In-Class Interview Borostyan
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 name Borostyan. This new name/version of herself will also give the name to the work.
The film will show visuals of her living her normal routine, which is quite opposite to the way most of us live and will possibly have a voice over giving context to our relationship. We are in many ways very similar but our lives are also quite opposite. A topic that I find quite important in this short film is her approach to what family means. She has lost her mother, 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 or mother. These terms become replaceable from one another.
She moved to Hungary where she then bought a house and now lives a very free lifestyle. Walking around the garden naked whenever she feels like it for example, far away from the usual rules and guidelines we feel like living. She has not studied but focuses her life on teaching herself a lot of other different topics like herbal medicine, femininity, spirituality or regenerative agriculture with the mission 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 of importance in this project and the general idea of escapism.
Why are you making it?
The film I want to make about Amber has a deep importance and urgency in my view. I am making it to show other people what her life is like and give a peak into a lifestyle quiet alien to what is usually expected from us by our western, capitalistic society.
I wish to give examples of the extremes so we can reflect on our own actions and life choices and not just go with the flows of society. Every time I visit Amber I come back with new habits, 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?