In-Class Interview

What are you making?

Right now I'm working on short documentary on my best friend Amber, documenting her life in Hungary, where she moved and took on the namer Borostyan. This new name/version of herself will also give the name to the work.

Her and I have had a very important time together when we were around 16, 17 years old. Which just had a big influence and both of us and the following course of our personalities and lives. We met when we were in highschool, and, together with Freya another friend of ours, started going to psytrance parties and festivals. At these events a strong community feeling was visible. Also drugs such ads psychedelics opened up a lot of new topics for us, which was confronting in some ways, but really important to me and her.

And then we lost contact for a while. After I heard that her mom had passed, I sent her a letter, she replied, we went on a walk together and our friendship started becoming stronger again, and since then, we have been in very steady contact and spend at least a week every summer together and call/text every few days.

Which is also another topic that I find quite important in this short film and that is her approach to what family means. And she has lost horses and her mother do not does not have any siblings and does not have any contact her father. So we have kind of become your chosen family to each other. Sometimes we call each other sisters and then flip on each other mother and all these terms are replaceable, replaceable from one another. So she moved to Hungary where she then bought a house and now lives a very free lifestyle. They're just walking around the garden naked whenever she feels like it very far away from the usual rules and guidelines we feel like living by in this part she has not studied but focuses her life on really teaching itself and a lot of other different topics like herbal medicine or femininity or spirituality or regenerative agriculture as our mission really is to become as self sufficient as possible, and to not be dependent on having to buy produce or buy electricity. So that is also why she moved to Hungary as there it is much easier financially to buy a piece of land and really create this vision for itself. One of the challenges I find in this is often the political setting inherently which will also possibly be a topic quite the importance in this project.

Why are you making it?

The film I want to make about Amber has a deep importance and urgency in my view. making it to show other people what my life is like and what other lifestyles that are next to what is usually expected from us to give examples of the extreme different lifestyle so people can get inspired by it and as I do prefer, also overthink your own actions because every time I do that I'm really thinking about how I live my life routines for myself choices in such a thing documenting the Life

How does it relate to other things you have done?

I think it relates in two ways. One of them being in general, I've always been taking photos of my friends documenting their beauty and on the other hand, it is just generally this idea of counterculture is that I find to be interesting that I focus on before as a leader photobook about a community in which people live together in a communal way. And these kind of different lifestyles because I think I want to focus on

How is it different to other things you have done?

It is different because I'm using a different medium than I would usually for these kinds of projects. Instead of always taking photos which I've done with her every year, sometimes several times. I'm now using films, which I think have a way different intimacy. Also I am searching for a new tension I used to exclude of my work.

This will be a great challenge with someone I know as well as I do Amber. To see how much Information on her life is needed and see how the communication goes, when you share something so precious about someone publicly and how to respectfully work with her story. At the same time I wish to make it authentic and not glorify it, but also not step on her toes.

What are the most significant choices have you made recently?

I think the most significant choice was to start this master and really focus on getting in depth with these kind of projects and film in general, in contrast to photography, my usual comfort zone. I want to learn further about editing and generally finding my own style in film which I feel like I haven't fully found yet.

Also I have decided to focus on my own surrounding and a reoccurring theme in such, being a modern hippie movement that I am observing around me. I generally want to focus on is this new age flower children hippie movement, as I see a lot of similarities between the lifestyles of me and my friends to what the "hippies" used to focus on in the 60s and 70s especially in the US only that the timeframe and political situation now is different, but in some ways comparable. Instead of the Vietnam war, we are facing the Russian/Ukraine war, a new movement towards right politics globally and the impacts of climate change. So this is something I find quite important to analyze. What did this movement used to mean? What did it change? How does this new hippie movement look like? What are the new global challenges and in what ways is this new movement approaching it?