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The System of Isolation: „Forst“
- a film on marginalization and self-organization By Jan-Frederik Bandel “Some people were really angry, they
had red eyes when they left the film”, Osaren Igbinoba says: “Many of them
couldn’t even imagine a situation like this. They were just shocked.”
Igbinoba, a Nigerian refugee who lives in Jena, is engaged in the networks
“Caravan for the Rights of Refugees and Migrants” and “Plataforma”. He
is also one of the founders of the refugee initiative “The Voice” in Jena, a
group that has been actively fighting repression for the last ten years spreading
information and organizing actions for the freedom of movement, against the so
called “Residenzpflicht” and against the system of deportation. After the
refugees’ situation in Germany has become even worse and being disappointed
about cooperations with German antiracist groups, the activists have recently
concentrated on debates about the chances of self-organization, networks an new
forms of actions and publicity. One phase of this process of reflection was the film
tour “Menschen unter Landkreisarrest” (“People under Local Arrest”) in
several cities and towns in Thüringen that took place in May 2005. The film
presented was “Forst” by Ascan Breuer, Ursula Hansbauer and Wolfgang Konrad,
a depressing experimental film. It uses abstract, dark black-and-white pictures
and sounds to demonstrate the forced isolation and marginalization of refugees
in Germany. Yet, it doesn’t rely on the well-known documentary productions of
authenticity. The
camera slowly moves along tree-trunks, roots, dark corridors. Voices off report
about the effects of a system that is designed to reduce people’s lives to
eating and drinking, to sleeping and expecting deportation a system that
makes stagnation a permanent state. Slowly, one by one, figures become visible
in the shadows, coming closer, putting “Caravan”-posters to the trees,
coming together, studying a map, discussing: First steps on the way to
self-organization. Successful self-organization, so the film’s condensed
narration says, can at least make it possible to escape deportation by going
underground in time. This is also Osaren Igbinoba’s story: He had to hide for
months. Now after three efforts to deport him he finally was given
political asylum. But the story of this successful escape is being contrasted by
pictures of isolation and finally by showing brutal preparations for the
deportation or transportation of a whole group of refugees in one of the last
scenes of the film. The filmmakers see their film in the
tradition of what Bill Nichols calls “performing documentary”. This type of
film “embodies a paradox”, the American film critic explains: “They create
an obvious tension between scenic play and document, between the personal and
the typical, between the bodily and the bodiless, to be short: between history
and science. One of these is poetic and evocating, the other serves as a proof
and stresses reference.” The film’s title already hints at
these paradox aesthetics. “Forst” is at the same time the name of a
notorious “Erstaufnahme”-camp in a forest near Jena, cut off from public
transport (the camp has been closed now), and a metaphor for all these
strategies of exclusion. The title refers to the borders serving to make people
invisible to our society and to the guilelessness or indifference of all those
who refuse to know about it. Yet, the film doesn’t just show this
system of isolation as the conditions under which a certain group of people has
to live in Germany, it doesn’t plead for pity or concessions. “These films
refer to us”, as Nichols says. This doesn’t imply any non-committal
existentialist view, but a political question: Do we really want to be part of a
society that does things like these to people? The refugees aren’t shown as
talking faces pleading for empathy, on the contrary, the film’s view is, as
Ascan Breuer explains, “made to ward off any possible repressive or absorbing,
any ‘understanding’ attitude.” It doesn’t intervene, it confronts.
It’s up to the viewer to become angry. “The film shows isolation so clearly
that many people just aren’t able to stand it. They refuse to accept that this
problem really exists”, Osaren Igbinoba explains: “I think that ‘Forst’
is one of the most important references in the analysis of the refugees’
situation and struggle. Many activists said: It’s to abstract. They couldn’t
see anything in it. But if you sit down and reflect about the film, so many
things come to your mind. The more you see it, the more diverging conclusions
you come to. It’s a special film. A film that has given us a lot of motivation.
Some people criticized that the film doesn’t give you the power to change the
situation. It leaves you depressed. But this is not the fault of the film.”
text taken from: iz3w-Magazine No.288, 09/05 (Information Center 3rd World) Jan-Frederik Bandel
is a literary specialist and journalist. |
