Night cap with Tracing Addai

An interview with Esther Niemeier, director of Tracing Addai

 At the beginning of this project, did you want to deal with war in general or with Daesh’s European fighters specifically?
My motivation to make this film was mainly driven by the personal connection I have with the main protagonist, Addai, and his family as he is someone that I knew very well. Because of his story my personal perspective on the subject of young Europeans joining Daesh changed. I wanted to understand and tell his story, not only the part after he converts to Islam and joins Daesh but also his life before and who he was to me. If this hadn’t happened to him I probably would not have made a film on the subject at all.

 How much are the dialogues excerpts of real interviews and email exchanges? Did you keep the original voices?All of the Addai’s mother’s interviews are the original interviews. Also the emails are the original emails between her and Addai. We’ve changed the names accordingly but the content is the original text. Ilias’s interview is portrayed by an actor but based on the original interviews I did with him. I was only allowed to bring a pen and paper and no recording devices at all into the prison where he was serving his time. I visited him there as often as I could and also send him questions via post that he answered and sent back to me. So the interviews are based on the original transcripts from our meetings and the letters he wrote me.

 How did you work on the different animation techniques and the application of colours?
It was really a team effort. We worked together with a team of animators and spent a lot of time trying out many many techniques before deciding on the final ones you can see in the film. This whole process was new to all of us, as the entire film team had never worked with animation before and the animation team had never worked on a documentary film before. In the end we chose different types of rotoscoping techniques where every strain of the story has their own style.

 Were you interested in demonstrating how the feelings of exclusion and inequality lead the young people to engage in war or did it come from the testimonies?
I was interested in the question that drove Addai and Ilias as well as other young men and women to engage in a war that isn’t theirs. While making the film it became more and more clear that in both their cases exclusion and inequality played a vital part in their story. This is now an important part of the film and its message as it very clearly demonstrates how the responsibility for this phenomenon partly lies within our society.

 Do you have further projects based on testimonies?
I currently have no further project planned based on the testimonies of Ilias and Addai’s Mother… but who knows, perhaps in the future.

 Would you say that the short film format has given you any particular freedom?
I would say it has given me a frame or an important restriction that forced me to really try and reduce the content to the essence of the story.

Tracing Addai is being shown in International Competition I1.