BEHIND GOD'S BACK

Short Talk with Roy Jox-Fedstie (director)

UK / 2023 / 20‘ 

BEST DOCUMENTARY FILM Category

21st IN THE PALACE International Short Film Festival 2024

Synopsis: „dèyè do bon dié“ is a textured exploration of the North of Martinique. A mostly agricultural region of the French-Caribbean island, where the deceptively simple lifestyle hides a layered and complex identity, one under the direct threat of a reawakening volcano. The movie paints a collective portrait of the North by taking the viewer through a vivid visual and sonic collage of the volcanic landscapes, whilst continuously asking its population to define the meaning of home, danger, and identity.

Biography: Under the moniker “r.”, Martinican documentary director Roy Jox-Fredstie investigates the intricate process of building one’s identity, whether at the individual level or at the societal level. 
Through a slow, compassionate, and cinematic approach, r. seeks to uncover the motivations behind individual and communal decisions. The aim is always to provide a nuanced, textured, and often contradictory portrait of the subject matter and of the contributors’ personalities.

Roy Jox-Fedstie, director

Vera Chandelle (author): The movie is a mix of everything: nature, history, culture and the people from this community. Why did you make this documentary?
 
Roy Jox-Fedstie (director): I am from one of the nine villages around this side of the volcano, which has not moved for 70 years. I grew up there and there was never any volcano activity. It was just a decoration, a background in my life. So, when the volcano started to emit smoke and magma, it was the fact that my childhood would disappear, where my grandma is buried and where my grandfather used to take me fishing. When me and my wife were trying to conceive, it created a very unique momentum, in which I had to capture everything that I could and try to give it to my son when he grows up. 
 
Vera Chandelle: How long does it take to film the documentary?
 
Roy Jox-Fedstie: It is a film, where we spend 20 days going from village to village. We stood in the middle of nowhere and just let every person that would stop, talk with us. We talked to about 70 people and we were there from 6 in the morning till midnight and just let people talk to us. It is a bad movie, because obviously it is not efficient, we had 8 terabytes of film material and I had to give only 20 minutes to the University. I just did not know what to do with it, since it was way too much, so the only way to approach it at the time, I found, was to use everything as music. The images, the words, the music I used as notes and we combined them to make a song. It is a movie in a form, but it is actually a song. If you hear it more than you see it, it is also a choice that is based on history: we are a colony of France and a lot of people do not feel understood. I am forcing whoever is looking at my film to take out anything they can of the film. A lot of people found it to be very beautiful, but the people who knew the story found the film very stressful.
 
Vera Chandelle: How does it feel to live so close to this big, huge volcano, knowing that one day it may erupt? 
 
Roy Jox-Fedstie: I think you normalize everything to a certain extent and you leave that trauma in you, whatever that trauma can be. As I grew up, the volcano was a decoration for me, a lot of things are so problematic that they become filmography: you focus whether on something very far, or something very close and that focus changes all the time. You can see the contradictions, but then life goes on.

Author's view (Petar Penev):
 
Behind God’s Back explores the fragility of life through a collage of interviews and slice-of-life fragments from life in a former French colony. But how do you even begin to grasp the fates and lives of so many people?
 
A life in nature may seem both tranquil and idealistic from the outside, but it is a double-edged sword. Your environment can be both your greatest friend and your worst enemy. When we do harm to nature and it has the power to “bite” us back, life exists in a grey area, leading to feelings such as uncertainty, confusion, and anxiety. It is no easy task to make sense of such circumstances, but perhaps, living so far removed from the safety and convenience of the first world, we can’t help but contemplate and search for answers.
 
As is often the case, the answer lies in the pursuit of happiness and in the small joys in life that we have access to.