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Winter 1996 (4.4) The Filmmaker's
Lens
I'm a filmmaker by profession. Lately, I've been on assignment creating some short documentaries that reflect the plight of our children during this bitter transition-children who are caught in life's circumstances that are bigger than they are-because of the war, because of displacement, because of dire poverty. If you drive south out of Baku about half an hour's distance, you'll come across a unique landscape. On your left side is the beautiful sea with all its colorful shades and nuances, reflecting the intensity and direction of the wind and sun. But on the right-hand side of the road, the view is stripped of nearly all color as if it were an old, faded, black-and-white print. From a distance, it conjures up images of fluffy, white, Oriental pilaf heaped upon black trays. But don't give a second thought to tasting it. As you approach more closely, the mirage becomes focused and you detect a third color-that of rust which outlines the perimeter of the chemically polluted ponds of oil.
Photo above: Mining salts from a polluted pond-no job for children. A strange scraping sound came from behind me, and I looked around for something that could have made such a grating noise. It was a little girl's bare feet as she walked across the caustic salt, dragging her shovel behind her. Everything perishes here. The child leaned down to pick up a little, dead bird. "It must have drunk the water from the lake," she says. Everything dies here, and only the hot, sticky, oily winds blow over the land. Below: But is this really a normal home situation? Pre-schoolers at one of Azerbaijan's refugee tent camps. Photo: Oleg Litvin
It's true: changes require generations.
But nothing will change if we don't try to make things change.
And the only way to make things happen more quickly is to shape
the psychology of children while they are still young and impressionable
and while they still consider everything around them to be normal.
Another countryside scene. The refugee camp in Sabirabad. It's nearly four years that this camp has existed. The camp spreads in front of your eyes, a sea of adobe-like dwellings. Some are covered with plastic tarps, others with straw. It reminds you of a child's game where they pretend to be adults and try to make their houses as real as possible from anything they can scrounge. But these make-shift shelters are real, and they offer scanty protection from the driving winds and rains of winter and the scorching sun of summer. But here and there, you can already see tiny patches of green-little gardens. And children. There are children everywhere. Children whose eyes are searching for knowledge of this world. How is the world made? What are the important things to know in life? Is the real world like this poor landscape that surrounds us? Where is a window to look outside? Another setting. This time in the industrialized urban city of Sumgayit. And one of the works of the famous Italian filmmaker, Federico Fellini, comes to mind. He once created a story about the life of people in one city. But actually, there was only one real building there, and the others were only props or façades. But here in our land, in real
life, there is an old, abandoned chemical factory in which people
have built one- and two-room compartments. They're mostly in
shambles. For many years, people have lived there. They've fallen
in love, married, given birth and tried to rear their children
here. What will happen to all these people and to their babies who will grow up associating home with this theater of the absurd? What conception of life will they have? During the process of filmmaking, everything possible has gone wrong with our equipment. We've struggled with our camera, the lights, the microphone, the editing equipment. We even had to go out and rent a camera because our old one didn't work anymore. But the professional camera we managed to find was so old, it quit on us every 10 minutes. It seemed that each time we managed to get these frightened people to relax and trust us, the camera would stop. All these problems nearly drove us crazy. But what are these problems compared to the reality of life for all these children, our future generation? Maybe, we can somehow manage to fix our cameras and our equipment. But can they so easily repair their lives? In the context of such serious problems, ours seem so small and inconsequential, like mere grains of salt in that vast, salty reservoir of oil. If we aren't committed to getting our message out about them, will life ever change for these children and so many like them-the disabled, the displaced, the orphaned, the imprisoned-each growing up in a microcosm of abnormal normalities. It seems we have little choice but to persist if we really want to make their world of abnormalities something of the past. Elena Dontsova, a professional filmmaker, is working
as a consultant on several projects documenting the plight of
children in Azerbaijan during this transitional period. AI Home Page | Magazine Choice | Topics | Store | Contact us |
In art,
there's a school of thought which suggests that one's initial
assessment of a situation is actually the right one. "Go
with your first impression," they say. I hadn't given much
thought to this idea until lately. But maybe it's true.
