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fiba Exclusive 2006
Opening
today (18th Nov. 2006) at the
ICA (London)
37 Uses For A
Dead Sheep
By
Director Ben Hopkins
& Film maker Andre Singer.
Introduced here by fiba
Moscow corespondent kirill Galetski
with interview with
the Director
Ben Hopkins (below)
kirghizistan
Administrative
States
of Kirghizistan
37 Uses for a Dead Sheep
on location
| One of the hallmarks of a good documentary is choosing unique subject matter, and this is something that British filmmaker Ben Hopkins has nailed in his film, 37 Uses for a Dead Sheep, which is about the 20th-century tribula- tions of small Turkic ethnic group from Central Asia known as the Pamir Kyrgyz. This tribe have had to move |
| several times in order to find a new homeland after being all but forced from lands where they were the indigenous population The film premiered at the 2005 Berlin Film (Ben Hopkins left) |
|
|
Festival, where it won the Caligari
Film Prize. It went on to win the Best British
Feature Documentary Award at the BritDocs
film festival and Best International Documentary
at the Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary
Festival. 37 Uses runs until Thursday,
November 30 at the Institute
of Contemporary Arts in London and
is currently in theatrical release in Germany.
Other documentaries and feature films by Hopkins
will screen at the ICA in November
and December. |
 |
| Hopkins,
37, is a native of North
London. He studied German and
Italian at Oxford and filmmaking at
the Royal Academy of Art. While in Afghanistan
making Footprints (also featured in the ICA
retrospective), a film about the multifaceted impact of cluster
bombs, Hopkins met a couple of Afghani
anthropologists who told him about a tribe of Kyrgyz
that lived in the Pamir Mountains of Afghanistan,
were affected by various 20th-century political
events and as a result, went on a exodus
that ended in Eastern Turkey after stays in
pre-Soviet Tajikistan, the Soviet
Union, China and Pakistan.
Hopkins' producer Nikki
Parrot (of the London-based production
company Tigerlily Films), who had worked with
him on Footprints, helped raise the money
for new film, but the budget fell short of the ambitions, as it often
does. |
 |
| The
limited budget meant using a small crew and coordinating heavily with
the locals to help in all aspects of the production. The sequences in
the film are intriguingly variegated, with standard "talking
heads" interviews, incidental shots of the environment and
daily life, as well as unconventional colour historical reconstructions
(albeit done silent-movie style, with intertitles) and daringly unique
"behind-the-scenes" sequences that
pull back the curtain on the production to provide funny, true-to-life
moments. For these varying sequences, Hopkins
uses two film and two video formats: Super-8
and 16mm (shot on a Bolex)
for the reconstructions, Digibeta for the interviews and DV
for the observational behind-the-scenes footage. |
| The film's historical perspective shows how the so-called great powers of Russia and Britain, in playing their Great Game, carved up the homeland of the Pamir Kyrgyz, probably only dimly they were doing so, and in any case, not caring. British and Russian officials created the country of Afghanistan as a buffer zone between Imperial Russia and British India. The lines that were drawn divided the Kyrgyz’ ancestral homeland the Pamir, into 3 parts – the Russian, Chinese and Afghan Pamirs. |
| The Pamir Kyrgyz lived mainly in the Russian Pamir, but when the Russian Revolution struck and the Soviets took power, the Kyrgyz’ troubles started. As with everywhere in the Soviet Union, under |  |
| the pretext of equality for everyone, the Soviets started by stealing the Kyrgyz’ livestock and when the Kyrgyz resisted, they started killing them. There were two decades of skirmishes in the mountains between the Kyrgyz and Soviet troops for two decades. Finally, Haji Rahman Qul, a newly chosen leader who survived multiple attempts on his life by the Soviets, led the Kyrgyz to the relative safety of the Chinese Pamir. But only a couple of years later, China fell to Mao Tse Tung and the Kyrgyz were forced to retreat again from Communism, this time into the remote and inhospitable heights of the Afghan Pamir. Despite hardships, Haji Rahman Qul managed to reorganize of the Kyrgyz economy by reallocating livestock, which eventually flourished and the tribe became relatively wealthy and successful on the basis of their sheep breeding. Their sheep became prized in all of Afghanistan for their quality. In an interview with an aging sheep expert from the tribe, we learn about the 37 different uses for different parts and products of a sheep – in a culture in which everything needed for life is provided by livestock and nothing is wasted. |
 |
| In
1978, Kabul fell
to a pro-Soviet government and Haji
Rahman Qul foresaw the imminent Soviet
invasion of Afghanistan. The entire tribe
and their 30,000 animals fled over high mountain
passes into Pakistan. They were the first
refugees from the war in Afghanistan. In Pakistan, the hot climate didn’t suit them and many died from diseases. Haji Rahman Qul wrote desperate letters to the various governments of the world, asking for a new place to live. After four years, offers from Alaska and Turkey arrived within the same week. The Kyrgyz chose Turkey – after all, they are Turkic people, speak a Turkic language, and are Muslims. In 1982, the entire tribe was airlifted from Islamabad airport to Eastern Turkey, where they live to this day. Haji Rahman Qul died in 1990. |
 |
 |
 |
 |
| Towards
the end of the film, the younger generation of Pamir
Kyrgyz are shown to be steadily and inevitably integrating into
Turkish society far away from the Eastern
part of Turkey, where there is hardly any
work, even in agriculture. The young men move to Istanbul
to work long hours in leathermaking and dream of opening their own businesses,
such as Internet cafés. One of the
young women gets an education and goes work in a modern hospital as an
operations nurse. One of the young men predicts that in 30
years, their village will be entirely abandoned. Ending on a somewhat
melancholy note as the older generation of Kyrgyz
reminisce about their ancestral homeland, the film will probably eventually
be a time capsule for a distant time and a forgotten people. ____________________________________ Kirill Galetski INTERVIEW WITH Ben Hopkins In addition to working in Afghanistan and Turkey, Hopkins has made inroads into Russia and Kazakhstan. Last year, Hopkins was hired as a writer by Kazakh director Ermek Shinarbayev and spent two months writing in Moscow. Together, the two of them wrote a project called The Fugitives, which follows the adventures of an "odd couple" of Russian women on a chaotic journey from Russia across Europe to Paris and back to Russia. It was to be a 6 part (6 x 52’) comedy-drama TV series, commissioned by Unifors Moscow production company for Russian television. While, the main director is Ermek Shinarbayev, Hopkins is the chief writer and is supposed to direct part of the series. The filmmakers describe it as a mixture of Thelma and Louise and Godard’s Bande á Part. The Fugitives is now on hold due to production issues, but Hopkins and Shinarbayev are keen to work together on another project. Hopkins sent Shinarbayev his script Ghosts, which is set in a kind of afterlife and reminiscent of Jean Cocteau's Orpheus films. Shinarbayev has translated it into Russian, and as the script needs deserts, mountains, a seedy industrial city and a shiny, modern city, Kazakhstan seems ideal, as it has all those types of locations. fiba: How did 37 Uses come about? What interested you in this particular story? How did you become familiar with it? B.H.: I was shooting another documentary called Footprints in 2002 in Afghanistan. That was a very serious documentary about cluster bombs. During the process of that, I met Afghan anthropologists who told me the story of this tribe and I immediately thought it was a great story, like a biblical story, like Moses taking the Israelites from Egypt to Israel. It has the same kind of epic quality. One of the anthropologists first told me about them and another, Professor Nazif Shahrani had written an extensive book about them. He's at Indiana University, an American Afghan. His book, The Kyrgyz of Afghanistan, is very helpful. I've never met him, but we've e-mailed a lot and I've read his book several times before making the film. It's well researched and I have an academic background as well, so I'm happy to do all my own research – I don't rely on other people. I do it all myself – I do all the transcripts of all the interviews myself. Very hands-on. Sometimes I wish we had money to pay a researcher or a secretary to write it up, dialogues and stuff, but actually, when I think about it, I don't want anyone else to do that work, really. About a year later, we managed to find where the tribe were and go and visit them, and it was immediately clear that they had a great sense of humour, so I just thought that I have to make this a funny film, especially since the last one I'd done was so serious, and especially since these people were so funny. I thought I'd make a comic ethnographic film, which is a great idea, but not for TV executives who don't really see that comedy and ethnography go together. They really didn't understand what I was talking about and so it took a long time for Nikki to raise the money, but she did, in the end, and it was good of her, really. Because I nearly gave up filmmaking as the result of this and many other films that I was trying to make, but going nowhere. That's when I said, I'm not going to make films any more, I'm going to write a novel. I started the novel [a political satire set in the Austro-Hungarian Empire called Gwupygrubynudnyland – this title is an amalgam of the Polish for stupid+fat+boring and the English land – ed.], and then Nikki said, actually, we've got the money to make the Sheep film, so I was slightly annoyed with her, because I wanted to finish the novel. But I enjoy making films so much, and 37 Uses has done so well now that I feel very happy now that I did it, because it's taken me back, put me back in the saddle, back on the map, so to speak. fiba: How long did it take you to shoot the film? B.H.: Three weeks. fiba: Was there a lot of preparation involved? B.H.: Well, like I said, Nikki raised the money, but she didn't raise what we wanted. We had about 60%-70% of the budget that we really wanted, but Nikki said let's just go make it, and I tended to agree with her. So in the end, we had to shoot it very quickly, but I'm trained as a feature filmmaker, so it's part of my professional training to organize things quite carefully, so I did a schedule and a budget that was really quite tight and quite well organised. It wasn't a traditional documentary shoot, where you sort of turn up in a village, hang around and wait for something to happen. It was very much at 10:00, we're at this person's house, etc. It was a very structured shoot. fiba: Perhaps that did not jibe so well with the lifestyle there? B.H.: You're right, inasmuch as the Kyrgyz and early mornings don't really go well together. So we'd say, we'll meet you at 7:30 in this field and you should be in costume, or something. We'd get there at 7:15, and there was no one there and we had to send our location manager to the village to wake them all up individually. Once they actually woke up and arrived, they worked very, very hard and were really happy to be working, but, yep, the mornings weren't great. fiba: An interesting aspect of the film is the use of dramatic sequences along with the documentary ones – a form which you don't see much of in conventional Anglo documentaries. How did you come to use this form? B.H.: It just seemed to me that they had such a great history that you needed to dramatize it, and if you did dramatize it, [you would enliven] the boring ways you have shots with voice-over and shots of feet walking up a mountain, or something – of course, that's boring, so we'll make discrete, individual short films within the film and we'll do them in styles which kind of reflect the period they're from. We'll just try to make them interesting visually. I'm kind of a frustrated fiction filmmaker, so it's not that I don't like doing documentaries – quite the opposite, actually – but it's no surprise that I would bring in some of my expertise from other areas [such as fictional feature filmmaking] into the work I'm doing. fiba: Another interesting thing in the film was the transitions in between the docu and the drama sequences, because you provide a sort of back-story to the making of them, which normally wouldn't appear in such a film… B.H.: The old, slightly boring tradition of ethnographic film is that they pretend that they were never there. They pretend that the cameras and the crew were never there – that there was no interaction between them and the Papua New Guinean tribe, or whatever, and this just seems slightly crazy to me. fiba How difficult or easy was it to get the locals to act all of these scenes from their history? B.H.: Well, some of them just didn't want to do it, and some of them were "Yeah, sure, okay" and some of the actively wanted to do it and pursued me in the street, so to speak. All of the usual things that happened in Hollywood – they appeared at the auditions in full costume, or… It was like pretty much any other casting – there were some reluctant, some desperate. fiba: What were some of the more interesting anecdotes from the shoot? B.H.: Well, most of them were in the film, but there's one that is kind of funny, which isn't – On the day we finished, we had a big dinner at the [tribal] chief's house and he said there's a tradition here that you're going to have to eat the part of the sheep relevant to your profession – the sound man had to eat the ears, the cameraman had to eat the eyes and I was given the brain, and we ate them, and then he said, we're joking – there's actually no tradition like that. fiba: How did the brain taste? B.H.: [Laughs] It tasted fine. The texture was slightly spongy, but I don't get squeamish about things like that. I think my cameraman had the raw deal. fiba: Is there any movement with the project in Kazakhstan? B.H.: I'm waiting for a producer in Germany to read it. The people in Kazakhstan also need or want some kind of international producer to lead the project. I think they want it to get out internationally, and there aren't any producers there with that kind of experience. I'm basically looking for a producer, probably from Germany, to take on the project. There's money in Kazakhstan, but not a huge amount of international know-how of how to get things out onto the international market, so I said to them, I'll come back with a producer and an international sales company some time next year – I hope – and see what money we can find out there. There's a lot of sort of strange, soft money in Kazakhstan – oil money, sponsorship and people wanting to invest in art in a way that doesn't really happen in the West. It was kind of like that in Moscow as well, but I'm very much aware that that kind of money is very much here today and gone tomorrow, but you can get lucky occasionally and it's definitely worth a try, making a film. I think it's a very interesting project and my guess is that it will never get made, but I have to give it a try. That's the way I live my life. I like quite unusual things that the marketplace doesn't support. Very unusual things most of the time, so you just have to get lucky sometimes and that's what I try and do. fiba: Did you find the locations you were looking for in Kazakhstan? B.H.: Well, I think that I established that I could definitely make the film there and some of it's quite exciting for me. Some of it looks very interesting. It was just a possibility recce rather than a real recce. Maybe we won't be able to film at the places we want to film, but we haven't done that kind of "reality test" on it yet. fiba: So, Afghanistan, Turkey, Russia, Kazakhstan. How did this concentration on the East come about? By default or by design? B.H.: Default, I think. I certainly didn't design it. I just love making films, so I'll go anywhere I can make a film – documentary or feature. Since about 2000 or 2001, in the U.K., there's been no real opportunity to make the kind of films I want to make because the change in the structure of the government fund here and also, just the marketplace changed, so I've had to go and look elsewhere for ideas and projects.From the 17th November 37 Uses For A Dead Sheep has its theatrical debut at the ICA until 30th November. ____________________________________ Details: 17th - 30th November ICA (Institute of Contemporary Art) London ____________________________________
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