Bulgarian Petar hates his job, but it is one he feels compelled to do. He is one of hundreds of thousands of Eastern European truck drivers that work in the west, picking up and delivering goods, for weeks on end living in the cabin of his truck, hundreds of miles from home. Yes, there is a kind of camaraderie on the road among fellow drivers, but all of them do what they do out of economic necessity, all the time serving the needs, demands and whims of consumers within western Europe.
Early in the film, Petar says how he always wanted to be an astronaut, wryly observing how he succeeds in this every two years, as that is the time it takes him to drive the distance to the moon, “eternally orbiting Europe.”
What’s more, our hero is something of a rough diamond, one who was subjected to a tragic childhood during which his father was murdered. Petar explains how, when he picked up his mobile after his father’s death, he realized he had nobody to call.
Petar is also very likeable and funny in a deadpan, unreconstructed kind of way. He compares the tachograph in his truck (the technological device that monitors speed and hours spent behind the wheel) to his wife as “always right, with a perfect memory and ready to use your smallest mistakes against you.”
But time spent on the road or in industrial zones is time away from his family back home in Bulgaria, and little by little the loving phone calls morph into bitter and acrimonious ones. As the notes for the film observe, he is journeying less towards a better life, more towards a dead end.
Triest explains to BDE how his motivation for the film derived from his dissatisfaction with the European Union. “We act like it’s a union, like it’s a social gathering of people, but people tend to forget it’s a neoliberal, economic union in which we always have to look for people who want to do the work cheaper.”
“That’s the main engine behind the expansion of the European union,” he says, referencing the arrival of countries such as Bulgaria, Romania and Lithuania into the EU at the beginning of the millennium. “To gain access to people that can do the job for less money.”
When Triest became a father his sense of injustice became even more acute. He could see there was a support structure in place for Belgian families that was serviced by people living hundreds of miles from their own homes in Eastern Europe, and who themselves have children that are being neglected.
So he decided to make a film about the iniquities of economic migration within the EU during which he would take to the road with a long distance lorry driver, all the time aware of his heightened status as a filmmaker who could walk away from the project were he needed at home. “When someone living in the west of Europe comes into a midlife crisis or whatever, he can take time off from the job, go to a mental coach, deal with it and make progress as a human being. How is it for the people in Eastern Europe who are in economic survival [mode]? They can’t do this.”
“And then of course there is all this xenophobia. People in the West kind of hate people from the East, while we know nothing about them. So I wanted to give them [the Eastern Europeans] a face,” Triest adds.
The project received an early boost after it won the 2016 Mediafonds Documentary Award (worth €125,000) for the plan that he prepared at the IDFA-Mediafonds Workshop (a co-operative programme between the IDFA and the Mediafonds). So he had production money to spend and a Dutch broadcaster in the form of NCRV, but no main character(s), without whom it was virtually impossible to raise further funding and broadcast finance.
Eventually he turned to a Bulgarian “fixer” who found Petar, and who also joined the production to provide translations on set (Triest doesn’t speak Bulgarian) as well work on the transcripts. Triest set up a microphone in Petra’s cab which recorded everything 24 hours per day. The director would follow behind the lorry in the company of his fixer pal who would listen in on Petar’s calls, ready to record when there was audio that would advance the story. “It’s a kind of a guerrilla filming technique to make a documentary like this,” says Triest.
The film, which was shot in Spain, France, Norway, Germany, Belgium and the UK (although no one country is particularly identifiable) is cinematically impressive, and one in which landscapes play an important role.
“It’s not about sightseeing. The landscapes are meant to have an expressionistic effect. Like they are scaring you, or sometimes they are romantic and then you have a contrast with Petar’s own life at that moment. Sometimes they are very raw and hostile and that’s their purpose.”
“For me, it’s a film about Europe. The main character in the film for me is Europe the continent, and Petar is just this little tiny bumpy person within this huge continent,” Triest underlines. “That’s why we put all this work into the style [of the film]. Not because it’s beautiful but because it helps to achieve the effect of a [person] subjected to his environment which is much more powerful.”
While the AJB Doc version of yer film is 52 minutes, the feature-length version [76 minutes] won the European Stories Award at Fipadoc in January and the First Special Prize at TNT Documentary Days in June and is currently screening in 22 Dutch cities before its Belgian release in December 2022. Sales for A Parked Life are handled by CAT&Docs.
