Glasgow Short Film Festival / Go Short Film Festival 2020 – Cloud Forest
In this fairytale-like film, five Dutch girls take us on an imaginative journey through the memories of their parents’ experiences of the war in the former Yugoslavia.
Interview with Director/Editor Eliane Esther Bots
Congratulations! Why did you make your film?
Most of the time my films start with an encounter and then develop into a close collaboration. This is also how it happened with my film Cloud Forest! The starting point of the film was an encounter with Elma, at that time a student of mine at the University of the Arts in Utrecht. During one of my classes, I gave a short presentation about my previous film The Brick House. After this talk, Elma approached me and explained that she wanted to share some anecdotes about her family history in the former Yugoslavia, she felt it could be interesting to me. By sharing her stories and thoughts in our meetings, she introduced me into the intimate spheres of her family and home. And she gave me an insight into the different ways that the war in the former Yugoslavia in the nineties is still present in her life. She also introduced me to two friends of her and her niece. I was very impressed by the girls and by their narratives. It became clear to me that I wanted to continue working with them and find ways to visualize their experiences in a film.
How do personal and universal themes work in your film?
This film is a continuation of themes which have my long-term interest. Five years ago, I made the film Conversations about my grandmother. I questioned why she archived all her belongings by describing them in a large book and by putting stickers with descriptions on some of the smaller items. It was through making this film that I learned how much these simple objects were bearers of larger stories, shaped by particular experiences in her life, by the Second World War and her Jewish background. I also realized that these stories and my grandmother’s silence influenced my mother and even me, two generations later.
That film has been the starting point of my fascination for the stories people construct and tell, to themselves and to others. Stories that help us to make sense of the world and give meaning to life, or likewise, burden us with their disruptive character and unwillingness to leave us. In many of my works, just like in Cloud Forest, I focus specifically on the way family functions as an independent narrative generator, changing and distorting narratives over time and through different generations. I investigate how (life-changing) experiences and conflict influence the construction of our narratives. And the way we establish intimate connections to that what is (no longer) present in our lives by oral storytelling or other narrative forms like poems, prayers, songs, diary entries, scribbled notes, letters and dreams.
How do you narrate a conflict you haven’t physically experienced? How does this history of conflict (war) influence the relationship between parents and daughters? What place do these narratives have in one’s life? The process of making Cloud Forest functioned as a way to investigate these questions and themes.
How have the script and film evolved over the course of their development?
Just like in my other films, I didn’t work with a script in making this film. I did have ideas about scenes, moments or visual elements, however, most of the scenes really developed on set, while improvising with the girls. Together we played around and tried to create scenes that represent the way the girls deal with these stories, such as the ‘whispering scene’ in the film.
Who do you need to come on board (producers, sales agents, buyers, distributors, film festival directors, journalists) to amplify this film’s message?
I would be interested in sharing and presenting the film in different contexts, also outside the film festival circuit. I think the film relates to notions such as post-memory, intergenerational narratives and self-narration. It would be fascinating to see how other makers or thinkers reflect upon these notions through their practice and work. Therefore, I think it would be fruitful to connect to other makers, academics and journalists, who could introduce me to these fields.
Would you like to add anything else?
I would like to share a bit more about the form of the film. From the beginning of making this film, I was intrigued by the idea that the girls were often in the position of ‘listeners’. They listened to stories which were, in a more or less extensive way, shared with them by their parents. I wanted the viewer to be in this position as well, to listen along with the girls. Therefore, I decided to record our conversations and edit these into audio clips we could later re-listen on the set. I was curious if, by listening back, we could somehow create a very focused, concentrated and quiet moment of filming.
An essential and particular visual element in the film is the set design. Elma, who is also one of the main characters in the film, graduated as a visual artist since we started working on the film. I invited her to become the set designer of the film. Together we thought of designing a set which we could use as a surrounding for filming several scenes. We both felt that this set could also be a visualization of the narratives. The stories are painful, dark, unsharp and at the same time precious and dear to the girls in the film. We wanted to come up with a set that resembles this and could also function as a surrounding for the scenes. Elma created a ‘forest’ of shadows, glitters and glow in the dark ‘tree-like objects’, in which the ‘narratives’ light up and disappear again in the dark, lid by cell phone light.
I was also convinced that I didn’t want any war images or visual archival footage to be directly present in the film. The girls know these images, but only through the screens of laptops and cellphones. They haven’t consciously experienced the war, because they were too young or were born after their parents fled from Yugoslavia to The Netherlands. These war images are part of their reality but in a less direct way. Therefore, I decided to use only the sound of these audiovisual materials in the film.
What other projects are the key creatives developing or working on now?
I am working on a new short film, which is called The Channel (working title). It is a short experimental film about the piercing experiences of three interpreters of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague and their position as a channel between speakers and listeners, witnesses and defendants, judges and attendees.
The interpreters are born and raised in the former Yugoslavia and lived through the war in the 90s. They find themselves in the position of having their own memories and emotions confronted with the narratives from opposite sides of the conflict: those of the people accused of war crimes, and those of the victims with whom they can identify as countrymen.
The film focuses on the contrast between the emotional and physical impact of the dramatic stories that the interpreters have to deal with on the one hand, and the controlled and neutral environment of the Tribunal and its missions in which these narratives get retold on the other. In the interpretation process, the interpreters have to be simultaneously present and absent: to be visibly neutral yet as invisible as possible, to get close to those involved yet keep their distance, to speak out yet be silent.
Interview: May 2020
We Are Moving Stories embraces new voices in drama, documentary, animation, TV, web series, music video, women's films, LGBTQIA+, POC, First Nations, scifi, supernatural, horror, world cinema. If you have just made a film - we'd love to hear from you. Or if you know a filmmaker - can you recommend us? More info: Carmela
Cloud Forest
In this fairytale-like film, five Dutch girls take us on an imaginative journey through the memories of their parents’ experiences of the war in the former Yugoslavia.
Length: 18:20
Director: Eliane Esther Bots
Producer: near/by film (Manon Bovenkerk)
Writer: Eliane Esther Bots
About the writer, director and producer:
ELIANE ESTHER BOTS (1986, The Netherlands) graduated cum laude from the Master of Film at the Netherlands Film Academy in Amsterdam. Her films have been screened at Berlinale, Berlin (DE), Cinema du Reel, Paris (FR), New York Film Festival (USA), International Short Film Festival Oberhausen (DE), Go Short, Nijmegen (NL), Kassel Dokfest (DE). She works as a lecturer of Moving image at the University of the Arts in Utrecht (NL).
Looking for: journalists
Website: twosmallthings.com/cloud-forest
Funders: Funded by: Stroom Den Haag
Where can I watch it next and in the coming month? Cloud Forest has recently been shown in the European Competition at Go Short Film festival in Nijmegen (The Netherlands). And will travel to 32 FILMFEST Dresden (Germany) and Glasgow Short Film Festival (Scotland).