» Interview about KRISANA
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Tammy Stone: How did you arrive at Fallen and how do you view your latest film in relation to your previous films?

Fred Kelemen: FALLEN (KRISANA) had been shoot during my three months stay in Riga / Latvia last year, where I was leading a work shop at the Latvian Culture Academy.
FALLEN (KRISANA) is another step on my way. But in this film I wanted to be stiller, I did without the expressive excesses. They raged inside instead. I put the drama, that really always plays inside - it just manifests itself in the outside world – into the heads, into the imagination. For a long time I’ve had an uncomfortable feeling about the vulgar, related stories. The real drama takes place in our spirit. It’s like everything an illusion, and like every illusion,reality.
FALLEN (KRISANA) had not been planed for a long time. The idea for it was a consequence of my intensive occupation with the city and its different worlds. It came out of the mood in which I was there. I made this film in a state of creative passion, and the actors and the team shared this passion as well. Independently of how it is judged, I am at peace with it, because it was born out of love, without having been the object of any strategy or negotiation etc. There was a short, direct path between idea and reality, similar to the artistic creativity of a painter or a poet or to work in the theatre. I was aware from the moment I first thought about making „Fallen“ that there would be no point in taking the idea to Germany, writing a script, going through the mill of film support and television editors, which could possibly take years. The film would get cold and never be made. And I think a film should be made while it’s still hot.

T. S. : Matiss is an interesting character in that he's both a man alone and without purpose, but also determined to set a course of action for himself in the film, to reach out to another human being; he very much has a trajectory. Would it be fair to say he's a character audiences can relate to more than those in your previous films (I'm especially thinking about Nightfall)? What is your attitude towards him?

F. K. : I don’t know if the audiences can relate more to the main male character in my new film FALLEN (KRISANA) than to those in my other films. He is a simple person, working in an archive eight hours a day. And suddenly something unexpected happens and asks of him to take a position. The way the characters are created is the same as in my previous films. I always follow the characters because I talk about humans.
The story developed from the characters all by itself. The people in the film do things, and as doers they spin stories. Stories or situations are natural spin-offs of our deeds; similar to a spider’s thread. I followed the possible and relevant behaviour of the characters. That let what happens arise logically.

T. S. : As a filmmaker, you've adopted an intensely observational mode of filmmaking that involves, for the audience, a marked distance from the characters and their environments. Thematically, Fallen deals with observation/distance as well. Can you describe the various modes of distance at work here?

F. K. : It was always very important for me to create distance between the audience and the characters of my films. I don’t want the audience to identify with the characters. The audience should observe and understand the characters and follow their way with disgust or compassion or what feelings ever are provoked. But it should not forget that the characters of the films are humans distinguished of them. No one is identical with another one. We are all different. And our difference is our great chance to enrich ourselves with the adventure to get close to some one, to experience a different way of thinking and living, to get in contact with the other world the other person is and to overcome the difference, which so often is a source of hate and violence, with love.

T. S. : There is a sense of "anywhereness" in this film, yet you create your own subjective, almost abstract universe through the black-and-white cinematography and use of music/sound. Can you describe what your vision was for the landscape/soundscape in Fallen?

F. K. : The vision for the landscape/soundscape was to use reality, real locations, real sounds to create with them an archetypical world. Reduced to the essential elements it focuses on the real which so often lies hidden behind the ornaments of design and narration.

T. S. : There is a raw, brutal authenticity in your films that is rare in contemporary cinema. Does the bleakness/senselessness that you so evocatively convey equate with "truth" to you?

F. K. : I do not see any bleakness/senselessness in films. There is just an absence of appeasement and palliation of life. Things are not as we want them to be. And we do not have the courage to look straight into the face of reality and to change them. We prefer to dream the world imprisoned in our own illusions. But there are moments when we have to wake up, when something shocks us and our dream-world gets a crack through which we can see reality. These moments make us sad. But these are moments of truth. This kind of despair is somehow the result of our own ideas about reality. Maybe we expect too many unrealistic things to happen, we want too much happiness without pain, we dream too much of being pampered throughout our whole life. If you have the strength to look at what is really happening, then the possibility of being disappointed is not so big. If we were to see what is going on around, we would not be so desperate. But we are always disappointed because we don't want to see what is really going on, and we hope a lot, we hope things will be different. But they are not. And then the sadness and despair come for sure. And that's why there is no solution. The only solution would be to stop the dreaming. I mean dreaming in the negative way of having illusions, of building constructions of life instead of living. We even have illusions about ourselves. But we do not know ourselves. We are permanently with us but permanently miss us. We do not know who we are. We do not know who our partner is, our friend, our child. And so there is simply a conflict between what we hope and what is really going on.
I know that cinema comes nowadays with the idea that we have to have a solution and that it has to have a happy end but it is something which did not always exist. If you look back to other films, like, for example, neo-realist films, they do not have a happy ending, there is no solution at the end. I think this kind of solution you talk about is fake, it is cinema, but it has nothing to do with life. There is no final solution in life. Because if there was a final solution, it would be the end of everything, it would be apocalyptic. But life goes on, so the fights and the contradictions continue. We are mortal creatures. Our death is undoubtedly true and the moment of death is maybe the only moment of truth in our life, far away of being artificial, manipulative, hypocritical or tactical. We are just true. Similar to this can be perhaps only a deep, true love in our life. But this kind of love, if it is true, is for sure something very real far away of being artificially sweet. We should not hope for finding ourselves one day in a dreamt world. Basically, we are alone. Everybody is alone. We should create and lead our life as a human being wholly, including our fleeting physical existence and our transcendental essence. I do not say that I don’t believe in hope, I say that hope, as I understand it, is a passive attitude, which keeps us in the state of waiting. We sit and hope and wait and while we are waiting, life happens and others act and determine our reality. Hope is a very popular political instrument for keeping people calm and controlling them. It has become a kind of ideology. But hope should be based on something. This could be called vision. I would prefer to replace HOPE with VISION. A vision is charged with energy and passion, it’s not passive, it demands fulfilment. In a time in which the end of utopias is being proclaimed, it is extremely important to have the courage to think utopian, to open our minds, to be able to go beyond the very limited pragmatism which focuses our thinking and feeling on a very material level of our existence and ignores our intellectual, emotional and creative abilities and possibilities. To live without hope, to believe in life and its possibilities without hope or desperation, to move beyond these illusions and enter the space of reality where we can see with an unspoilt look what life is really like, to think the unthinkable without limiting ourselves, to act authentically, not to be afraid of Utopia even if there is no promise of fulfilment, to extend our mental and emotional boundaries, to love without expectations and reward, would be an act of human dignity and beauty. – Even though it is terribly difficult because of its deep simplicity.

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Toronto International Film Festival, Canada, 2005