Near and Elsewhere

The directors Sue-Alice Okukubo (SO) and Eduard Zorzenoni (EZ) interviewed by Claudia Engelhardt (CE), deputy director of “Filmmuseum Munich” and board member at “Bundesverband kommunale Filmarbeit e.V.”

CE: “Near and Elsewhere” is dedicated to an important social issue. As a cross genre film, it is not so easy to grasp and raises a lot of interesting questions.

What was your starting point ?

SO u. EZ: For some time we felt that facing the current societal, economic and cultural challenges, there was and still is a growing anxiety flooding our mind, falsifying our perception and deeply influencing our thinking. We have asked ourselves how future can be thought despite these depressing tendencies.

There is a huge mismatch: our society has achieved so much development through visionary thinking. But nowadays it seems that our thinking is circling more around the fear of losing the status quo and not around positive and innovative plans for the future. But it is impossible to see the opportunities ahead when fear prevents us from following new visions. Therefore sometimes easy to grasp pseudo-solutions seem to be more attractive then really thinking a problem thoroughly.

This is why first we wanted to look at the conditions, which have led into this „mental dead end“. And secondly it was all about how we can free our decision making and our thinking again for positive societal future schemes. Or to put it differently: It is about being able to image a positive future in the first place.

CE: The concept of utopia plays an important part in this question. Can you tell us something about that?

SO u. EZ: During the research for “Near and Elsewhere” the concept of utopia as a future scheme came up very quickly. Of course this lead to the question, if nowadays utopias are still workable solutions. At least after the last big utopia, the communism, collapsed, utopias are viewed sceptically.

But we need to understand, how ubiquitous the utopian is in our perception, in our everyday life, although it seems that after all the opposite of utopia, the dystopia, the negative image of future, seems to have much more impact on our thinking. For us, positive utopian thinking is a major driving force in our society, it expands the question about future schemes with -let’s call it – further “possibility spaces”.

So we asked ourselves: How can utopian thinking help us today? How can we identify the pitfalls to avoid? This issue is especially enhanced by the interviewees Svetlana Alexievich and Matthias Horx.

And to put it provocatively : should only the doable be considered a solution. We need utopian thinking, which exceeds the limits of the possible. Utopia and pragmatic realism can and should complement each other wisely. Utopian thinking is free, it can move in any direction and is not bound to the limits of the “actual doable”. It is not detached from reality but dares to go beyond to new and –still- fictional places of the imagination. This power particularly distinguishes utopian thinking from other future schemes.

CE: And that way the idea of merging fiction and documentary in the film came up?

SO u. EZ: Yes, exactly. We were searching for a narrative framework for this film. In doing so, we found the utopian books by Thomas Morus, William Morris and H.G. Wells. In all of these books, a strange, maybe invented, maybe imaginary or dreamed place becomes a sandbox for utopian future visions. Just as with Morris and Wells, in “Near and Elsewhere” two protagonists, a man and a woman, being our alter egos, are stranded at a strange place. There they “meet” the interviewees, engage in dialogue and together they negotiate the questions about how to approach the future.

Although the fictional plot of the protagonists’ personal search for their future is deliberately fragmentary , it is the strand in which the stories of the interviewees are interwoven, pushing the protagonists plots forward, motivating them at certain pivotal points in the dramatic structure. In doing so a third protagonist gets involved: a “mermaid”. Loosely inspired by the Danish fairy tale mermaid (by Hans Christian Andersen) our mermaid is driven by curiosity. She wants to see a new world, wants to try a new way of being, whereas the two protagonists are more hesitant and skeptical at the beginning. With the mermaids’ playful optimism, she is guiding the protagonists and encouraging them.

At the end, all of them are facing a personal decision: Should they break new ground, should they go and find a new imagined future-place, because this kind of search will never reach a final state?

So to create an entity between the subject and the form of “Near and Elsewhere”, the cinematic form mirrors the ambiguity between fiction and documentary, between reality and a possible (fictional) utopian place, that emerges in our heads. The interviews and the fictional scenes are not separated. Both elements are interchangeable and merge together at times.

CE: The experts in the film come from very different professions, there is also an extreme sports woman and a “Mars scientist”.

On which criteria did you choose the interviewees?

SO u. EZ: In our last two films we followed a trans-disciplinary approach. It is not about to claim, that a particular specialist or expert can safe the world with his/her knowledge. We think this is everyone's responsibility. This is also why we are very cautious with using such terms like “expert”.

We were specifically looking for interesting people from very different professions, also beyond the obvious ones, to create an inspiring mosaic of thoughts in our films.

What can Christiane Heinicke tell us about group dynamic and about conflict management? She has spent one year in isolation with five other men and woman in a simulated Mars Habitat, being part of an psychological experiment on group dynamics.

What can extreme runner Andrea Mayr tell us about her struggling between giving up and holding on while running a marathon, and what about self-motivation?

Svetlana Alexievich, didn’t only portray the fate of thousands of simple people in communism and post-communism and was giving them a voice but she was also personally engaged in working on their common past and identifying the pitfalls of communism.

And which images and associations come up when the protagonists meet Benny Techen, the last lighthouse keeper in Denmark. By the way In this scene the borders between fiction and documentary are heavily blurred.

During our research we found a lot of very interesting possible interviewees and it was not easy to decide whom to pick. Looking specifically for people, who were not working on a concrete utopia but who were dealing with the subject of utopia on a more general level, helped us narrowing down our search.

CE: Where did the filming take place?

SO u. EZ: The fictional scenes were shot in Copenhagen and the nearby areas. Mostly in Ørestad, a modern district of Copenhagen. It has a lot of of buildings (many of them by famous Danish architect Bjarke Ingels), which were very inspiring to us because of their imaginativeness, futuristic, but in a playful way. So some of those buildings became our “stage setting” for the fictional scenes.

The Interviews were shot at carefully chosen locations in Germany, Austria, Italy and Denmark with regard to the specific subject the respective interviewee was talking about or to the linking of the fictional and the documentary parts.

E.g: the interview with Joseph Vogl was shot at the Anatomical theater in Berlin. The preliminary talks with him showed us a person with a fascinating way of precisely dissecting an issue, so we almost immediately had the idea of staging him in such a surronding.

In the interview sequence with runner Andrea Mayr one sees a mountain in the back. This mountain reappears as a print on the wall in the following fictional scene, linking associatively the story of Andrea Mayr with the story of the female protagonist in the “stage setting”.

Never would we shoot an interview just in the interviewees office, though sometimes this would be much easier (laughing). Benny Techen, the lighthouse keeper was the only one that we filmed at his working place, the last manned lighthouse in Denmark.

CE: How do you work on a film, how do you divide work? Who does what? Do you two have different roles like one is responsible for the fictional scenes and the other one for the documentary part?

SO u. EZ: No, not at all. We are working together on the conception and development of the entire film and we are directing together. Beside of that we do have different roles: Eduard did the camera work. In postproduction Sue did the editing und she composed the original music for the film.

And concerning how we work on the film: From the very beginning the research for the interviewees and the development of the fictional plot went hand in hand and merged in the script.

CE: So to sum it up: If you were to give someone an “elevator pitch”: what’s your film about in 3 short sentences? And, did you find an answer to the questions raised in your film?

SO u. EZ: It’s about the question, how our society can shape, facing the current societal, economic and cultural challenges. Right now, as the societal future seems insecure, „Near and Elsewhere“ imagines another world, a utopian place, somewhere between fiction and reality, where our alter egos and the experts plot inspirational, critical and provocative visions of a maybe or maybe not utopian future.

And about an answer to the questions raised in the film: Yes in terms of hopefully having illuminated some blind spots in the individual and common perception of the future. We hope to contribute with “Near and Elsewhere” to the ongoing dialogue about/on our societal future by thinking about essential strategies and not believing in a single salutary solution to the complexity of this subject. We are aware, that the rapid change of society leads to people wanting a concrete orientation, wanting a generic “recipe”, which then just has to be followed. A lot of business sectors make good money by selling such “recipes”.

But we refuse to accept an idea of utopia which suggests perfection or a static final state. In our understanding productive visions for the future don’t originate in set out utopias, which leads one only to react to them. So either one likes this utopia and tries to persuade the others or one tries to prevent this utopia in the first place, etc... In any case one is mentally bound. Further more they suggest a false sense of security, that doesn’t exist like this, and they close themselves to the unforeseeable.

But our thinking about the future must be held open to be able to respond flexibly to unforeseen needs and issues demand. And each one of us should keep on developing this kind of thinking. This is our cause.