By Franziska Schuster. With their short film SLAVES David Aronowitsch and Hanna Heilborn chose – as they did before on their 2002 documentary HIDDEN – an animation technique to approach their visually rather abstract subject. The narrative the directors have to visualize doesn’t follow any conventional plot structure. It’s based on the traumatic experiences of two children who were abducted in the Sudan during their early childhood – the girl Abuk when she was five years old, the older boy Machiek when he was nine – and forced to years of slave labour.

The common practice to ground any experience in a biographical context must fail with these two, as they simply don’t have any biography to speak of yet. Their conscious life starts with the end of their childhood, and from that point on there is no more fixed data that they can get a grip on – birthdays, family gatherings, start of school or anything like this. Their sense of time started with the separation from their family and is then loosely held together by a vague collection of events like escape attempts, injuries, thirst, nightmares, the arrival or the death of other children.

Aronowitsch and Heilborn don't even try to realistically depict the reports; instead they hold on to the children's voices as the only possibly approach to their memories. They keep the pictures full of allusions, drawing back into the surreal and always returning to the film's original situation – the interview. On this level even the interviewers themselves make an appearance, insecure, awkward, fighting with the malice of the recording device, asking shyly how far they are allowed to go with their questions. Through this self-reflexive twist enables them to keep the realism of these sequences palpable all the time.

In the end this is the way the film can acknowledge the fact that the commonly used pattern of shock-and-awareness serves the voyeurism f the audience more than the interests of the afflicted. They also articulate their own helplessness as filmmakers towards the unbelievable cruelties these children had to endure. For this achievement SLAVES was rightly awarded many prizes, and it stands on one level with several other films that have rendered outstanding services for the fight against human rights incursions. In a tone that's completely matter-of-fact the two Swedes manage to shake their audience in a much more profound way, which they would have never reached through mere pathos.

Links

• SLAVES (SE 2008. David Aronowitsch, Hanna Heilborn)
• Being an Animated Character – An interview with David Aronowitsch
• Every Fifth Ticket for a Swedish Film – Werner Busch about the Schwedish film market