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| The Deportation Of A Model Citizen |
One of the most powerful entries in this year’s awards race, Jacob Thomas Pilgaard’s short film The Deportation Of A Model Citizen invites viewers to follow the journey of a teenage girl as she is taken from her home in Denmark by two police officers who have been ordered to escort her to the airport so that she can be deported to Syria. In what seems to be a hopeless situation, the girl begs for the chance to say goodbye to the people and places she loves, and the men struggle with their consciences. This isn’t the first time that Jacob has experienced festival success, but it’s the first time one of his films has qualified to enter the Oscar race. This is a brand new world, he says. It’s very strange, but nice.
The film is based on a true story, so I ask him about that.
“I actually I worked on a different project last year about Syrian refugees,” he explains, “but there was something about it that just wouldn't work. I had written the script and I had a crew ready, we had the money for it, but something was just, like, off. So I decided to shut down the project, and then I read about a girl who lives quite close to where I live, and she has spent four or five months in this uncertainty, because suddenly she had her permission to stay in Denmark revoked. She spent five months trying to get to stay anyway, and she finally did, just before she was going to graduate from college.
“Her story just stuck with me. There have been other cases, but there was something about her story that just resonated in me deeply because yes, she was about to graduate, she decided she would like to become a nurse, she was fluent in Danish and everything was just fine. And then suddenly, to have to go back to a country she had not been in for like seven, eight years, that just seem so unjust on so many levels. Because she was no no burden to anyone. She was doing okay. She had a job. She had an education. I just couldn't make sense of it. And then I reached out to her. She was willing to read the script, make some notes. She met with the actress. They spent the day together. So she was very generous. She was at the première of the film and I was so nervous if she would like the film, but she really did like it.”
Her support must have been useful. That’s a very powerful central performance.
“I actually did a nationwide search for an actress her age with a Middle Eastern background. And I got like 20 or 22 mails from people, and none of them felt right. I’m really intuitive when I cast. Then one of my friends showed me a picture of Thalita [Beltrão Sørensen]. They had done some some musical with her. I just knew the moment I talked to her that she was the one, but she has no form of education as an actress. She was only 18 at the time. She hadn't done any film. She’d done some theatre in school. I think she did a music video. But I knew that she could do it. It’s difficult to explain because I got a gut feeling. But she was so nice to work with and she was so prepared each day, she knew everything by heart and she understood the human dynamic on a deep level despite. She was quite grown up in some ways. It was a joy to work with her.
“We had four days to do everything and it was winter and snow, and we did we had one day of rehearsal with Thalita and some some of the other actors and that was it. And then I think we talked on the phone a couple of times, but she rather quickly got what it was about so she didn't really need that much direction. She was quite confident in what she was doing. She really got a lot from the other actors as well, so it was quite easy.”
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| Aida says goodbye |
I ask about the actors playing the police officers, who are also very good. Where did he find them?
“Funny story. I worked on a feature film last year, where I met Mads Hjulmand, who plays Marcel. He was playing truly evil Nazi, and that was really, really scary. But he’s just such a nice guy. I thought he would be really good as a good cop, a cop with a heart, and he agreed to do it. Joey [Moe] – Lasse – is not really an actor. He's a really well known musician in Denmark, and he had done only one short film before, and I just had the same feeling. I was like, wow, the camera just loves him! And he has no training as an actor whatsoever. He's just so natural. We met at a film festival and we just became friends.
“Him and Mads didn't know each other, but they really hit it off right away. So it was really nice working with both of them. They are such pleasant people. Also Joey really likes to entertain. But I really think he did well. He had never tried anything like this before. He really showed up and was willing to work for it. So it was great working with all of them.”
I tell him that I like the fact that the film presents the police offices as human beings rather than just monstering them. It makes the story much more interesting and gives us a greater range of perspectives on it.
“I did a lot of research into the kind of police officers who do these actual transports,” he says. “I found a guy who had done it for some years, and he gave me some practical information, but we talked a lot about how difficult it was, really, to go pick up these people and drive them to the airport. And then he could just go home to his family, his kids, while the person on the plane would be back on the way to Syria. He thought that was strange. He couldn't really get to shut it off and not think about it. Eventually he had to stop doing it because he couldn't. It was just too hard.”
Thw thing that I kept thinking when I was watching it, I tell him, is that I think most people, if they saw a teenager being beaten or sexually assaulted, would desperately want to help her – and yet we do nothing when people like her are shipped off to places where there’s strong evidence that that will happen to them. It’s a strange disconnect.
“Yeah, that's the big question,” he agrees. “The tragic part is that we we tend to send the young girls and women home because they're not protected by UN conventions. The young men are protected. because if they have been drafted as soldiers and fled, they can incur the death penalty as soon as they go home, because they're the soldiers from the army. So all the men are protected, so we cannot deport them. The women, because they cannot be soldiers, they're not protected. So basically most of the people we deport are women aged 18 to 20 or something, so it's really strange.
“If they don't want to leave voluntarily, sometimes they get stuck in these camps in Denmark, and they’re stuck there, they cannot leave. It's really strange. There’s a lot of discussion about refugees in Denmark. We tend to be really hardline. Together with Hungary, for some reason.”
I ask about his decision to shoot most of the film outdoors, where we just get glimpses of the spaces which are familiar to Aida. It seems to make us outsiders, observing places where she belongs.
“It was important to me to show some of the places she cared about,” he says, “but also I needed to do more things outside. My three previous film were mostly inside. I wanted to take advantage of the season, the winter.”
It’s also coming up for Christmas in the film, so there’s that sense of anticipation, which makes us more keenly aware that she’s being cut off from the future as well as the present.
“Yeah, that was quite intense. The favourite season of the year for many people. It’s three or four days before Christmas Eve, she’s playing a game with her foster mum when she has to go, and the cops will just go back and celebrate Christmas with the family. It's Christmas, it's a happy season, and suddenly that’s just taken away from her. And she was just about to start to become a nurse, and that was taken away also.
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| Following orders |
“I guess all of my films are about some sort of grief and atonement, and about family. They're all built upon different people meeting each other and having some sort of impact in each other's life. So basically I think I've made the same film seven times.” He laughs. “It just keeps coming back to me. And family also is a huge part of my other films. I think they're all about family somehow. I really am quite sentimental. And they acknowledge that the world is rather strange and dark place, sometimes – especially right now in Ukraine.
“But I choose to believe that if we treat each other kindly, with dignity, then we can find some sort of hope in all this despair. Because in my experience, people can really treat each other so beautifully and so well. We're able to show so much compassion for other people, and love. I think it's vital for me to keep a hold of that, especially right now.”
He’s currently working on getting his first feature together, he tells me. It’s about a small family in which a daughter is dying of cancer. “It's quite low key, but it just gives me room to concentrate on the actors. That's the most fun part. I really enjoy working with the actors. I always talk with them about creating this space just with me and the actors, and I really tend to forget everything about me when we’re really in flow. And it's just such a magic experience just talking with the actors, watching them work. Creating these characters and the small moments for the audience. I mean, everything is about the audience to me. We do this film because we like to tell something to them.”
He also has another project, he tells me, set just after the end of the Second World War and focusing on a young Danish police officer who faces a moral dilemma. He doesn’t know if he will be able to get the funding for it. I suggest that an Oscar nomination might help, and he laughs. “It's really, really lucky that I can do this,” he says. “After the first screening of the première, I had a woman come up to me and she was like, she had known about these refugees being deported but she has always just thought of them as number or a file or some statistics and it hadn't really resonated with her. She was kind of shocked. She said ‘That was a real person, wasn’t it? Who was going to be raped or tortured or killed.’ She completely changed her view of these deportations, though she had known for many years that we are doing them. That was a strange moment for me. She was a changed person after that screening. It makes it all worthwhile, because it's been a tough doing this, because no one gets paid and I have to ask everyone to do it for free.
“It would be so cool to get shortlisted for the Oscars. Literally, that would mean so much to me for so many reasons. I have watched the Oscars since I was like a couple of years old, together with my dad, and it’s just some of my best childhood memories. Staying up all night because of the time difference, just watching it with my dad. So that would be quite important.” He smiles.
