With two documentary films, Philip Scheffner demonstrated at this year's Berlinale how to circumvent clichéd depictions of flight and migration. In "And-Ek Ghes ...", which will come to theaters this Thursday, three Roma families portray themselves, a family man acts as a co-director. In "Havarie" (theatrical release 2017) Scheffner expands a three-minute mobile video of a refugee boat on feature length and tells the story on the soundtrack alone.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: Mr. Scheffner, how big is your distrust of film and cinema?

Scheffner: Very tall.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: What does it feed on?

Scheffner: I have a mistrust of pictures, whether moved or not. But especially against images that I am responsible for producing.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: Who makes the pictures, mastered?

Scheffner: Mastering is already too much said. Rather, one tapes into the same trap, is controlled, runs behind blindly or implements the status quo without question. Questioning the pictures is also an instrument for me to make sure of my own position. So that's no burden. It is a cognitive tool in all directions.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: In "And-Ek Ghes ..." the Roma families are filming themselves. Is this politically an authorization?

Scheffner: Rather an appropriation. With authorization, I always ask myself: "Who authorizes whom?" I am not the one who empowers them. They do not need me for that. At most structurally. If they had made a film, I do not know if he would have run at the Berlinale. In any case, they have enough networks to reach relevant publics, for example via Facebook. You do not need me for the impulse to make a movie. In this respect, I would point far from me, which was also partly in newspapers: "The director gives the camera Colorado Velcu [protagonist and co-director of the film]". That would be such a real fuck-gesture.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: Because that sounds so paternalistic.

Scheffner: Yes, of course. "I'll give you the camera, and now you're allowed to make your own movie." I would have wanted to see the reaction from Colorado if that had happened. It goes without saying that he does it himself. Nobody needs to ask. That's exactly the point. The work on the film makes it possible to meet us at eye level. We try to negotiate something together, which is a movie at the end. The film was very processual, it was not planned.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: That's why the many different types of images?

Scheffner: Exactly, it was not just our camera. That's what the film tells us: It was created because we gave a small camera without great ulterior motives as a gift from the oldest daughter of Colorado and were then thrilled by what she filmed - not only her, but the whole Family including Colorado. From then on, it was clear that it was an open concept.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: In "And-Ek Ghes ..." there is a great staging and playfulness. The film ends in a kind of Bollywood clip. (Seen in the video above)

Scheffner: That is also a resistance to existing image politics. In the end it became more and more a feature film. It's really not about authenticity at all. Everyone was aware of that and enjoyed it as well.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: Although there are certainly markers for authenticity.

Scheffner: Where?

SPIEGEL ONLINE: They show that the material is improvised: for example, by focusing or when the camera is moved back.

Scheffner: In the sense already authentic. But not in what is then shown as a scene. There is a great danger, especially in a film that really happens to have a Roma family as a subject, that then all sorts of authenticity terms are retrieved: This is the Roma family in itself. Exactly that is the problem that it is incredibly difficult to see a family as a family and secondarily as a Roma family. That's what the movie is trying to do.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: So no representational character.

Scheffner: No. But you know that this trap opens up everywhere: folklore, image politics, racism. You are in a context of 50,000 other films and images about this community. This beats the movie in a very anarchic way. As a father would like to present himself as a father, I find politically much more explosive and stronger than trying to somehow show how the family actually works. To leave this doubt: Do they do that extra for the camera? The fact that Colorado and the family take that out, I find incredibly liberating.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: The relationship of Roma families to institutions and authorities is always in evidence by the way, but remains a void.

Scheffner: It was a real "aha" moment for me: With the classic well-intentioned documentary film look one thinks, they certainly have a lot of problems with the German bureaucracy, because you yourself have many problems with it. And of course it is. Colorado would never think of turning on a camera in the job center. The insistence that the family gets certain pictures, that has a political attitude for me. This then culminates in the music video: These are pictures that you associate with Berlin, but not necessarily with a Roma family. Why are there no pictures of Roma families photographing in front of the Brandenburg Gate? They do it all! So we decided, consciously following the Bollywood formula, to reappropriate Berlin and to give these images the same meaning as others.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: In "And-Ek Ghes ..." you give subjectivity a space. At "Havarie" one initially has the impression that the perspective is very distant. This is due to the decision to use only a video at the image level showing a refugee boat from a distance, a clip stretched over the entire duration of the film, originally 3 minutes 36 seconds long. How did this decision come about?

Scheffner: In contrast to "And-Ek Ghes ...", "Havarie" was a properly funded film. We had a budget, camera people, sound people; We worked for several years and filmed on 30 days of shooting in Algeria and places in Europe.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: What we are now experiencing on the soundtrack, the different perspectives of people who are for the most part directly connected with this concrete escape story, were there as film footage?

Scheffner: Exactly, we have shot of all that you hear - and some more - footage. Not only interviews, but also conversations, situations, their everyday life.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: And after the shoot everything was different?

Scheffner: When we started editing, the media coverage of refugee boats in the Mediterranean was just at its peak. We cut this movie and virtually saw other boats all the time, on the internet or on TV. People have also died before because of the European migration policy. But the media presence of just this iconographic image of the dinghy in the blue sea, which immediately triggers all sorts of associations, rolled us over at the time. We felt we had to do it. We can not do it with the means we have to focus on the concrete event, as we originally intended. It should get into a flurry, but at which one remains very close. Then we decided to concentrate on the sound and stretch the one image that was the trigger for us to 90 minutes.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: With what effect?

Scheffner: Not to dismiss it as one of many pictures, but to be forced to look at it exactly. Then, when we used parts of the cut that we had done earlier, inserting segments in the sound, we realized that things suddenly made complete sense. One example is the recurring clocks you hear. Many people you meet in their private ambience have a clock hanging on the wall that is ticking. That was totally present, even when we filmed. What do you hear of a clock: Sure, the second hand. And when we stretched that 3 minutes 36 seconds to 90 minutes, we came down to about one frame per second. The time is running out all the time. So it all came together at once, which was very disparate before.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: In the stretched clip you have not cut?

Scheffner: No. That's all there is from this one shot. The recording is very special, because you are always in between to recognize something and then recognize nothing again. This quality does not have the other pictures. In retrospect, it is really crazy to see: We went with "disaster" many detours and have also made some drastic decisions, but what came out of it, is exactly what we actually wanted.

In the video: The trailer for "And-Ek Ghes ..."

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