Physical and mental exhaustion—burn-out—is a highly contemporary issue that many researchers are dealing with. Action Item seems to have grown out of a personal experience. Can you tell us more about how the project came about? What does the notion of a “therapeutic film” inspire in you?
This project has been with me for many years. I’ve had long-term personal experience with depression and anxiety, but several years ago I experienced something I could describe as burnout. This experience shook me to the core. Coming out of it, I needed to put some context to what had happened. Besides therapy, I started to read self-published zines, essays, and capitalism-critique theory questioning the privatization of mental health struggles. I also joined a few support groups in Berlin working from this perspective. I had mostly been conditioned to think that what I experienced was a personal issue and that I should deal with it as such. So all of this challenged me a lot.
One evening I met my friend Eliana, and she told me about a burnout she had recently gone through. It was both exciting and terrifying to share so much in common over this. We were both interested in figuring out what aspects of our experiences might have a systemic source, and Eliana agreed to reflect on her experience in the film. I wanted to depart from this personal, invisible experience, and while searching for perspective, the individual protagonist shifts into a group of people reflecting collectively.
I am interested in films that follow a certain process, and I find it therapeutic to reflect on something together with the film, without necessarily coming to a conclusion. With Action Item, I wanted to create a moment of pause that allows for the processing of these piled-up experiences and for seeing what might come out of it.
You use a highly original repertoire of images, combining views of spaces without quality, textures and close-up details that sometimes make it difficult to identify the objects to which they refer… Can you tell us more about how you built it? Where do these images come from? How did you work on them? Your color grading choices for instance…
This approach came from a specific aspect. At one point, we paused the project because I was grieving the loss of my grandparents. I felt the need to address the grief through the medium of film, out of which my first feature, Lapilli, emerged. After I came back to Action Item, I had to find a way to reconnect with the project. I was looking at the footage and revisiting the places in Berlin that carried certain memories for me—places where I once had a panic attack and later passed by again, or elements in the city that offered focus when I felt overwhelmed.
As the film also talks about the aspect of carrying memories of past experiences, I felt a notion of claiming agency while stepping into the footage we had filmed before. I started to literally refilm some of the footage from my screen, reframing it, cropping in, making new compositions. I realized this was the way I was coming back to the project after the pause. Combining images of the city with more personalized elements, I was inspired by the language of archive footage and created my own interpretation of a collective, shared, and fluid archive.
At the same time, I remembered the group discussions we had about the emotion of anger. Berlin now also carries another layer of memories that are recreated every week: the unhinged police violence towards people in solidarity with Palestine. Living in Germany, I felt more and more anger, and I understood it’s not a destructive emotion but something very focused and justified. With the concept of refilming—choosing a particular element or aspect of an already produced image—I worked with found footage of protests, riots or manifestations, depicting people fighting collectively, supporting each other, finding methods of subversion, and essentially reframing the power dynamics, even if on a utopian level.
A first-person voice over identified as feminine punctuates the film and opens onto more theoretical considerations… What were the stakes of this narration? What were your sources of reflection in writing it?
In the editing room, I drafted the voice over as a reference using my own voice, and we had long discussions about what it means when it’s the director’s voice compared to, for instance, the voice of one of the protagonists. We decided to create this narrator character, whose tonality is different but also intertwined with the voices of people in the film.
Even though the narrator sometimes speaks from a more theoretical realm, I wanted the voice to be a sort of ally—someone who steps in at various points, shares a personal story or a loose theoretical input, offers reassurance, and also provides a certain guidance. This voice over is a compilation of three text sources that were central to the film. These texts were also used in the collective discussions.
The construction of the voice overs and several sequences involve a group of people engaged in a form of testimony. Who are these people? Where did you meet them and how did you work with them? What methods did you use?
I was inspired by attending various support or consciousness-raising groups in Berlin and wanted to bring together a group of people who didn’t necessarily know each other before. Eliana would, at one point in the film, enter the collective. We first filmed with a wider group of people, out of which a smaller group, including Jasmine, Sam, Alžběta, and Eliana, formed. They all had personal experience with either depression, burnout, anxiety, or invisible chronic illness, and also prior experience with therapy, various forms of facilitation, or self-care practices. We compiled excerpts from essays and books, which we used in the group discussions as inspiration for collective sharing.
Together with Jasmine, we worked on a method of “silent facilitation“. Jasmine was part of the group but also had an important role in guiding the discussion without imposing a sense of hierarchy. Individually, we also discussed what each person wanted to share in the group. Together, we set some rules –mainly that they shouldn’t feel pressured to speak, that long silences in the group are totally okay, that we would stop filming when requested, and that we had check-in moments with a small exercise or grounding facilitated by Alžběta and Sam. The crew was also receptive to the topics the group discussed, and we often shared experiences together during breaks.
Action Item offers slowness and time with sequence-based progression. How did you go about editing it with Deniz Şimşek?
Deniz stepped in when the concept of the film was still actively taking shape. Based on our discussions over the footage, I would produce new material and bring it back to the editing room. So, it was a very fluid way of working.
We were inspired by the repetitive aspect of anxiety or depression, each new experience carrying the memory of the previous one and, at the same time, anticipating the next. In editing, we worked with this idea of circulation and looping. We set a few core points of where certain sequences appear in the film. Then we discussed specific images and their meaning, and by reusing them in different parts of the film, we integrated this past memory and, as the film progresses, shaped the aspect of something growing in a clearer way from the images. We worked with layers of very real footage and then the abstract or unreadable ones, something that is more under the surface. We let these layers run alongside each other, interact, or at points leak into each other, as at certain moments, the seemingly invisible one takes over.
Can you talk about the sound composition? What principles guided it linked to the visual editing? At what point in the making of the film did it come into play?
As I constructed a draft of the first short sequence, I immediately had in mind the musical compositions of Lénok. I found one specific sound in one of her tracks that obsessed me. We decided to work with this sound element, which changes its function throughout the film—evolving from a more pressuring, antagonistic sound element to an accompanying one. Lénok created a musical layer that supports the idea of looping and progression, accompanying the story as some sort of active entity. On the sound design layer, we worked together with Clara Becking, with the idea of creating a more personalized soundscape of the city.
Interview by Claire Lasolle
