A humanist conspiracy  

Carlos Ferrand

role in Michka’s films

Tragedia - Director of photography

MF: What does "The Other" mean to you?

CF: One side of my family is Spanish. Another side is French Jews. On the other side — there are many sides — it's Sicilian from Lipari. I was born in a Euro-Peruvian family surrounded by an Indian country and my second mother was Black.

The family was rich. We had fourteen people in the house, but maybe eight or nine were servants. We were always with them. At the table, when we ate with the family, if there was any bad behaviour, the "punishment" was to send us to the kitchen to eat with the servants. So we often went to the kitchen because it was much more interesting. We ate better. It was lively. Full of stories, anecdotes and culture.  

Little by little, when I was young, I started to understand that my family, my parents and the clan, my class, despised the people I was brought up with. Because the richer you were, the less contact you had with your parents, but the more you were with the servants. So it was unfortunately through racism that I discovered who the "Other" was. And that was something that marked me for the rest of my life in all my work.

MF: Michka had similar experiences, I think.

CF: When I met Michka, who came from “elsewhere”, she was always talking about multiplicity, hybridity, impurity, racism. Varieties of colour. And that's what I thought was wonderful. Being with her was like visiting an extended family, the one we create by sympathy and chemistry. One had the impression, when talking to her, that we were part of a humanist conspiracy determined to infect the world with a good dose of justice, love, poetry and sensuality.

She was Jewish. I was a bit Jewish. We connected over our curiosity and interest in Jewish culture. But also, aesthetically, all the excessive and colourful things that in "Western" societies are suspect. There is that quote from Goethe, which says that "The Occidental has a relationship with colour as with a horse that cannot be tamed". Like a wild horse. The Occidental cannot tame the horse so he returns to black, grey and white because it is more "elegant". I think it's a mark of Occidentals to have this idea of elegance. And for me, Michka was oriental, and I come from Peru, a country where colour reigns supreme. I discovered that, for Occidentals, having too much "colour" means kitsch. I think it's a deficiency in Western culture.

Michka and I could talk about two subjects that are difficult for Westerners to access: superstitions and dreams. The question of whether they are true never came up for us.

So when we made her film in Toronto — Tragedia — she wanted the passion and the feelings and the love to be transmitted in the colours as well. So we had a lot of fun. She gave you a lot of freedom once she trusted you. And that was precious. During the shoot, I had the feeling of being on an adventure. She didn't impose herself, but she created the right atmosphere for people to give their best. She made us all feel part of her dream.

MF: Your childhood is incredibly similar to Michka's because she grew up in a rich family in Tunisia, and there were maids — Arab maids. It was Arab women who gave her the only love she felt as a child.

CF: I understand that very well. When you are a child and these people give you so much love, and your parents start telling you that because of the colour of their skin they are inferior, you realize there is something terribly wrong. And as a child you can't say to your parents. "No, no, no, no, you're wrong, it's not like that, it has nothing to do with skin colour, it has absolutely nothing to do with that.”

MF: In your short quote on Michka's website, you talk about her being fearless. What did you mean by that?

CF: For very complex reasons, Quebec has had prejudices against people who came from elsewhere. And Michka was not afraid to say so. Her film about racism and the police, for example.

MF: Zero Tolerance.

CF: It was very much ahead of its time. I had the impression that she herself felt like an outcast in society. Like I feel – like all of us, like a lot of people feel — but that she identified very strongly with everything that was exclusion and racism. She had a visceral reaction to social and political injustice. It was really visceral, it was deep. And then she got angry. Because she was angry, she made both enemies and friends.

In fact, I was angry with her when she left for several reasons. I felt that she left an extraordinary opportunity to advance her filmmaking here in Quebec, where there is so much support for film. That doesn't mean that it's easy, but it does mean that it's much easier than elsewhere.  

MF: You mean when she left for Toronto?

CF: No, no, no, Canada, I mean. For France and in Sweden. Toronto wasn't far away. But I thought she should have stayed here. She missed an opportunity, but I also felt that she had a lot to give to us Quebecers. And that her point of view was enriching for the society here. She deprived us. 

MF: I don't agree. Even when she went to Toronto for a year, people here in Quebec were punishing her.  "How can you leave Quebec for Toronto?” She always told me that even after ten years, people would pass her on the street and say, "Ah, you're back from Toronto.”

CF: Ha! That's good!

MF: She was more or less in Paris but she came back to Montreal a lot. It wasn't like she lived in Sweden. She made a film, that's all. And then it was complicated with her first marriage in France and all that. But I think she never gave up on Quebec. She was following her dreams. In fact, if there was a story like Prisoners of Beckett in Montreal, she would have stayed here. No problem.

CF: Sure. 

MF: But tell me more about her experience in Toronto. Michka told me that she was a bit naive to want to make a film in two languages or maybe three. All the languages mixed together — English, French, a bit of Italian. I think there's even a Pole in the film.

CF: Yes, I think so.

MF: When I read the script, I’m almost embarrassed! It's so explicit but I presume it wasn’t vulgar. I've never seen the film.

CF: It was excessive, but not vulgar at all. As for the naivety, I shared that with her because I found it interesting that someone spoke in French and the other in English. In that moment, we still had hope that English and French people could understand each other better. We were against the prejudices each group had for the other. So it was very interesting to work in several languages. But I don't know if you can call it naive. I imagine that with time, she realized there was not much chance of French becoming universal. In any case, that's our sadness here. And the famous "solitudes", no? Francophones and Anglophones are now in solitude with Indigenous Peoples. We are blind sometimes.

MF: The title of the famous book, Two Solitudes, by Hugh MacLennan, has become a symbol of irreconcilable distance between Anglophones and Francophones. But, still, the expression comes from Rilke who speaks of two solitudes coming together and loving each other. I remember her telling me after the screening of Tragedia in Toronto, Wayne Clarkson, who was the director of the centre at the time, simply responded, "French film”!

CF: Ha, yes. But when she showed it here, someone from here and I won't name him, someone important in the film business said, "What the hell is this kitsch that you and Carlos made?"

MF: Amazing. I wanted to ask you about your perception of the reception of Michka's films in Quebec. Even some positive reviews seemed paternalistic. Like, "Look what immigrants have brought to our shores.” Do you think there’s something to that? 

CF: Yes, it's possible. It's just now, in these past years, that people have learned to talk about the Other. Have you seen my film on Jongué?[1]

MF: Yes.

CF: He suffered a lot from that too. People had not yet learned to talk about the Other. When you have a new awareness, you start doing things as best you can, and often you do it badly. Today in Le Devoir, there is a long article on the treatment of Aboriginals in clinics and in cities, in hospitals. It's only today that we can talk about this issue, but it’s always been there. At the time, Michka was one of the only ones who managed to make films that weren't "from here". The other day, I was showing a filmmaker, a dyed-in-the-wool Quebecer, my film on Benjamin.[2]  And he said to me, "That doesn't look like a Quebec film.” I wish he had said something else. That's all he said.

MF: You said you were disappointed or even angry that she left for France and how she should have contributed so much to Quebec. But still, Prisoners of Beckett received funding from the NFB.[3]  It's true that you can't say it's a Quebec film, but what does that mean? I don't know. Or A Great Day in Paris. Is that a French film? No, I don't think so either.

CF: No. It's a Michka film, that's all.

MF: Yes, exactly.

CF: What I wanted to say is that I would have liked her to have stayed here and not to have gone to Europe. All because her personality, her cinematography, her values, her political position, her intellectual position were very rich. And society would have benefited more. That's what I mean. I wouldn't have wanted her to do anything different.

I'm happy to be sitting between two chairs. I don't feel Peruvian. I don't feel Quebecois, I don't feel Canadian. I'm here, you see? I'm happy here, I'm happy that we welcome a bastard like me, a dago. I like it a lot. I don't need to call myself Peruvian or Quebecois or Canadian.

MF: There was a moment that I really like in one of the films Catherine [4]made with Michka, The Violin on the Canvas. Yuli Turovsky says, "In Russia, I was Jewish, in Quebec, I am Russian. I think there's still a little space in my heart to be a Quebecer or a Canadian."

CF: That's beautiful. We can vibrate between different things — that’s what Michka was doing — and this vibration is beneficial for society.

MF: Yes. She made thirteen films, including the last two. And then there were another ten that she wanted to do that she didn't because of lack of funding. I think once or twice she got money from the CALC.[5]  She was getting more CAC[6] grants like for her films Spoon and New Memories. Then she got funding in Quebec to write a fiction film in China after China Me, her documentary in China.

CF: I loved her film about China. For me, it's one of the most interesting documentaries I've seen on China. I loved it because she was free to search.

MF: She never planned her career. She made films that turned up. Do you remember what she wrote about you in the credits of Spoon? It was you who gave her the idea to work on several projects at the same time. Because there are always obstacles somewhere and so you have to keep going.

CF: Film for her was not a career, just the right path to take. I don't plan my career either. I've never done that. I know people who write film scripts knowing which festival they're going to send it to after they finish the film.

MF: Wow!

CF: When I was with her, I was with my spiritual, political, social, familial cousin. I really felt like we were from the same family. A family from somewhere else. An extended family. It was nice for me. She was always fighting for or against something. Always, always, always.

MF: When Michka did the programme in Toronto at the Canadian Film Centre to shoot Tragédia, she still returned to Montreal on weekends. Instead of buses, she took advantage of a "car pool" service run by immigrants, especially Peruvians. She even wrote a script for a documentary about them, Easy Riders, but never managed to get funding.

CF: She had told me about it a little bit, yes.

MF: It was like an Uber prototype. She told me the big transport companies finally stopped this competition because the price of Easy Riders was so much cheaper. The characters were fascinating. She said that people who see her films often ask, "But how did you get these people to talk?" She said it's not hard to get people to talk. People want to talk. But still, when I read the script for Easy Riders the stories are very intimate. I think Michka was good at that. People talked to her.

CF: Yes, for sure. And then she looked Peruvian too. She could have been Peruvian. In her colour, her liveliness, in the essence.

MF: Do you think there's a kind of freedom in being an immigrant? Michka embarrassed me sometimes when she asked people, "Where are you from?” As a Canadian-born white person, I can't ask such questions. But she was from somewhere else, which gave her permission.

CF: Yes, because you could see that she came from somewhere else. And then she always had a curiosity that was positive. It also depends on how you ask the question. 

MF: Did you talk about her projects? I think you saw the first rough cut of Spoon, for example.

CF: In the beginning, yes. But not much of the later ones. I saw some of Spoon. We were each doing our own thing. A wonderful film, Spoon. I'm really surprised that it never came out in the States. Very surprised.

MF: You saw a rough version of Mavericks. Then you decided not to see the final version.

CF: I didn't like a lot of what people were doing and how it's filmed. But that's okay, you can't like everything. I've shown Michka films of mine that she didn't like.

MF: Oh yes, which one?

CF: I remember showing her one I was making for television. I wasn't making art-house films like Michka from the beginning. I only became an auteur when I made Americano or from then on. Before that, I thought it was a bit elitist. I didn't feel comfortable in it. So I did things for television. I was very happy to make a living from it. A film for TV was not enough of a film d’auteur for her. She was sucking the air out of me with her “European superiority”, but even when I found her snobbish she was stimulating.

MF: You're researching a film about kitsch.

CF: Michka would have had a lot to say about kitsch. The Middle East and Latin American cultures have a lot of points in common with popular art. What Occidentals consider kitsch is for us a source of joy and happiness, of alegria, So we say kitsch a little too quickly. The film I would like to make is a celebration of kitsch.

I was very comfortable with Michka and her decor and clothes and the broken mirrors and the cushions full of colour. All that. I felt at home.

Sometimes when I discover a good idea, I wish I could share it with her. Like that notion of a fabulous poet, George Oppen: “Reality is the place where what we know meets that which we do not know”. She would have loved it.

I could never believe she was going to die. In the hospital, I was angry and wanted to shout, "Get up and stop this opera!" I'm not proud of myself, but it's true.

[1] Jongué, A Nomad’s Journey (2019).

[2] 13, A Ludodrama about Walter Benjamin (2017).

[3] National Film Board of Canada.

[4] Catherine Van Der Dondkt.

[5] Conseil des arts et lettres du Québec.

[6] Canada Council for the Arts.