People I Could Have Been and Maybe Am by Borris Gerrets

This very unique documentary would not be possible without the initial belief that the life of every single person is special, and therefore worth being told. Such an apparently ordinary statement is the justification for director Boris Gerrets to go down into the streets with nothing but his cellphone, looking for strangers sleeping inside the subway or sitting on a park bench.

Two individuals in particular eventually catch his attention: Steve, a homeless man in London, and Sandrine, a Brazilian girl living in England and hoping to find in a rich man - a solution to her financial situation. After obtaining basic information (their name, age etc.), Gerrets ends ups following these people, getting deeper and deeper into their intimacy and eventually intervening in their lives, encouraging Steve to look for his daughter and having a love affair with Sandrine.

The director is constantly questioning his own role in this project as well as his responsibility towards his subjects’ lives after making them public. In a sort of naïve series of questions, written over a simple black square, he insists on his own astonishment and lack of control over the material he is filming. Their lives are stronger than this project of his, he seems to say, as both character’s lives get bitter and hopeless.

This is maybe the reason why he continues to follow them for such a long time, avoiding sentimentalism and exploring all the limitations of the bad image quality as a personal choice. By the end of the film, the ordinary grain and the ordinary lives of the homeless man and the ambitious woman have already become special. At a certain moment, in the middle of a common discussion, Steve turns and says: “I love you, by the way”. The surprise of the director is evident: there is a lot more going on in front of his cellphone that he would have imagined.

By Bruno Carmelo