Fire Fire Desire
| Movie | |
|---|---|
| Original title | Fire Fire Desire |
 | |
| Country of production | Switzerland |
| original language | English |
| Publishing year | 2017 |
| length | 125 minutes |
| Rod | |
| Director | Steff Gruber |
| script | Steff Gruber |
| production | Steff Gruber ( Kino.net ) Chris Jarvis |
| music | Sorn Solinka Jane Saijai Dengue Fever Kaotip Tidadin |
| camera | Steff Gruber |
| cut | Diana Bärmann |
| occupation | |
| |
Fire Fire Desire is a film by Steff Gruber .
content
The Swiss filmmaker Steff Gruber finds a video guide for sex tourists on the Internet. In it he thinks he recognizes his former Thai lover Malee. Her fate does not leave him in peace and so, after 25 years, he travels back to Southeast Asia to look for Malee. This is the beginning of an eventful story that takes the filmmaker across Southeast Asia.
On his trip, Gruber meets various so-called expats , western emigrants who are looking for their fortune in Southeast Asia. One of these expats recognizes Malee from a photograph and also remembers her friend, the supposed creator of the sex travel video, who goes by the name of Roman Guy. Now the search for Malee shifts to the search for Roman Guy.
The search is anything but linear. In addition to the foreigners, the filmmaker also meets Asian women who place their hopes in the expats. He finds out that Roman Guy was well known in the expat scene at the time and also notorious for alleged contacts with the CIA . However, it seems to have been lost for over a decade. Rumor has it that he fled Cambodia after a girl died while filming.
Old video material is passed to the filmmaker through a friend. The found footage was taken with a hidden camera in Cambodia's brothel districts in the 1990s. They show countless prostitutes and their external circumstances during the time when the UN peacekeeping forces of UNTAC were stationed in the country.
Together with the historical video material, the film interweaves the different fates of Asian women and aging emigrants into a multi-layered picture of Southeast Asia, which is in the process of cultural change.
The odyssey , which is based on the structure of Joseph Conrad's novel Heart of Darkness , ends in the triangle of Laos , Cambodia and Vietnam . Roman Guy resides in a jungle brothel where the Ho Chi Minh Trail once ended. The film ends with a sentence from Conrad: “Do me a favor: tell them everything I've done, everything you've seen. Because if I hate one thing, it's the stink of lies. "
background
Against the background of a multi-faceted love story, Gruber's personal confrontation in this film is about getting older, the longing for the past youth and the view of the remaining time. The aging expats, who all have to pay their price for life in what is supposed to be paradise, serve as a mirror. His loving look at the women at the side of the stranded adventurers paints a revealing picture of today's Southeast Asia.
Gruber does not divide his actors into «good» and «bad». Rather, he sees himself as a documentarist who is committed to the truth and tries to approach his protagonists with an open mind. In the film, one of his protagonists quotes Bob Dylan : "The truth has many different levels." These levels become the dramaturgical principle in Gruber's film. Black and white is only the video material he cited. He does not take ratings from the audience. It has to do this work itself. This is how subtle portraits are created. You have to listen carefully. Sometimes the gist of the statement lies between the lines or the unsaid.
Gruber uses the camera and microphone as a personal microscope to better understand the world. For Fire Fire Desire , Gruber traveled regularly to Cambodia and Thailand over a period of five years . These long-term observations gave him insights into the characters and souls of those he portrayed.
His cinematic documented trip through Southeast Asia is also a travel report in the sense of Lawrence Durrell or Bruce Chatwin ; the pictures of the outer world are supposed to illustrate the inner world.
The metaphor used by Gruber from Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness , the journey up the river into the jungle, where the renegade Colonel Kurtz lives as a self-proclaimed ruler, is established in our cultural heritage and has been quoted several times in film history and used as a dramaturgical structure. Impressive examples of this are Werner Herzog's Aguirre, the Wrath of God and Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now . Gruber's “Kurtz”, Roman Guy, also lives by a river in the inaccessible jungle. Roman Guy runs a brothel here, where once the Ho Chi Minh Trail, through which weapons, ammunition and Viet Cong fighters were smuggled into the American-controlled south of Vietnam during the Vietnam War .
With the film Gruber invites the viewer to travel with him across Southeast Asia and to look into the various mirrors that he has set up for him inconspicuously at the side of the road.
Expat Joe says in the film: «People disappear. And then you have to find them. Why do you have to find them? Because you want to know what they know. He knows something I don't know, so I have to find him. "
Web links
- Fire Fire Desire in the Internet Movie Database (English)
- Official Site of Fire Fire Desire
- Fire Fire Desire on the website of the production company Kino.net