The traditional way of depicting history on the big screen is to wait a while after something has happened before turning it into a film. But one of the most talked-about premieres at the Berlin film festival depicts a chapter of the history books very much still being written: the Occupy movement.
Indignados (The Outraged) is loosely based on Indignez-vous! (Time For Outrage), an essay by Stéphane Hessel, a 94-year-old concentration camp survivor and former diplomat and ambassador. The slim volume, which urges readers to take action against the unfairness of modern society, was translated into at least 40 languages and has become the set text of the civilian movements that have occupied public spaces around the globe.
The feature film tells the story of an African immigrant, Betty, who washes up on a Greek beach hoping for a better life in Europe. The camera follows Betty, a woman in her twenties with no passport or other papers, as she is bumped from one hostile country to the next. Filmed on location in Greece, France and Spain, almost everybody Betty encounters on her journey is real, whether immigrants sleeping in dusty railway carriages in the coastal Greek town of Patra or angry young Spaniards occupying the Puerta del Sol square in central Madrid.
Betty is played by a real refugee, Senegal-born Mamebetty Honoré Diallo, a social worker who was discovered on the streets of Paris by the Indignados director, Tony Gatlif, last year. Diallo said the film reflected her own experience, although she did have the correct papers to move to France in 2005 after her husband died. "The trajectory my character went through allowed me to show the indignation, the outrage I feel at the current state of affairs," she told reporters at the Berlinale.
Many of the scenes were not staged; instead Diallo was thrust into unfolding events, jostling with refugees in Greece to try to get a job and having her fingerprints taken when she was caught in Paris without the necessary documentation. These scenes are interspersed with more avant garde sequences, such as thousands of oranges rolling down a steep narrow street and into a waiting rowing boat – a nod to the Tunisian fruitseller whose self-immolation has been credited with sparking the Arab spring, as well as to the many refugees who have risked their lives trying to reach Europe from Africa.
So far Indignados has received a muted reaction from critics in Germany. The Taz said it veered into pretentiousness, while the Tagesspiegel said that, like the Occupiers, it identified a problem without offering a solution.