[Omer Fast: "Continuity"]
Those moments are magical in film
when we have kind of a pure linear motion
that approaches something and reveals it.
But I'm interested in the stuff that gets in the way.
With more and more and more questions,
you create, in a sense, a productive kind of confusion.
And I think that's what I'm after.
I had a commission for dOCUMENTA
and they were also going to show this on TV.
I started to think about this, kind of, TV movie
and this notion of the domestic interior that TV is all about--
or at least for me--and that kind of middle class obsessions
of showing the family
and showing the living room
and showing the kind of dynamic within a particular family.
And I wanted to do it in the context of a homecoming--
that is, ostensibly or topically, Germany’s involvement in Afghanistan.
Except for, there isn't that kind of classical development.
You don't reach a particular climax and a denouement.
You have a repetition of these scenes and these places.
It is increasingly formalized.
And having TV as the medium for showing the story
has dictated a lot choices I made.
You have two parents who are middle class
who are doing materially well.
But something in their relationship is off.
There is a trauma,
but it's not the trauma that you think it is.
It's the trauma of emptiness.
It's a, sort of, suburban desert.
It's this kind of middle-aged angst that these people have
and they try to fill it with something--
and that thing is young flesh.
There's this empty hole in their relationship
that they fill with a choreography.
They try to revisit this homecoming--
this return of the son--
which never took place.
They pay these young men,
who are male prostitutes,
some money in order to come and perform.
These men, who offer their flesh to these parents,
are in a sense also the young men whose flesh is used
in order to do the state's bidding.
You know, who do we ship off to do our bidding in Afghanistan?
The world keeps asserting itself in, kind of,
strange and theatrical ways around them--
in these little apparitions
and these sort of ghosts and images that they have.
They become, in a sense, viewers of the spectacle--
of horror.
Death should happen far away.
You know, conflict should not happen in these particular comfortable surroundings.
And so, they are caught between those two roles--
of being a soldier, being a son,
and being an object of desire.
But for me, the more interesting possibility was
maybe there was never a son.
Maybe there were sons and they're just gone
and there is this vacuum.
In the end, they drive down this country road.
We've seen that country road three times already.
And all of a sudden there is a camel walking towards them.
And they follow this animal to a quarry.
Inside is sons that we’ve seen up until that point.
They're comrades.
They're all dressed in fatigues and uniforms.
They've been ambushed and they've been killed.
Through having these multiple references,
it becomes something I was able to talk about several things at the same time
and is none of them at any one time.
So it's about sort of figuring out what to put along the way
to pull you away from this notion that there is a linear story
with a goal at the end.