Quotes

When I select my characters, I ask myself: do I like this person? Do I want to spend a part of my life with them?

[after being asked why he filmed in Kisangani, Congo] 'For several years I've been following wandering, migrating, rootless people: traveling artists, circus performers, gypsies - this has become a central interest to me as a filmmaker, perhaps because rootlessness and exile so define our times. But I was not prepared for what was to come. Naïve enough to go to a country in civil war, I wanted to make a documentary about refugees and life on the run.

What I found in the rotten jungle of the Congo were not refugees, but human beings in tens of thousands, muted by starvation and military persecution, silent; dying or dead. Without having intended, I became a witness to an apocalypse. The horror was not only seeing the results of another senseless war, another genocide, but understanding the continuing indifference of our "civilised" world towards such man-made disasters - at the end of our century of holocausts.

Children without parents. Faces without hope. Bodies without graves. White men walking over black corpses. TV-cameras and machine-guns shooting. Shooting right into the crowded camps.

For me, making this documentary was a step too far into the dark, the unknown. And how to come back?

Now the film exists. "Spectators" may expect a well-reflected and reassuring commentary to comfort them, to protect them from the enigma they have to watch. But there is not much left to explain. The images stand for themselves, and while editing the Kisangani Diary, I used them chronologically as they had occurred - naked and ugly. The audience is completely exposed to become an eye-witness to the "Heart of Darkness" of human nature.