Fast and Furious
An interview with director Tony Gatlif, whose timely INDIGNADOS just screened in the Berlinale Panorama.
Tony Gatlif
Timing was of the essence for director Tony Gatlif when he made INDIGNADOS, his film about the European Occupy movement in this year’s Berlinale Panorama programme.
It took Gatlif only a few minutes to find and cast his protagonist, a young African woman named Betty. Her role is integral, he says, in ensuring INDIGNADOS did not simply represent Gatlif’s point of view. In the film, Betty lands in Europe to find a better life, only to find the opposite, as she is consumed by the energy of one protest after another. “I chose her because she has this very pure and neutral sight on the world. She discovers something without any kind of critique or opinion”, says Gatlif.
Five-minute casting is indicative of the speed with which Gatlif moved to release INDIGNADOS, which Gatlif says was due to the highly topical nature of the film. “One very important element of the movie was that it was made very quickly. I did it with my own money. Funding takes years to find and this was not possible with INDIGNADOS.”
The project started when Gatlif read Stephane Hessel’s essay “Time for Outrage!”, a best-selling essay that calls for non-violent protests against financial capitalism. “When I read it I found a lot of topics and problems that moved me, and that I agreed with,” he says.
Gatlif wasn’t the only one. The essay’s strong political message propelled many of the Occupy protests in Europe last year. In Spain, the protests were called (among other names) Indignados, taken after the essay’s translated Spanish title.
“What interested me was: who is reading this book, and what will happen after they read it?”, says Gatlif, who got the film rights immediately after the essay was published in France in December 2010.
In January 2011, “Occupy” was not yet a household name. “I was still waiting for something to happen. On May 15, it happened. It started in Spain”, he says. The movement spread like wildfire across the world, and Gatlif moved with it, camera in hand. Spain, Greece and France all make a presence in the film.
While Gatlif’s films often focus on discrimination against Roma people, he says his switch of focus to Occupy did not fall outside his comfort zone. “It’s the same thing”, says Gatlif, comparing gypsies to Occupy protestors. “You have 500,000 people in Occupy who move around. They live in tents. They are nomads. The gypsies have ‘occupied’ Europe for the last 500 years.”
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