Where yearning meets reality

From now on, Larisa has to get by on her own. Her husband has disappeared and left her alone with their joint debts and their business, a call shop. One day, Amari, who has lost his memory, stumbles into this international hub where people call their home countries and send money. Amari tries to retrieve his memory by making phone calls to his sister in Nigeria.

Ange is another regular here. Her longing for Romeo and for Leon, and for her home in Togo lead her to this phone booth. She is lonely. Leon’s warm voice coming through the phone receiver helps her forget her loneliness for a while.

Reza, a young man from Afghanistan, has to contact his family back home on a regular basis. His parents want to marry him off and his wife-to-be is already excited. Seeking help, Reza calls his brother. In one hand he holds the receiver and in the other, the hand of his Viennese girlfriend Lisa.

The only place Mimi feels safe is in the call shop. Here, she can talk over the phone with her lover in Rome. If only he would answer the phone more often!

Dioma gets angry. Her boyfriend has returned to Senegal, because he’s had enough of Europe. Or has he had enough of her?

They enter the phone booths, close the glass door and sit down at the phone, eager to hear their loved ones’ voices.

They lie, dream, make confessions and love each other through the phone. The person at the other end of the phone becomes a space to project their feelings. What they try to conceal with words is betrayed by their voices.

A person amounts to far more than the situation they are in at a given moment, a certain legal definition, or a classification a system assigns them. I’m interested in the other side of people: their internal, real existence despite external classifications and social restraints.

Searching and collecting

Before I decide to develop and realise a film project, I gather elements from various areas – from the narrative, from filmic curiosity about a certain form and from social developments. I collect what seems important to me and then I find a terrain in which I’d like to move around in to tell the story.

When thinking about a new project, I keep collecting until I discover ways to connect all the material I have gathered on all levels, as if they existed purely to be brought together.

My work on my first feature Auswege (about three women affected by domestic abuse) and on my second film Little Alien (a documentary about unaccompanied minor refugees at the borders to the EU and in Austria) and the reactions they provoked, inspired me to consider cinema within a broader social context: Who is making films for whom? Who is even allowed to make films? What stories do these films tell? Which environments do they represent? And finally, who and what is seen and heard on screen?

Where, if not in the field of art, should there be a privilege-free space regarding both production conditions and the conveying of content: the representation of the characters and their relevant stories, biographies and forms of expression?

Out of this questioning, a desire arose in me to make a film that, like my previous films, interacts with and reflects social processes, but also captures the life situation of the characters in the aftermath of a big drama on the content level.

In our noisy, voyeuristic world, where our concern for a person’s fate depends on the harshness of the trauma they’ve experienced, I wanted to tell of an inner moment – of the echo afterwards – which can be just as serious for a person as a threat coming at them from the outside.

Time to say farewell, or…?

For me, Ciao Chérie is an extension of my previous film Little Alien, in terms of a continued imagining of the characters, these people who come from somewhere else. Little Alien was about beginning a new life in a new country. Now I am interested in the time afterwards, in the issues people struggle with after their arrival. Because there are so many times in life where we arrive somewhere far away from our (old) home. This opened up a huge, partly uncharted and sometimes also taboo territory for me: the realm of the past and of people and places that have been left behind. Can I be in two different places at the same time? Can I be in the country I live in now, in the city where I sit in the Ciao Chérie phone booth, but at the same time, also be in the home of my loved ones at the other end of the phone?

Which moments of their biographies define these people in their own eyes, and which define them in the eyes of others, of the society, and for how long?

These people continue with their lives in a new place, with the whole range of their life issues. But when and how do they say farewell to their old homeland and those they’ve left behind? The phone calls made it possible for me to pursue these questions in a focused way.

“Watson, come here. I need you!”

These were the first words Alexander Graham Bell said more than 140 years ago, when he made the very first phone call.

With his experiment, he laid the foundation for the invention of the telephone rather by accident. What he actually meant to do was record acoustic sound waves to make what hearing people said visible to the hearing impaired. He didn’t succeed in his original plan, but he invented something else – the telephone. When I started developing Ciao Chérie, I was primarily interested in the old oral tradition of storytelling. I wanted to learn more about that instant the voice of the storyteller breaks the silence: where reality vanishes, and the audience enters an inner space. I searched for the origins of storytelling. The transcriptions I found of texts once only told orally, no longer contained any of the magic of storytelling. Only the voice of the storyteller can deliver the words in a way that moves people. This fact gave rise to a lot of questions. Film, as a medium, captures something. Capturing things, a certain moment maybe, be it fictional or documentary, is the very nature of film. So, how can I, as a filmmaker, capture a moment, without making it as hollow as a transcription? How can life unfold in film while using technical instruments like the camera and the projector?

The issue of communication became the focus of my interest, in all respects – storytelling as a mediator between the story and the audience, film as a continuous flow between the chosen form and the story, between the filmic space of the screen and the cinema auditorium.

The voice is a fascinating phenomenon. It is said that no two people in the world speak exactly the same way. I had entertained the idea of exploring the voice and also this concept of mediation for some time and written a few drafts for an essay film before call shops finally caught my attention. These rather inconspicuous, tiny shops are crawling with a whole universe of major social issues in their one-room settings. I just couldn’t stop thinking about them.

And so my research began. First up on the agenda was visiting about 100 call shops in Vienna, as well as photo sessions, interviews, notes and auditions. While making Ciao Chérie, the working method and the content were developed side by side. One couldn’t mature without the other.

Just like with the main topic of the film – the limits of the potential for interpersonal communication – for the form of the film, I also set out to understand how my chosen working method influenced the resulting scenes and vice versa – how the methods of the process changed as a result. Just like the topic of the film, this process of communication already existed behind the scenes.

Nina Kusturica
Vienna, September 2018

Nowhere is a place for everyone…

A Call Shop in the belly of migrant Vienna. People from all over sit in the booths and phone away their hard earned, just to stay in contact with those that are dear to them. The Austrian-Bosnian filmmaker Nina Kusturica has shaped her third film into a wonderfully poetic piece of cinema…

Kusturica tells of the stories, transported through episode-like telephone calls, shared between people from all over the world. The calls all take place in the protagonist’s native languages. On the other end of the line, based on the director’s cleverly prepared dialogue, the respondents present themselves as mere sounding boards -phantoms that take imaginary shape in the minds of the viewer…

The director’s choice of musical accompaniment is a stroke of genius: the nursery rhymes and children’s songs from each character’s respective homeland imbue the picture with the sense of an inner voice. The songs, sung, hummed and recited by the actors themselves require no instrumental backing – giving them a tangible intimacy which contrasts the sometimes tragi comical conversations and eccentric Call Shop reality…

Kusturica’s ‚Ciao Chérie’ is a lesson in humanistic thinking for all those stuck in the ‚us versus them’ paradigm.

Tiroler Tageszeitung

Hello, Vienna Calling!

People come and go, seat themselves in one the glass booths, send money home to their families and tell their stories on the phone. Once the door is shut, the glass booth becomes something of a confessional box – a place of complete, stark honesty. Joyful faces, tears, awkward moments of silence or arguments are all captured. While they focus their attention on the other end of the line, yearning, the protagonists become isolated from their immediate environment. They seek solace in the confessional. For me though, as soon as the booth is vacated, the call paid for, and reality resumed – the isolation grows, further from the emotions and the ultra-reality left in the booth – the reality left in Japan, Syria, Nigeria, Italy and other countries.

The yearning for their counterpart, the power of language and silence is what makes Kusturica’s stylistically so interesting. She is fascinated with the power of voices – voices that cannot lie over the telephone, that hide nothing – even when they try.

The film, with it’s clever soundtrack, is a little like a trip around the world in a dream. The images show almost exclusively portrait shots of the callers – and yet they grab me and pull into the world they create.

Uncut Movies, April 2017

The Call Shop, a hub for life stories

The telephone as an intimacy device and as an apparatus of alienation. Bonds, one wished to uphold, break apart. Fled, stranded, arrived, to stay or just wire some quick money. Words contain whole worlds as they generate a sometimes comical and eccentric microcosm – all part of the narrative universe of Ciao Chérie.

The combination of conversation and picture (Camera: Michael Schindegger) opens doors to places only thoughts had resided. Spaces bigger than the lines spoken, bigger than the confession booth, than your own four walls of perception, the confines of loneliness and the edges of happiness.

Where all is heard and only heard, every word becomes important, every breath, pause and intonation.

Diagonale Catalogue, March 2017

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