You Don’t Have to Be a Prophet to Foresee the Fire: Talking to Filmmaker Hubert Sauper about We Come As Friends and South Sudan
How do you gain the trust of the people you interview? After all, as you say in the title of this movie, the people who exploit the colonized so often come as friends, as you did. How do you convey to them that you aren’t just doing the same thing and that they can trust you? Because they probably haven’t seen your other movies, so how do they know what you are planning to do with this footage you’re shooting?
Ok, there are two answers to that. The first is that “We come as friends” is a line that we use ourselves all the time. And it’s in there because it’s true. I didn’t come there because I want to buy their land, I don’t want to eat their food, I didn’t want to challenge them. I just wanted to interact with them as human beings.
Politicians, warlords, oil field managers—they have power, you know? Power over other people. And here I come in this stupid like flying lawnmower, and there is no organization [behind me]. I kind of out myself for people. I think it’s almost a duty of intellectuals, and journalists like yourself, to oppose huge blocks of mainstream thinking. This little airplane was a Trojan horse, in a way.
The other answer to “How did I get their trust?” is: By communicating a lot. We came to places where people had no idea if we were Arabs or Chinese. Because we were white, they thought we were Arabs and we would have bombs. We traveled in a world with no cameras, trying to put a film together. It was a huge work of interaction. I talked to people a lot.
Did you start filming people right away or did you interact with them for a while before you turned on the camera, or did it depend on the situation?
It depended on the situation. I always had my camera, and it was a tiny camera so I always had it on to record something, almost like a diary. So, for example, the man who was kind of like the character in Dostoevsky’s The Idiot, the guy with the white hat, I saw him at the side of the road. I was on a little motorbike taxi. I got off and gave my taxi driver a couple dollars and said goodbye, and I stayed with this man in the white uniform. I said, “Do you mind if I film you while we talk?” And then he said “Give me the camera. I want to record you.” So he took my camera and filmed me for half an hour. We were talking and it kept running—cameras don’t need tape any more, so they can just run. And for half an hour he questioned me on what am I doing here, and he was going on and on about how naïve I am, and then at one point I took the camera again. He was very very present and very together—it was a very strong encounter. So that was one situation. And sometimes it was a long time, years of writing letters and meeting up before filming a scene.
Is it often just you and your camera or are there usually other people helping you film?
I have the camera, and I am filming.
And you don’t have a sound person or anything?
No, no sound person. I’m filming, and sometimes I give the camera to my very good friend and copilot. He is a very good filmmaker himself and he was always around. But mostly I’m filming while I’m having these conversations. It’s more conversations than interviews. So I’m recording these conversations, and my fears and my hopes and my strange questions are essentially a character in the films. It’s a strange situation. People are strange when you’re a stranger.
I’ve seen some other strong and interesting movies about Africa lately, including Timbuktu, Concerning Violence, and Beats of the Antonov. Do you think there are more interesting movies being made about Africa now than there were before?
Yeah. First of all, there are going to be more and more good films out of the southern hemisphere in general, I think. But I don’t make films about Africa at all. I just make films that happen to be set in Africa. I don’t think they’re about Africa, really. They’re about many things. We Come As Friends is about the Chinese. In a way, it’s a film about Europe; it’s just set in Africa. It’s about the devastation of Africa when the Europeans divided it up with 52 national borders. And then a couple of years ago, the way the whole international community agreed to have another national border created [the creation of South Sudan, which is documented in We Come As Friends], and also agreed for it to go straight through the oilfields.
I was totally sure, and was sort of steering the whole argument of my film toward this situation, that it was going to end in a fire. You don’t have to be a prophet to foresee that. I could foresee the war on the border after the election.
It seems to me that a lot of what is happening worldwide these days is that historically warring people who were forced into becoming fellow countrymen by a line drawn on a map from afar by a colonial power—an act you illustrate in We Come As Friends—are now fighting to become separate and self-governing again. So that’s one huge strand of history that’s also a big part of this movie.
Yeah. There was a worldwide epidemic of land-grabbing by all kinds of methods, and now people are grabbing natural resources. There are places on the planet, like Antartica and central Africa, that are open to this kind of claim. This is where wars are going to happen, and this is where people are going to die because they unfortunately were born near some kind of stupid gold mine or something. This is what happens. It happened 100 years ago and 200 years ago, and it happened when the Spaniards came to the Incas and the Mayas. What is more interesting to me is how this inheritance repeats itself and becomes more and more refined. Because the more crime evolves, the more you have to be smart in disguising it as something else. We have to reinvent our own narratives over and over.
Have you been disappointed or heartened by the way your films have been received?
I’ve been very happy that I have a lot of smart people around me, and I’m happy to go on this tour in America, and I’m happy to interact with audiences. People are always asking me for solutions. I don’t know what solutions are, but I know that solutions are out there. We have to ask ourselves the right questions and then come up with lots more answers. As a filmmaker, you can only give the platform for questions, and it’s a fantastic thing.
It’s like in any family, I guess, or relationship: You have these moments when you have to lay down what’s going on and examine it. I think we’re at a good point in history for doing that. The world can go one way or the other, but the problems are very abstract, you know? Global warming is very abstract. In our inner souls, we think, “Ok, warming is not bad. It’s good to be warm,” so it doesn’t really kick in that it is actually a disaster. What I see is that people can work with metaphors and images and poetry. They are vital for us. We are overflowing with information, but it is a kind of information that doesn’t make us smarter. It makes us full of facts and figures but it doesn’t give us a clue about what to do. It’s not interesting to hear how many million people died in some natural disaster, because you cannot picture that. But it’s interesting to find the background of one of these survivors and show it in a film. Then you can extract the rest from there.