Timecrimes (Los Cronocrí­;menes) combines elements of science fiction and psycho thrillers to create a film full of intriguing ideas and imagery. Alex Fitch spoke to director, writer and star of the film Nacho Vigalondo about his influences and love of genre movies. [WARNING: SPOILERS]

Alex Fitch: What was the genesis of this film? Had you been a fan of time travel movies or did the idea come to you as a short story?

Nacho Vigalondo: I’ve been a science fiction lover all my life. I spent my childhood reading sci-fi and I’ve always dreamt of becoming a science fiction filmmaker. But because Spain doesn’t have a sci-fi tradition, it’s very difficult to convince the business people and the industry people here to make that kind of film. It’s easier to make comedies or drama. But in 2005 I became this little celebrity in Spain because one of my films was nominated for an Oscar for best short. At that time, I decided that if I had an opportunity to make a feature film because of my Oscar situation, that out of all my projects, I’d make the crazy, complicated, science fiction one! So that’s why I insisted on making Timecrimes.

AF: The film has a complex plot, but it involves only five actors, and even though it’s science fiction it doesn’t require any special effects.

NV: I think that powerful science fiction comes from ideas, and it isn’t related to big concepts in terms of production but in terms of script-writing. For example, this movie seems very cheap but even a cheap film is expensive to make here. It wasn’t easy to sell this idea because you’re dealing with a time travel device that twists the reality of the character again and again. I tried to make a movie that is easy to watch on the screen, but you can figure out how complicated the script was. Here in Spain, if you want to raise money, you have to go to these commissions related to public funds and the TV industry, and it’s pretty complicated if you want to convince these guys to invest based only on the script. As a result, it took me many years to finish the film.

AF: Still, in some respects, it’s a relatively simple premise: a man observes what he thinks is a murder and then inadvertently becomes the murderer himself.

NV: Yes, of course. But the genesis of the idea for me was this: what if I make a time travel story that becomes a crime story, and in that crime story, what if the innocent guy and the villain and the guy who pulls the strings from the darkness are all the same? What if we push the ambiguity of crime stories like The Postman Always Rings Twice, for example, by putting in a time machine that makes the good guy the villain at the same time.

AF: I don’t know if you’re a fan of classic thrillers like Dario Argento’s The Bird with the Crystal Plumage?

NV: Yes, of course! The Italian giallo is one of my favourite genres! I wanted to join my two passions in one film – one of my passions is sci-fi and the other is the kind of thriller that combines a specific point of view, bizarre killers and this kind of erotic stuff. Argento is one of my favourites, but other thrillers I have in mind are Body Double by De Palma, and of course Alfred Hitchcock.

AF: A recurring theme in a lot of these thrillers is the idea of the doppelgänger and you’ve taken that to its logical conclusion.

NV: Yes. There were several drafts of the story – it was maybe draft four or five when the girl entered the story, and her appearance became the heart of the film. It’s similar to the theme of the doppelgänger and the simulacra because we are dealing with the point of view of a certain character. Later we learn that the point of view belongs to someone hidden from the view of the audience. I love those kinds of games!

AF: The look of the film, the aesthetics, was that influenced by films like Se7en, which have a high contrast ratio? Did you use the bleach bypass/silver retention method to get that look?

NV: I love the look of Se7en, I’m really in love with David Fincher! Se7en became known as a very 1990s film, but the strategy for that film was to make it look like a 1970s picture, like The French Connection, for example. In Timecrimes, we tried to make a film that didn’t feel like any particular decade. Imagine someone watching this film in 50 years – we wanted that audience of the future to feel confused about the age of our film: is it the 1970s, the 80s, the 90s or the 21st century? Some of the elements of the film look contemporary, but at the same time other elements feel like Doctor Who from the 70s or the 80s. Some of the creepy material from Se7en doesn’t feel contemporary, but I feel that if you don’t stick to the aesthetics of your time, you’ll stop the movie from dating.

AF: In a way, watching any movie is a kind of time travel because as a viewer, you’re travelling back in time to the period it was made, so in Timecrimes, you’re playing with that in a way.

NV: Yes, the fact that you have time travel in a movie reflects the fact that a movie itself is something that travels back in time. That’s the nature of filmmaking.

AF: You play the role of the scientist in the film. Was it important for you to play that part? In a way, you have cast yourself as some kind of Deus ex machina, you’re ‘God’ within the story.

NV: I’ve been working as an actor since the 90s, in commercials, short films, in some feature films working with models, but I would never play an important role in one of my films. In this case, it felt funny to me to direct the film from inside it, experiencing all the contradictions related to filmmaking. When you’re a director, you’re like a god, you are pulling the strings, but at the same time you are the first victim of everything. The movie itself is pulling the strings and controlling you. It’s funny because that’s more or less what’s happening to the character in the movie. Some of the promotional stills from the movie are labelled as: ‘This is Nacho Vigalondo directing the main actor, Karra Elejalde’. But those stills actually show me acting in the movie – it was my character directing Karra’s character, and that is funny.

AF: What other time travel films are you a fan of? Inevitably that scene where you draw an arrow on the wall, to explain the path of time, brings up images of Christopher Lloyd in Back to the Future?

NV: When we were making the movie, Primer came out, as well as Tony Scott’s Dé;jà Vu and the time travel episode in Lost. But at the time when I was writing the film, it wasn’t common to find time travel plots on the screen. Obviously, some of my big influences are Back to the Future and Twelve Monkeys, but the kind of time travel I wanted to bring to the screen were the short stories of Philip K. Dick, writers like Robert Heinlein or Stanislaw Lem, who wrote Solaris, which is one of my favourites. These writers deal with this kind of twisted time travel in which you’re not travelling far from home, but you are making a trip where you’re multiplying your past. There’s a short story by Heinlein called ‘All You Zombies’, and in this tale the guy becomes his own mother and father! I love those kinds of quirks!

AF: Do you think free will is possible in a time travel story? It seems from the moment that Hector observes the girl, he’s trapped in his own fate. It seems like a mix of the consequences of voyeurism and also quantum mechanics – when you observe something, it’s fixed in its state and cannot change.

NV: The quantum mechanics aspect is the girl. We put an image of Schrö;inger’s cat on the girl’s shirt – there’s a point in the movie where she’s dead and alive at the same time; it depends on what Hector sees, he defines whether she’s dead or alive. The theory of this film is that you only have free will within the limits of your perception. If you haven’t seen what happens inside a room, you can change what happens there, but if you have seen inside the room, you cannot change anything. When I was writing the script it was something that came to me. It’s a quantum physics conclusion. For me, that seemed fairer than giving the character the freedom to change everything.

AF: I suppose that, maybe more so than in other films, the actors must have had a lot of questions about what they were doing in each scene, particularly when there were three different Hectors acting simultaneously! How difficult was that to direct?

NV: It was pretty difficult. There were moments while we were shooting when we had to stop everything, because suddenly there’d be a question. We’re shooting in the middle of the night, in a forest, and suddenly a member of the crew says: ‘Wait, if Hector 2 is here, which tone of the lights are we using?’ And we’d have to stop filming and try and solve the problem! Until that moment, you think you have the film under control. The worst thing is when you go back to the hotel at the end of shooting each day and you can’t avoid thinking that nothing fits in with anything and everything’s a disaster. When it comes to editing the results, you come back to life again and realise that somehow everything fits. For me, it’s a nightmare until you see the finished material.

AF: The film has been marketed as a horror film to a certain extent. How do you feel about that? Is it because the plot is quite difficult, so if you introduce it to people as a sort of psycho thriller, you can ease them into the idea that it’s about time travel later on?

NV: There are many sci-fi festivals around the world, but very few festivals where the richness of the genre is not restricted. There are not many mixed genre festivals. There are two kinds of horror festivals: the ones where there are only ‘pure’ horror films and the more open horror festivals that have become fantastic genre festivals. So your film will be seen next to a gore fest or a psycho-killer thriller there. I’m not worried about people seeing my film as a horror film, because while I have this time travel device, I put in a lot of giallo iconography. As I said before, my inspirations for the script were mainly sci-fi, but my inspirations for the filmmaking were closer to Alfred Hitchcock, Mario Bava, Dario Argento.

AF: It’s interesting to think of Hitchcock, because Timecrimes is like a reversal of Rear Window, where the middle-class voyeur becomes the killer. Do you think there is this tension with the middle classes that they have their new houses and their Ikea kitchens but all it takes is some encounter with the uncanny and they’ll become unhinged?

NV: Yeah. At the beginning of the story, we have this Hitchcock element: we have a woman, who is working and building a table, and all the time she is thinking about putting the table inside the house. And then there is a man looking through binoculars at the forest. This is a real Hitchcock opening: you have a great house in a great forest, you have this great life, but you are looking through binoculars far from home. Why? What is he trying to find? Once he finds this fantasy of a naked girl in the middle of nowhere, he becomes a Hitchcockian character because he’s dealing with his own fantasies.

AF: Just like Norman Bates in Psycho, he’s a victim as well as a criminal?

NV: Karra, me and Jon, the other actor,we watched Psycho together and we tried to Norman Batesify the characters! This is one of the things we brought to the film: we copied some of Norman Bates’s gestures for Hector. While I love the shower scene, my favourite sequence in Psycho is the one after the shower, when Norman is taking the corpse of the girl to the car, and sinks the car in a swamp. All of those scenes where he’s cleaning the bathroom, putting the plastic around the corpse, I love that part of the movie, that’s one of my biggest influences. You’re not dealing with suspense, it’s almost something else; it’s like a musical and dancing. There’s this kind of sinister beauty in the sequence and we watched it again and again!

AF: Like Psycho, your film has a twist in the ending that makes you want to see it again.

NV: We’re in the DVD age, and you have to face the fact that people are not going to watch your film just once, so you have to be prepared to put enough ‘hidden’ elements in, which you might miss the first time, but see the second time. In the Spanish DVD, we added an extra cut of the film from a chronological point of view. Instead of following one Hector, we watch the actions of the three Hectors at the same time. Watching the film again – it lasts 30 minutes – it turns into this kind of gracious filming with a lot of Hectors at the same time! It doesn’t work as a real film because it’s too confusing, but if you’ve just seen the normal version, it shows you how things really work in the story. I feel very proud because you can check that everything matches.

Interview by Alex Fitch

A story about the love between two damaged young women, their revenge against those who abused one of them, and, more generally, the intense pain of human life, Martyrs is a horror film, certainly, but one where the horror stems from a profound existential despair. Director Pascal Laugier takes his subject matter, his actresses and the audience’s preconceptions as far as they will go and beyond, and if the film does not always succeed, it is because it so fearlessly jumps into the unknown. Opinions have been fiercely divided and Martyrs has been beset by controversy ever since its screening at the Cannes festival last year. It was hit with a rare and prohibitive 18 certificate on its release in France, and although the decision was quickly reversed and the certificate downgraded to 16, in the UK it only had a limited theatrical release at the ICA in London in March.

Virginie Sélavy: To describe Martyrs as a horror film seems too reductive, as it is so unusual and unpredictable. Was your intention to make a horror film?

Pascal Laugier: Yes, because I always liked the genre. In the 70s in particular, it produced very singular works, made by filmmakers who were using it to express very personal things and a certain vision of the world. We now see John Carpenter as an auteur, in the most European sense of the word. I modestly wanted to reconnect with that spirit and to make a film that, while using the codes and archetypes of the genre, would be as unexpected as possible. Horror film should be a space of freedom, a territory for experimentation. But what happens is often the opposite. I was fed up with formulaic movies that just copy the classics, I thought that the original meaning had been lost. The genre had become politically correct, as safe as any other genre, whereas its origin lies in fact in transgression. I tried to make an uncomfortable, unpredictable film. I don’t know if I succeeded but that was the intention.

VS: What motivated you to make such an extreme, excessive film?

PL: PL: I was going through a difficult time in my life. I was in a very sombre, pessimistic mood. Our epoch is not very glorious. There are no utopias, ideologies have collapsed and our faith in the future with them. I realise it’s not very original to say this, but I really believe that the Western world is sick. Individual anxieties are at their highest, everyone lives in a constant low-level fear, it feels like we’re going to crash into a wall, there’s something very deathly in our current society. Horror cinema allowed me to express this in a very direct way. Martyrs is almost a work of prospective fiction that shows a dying world, almost like a pre-apocalypse. It’s a world where evil triumphed a long time ago, where consciences have died out under the reign of money and where people spend their time hurting one another. It’s a metaphor, of course, but the film describes things that are not that far from what we’re experiencing today.

VS: At the heart of the film lies the definition of the word ‘martyr’, which explains the extreme suffering to which the characters are subjected. Can you tell us more about this?

PL: For me, the martyr represents the one who, having no other choice but to suffer, manages to do something with this pain. Of course it’s an extreme projection, entirely disenchanted, of what I was telling you about today’s world. Since we don’t believe in anything, since the world is increasingly divided between winners and losers, what is left to the losers but to do something with their pain? Deep down, it’s what the film is about.

VS: There seems to be a fascination for suffering in the film, whether physical or psychological, whether with those who inflict it or those who are subjected to it.

PL: It’s not really a fascination, but a questioning. The film is a personal reaction to the darkness of our world. And I like the paradox within horror film: take the worst of the human condition and transform it into art, into beauty. It’s the only genre that offers this kind of dialectic and I have always found this idea very moving – to create emotion with the saddest, most depressing things in existence. I’ve always felt that horror was a melancholy genre.

VS: There is also a lot of tenderness in the film between Lucie and Anna, who are very moving characters. How important is their relationship to the film?

PL: That was a crucial element for me. I didn’t enjoy making this film very much. Everything, from writing the script to editing, was, for different reasons, very difficult. What gave me the strength to tell this story, to spend two years of my life in such a dark world, was the love story between Anna and Lucie. It was what connected me viscerally to the film. It’s a love that is not shared. Anna loves Lucie unconditionally and this love will kill her. That’s something very real that we all experience: to fall in love with the wrong person, the one who, without consciously wanting to, will destroy you. Just because they are what they are. Anna loves in an absolute manner, and in that sense, she is a sort of modern saint. She gives all of herself and she will pay for it very dearly. The world and its trivial reality are fatal to people like her…

VS: Watching the film is a profoundly unsettling experience as we are led on the same journey of pain as the central characters. What sort of reaction did you want to provoke in the audience?

PL: I swear that to disgust audiences has never been my motivation. When critics describe the film as butchery, a display of guts and gore, it saddens me very much. I see my film as a rather reserved work, in fact. And I would like it to touch the viewers, to plunge them in a state of profound melancholy, just like mine when I was filming – because I think that Martyrs is really a melodrama. Hard, violent, very disturbing, but a melodrama all the same. I hope it will be a powerful experience for those who will see it because I put everything I had into it.

VS: What was the reaction of the public in France and elsewhere? Were you surprised?

PL: I knew that I was sending out such a blast of dark energy to the audience that I had to be ready for any reaction. It’s the rule of the game. I had some amazing experiences at festivals around the world. Some people insulted me and were angry with me; others reacted very warmly. Martyrs forces people to take a strong stand, and that suits me fine. Horror in my view shouldn’t be a unifying genre. It must divide, shock, make cracks in the certainties of the audience and their propensity to a certain conformism. Horror is inherently subversive. Otherwise, I don’t see the point.

Interview by Virginie Sélavy

A nice surprise in the line-up of this year’s London Lesbian & Gay Film Festival was a mini-retrospective of German director Ulrike Ottinger’s extensive body of work. The three features and one documentary that were screened offered a brief insight into the fantastic, colourful and stylised universe she creates. One of the most important women filmmakers to emerge from the experimental fringe of New German Cinema in the late 1970s, Ottinger initially worked as a painter and photographer in Paris in the 60s before turning to film. In 1977, she made Madame X – An Absolute Ruler (Madame X – Eine absolute Herrscherin), a ferocious exploration of traditional role models that is often referred to as a ‘lesbian feminist pirate movie’. Ottinger used the pirate genre as an ironic framework for her distinctive visual style. The film stars underground icon Tabea Blumenschein as a spike-fisted, leather-clad dominatrix and caused a stir when it was first shown on German television.

Most of Ottinger’s subsequent narrative films also focus on exceptional female characters: from Orlando, a symbolic figure who changes sex and lives over several centuries (Freak Orlando, 1981) to Johanna D’Arc of Mongolia (1989) and Dorian Gray, played by the actress and model Veruschka von Lehndorff in Dorian Gray in the Mirror of the Yellow Press (Dorian Gray im Spiegel der Boulevardpresse, 1984). However, the term ‘feminist film’ doesn’t suffice to describe the unique narrative blend of her futuristic fairy tales and sumptuous cinematic voyages. Vigorously independent, Ottinger acts as writer, director and producer of all her films, including documentaries in which she has explored her fascination with both the traditional and unusual aspects of contemporary culture, following the minorities and outcasts of Berlin as they crossed the newly fallen wall between East and West in Countdown (1990) or migrating with Mongolian nomads across the Taiga forest (Taiga, 1992). Pamela Jahn spoke to Ulrike Ottinger during the LLGFF in April 2009.

Pamela Jahn: Your films come out of a tradition of fantasy and surrealist filmmaking. What sparked your interest in the unreal?

Ulrike Ottinger: It is true that my films are often set in futuristic landscapes and create a surreal imagery, but my inspirations often come from reality, from observing the world, the people, their different cultures and traditional role patterns. In film, however, you can’t show things just ‘as they are’, you have to do something with it, you have to condense reality. When I first started making films, I soon became very fascinated with the idea of using fragments of reality in a collage process, including my personal experiences, often related to my travels, but also references to literature, art and art history. The viewer then has to add his or her own imagination to make it all work. I’m interested in so many things and I like to show this in my films. I’m playing with genres and with citations but what is most important in the end is how these things come together. So in a way, fiction and fantasy are always frighteningly close to reality in my films, and vice versa.

PJ: How did your experience as an artist, especially in Paris in the 1960s, influence your work as a filmmaker?

UO: Of course, this was the time of the Structuralists in France. So I saw a lot of films, not only the nouvelle vague, but the older German Expressionist cinema, which I liked a lot, and also some early American independent cinema. It was all a bit like ‘learning by seeing’, and I don’t think I would have developed this strong desire to make films if I had only been able to see the so-called ‘commercial cinema’. On the other hand, through my work as an artist, I have become extremely sensitised to visual images. I construct my films with images. Before I started shooting Freak Orlando, for example, I took hundreds of photographs with the actress Magdalena Montezuma, who I’ve done several films with. She’s also worked with Fassbinder and Werner Schroeter. I always make a lot of photographic studies to work around a certain theme and to find interesting images.

PJ: Another connection between your films seems to be a fascination for excessive female characters, as in Madame X in particular, where the crew on the pirate ship is composed of a very bizarre collection of extreme women. Did you have a set concept in mind before you started making the film or did it ultimately develop out of the collaboration with the female cast?

UO: When I started working on the film, I actually wanted to use completely different women. But then Yvonne Rainer, who plays Josephine de College in the film, happened to have a DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service) scholarship in Berlin at the time and when I met her, I thought she was perfect to play the part of the artist. Then there was this very famous prostitute from Zurich, Irene von Lichtenstein, who had worked with many artists before. I got to know her through Schroeter, and so I used her as the photo model character ‘Blow Up’. Lutze is another artist, who was living in the Lower East Side in New York at the time, and she was just wonderful in her role as the American housewife; there was also the woman who looked like she was from Tahiti – she wasn’t actually from there, but it was great to have her in the film as the ‘native’ character. So we got together all these different kinds of women, but there was an enormous amount of stylisation. It was an unbelievable coming together and it was perfect in its character composition.

PJ: It was bound to create controversy.

UO: Oh, yes, I think people today can no longer understand the kind of shock this film was for the public. I never again had such an extreme reaction from the audience to a film.

PJ: Did you expect that kind of reaction? Did you intend to provoke people with your films at the time?

UO: Absolutely not, I was completely shocked myself, you know, because for me it was a very playful film with a lot of sympathy but also a lot of humour in it. Although I was confronting something that was not talked about openly until then, it was the form more than the theme that was so shocking, and that made people have such strong feelings about it. The film was first shown at prime time on German television and I received thousands of letters afterwards. And people from all over the country turned up in front of my house in a tiny street in Berlin to speak with me because they went crazy after seeing the film. I was absolutely amazed by this, it was a huge surprise for me.

PJ: What is so striking in Madame X is the contradiction of the role itself, Madame X as a master but also as a promise of freedom.

UO: When I returned from Paris in 1969 it was the height of the student movement and the women’s movement, and my theory about feminism was to find alternatives, and not to be caught again in a cage. However, I found some of the new figureheads or leaders of the movement just built new cages by setting new rules and limits, like Madame X in a way. This is why some women said that the film was against the feminists’ movement, but, of course, it wasn’t, quite the contrary. But although I find the movement itself very important, I think we need to be aware of the power of traditional patterns, and this is what Madame X is about too. It took a while for people to understand that there was an artistic freedom in my films. In the beginning, some of the women in the movement only wanted a film that would clearly and ideologically fit into their line like a political slogan, but this is not the way I make films.

PJ: Your latest documentary, The Korean Wedding Chest, just premiered at the Berlin Film Festival, but I believe you’re already in the middle of shooting your next film called The Blood Countess, a vampire story.

UO: Yes, I’m very excited about this film. I wrote it a long time ago, but never had enough money to make it and so I made other things in between. As often in my films, it is very inspired by location, by the history of these locations, which, in this case, is already so crazy that it makes for a great film. And, yes, it’s a vampire film set in Vienna, which depicts a dark part of the history of the royal Habsburg family. It will also include some documentary elements, but of course it’s a fantasy fiction story.

Interview by Pamela Jahn

This year’s Birds Eye View Festival opened with German writer-director Nicolette Krebitz’s second feature The Heart Is a Dark Forest, a daring, darkly stylish and artfully constructed marital drama centring on a woman’s emotional meltdown after she finds her illusions about bourgeois family life shattered forever. Vacillating between social realism, emotional tragedy and mysticism, Krebitz (who is best known in Germany as an actress) dissects what lies underneath the grid of social roles in contemporary society through an increasingly surreal modern-day version of Medea that is not always easy to digest, both formally and thematically.

With a mesmerising Nina Hoss and Devid Striesow in the lead roles, who last performed together in Christian Petzold’s remarkable thriller Yella, the film centres on Marie, who one morning accidentally discovers that her husband has a double life, with a second wife and little child in another suburban house just like hers. Utterly shaken and bewildered, Marie escapes into the nearby forest where she passes out. After returning to her children, strangely calm and collected, she attends a masked ball held in a friend’s country mansion in a scene reminiscent of Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut. There, she confronts her tragic fate and the inner demons that haunt her.

Pamela Jahn spoke to Nicolette Krebitz during the Birds Eye View Festival in March 2009.

Pamela Jahn: Your film is based on a tragedy of betrayal and focuses on a woman whose love ultimately leads to her destruction. What attracted you to this kind of subject matter?

Nicolette Krebitz: I saw Medea on stage and read the play again when I started working on a new script, so the story comes partly from Medea, and partly from some real-life cases that I discovered during my research. I found out that there were basically two different types of women, two different reactions, when they found out about the double lives of their partners. The first type just remained silent and never said a word about it, not even to their children, for fear of losing their husbands and the lives they lived. The second type of women reacted in a very extreme manner, most of them tried to kill themselves, and I was shocked by this. I started asking myself all these questions: Why would they do it? What’s the point? Are there really no more reasons to go on living? My conclusion was that it must have had a major impact on their desire for being wanted, being needed, and that it has something to do with their roles as mothers in society. They must have felt betrayed also in the way that they had given their lives and bodies to build a family, to become mothers and to raise children… It’s still a big deal, I think. And it’s this archaic feeling that caused such an extreme reaction, that I found very fascinating.

PJ: The metaphoric title perfectly matches the theme and the increasingly gloomy atmosphere you’re creating in your film. What does the image mean to you?

NK: Neither the man nor the woman in the film is to blame for what they do because of love. Most of the time, you don’t really know what it is that you love, or what you long for. Basically, you just don’t really know what you want when you love, and this for me is like a dark forest. It implies a lot of things that are hidden or invisible, but they are all part of what we call love…

PJ: In addition to the literary and cinematic references such as the masquerade scene in the castle, the film also has many theatrical elements, in particular the scenes in which Marie plays out her memories with Thomas on a sparse Brechtian stage. What was the idea behind this?

NK: To me the scenes that take place on a stage are the ones that draw the audience into the story. I think they are very necessary because they are the only moments were you see Marie and her husband Thomas, happy or not happy, but actually together. The rest of the film focuses on Marie and her point of view. To me these scenes are the soul of the film, because you see what their life as a couple has been, you witness their conversations, and thus you realise that everything that happens was mentioned before. It’s like psychoanalysis, when you reconstruct the past and look at what really has been said and done, and then you compare this to what you’ve built up in your mind.

PJ:Although we’re drawn into what happens to Marie and how she tries to cope with the situation, it seems that in a subtle way we’re also kept at a distance from her…

NK:Yeah, we change perspectives when we follow Marie. Sometimes we are inside of her, looking through her eyes, and sometimes we are spectators of the whole scenario. What I tried to do here was shifting between being part of society and being part of the person involved in this tragedy. And I think it’s important to get this distance from her, because she does something very cruel in the end.

PJ:Was it always your intention to end the film in such a surreal, nightmarish way?

NK:I don’t see it as unreal as a nightmare would be…It’s reality. Of course it is not a documentary, it’s a fiction film, and I tried to not let the audience down by being too…grey. But what fascinated me most was the fact that, if there is somebody just like you and an entire situation that mirrors your own life, you could just as well be deleted, because you are no longer of any use. This is how Marie feels, and this is because she had already given up on everything. It is possibly the most irrational decision and the darkest way to end this story, but my aim with this was to provoke a discussion in the audience.

PJ:What sort of reaction did you get from the German audience, especially women?

NK:A lot of women said they were very touched by the whole story, even the ending. Of course, they said they wouldn’t have gone that far, but they know that this is how it feels, and maybe it’s what they forbid themselves to do. But they could allow themselves to think about it through the movie…it’s a relief in a way. Because society expects all these things from a mother, and sometimes it’s just too much. And by the end of the day it’s a story about two people, a man and a woman, and too often it is down to the woman to deal with the situation.

PJ:You’ve recently contributed to a film called Germany 09: 13 Short Films about the State of the Nation, which premiered at the Berlinale in February, and your segment, ‘The Unfinished’, tells the story of a young writer who travels back in time to meet with Ulrike Meinhof and Susan Sontag in 1969. Do you feel an urge to make films about women or women’s issues in your work as a writer-director?

NK:I’m a woman and I tell stories and make films, and I think the film industry needs more women because they make different films. It’s a way of showing even to the male audience how we are, how we see things, how we feels things in order to understand it instead of treating women like objects or reduce them to being only mothers or only daughters. Yeah, so that’s my contribution but it doesn’t necessarily mean that I will also make films that deal with emancipation issues. It can be anything, but it will always be seen and told through my eyes.

Interview by Pamela Jahn