The origins of the short film Blue Light – Memories From A Paramedic, screening in Ji.hlava’s Short Joy Competition, can be traced back to a curious conversation in a school playground between a mum and a dad.
The mother was Dutch investigative journalist Carola Houtekamer who inquired of a father, Louis Diks, as to what he did for a living. But this was never going to be an idle throwaway chat, because for the past 23 years Louis has been a paramedic, and the questions Carola posed elicited such trauma-laden answers that the subsequent article she wrote for leading newspaper NRC not only hit the front page but itself provoked an outpouring of sympathetic responses from the Dutch public.
What’s more, Houtekamer’s partner, filmmaker Jaap van Heusden, was equally “floored” by Louis’s story and vowed to tell it in documentary form, turning to co-director Jefta Varwijk, who talks to Business Doc Europe.
In the film Louis tells a litany of tragic tales that he witnessed first-hand over the years, and the trauma of each recollection shows on his face. In all cases the accident victims, whether a small girl drowning in a canal, a young lad bent double, his back broken by a concrete block on a building site, or a farmer cut to ribbons by a harvesting machine, leave behind devastated family members. But the focus of Varwijk and van Heusden’s film is on Louis’s pain, and the collective toll of having to deal with this on a daily basis over a period of 23 years.
For most of the film Louis talks to Carola behind the camera. The eyes of the dead are generally glazed over by the time he gets to look into them, he says. Not so, the small girl who drowned in the canal. Her eyes were still sparkling, a memory that haunts him to this day, as do the screams of her parents at the canal side. Normally he would go to see a sad film to trigger an inevitable outpouring of grief. This time he could merely sit in his car at a bus stop, unable to move, until he was eventually taken home in a police car. And then to work the next day.
At other times in the film, Varwijk’s camera weaves and roams like a spirit close by ambulances whose cold blue lights glow incessantly, all the time within an ethereal soundscape that hints at a kind of mystical secularism.
The co-director tells how he was particularly receptive to Van Heusden’s offer to work on this project as it was the kind of “ultra-subjective experience” he had been looking to record. He thereafter provided a “poetic way of relating to something that you cannot film anyway. You cannot film the traumas or the stories that he [Louis] is sharing. You’re not going to re-enact them. That would be horrible for all parties involved.”
Varwijk further observes how the medical system in The Netherlands isn’t always set up to deal with the levels of trauma suffered by key workers and first responders, not least because many health service contracts have been farmed out to a private sector which doesn’t invest enough in pastoral care.
“Thrown to the wolves is too strong of a word, but it is kind of like some people are left to their own devices, and that device is coming home and not talking to your wife…because you’ve seen horrible things,” says Varwijk. “And maybe you do talk to your wife or to your partner, to your husband, and then they can get secondary trauma too.”
He argues that the film works as a companion piece to more palatable and upbeat primetime fare about paramedics that is on offer to many global audiences. These are series in which psychological trauma is merely hinted at and ‘hero stories’ and happy endings are core requirements. As compromised as this type of programming may sound, it has its place, Varwijk underlines, but so does the type of no-holds-barred analysis that Blue Light – Memories From A Paramedic presents. If you put any paramedic into a safe space, the director suggests, and ask them if they recognize Louis’ stories then they undoubtedly will. “They have a look in their eyes and you see it, you see they kind of glaze,” he says. The trauma doesn’t begin when the ambulance doors open ahead of a job, he further suggests, rather when they close and the paramedic is left to process, often on their own, what they have just experienced.
Blue Light – Memories From A Paramedic premiered at the Netherlands Film Festival and has been broadcast twice (both primetime) on Dutch public television, generating high audience figures, Varwijk informs BDE. It will receive its international premiere at Ji.hlava on October 27.
Next up, Varwijk would like to explore the work’s potential as an installation. “We’ve had it on TV, in a newspaper, and in a movie theater, so how would it work as a film installation where you walk into a space and get more of the physical experience with the flashing blue lights and the faces?” he muses. “And its [dramatic] soundscape. I think sound would maybe be the most important part of the film installation.”
