Photo Credit: Matthew Williams
Pietra Brettkelly
The Art Star and the Sudanese Twins
2008 Sundance Film Festival
www.theartstarandthesudanesetwins.com
www.theartstarandthesudanesetwins.com/trailer
Bio: Pietra Brettkelly describes herself as a passionate documentary maker. Her self-funded documentary The Art Star and the Sudanese Twins experienced international success at the Edinburgh International Film Festival, Hotdocs, Toronto, Zurich International Film Festival, the Melbourne International Film Festival, and Rio de Janeiro International Film Festival. The film won several awards, including Best Editing at Sundance and Best Documentary at Whistler Film Festival. She is the 2010 recipient of the New Zealand Film Commission Producer’s Award.
In 2003 her film Beauty Will Save the World brought Brettkelly to Libya for the country’s first beauty pageant, as well as an interview with then-colonel Muammar Ghadaffi. The film premiered at the American Film Institute Film Festival in Los Angeles. It had later screenings at Hot Docs, Toronto, and IDFA in Amsterdam. She produced and directed the television documentaries Outward Bound and Maori Boy Genius in 2011. (Credit: Pietra Brettkelly Website)
Description: The Art Star and the Sudanese Twins follows Vanessa Beecroft’s intentions to adopt orphaned twins, Madit and Mongor Akot, and how this bleeds into her art and her personal life. For sixteen months, the film follows Vanessa with an often-brutal honesty, she exposes the truth about her life—her creative process, her struggle with depression, her volatile relationship with her husband, and her love for the twins. (Credit: The Art Star and the Sudanese Twins Official Website)
Interview Date: January 22, 2008
Women and Hollywood: Even though Vanessa Beecroft is an internationally well-known artist, she is much better known outside the United States. Please introduce us to your subject.
Pietra Brettkelly: From what I understand, her persona as an artist is more well known in Europe because she was brought up in Italy. But she is one of the world’s top contemporary artists, certainly one of the top female artists, and her focus has been tableaus of naked women that she stands in a room or space for three hours and people come and view them. Footage is taken of the tableau and those elements are sold as part of her artwork.
She’s been doing this for thirteen years, and in the sixteen months that I was filming her, she was thinking about changing and adapting her work as an artist, as well. It seemed that things were coming to a head both personally and professionally in the time I was filming her.
W&H: How did you come to pick Vanessa as the topic for your film?
PB: I was in the Sudan filming another documentary and in southern Sudan there is an area where foreigners can rent a tent at night—it’s mostly aide workers or NGOs. At night, you sit around a tree. Vanessa and her team were there; they didn’t look like aide workers, and we started talking to them. When we were leaving, she said to me, “I’m thinking of adopting the twins [Madit and Mongor Akot] at the orphanage next door; I’ve been breastfeeding them during my last two visits to the Sudan.” A couple of days later, I emailed her and said that international adoption is a topic that I’ve wanted to discuss and if she’d be interested I’d like to follow her story. I didn’t even know she was an artist; I didn’t even know what performance art was.
W&H: It must have been hard as a director not knowing the direction your film was going to go in?
PB: That’s what I love about documentaries. It certainly was a curve ball when it gradually became obvious that her art was a very strong part of her and that she was famous. So then, I had to work out how much of that side of her needed to be part of the film and how I could incorporate it. I wasn’t doing a profile of an artist. That was never my intention. My intention was to discuss international adoption. I did grapple with how much of her art needed to be in the film.
W&H: Understanding her as an artist helps you understand her pursuit of these children.
PB: The situation with many international adoptions is that there are parents and that’s one of the aspects I wanted to discuss. They do have parents but it’s through circumstances like poverty, war, or separation of some kind that they end up in orphanages or in situations where they don’t have adult support. We think orphans have no parents but in developing countries, they often have parents.
W&H: This brings up the issue of the fact that many women don’t survive childbirth in these countries.
PB: I was in Afghanistan on another film two-and-a-half years ago, and I went to this region where one out of five women dies in childbirth. Those numbers are horrific. That just shouldn’t be happening and as the so-called privileged people, there is so much more we could be doing so these children wouldn’t need to be adopted. I don’t think it should be a given that our world is better than their world. One of the things I wanted to discuss was our future as a global community; if we want to create a situation in which, since we have the better world and the better life, we try to bring these children to our world.
W&H: We realize very far into the film that Vanessa’s husband [Greg Durkin] knows nothing about her intention of adopting the twins. Why didn’t she tell him?
PB: It’s hard for me to say what she was thinking, because I would tend to think in a different way, as would you, so it’s hard to figure out her motivation. She seemed to have convinced herself that she was researching the subject and then she would broach it with him and he would say, “Of course.” I do think she was generally surprised that he wasn’t interested in adopting the children. He’s an intelligent person, socially and culturally sensitive, and he could appreciate that all children need an education and clean water, and these children didn’t have those things. I think she thought that he would agree to it.
W&H: She seems to be the type of person who gets her way a lot.
PB: Yes.
W&H: She thought she could probably convince him to do this, and she fell apart once she realized it wasn’t going to happen. Talk about the scene where she has a breakdown after this realization.
PB: We were shopping with her and she got a phone call, and we just wandered out onto the street and then she came out and we could see that she was crying. I’m like, “Oh my goodness”—that obviously was a phone call with Greg. You can see that initially we weren’t focusing on her—we were just walking with her—and then I realized that she’s OK with my filming this. I do have a conscience and some things aren’t appropriate to film, but I knew that it was OK to film it. It was an incredible moment where she has this clarity that Greg is not going to agree to the adoption and that it isn’t going to go forward. She was thinking, “Well, now how do I express my emotions?”—for her it was through her work.
W&H: You are an active participant in the story, almost like a character behind the camera.
PB: Those are the types of films I like to make, telling people’s stories and following them through a particular or influential part of their lives. I’m not a great writer, but I’m good at asking questions. I’m fascinated by people, and those are the stories I want to tell. All my films are like that.
W&H: Vanessa says at the end, “I couldn’t adopt the children I wanted to adopt so I had to do something.” Is that what fueled the final scene at the Venice Biennale?
PB: The Biennale was an exploration of how she felt about the Sudan situation, about wanting to do something. She couldn’t adopt the twins, so she looked for another way. One of the things that the film shows is that there is no line between Vanessa’s art and her life and, therefore, the expression of her emotion for these twins is expressed in her art and the Biennale performance.
W&H: What are you hoping people think about when they leave the theater?
PB: I want them to discuss international adoption; to think about people from so-called privileged countries and how we should be helping people in developing countries. I don’t think we can make a blanket statement about international adoptions being either right or wrong. I’d like people to appreciate that she is a complex character. She’s different from anyone I’ve ever met, and this is a window to someone like that.
W&H: We have many male performance artists who are more famous, and I was really shocked that I had no clue about the breadth of her work. She seems to be so controversial because her work is about women and women’s bodies.
PB: I know that she really struggles with her place as a woman in the art community, because there aren’t many successful female artists in her field. She struggles with where she fits in. She was born in London, grew up in Italy, and then she immigrated to the United States. She’s English and speaks with an Italian accent, yet in Italy they call her a British artist. Strangely, she feels really comfortable in the Sudan even though she has no connections to Africa. Finding herself has been a lifelong struggle for her.