“Heart of Light — Eleven Songs for Fiji”, interview with director Cynthia Beatt

Presented in the RealeNonReale section of the 39th Bolzano Film Festival Bozen, “Heart of Light — Eleven Songs for Fiji” is the latest work by filmmaker Cynthia Beatt, born in Jamaica and raised partly on Fiji, now based in Berlin for decades. The film had its world premiere at the 55th International Film Festival Rotterdam.

Featuring Tilda Swinton as Iona, a woman returning to her childhood home in Fiji, the film weaves together poetic narrative, ethnographic observation and essayistic fiction into a sort of traveling experience through the islands’ simultaneous dimensions:  past and present, colonial and post-colonial, personal and universal.

A non-category for a film impossible to categorize

For Cynthia Beatt, the RealeNonReale section feels like a natural home. She has little patience for the rigid distinctions between fiction and documentary that govern most film funding applications, and the word “hybrid” doesn’t quite satisfy her either. “Essay,” she says, “encompasses a lot of what is interesting for me in cinema.” The section’s premise that everything is cinema and categories should have no limits  is one she has embodied throughout her career, from her 1979 debut “Description of an Island”, co-directed with Rudolf Thome, to this, her most ambitious work to date.

Forty years in the making

The film’s origins stretch back to 1985, when Cynthia Beatt first began researching a return to Fiji after making a film in Vanuatu. In 1986, she met Tilda Swinton at the Berlin premiere of “Caravaggio” and immediately began discussing her as the protagonist. For years the project developed — including a period with Wim Wenders’ production company Road Movies before Beatt realised she wanted something smaller and more intimate. “It went through a long marinating process,” she says. “If I’d made it then, it wouldn’t be what it is now.” Hurricanes destroyed locations, people died, and the film had to be constantly rethought, always with the generous help of Fijians who guided her when she needed to go a different way.

Fiji as the main character

One of the most striking decisions in the film is the degree to which Tilda Swinton‘s role is stepped back to allow Fiji itself to take centre stage. “I became more and more clear that Fiji had to be the main character,” says Cynthia Beatt. “I didn’t want a white woman as the main character in a film about Fiji and Tilda understood that perfectly.” The film could not have been made without Fijian collaboration: an assistant cameraman, production assistants, and countless people who solved problems in what Beatt calls “the Fijian way” generously, communally, without fuss.

Home, belonging and the colonial gaze

Cynthia Beatt herself is a woman of many homes, Jamaica, Fiji, Berlin and the film is in part an exploration on what it means to belong to a place. “Berlin is not my home, even though I live there,” she says. “But when I go back to Fiji, I feel like I’m coming home.” More deeply, the film is about confronting the limitations of the European mind, what Beatt calls the “superior gene” that Europeans carry, often unconsciously. “The more you understand that, the more interesting it becomes,” she says. Through the process of making the film, guided by Fijian generosity, she found herself growing more conscious of her own position as a European and distancing herself emotionally from imperialism and colonialism.

Plot