Emmanuel Itier

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IN THE EYE OF THE STORM

Interview with director: Raoul Martinez.

By Emmanuel Itier for filmfestivals.com

Q: What was the inspiration behind this doc series, what were your intentions?

Raoul: I always wanted to do a movie about economics and capitalism. What I consider the madness of our economical system. It’s something I researched and wrote about for a number of years. But I realized that to put it in a documentary form you need a human connection, unless you want to reach a tiny audience. You need the drama and the story. I was on the look-out for a while and how I could do this. And I heard about Yanis Varoufakis. And I ended up meeting him at a small event. There was a questions and answers with an audience. I saw how engaging he was at this live event and how funny he was. And how he was able to make these issues incredibly accessible and relevant. It was a moment of lightbulb for me. I then read his memoirs, “Adults in the room” and it blew me away. I finally approached him, telling him there was a fantastic movie to be made with him. The whole idea expended, and we ended up with a complete doc series.

Q: What was your intention, what were you trying to convey with this series?

Raoul: Once I decided Yanis was going to be the main focus I went to Athens for a 10 days trip. And we started filming covering all kinds of things. We went in various directions such as with his childhood and his various involvements with politics and economics. I realized how strong the material was. I understood it wasn’t only about Greece but it’s about the state of the Globe. Where we are as a species and a civilization. This is how it became a series. To get there we go through a very personal and dramatic journey that takes us through the corridors of power. It was important to me that we broaden up the conversation and tackle what are the most pressing challenges of our time such as the rise of fascism and the climate challenge. But from a perspective that doesn’t shy away from capitalism. If everything is collapsing around us, perhaps we should look at the dominant economic systems we’re living in.

Q: What were your various challenges putting together this series?

Raoul: There is a big challenge at the beginning. Whether you’re going to jump in and it’s a world of uncertainty because you don’t know how it’s going to go. Or you’re not. For me it’s always a very important moment because it takes a lot of time to commit to such a project and see it through to the end. There was a period of hesitation: am I doing this for the right reason? Is there enough to make a compelling vehicle? Simply, committing, psychologically, was the main challenge. But after seating down with Yanis, I felt very good and I knew we had something unique and impactful.

Q: What were the various revelations, solutions you found out to go beyond this catastrophic situation we’re in?

Raoul: I used to think it was a difficult question. What is the alternative to capitalism? Our imagination has been narrowed so much that this is all we can think about. There is a famous quote: “it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism”. I no longer think this is the challenge. There are very clear solutions. They are scientific, economic, and political solutions. We explore a number of them in our series. Economically it’s basically about de-growth and redistributing wealth. You realize you can’t grow forever. So, you have to put a limit on resources and sharing out resources. It’s very simple.  The problems becomes: why aren’t we embracing these obvious solutions? We need to better understand how capitalism works. Growth is built in the DNA of capitalism. It’s a perpetually expending system, by definition. When you remove the growth imperative, it’s no longer capitalism. I think this is a very important part of the answer. But you can go deeper than that and you can start looking spiritually and psychologically: why are we so addicted to this growth paradigm, why so many of us have not thought harder and bought in to this ideology? Even when we don’t benefit from it, directly. These are the big questions of our time. There are so many alternatives, such as the way we organize our banking system and the way we use our resources on this planet. We have the knowledge and the resources but what we don’t quite have is the power to implement these solutions. The power is held by a tiny handful of people, of corporate state entities and they are caught up in a total cycle of madness where they don’t think more than six months ahead. It’s all about how the billionaires get richer, this shouldn’t be the key goal of our civilization. It boils down to that. And it’s about various movements, all around the world, to resist and fight this situation.

Q: Are we on the eve of an international revolution?

Raoul: I think thing are going to get worse. But, as things get worse there will be an enlightening process. I sometimes think in terms of the individual. It sometimes takes an immense suffering on an individual level to grow, to actually make changes, to confront the pain and anger locked up inside. If you study the psychology of awakening, you realize that the immense suffering provokes a break in the psyche. And then you can end up in a deep peace zone. I think something like that could happen, at least to sections of Humanity. But for now we are up for a very rough ride before we get to somewhere better. I hope work like our series can play its part in rising our level of understanding and help find direction of travel for some sort of resolution.

Q: In what ways were you transformed by making this film and what is, at the end, the take-away from your doc series?

Raoul: For me, the take-away, is about the personal courage it takes to stand up against established forces. To meet and to see people engage in this fight and who decided to jump in the political arena, to see that courage it takes, truly transformed me and it stayed with me. It makes me want to do more. I think that we are suffering from the twin materialisms. The materialism from capitalism, which is the only thing we recognize and value, all that stuffs. This is a form of madness. And then there is a deeper form of materialism, it’s a metaphysical materialism which views the entire existence as dead matter. Even ourselves, even our own consciousness, according to some people, doesn’t exist, it’s not even real. You have to arrive at this conclusion, to be consistent. There is no way of arguing. There is no scientific understanding how to get from a nano matter to consciousness. We ended up with a very strange metaphysic which encourages us to see the world as dead. We end up seeing ourselves as pleasure seeking robots. I think this is a very corrupting philosophy, and you cannot separate this metaphysic from the mad materialism and consumerism which is the heart of our economic system. This is what needs to change. We need to ditch this materialism. We need to change our values and the way we see ourselves and the universe which we are such an intimate part.