INTERVIEW/Humor for humanity: Slovak filmmaker's unique approach to documentaries

By Teng Pei-ju, CNA staff reporter

There is no other way to discuss Central European history in a documentary other than to approach it with humor, Slovak filmmaker Peter Kerekes said, "because if you get serious, it's just a reason to force suicide."

The director's comment was an exaggeration -- maybe -- but it shed light on his penchant for injecting humor into his more than a dozen works made across three decades.

This is evident in "Cooking History," which narrated World War II through the perspective of military cooks, and "66 Seasons," which explored Central and Eastern European history through the memories of community swimming pool-goers from the 1930s, when the pool was built, to the end of the Cold War.

"You have to watch it somehow from the distance," he said when he explained how he tackled turbulent and complex history in filmmaking during an interview with CNA on May 11 in Taipei.

Kerekes, along with another Slovak director, Viera Čakányová, were chosen for the "Filmmakers in Focus" section of the 2024 Taiwan International Documentary Festival (TIDF) from May 10 to May 19.

Both directors have experienced the transition from communist Czechoslovakia during the Cold War era to present-day democratic Slovakia, and their productions are "distinct from mainstream works prevalent in Western Europe or North America," according to TIDF Program Director Wood Lin (林木材).

In "Cooking History," black-and-white footage of World War II soldiers marching on the street is paired with upbeat music, with the director often unexpectedly punctuating the retelling of moving wartime stories with quirky questions that elicited raw responses.

At one point as two of the featured cooks tell their stories, the director asks them when the troops would normally fire bullets like crazy, and one of the cooks answered: "We knew when they would start shooting-- on payday. That's when they would have a bit of fun and get merry with the food and drink."

Another of the scenes shows a cook who worked in a German submarine in World War II telling his story.

But instead of sitting him on his living room sofa to recollect how he cooked in the submarine's metal kitchen, Kerekes had him go to a submarine to make the dish he once prepared on the front lines while sharing how he managed to dodge death and emerge as the only survivor in his unit.

The documentary, which was filmed in 11 countries across Europe and took five years to finish, was awarded the Special Jury Prize at the Hot Docs Festival in Canada in 2009.

 In the short film "Second Chance," meanwhile, Kerekes, who has been disenchanted with Slovak politics after 20 years of democratization, embarked on an experiment where he attempted to invite the Finnish government to invade and take over his country.

The project was meant as "a joke," Kerekes said, claiming that he drew inspiration from the alleged invitation extended by the Czechoslovak leadership to the Soviet Union in 1968 to suppress the Prague Spring, a period of political liberalization in Czechoslovakia.

Humor is a tool the director has employed to challenge the dominant historical narrative, bringing attention to the personal stories of each individual involved.

"Behind every soldier, there was a very strong personal story" regardless of which side they fought for, the 51-year-old said, expressing an urge to showcase that humane aspect of history and arguing that "humor gives you humanity."

The seemingly playful arrangements in his works were in fact built on meticulous planning uncommon in documentary filmmaking, and they sometimes produced effects so powerful that the director called them "the magic moments."

According to Kerekes, the submarine cook, constrained by the military's rules, had to feign cooking during the three-hour filming, but in the end he held out an empty plate and proclaimed "[the invisible food was] for my invisible crew," alluding to all those drowned underwater.

"It's such a strong statement," Kerekes said of the ending scene, one better than if it had been scripted in advance.

Lin, on the other hand, described scenes like that as "crossing the boundary."

The audience is fully engaged with the cook in the present, but then is suddenly transported to a moment lost in the past, he said, giving a new meaning to the same scene.

Kerekes has also deviated from conventional documentary filmmakers in making a considerable effort to arrange scenes and incorporate dramatic elements to enrich each film.

In his first feature-length film, the 2003 "66 Seasons," for example, the director did not simply request elderly people at the pool to share their life stories, he also randomly invited young people on site to re-enact those anecdotes.

The director's ability to fuse dramatic elements into documentaries derived from his original training as a director of fictional works at the Academy of Performing Arts in Bratislava, the capital of Slovakia.

While it was reality -- a lack of funding for the movie industry in the 1990s, according to the director -- that led him into the world of low-budget documentaries, Kerekes "fell in love" with the genre and gradually developed his own style.

The director, who currently also teaches at two film schools in Bratislava and Budapest, respectively, stressed the importance of "finding [one's] own voice" in filmmaking, noting that he never meant to merely document events by filming individuals and locations.

"You don't see a swimming pool as it is," he said, referring to "66 Seasons." "[Instead], you see on screen the swimming pool as I see it...You see my world."

Enditem/ls