Interview: Asger Leth

According to the United Nations the Haitian slum of Cité Soleil is the most dangerous area on the earth. In fact, the Cité is so dangerous it’s rare to see a person over age of 40. “We die young,” states Bily, a Haitian gang leader and a central figure in a new documentary by Asger Leth titled Ghosts of Cité Soleil. The other figure is his brother, 2pac, a rival gang-leader, aspiring musician and peace advocate.  The biggest bone of contention in their rivalry is the fact that Bily sometimes takes jobs for Haiti’s (former) president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide. These “jobs” involve frightening the local community into violent submission by donning masks and assuming the title of “ghosts.”

2pac’s dreams of becoming a musician puts his ideology in a different camp then his brother’s, as he seeks to bring an end to the governmental corruption and the seemingly ubiquitous violence with his music. The film progresses with both brothers dealing with the inevitable demise of the president’s regime. The film also depicts their relationship with a French aid worker, Lele, a mutual attraction for both.
 
The potent aspect of Leth’s film is that it isn’t cut to be shocking or judgmental towards any particular ideology. The film was shot in 2004-2005 and today both Bily and 2pac are presumed dead. Thus, the tone remains elegiac, the audience slowly realizing there’s real no answer to Haiti’s deteriorating situation. This documentary boasts a true-to-life air as it’s devoid of making judgments on the events it depicts.

Although this is Leth’s first widely distributed film, he is no stranger to the filmmaking world. His father is Jørgen Leth, one of Denmark’s most respected filmmakers and the subject of Lars Von Trier’s recent film The Five Obstructions. Leth Jr. originally ventured to Haiti in hopes of making a narrative feature. When he arrived, however, he found that the subject matter worked better in the documentary form.

I sat down with Leth at THINKFilm’s cozy NYC office.

Benjamin Crossley-Marra: Do you think if your father hadn’t been a filmmaker you would have choose another career path?
Asger Leth: Well when you’re born into film you really can’t escape it.  I grew up in a house that doubled as a production company. We lived on the second floor and the offices were on the first, we kept the equipment in the basement. That’s the kind of house I grew up in, you know? Just film, film, film. In fact, everybody in my immediate family are filmmakers in their own right. 

BCM:  That must be quite the environment to grow up in.
AL: Yeah it’s kind of like the mafia (laughs) it’s pretty hardcore. My father (Jorgen Leth) was Lars Von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg’s professor and he’s a pretty big name in the Danish filmmaking world. So I really grew up in that type of environment. When I was a kid I acted, then I completed some shorts, in fact I think I’ve worked just about every position there is to work on a film set. I’ve been in administration, line producing, film editing, cinematography, everything you can imagine including being an assistant director and second unit. Then I taught film school for a while and after that I decided I wanted to work on my own projects.

BCM:  What made you pursue the documentary form?
AL: I didn’t set out to make a documentary specifically. My father did a lot of documentaries and he kind of spoon-fed me the idea that documentaries aren’t really what people think they are. They can be much more then just talking heads. They don’t have to be people with multiple degrees attacking some socio-anthropological enterprise. I hate those kinds of documentaries because I don’t think they use the documentary form as far as it has the potential to go. A documentary can really be anything. I mean if a narrative feature is like a novel, then a documentary can be a note on a napkin or a poem and it can go all the way to being exactly like a narrative. I guess what I’m saying is the channel is so broad it’s a shame more people don’t explore it. It’s funny because the fact that my father was doing so many documentaries, I really didn’t want my first feature to be a documentary. I feel I’m more of a storyteller. So I was actually writing a story that I wanted to shoot in Haiti, but I became engulfed in the culture and the stories that were actually going on. Soon I realized that reality was even crazier then what I was writing. All the characters already existed; it was just a matter of gaining access. Once I found out I could obtain that level of access, I knew we just had to shoot it.

BCM:  Did you ever feel that you were in mortal danger while shooting?
AL:  Oh yeah there were two days when we were trapped in the hotel and couldn’t move anywhere or we’d get shot. There was the slum of Cité Soleil, which was tricky going in and out of because you’re going from a controlled environment to chaos. The gangs who wanted us to do the film controlled the slums and the government controlled the outside. In the slums we were under the gangs strict protection so we were fine. Outside, especially during the rebellion at Port-au-Prince is when things got hairy because the rebels didn’t know who we were and would shoot at us in the street. I had to cross the front line a bunch of times to get it on film and that was really, really dangerous.

BCM:  Can you talk about some of your next projects?
AL:  I’m developing a feature film with Imagine and Universal, a narrative feature. I can’t really elaborate too much more on that at the moment.  You know some stories need to be told as documentaries because that form is the strongest but others really need to be told as features.  I’m a storyteller, I’m not looking to just direct documentaries, and I didn’t dive into the world of documentary filmmaking to do it exclusively. It’s just about the story.  If another story hits me over the head in five years I might make another one.

TH!NKFilm releases Ghosts of Cité Soleil on friday June 27th.