Drawing upon narrative therapy ideas this interview with filmmaker Florian Kunert was held in preparation and to acknowledge the release of his first feature film.
Fortschritt im Tal der Ahnungslosen
Progress in the Valley of the People Who Don't Know
Fortschritt im Tal der Ahnungslosen
Progress in the Valley of the People Who Don't Know
“Florian Kunert is a German writer and director. Florian's short documentary film ‚Oh Brother Octopus‘ premiered in the Berlinale Shorts Program in 2017 before winning the German Short Film Prize. As part of making the film, Florian lived in Indonesia for one year. He studied documentary direction at La Escuela Internacional de Cine y TV in Cuba and has recently completed a post-graduate at the Academy of Media Arts in Cologne. ‚Progress‘ is his first feature film project.” https://www.floriankunert.com/
Section of the interview...
Poh Lin: From what I understand, when you made “Oh Brother Octopus”, you went to a community to make the film. What was the difference between being a filmmaker, going to a community as opposed to being a filmmaker, making a film that you're both within the community and outside the community?
Florian: That was a very different experience for me because this is the first time I make a film in a community that I'm part of myself, or have been part of myself.
Poh Lin: How is it different? When I say that, what stands out as being the real difference for you as a filmmaker from doing a film about a community and then doing a film where you are both in and out of the community?
Florian: I had to be much more protective about myself. Means I had to have certain measures in place so I don't fall back into old behaviour patterns. The film was very much also a therapeutic process. So was “Oh Brother Octopus”, but the theme was not as personal as now because it's very entrenched with memory and family. It was like a catharsis for me as well, but in “Progress in the valley of the people who don't know”, this therapeutic process is much more obvious. I chose a house or a building that has a meaning in my memory. It was the place where the production of harvest machinery happened during the GDR and after that it housed asylum seekers, which as a child I saw as a violent foreigners. This invited me to make use of this house as a tool in a therapeutic process. Which is not a decision I can justify from scripting perspective.
Poh Lin: So you weren't using scripting logic?...What were you using instead?
Florian: Really only instinctual reflexes in association with my memory. Means, this house was
a mystery. It was shrouded in clouds in my childhood when I think back of it and I wanted to just know more about it. Then I found out and picked up all that stuff and then decided, we tell the story there. I put all this new meaning, being 20 or 15 years older, this much more reflected meaning into this building and then filmed the demolition process of it and at the end it's gone. And then it was so therapeutic and I can only advise to anybody to go through this. This could be a process that could have been prescribed from the therapist. To put meaning into this building and then destroy it. I mean that was so very ritualistic, the poor film team had to go through this. But when the building was destroyed, I could feel that a really heavy, big load was gone and it felt so good.
Poh Lin: I'll just summarize what I’ve heard you say so far..correct me if I get any wrong... about how the whole film was based on your own process and experiment and it was a type of research if you want to say, where people kind of played a different role in that, but you were still the centre researcher, if that makes sense. And then you talked about what you did to kind of sustain and keep people connected to the project was attention to relationships. Relationships where there was some kind of mutual giving and taking of sharing in some way. And that you tried to be as honest and open as you could be while still maintaining this experimental kind of posture, which is for everyone to know that at times they won't know what's going on. Otherwise, how do we disrupt the regular common stories that people tell about their lives? Because as we get older, we start to form a very kind of solidified series of memories and connections between them and in that we lose all the other archived memories that exists but because they don't get told, they start to kind of dissolve and we question their existence. So it sounds like when you talk that in your experiment, it's research but it's also about how do you research material if people just say the same story. Bringing in the perspective of the Syrian people, finding ways to disrupt, like you said, for someone to rock up at an abandoned building and put on a uniform, like you immediately can't replicate the same types of conversations. So I'm hearing it was very experimental, but also in that you recognize that there's risk. There's ethical risk. And whilst you did try to take up this, you know, this ethic of care in terms of prioritizing relationships. You're saying that not having assistants meant that you were both in a process and trying to facilitate a process, which is a pretty big job. That's kind of what I've got from this last bit that we've been talking about. Does that make sense? Or do you want to make any changes or does it have you think about something else?
Florian: This was really spot on, in your summary. I feel very connected to that. Especially the first thing which I’ve never seen in this way, what you said, that I’m the only researcher from the beginning to the end and that the film itself was a type of research from the beginning till the end. I find it interesting to see it in this way, which is true because it has an experimental character from the development to the editing. It was always this quest, where I was the kind of principal researcher if you want to say. And all these people coming in and joining for parts of the way in this research. Leaves the question what was there to research or what is the research matter?
Poh Lin: Yes. Which might link to this idea of the broader social meaning of the GDR, which is something that we could talk about. You said that it really caught your attention to use the word researcher because you talked a lot about therapeutic process, but as I'm a therapist, I see a therapeutic process as a form of research. It's a form of inquiry. And I was curious about the title of your film progress in the valley of the people who don't know and how you said that, that was kind of about opening up a question. Does that connect for you? Was that the quest, the question of the quest or was it something else?
Florian: Progress with a question mark. How to make progress in the valley of the people who don't know. Because what I found that the very first book that drew me into this thing was a book that was written the year after the revolution in 1989 of someone that lived in the neighbour town of mine and experienced the whole GDR, the 40 years of the GDR there. And it was like analysing from a psychological or therapeutic point of view, the way the regime of the GDR influenced every citizen on what levels, family level, in the medical level, in the school level and all the different levels of community and society. Very detailed, oh my God, it was just such an eye opener for me.
Poh Lin: Did it in some way acknowledge some of your own experience or did it bring more questions?
Florian: It was like something that I knew already. Everything I knew but I could have never put it that way - it was all there. The emotions about this were there, but suddenly I could channel them into a direction. It's not about blame, but just to know where it comes from. All the things that he was writing about, I could feel I experienced even though I didn't. Because I was born 1989 and I lived only one and a half years in the GDR.
Poh Lin: Is that what made it even more confusing? That you hadn't the lived experience?
Florian: Yes, this is definitely contributed to the predicament of my generation. You are so close to the lived experience, but yet you don't have living memory. So where to put these things that got passed onto you in your education, in your upbringing, in your social context. And this was what led me to the question of what happened in 89, in my hometown, in the area where I grew up, in the valley of the people who don't know. Which was very different to what happened in Leipzig, in Berlin, in other towns in the GDR. And this is where it becomes difficult to talk about it because of course within my town there was also destinies and experiences, that were very different to this. So my family experience always plays a role when I talk about this. I can only have this very personal perspective if you want because it is just the sum of people I got in contact with.
Poh Lin: Does it feel like that sometimes you are taking on a collective voice?
Florian: This is always the point, where people point the finger and say, I don’t want to listen to this because I'm not part of this collective or it's easy to certainly say I'm not part of that collective, and that he doesn't talk about me or he says like, "This is not me," and he puts the blame on me. This is where it's really hard to talk about this. I went back and back and back and said, I only talk about my experience, my personal view, my personal experience and maybe other people can find similarities or share some certain aspects. But if you say this is the legacy of GDR… obviously the word is there, “legacy of GDR” is there when you talk about the film. But when you word it it becomes so differently suddenly. Suddenly it doesn't make sense to talk about the legacy of GDR because every individual had a different legacy of the GDR, different memory, different life experience, but there is a collective experience that people underwent in this area of the GDR, I would say.
Poh Lin: And I guess, it begs the question, what is the concern or the fear to acknowledge that there is a collective shared experience? Why is it so important to differentiate and say, no, no, no, that's not how I experienced it.
Florian: Because the collective memory of the GDR, the voice of the public in Germany is a very negative one. It points out the military aspect of the GDR that it was a dictatorship that imprisoned people and the Stasi that was wiring all the apartments, listening to people and this aspect. Which is true, but it's not the dominant narrative of most of the people who lived in the GDR and especially people in the valley of the people who don't know because they were further removed from Western counter stories of the GDR, having very happy memories thinking back to the GDR. And now they want to reject this collective identity of the GDR because it's not conform with their’s, and it actually is hurtful probably to them.
Poh Lin: But to reject it means also to dismiss any harm?
Florian: Done to themselves, what would it mean to them? To acknowledge, maybe there was an underbelly that I just was not aware of while I lived in the GDR.
Maybe there was something going on and maybe things I did meant also something else which they were not aware of or not aware of until now. And this is the revolution 89 that didn't happen. Which is a inner revolution of acknowledging, something that I thought was a certain way is maybe another way. And the country did this because suddenly this country is another country, and everything has changed but the very people themselves didn't have to do this to be part of the new country. So this is what I was very interested in to address. What are those things that led to people having happy memories about that from today’s perspective carry a very different meaning at the same time. And when you hear the participants talking about military camps and the way it was a cool class outing, the coolest thing to do. The defensive tone everybody takes on talking about those things is the way the film works you know. In this defensiveness, in the tone, in the way they describe their memories, you can see that there is a misunderstanding or that there is a process missing.
Poh Lin: Ot that there's something at stake. There is something very valuable that they are concerned is at risk. If there's good memories dispelled or proven otherwise. Do you know what I mean when I say that?
Florian: For them there is a lot at risk.
Poh Lin: That's what I mean, yes.
Florian: It makes sense that they are defensive. I can so understand their defensiveness, you know, but it seems like the public German voice, the media did not understand the defensiveness. This is where I said, can't you see? And maybe I can see because I'm from there and I was born in this time and have a foot in both worlds. So this is where I as the transmitter of this or like maybe the legitimation of me as the principal researcher comes about, because I can understand both worlds at the same time.
Poh Lin: Is there an image that comes to your mind as you describe that? Maybe that's why I'm the key researcher?
Florian: One image for example, when I watched the archived material of the GDR I had highly emotional responses. I was crying watching the wall coming down even though I don't have personal memory to this, I wasn't there. I mean I was there as a baby, actually.
Poh Lin: That challenges the notion of it though, isn't it? Why is it more legitimate if you have lived the experience as opposed to it is within your culture?
Florian: This is one image that made me very aware of my own involvement and being able to feel in ways, my mother feels or the generation of my parents feels and that in some ways I’m part of this even though I'm the next generation. But at the same time the kind of turn my life took, in terms of moving away from that area or more so getting as far away as possible from that area and now having troubles to go back because I find it suffocating shows that I have built a very different reality for myself outside of this conditioning. And these are the two things that live inside of me that I'm negotiating during the filming process.
Poh Lin: Is that the thing that you're pushing against in this inquiry?
Florian: Yes. This thing that I was pushing against is this conditioning that I carry and that is a reality for me as well.
Poh Lin: Well, it sounds like a physical legacy.
Florian: Yes, it is.
Poh Lin: That you carry…
Florian: It is something that feels like I lived through even though I don't have a single memory to put it to, but that's why reading the history, reading those books, looking at the archive was so beneficial because there are the memories, there are the images. There are the images that are missing for me.
Poh Lin: It's like you have the sensation without the image, is it like that?
Florian: Exactly. I had the same sensation, the same anger, the same frustration or fear, but there was no images to put them towards to.
Section of the interview...
Poh Lin: From what I understand, when you made “Oh Brother Octopus”, you went to a community to make the film. What was the difference between being a filmmaker, going to a community as opposed to being a filmmaker, making a film that you're both within the community and outside the community?
Florian: That was a very different experience for me because this is the first time I make a film in a community that I'm part of myself, or have been part of myself.
Poh Lin: How is it different? When I say that, what stands out as being the real difference for you as a filmmaker from doing a film about a community and then doing a film where you are both in and out of the community?
Florian: I had to be much more protective about myself. Means I had to have certain measures in place so I don't fall back into old behaviour patterns. The film was very much also a therapeutic process. So was “Oh Brother Octopus”, but the theme was not as personal as now because it's very entrenched with memory and family. It was like a catharsis for me as well, but in “Progress in the valley of the people who don't know”, this therapeutic process is much more obvious. I chose a house or a building that has a meaning in my memory. It was the place where the production of harvest machinery happened during the GDR and after that it housed asylum seekers, which as a child I saw as a violent foreigners. This invited me to make use of this house as a tool in a therapeutic process. Which is not a decision I can justify from scripting perspective.
Poh Lin: So you weren't using scripting logic?...What were you using instead?
Florian: Really only instinctual reflexes in association with my memory. Means, this house was
a mystery. It was shrouded in clouds in my childhood when I think back of it and I wanted to just know more about it. Then I found out and picked up all that stuff and then decided, we tell the story there. I put all this new meaning, being 20 or 15 years older, this much more reflected meaning into this building and then filmed the demolition process of it and at the end it's gone. And then it was so therapeutic and I can only advise to anybody to go through this. This could be a process that could have been prescribed from the therapist. To put meaning into this building and then destroy it. I mean that was so very ritualistic, the poor film team had to go through this. But when the building was destroyed, I could feel that a really heavy, big load was gone and it felt so good.
Poh Lin: I'll just summarize what I’ve heard you say so far..correct me if I get any wrong... about how the whole film was based on your own process and experiment and it was a type of research if you want to say, where people kind of played a different role in that, but you were still the centre researcher, if that makes sense. And then you talked about what you did to kind of sustain and keep people connected to the project was attention to relationships. Relationships where there was some kind of mutual giving and taking of sharing in some way. And that you tried to be as honest and open as you could be while still maintaining this experimental kind of posture, which is for everyone to know that at times they won't know what's going on. Otherwise, how do we disrupt the regular common stories that people tell about their lives? Because as we get older, we start to form a very kind of solidified series of memories and connections between them and in that we lose all the other archived memories that exists but because they don't get told, they start to kind of dissolve and we question their existence. So it sounds like when you talk that in your experiment, it's research but it's also about how do you research material if people just say the same story. Bringing in the perspective of the Syrian people, finding ways to disrupt, like you said, for someone to rock up at an abandoned building and put on a uniform, like you immediately can't replicate the same types of conversations. So I'm hearing it was very experimental, but also in that you recognize that there's risk. There's ethical risk. And whilst you did try to take up this, you know, this ethic of care in terms of prioritizing relationships. You're saying that not having assistants meant that you were both in a process and trying to facilitate a process, which is a pretty big job. That's kind of what I've got from this last bit that we've been talking about. Does that make sense? Or do you want to make any changes or does it have you think about something else?
Florian: This was really spot on, in your summary. I feel very connected to that. Especially the first thing which I’ve never seen in this way, what you said, that I’m the only researcher from the beginning to the end and that the film itself was a type of research from the beginning till the end. I find it interesting to see it in this way, which is true because it has an experimental character from the development to the editing. It was always this quest, where I was the kind of principal researcher if you want to say. And all these people coming in and joining for parts of the way in this research. Leaves the question what was there to research or what is the research matter?
Poh Lin: Yes. Which might link to this idea of the broader social meaning of the GDR, which is something that we could talk about. You said that it really caught your attention to use the word researcher because you talked a lot about therapeutic process, but as I'm a therapist, I see a therapeutic process as a form of research. It's a form of inquiry. And I was curious about the title of your film progress in the valley of the people who don't know and how you said that, that was kind of about opening up a question. Does that connect for you? Was that the quest, the question of the quest or was it something else?
Florian: Progress with a question mark. How to make progress in the valley of the people who don't know. Because what I found that the very first book that drew me into this thing was a book that was written the year after the revolution in 1989 of someone that lived in the neighbour town of mine and experienced the whole GDR, the 40 years of the GDR there. And it was like analysing from a psychological or therapeutic point of view, the way the regime of the GDR influenced every citizen on what levels, family level, in the medical level, in the school level and all the different levels of community and society. Very detailed, oh my God, it was just such an eye opener for me.
Poh Lin: Did it in some way acknowledge some of your own experience or did it bring more questions?
Florian: It was like something that I knew already. Everything I knew but I could have never put it that way - it was all there. The emotions about this were there, but suddenly I could channel them into a direction. It's not about blame, but just to know where it comes from. All the things that he was writing about, I could feel I experienced even though I didn't. Because I was born 1989 and I lived only one and a half years in the GDR.
Poh Lin: Is that what made it even more confusing? That you hadn't the lived experience?
Florian: Yes, this is definitely contributed to the predicament of my generation. You are so close to the lived experience, but yet you don't have living memory. So where to put these things that got passed onto you in your education, in your upbringing, in your social context. And this was what led me to the question of what happened in 89, in my hometown, in the area where I grew up, in the valley of the people who don't know. Which was very different to what happened in Leipzig, in Berlin, in other towns in the GDR. And this is where it becomes difficult to talk about it because of course within my town there was also destinies and experiences, that were very different to this. So my family experience always plays a role when I talk about this. I can only have this very personal perspective if you want because it is just the sum of people I got in contact with.
Poh Lin: Does it feel like that sometimes you are taking on a collective voice?
Florian: This is always the point, where people point the finger and say, I don’t want to listen to this because I'm not part of this collective or it's easy to certainly say I'm not part of that collective, and that he doesn't talk about me or he says like, "This is not me," and he puts the blame on me. This is where it's really hard to talk about this. I went back and back and back and said, I only talk about my experience, my personal view, my personal experience and maybe other people can find similarities or share some certain aspects. But if you say this is the legacy of GDR… obviously the word is there, “legacy of GDR” is there when you talk about the film. But when you word it it becomes so differently suddenly. Suddenly it doesn't make sense to talk about the legacy of GDR because every individual had a different legacy of the GDR, different memory, different life experience, but there is a collective experience that people underwent in this area of the GDR, I would say.
Poh Lin: And I guess, it begs the question, what is the concern or the fear to acknowledge that there is a collective shared experience? Why is it so important to differentiate and say, no, no, no, that's not how I experienced it.
Florian: Because the collective memory of the GDR, the voice of the public in Germany is a very negative one. It points out the military aspect of the GDR that it was a dictatorship that imprisoned people and the Stasi that was wiring all the apartments, listening to people and this aspect. Which is true, but it's not the dominant narrative of most of the people who lived in the GDR and especially people in the valley of the people who don't know because they were further removed from Western counter stories of the GDR, having very happy memories thinking back to the GDR. And now they want to reject this collective identity of the GDR because it's not conform with their’s, and it actually is hurtful probably to them.
Poh Lin: But to reject it means also to dismiss any harm?
Florian: Done to themselves, what would it mean to them? To acknowledge, maybe there was an underbelly that I just was not aware of while I lived in the GDR.
Maybe there was something going on and maybe things I did meant also something else which they were not aware of or not aware of until now. And this is the revolution 89 that didn't happen. Which is a inner revolution of acknowledging, something that I thought was a certain way is maybe another way. And the country did this because suddenly this country is another country, and everything has changed but the very people themselves didn't have to do this to be part of the new country. So this is what I was very interested in to address. What are those things that led to people having happy memories about that from today’s perspective carry a very different meaning at the same time. And when you hear the participants talking about military camps and the way it was a cool class outing, the coolest thing to do. The defensive tone everybody takes on talking about those things is the way the film works you know. In this defensiveness, in the tone, in the way they describe their memories, you can see that there is a misunderstanding or that there is a process missing.
Poh Lin: Ot that there's something at stake. There is something very valuable that they are concerned is at risk. If there's good memories dispelled or proven otherwise. Do you know what I mean when I say that?
Florian: For them there is a lot at risk.
Poh Lin: That's what I mean, yes.
Florian: It makes sense that they are defensive. I can so understand their defensiveness, you know, but it seems like the public German voice, the media did not understand the defensiveness. This is where I said, can't you see? And maybe I can see because I'm from there and I was born in this time and have a foot in both worlds. So this is where I as the transmitter of this or like maybe the legitimation of me as the principal researcher comes about, because I can understand both worlds at the same time.
Poh Lin: Is there an image that comes to your mind as you describe that? Maybe that's why I'm the key researcher?
Florian: One image for example, when I watched the archived material of the GDR I had highly emotional responses. I was crying watching the wall coming down even though I don't have personal memory to this, I wasn't there. I mean I was there as a baby, actually.
Poh Lin: That challenges the notion of it though, isn't it? Why is it more legitimate if you have lived the experience as opposed to it is within your culture?
Florian: This is one image that made me very aware of my own involvement and being able to feel in ways, my mother feels or the generation of my parents feels and that in some ways I’m part of this even though I'm the next generation. But at the same time the kind of turn my life took, in terms of moving away from that area or more so getting as far away as possible from that area and now having troubles to go back because I find it suffocating shows that I have built a very different reality for myself outside of this conditioning. And these are the two things that live inside of me that I'm negotiating during the filming process.
Poh Lin: Is that the thing that you're pushing against in this inquiry?
Florian: Yes. This thing that I was pushing against is this conditioning that I carry and that is a reality for me as well.
Poh Lin: Well, it sounds like a physical legacy.
Florian: Yes, it is.
Poh Lin: That you carry…
Florian: It is something that feels like I lived through even though I don't have a single memory to put it to, but that's why reading the history, reading those books, looking at the archive was so beneficial because there are the memories, there are the images. There are the images that are missing for me.
Poh Lin: It's like you have the sensation without the image, is it like that?
Florian: Exactly. I had the same sensation, the same anger, the same frustration or fear, but there was no images to put them towards to.