When he was growing up in Mozambique, Pierre-François Sauter used to go on holiday to Cape Verde. Years later, the Swiss filmmaker has returned to the islands to make his stark new feature documentary, Far West (world-premiering at Visions Du Réel).
The film, which has almost no dialogue, focuses on two characters, Angela and Jair, as they try to eke out an existence in their fishing village in a rocky, volcanic corner of Cape Verde.
“I was looking for a very hidden place. I arrived in this village which was very isolated. There was no road to it,” Sauter says of his discovery of the location where he filmed.
During that first visit, he spent a week there, speaking to the fishermen. Fluent in Portuguese, he was able to strike a rapport with them. He also met Angela and Jair.
“They were on the beach. It was early morning. I woke up very early. I was with my small camera and I asked them if I could take some pictures.”
Several months later, the director returned. Now he has known Angela and Jair for 10 years. They trust him and allowed him into their lives. He has spent a lot of time with them, first with a small camera and then, before shooting began, with a bigger camera and a tripod.
“I wanted to make fixed pictures without movement,” he says of the shooting style. He was taking inspiration from two older directors he has always admired: Kaneto Shindo (Naked Island) and Robert Bresson (Mouchette).
For a few weeks, Sauter worked with a crew but eventually he decided to film on his own as he felt that Angela and Jair were more at ease without the other technicians.
“They don’t speak a lot, especially Angela,” Sauter explains the lack of words in the documentary. He adds that he was keen to make a “mute” film…I thought in this way I could make something more universal.”
Late on in the documentary, the focus of the storytelling shifts briefly. We see wealthy white tourists pouring on to the island to fish for blue marlin and chronicling their exploits with boastful social media posts.
“When I met Angela, I didn’t know there was this big game fishing in the village,” Sauter notes of the influx of outsiders (who come to Cape Verde for two or three months). He was keen to show the contrast between the tough lives of the locals and the very different existence of the tourists who come in from all over the world.
The relationship between the locals and the tourists is ambivalent. These tourists bring work and money and so their presence is welcomed. “All the people of the village have only one hope and that is that next year there [are] more clients of the big game fishing.”
At the same time, there is a glaring contrast in the lives they lead.
Sauter himself is an outsider but one who fits easily into the community. “I am white but I grew up in Africa and I was the only white in my village and at my school…My parents were involved in the revolution in Mozambique and so I had a strange life.” the director reflects. The villagers told him that they regarded him as being very different to the tourists. “You are like the people from Cape Verde,” they used to say to him.
In one scene, Angela is shown dancing to the ferocious beat of drums.
“One day we were filming at Angela’s house. We heard the drums outside. It was in the neighbours’ house and we went there,” recalls Sauter.
Some viewers of the documentary have suggested the scene was staged but the director insists this was not the case. Everything in the film happened naturally, without the filmmakers’ prompting (although he acknowledges he provided the drummers with some rum).
“It’s the peasants from the village and also the fishermen. They used to play drums for a big feast in June called St Joan’s,” Sauter notes of this riotous musical interlude. “All the people who’ve seen the film think that it [Angela’s dance] is sexual but it is a traditional way of dancing there.”
Far West was made through Le Laboratoire Central, and is produced by Nadejda Magnenat. “It’s a small company. We don’t make a lot of films,” he says of the production outfit with which he has worked for many years. Funding for the documentary came from Office Fédéral de la Culture, Cinéforom et la Loterie Romande and Fonds culturel Suissimage. Terrateme Filmes were the associate producers.
Ten days ago, Sauter and Magnenat went back to Cape Verde to make sure the subjects were happy with how they had been portrayed. Angela, they discovered, isn’t currently in the healthiest state emotionally. She has become prey to depression, something which afflicts many others on the islands as they try to cope with poverty and problems with alcohol. Sauter is struggling to help her. “It is very difficult. They don’t have cellphones, they don’t have electricity, they don’t have internet. To have some news [of what’s happening to them], I have to go there, and it is two days from Lausanne.”
The director is already beginning production on another film, Animal Dream. “This film tells the story of the life of a cow from her birth till her death in a slaughterhouse – and the slaughterhouse is in the farm where the animal grows up,” Sauter says of the new project. This again will be “a film without words.”
