The juvenile prison, the difficulty of maintaining a job for young offenders, small thefts, debts, gambling, the camaraderie of street gangs. David (Noah Sayenko), just released from prison, has to deal with all this in Rain Fell On The Nothing New, winner of the Young Actors Award at the Internationales Filmfestival Mannheim-Heidelberg and premiered in Italy during the 6th edition of the German Film Festival, which took place in Rome from 19 to 22 March. For the occasion, we met the film director, Steffen Goldkamp, at his first work, and the director of photography Tom Otte.
Towards the end of the film there is a scene, during the trial in court, in which one of the accused boys tells his story, and it is a very concrete, real story, but also universal, in a certain sense, could refer to anyone of those boys, the protagonist included. Was there a real inspiration behind the story of the film?
Steffen Goldkamp: I think that was the most memorable situation, because we witnessed a real process, and during hearings sometimes nobody said anything about the case, but at some point someone told that story. And it was a crazy, hard, challenging story to listen, and it was also very vague, full of holes and missing links. At the same time, it was easy to imagine. So we wanted to recreate something like that in the film, and the story that feels in the courtroom is not a fake but real story, which I had heard from another guy during my research. That was the starting point. And then I had done a short film before, always with Tom as director of photography, which was called After two hours, ten minutes had passed and was also a film about the juvenile prison. Many guys had committed new crimes after the prison sentence and I wondered how and why, I found something really amazing. I knew I wanted to represent a specific reality, going beyond the typical movies set in prison, I wanted to contribute to something real. So that was also a starting point.
Rain Fell On The Nothing New represents a situation where there seems to be no escape for people like David, once convicted they can only return to commit crimes. Having spent time in prison and with these guys, what do you think are possible solutions?
S. G.: I have the feeling that the film does not give an answer, because it is very difficult to provide one. I mean, punishing crime with imprisonment is always a weak solution. But the biographies of these guys are really terrible and difficult, so it’s not easy for them. Also because they can be very irritating, and at some point it stops wanting to help them, even by the authorities. What I find very stupid: if a kid does something wrong and punish him a year and a half later, that same kid no longer knows what punishment was for. This happens very often, which makes them angry and, since they are sometimes not among the most intelligent, they continue to commit crimes and it does not help anyone.
Tom Otte: It’s hard to say, because we’ve had a lot of experience with life in prison. We spent time with boys in a juvenile prison, but we were in a single section of a single prison, which in turn is part of a much larger system. Obviously while you’re in that situation you’re thinking about how to change things: they could learn how to cook or how to provide themselves once out or things like that, but they’re all very trivial ideas and I’m not an expert in this matter.
I also wanted to focus on the visual language of the film, which is very focused on the protagonist David and is rich in details, details, close shooting. How did you develop it?
S. G.: What I find interesting is that if a person is off screen and speaks to another person on screen, then all the sense of the scene is on the demands that the first does to the second. As if it were society itself, in a way: raise your head, move your body in this way, smile. If you smile, you’ll get a job, and if you have a job, you can live a good life. Life in society can change and it does it from outside, and that is what happens to these guys. So I found it a linguistic choice, and I also think you can show an expression in something like the nails of the hands, or in some very close detail that describes a mental state. It is the power of cinema, after all, and I really believe it.
T. O. I also think we had certain limitations on what we could show. Especially in the first part, which is the one set in prison. We tried to do something that normally is not advisable to do, that is to keep the protagonist almost anonymous for all the first 15 minutes. We wanted to grasp more than anything else the environment, the daily routine and the atmosphere of this system to which David is tied. Priority was not his face or voice, but what surrounded him. I think this thing is interrupted when it is released from prison, and there is a short path where it seems to smell freedom and new opportunities. But then, of course, everything collapses again very quickly.
S. G.: The film was almost entirely filmed with only one lens. Sometimes there are zooms, which describes the look of the film, I think. While we realized that if we had maintained this closeness to the subjects, which allowed the use of strong details, it would become a very visible element. And with this awareness we could also define our position within this story, which is not my story but that of someone else. I’ve never been to prison after all.
Steffen, Rain Fell On The Nothing New is your first feature film. How did you approach the project compared to your previous shorts, and what were the greatest difficulties and the most complex aspects you encountered in realizing it?
S. G.: Making a movie is a huge privilege, and that’s why we had to fight for a long time: we spent four years completing it. Tom was on my side from the beginning, beating with me, but there were high and low: at some point I changed production company, which was quite depressing, and funding was generous and helped a lot, but other people did not believe in the project and it was difficult not to abandon it entirely. But the thing I found most depressing of all was the research process, which was long and thorough to approach as much as possible to reality. It’s not a documentary, but it looks a lot like real life. And it’s depressing because you get into a very negative subject and it almost becomes a social job: talking to these guys and listening to their stories can really affect your mood and your mental state. There was a 19-year-old boy, for example, who died while doing our research, and it was absurd, it is a very bad situation. While the works were in the middle, moreover, they were born of productive difficulties and we did not know what would happen. But if you can spend some time with the people you want to make the film with, just do it, and sooner or later you can finish the film. And we did this: we went to see the locations and improvised scenes, just to do something together, to work together with whatever comes in mind. Thus a certain confidence has been created, which also defines the final result.
L’articolo Rain Fell On The Nothing New – Interview with Steffen Goldkamp and Tom Otte proviene da SentieriSelvaggi.
