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JB: How difficult was it to gain the trust of Ovahimba people to begin this project?
RS: The social obligation of the Ovahimba culture to welcome visitors and not ask them when they intend to leave does not necessarily correlate with any level of acceptance of such visitors. The Otjiherero expression: “He is smiling through his teeth,” means just that, grin and bear it. There was a degree of mutual grinning upon my arrival. Imagine the source of tension created by a visitor arriving on your doorstep, asking to stay for a while to study your culture, and then the visitor stay and film your life intermittently for seven years. The Ovahimba taught me to how to love them during that time, a time that did not pass without human friction. What was difficult initially was that I did not speak the language and was obliged to interpret the interpretation of my translators. Once I had learnt the language, at least I knew what the problems were about.
JB: Were you traveling back and forth between France and Africa over the seven years it took or did you stay in Africa the whole time?
RS: I returned to France once a year for about three weeks to tend to administrative matters. During my short spells in France, I filmed my life in Paris, running from one office to the next, the abundance of consumer goods all over, the street artists and showed the images to the Ovahimba upon my return. Most of the remainder of my time was spent at the homestead of the Headman of Etanga, traveling in the vicinity with them. Most of the last year in the field was spent in south-western Angola, with the Ovahimba and other Otjiherero language speaking peoples.
JB: This film is a truly remarkable piece of ethnographic filmmaking. I would imagine you have hundreds of hours of footage. How long did it take for you to distill it down to this very sharp 75-minute cut?
RS: I returned to Paris with some three hundred hours of footage, which is not a great deal given the length of my stay. At times, I would concentrate on photography or writing and at times I did not record anything but just followed life as it happened, and at yet other times, the intimacy of the moment was such that I could not film. I started editing the film upon my return to Paris in April 2004. I worked on it intermittently for three years. Some scenes fell into place immediately, others found their shape over time. The first cut was 2h15 long. Given that I lived through the experiences, filmed and edited them, it took time to distinguish between memory projected onto the image and what the uninitiated viewer would see in the image. This type of filmmaking is comparable to the process of writing; nobody can hold the pen in one’s place, it is a matter of maturation.
