Strangers We’ve Become

KINEMATRIX In your first movie - Molly’s Way, you were observing Silesia in Poland from the outside. Molly was a stranger in mentioned environment. Now, we are after the screening of your second film The Stranger in Me (Jury Award winner, São Paolo International Film Festival), in which you are telling a story about the woman, who is strange in society, because her behavior is different from the conventional one. She is thinking differently, her body reactions are awkward. Can I say, that strangeness is a key issue in your works?

EMILY ATEF Yes, obviously it is truth. Molly’s story was in a sense my own story. I was traveling a lot during my life; I was born in Armenia, living in America, studying in France. I do not have one home. I have always been strange in a way, most people do not understand. I need to readjust to new environments over and over again. Sometimes it was really hard, the other times wonderful experience. Still, strangeness is an issue related to me. Molly’s journey to Poland, wandering in search of ex-polish-boyfriend and being on accidental terms with other people, help her with finding herself. Rebecca, from the second movie, is in post-natal depression. So to say strangeness overcome her, she did not decide. She became a stranger for herself. Her child is strange for her. Simultaneously the plot is also a story about woman and men, which became strangers to each other.

Therefore strangeness returns in your projects. May we look forward to see it in your following movie?

My next film is a story about twelve years old girl – who wants to die. All of a sudden she meets fugitive from prison, the murderer and conclude a kind of gentleman’s agreement with him. She make a promise that she helps him run away from the country, if afterwards he gonna’ kill her. The movie is going to be an outlandish story about an unusual relation between people who seemingly do not have anything in common. The man is autistic, a little bit aggressive and apprehensive. Gradually he started to trust the girl. Strangeness, if will be inscribed in the film, will have so to say different shape.

We had Molly, now we have Rebecca, in following movie will meet teenage girl. You concern yourself with women’s problems.

Definitely I have been focused on that issue during my working on Molly’s story. Yet, in my next film, the girl’s character will be even with the one impersonate by a 43-old man. The Stranger in me is not only concern of women’s issue. Rebecca’s  mental disease has an influence on her husband as much as on her. Daniel – her son, is a boy and feel even intensively as his mother. That is why it is not raising no more than women’s topic. I only wish that viewers saw this distinction. As a woman I am interested in woman’s problems, but I am also keen on different layers of significances.

Indeed, you show Rebecca’s husband – Julian (Johan von Bülow), as a truly sensitive man, who is beyond stereotypes. He seems to be emphatic enough to feel what his wife is going through. Also Susanne Wolff as Rebecca phenomenally played her role as a person isolated in kind of mental and physical illness. You gain high level of realism together. How your work with actors looked like?

We were working very slow and long, all the time with awareness of that our project would profit by good acting or be weighted down with half-baked creations. Susanne’s part was extremely important but tough. She needed to play woman, who reject a child, but at the same time, she could not be rejected by viewers. It was the main issue for me and my screenwriter, Esther Bernstorff. Everybody, from the beginning, sees an independent middle-class woman and her loving husband. She delivered a beautiful, healthy child and all of sudden fall into depression. Yet, I try did not let the audience to prejudge her. Rather that this, viewers should feel her emotions, defenselessness and completely lostness. Thus I was looking for powerful actress, who could cross over her illness, suicidal attempt and afterwards, step by step, learn how to love again. I saw Susanne in theater; she has never been playing a leading role in a film before, but I gave her the scenario with conviction that I made a good decision. Thereafter we were talking a lot; in spite of neither I nor she is a mother, we achieved a lot thanks to psychologists and other women. We also made lots of rehearsals before final shooting. Because of child on the location, everything needs to be perfectly made-up.

Your movie somehow destroy social taboo. Once you said, that pregnant Molly came to Poland to find her man, close the circle: mother, father and a child. Rebecca destroy it… And you take away whole sanctity from the sacrum, which is a nuclear family in our culture…
 

The day, when Rebecca wants to love and be loved came, right? Mother’s love became the most important thing for her. But on the other hand, you are right. Almost every women, we met and talked with about their past post-natal depressions, were misunderstood and abandoned with their problems. In my opinion, taboo in this matter (still alive in German society!) is ridiculous. If we will be talking about this, more people start to empathize with mothers and help them with overcoming disease, reconstruct relationship with family. It is unbelievable that people still believe that something like maternal instinct exists. There is no such a thing. Lots of women, I have been talking with, claim that motherhood was not a good experience. They were frightened, did not know if they deal with their babies as they should, even if their child likes them or they love it. It is society, who impose women on being mothers and tell that it is natural and easy. Many women admit that when somebody had asked them if they are happy after childbirth, they did not mention, that they do not know. But it is usual and normal. And this is the thing we should talk about.

Thank you for the interview

Kracow, March 2009