Frédéric Choffat tackles the issues of his time in his work, whether as a photographer, in the Bosnian refugee camps in Croatia in 1993, or as a short film, A Nedjad (Pardino de oro, Locarno 1998) or feature film, La Vraie Vie est Ailleurs (2006), Mangrove (2012), both of which won several awards, or on stage with Julie Gilbert, Outrages Ordinaires (2011 – 2012), which blends theater and cinema, bluntly recounting the tragic fate of migrants thrown onto all the roads of exile.
In 2015, he directed a documentary for television, Terminus Brigue, which received the Prix Louise Weiss from the Association of European Journalists at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Paris in February 2016. In March 2016 he directed Non-Assistance, winner of the (In)Iustice for All – New-York 2017 award. Also in 2017, he covered the US presidential elections from Los Angeles in the mini doc series It’s So LA, broadcast online by the daily Le Temps, Geneva, totaling over half a million views.
His latest feature-length fiction film, My Little One, was released in 2019 in Switzerland, then sold in Eastern Europe, South Korea and the USA. In 2020, he directed the short film Confiné dehors as part of the “Lockdown” Collection, by Swiss filmmakers.
After three years of filming, he released a new feature-length documentary, Tout Commence, which follows these activists intimately, from the euphoria of the first demonstrations to the spleen of the health crisis. It asks us, young and old, about our relationship with this world that is collapsing, and how we can envisage a future together, across all generations. To be seen in cinemas in French-speaking Switzerland.
Through your work and all the documentaries and films you’ve made, we sense that you’re totally rooted in your time and in your observation of society and its shortcomings. Was it with this in mind that you decided to tackle the subject of climate change, and from a certain angle in particular, that of the younger generation’s fight against climate change?
Yes, I’m not a film theorist, I’m not going to make a film in reference to another director, I’m not a cinephile and I even have a rather meagre film culture, but on the other hand a very broad one, in many fields. I’m as interested in theater as I am in political movements and literary discussions, so it’s more subjects that catch my eye than me catching subjects. I don’t ask myself what subject I’m going to deal with, it’s just that I’m obliged to shoot and then we’ll see how I do with it.
It’s really reality that tells me what to do.
And how did you come up with the idea of involving your children in your film project?
The project started without them, but then it was a bit of a synergy because I’d done a little series on the American presidential elections,
It’s so LA
. Typically, it was my son who absolutely wanted to go and see the Bernie Sanders debate, so I thought I’d take the camera and on the way I asked my two children what questions they’d ask if we saw him. My daughter took out her notebook, my son made a few suggestions, and they bounced around a few questions. My daughter was too small, so I continued with my son, and that’s how we made our first episode, filming what was going on. It was really a collaboration and that’s how it started.
For “Tout Commence”, it’s a field that has been nurtured for a very long time, for as long as I can remember, the question of ecology, of respect for the ecosystem, for other living species. But at the end of 2018 I discovered collapsology, the books by
Pablo Servigne
,
Jared Diamond
about this possible collapse, not unique but plural, of systems, whether internal, economic or ecosystemic, with the impression that each domain could collapse overnight. I also have the impression that in every field there are as many geeks from Silicon Valley as environmentalists from the Ardèche who say that if we carry on like this in a month, a year or six years, we could have a real catastrophe on our hands. Collapsology is really this movement to bring all these fields together and say that if we run out of petrol, we’ll run out of deliveries, so we’ll run out of cooling and power for nuclear power plants, and that everything is totally linked.
Lucia and Solal Choffat
It’s interesting because even though ecology is not a recent field at all, and we’ve known for over 60 years that it’s not going in the right direction, this awareness of the interconnectedness of all issues is fairly recent.
Yes, and I think we’ve discovered this with containment, but we live in such a complex, globalized and interconnected world: I don’t know exactly, but to make an Airbus I think there are 5,000 different companies involved, so if one of them can’t do the seat upholstery, for example, the plane is stuck, so we can’t produce any more. So maybe it’s not so serious in this case, but all our systems are completely caught up in a multitude of interconnections that mean we can’t just get up and go and eat a piece of bread and then do our job if we don’t have the Internet network, if we don’t have this or that. So the realization for me was that I really wanted to make a film out of it, to tell the story. Then I wondered if this was supposed to be a film for the prosecution, a reportage, an interview with white thinkers in their forties or fifties who thought and theorized about this?
And then suddenly it was my children in the street, it was the big demonstration, the first climate strike in January 2019. I arrive at the Place des Nations and it’s my son who’s giving the speech, although I wasn’t even aware of it, and so I filmed it. You can see this at the very beginning of the film, and also in the trailer. I tell myself that it’s not up to me to explain the world to them, it’s up to our generation who didn’t do anything, my parents’ generation, and I’m speaking globally because we’ve all done little things, who have to listen to them. It’s no longer up to us to lecture them about turning off their TVs, smartphones or showers, but up to us to listen to them about their urgency, their needs and what tomorrow’s world will be made of.
And right from the start, you wanted to focus on this generation of hope?
Hope or despair! It wasn’t a choice, I said to myself: either we fall back into the ways of old philosophers and thinkers of my age or more, stuffed with privilege and who take the liberty of looking down on the world, or we talk about this generation who are shouting, who for the first time are taking up so much space in the streets, politicizing themselves when many of them had never been to any demonstrations. It made sense to me that this was the story that needed to be told. Then I asked myself if I was still making a film about the collapse, but there were lots of reports and podcasts, and then I said to myself, we’ve got to go further, we’ve got to go into the evolution of this movement. And am I talking about all the children in the world or just my children? So I decided to tell the story through the eyes of my children and three other activists.
There are five people I follow over three years and then in the middle comes Covid, I see the interruption, I see that everything stops, I find myself with my family and so I start filming my parents, telling myself that they are early anti-nuclear activists and I ask them how they see the world today. That’s my mother in the trailer too. Then I ask myself what it’s all about, and inevitably it becomes a more intimate film as time goes by, and I say to myself that maybe the more intimate it is, the more universal it will be, because I can only talk about what I know, and they’ll talk about what they experience on a day-to-day basis, and so I avoid any generalization by saying “young people today want this”.
All I can say is that I have children, and their girlfriends and boyfriends may not want children in this world.
How do you think we can explain, given the rationality of what we know about climate change?
this inaction and denial of the seriousness of the issues that ultimately outweigh all other issues, since we’re talking about the survival of our children, of a species.
And hundreds of other species… I don’t have an explanation of my own or my author’s, what I see is that we’re not impacted by it all. A lot of people still think that an extra degree or two will be nice because we freeze a bit in winter, and that if it’s -1° instead of -3° it’ll be fine. Scientific warnings and IPCC reports are rational in what they say, but they are not rational in how we interpret them.a child born in 2020 and who will live until around 2100 will have three times as many climatic consequences in the number of tornadoes, etc., and this figure can increase tenfold depending on the evolution of these curves. So to answer your question, I think it’s the fact that we’re not impacted, it’s the fact that today’s leaders are totally at the beck and call of the lobbies and corporations, and it’s not leftist to say that, it’s just that if there were a lobby of permaculture gardeners or a lobby of organic seed sellers, politics would change. But that’s not the case because it’s not an economic power, so the people in power, the people who are accumulating billions – and this was multiplied tenfold during the Covid crisis – have no interest in seeing things change.
So it’s a systemic problem?
Yes, it’s a system problem: we’re in a system based on unlimited growth in a world of finite resources. If you question that, you’re questioning something far more frightening and global: how can you go on dreaming of making more money, dreaming of growing, growing, being more important, if all of a sudden you’re told you might have to do the opposite? It’s the question of patriarchy, it’s the question of capitalism, we think that the stronger we are, the more virile we are, the more beautiful we are, the more we’re going to win. How can you let different people who aren’t into domination win? We can’t win if we don’t dominate, so maybe we need to change and say to ourselves that the goal may not be to win, but to live, to share and to move forward.
We should change our software somehow?
Yes! There’s a 23-year-old boy in the film called Robin who says that they’re trying to make us believe that we have the elements within our system to change the system, but we can’t take tools from within the very system we need to change.
In the same way that you can’t slow down a car while you’re driving it, or take the wheels off while you’re on a freeway at 130km per hour. So we’re really forced to change our paradigm completely, and that’s scary and very difficult to do, because we’re driving in a car at 150 kilometers an hour, stuck everywhere, pissing water, air, gas, polluting, but we can’t slow down and then just pull over and ask ourselves what we should do: do we continue on foot, is that the right direction, do we leave across the field, do we continue to the right? There are so many cars around that we’re squeezing our butts.
Alexandra Slotte
Optimistically, we could say that within the next fifteen years or so, the new generation will occupy decision-making positions, and there’s a good chance that, given their commitment today, they’ll be bolder and more courageous in their decision-making, even if it’ll be too late.
It will be too late, and I’m not even sure it will happen. Our generation had long been aware of other issues, such as immigration and racism. But that doesn’t mean we’ve been any more open or tolerant just because we fought against apartheid in South Africa when we were 15.
There’s a system whereby at some point you have privileges and then you forget that they’re privileges and then you sit on them and enjoy them and don’t see those who don’t have them.
There were maybe 10,000 people in the streets of Geneva at the beginning of 2019, maybe 10% of whom were really motivated, and the others were perhaps very happy to follow because there was a very festive and fun side to it. Of these 10%, perhaps only 1% are really active and driving the boat. So these are purely invented figures, but will this 1% of them be green federal councillors in 20 years’ time? And will they even be in power in twenty years if they’re 20 today? Today’s decision-makers tend to be in their 60s, with a few exceptions, and they’re people with long enough teeth to keep everyone else out of the way. If we have a generation of humanists, attentive, polite, pan-cultural, pan-sexual etc., it may not be a generation that will have the long teeth to tell everyone I’m passing and I want power, if the aim is precisely to change this time.
So if that’s not a solution, is civil disobedience? If we look at the great liberation movements, the great social movements, they have all more or less involved civil disobedience and a certain amount of violence. Do you think it’s a must?
I think it’s compulsory, yes, but the question is complex. If we take the queer milieu today, for example, which I’m passionate about, it blames the white gays of the 1990-2000s for now being in power and locking everything into a kind of clique, once again patriarchal in the end, without having at all integrated issues of colonization, racism, plurality, and even lesbian purchasing power. So we’re back to reproducing a power that’s already in place.
Being gay today is much more accepted than it was twenty years ago, but being a foreign-born transsexual is just as terrible to live through as what gay people have experienced themselves, but don’t give them the support they need.
It’s wonderful that there’s been this evolution for the gay community, but it stopped there. I’m making a quick analysis of it when it’s perhaps much more complex, but they managed to change things and didn’t ask themselves what they could change for others and how they could set up a permanent movement to change mentalities and not just say “we’re going to save our skins”.
I told myself, for example, that I was going to talk about lake pollution in my film, and I met ecotoxicologists who told me that the lake was 10 times less polluted than it was 20 years ago, and that fishermen were even saying that it was too clean because there were no fish or algae left. It’s because it’s a closed territory with Evian, its casino and Switzerland, which will do everything they can to save a lake, but we won’t do it for the ocean, the Nile or the Ganges, because that doesn’t concern us.
If you could imagine the community of tomorrow, the community of the new world?
I’m thinking of the Internet. With the Internet, we’ve managed to move away from a linear approach, with this idea of the web, this idea that when information isn’t there, it comes from somewhere else. And it’s a very fine example of a horizontality that suddenly becomes a trap, and the web of thought becomes a kind of net that’s going to wrap you up because the algorithms are only going to lead you into a thought. For example, and that’s another debate, we turn off the media tap, but should we turn off the Russian media for Europe? Is this what’s going to give us a better understanding of the conflict, or is it censorship in the other sense, where we’re no longer even allowed to have access to what the Russians think or what we’re transmitting to them so that we can make our analysis.
So I’d like to see this hyper-dependence we have today, thanks to technology and globalization, become a synergy, i.e. for everyone to be able to share what they know, and for us to arrive at a much more horizontal relationship of sharing skills, sharing resources and knowledge, and sharing the acquired.
With the trap like the Internet that it turns into something else again. It’s also a questioning of private property, of inheritance, of the system once again: as long as the great families of Florence have been the same since the Renaissance, the dynasties have been the same for 500 years and no one has managed to get in. Then there are the nouveau riche, but they joined this monarchy by marriage. Young people starting out today, if they’re like my white, well-educated children, they’ll have a chance, whereas a traumatized first-generation Syrian child will also have a chance, but that doesn’t mean he’ll become a lawyer, banker or doctor… Even though Switzerland’s power of integration is quite astonishing, we’re still stuck in this system.
What I’d like to see is a move away from this “acquisitive” approach to a “mutualized” approach, but what form this will take I don’t know, I’m open to it. I’m excited to imagine that anything is possible and I’m not overly optimistic in saying that anything is going to be possible, but we’ve got to do it, we’ve got no choice. So it all begins!
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