FILM #Special Issue / EU2012 / DOCUMENTARIES / page 41
OUT OF LOVE by BIRGITTE STÆRMOSE
Constructed reality By Per Juul Carlsen
Birgitte Stærmose’s Out of Love is a beautiful example of how you always have to keep moving to reach the audience. Fundamentalist documentarians and journalists would say that Out of Love doesn’t document anything, since the film’s words and situations are all constructed. But in a media world, where images of starving African children with bloated bellies and flies crawling around their eyes have a grim tendency to lose their impact once you have seen them a few times, you have to find new ways to wake up the world. If Stærmose had gone the usual route, setting up her camera in front of a bunch of insecure Kosovo-Albanian children, ordinary Western viewers would have been immune. The kids, in all their trivial misery, would just have been the usual victims of war.
Instead, the director constructs a small poetic slice of reality running all of 22 minutes. First, she interviewed a number of orphaned children about their lives in Kosovo’s capital Pristina. Then she gave their statements to a writer who shaped the words into lines like, “There’s only one reason why I’m speaking with you, and that’s because I’m hungry. I’m so hungry I could eat your money. I could eat anything in the world, including you, if you were dead, like my dad.” Finally, Stærmose had other kids speak the lines in various cinegenic setups, like the boy gutting a freshly caught fish while he tells us his life’s story. The film may be constructed, but it makes you see reality with fresh eyes.
Director Birgitte Stærmose, born 1963. Photo by Jette Jørs
OUT OF LOVE / 2009 Fusing documentary and fiction, Out of Love depicts the lives of children trying to survive the aftermath of war in Kosovo by selling cigarettes in the streets. Through monologues performed by the children against the eerie backdrops of Pristina, the film tells their gripping and sad story of memory, loss and fear. Out of Love was nominated for Best European Short at the European Film Awards and received a special mention at Berlin Film Festival. Produced by Jesper Morthorst for Alphaville Pictures Copenhagen.
Photo by Marek Septimus Wieser
Other films by Birgitte Stærmose: Now, Look at Me (short, 2001) Small Avalanches (short, 2003) Room 304 (2011)
Out of Love is one of the 20 films on the EU 2012 Blu-ray box set published by the Danish Film Institute.