INTERVIEW: Protest cry of Indignant Ones reaches Berlin film festival

By Elena Box Feb 11, 2012, 2:06 GMT

Berlin - The spirit of rebellion that brought tens of thousands of people to Spanish streets in May 2011, sparking a nationwide protest movement against unemployment and unbridled capitalism, is reflected in French director Tony Gatlif's film Indignados (The Indignant Ones).

The movie, which is on the programme of the Panorama Specials at the Berlin Film Festival, is the first major one dealing with a movement that was echoed around the world.

Gatlif's film, half-way between fiction and a documentary, was initially inspired by 94-year-old French former resistance fighter Stephane Hessel, the director said in an interview with dpa in Berlin.

Gatlif said he was 'so impressed' by Hessel's best-selling pamphlet, Time For Outrage, that 'I wanted to make a movie on what those words had sparked.'

Gatlif and Hessel were making plans for a film when the movement known as 15-M or The Indignant Ones took off in Spain.

'Suddenly, Spanish youth showed up at the Puerta del Sol (square in Madrid) and I thought, this is what I had been waiting for,' says Gatlif, whose film Exils won the best director award at the Cannes Film Festival in 2004.

Indignados was such an 'urgent' movie that there was no time to seek financing nor to audition actors, according to Gatlif.

Yet the director did not just want the spectator to be a 'voyeur' on the streets. The movie therefore adopts the view point of Betty, an undocumented African immigrant who arrives in Greece in search of paradise, but who is confronted with a crude reality.

During her odyssey through Greece, France and Spain, the young immigrant sees 'another war, that of people sleeping on the streets, who do not have physical wounds, but wounds in their souls.'

Gatlif dismisses critics saying movements like The Indignant Ones, or Occupy in Britain and the United States, do not have a clear programme. 'The biggest gesture to create a revolution is that the people rise one day and say, 'we are here.' That in itself is something enormous.'

If politicians do not heed the protests and maintain policies creating more poverty, there will be '10 or 15 times more indignant ones,' the director predicted.