Last night I went to see a special screening which featured segments of Michael Palin’s (of Monty Python fame) new documentary series on Eastern Europe. After the screening was a Q&Q segment with Jon-Paul Davidson, the film’s director.
The screening, which took place at the Lumiere Theater at NDK, got a lot of laughs from the audience (me included) which featured scenes of Palin drinking home-distilled Rakiya, dancing with pistol wielding gypsies in Plovdiv and hiking to the Seven Rila Lakes at Summer Solstice to see the “White Brotherhood” spiritual gathering. (Note: Not related to White Power or the Aryan Brotherhood). I had a lot of fun watching it despite numerous “technical difficulties” the theater staff encountered.
The Q&A was a desperately disappointing affair, and I felt sorry for J.P. Davidson as the audience showed the depths of their own insecurities and self consciousness about their country and history.
“Why did you show Bulgarian’s drinking Rakiya? The world will think we are all alcoholics!”
“Why did you include such a long segment about gypsies? The world will think we’re a backwards country full of gypsies!”
“Why didn’t you go to (insert someplace here) instead, so everyone could see how great that is?”
and stirring the most controversy…
“Why did your film give Macedonia credit in the development of the cyrillic alphabet? That was BULGARIA!!!! ARGHH!!”
Davidson politely listened to question after question like these and answered all in roughly the same way, highly paraphrased:
“Every country we went to had complaints about the way we portrayed them, but we were not out to create a fully representational or balanced documentary… we wanted to choose a few things that we as outsiders found interesting and focus on those with the limited time we had. I think you will in fact find that this film inspires more tourists to travel to Bulgaria and discover it for themselves which can’t be a bad thing.”
It may be because I grew up in Southern California in a culture that thrives and churns on constant exaltation and self-devouring criticism, building up and tearing down its own image on a regular basis, but I had hoped for an audience with a greater sense of humor and cultural pride, and not one that came across as ashamed an fearful at what had been swept out from under the rug.
