“Fear Can Also Be Powerful for Creation, Not Just for Destruction”: Déni Oumar Pitsaev on his Cannes Prize-Winner ‘Imago’

In Imago, the Chechnya-born filmmaker Déni Oumar Pitsaev journeys to a Chechen enclave in Georgia named Pankissi, where his mother has secured a plot of land for him to settle down. But it’s easier to describe Pitsaev’s film than it is to capture its welter of emotions around homecoming and how home can be a moving target. He spends time with his mother, with whom he’s close, and a hearty cousin and a friend, but he has barely seen his father since his parents divorced when he was nine months old. That’s on top of a childhood marked by his and his mother’s stays in Kazakhstan, Chechnya, and—when the Russians attacked Grozny in 1996—St. Petersburg, where she changed his Chechen name for his protection.

Despite this traumatic backstory, Imago can feel almost becalmed as Pitsaev hangs out in Pankissi, chatting away, dodging constant questions about why he’s not married. The urgency seems to come from within Pitsaev, rather than the supposed practical questions of whether and how to settle there; his proposal for a house is a somewhat fanciful home-on-stilts. “It’s a feeling about return, to better say goodbye,” Pitsaev told me in our recent call the week after Cannes, where Imago had screened in the Critics’ Week independent sidebar and won two prizes: the French Touch jury award in that section, and then L’Œil d’Or, the best documentary prize of the entire festival. We spoke about starring in a film about his own life journey and the balance between pre-planning and responding in the moment. He is currently developing the script for his first scripted feature film, Maspalomas. This interview has been edited.

DOCUMENTARY: What goes into the choice of being in front of the camera as the on-screen protagonist?

DÉNI OUMAR PITSAEV: Actually, I feel uncomfortable when the filmmaker is behind the camera. You ask so many things, and the people give you so much, but you have this protection for yourself. I cannot ask so much from people and protect myself at the same time. That’s why I put myself in a very vulnerable position, as they do. It’s important they remember that I’m a relative, but I’m still controlling the storytelling. When you’re inside the frame, you’re a character but also you’re a director. I can direct the discussions which way I want, or I can move around because I understand where the camera is going to be. So I can direct things without disturbing the other characters because they don’t think about the technical stuff. 

D: People talk quite openly, and you get lovely candid scenes like the big lunch with women in town.

DOP: Yes! This was the most heartbreaking scene because there were so many good things there, and I had to cut it and take a small bite. It was such a big complex [look] at their point of view of life, of religion, of relationships, of freedom, of so many things. I almost felt like I could do just a film about them and it would be powerful enough.

D: You co-wrote the screenplay (with Mathilde Trichet). What went into that and what did that look like?

DOP: It was not like a traditional screenplay for a fiction, more like a treatment. It was around 80 pages, so it’s quite detailed. It’s a requirement in France, in Europe, to get grants. I know it’s very different from USA, because we already did this for Sundance for our first grant, and that was like four pages maximum, quite different. In France, the whole dossier was around 140 pages, and the treatment was about 80 pages. So it was imagination—how things could go, but without experiencing the things. Especially scenes with my father, because I really didn’t know him. So it was all expectation. In reality, things were a bit different. I remember that in my script, I wrote that it might be complicated to communicate with him, that he might use a lot of silence. But he talked a lot, and so that was a surprise.

D: He even recites poetry.

DOP: Yeah, exactly. I didn’t know all this stuff. It’s all spontaneous. So I couldn’t imagine things like that. I’m quite happy that the reality can be more powerful than what we write.

D: How did the screenplay help when shooting? 

DOP: It helped for the dramaturgy of the film: my arrival, then my mother coming, then my father. And I was able to communicate with my team what we were going to shoot and how and why. It helps editing as well, because if you arrive with 80 hours that you shot, you need to know what your structure of the film was. 

D: How did the film evolve in the edit?

DOP: Just the image editing took seven months. I worked with two editors. The first was Dounia Sichov. She’s French, but she speaks Russian as well, so it helped me a lot for the first part of the work on structure and the first rough cut. Then I worked with Laurent Sénéchal. He was an Oscar nominee [for Editing] for Anatomy of a Fall. I worked with him for two months and a half to finish the film. We rearranged things with him together, and it was a great collaboration.

D: Did you have any other films in mind that offered inspiration of how this film could feel?

DOP: No, but I had an inspiration before the shooting: a fictional film of Oliver Laxe, who did Sirat this year, but he started his career as a documentary filmmaker as well. Fire Will Come (2019)—his first fiction, I think, but it looks like a documentary as well. I like it very much.

D: That’s the one with the Leonard Cohen song when they’re going through the countryside?

DOP: Yes, yes, they go to the countryside in a bus, when the guy is coming back to the village. It’s amazing, a beautiful film. And it looks very quiet as well, even if there’s a fire in the end. So that was a reference beforehand, but when we were doing editing, I didn’t have any film in mind because the structure of my film is so different: everything is happening in the end of the film. All of the beginning is preparing for this ending, and in the scene in the forest, we understand a lot of things from what came before. So the dramaturgy is not like this [makes an arc with his hand] where it’s happening and then we have a resolution. It’s like this [makes a straight line with a peak at the end]. I don’t remember any documentary that looked like that. We knew how important this scene was for me, and how powerful, and that we could finish the film on that. 

D: You and your father are more comfortable with each other by the scene of the forest conversation, but still, what was it like to film that? How long were you there?

DOP: It was actually not so complex. We shot our journey through this forest for two hours. It was one movement with no stops—only when the DP needed to change the battery for the camera, stuff like that. And it was quite a protective way of filming: from the back, half of the face—to be there but also to keep something intimate inside of such an almost naked scene for me. To be in there, but still keep some distance. 

D: What aesthetic did you want for the film? On a basic level, there’s the beautiful backdrop of the land.

DOP: I was afraid of the beauty. I know my tendency for aesthetic choices is that I love to control the frame so that everything is perfect, nothing is shaky, everything is smooth. The first shoot we did with the DP and the assistant of the DP was with a new ARRI Alexa camera, with things so that it can move slowly and everything. I realized it was too perfect, too beautiful. Sometimes in contemporary cinema, technically it’s easier and easier to make such beautiful images. And I realize that I myself watch a lot of beautiful films where I end up thinking, ah, it’s so beautiful. But then I feel nothing! Or sometimes it’s a film which is one hour, no dialogue, just observation, and so beautiful that my mind can be somewhere else, not in the film, so it’s like a meditation, and that’s also nice. But I realized that I just needed to shake it up. So the frame we chose is 1.5, a Kodak standard image. It’s a perfect format for family albums. So you cannot show a large space.

D: No panoramas.

DOP: Yes, but you could focus on one face and half maybe. So you always need to make a choice. I wanted to not be a prisoner of my aesthetic, and to focus on what I wanted for emotion. When we were in the editing room, the work with Laurent Sénéchal was to deconstruct the beauty of the film. So now we have a few times when someone says that it’s a camera day [i.e. points out that they’re filming]. I wanted to cut this at first, but then we realized it gives this balance. Same thing with the table with the women, the shot you liked: we had another shot of this in another place that was much better filmed but it lost the chaos of reality. The whole process of post-production was to lose a little control of perfectness and be more aware of the reality of people and emotions and honesty.

D: There’s a lot of painful past experience that informs the journey, with the Russian war, and I was curious how much the element of danger or fear affected you while making the film. 

DOP: I can just say that everyone was surprised that I didn’t want to build a cellar. They would say that war could always come back, and Russia is just behind the mountains. And I didn’t want to think about that. I wanted to have this house which is in the air. It’s like in the tale where the Siren sings the song and attracts the boats. The more you talk about the war or the more you say to the other person that it’s dangerous, or that Russia will come, it’s like a law of attraction. And I say, enough war. We all experienced this war. I experienced it in my childhood as well, and I don’t want to give so much power to these bad people who brought the war into my childhood, as if it should define my entire life. As if it was not enough that my life was fucked up in my childhood. I don’t want to be in a victim position all my life, and if you do this, you give too much power to other people. 

You cannot change the past, but you can do something with the future. So the film was more about dreaming and watching the stars, and remembering being a child and thinking positively. Even if the war comes, it’s not the cellar that's going to help you to survive. I say, if the Russians come back, at least I’m going to die the quickest way possible, because they’re going to see my home from far away—the bomb is going to be dropped and it’s going to be finished. Or [should I rather] suffer in a cellar, where the house collapses on you and you cannot breathe? I felt that I needed to choose death in an easier way, and a more pop way as well.

D: Why live in fear.

DOP: Exactly. You must do something with your fear, actually, because the fear can also be powerful for creation, not just for destruction.

Nicolas Rapold is the host of the podcast The Last Thing I Saw, a frequent contributor to numerous publications, and former editor-in-chief of Film Comment. He is editing a book of interviews with Frederick Wiseman.