Interview: Iveta Grófová Director of Made in Ash

Your film deals with a very big social issue, how did you do the research?

I went to Aš to do research and search for authentic surroundings and talk to locals. I started making this film 5 years ago when I was a student, initially I thought it would be a documentary. It is very usual for Slovaks to come and work in the Czech Republic, but the factories have been closed down, especially in the nineties. It is a very common story. Many Slovak people live in a bubble, they don’t know why anbody would leave the country to work abroad. Many of them also go to the UK, but most of them go to the Czech Republic.

Since it started out as a documentary project, how much of the film is documentary and how much was staged?

Some scenes are authentic and the cast is made of non-professionals, but the story is a written script. I knew many of them before, I was in school when I started the film, and they never believed I would actually finish it. Silvia Halušicová was a great help, even though she is not an actress she always knew what to do. Sometimes I felt like an observer, and she initiated everything.

Despite the social realism of the story, this film also has a little bit of a magic touch, with many light effects, reflexions and animation parts. Can you tell me more about them?

Iveta: I first shot all the live acting scenes and then used animation. One of the reasons was that I wanted to capture the inner life of the characters. They are hand drawings. I studied animation before, the first drawings are mine, but then I worked with an animator, Josef Elsik, who finished my drafts. As for the camera effects, I wanted to combine the points of view of both the characters and the public, that is why I used all the reflexes, and why sometimes it is blurry or unsharp. Why I like to work with Viera is that her way of working is very humble, she never tries to point at her camera work, and the form is never more important than the content.

Viera Bačíková, D.O.P.: In the beginning we used a steadycam, but then we decided not to: we wanted to keep the documentary style, we needed a small camera so we can keep it a little bit hidden on set.

Dorotka, what was it like to play this character who goes through so many rough experiences?

Dorotka Bílá: At first, I was very worried of what my parents would say when they saw this film. I was only seventeen and very shy in the beginning. However, it was very easy compared to the second half, but I survived. I am from a Roma comunity in Slovakia and I am afraid of how the Slovak Roma people will receive this film: I hope they will understand that it’s just a film, and this is not me.

By Andreea Dobre