Festivali        Outview, Interview: Pia Hellenthal

Searching Eva,
searching us in the post-truth digital age

Searching Eva shows different fascinating versions of Eva Colé: she is a blogger, sex worker, bisexual, lesbian, feminist, poet, model, anarchist vagabond, internet icon, Berliner on the move, nomad and now a film protagonist. Film authoress Pia Hellenthal masterfully ‘translates’ the internet form into a cinematic universe (combining impeccable real-life shots with anonymous comments and messages from Eva’s blogs) and exposes the fragmented, fluid identities of Millenials, for whom the concept of fixed identities becomes obsolete . “Eva is everything and nothing, as most of us are”.
By covering, through Eva’s writing, various topics of identity, sexuality, sex workers’ rights, political systems, hypocrisy of the ruling classes, dichotomy of individuality vs. collectivity, followers, so-called “mental disorders’, the film exposes various faces of Eva, but also today’s socially relevant topics. Hellenthal moves freely and comfortably between and across many film sub-genres: personal diary, intimate portrait, cinema veritê, multimedia, observational documentary, poetic experimental documentary, surreal fiction-like dreamy sequences, direct cinema etc.
Most scenes in this non-linear narrative show Eva as happy or laughing, i.e. she seems to enjoy fully her body and moments of socio-economic transgressions. For Eva, sex work becomes the ‘natural’ resistance against the sexist, patriarchal society, as she states in the film: “The patriarchy fucks me over every day, so I may as well get paid for it.” She, also, claims that she ”makes more money from a blowjob then during the 3-day fashion show in Paris”. The message on her T-shirt reads: “Free me from the bondage of self”.

Eva Colé demolishes all barriers of intimacy and so-called personal world, but she also breaks some epistemological boundaries by reflecting on these artificially imposed barriers in political terms, as an echo of the feminist postulate “personal is political”. Her refusal to shave her armpits and vagina may be a strong political statement, especially within the sphere of sex work. Her statement “Feminism arose from the need to fight the patriarchal system, only to become incorporated into the system it sought to fight against” resonates true in the current context of global backlash against women. She uses the internet’s democratic and liberating potential to her benefits, but is also aware of its damaging aspects (e.g. a woman’s suicide after video of her rape goes viral), so the film heroine utters bold statements about sexual abuse on the internet and ensuing women’s suicides, missing persons, hypocrisy of bourgeois conventions etc. – all in the public eye.
Eva mirrors a part of us that is a fatigued disappointment with the current global state of affairs, but also the lack of empathy among fame-driven internet users, who ‘know’ it all but feel little, unless they are the centre of immediate, fast and all-consuming (no matter how short-lived) attention.

Many young bloggers easily declare ‘big’ words and phrases, advocate diversity, fluidity and difference, in order to promote their public image, while making the content void, as they usually fail to communicate efficiently with those even slightly different from them. People who use the internet to abuse others in other to reach fame assert their own ‘superiority’, reinforcing, thus, the ‘viral’ selfie trend of superficiality and voyeurism, and displaying a high degree of narcissism. Although Eva turns her search for multiple identities into a publicly accessed spectacle, the film efficiently conveys Eva’s refusal of identity politics and her adamant argument against any labels. Eva advocates strongly for anti-capitalism, working class rights, feminism and anti-patriarchy, insisting her arguments are not just loud banners, but something more meaningful in her radical and authentic fight.
By balancing and conveying all Eva’s sex work aspects – as a liberal escape from the 9 to 6 grid, but also as a dangerous adventure – Hellenthal carefully avoids clichés and reductive labelling of either sex work and Eva, and the film never turns exploitative or objectifying of Eva. Eva frequently stares at the camera, asserts her subjectivity and challenges the normative perceptions of identity and mainstream politics. Searching Eva, thus, becomes a thought-provoking and insightful endeavor, making audiences create more nuanced and complex interpretations.
I talk to Pia Hellenthal about her film, which won the audience award at Outview Festival, many questions raised by it and various audience reactions ranging from “a bunch of young girls & queer kids hugging us, one older lady crying, a couple of furious older men, intrigued intellectuals, to excited film students, bored documentary audiences missing emotions, some puzzled faces”.

Pia Hellenthal is a Cologne based writer & director working in fiction and documentary. 2013 Hellenthal graduated from Academy of Media Arts Cologne with a Diploma in Media and Fine Art. Her short films screened at various international film festivals like Karlovy Vary, New York and Oberhausen and received prizes like the Prix H. R. Giger „Narcisse“ for best short. Next to her own films, Hellenthal has been working for publications like VICE, where her work got nominated for the Lovie Awards and licensed to international TV Stations. For her debut film SEARCHING EVA she received the 2016 Gerd Ruge Scholarship from Film- und Medienstiftung NRW, the Goethe Institut Film Residency in Beirut and took part in the dok.incubator Workshop 2018.

Camera Lucida: How did you come across Eva and when did you get an idea to make a film about her? Did you meet for the purposes of this film?
Pia Hellenthal: Co Author & Creative Producer Giorgia Malatrasi found Eva’s Blog online and stalked her for a while. Then she came up to me and said: „You should read it, I think this is special“. And then it was me getting obsessed.
When we met her for the first time, we already brought a camera and a mic and started shooting with her straight away. Eva was that long haired, angelic looking girl, dressed all white sitting in her all white bedroom in Berlin Wedding talking for three hours straight about her life being mostly illegal.
Neither of us knew what that was going to lead to. It took us about a year, shooting here and there a little, interviewing her in different flats in Berlin with different hair styles. It was not before Giorgia and I realised that what kept us so fascinated in Eva was that she became like a projection wall for us, like a mirror in which we foremost saw ourselves.
This happens with Eva, because she is escaping every attempt to narrow her down, define her. So she is everything and nothing at once and you are left with your gaze upon her. We needed a while to understand that her escaping every narration is actually the theme of the film rather than our downfall while trying to narrate her.
Camera Lucida: What was Eva’s response to your film idea?
Pia Hellenthal: A day before we wanted to meet her for the second time she posted on her blog:
„Guys I need advice, somebody is interviewing me for a project and we already had first session where they came to my place and now they want to film me while I do something normal but I don’t know what to do, help.“
Then a bunch of followers answered and proposed things like: „listen to music, dance, read, go on the internet, pet your pet, clean your house, call someone, text someone, eat something, drink something, cry, laugh, take a nap, go pee, cook something, water your plants, take a selfie :)“
Obviously she knew we could read that.
Camera Lucida: How long did pre-production and then the shoot itself take?
Pia Hellenthal: The blog entry I just mentioned was posted in November 2014. We kept on shooting in phases until end of 2018 and preproduction kind of went along shooting. But the actual funding money came early 2017. By then, at least a third of shooting was already done, though.
Camera Lucida: Was it easy to gain Eva’s trust?
Pia Hellenthal: There are two realities to that. One was meeting Eva and having the feeling of her not giving a shit about us filming her. She just talked, got naked, peed on the toilet in front of us. It felt like it could have been anyone sitting in front of her, she simply did not censor herself, so I felt like trust was not even a concept that applied.
The other was reading her blog, where she captured the shooting process every now and then and where you could tell she was going through stages, also sometimes being anxious or trusting us despite her own doubts. Here are a few examples:
here’s a documentary about me going around the world and not fitting in anywhere but eating a lot of drugs so that i can pretend to
posted: 10 June 2016 @ 23:03

the reason why they made a movie out of my life is that one day i’m shooting up in a public toilet and the next day i’m bleaching my teeth in a jacuzzi
posted: 2 December 2017 @ 01:31

Anonymous asks: when will searching eva come out?
2018 maybe i think they’re waiting for me to say my first and only clever thing in the whole movie then they’ll be like yo finally done. kidding we’re waiting for the result of applying for different funds but also be ready for a movie about an average white uneducated internet kiddo. good thing is most of you will be able to relate but do we need this? they think we do, let’s trust them, amen!