Director Tobias Nölle On Making Berlinale Film ‘Tristan Forever’ On Very Remote Island: “It’s Super Freeing” – EFM DocSalon

About 235 people live on Tristan da Cunha, a volcanic island in the South Atlantic that is considered the remotest inhabited place on Earth. The question in the new film Tristan Forever is whether the population should be allowed to rise by one.

The feature, directed by Tobias Nölle and co-directed by Dr. Loran Bonnardot, just premiered at the Berlin Film Festival in the Panorama Dokumente section. It follows Bonnardot as the enigmatic physician and volunteer for Doctors Without Borders decides to leave his old existence behind for a new life on Tristan da Cunha. He must undergo a probationary period of a year before the island’s governing council votes on whether to allow him to stay permanently.

“[Loran] discovered Tristan da Cunha when he was 23 and started a relationship, a very close relationship with the island,” Nölle explained during a Q&A at the EFM’s DocSalon, a day after the world premiere. “Now he decided to go there and become a resident. That’s the setup of the film.”

Nölle, who grew up in Zurich and now resides in Berlin, said he first met Dr. Bonnardot through a filmmaking colleague.

“I had a French co-producer, Jean des Forêts, on a fiction film I did, Aloys. He called one day and told me he knows this guy who is obsessed with this island, and they tried to make a film, and he would be interested to meet me,” Nölle recounted. “Then [Dr. Bonnardot] came to Berlin and we took a walk and that’s how I met him and was pretty quickly fascinated by him. And of course, the first thing I did, I Googled [Tristan da Cunha] and I was like, whoa, that’s extremely far away and I want to go there. And a combination of the place and him made me then decide that I want to do this film.”

In Tristan ForeverDr. Bonnardot makes well-intended by slightly awkward attempts to integrate into the community. He goes to work at a general store — more or less the island’s equivalent of a 7-Eleven — and a potential romance buds between him and a Tristanian woman who’s in the process of getting a divorce. There’s a somewhat dreamy or vaguely unreal quality to this place so far from what one typically thinks of as civilization. And, in fact, Nölle and Bonnardot call the film not documentary but docufiction.

“That’s absolutely the point — for the viewer to have the pleasure to figure out is this fiction, where is the documentary [element]? That was the idea because it’s a film about a utopian place and you don’t really know if it exists,” Nölle observed. “Also, Loran told me in the beginning, he sometimes is not sure if the place exists or if it’s just a figment in his head. And for me it was clear if we can find this line between the real and imaginative, that could bring across the feeling of the island. And so far, people that watch the film, they kind of like that. Sometimes they’re not sure and obviously I’m not going to tell them what is real. It’s up to you. That’s the riddle.”

There is certifiably documentary material from 65 years ago incorporated into Tristan Foreverblack and white footage shot in 1961 when a volcanic eruption forced the evacuation of all the island’s residents, who were relocated to the UK. Like Bonnardot but in reverse – going from a remote place to a densely populated one — the islanders were meant to stay permanently in their new surroundings, but it didn’t take.

“After two years in the UK they said, ‘No thanks, we want to go back,’” Nölle reported. “And [in] the UK, [people] were kind of offended, because they got everything. They gave them televisions, jobs and cars and all that, but they were like, ‘Ah, no, we prefer to go back to the end of the world.’”

Ships arrive every few months to resupply the island. Many “modern conveniences” exist on Tristan da Cunha, just not everything taken for granted in “developed” societies.

“You don’t have a cell phone network. You cannot send messages. Internet only starts at 7 p.m. or 5 p.m., I don’t remember. During the day they need it for the shipping and emergency kinds of things. And it’s super freeing when you come there,” the director said. “It sounds escapist, but honestly almost for a moment I was also relieved that you’re just away from everything. And in the beginning, it’s a bit strange. You cannot [text] home, ‘Oh, I arrived.’ But after a while it’s so easy to get away from the phone.”

Would Nölle be tempted to follow Dr. Bonnardot’s lead and consider relocating to Tristan da Cunha permanently?

“No,” he said without hesitation. After a pause, he added, “I mean, I loved to be there, but after a while I also missed very much the continent. There is no restaurant, there is no cinema. Mostly I missed to go to the cinema or to go to the theater, things like that. But I can totally understand why [Tristanians] decided to stay there and why they refused to move away. And if I had been born there, I would be super happy and stay there. But when you come from the outside, it’s different.”

Nölle continued, “I think everybody that goes there takes a little peace from what they preserved inside of them with them. And I hope I did so too because the main thing in the island is really, they weigh solidarity over prosperity. And to see that is extremely touching because I haven’t seen any place like that. And they look after each other. Money doesn’t really matter.”

This is the second film of Nölle’s to premiere at the Berlinale, after Aloys in 2016.

“I love the festival. It’s a very warm festival,” he said. “Now I live in Berlin, so it was very nice to have so many people I know at the premiere. No, I’ve only good things to say about the festival… For this film, we had to decide for the premiere if we go for an all-documentary festival. But I think Berlinale is perfect because they don’t really care so much about the labeling — if it’s documentary, if it’s a hybrid. And that I appreciate because, myself, I don’t really think in those terms. So, I think Berlinale is perfect.”