The New York Times
Northwest Film Forum
The children behind “You Are All Captains,” a film by Oliver Laxe, which opens at Anthology Film Archives in Manhattan on Wednesday. The movie is part documentary, part fiction,springing from a workshop Mr. Laxe conducted at a shelter for disadvantaged children in Tangier, Morocco. The film won the international critics’ prize at the 2010 Cannes Film Festival.
By DENNIS LIM
FOR the last five years the Spanish filmmaker Oliver Laxe has lived mainly in the northern Moroccan city of Tangier, where he developed a film workshop at a shelter for disadvantaged children. At first glance, Mr. Laxe’s debut feature, “You All Are Captains,” looks to be a straightforward reflection of this experience: he appears as himself, lecturing on photographic optics and showing his young charges, all preadolescent and adolescent boys, how to operate a 16-millimeter camera.
Northwest Film Forum
“I am the biggest child in the film,” Mr. Laxe said. “I had to accept that the film was not about the children but about me.” (The children complained about his self-absorption.)
But the film, which won the international critics’ prize at theCannes Film Festival in 2010 and opens at Anthology Film Archives in Manhattan on Wednesday, soon steps into a hall of mirrors. Scenes are replayed, actors break character and at around the halfway point Mr. Laxe is ejected from the movie, after the children complain about his self-absorption and the confounding collaborative project he has foisted on them. (“This isn’t a film.” “A film needs a story.”)
His replacement, a local musician named Shakib, leads the children on an outing to the countryside. Their film project seems to have been abandoned, or perhaps, it has been absorbed into the film we are watching. With the on-screen Oliver banished but Mr. Laxe still behind the camera, “You All Are Captains” becomes a pastoral of sorts — lingering on the landscapes, olive trees and animals that the boys had earlier said they wanted to film — “but with a little bit of fiction,” as one of them puts it.
A shape-shifting movie that becomes increasingly hard to categorize and contain, “You All Are Captains” has been described as a documentary-fiction hybrid. But it is perhaps more instructive to call it a metafiction, concerned with the way stories can be activated and reframed, or a documentary of its own making, revealing both the conflict and the labor of the creative process.
Mr. Laxe said that he came to a crucial realization early on: “I am the biggest child in the film,” he said by e-mail. “I had to accept that the film was not about the children but about me.”
Born to Spanish parents in Paris, Mr. Laxe, 29, studied filmmaking at the Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona. He first traveled to Tangier in 2006 on what he called a “purely random” impulse, drawn in part by the mythic portrayals of earlier expatriates like Paul Bowles and William S. Burroughs.
Mr. Laxe is the first to admit that there was an element of self-interest in his decision to work with children: their curiosity inspired him, and he valued the freshness of their perspectives.
“I wanted to rediscover a part of my personality,” he said. “I wanted to film in a much freer way, as children do, shooting just what you think is interesting and stimulating, with the constant feeling that the world is strange.”
The goal of seeing the world anew also underlies Mr. Laxe’s short film, “Paris #1” (2007), made in collaboration with friends in Galicia, in northwest Spain, who were entrusted to “film what they like, without preconceived ideas.” Likewise, “You All Are Captains,” shot in a limpid black and white that resists the usual touristic depictions of colorful Morocco, emphasizes the transformative act of looking from the first scene, in which the children debate the color of a chameleon and gaze up at a passing plane. One boy suggests they close their eyes to “see it better.”
Self-consciously framed as the misadventures of a foreign interloper, “You All Are Captains” takes a deceptively light hand to quandaries that have long plagued filmmakers who approach their subjects from across cultural and economic divides. Mr. Laxe doesn’t solve these problems so much as delight in complicating them. The imbalance of power between the filmmaker and the filmed, the troubling subtext of many a documentary, is front and center here, and as the struggle between the teacher and his students plays out in unpredictable and not always visible ways, this tricky dynamic is highlighted, critiqued and reversed. (Even before their midfilm mutiny, the children are seen training their cameras on a group of European tourists, who grumble, “They should ask for our permission to film us.”)
Mr. Laxe’s boldest strategy is to insert himself into his movie, and more than that, to implicate himself by playing the nominal villain: “the typical European neocolonialist artist,” as he put it. He described his dual role of protagonist and director as “a negotiation between my cynicism and my romanticism” — in other words, between the sometimes callow figure on screen and the more thoughtful and generous one making the movie.
“What struck me about Oliver’s work is how successfully it occupies this no-man’s-land between fact and fiction,” said David Wilson, the co-director of theTrue/False Film Festival in Columbia, Mo., where “You All Are Captains” had its United States premiere in March. “He forces the viewer to stop caring about whether something is factually true or not and instead asks us to follow him into this space which is uniquely his.”
Down to its title, the movie could be seen as a gesture of empowerment or of ultimate empathy: an attempt to see the world through the eyes of its subjects. But it is of course Mr. Laxe the director who remains the movie’s guiding hand, its true captain.
“I chose the title for its musicality, but for me it’s a film about the cruelty of creation, which is undemocratic,” he said. “We all are captains or have the right and opportunity to be, but it will be some more than others.”
Both in his work and his remarks, Mr. Laxe seems less interested in resolving contradictions than in embracing them. He described his next project, “Las Mimosas,” which he said would deal with Moroccan caravans, the myth of Faust and a Sufi wise man, as an “idealistic film about the absurdity of idealism.”
Mr. Laxe’s insistence on taking play seriously recalls “Homo Ludens” (“playing man”), the seminal 1938 work by the Dutch historian Johan Huizinga, which argued for the central role of creative play in society and culture. Mr. Laxe said he thought of “You All Are Captains” as a game, played with his collaborators and the audience, in a spirit not of trickery but of openness and discovery. He invoked the iconoclastic Italian filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini, who said that the liberated viewer rejoices in “the freedom of the artist.”
“What surprises me most about filmmaking is to constantly rediscover that all the director does is to put things in motion, to provoke,” Mr. Laxe said. “Art becomes a matter of attitudes and gestures. Everything depends on the energy that triggers things.”
