Lunch with Nacht Uber Kepler 452b [Night Upon Kepler 452b]
Interview with Ben Voit, director of Nacht Ueber Kepler 452b [Night Upon Kepler 452b]
How did you go about creating Nacht Ueber Kepler 452b? Can you talk us through the filming processes a little?
Almost every documentary that deals with people sleeping on the streets, I found very problematic. It always felt like the filmmaker was taking advantage of someone in a vulnerable position to create emotional value for his film. I hated the fact that people were getting exposed and reduced to “being homeless”. It’s like calling me “car-less” because I have never owned a car. There are so many more aspects to a personality. When I see someone sleeping on the bare ground at minus degrees, I absolutely can’t comprehend where all that strength is coming from. If I haven’t slept for two days I am absolutely incapable of doing anything. I can’t wrap my head around the fact that so many people told me that they haven’t slept longer than a few restless hours a night, for years! How does the border between reality and fiction blur, if you’re ever only half-asleep? I wanted to find a way through cinematic means to enter the mind of our protagonists. I wanted to make a film about a city that never sleeps, but desperately wants to. Our aim was to grasp the perception of people who are constantly on the run, who can’t remember the last time they’ve slept in a real bed. I wanted to recreate the rush of the night. How the things we witnessed turned into inner landscapes. How fragments of conversations become collective thoughts and how we learned that none of us could survive without something to wake up to.
How did you work with the people taking care of homeless people?
I’m a student at the Film University Babelsberg Konrad Wolf and Night Upon Kepler 452b was my first-year film as a director. I loved the saying our mentor Daniel Abma told us: “Don’t make a film about us, without us” and I probably took it to the extreme. Prior to shooting I told all of our protagonists very clearly how I imagined the whole film would look and sound like and asked them for their own ideas. If they had to shoot this film, what shouldn’t be missing. It was overwhelming to me how through their eyes things looked peaceful, while to me they seemed merciless. So I also sat down with everybody, showing them what we’d shot and it meant a lot to us, listening to their thoughts. Dennis, who falls asleep in the S-Bahn at the beginning of the film, pointed out things in our material where I was like: “Dude, you should go to film school!” Most of them just replied that they have never seen themselves in such a way. I wish we had filmed that reaction actually. The same goes for Matze and Arthur, the two men operating the winter bus of Berlin City Mission. Even though they had very bad experiences with camera crews that behaved as if they are on a safari, they gave us another chance and took us under their wings. In all the districts we went through, the people knew their names and no matter how brutal the night was, Matze and Arthur could get a smile out of everybody. When I asked them how they cope with the fact that they can’t help all those thousand people sleeping on the streets of Berlin, they simply replied: “But we can try”.
What do you hope the audience will get out of it?
If the film could break down certain boundaries that would be all that I can wish for. Someone approached me after a screening and told me that after watching the film he had more questions about the subject than before. I had to laugh. I told him if that makes him talk to the next person he meets who lives on the streets, then that’s the best impact the film could have. The fact that this film was made didn’t improve the lives of our protagonists one bit. The only thing that might have, was the fact that we cared, listened, laughed and had beers together. I realised that even a simple handshake is something very rare out there.
Would you say that the short film format has given you any particular freedom?
I don’t think that the essayistic style of our film would have carried a feature-length documentary. Making a feature film feels to me like a mountain to climb. Everyone says that the journey is the goal, but if they don’t reach the lookout point or everything is covered in clouds, they are still mad as hell. With a short film, it’s okay to get drunk in the first pub on the way and to roll down the hill and to wake up in the arms of a shepherd. It’s less important to get somewhere, but rather to be somewhere. Film for me is the only medium where space and time can be compressed, where moments can be conserved with no expiry date. Where I actually gain lifetime, because experiencing all the stuff the filmmaker has put together would’ve cost me months or years to discover myself. But if I knew that I only had 10 more years to live I would live way bolder and more radical and freer of any preconceptions. That is a short film to me.
What do you consider your cinematographic references?
The only thing we were consciously inspired by were the photographs of Khalik Allah. Together with the cinematographer Konrad Waldmann, I was looking for a consistent style to portray our protagonists, without exposing them. We realised that the closer you get to someone’s face, the more anonymous it becomes. That may sound contradictory, since we all know that the eyes are considered the windows to our soul and that in an extreme close-up the skin becomes like a unique landscape. But ironically, when friends watched our raw cuts, they asked us why we cut back to the same woman three times, even though it had been close-ups of three different female protagonists. Generally I could say that I’m very keen on finding the perspective that differs from a common point of view. I think it’s the hardest part of any artform to simplify our means of expression. To kill a million darlings and reduce everything down to its core. For that reason I try to show fragments of the reality we perceived, so the audience has to merge the pieces together by themselves. In this film it was also important to disorientate the viewer, so he or she would not try to watch the film from a logical point of view, but rather get immersed into that rush of the night. That particular feeling when the borders between reality and fiction become blurred. When you’re losing track, whether you’re part of a dream, a memory or the present moment.
Nacht Ueber Kepler 452b [Night Upon Kepler 452b] is part of International Competition I8.
