Interview with Stéphanie Roland
1. Podesta Island is a continuation of your explorations of imaginary geographies and unknown lands (physical, dematerialised or mental), especially ‘phantom islands’, which have already been the subject of some of your films such as Phantom Islands (2019) and Deception Island (2017). Where does this fascination come from and how did the Podesta Island project come about?
In my artistic work, I examine the complex systems of western societies that, through the way they function, create ambiguous grey areas where there’s confusion between reality and fiction. My work looks at the possibilities of portraying these phantoms of western civilisation – the immaterial, invisible and negative entities directly generated by our system, which they’re an integral and influential part of.
From this perspective, the existence of phantom islands attracted my attention and I began to research the topic. I was surprised by the wealth of narratives and legends that sprang up around these concepts. Some islands were invented after a mirage, some explorers created islands and named them after the minister at the time to justify their expedition and raise more funds from the government! Some mapping companies inserted geographical anomalies into their maps to prove, in the event of plagiarism by another company, that even their own inventions had been copied. Paradoxically, these capricious notions have had real, geopolitical impacts on the world.
Among these islands, I was particularly interested in Podesta because it’s one of the only contemporary phantom islands. I was amazed that doubt about the existence of an island could linger in our hyper-connected day and age. That was the starting point for my research.
2. The film combines numerous accounts of different kinds such as interviews, (fake?) news, fantasies and legends, leaving doubt about their origin and status. Why this approach? How did you identify and select these accounts and how did you develop the screenplay?
For me, this way of creating a narrative reflects our ‘post-truth’ era where truths, half-truths, lies, fiction and entertainment are easily interchangeable.
I have the feeling that this day and age requires new approaches to identify the underlying narratives that structure our perception of reality in a world where there’s no longer a widely accepted framework for it. The ‘polyphonic’ account takes into consideration the subjective and fictive nature of the categories we use to perceive and define; for me, it sums up a form of the complexity of western functioning.
3. In this exploration, real shots are interwoven with satellite images from the geographical information system Google Earth. What led you to integrate these images and how did you develop them?
In a world that I thought was extensively mapped, I found it very beautiful that we still have doubts about the existence of an island, and I wanted to probe the flaws of this extensive knowledge. Jacques Rivette says that any film is only a documentary of its own making. It was in this spirit that I contacted Google Earth Studio to take some satellite views of our shoot in real time, and I was even able to manage their recording parameters, viewpoints and focus like a director of photography would do. These shots have a distance limit beyond which you can’t zoom in anymore, which makes the image more ambiguous, and it’s this interstice that I chose so that certain elements could remain elusive.
4. One thing leads to another, and we land on what seems to be Podesta Island to discover that it’s not deserted but inhabited by three castaways. The voyage doubles up as a mental roaming through unknown areas of the psyche, between memory, imagination and oblivion. Did you plan this from the start? And how did you write the dialogue and direct the actors?
While researching Podesta, I came across a brief news item about three people who disappeared during a storm off the coast of Chile, and their families have been doing a lot of research because they believe them to be on Podesta. This echoed the controversy about the existence of the island. What’s more, the event really moved me because we can also implicitly see the political context in Chile, families’ tireless searching for the disappeared under Pinochet’s dictatorship, even if this isn’t addressed explicitly in the film.
It was the first time I directed actors to get them to have a dialogue as part of an account. To start with, I’d written a text for them, but I soon realised that I was looking for something different. During rehearsals, I was more interested in them as people and their real-life experience than my texts, and I began to ask them in detail about their memories and key moments in their lives. We settled into a very natural dialogue similar to what I have with my psychoanalyst, associating ideas, letting the subconscious speak. My own analysis process has contributed to a lot of openings and unexpected connections in my artistic work in general. I wanted, in a documentary spirit, for the actors not to be the means to convey a fiction but to convey their own real experience, re-fictionalised and integrated to echo the fiction of the island. One of the characters hits their head “to forget”, and this isn’t innocent in an age when exhaustive data are collected about our lives, and the right to forget has become utopic. But the island is the ideal land to reinvent oneself in an imaginary way – a lot of video games work with the paradigm of this tabula rasa, of a new world that’s still possible.
6. The film is shot between the Belgian and Irish coasts. How did you choose the locations and what was it like filming in such settings?
The shoot on Podesta Island was done with a small, very adventurous documentary film crew, with a lot of freedom and improvisation on location. The journey was also a kind of roaming and research into the sense of insularity. All sorts of adventures and circumstances shaped the film: incredibly hostile weather, a tornado, storms while we were at sea and so on. The expedition had a hint of the extreme film shoots of Werner Herzog, one of my heroes! I chose not always to mask the traces of the weather or the filming accidents so as to retain this brutality we were faced with.
7. In the film, someone says “absence is terrifying and sometimes we need to fill it by telling stories.” In fact, the movie seems not to want to solve the mystery surrounding the island, but instead to celebrate the infinite possibilities of creation offered by the void and the unknown. Do you know yet what your next project will address and in what form it will be presented?
I’m currently finishing editing my new project, a documentary essay about Point Nemo, a very isolated marine area in the South Pacific used as a vast spacecraft cemetery to deposit obsolete but controllable spacecraft and satellites. Very little is known or has been written about this place. There’s practically no archives or images of this point. I’m interested in a non-human point of view, the point of view of a spacecraft from its birth to its death using various fictive and real archives. The film is constructed to the rhythm of a funeral rite, the funeral of a machine loaded with fantasies of exploring but also of a utopic belief in technology and progress.
Interview by Marco Cipollini.
