a film by Boris Gerrets

The film evolved from two chance encounters in the streets of London. Its protagonists are Sandrine, an attractive young woman from Brazil on a mission to find a husband, Steve, a seasoned beggar, whose life is a continuous struggle with drug addiction and Precious, a poet who became Steve's girlfriend. The stories of these three characters emerge from the coarse anonymity of the city, and were shot entirely on a mobile phone camera. The filmmaker mostly remains off-screen while he struggles to determine his own role between observer and participant. Originally begun as a documentary project, the film soon developed its own distinct dynamic where the confines between fact and fiction became blurred. Questions arise. Questions about the relationship between filmed and filmmaker and about real and imagined realities. There is a paradoxical sense of failure: the closer he gets to his subjects, the more the obstruction of his camera seemed to distance him from them. Yet ultimately, and perhaps unexpectedly, People... reveals a personal, humane and fragile space that only came into existence precisely because it had been filmed.

Filming creates one moment while it destroys another one. That is the paradox that defines cinemas’ relationship to reality. This became apparent to me in the continuous negotiation between different interests, between me and my camera, my subjects and our emerging friendships. To my protagonists it was clear early in the process that they where my actors whose real life extended into the space created by the film. While they were living their life in the first person, I was filming their second persona, the one that pertains to the space of the cinematic narrative. This included myself, which is what made things complicated at times.

There is darkness in the film, cinematic darkness. In other words, how the camera records the absence of light - in this case, the mobile phone camera with its coarse, grainy images. Inside that darkness resonates my own feeling of the city, its yearning, its mysteries and secrets. There is another layer in the film, embodied by anonymous phone conversations. They represent the collective voice of the city, bouncing about in a virtual and electronic dome that stretches over its skyline.