After Ernesto Martinez, a perpetrator of violence on women, wrote a confessional autobiography, he contacted 300 production companies to have his story turned into a documentary. Only one person replied. That was Greek DOP and soon-to-be debutant director Ecthyma (Efi) Zymvragaki of Grismedio Productions in Barcelona.
“I realized that all my life I was surrounded by people that I felt had done or been violent somehow, and they had never been able to say anything about it,” Efi told the DocsBarcelona professional audience during the May 7 case study of Light Falls Vertical (see Business Doc Europe review), for which she was joined by Andrea Prenghyová, head of the dok.incubator rough cut workshop.
When Efi contacted Prenghyová, the dok.incubator boss could see little chance for the project’s future success. “Efi didn’t have money… Efi didn’t have a team [and] there was a producer who was not really a producer,” she remembers. What’s more, the main protagonist Ernesto had recently committed suicide.
But Efi was persistent. “She was very stubborn, she kept bombarding us,” agreed Prenghyová. “So before the Zoom I watched what she had sent us…but it was super chaotic, and there were fiction scenes with this guy. Then there were documentary scenes… it was not clear.”
Nevertheless, Efi was “super clever” on the Zoom call, and there was enough to persuade Prenghyová to put the project before the workshop’s experts and mentors. But another problem very quickly arose, that of ethics.
“You cannot give a voice to perpetrator for one and a half hours. You cannot defend this. Just imagine that one of the abused women will be sitting in the cinema, how she would feel that someone is giving a voice to this man,” remembered Prenghyová.
So the tenacious Efi sent through 42 minutes of footage that alternated scenes of Ernesto with “landscapes [that] my voice, let’s say, could inhabit.” Prenghyová had licence to invite one artistic project to the programme so, after much deliberation, Efi eventually got the nod.
At which point the “magic,” began to happen. Or, as Prenghyová puts it, the “turning point.”
At the beginning of the dok.incubator process, a “safe space” is offered to each participant for discussion, analysis and introspection. “This helps superfast to identify the main problematic points of the films,” says Prenghyová . “It starts with what I call distraction. The first three days of the incubators, somehow the structure of the film is somehow destroyed to pieces and then rebuilt.”
For Efi, this process of existential analysis would inevitably make her ponder why, of all those producers who were contacted by Ernesto, she was the only one to respond.
Prenghyová knew this was the crux of the issue. “She [Efi] said, ‘because I have my personal experience with violence very deep in my family, and I wanted to see the other side…I want to research why the people are doing these horrible things,’” Prenghyová remembers Efi’s response. “So then we got the idea that maybe we can shift our characters. Maybe the main character is Efi and not Ernesto – and then it’s a different game.”
“It’s so often that you see [that the director] is a very important player in the film but (s)he always has the camera and you cannot see him/her,” Prenghyová added. “But you [as director] need to build yourself as a character in the film. And it takes, sometimes, all these sessions for some people to accept that they should be there. And I feel she [Efi] was so brave.”
Efi concurs. “The fact is that, yeah, I felt really strongly the responsibility of holding the death [of Ernesto] in my hands and somehow having to make sense out of it. [It was] kind of a sublimation that could liberate him and me. And I also realized that I had all these materials that they [the dok.incubator tutors] were talking about. A lot of my story, it was already there. I realized that everything I was trying to hide, they were asking for it.”
“The relationship you have with the film, and the motivations you have, must be generously shared,” Efi added. “It feels that it’s fair to expose all these elements. And in this case it was an act of resilience finally, because for me it permitted finding a voice that I didn’t realize how much would help afterwards for everything that I’m doing. And it was something that [happened] slowly and gradually, because in the first session I was so much ashamed and crying…”
Placing herself into the film entailed Efi distancing herself from the person she was editing on screen, which was essential if she was going to come through the process. “You realize that this distance that you have to take from yourself is because you’re putting yourself in the service of something. Your vision…has to be meaningful and honest because there is a need to share something there. And if you’re not changing yourself with the process, then how could the film [itself] change anyone.”
“And it’s magical because it provokes things and it’s liberating,” she added.
Efi successfully applied for IDFA 2022 (the film was eventually selected for Envision Competition]. “Once she entered the film, everything clicked and she was so fast with the editing,” said Prenghyová, who underlined how the director addressed and overcame the ethical dilemma at the heart of her film, at the same time crediting her programme’s role in widening the international scope of the project.
“Maybe if Efi wouldn’t [come to] dok.incubator, she will do an ethically super controversial film, which wouldn’t travel at all,” said the programme boss. “It would be probably staying here in Barcelona. Even though it would be a good film, an interesting film, it would not travel. This is the reality of the world.”
