Déni Oumar Pitsaev isn’t just the director of Imago (a world premiere in Critics’ Week in Cannes). The Chechen director is also the film’s main protagonist. The doc follows him as he returns to Pankissi in Georgia. He has inherited a plot of land, close by the Chechen border, and is contemplating building himself a home – but his presence causes family feuds. His relatives all want him to get married and to go by traditional Chechen codes of family and masculinity.
How did Pitsaev cope with being both behind and in front of the camera? “I was relying a lot on my DOP and also I had an assistant director – which is not often very common for documentary,” the director explains how he coped with making a movie about himself. He also established a working methodology, After shooting, he would watch everything that had been shot. If a sequence didn’t work, he had an immediate option to replace it.
“It was shooting, watching, shooting again…but everything you see in a scene is shot once. I never re-took the same scenes again.”
Pitsaev was filming all the time. This helped his subjects feel at ease around the camera. It also gave him more scope in the editing.
Sometimes, looking back on what he had caught on camera, Pitsaev felt it was too smooth and that it looked as if it had been rehearsed, which was never the case. He wanted the film to feel real – and it was.
Pitsaev has a complicated background. His parents split up when he was young, his father left and he was brought up by his mother. He lived through the horrors of the Chechen war.
The director has an ambivalent relationship with the father who was “absent” for much of his youth. Tensions between them are sometimes apparent in the doc.
“It was quite challenging both as a director and also from ethical questions. First, when I was writing it, my mother said she would not appear in the film – but then she changed her mind. For my father, that was not the case. He really wanted to come to help me…to show he was there for me.”
To the director’s surprise, his father was instantly comfortable in front of the camera. “[But] during the process of the film, he realised what kind of film it might be. Some things that were more rough, raw, emotional and private I did not include in the film because it was too personal and my father was too vulnerable.”
Even so, the film still has one emotionally charged scene shot in the forest where he asks his father some tough and searching questions. Here, though, the filming is done with the camera placed behind. “I give him space…it is never too close.” Pitsaev and his father don’t have a reconciliation but they do manage to speak frankly.
This was never intended as verité-style direct cinema. The camera is never hidden. In one startling scene, Pitsaev is shown by his cousin David Margoshvili, a former Olympic judo competitor, how to shoot a pistol. “It was a very, very strange feeling…the most scary thing for me was that it was so easy. It’s not heavy. It’s a very banal gesture in the end,” he says of pulling the trigger. “That was what made me scared, that it was so easy. I was thinking in my head that it is complicated, it is stressful [to shoot].”
In Pankissi, the local residents have limited experience of war at first hand. However, as a boy growing up across the Chechen border, Pitsaev himself was caught in the thick of it. “I was on the other side of the mountains in Chechnya when the war was [raging] with Russia and I know the consequence.”
The director was eight years old when the First Chechen War began. “I remember everything. When you’re a kid and you see helicopters, guns and stuff like this, at first you don’t know what it is. It’s exciting actually because it’s the kind of thing you see in films. When I was growing up, it was just after the Soviet Union collapsed and we had all these films coming from the US, old action films and things like that. Then I saw it in real life and it was quite different. I realised it is not just a game or a film but it’s a real thing. It stays with you, actually, with your body. As a kid, you don’t realise what is happening. Your mind doesn’t understand why people kill each other…but your body reacts. And even when you grow up and you understand things with your brain, your body reacts in a different way. It has this memory…something very physical. Only people who’ve experienced it can understand it.”
The documentary was made through French production company Triptyche Films alongside Need Productions (Belgium), Arte Cinéma and RTBF. Pitsaev met producer Alexandra Mélot (a former documentary editor) when he was working on a graduation film that was selected at Visions du Reél in Nyon. Imago is a first feature for both of them.
Now, Pitsaev is turning his eye toward fiction. His next feature Maspalomas will be a drama shot on the Grand Canary Islands. It’s about escorts from eastern Europe and will be made through French outfit Dublin Films with Nabis Filmgroup (Austria) and Potenza Producciones (Spain).
Pitsaev is almost certainly the one and only Chechen filmmaker in Cannes. “It’s the kind of sad but I am the first film director in Chechnya because cinema doesn’t exist in Chechnya. Old films, old documentaries and even reports are made from outside. It [Imago] is the first time a voice is coming from inside the community…we need to tell our stories ourselves.”
The director also points out that the stereotype of Chechens as thugs, terrorists and gangsters is coming from Russia. “A lot of people forget that Putin came to power by destroying Chechnya.”
Whatever its echoes of war, Imago is a surprisingly lyrical documentary that even has traces of Chekhov. The director insists that he embarked on it without any preconceptions about how it would turn out. “If you come with an open heart, then people will be open to you,” the director reflects. “I loved doing this film. It was a real pleasure. And I loved all the characters…”
As for Chekhov, the playwright famously said: “if in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the following one it should be fired. Otherwise don’t put it there.” Pitsaev was thinking about this when filming the scene with the gun and jokes that he hasn’t followed the advice.Beijing-based Rediance is handling international sales on Imago. “My producer was thinking always out of the box and was very open-minded,” Pitsaev says of how they came on board. New Story will handle the French theatrical release.
