Bénédicte Lienard and Mary Jimenez • Directors of Fuga
"It’s also our responsibility to talk about the past in the present"
- The directorial duo chatted to us about their new movie which sees them pursuing their journey in search of ghosts from Peru’s past
Five years after scooping the Special Jury Prize and the Bayard for Best Photography by way of By the Name of Tania [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Mary Jimenez, Bénédicte Lié…
film profile], which saw them travelling along the Peruvian stretch of the Amazon River, Bénédicte Lienard and Mary Jimenez have once again been selected in competition at the very same Namur International French Film Festival (FIFF) to present their new opus, Fuga [+see also:
film review
interview: Bénédicte Lienard and Mary …
film profile]. The film follows their journey in search of ghosts from Peru’s past, a memorial, sensory and spiritual investigation led by Saor following in the footsteps of Valentina, a victim of the terrorist violence and homophobic persecution which has ravaged the country for years. We had the pleasure of meeting with the two directors.
Cineuropa: How did this project come about? Where does it sit in your filmography?
Bénédicte Lienard: This is our third film in the Peruvian Amazon and the final part of a trilogy. Often, with us, one film leads to another, and Fuga first took root when we were filming By the Name of Tania. We realised the LGBTQIA+ community enjoyed a strong presence in Iquitos, and we wondered why that was. They explained to us that during the civil war years, the aggressors’ slogan was to clean the country of homosexual vermin. The country set up a Commission of Truth and Reconciliation, but they realised there were very few testimonies by gay people, because of the sense of shame and homophobia. These communities didn’t have the right to speak. We set off along the river, as we’ve been doing for a few years now. We’ve always worked like that: we harvest stories. One door opened to us by way of one of the film’s protagonists, Miguel, and through him we met all of his friends who’d never spoken before. We formed a community with them.
In By the Name of Tania, there was one voice, while in the present film, there’s someone who listens in the form of Saor.
Mary Jimenez: We’re always looking for a ferryman for our story, someone who’ll share our point of view. Bénédicte had the idea of Saor being the one who listens to stories. And as we had non-professional actors as witnesses, it helped to frame their narrative. Saor, who’s an engaged queer artist in real life, carries and shares his emotions. His character allows for empathy and distances us from the traditional documentary form which offers "unadulterated" stories. He acts as a prism which sometimes creates a certain distance and sometimes a proximity. Saor is firmly anchored in the present reality of his land, but he also invokes the past and ghosts. There’s a mystical and supernatural side to him.
BL: It’s our responsibility to talk about the past in the present, to anchor our films in modern-day film writing. There’s never any need to reconstruct in our films. We’re in Amazonia, so a person who hears about others’ lives is a shaman. The land opens this imaginary up to us. It’s also about our love of sound, of creating an off-screen world, and of daring to take a journey into imaginary zones which aren’t necessarily mystical, they’re mysterious. These are highly populated places, so how do you plunge into local memory while maintaining a political and poetic relationship with the world? It’s about imagining cinema while standing on the outside of it, and I really like that position. On the edge of the forest, on the banks of the river, on the verge of massacres, always in a journeying capacity which isn’t about frontality but possibility. While making sure the viewer finds their place on this journey. Fuga speaks of violence and resilience. We wanted to share through film the upheavals and tremors that we ourselves experienced while listening to certain testimonies. To create a path which helps the viewer take in the story too.
There’s a great dichotomy between the beauty of the landscape and the violence of men.
BL: I think we actually make quite gentle films. Violence is intrinsic to the story we’re telling, but we have a way of using film that’s more potent, more elusive. We create images which help viewers to project themselves into the situation and which help their imaginations graft themselves onto a film.
MJ: We show the consequences of violence, not violence itself. We depict it through the suffering it causes.
(Translated from French)
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