Interview with Paddy Wivell and Vicky Mitchell for The Tribe

27 May 2015

 

In a television first, Channel 4 has been granted access by a rural Ethiopian tribe to capture their life as never seen before by using fixed-rig cameras in this brand new series. Here, Series Director Paddy Wivell and Producer/Director Vicky Mitchell reveal what it was like making this remarkable, ground-breaking series.

 

What’s the genesis of this series? Where did the idea come from?

V: The Head of Development at Renegade, Alexis Price had the idea for the series originally.

P: Yeah, it was her idea, and then Head of Documentaries, Nick Mirsky, at Channel 4 seized on it really quickly. So before you knew it, there was a team out in Ethiopia searching for a family. The producer/director Livia Simoka had a fixer that she’d worked with before, who had worked with Bruce Parry and had a really good relationship with the tribal communities in Southern Ethiopia. They spent a week or so looking for a family, and actually alighted on the family, relatively quickly. They shot a taster tape and then the series was immediately commissioned.

V: There have been series made with tribes in the past, but it’s always been done through the eyes of a Western visitor. The thing that everyone was excited about – both the channel and the team that came on board later on, was the idea of this being completely unmediated. It’s the family who are centre stage and who drive the story in each film and because of that it feels like a uniquely personal and authentic insight into their lives.

P: There’s a magic in the rig. It’s a big signature of Channel 4, the rig, and the magic is being able to film life that is unmediated, and you’re filming it from so many different angles, and you can cut it like a drama, in a sense.

V: We had a consultant anthropologist on the series, and when she came over to watch the films, she was flabbergasted by the intimacy of the footage that we’d managed to gather, and the things that we’d been able to observe.

 

Why do you think they agreed to take part?

P: They’ve got quite considerable status within their community, so there’s a kind of confidence there, I think. They were eager to show us how they live. Also I think they’re quite a curious bunch of people. I think they were quite intrigued by what we were attempting to do.

V: The Hamar are famous for being really warm and generous hosts. So as well as this desire to promote understanding of their culture, they genuinely enjoyed welcoming all these new people into their home. I also think there was a real sense of pride that their family had been chosen to be filmed.

 

How many of you were there out there, and how long were you filming for?

P: I think there were about 40 of us in total. It’s a big team – you’ve got the gallery team, two regular camera crews out there, we had support staff, production team, translators, drivers, caterers, a lot of people. We were there for six weeks, and filmed for four.

 

What were the main logistical problems you encountered?

V: The language! We didn’t understand a word anyone was saying. That was the biggest one, and what was most daunting for all of us. How do you approach a documentary – never mind a rig documentary – when you don’t understand the language? It was a real challenge to find translators that spoke English and Hamar to a high enough standard to give a fast and reliable ‘live’ translations. That was quite a task, scouring the whole of Southern Ethiopia to find fluent English and Hamar speakers. Then working out a way that we could run the gallery and the PSC [Portable Single Camera] filming, so that we were always on top of what was happening, it was all a real challenge.

P: With a rig, you’ve got material coming in to the gallery live, 11 hours-a-day. The translators couldn’t stop for a long time to consider what was being said, they had to give us a running translation. It was a really tricky job for them, and there aren’t that many people who speak both Hamar and English.

 

What was the technical set up there?

P: We had 22 camera positions and 16 cameras. We had cameras inside four huts and the immediate outside area, their homestead. And we had something like 5km of copper cabling that went from the cameras, dug into trenches, taking a feed to the gallery so we could monitor what was going on on all the cameras at any one time. Ordinarily I think they’d ship this equipment out there, but for one reason or another it couldn’t be done, so we had to take it on the flight, in 72 boxes.

 

Did the Hamar show much interest in the technical side of what you were doing?

P: There was a certain amount of curiosity, although they took it in their stride. They weren’t that bowled over by it all. They were just getting on with their lives. They have other preoccupations, Ithink..

V: Although we explained how all the technology worked, we didn’t show them the gallery, and that’s true of all rig programmes that I’ve worked on – we don’t show contributors the gallery until filming is over because we don’t want it to influence the way they behave. However, they did launch a few night time missions to try and sneak a peek!

 

What do you think they made of the whole filming experience?

P: I think they enjoyed it. I went back a few weeks ago to do some pick-ups and a stills shoot, and they seemed really glad to see us. I think they felt it was something of an adventure, something out of the norm for them. I think the main thing was that they valued the relationships that they formed with the crew. In fact, a baby’s been born recently that’s been named after the location producer who put on their radio mics in the morning. So there’s a little baby Sophie there. Certainly they loved the films. I went back and showed them – we watched the films in the homestead on a big projector, eating some barbequed goat, under a starlit sky. It was really gratifying, they seemed to be laughing at all the right bits.

V: They said that we’re welcome back any time, which is a good sign, I think, that they enjoyed the experience.

 

The Hamar’s is a fairly patriarchal culture. Vicky, what did they make of you as a working woman?

V: I think they accept that our culture is very different to theirs. I don’t feel that they treated me any differently to the male members of the team. Obviously you’re in their world, so you have to try and be respectful of their mores. If we were with them having coffee or sorghum beer, then I would generally sit with the women, because they would tend to sit in separate groups. It was important to respect their world. I don’t think the women could understand how what I did actually constituted a job. Because I wasn’t hauling gallons and gallons of water 8 miles every day, or grinding sack upon sack of sorghum, they thought just sitting on my bum at a computer didn’t constitute hard work at all.

P: They’re used to seeing tourists around in the local town, so it’s not a complete shock to them that we dress and live according to different values. They’re quite accepting, really.

V: The thing to say about the Hamar is that on the face of it it’s an incredibly patriarchal culture, but in that family in particular there are some very strong, feisty women, who have their own ways of exerting control and influence. It’s not as straightforward as it first appears.

 

The women seem to get a rough trot, though. Being a Hamar bride, for example, doesn’t look like much fun.

P: It’s remarkable. The bridal process is something way beyond our experience. We watched it with amazement, the different stages of it. The leaving ceremony, the shaving of the head, the covering in butter, the living in an attic for five months, it’s just something that we looked at with complete astonishment.

V: It’s interesting, actually, I didn’t go back on the last trip, but the guys were telling me that Dami, the bride we filmed, is like a changed person now. She has really settled in to the family, and is really enjoying living there. She’s a much more gregarious person than the one we experienced when we were filming. All Hamar girls know this is coming and prepare for it. Our anthropologist discussed with us beforehand that there is an element of performance, as well, to the tears and around the leaving ceremony. Though I don’t doubt that it was real emotion as well, she was genuinely upset to be leaving her family.

P: It’s a very ritualised, codified way of existing, so everything we see there is something that’s enacted time and time and time again. To live within the Hamar means you have to accept a way of living that is laid down generations and generations before you. But within this very strict way of being, like Vicky says, it’s amazing how nuanced it is, you know?

 

Do you think there are a lot of similarities between us and the Hamar?

P: There are a lot more than I expected to discover. They have similar dilemmas – they think about retirement, health, education, they deal with difficult teenagers, familial relationships are both different and quite similar in the way that people do and don’t get on. I think there’s quite a lot more common ground than I’d anticipated. When you first arrive there, you go in one of those huts, and the way people are dressed, and the way they look, and the foreignness of the language, makes you feel like you’ve just stepped behind the glass of a museum piece. But actually, the longer you spend there, the more their personalities emerge. By the end of it, we stopped seeing them as tribal people, they were just individuals who we could relate to in one way or another.

 

Did you get on with some of them better than others?

P: I’d say we got on with them all, really.

V: We got on with them all. There were definitely members of the family that we all had real soft spots for – we all absolutely adored Kerri Bodo, and Rebo, who appears in a later episode, is just the most wonderful woman, who both Paddy and I took to our hearts.

P: And then there’s the kids, they were brilliant. But they all offered something interesting and distinctive.

 

What do you think the key differences are between us?

P: I would say that the rigidity with which they live their lives is quite unfamiliar to us. Gender roles are so expected, and that very ritualised way they live their lives is something I’m not really familiar with. They don’t have the choices that we have – whether that makes them less or more happy I really don’t know, but it’s a much more set way of living, and that’s where it’s so different.

V: I think also they’re not naturally reflective about their emotions. I think it was quite unusual for them to be asked questions about how they felt about something. Paddy did an incredible job with the interviews, but I think it took them a while to get used to that.

P: I was quite nervous of doing the interviews, but actually when you’re on a one-on-one, I was getting a live translation as I was interviewing people, and it became much more conversational, so you could unlock things. They’re not naturally reflective and prone to talk about feelings. Feelings don’t take huge prominence in a culture where survival is the most important thing. But having said that, they’re all individuals, and given the opportunity, they would start to articulate the way that they felt.

 

During the interviews, there was quite a lot of laughter both in front of and behind the camera. Was it a fun experience to do them?

P: Amazing. Just amazing. A real pleasure to meet people who are different and then find a commonality there. And they’re so playful, and so up for mischief. I think that’s what makes it such an enjoyable watch. They have quite solemn, traditional ways, but actually they’re quite a laugh.

 

Do you worry that the experience of filming this, and the resultant exposure, might influence their lives in a negative way?

P: I do honestly think it’s unlikely. I think the way that they live is so entrenched that actually their daily existence of cattle-herding or going to the farm or fetching water, just living the way they live, is quite deeply set. Of course things are changing. Mobile phones are coming in. But they’re a group of people that’s very committed to the way they live, and I don’t honestly think things are going to change that much. They might get a bit more interest from tourists, but I think they’ll be happy about that. It’s a very robust way of life that they’ve got, and I can’t really see that fundamentally changing. Not as a result of the films.