Documentary Intimacies

Take Persona Non Grata, which chronicles the life of Belgian priest Frans Wuytack, who fought for the rights of his parishioners in the Venezuelan slums during the sixties. This documentary was made by Wuytack’s son Fabio, but if he hadn’t shown his baby pictures at the start, you’d never know. It’s strange that Fabio Wuytack chose to open with this declaration of family relationships, since he then focuses solely on his father’s story. You find yourself wondering how he himself feels about his father, about whom everybody speaks so lovingly. Somehow, the fact that this is not mentioned makes you suspect a distance – which is probably actually not the case. Fabio most likely wanted to view his subject objectively.

In the Dutch film Pyotr – Letters from the Gulag Jan Jaap Kuiper films his wife Katja, retracing the experiences of her great grandfather in a soviet prison camp. You wonder whether she would have reacted any differently had the filmmaker accompanying her not been her own husband. This makes you feel a slight regret that their closeness didn’t produce more intimate scenes, automatically translating into a more special film. Again, this is an unjust feeling, since if it weren’t for the relationship between Jan Jaap, Katja and Pyotr, Pyotr’s story wouldn’t have travelled as far as it has.

The story at the heart of the extraordinary Shakespeare and Victor Hugo’s Intimacies will not travel beyond the grave. Mexican director Yulene Olaizola recounts the intense friendship between her grandmother Rosita and troubled young lodger Jorge, now dead, with whom she shared her home for several years. Basically a long conversation between the two in Rosita’s house among Jorge’s paintings and other more poignant mementoes of his stay, the grandmother-granddaughter relationship was a clear prerequisite for the film and it’s intimacy. Rosita makes many allusions to family history and patters on about personal details in a way that she would never have done with a stranger. This means that as a viewer you get that extra layer of intensity that you hope for when you realize the connection between filmmaker and subject.

When that connection itself becomes the subject of a film, it can make for an even more layered film. In Lakshmi and Me, Indian filmmaker Nishta Jain chose not only to portray the harsh life of her maid Lakshmi, but also to examine her own role in it, thus exposing how she too plays a part in the social inequality of her country. This requires courage.

Even more courage is needed when a filmmaker takes the next leap and decides that the best story to tell is her own, as Swiss student Anja Schwyzer did with the short film Tributary, in which her family and boyfriend talk about the period when she was severely depressed after being raped during a trip to Brazil. It seems that even in a film about yourself you can leave out your own voice. This is a delicate subject, and the result is a sparse, balanced film. Yet on a human level, your curiosity remains unsatisfied. You yearn to know more about the gaps in the story, so consciously withheld. So Anja, if you’re reading this, please drop us a line. We just want to know how you’re doing now.

Rebecca Wilson