A world premiere in IDFA International Competition, Journey To The Sun marks the first occasion when revered Portuguese filmmaker Susana de Sousa Dias co-directs a film with Ansgar Schaefer (her partner and usually her producer). The filmmakers discuss their collaboration with Business Doc Europe.
Like most of De Sousa Dias’ previous work, this is an archive-based documentary. It tells the extraordinary story of how, at the end of the Second World War, thousands of Austrian kids were packed up and dispatched to sunny Portugal so they could recuperate from the trauma they had just endured.
Families were waiting for them on the pier, ready to choose them as if they were “toy soldiers.” The youngsters were then whisked away to different parts of the country.
The foster families came from the most well-off sections of society. The twist there, though, was that this meant they were often connected with the Portuguese dictatorship.
“The story was directly related to my PHD project,” Schaefer (a historian as well as a filmmaker) recalls. He had been researching what had happened to refugees from Nazi Germany who came to Portugal when he learned about the Austrian kids. That was several years ago. He and De Sousa Dias started working on the project in 2016.
“It is not an episode which is in collective memory in general terms but the older people remember [it],” De Sousa Dias (also due to give a Filmmaker Talk at IDFA on 21 Nov) notes. “Lots of people actually know some Austrian child.”
Many of the displaced kids ended up going to Portuguese schools. The selection process may have been uncomfortable and even traumatic but most of the children had a very positive time.
The two directors were able to track down huge amounts of private archive material including home movie footage shot on 8mm and 9.5mm.
The surviving Austrians who had been part of this experiment all those years ago were keen to become involved with the documentary. “They were very, very happy and very open to share their experiences,” De Sousa Dias says.
“It’s a very strange and interesting story,” Schaefer adds. “This happened between when they were seven and twelve years old, which is now seventy years ago.”
Two of the women involved had already started a project supported by the charity Caritas to gather together material about their experiences. There are now groups in Austria which meet regularly to share their stories.
In the 1990s, the women organised a collective trip back to Portugal and they tried to get back in touch with the families who had fostered them.
The filmmakers have been in touch with this group for five years. Through the organisation, they were able to interview more than 50 of the Austrians who spent part of their childhood in Portugal.
Both De Sousa Dias and Schaefer combine academic careers with their filmmaking. “I am teaching in the fine art faculty and so I am completely immersed in the art field,” De Sousa Dias says of her work at the University of Lisbon. “For me, it is very natural to do both things. There is no separation. For me, it is not two different worlds.”
Schaefer, meanwhile, describes documentary making as very similar to writing history. The difference is that you are using “film, montage and sound. Basically, it’s the same. You’re just using different platforms.”
“It’s how cinema can convey and present a different dimension of history,” De Sousa Dias elaborates. “This is very important in my practice. It’s not so important to go to the past in order to find the truth but to see how the past comes to the present.”
Few filmmakers have as much experience in using archive as De Sousa Dias and Schaefer. What is the secret of making successful archive-based docs?
“Actually, in this film, it was easy because in 90% of the film, we only use private archive. The archives belong to the persons we used – and they were our partners in a sense. We were making the film with them,” De Sousa Dias says. Other footage came from Portuguese and Austrian archives.
Pulling the archival material together for Journey To The Sun may have been relatively straightforward – but it’s not usually like that. The filmmakers speak of the secrecy of many of the institutions holding such material. In the internet era, it has become a little more straightforward to work out what is being held where but, even so, this is painstaking work. The material can also be prohibitively expensive to license.
“They’re putting up barriers…and one more thing. The point about archive is that it needs research. You have to see a lot of stuff to discover one single point. You have to have previous knowledge of the subject,” Schaefer points out. Nor is there ever any guarantee that descriptions in databases about archival holdings are completely accurate. There is also a subjective element to the research. “I can find something completely different in one image than the archivist finds in the image.”
“It is very, very complex…and always a kind of luck if you find something,” the filmmakers say. Few, though, can match their record of digging out treasure from the dirt.
World sales of Journey To The Sun are handled by Portugal Film – Portuguese Film Agency
