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Today, Women Make Movies‘ feature, Sarabah, is being broadcasted on Link TV.
To complement this broadcast, we bring you an exclusive interview with the Director.
Telegraph21: What inspired you to make Sarabah?
Maria Luisa: Meeting Fatou (aka Sister Fa) was the biggest inspiration. Anyone who meets her can attest. We met her at the UN Day Concert (where she performed with Niles Rodgers) in 2009, and the next day we talked about doing a short piece on her for a series we were producing at Link TV. But she started talking about all the causes she cares about, the things she is fighting for, her beliefs about grassroots change – and we were hooked. Steven Lawrence (my co-producer and the Executive Producer on the film) was there with her that day, and in the car afterwards we were in complete agreement that we had to do something more with her story. So, we decided to kick into high gear. Steven started raising money to finance it more fully, and I went to Berlin to start filming her; the money Steven raised allowed me to go to Senegal with a micro-budget to join her on tour. It all happened very quickly.
Telegraph21: What do you want viewers to take away from the film?
Maria Luisa: The most important thing to take away is that an individual can make a difference, and that activism can take many forms. Sister Fa uses her talent and her popular appeal as a vehicle to get an important message across; it takes a lot of courage to do that, to risk offending people when you depend on people buying your music. It’s also really important for people to perceive that this movie is about an African making a difference in Africa. These are the kinds of stories Americans don’t usually get to see because our media gives preference to activism stories about celebrities like Bono and George Clooney. There are plenty of people like Sister Fa who need our attention and support.
Telegraph21: How did you first connect with the Sister Fa?
Maria Luisa: Steven, Gloria Bremer (my co-director) and I were all working on a series for Link TV called “Rappers, Divas and Virtuosos,” featuring dynamic musicians from Muslim cultures. We wanted to do the last piece on Sister Fa, so we made a point to connect with her at the 2009 UN Day Concer, where Steven had arranged for her to perform.
Maria Luisa: Steven, Gloria Bremer (my co-director) and I were all working on a series for Link TV called “Rappers, Divas and Virtuosos,” featuring dynamic musicians from Muslim cultures. We wanted to do the last piece on Sister Fa, so we made a point to connect with her at the 2009 UN Day Concer, where Steven had arranged for her to perform.
Telegraph21: What can be learned from her experience?
Maria Luisa: I think what can be learned is that it’s worth taking the risks. She takes a lot of risks in this film. She takes time away from building her musical career in Germany. She takes her whole family and band to Senegal. There is no major funding, and that’s also a very deliberate choice, but obviously one that augments the challenges. She is talking about something that a lot of people would still rather not talk about. She’s doing this in a village full of family and lifelong friends, and she doesn’t know what their reactions will be. But she believes in her cause and she believes in her message. That makes the choices very simple.
Telegraph21: What have been some of the successes of the “Education Without Excision” campaign she started? Has there been change in Senegal?
Maria Luisa: The change is coming slowly. Sister Fa’s campaign is one part of it. This is a huge cultural change that has been in process, and will continue to be in process. The effect her campaign has had is to broaden the dialogue a little more, and that is a really important component. No one’s going for an easy win here – easy wins usually end up being temporary. This is something that takes patience work at the roots. Tostan is a big factor too – their approach of respect-based communication and general education has proven very effective. So, luckily there is steady change happening, and there’s every reason to believe the practice could be almost completely eradicated in Senegal by the middle of this decade.
Telegraph21: What is the potential of music as a tool for activism?
Maria Luisa: I can’t say enough about this. There are a lot of people who could articulate this much better. Let me just say that music has enormous potential because you are communicating on many levels. You are getting at people emotionally, and then you can also get strong message in there. Look at what Ramy Essam has done for the Egyptian protests – I can’t get those songs out of my head, they’re so beautiful and they express such a longing and such a desire to commit to the cause. You can see the difference music makes when Sister Fa gets on stage. People’s ears are more open. They are woken up on many levels. So, the dialogue that comes after is more charged. Music electrifies.
Telegraph21: Your favorite thing about Senegal?
Maria Luisa: That’s a nice question. The music is one sure thing to absolutely love. But I’d have to say the thing that really struck me is the pace of life and the quality of human interaction. Her band members are all German, and we talked about this a lot. People really take time with each other, if they stop to say hello they stay a while, there’s no rushing, there are no deadlines. The next appointment can wait. People care about the conversations they’re having in the moment. It all creates a completely different state of being for the time that you’re there; you don’t notice the change at first, but after a few days you notice that your whole perception is totally changed. I’d like to go back soon and enjoy it when I’m not trying to get a movie made!
WOMEN MAKE MOVIES:
Now celebrating its 40th anniversary, Women Make Movies continues to achieve international recognition through its distribution and Production Assistance programs, with films acknowledged by the Academy Awards, Emmy Awards and Peabody Awards, as well as at Cannes and the Sundance Film Festival. In 2012, WMM will be screening films around the world at 40 events, reaching over 40,000 women and young girls.
By Julia Knobloch
For quite a while now, juggling and merging several layers of reality and fiction has been established as a standard in film narrative. Like almost everywhere around us, the boundaries between what is true and false, real and surreal, interpretation and fact are often blurred. Fiction is being told as if it were reality, and reality is often presented as fiction.
Yet there is always room for experiment. In this context, Edmon Roch’s feature film documentary Garbo – The Spy can be regarded as, if not an entirely new, nevertheless an original and fresh attempt at pushing those boundaries even further. To a great extent, Roch relies on clips from spy films and WWII movies (Mata Hari, The Invisible Agent, Our Man in Havana, The Longest Day, and Patton, to name just a few) to tell the historically-confirmed story of a Spanish double agent, Juan Pujol Garcia, who served both the Nazis and the British.
It is a refreshing stylistic approach in that the clips illustrate what usually is very difficult for historical documentaries to show, especially if they don’t use reenactment: the actual action—the what “really” happened—what nobody saw besides the people involved.
By choosing the archived movie scenes, Roch and his team fill in the blanks. This is not so different from reenactment, in the sense that any selection of footage or any scripted re-creation is always an interpretation of the historic facts, a placeholder for what has been lost in history’s maze of “what ifs.”
There are, of course, facts: Pujol—code named Alaric by the Germans and Garbo by the Brits—accepted both the Nazis’ Iron Cross and England’s OBE. After the war, he was reported to have passed away in Africa, a false reality his Spanish family had to accept while Pujol started a new life and a new family in Venezuela. Asked about the underlying motives for his maneuvers as a double agent, he emphasized that he wanted to fight the injustices of his time with the means at his disposal. One can interpret this as Pujol describing himself as a well-intentioned humanist, albeit a cunning one who had to make moral compromises.
According to the film, Pujol, who had defected from the Republican to the Nationalist side during the Spanish Civil War, played a major, if not decisive, role in the Allied invasion of Normandy in June 1944, when he convinced the Germans that the imminent landfall of Patton and his troops was slated to occur at Pas-de-Calais, and not, as it eventually did, on the Cherbourg peninsula.
It is a well-known fact that the Nazis were easily to be duped in their war-fueled intoxication. But the successful misleading of the usurpers in black leather boots was a huge, manifold and multi-faceted orchestration, which arguably did not depend on one person alone. Does it diminish Pujol’s undoubtedly important role in the Operation Fortitude (as the Allies codenamed their counterintelligence campaign) if one wonders whether selling him, as the film does, as the lone ranger who saved the Allied Invasion – or the world, as the title suggests – is a stretch?
Nevertheless, Garbo –The Spy is an entertaining, idiosyncratic and provocative film. It clearly involved a lot of time spent in archives and doing in-depth interviews. Tracking down people who by trade aim to remain invisible requires passion and persistence. Seasoned and visionary professionals, Roch and his team researched the facts, talked with trustworthy experts, chose from a nicely-filled pool of footage, and then twined all the layers together, according to their own personal interpretation of one moment in history.
