Interview: Filip Marczewski Director of ’Shameless’ - East of the West Competition

This film seems to be an adaptation or a continuation of a short you did, it deals with the same issue…

Yes, but we changed almost everything, except for one: it’s a story of a brother and a sister. In Prague Short Film Festival, director Jan Sverak said to me “If I were you, I would make a longer version of it”. And I had so much stuff left over from the script, that when scriptwriter Grzegorz Łoszewski contacted me and proposed to work on the story, I knew I had to do it.

In the short, the incest subject matter is more augmented, the boy’s obsessions are less cleaned up. Why did you decide to tone it down in the feature film?

This boy was much younger, he was just 14. At that age people are dominated by obsessions. Some of that passion is still there in the feature, but in a different way.

The boy’s restlessness is one of the most striking aspects of the film: he struggles to be loved, but he’s totally blinded by it, so he can’t see that someone else has fallen for him. Didn’t you feel like investigating this egotistical love more?

It’s very common to be dreaming of someone and not seeing that someone else is by your side. It could be a perfect match with that Romany girl, but the timing is not right. Anyway the final is pretty open: some viewers just tell me “It’s obvious they’re going to be together”.

Was it difficult to convince the Roma community to participate and use their place? Were they concerned with how their community was going to be depicted?

Actually we sort of became friends, during 2 years I went there and talked to them. And the script was ok for them. They also suggested some changes for it to be more true to reality (i.e. the wedding scene).

While your film comes across as a melodrama, you also tackle social matters: is it just for the film to be more realistic or were you trying to point out some political issues?

The main story is kind of a melodrama, but for me it’s very important to put it in a concrete world: those gypsies really exist, those neo-nazis exist as well, close to each other. And such issues prompt the viewers to think about their own lives. Had I made the film only about the incest, this wouldn’t have happened. There’s also a parallel there: when we see the siblings together, we think they’re “sick”; same with the gypsies, we assume that they are dirty, that they steal… but actually we don’t know much about both issues. These two aspects raise more or less the same questions. This film is about tolerance.

By Sebastiano Pucciarelli