Kim Longinotto Rough Aunties

Embracing the moments when the people she is filming find strength to speak up or go through a process by having her there as a witness, Longinotto goes far beyond the ‘fly on the wall’ concept that she’s often connected with. “I love the complexity in doing a film together with the filmed and that my presence influences. But I also love when they forget about me”, she explains in the Swedish publication Filmkonst #100 (2006), entirely dedicated to herself and her work.

She doesn’t make interviews or set things up, but it often happens that her films include interview-like situations, or even sequences where the filmed talk directly to her: “If the people I’m filming speak directly to me in the natural course of events, it may feel good to have this in the film. I suppose I want the audience to feel that they are here where I am, seeing things through my eyes.”

Longinotto stays by the vulnerable, the abused and the overlooked, but it’s not sentimentality that she brings to the screen. Most of all, her camera focuses on the heroes and heroines of today’s society – usually women and children who take up the fight against injustice and indifference.

In spite of her films sometimes becoming close co-operations, she tries to be clear about her role as a filmmaker. She carries her camera from the first encounter: “It’s not the camera people are scared of, it’s the people behind the cameras”. And what some filmmakers would have missed by not asking questions Longinotto gains in seeing and never switching off – neither the camera, nor her interest in seemingly hopeless subject matters. In Rough Aunties Longinotto follows the tireless work of the South African association ‘Bobbi Bear’, which fights to bring child rapists to justice. Other recent works include last year’s critically acclaimed Hold me tight, let me go (2007) about a boarding school of traumatized children, and Sisters in Law (2005), on female judges in Cameroon – the latter won the ‘Prix Art et Essai’ at the Cannes film festival. A few years earlier she made Runaway (2001) about a shelter for runaway girls in Tehran, followed by The Day I’ll Never Forget (2002) on the subject of female genital mutilation, which she mentions as one of the most difficult: “It took me over 10 years to get the courage to make it”, she admits.

The Day I’ll Never Forget made someone faint at IDFA in 2002. It includes a scene in which a woman is being circumcised. During the shooting of Rough Aunties one of the sons of a Bobbi Bear worker drowned and Longinotto and her sound recordist arrived just after it had happened. Despite the sound recordist saying they should stop, she kept filming because: “Turning my camera off wouldn’t help”.

The 56-year-old Londoner might sound like a natural-born documentarist, but her childhood was pervaded by conservative values. Between the ages of eleven and sixteen she was sent to a boarding school for girls, with the main aim of educating her for marriage. Ironically enough, this experience eventually kicked off her film career, as during her studies at the British National School for Film and Television she returned to the school and made her debut Pride of Place (1978).

Although Longinotto’s lens never shies away from unpleasant reality, today her work is primarily driven by a wish to depict the life and work of people she admires. As for the upcoming screening of Rough Aunties, she concludes: “I hope that it is ultimately an uplifting experience.”

Anna Weitz