show, but on deeper reflection, wound, torn, intense and thrilling on otherness, about life in the borders Physical, mental, ideological, identity, about being and nothingness, on power, on the fight, about life.

We are fortunate that Angelika Levi is in love with a singer Catalan, Marta Montserrat, whose voice can track their movies. We are fortunate that love brings us to Spain and our screens the work of Levi. If he reaches into festivals, can be seen on the big screen, as it deserves. Unfortunately the film does not reach the public, because the public does not have the teeth needed to chew such work.

But that is the least: it exists, his films is there. Just look, and dare her.

This work is licensed Brigitte VasalloCreative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Spain License.