The first session of the Amalgama section of the La Cabina festival began with the screening of Haunted by Danish director Christian Einshøj. The piece is a portrait of the director's own family, focusing attention on his mother, which he visits after a long time with the purpose of analyzing the common past and reviewing his present. There are at least three events that mark Einshøj's relationship with the subject of his film. The first of them, It is the very fact of that distance self-imposed by the director and his three brothers with respect to their mother.. The second is marked by early death, at the age of three, of a fourth brother whose memory is recorded on home videotapes kept in the family home. And the third and most surprising element has to do with the fact that his mother had a furtive encounter in the house with a ghost.. Who is that ghost? What does it mean? Do they exist, somehow, the ghosts? Aren't the wounds of our past the ghosts that visit us throughout life??
How does the need to talk about your family arise in you?? When do you say: I have to talk about this?
Es, above all, for my brother's tragedy. I was eight years old when he died and, as I was very young, It was my first experience with death.. That was the story I wanted to tell., but I didn't know how to do it because it is a very sad and tragic story., y, somehow, very depressing (laughter). So, I thought it was not a good starting point to make a film. It took me a long time to figure out how I could introduce it into a more humorous film. (bueno, I think it's funny or it's supposed to be funny). Later I realized that it was very interesting how that story conditioned the family dynamic.. At first, I focused on the tragedy, but then I had the need to talk about this story about our relationship and, especially, about the distance that separates us.
I wanted to ask you about this last thing because the movie talks about, above all, of that distance that separates the different members of a family, something that I think is increasingly common in Europe. I am referring to the fact that family members separate and live in different places or countries.. Why were you interested in it??
Although I left home to live in another country because I wanted to distance myself from my family., I feel like there's something that's been lost in my life.. It's something I want to be part of my life and, at the same time, I find it annoying (laughter). You have very high expectations about what your family is supposed to be.. How relationships are so intimate, when your expectations are not met, It can be very disappointing and that's when it becomes very easy to walk away.. I would love for my family to have Sunday breakfasts and things like that., but the reality is that it is very difficult. And I think one of the problems (and the movie plays with this) is that we had had many conflicts about certain topics that we were not qualified to talk about.. And that's why it was very difficult to be together, because it was very artificial and superficial, because we were not prepared to point out what those problems were that we had between us.
Do you think something has been lost with this new model of society in which people live separately and children live far from the place where they were born??
Yeah, my father, For example, was born in a very small community in Denmark, but he left the country very soon to do business. This was in the 80. I think that, As with globalization, He had this idea that borders didn't matter., and that you could be anywhere. I agree to a certain degree, But I feel like we lose something in this transaction., by abandoning that idea of home and believing that you can build one anywhere. But it is not possible. He went to another country, but he was always a kind of foreigner. I don't think you can choose your home., your house, because your house is a place where your family has been for generations. And that's something I feel like I've lost, that feeling of home. I don't know if I'm ready to do it, but I would like to create it for myself and my future family.
Putting yourself in the front line of the film is something similar to showing yourself naked in front of others.. In this sense, what was the most difficult for you?
At first I thought I wouldn't be in the movie.. I just wanted to film my mother, and the movie was supposed to be about her. I wasn't even going to do the voice on off, I would just be behind the camera. But at some point I thought I needed to include myself. The movie didn't work, It wasn't funny and it wasn't clear why he was filming that woman., something that didn't happen until I started editing and saw the need to include the voice in off. Perhaps the most difficult thing was speaking to make that voice in off. I think it's very uncomfortable to hear your own voice.. I felt very shy and it was horrible to do it over and over again.
I was referring specifically to the idea, not just getting in front of the camera, but to talk about something that is very intimate, What is it like to tell all those things about your family and yourself?.
Yeah, I guess the most difficult thing has to do with those problems we had. No family is perfect, everyone has some tragedy or some unfinished business. It was very difficult to find the balance between showing these issues and not harming my mother by showing her as a horrible person.. I couldn't do that. So, Yeah, the hardest thing was that, finding the balance between saying she wasn't perfect, but don't make her too bad.
Humor is very important in the film, you already mentioned it. Was it something you needed or did it come naturally while you were filming??
I spent a lot of time editing the film. It took me two years and the first version was not funny, it was boring, in fact. It took me a while to realize that she could be funny and that I could make her funnier and I started thinking about it., among other things, because those are the kind of movies I like, with a humorous or sarcastic touch. I love the movie Sherman’s march Ross McElwee, For example. It is a famous documentary of the 80 in which a New Yorker talks about his family in the South and explores these family dynamics. It was very inspiring for me.
There is another element that appears in the film and it is the story of the disappearance of a man in the mountains near your mother's house.. Why did you need to introduce this element into the film??
I wanted to talk about death and something that is no longer there.. I was trying to make people understand that my mother had lost something, that she wanted something that had disappeared and that was a good image to talk about it. She is very interested in the case of a man who has disappeared in the mountains, he's probably dead, And that was one of the things I wanted to point out.. But, besides, gave me some action, the idea that something was happening in real time, that something was happening while I was there.
For me the film is an exercise in nostalgia.. I mean that look into the past in search of something that could have gone wrong or a better past..
Yeah, safe. My character in the movie has an obsession with the past and with those tapes about my father.. The camera is always looking for traces of the past in the present. That's a basic idea of the movie., the fact that I return home looking for clues from the past, to see if the past is still present. It is an exercise about my mother and whether I can reveal or see the past in her daily life..
One of the lines in the film says that “the only place I can see death is in the image we leave behind.”. In reference to the home videotapes your brother appears on, the film talks about the power of the image and what those images mean to you. It is not just a mere memory of something that happened, but the shadow of what we left. What was your intention?
Yeah, thanks for pointing it out. I like that part of the movie. In the movie I play with the idea of the ghost, what is a ghost. A ghost is something from the past that you can visualize and see. My mother saw one. I have never seen a ghost because I don't believe in it., but the ghost that I can see are those images. For me that is the ghost, the idea that you can see something that will never be there again.
In your work it is difficult to find the line that joins all the points you want to treat. I wanted you to tell us what the process was to find that line of union between all those elements..
The first elements of the structure were that I wanted to see all of my mother's children. [in the movie] you meet a son on the soccer field, to another in a Skype conversation, even, at first, in the hall of the house, with the first child (what am I). You have three meetings with your children and the fourth is the son who died.. So the structure is based on those meetings. After, I found that journey of myself as a character. I would put myself there and something would happen. And that was the framework of the movie. I can't describe it well, But that was the way I thought of doing it.. I didn't want to make a conventional film. I didn't want people to say, ah, this is a story about my dead brother, I wanted to get that idea away from the movie.. In that aspect, the ghost story is important to create interest. I introduced the idea of the ghost to draw the audience's attention to it and make them wonder why the ghost is present and how my mother reacts to it.. She is not afraid of the ghost and, in fact, welcomes you. If I saw a ghost I would probably try to run away (laughter), but she welcomes a visit from death. That mystery will encourage the viewer to wonder about everything else.
What have you learned about yourself after making the film??
Making the film has offered me a new way of seeing my family, especially my mother. I had a very closed way of considering my parents., connected to my childish way of relating to them. I guess I didn't see them as people.. After making the movie, This is the first time that I consider them as human beings with an experience of intense pain.. at the end of the movie, We go to the hospital and she tells the story of my brother's last day., And for me that was very significant because I had never heard that story.. But that story opened a new way to understand it much better.
Has your mother seen the movie? What do you think of your work??
The first time he saw her, I don't know if I was disappointed, but I think he didn't understand the story. To her that didn't make sense. (laughter) But we had the premiere in Toronto and people laughed, laughed and cried, There were even people who told me that they had understood the movie. She was with me and, seeing all that, connected with the movie. Now she is managing the film's Facebook page and follows everything that happens. I wanted to come to Valencia, but it was not possible (laughter).
Do you think she has changed her relationship with you and your siblings??
Yeah, safe. At the beginning of the movie it was obvious that he didn't trust me. She was very reluctant to be part of the film because of our relationship.. We were never very close. We always had a very distant relationship, so when I started filming it it was like, oh, why do you want to do this? Now we have another kind of trust. Now he takes this film more seriously and can understand what he was trying to do.. So, Yeah. Now I feel that we are more united than before.
