My long distance friend (2008/2009)
My long-distance friend
My long-distance friend is a film about mobility. Ever increasing mobility in terms of traveling, identities and ideas. About the endless possibilities but also about what is hidden underneath, the other side, the danger. The danger to loose direction and to loose a solid base from which we operate and face the world. This is a film about the overwhelming times we live in and the ways we try to cope with it.
In my long-distance friend the filmmaker takes us on an enervating trip through time, through the way of thinking and behaving in the hybrid times of todays world. Traveling through Europe she wills share her fascination for the very explicit and poetic ideas of the German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk about the human struggle in global times. From the perspective of his philosophy we will zoom in on OG, the filmmakers long-distance friend from Zimbabwe.
OG’s very turbulent life, her search for a solid base, love and shelter will be the focus of this ‘road movie’.
She is a tiger, powerful, a survivor, tough but at the same time very sensitive. She knows how the world functions and she is persistent to take from it what she thinks belongs to her. Her struggle with the past never leaves her though.
I met OG on a new years party in 2001. She was then 23 years old. A tall and gracious girl, very beautiful and very sexy. We talked all night, she danced in front of me and told me bit by bit the unbelievable story of her life. I was very moved by her. In the early morning she layed her head in my lap and fell asleep. This is where our long-distance friendship started.
OG, or Angie or Tsitsi (she uses her 3 personalities on and off) is born in Jamaica from her 17 year old Zimbabwean mother, who leaves the father of her child when OG is 5 years old and takes her back to Zimbabwe. OG is left with family, whom she never met before, while her mother leaves for the city to find a job. When OG is 9 years old she runs away from home, because there is nobody anymore to take care of her. She decides to try to make her dream come true, to go to Europe. She ends up in a monastery in Cyprus.
When she is 12 years old, she leaves the monastery and meets a german couple who takes care of her. Soon she leaves them too and starts her wanderings through Europe.
When she is 14 she gets pregnant. Not able to take good care of her baby, Child Care Denmark forces her to bring her child to her mother in Zimbabwe.
OG supports them financially from Europe and keeps searching for possibilities to officially adopt her own daughter. Meanwhile she moves as a vamp from clubs to parties, from Vienna to Monaco, to Hawai and back and struggles with her inner devil as she calls it.
From the moment that I met OG, I wanted to offer her the roof under which she could find shelter. The loneliness that surrounded her existence seemed unjust to me. At the same time I was enchanted by the power of this streetwise soldier and by her adventures all over the world. These were things I could only dream of. She took the stairs of the mobile world with enormous speed, but is, more than anyone I know, a being without shelter.
So now, the the time has come to get her daughter and take her into a new world. A world full of possibilities but also full of dangers. So in the film we will eventually find ourselves in Afrika, the world outside of Europe. We leave the world of supposed immunity and deminishing comfort to join OG on het journey to Zimbabwe, a country on the edge of a breakdown and to her more or less forgotten family trying to survive amidst traditions under harsh economic circumstances.
Apart from getting her daughter she is determined to visit the old places from the past in order to finally deal with it. She longs to get rid of the devil inside and get on with her life. If the return of her daughter, now 15 years old, will provide her with the inner space she so desperately longs for, is a question where this film will end with.
In the mean time the filmmaker has to deal with her own expectations about OG’s life and realise more about her own subjective point of view.
This intriguing story will make the film a wilful and strong document of the times we live in.
Spheres are the spaces where people actually live. I would like to show that human beings have, till today, been misunderstood, because the space where they exist has always been taken for granted, without ever being made conscious and explicit. And this lieu or space I call a sphere in order to indicate that we are never in fact naked in totality, in a physical or biological environment of some kind, but that we are ourselves space-creating beings, and that we cannot exist otherwise than in these self-animated spaces.” (Peter Sloterdijk)
Posted in My long distance friend on June 14th, 2007 by carina | |