On the border between France and Belgium, the population of foxes increased exponentially. In Brussels, rose-ringed parakeets colonized the parks of the city. In Colombia, hippopotamuses imported from Africa thrive in their new environment. Despite adapting well to their new conditions, these animals, which have been displaced from their original contexts by humans, are establishing ambivalent relations with the ecosystems they inhabit.

David Neary: Wild Beasts has the air and energy of an experimental documentary. But right from the outset it is also an educational piece, opening with a definition of the word “feral” that may be new to viewers (as it was to me)—specifically a tame animal reintroduced to the wild, or a wild animal descended from that once-tame beast. What connected you first to the subject of ferality, and how did you discover the path to balancing the informative aspects of your film with your artistic and whimsical vision?

Éléonore Saintagnan: We discovered the word feral while making the film. We were looking for the commonality of the three stories that composed it and we discovered the concept of ferality. Our method is quite intuitive. The necessity of writing grant applications to finalise the film made us learn some new vocabulary like this term. And as we were very proud to have learned a new word, we started the film with this definition. It was a kind of trap to catch the attention of documentary enthusiasts… and also to announce the documentary aspect of the film. But then we thought that the beginning was too serious and we added the first sequence, where Grégoire is capturing fake cardboard hippos, for viewers to be wary of the images they are about to watch.

Grégoire Motte: Also, the concept of ferality, the tame that becomes wild again, could perhaps be adapted to film itself...?

DN: Your film is a triptych, dealing with your subject both at home and far abroad. Tell us how you came across these tales of foxes, parakeets, and Colombian hippopotamuses, and how you were able to tell them without straying outside your native Belgium.

ES: Our native country is France, David! But we’ve been living in Belgium for almost ten years now. The film was shot in France and in Belgium. We shot Pablo Escobar’s hippos story in Lac d’Annecy, in France, because it was cheaper and less dangerous than going to Colombia. We found a shore of the lake that ressembled our imaginary of Colombia and as we had won an artists’ residency in the art school of Annecy, we created floating sculptures of hippos.

GM: We finally noticed that it was easier to deal with the story of the hippos, especially because it is the one more distant from us… without going to study the ground realities. Trying to carry out a Colombian scene from an Alpine lake—cardboard and fake blood—has allowed us to tell this true story in a more sensitive (and maybe more exact) way, rather than to show an authentic reality that paradoxically might appear blander. It wasn’t really a choice at the beginning, because if I remember well at one point we had planned to do the trip. Then we could add that the lack of money was a virtuous factor in this case. The presence of the green parakeets in Brussels, which are part of our everyday environment, turned out to be more complicated to approach.

DN: You compress a tremendous number of documentary styles into less than 40 minutes— from nature doc and on-the-street interviews, to archival footage, reenactments, flashes of docufiction. And despite the old adage, in this case more is more! What drives the playfulness of your storytelling, and what styles did you find most enjoyable to toy with?

GM: The three stories we tell have a common root in reality while being suitable to extrapolation, fantasy. Also, in time as in space—as we said previously—the things we tell occur in different situations, from the palpable present to a disappeared and doubtful past, passing by ruins… All this conveys different vocabularies. There are a lot of levels of narration, like in an oral storytelling (in a bar for an example): in this way of transmission there is no limitation in terms of registers.

ES: For the foxes story, we still don’t agree: Gregoire is sure that it is a true story and I think it is a urban legend. The diversity of forms comes probably also from the fact that we are two filmmakers who don’t always agree… but stay open to dialogue.

DN: What were your experiences with the animals themselves, from catching parakeets in the streets of Brussels to casting a fox to play the role of a drug smuggler’s diversion? How difficult is it to get the shots you need when your stars are no longer tame?

ES: Filming animal actors is not so hard. Animals are much more able and intelligent than we think. The dog and the fox of the movie are tamed animals, they have a trainer who knows a lot of tricks to make them to do what he wants. It is a fascinating job. The fox wasn’t completely tamed, he was very scared to be in the car and he pissed and pooped on the back seats. Just as in the story we wanted to tell…

For me, the hardest thing was to catch animals. I felt very uncomfortable when we went in the streets of Brussels to catch parakeets. Because they were really wild, I was afraid they could have an heart attack, or be aggressive. I felt guilty also, probably, to separate them from their family. But after a few ours at home, they didn’t look afraid anymore.

GM: Partially, the film deals with humans who feel an infantile fascination for wild animals... and they are going to have a story—an adventure, a contact, a mutual influence… an affair—with them. These sentiments are easy to understand or to remember for all of us; this desire of contact with animals—even a fake one, like swimming with cardboard hippos—was, for us, one of the motivations to make this film.

DN: The archival footage shown in your film is so fascinating, from old film of Brussels’s Meli theme park, to a winding tour of Pablo Escobar’s crumbling compound. Where did you find these images, and how did you decide upon what to use, and where to use it?

ES: The image of the Meli Park was given to us by a person who was filmed by her parents when she was a child. It was on a VHS tape. All the rest of the archives come from YouTube. We found the video of the sacked villa on a website of people who tour the world by motorbike and share their videos.

GM: The only modifications of those documents were, in some cases, to ask Gaëtan Gampos to redesign the sound or to compose music inspired by the original sound (Meli fantasy).

DN: The creative brilliance of Wild Beasts really comes to a boil in the third segment, “The Hippos of Colombia”. The sequence features two actors portraying Pablo Escobar—in turn portraying the Mexican revolutionary, Pancho Villa—and a third actor narrating the inner life of Escobar’s late bull hippo, Pepe. Can you tell us how these sequences came into being, and how you instructed the actors? Particularly how did you cast the extraordinary Gabriel Kinsa, whose voicework as Pepe encapsulates the passion and creativity of the film as a whole.

GM: Escobar created his African animals’ reserve in 1983, which is also the year of his portrait disguised as Pancho Villa. In this sequence, we slide from a kind of justification of his crimes by the convocation (in the way of a child’s “pretending to be”) of a huge figure of the social banditry, to this infantile attraction for exotic animals. We wanted to give an instantaneous and incomplete portrait of Escobar.

And regarding Pepe the hippo, who narrates his own story following the death of Escobar, it is almost like a filiation or even more a reincarnation. When Pablo died, Pepe appeared in daily life for the Colombian public (newspapers relate the development of the hippos herd, their births, etc.), and when Pepe speaks at the end of the movie, he is chased by servicemen because the government decided he had become dangerous. And he will have the same death as Escobar, killed by the same people. Then he’ll have the same photo in the newspaper, causing a comparable division in public opinion.

ES: The role of Escobar is played by Emilio Lopez-Menchero, who isn’t an actor but an artist. A part of his work consists of a series of self-portraits disguised as famous persons like Rasputin, Che Guevara, James Ensor, Marc Dutroux or Cindy Sherman. He’s able to let his hair grow or to put on ten kilos to play Carlos, the famous bandit, for example. When we proposed him to add Escobar to his series, he had just lost weight to become André Cadere, and we had to wait a little until he regained weight.

Pepe is played by Gabriel Kinsa, a congolese storyteller. We first worked with him for the performative part of the project that we created for the Centre Pompidou in Paris. It was a kind of conference about our film, and we wanted to work with a professional storyteller. We held a casting and Gabriel Kinsa was by far the best person we met. He re-appropriates the stories with an incredible liberty. He proposed to tell the story of Escobar from the point of view of Pepe, and we kept his idea for the film. The voice-over is in Kikongo, the dialect from his congolese village where there are a lot of hippos. He suggested that it was maybe the mother tongue of the hippos of Escobar. 

GM: Emilio is Spanish but the voice that expresses the thoughts of Escobar during the photo-shooting is by Diego Sandoval, who speaks with a Colombian accent.

DN: In an era when the role of humankind’s influence on nature is constantly under question—when nature documentaries repeatedly scold their human viewers for destroying the natural world—Wild Beasts is refreshingly unjudgemental, interested in the effects humans have had on these creatures, but in an academic, observational sense. Was this a conscious decision in making the film? Three years on, do you still see it the same way?

ES: We didn’t want to make a moralistic nor a dogmatic film. Actually we are more interested in cinematographic questions like “how to tell a story that we don’t even know if it is true?” (foxes) or “how to tell a story of which we have no images?” (Meli Park) or “how to tell a story of which we have too many images?” (Escobar).

That is one of the reasons why we didn’t find money to make the movie. An incredible number of cinema commissions have rejected our applications because they found that the ecologic message was not clear enough.

We, however, had ecologic preoccupations or ethical principles while making the film. For instance, we wanted to shoot a scene where a guy releases parakeets into nature. But we didn’t want to buy tamed parakeets because they would have died immediately. That’s why we decided to catch wild parakeets in the streets of Brussels, exactly where we would release them afterwards. We took our camera just in case.

Eventually, we didn’t keep the releasing sequence but we kept the sequence where we catch birds in the streets, almost right the first time.

GM: The three stories happened approximately at the same period, in a time when this idea of ecological responsibility was not so widespread. But it is true that the denunciation of irresponsible action is an important engine in today’s creation… That is certainly why Guy Florizoone—who was the owner of the Meli Park from 1958 to 1987… the man who  released sixty colourful parakeets in 1974 to «brighten up the sky of Bruxelles»—, after inviting us to a warm-hearted lunch, refused to appear in the movie. He didn’t understand that we were more interested in the poetic aspect of his gesture (in the time he did it) than in the scandal it can produce today.

The consequences apparently appear in watermark, as the subject always arrives in the conversations about the film... It is up to the spectator to develop this... and we can spare the film from the heaviness of the usual outstretched finger…

Credits

A film by Éléonore Saintagnan and Grégoire Motte.

Produced by red shoes, Paris, in co-production with Michigan Films, Brussels.

With the support of Département de la Seine-Saint-Denis, in partnership with CNC, and Fédération Wallonie-Bruxelles.

With the participation of FIDLab (2012-Prix CVS), Hors Pistes / Centre Pompidou, ESAAA Annecy-résidence Summerlake, and Idem+Arts association (in the frame of its residency program).