Festivals        INTERVIEW: ANJA KOFMEL

Whose war is it?
When the choice is between bad and very bad

One of the surprises of this year’s Cannes festival was the debut feature-length documentary/animation hybrid (screened in the Critics’ week) Chris the Swiss, by Anja Kofmel, which also opened the programme Dealing with the past at this year’s Sarajevo Film Festival. In joint effort with the International Festival in Rotterdam and their IFFR Live initative, fifteen European cities could watch this screening.

Chris the Swiss is on Anja’s cousin, Chris Würtenberg, who was killed in Croatia in 1992 in mysterious circumstances, when he was 27 and Anja only a child. About twenty years later, haunted by this death and mysterious stories surrounding her cousin, Anja starts research first on a short film which turns into enormous research for a long film project. Chris came to Croatia in 1991 as a journalist/reporter on the Yugoslav wars, but soon joined a brigade of international mercenaries and right wing fanatics, the PIV, fighting alongside the Croatian ustashas. Chris already had some basic military experience in South Africa as a 17-year old fighting for the independence of Namibia. In Croatia, he came into contact with some of his more experienced journalist colleagues, usually meeting in the press centre of the hotel Intercontinental in Zagreb (interviews in the film are made with Heidi Rinke and Julio Cesar Alonso). However, his fate is determined by his meeting with a journalist-turned-fanatic mercenary-international terrorist Eduardo Rozsa-Flores, who became a Kurtz-type commander of the PIV. “Chris the Swiss”, as Chris was nicknamed by the fighters, planned to write a book on this war, including the revelations of all its atrocities and horrors on all sides, but his life ended tragically before he was able to complete it (maybe he was killed precisely because of his intention to write this book, as it was suggested by some of Chris’s colleagues?)

This intimate and politically controversial hybrid film is made up of archive footage, live interviews (one interview with terrorist Carlos was conducted by phone while he was in prison), black-and-white hand-drawn animation sequences, consisting of giant nightmarish black shades/silhouettes, as an omen to gruesome murders about to happen, madness of war violence and massacres. These haunting animation sequences, intercut with documentary passages, highlight the film’s lyricism, by embodying mainly the inner world of anxiety and fears, while depicting images which could not be conveyed verbally, especially from a child’s perspective. Kofmel does not hesitate to question and refer to the evil deeds and plans of the ultra-conservative catholic organisation Opus Dei (“when people are weak, religion becomes crucial”), neither giving it too much sensational or pompous attention, nor further expanding on details from the evidence she had gathered.. Machiavellian criminal Flores, nicknamed Chico, originating from a Bolivian political family escaping junta regimes of South America, spent some time in Sweden and Hungary (where he was, allegedly, trained by KGB) and, after the fall of the Berlin wall, joined Opus Dei, from which he, allegedly, received funds. He was suspected of personally ordering the murders of both Chris and British photographer Paul Jenks, before he himself was killed in 2009 during a failed assassination attempt of the Bolivian president Evo Morales.

Before concluding whether her cousin was complicit in the massacres of civilians, Kofmel asks many questions, following Chris’s own questions from his notebook, mirroring his moral dilemmas, to which there are no straightforward answers: Why was this war not prevented? How could all this happen at all? What kind of evil in people pushes them to kill and commit atrocities?

I talk with Anja Kofmel about these and many other questions after the screening of her film at Sarajevo FF in the Meeting point kino café. The late night cheerful noise of the café didn’t distract us from having a very long exciting conversation.

”The people who suffer most in the war are those who don’t want the war”, Chris Würtenberg

Camera Lucida: When did you start thinking of this as a film project, when did you really start wanting to tell this story?
Kofmel: Actually, I started as a short film, Chris the Suisse as a short film subject and I focused on a child’s perspective. I didn’t really explore political things, there were so many topics behind…

True, this film is not about labelling or pointing fingers at someone, it’s an anti-war film. But it is also about dark spots we all have inside ourselves. I realised during my work process that I got addicted to my research, that I wanted to know more about these bad stories…Addiction to all black sides of humanity

Camera Lucida: You probably didn’t know what you were getting into.
Kofmel: No, I didn’t know. It was my diploma short film and, as I am coming from the animation background, it was clear that it was going to be an animation film, a short film. And then, while I was doing research for this film, I realised what story is behind. At the same time, when I started my research, there was not so much material on the internet, it was in the 1990’s, the beginning of digitalisation, so most of the archives start in 1995. I was really interested in finding archives, especially radio archives of my cousin, of his voice, but it was really tricky to find them, because most radio archives go back to when the digitalisation started… And then, Flores was killed by the police in Bolivia in 2009 and I had my diploma in 2009, so the timing was exact as everybody started talking about this case on the internet or whatever. So, all of a sudden, I had a lot of information. It was a pure coincidence. And that was the moment I decided to do the film, I mean I wanted to do the film before, but I wasn’t sure. It was also interesting – this story is not in the film – that during my research I learned there is a production company in the USA planning a feature-length film about the first international platoon, and the core writer of this fiction film is Eduardo Flores. So, I wrote to the producer, telling him that I am a film student and asked him if I can work as an intern on his set. I added that I knew a bit about the story and I would be very interested in seeing the script. He sent me the script and in the script you have the character named Chris Würtenberg. And I thought ‘OK, if they didn’t change the name of Chris, then the other names are right names’ and that’s also great help. Shortly after I got the script, Eduardo was shot and, all of a sudden, the internet was flooded with a lot of information on him.

Camera Lucida: What an amazing coincidence – of your graduation and Flores’s murder. Do you think you could have made this film if Flores had still been alive, i.e. did you feel freer after he was shot?
Kofmel: I even wanted to meet him, I was so naïve. But I realised while doing my research that journalists and core fighters started to talk because Flores was dead, they couldn’t talk while he was still alive. I was naïve because I even asked if I could work on the set. I was like “let’s go”.

Camera Lucida: Similar to Chris’s adventurous character, well, he is your cousin…
Kofmel: I don’t know. I was a bit naïve in terms of… I just wanted to know what’s going on.

Camera Lucida: How old were you when Chris was killed?
Kofmel: Chris was not just killed, he was tortured, he had bruises from cigarettes before he was strangled… the bruise looks like a bullet hole in his head. Those photos were taken by his brother, because his family realised something strange was happening. There were some contradictions and they decided to take his body to Switzerland and make a second autopsy, so the body got older and the photos made by his brother are professional, because he is a professional photographer. I was a kid when he died, I heard the story in the news, my parents told me bits. They also wanted to protect me from everything. But I realised something was going on, something mysterious, a family secret somehow.

It’s a long process, a lot of drafts. You try, then you show to people to check if they get the story. And I realise that this historical story is very important, especially for people not coming from former Yugoslavia, not only because they have no clue about what happened there, but also to understand why international people with a strong religious and nationalistic background would come to participate in the war of the 1990’s. Why would they?

Camera Lucida: How well did you know Chris? How often did you see him?
Kofmel: I knew him in a way that a little cousin knows her big cousin who is always travelling. I didn’t really know him much, I saw him of course, but he wasn’t interested much in me. I was just an annoying little cousin. But I was very impressed by him.

Camera Lucida: So you already had a certain image of him?
Kofmel: Of course. It’s not the same relationship as with your father, but he was a very important person for me. He’s the son of my mother’s sister, so it’s very close. But there was a huge age difference: I was the little one, he was the big one always travelling. He had already been married in Thailand, he travelled to Africa, I knew all these stories: he’s there with lions. For a small kid that’s impressive… It was a time when I started reading about Marco Polo, stories of adventures and expeditions, so I had my own picture of him.

Camera Lucida: It’s fascinating how long you were nurturing this idea, how you wanted to find out the truth and tell the story of his murder…Kofmel: Actually, it hit me much later, when I was the same age as Chris when he died, you realise how young he was and you start to imagine how it would be if I get killed all of a sudden. And then I got interested in the story.

Camera Lucida: Animation can be very effective to portray the psychological world poetically, but it can also serve as a device of detachment from too much emotional involvement. When did you decide to include the documentary part, talk with real people, including Chris’s family? These parts are quite emotionally striking.
Kofmel: Animation is strong in certain parts and documentary is strong in some other parts. Animation is strong when it comes to subjective images that you cannot show or to the symbolic… But it cannot capture the information between the lines, when people are talking, especially with this subject, I knew that there would be many conspiracy theories, dead ends, many different things. Animation is a powerful tool when it comes to topics such as violence and war. I could come up with symbolic images for something I didn’t want to or couldn’t show otherwise. But I needed to use a personalised approach, let people tell their own versions of the story and the documentary footage captures emotions more effectively. In the end, it is more convincing for the things that really happened. Also, I had doubts and I also wanted my doubts to be there, and animation cannot capture that.

Of course Chris’s mother knows that he was in Namibia, but she wouldn’t talk about it, she wants to keep the image of him as her son, her hero. She is completely aware of the fact that he is not a hero, but she just decided not to talk about it. You cannot capture these nuances, moments with animation. And also, I became aware that I cannot tell the story without exposing myself, although I hate to be in front the camera. But I had moments of dilemma, that there was not enough truth. I feared that the story was not going anywhere and I needed to connect the story to myself. So I decided to involve myself and expose myself, although I hated to be in front of the camera.

Camera Lucida: It’s more authentic that way.
Kofmel: I knew the film would be authentic only if I am in it (self-ironic smile).

Animation, especially black-and-white, is very poetic in the way it exposes the subjective world and the imaginary (fears, paranoia…), the world of the past and fading memories, with undefined huge black monstrous figures appearing, as a leitmotif omen, when there is a threat of violence, murder, or massacre – on all sides.

Camera Lucida: The black monstrous figures appear to announce, in a way, killings and slaughters – on all war sides. They don’t bear any army symbols or flags, there is no national labelling, they are the ‘universal’ harbingers of violence. In essence, it is an anti-war film.
Kofmel: True, this film is not about labelling or pointing fingers at someone, it’s an anti-war film. But it is also about dark spots we all have inside ourselves. I realised during my work process that I got addicted to my research, that I wanted to know more about these bad stories…Addiction to all black sides of humanity (another self-ironic laughter).