The Latest at Goethe

A few weeks before the start of his new film Three, we find director Tom Tykwer in the offices of his Berlin production company plugging an entirely different movie: Soul Boy. We spoke about a special film project from Nairobi.

Mr. Tykwer, do you believe in ghosts?

Let’s put it this way: I believe in the benefits of ghost stories. They can be very good at helping cultures find their identity. But, I don’t have much to do with ghosts in my everyday life.

Unlike during the filming of Soul Boy, I take it. Because the main character, Abila, does believe in ghosts.

He has every reason to. This Abila, a boy who lives in the Kibera slum, learns one morning that a witch has stolen his father’s soul. Abila has to complete seven tasks in one day to save his father’s soul. Of course, in the end we learn that it was all mainly a journey of self-awareness for the boy and his father merely served as the membrane.

Soul Boy is an African film through and through – it plays in Nairobi, the actors are Kenyan, the director and scriptwriter are also African. So, what does a German star director who usually travels between Hollywood and Berlin have to do with it?

I supervised the project. I got involved through my wife, Marie Steinmann, who operates an NGO in Kenya and organizes art lessons in slum schools. She has been doing it for years very persistently and successfully. At some point I noticed that I would like to get involved and it seemed the film sector would be the natural place to start. We established a small firm that has been offering two-week intensive courses now every year in various disciplines – from directing to sound. These seminars then generate a crew that shoots a feature film in three to five weeks under our supervision.

What is the response to the offer?

It’s huge. In Nairobi I encountered a very vital arts scene and an enthusiastic filmmaker front. They want to tell their own stories; stories that are moored in their culture and don’t follow the mannerisms of international colonial cinema, where some white reporter falls in love with an attractive native woman. We are now receiving applications from all over East Africa.

Was Soul Boy the result of one of these seminars?

No, it was all less structured. Soul Boy was in a manner of speaking the pilot film; it was all quite improvised. We recruited the crew mainly by word of mouth. The Goethe-Institut gave us a good deal of support in that.

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You were the supervisor – what exactly does that role involve?

To make a film that is dramaturgically somewhat coherent, it helps to have experience and that is what I tried to convey – in the form of dramaturgical consultation. My only real responsibility was to ensure that we managed to do it in the time allowed to us.

Are you and your work well known in Nairobi?

A bit. Some have seen Perfume, but that wasn’t really very important. I wanted to be someone the makers of the film could turn to and at the same time always urged them to follow their own instincts. The idea was for them to realize their own vision for a film and not to think about how a western director like me might have done it. I always said, “Surprise me and yourselves with the idea and the visions that go through your heads! Don’t try to please other people!”

The setting of the movie is Kibera, one of Africa’s biggest slums. In spite of this, the story is not a drama of life’s misery.

That’s true, but the frame is also not ignored. The film shows how tough everyday life is without focussing on it. The kids in Kibera are, of course, confronted with the harshness of everyday life so regularly that they don’t always think about it – and manage to lead exciting lives nonetheless. But, Kibera itself is also hellish. The hygienic conditions are catastrophic and the quarter is incredibly densely populated. Sometimes up to a dozen people live together in tiny shacks. And still, above it all is this mysterious feeling of cohesion.

How much attention had you paid African film before Soul Boy?

I had always had contact with it because I attend a lot of festivals. There have been individual films that highly impressed me, for example Yeelen, by director Souleymane Cissé from Mali. Yet, of course, sub-Saharan Africa is highly neglected by the world cinema.

What’s the problem? Just not enough money?

The main problem is that the distribution channels are so tenacious. Of course, the first priority should be to make sure the films are at least shown domestically. People in Kenya have now heard of Soul Boy, but most still haven’t seen it. We’d like to hand out DVDs so that as large a number of people as possible get to see the movie. Because that’s our biggest interest.

Are there any cinemas in Kibera?

Yes, but there, cinemas are shacks with video screens. And since there are so few DVDs, even in Kibera many people haven’t seen the film yet.

Soul Boy is an absolutely low budget film: a manufacturer donated the film footage, the rest is said to have cost about 60,000 dollars. How important is money for making a good film?

If we add postproduction, it was probably more like 100,000 dollars. The budget is unimportant for the relevance of the film’s content. We experience that all the time when we go see the 200-million-dollar blockbusters that leave us with our brains blown out and send us home shrugging our shoulders and shaking our heads. Then we see a dogma film from Denmark that was made for pittance and it leaves us deeply moved for weeks. You mustn’t underestimate one fact though: since Soul Boy was a workshop project no one earned anything from it. We were only just able to pay the people their sustenance during shooting, but there was no budget for suitable salaries. What ultimately makes films expensive is the personnel. Naturally, you can’t do certain things in a movie with no money.

You know Hollywood well. When you’ve just been in Kibera and then are sitting at the Oscar ceremony, is that a culture shock?

It’s not very easy to pull it off. Nairobi is a very tough place: the traffic, the speed, the crowds of people – it’s all very aggressive. You are subjected to a high level of stress and at the same time have to process the discrepancy between the world there and your own world at home. On the other hand, due to the intensive experience I have gathered in these very different hemispheres, I am somewhat well equipped to refer to this world in political terms.

Now Soul Boy is premiering in Germany, too – what are your expectations?

The film won’t have an easy go of it. Very few movies from that region are successful here. But we know that the film has a great deal to offer to teachers and parents. It is a film you can talk with young people about very easily; it asks a lot of questions and doesn’t answer them all. It has high educational value that is non-dogmatic and doesn’t point fingers. But most of all, it’s a very well made, exciting and entertaining movie. You don’t have to enter the cinema with a benevolent attitude and consider it a good deed to watch the film. The film can stand on its own feet internationally and has never disappointed an audience yet. The word simply has to get around in Germany.

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