Question: Chrigu wants a film that doesn’t moralize and isn’t sad, but fun. A tough assignment for a film that shows a young man suffering until he dies. Would you say the plan succeeded?

Jan Gassmann: Of course it’s an illusion to make a fun film about someone who is dying. But the intention of not conveying the theme to the viewer in an oppressive way is clearly recognizable in the film.

Question: You send the viewer on an emotional roller coaster ride. Christian’s sufferings are balanced again and again by scenes from untroubled days. What emotions in the film are the most important for you?

J.G.: I think the most important emotions are those that show how one deals with life. In the archive materials from Christian’s earlier years, there is an incredible lightness and inner freedom. This feeling for life later makes way for his inner acceptance of his fate, which once again leads to a feeling of freedom. Christian very clearly shows us this attitude of accepting his own fate, and I hope that at the end of the film the viewer can also accept that he has to die and recognizes that Christian followed his own path all the way to the end.

Question: CHRIGU is a very personal film. What significance did it have for Christian? Was the camera also a means for him to communicate with his friends and relatives?

J.G.: Film is communication, and especially in such a personal project. Christian’s friends and relatives visited him as often as they could, but when they did so, they only experienced part of him. They couldn’t conduct all these talks that went on between us. Christian wanted to show people what he was going through and how the disease changed him. He was an exceptionally gregarious person who had lots of friends. But suddenly he sat alone in a small room and realized that he no longer had any desire to communicate. He wanted to convey this experience to others.A certain narcissism definitely also plays a role. Christian didn’t want to be forgotten, and the film was a means by which he tried to achieve this. On the other hand, filming, which accompanied him for the entire duration of his illness, itself became a kind of helpful self-reflection for him. For example, when he says to the camera that if he has a relapse, he will commit suicide, then he is using the cinematic situation as a kind of insurance: because he has said and eternalized it on video, he has the irrational certainty that it will never happen.

Question: Christian is initially alone as he documents the first phases of his illness. When was the decision made to work on the film together? Did you work out a plan for this?

J.G.: When I heard about Christian’s relapse, I almost immediately felt the desire to make a film. At first I was ashamed of this idea, because it also has something to do with a flight from reality. Besides, I didn’t relish the prospect that the last time I would be with Christian I would be mostly behind the camera. Then one afternoon we spoke openly about it together. The material he had shot by himself up till then – he didn’t simply want to leave it lying around; at the same time, the medications and painkillers he was on took such a toll that he couldn’t remain active. So Christian was enthusiastic about my suggestion to complete the film together. We developed a rough plan that included the trip to the Baltic Sea, where he wanted his ashes strewn after his
death. That may sound macabre, but this sequence is in the film exactly the way we imagined it. For Christian, the most important thing was to show what was special about his situation: What does a normal young person go through when he is confronted with a fatal illness? My part in the film initially consisted in setting up the camera and bombarding Christian with questions or observing him. I had to keep at him, because he could have easily succumbed to his morphine high and slept all day. The biggest task for me was the editing at the end. I had 130 hours of material available and had to try to draw a differentiated picture of Christian with it. That took a good year.

Question: The film can be roughly divided into two parts: at the beginning, Christian describes himself, his thoughts and knowledge; in the second part, you are the director and the camera observes.

J.G.: Indeed, there are two very different approaches. In the first part of the film, Christian has the strength to keep a video diary and to tell the viewer what he wants to. To a certain degree, he thereby stages himself, of course. For the second part, we agreed that nothing should be staged. Here Christian takes off all the masks a person normally wears. He doesn’t care what he looks like on camera and has nothing left to lose. The tension that becomes palpable between these two approaches says a lot about Christian’s way of dealing with the disease: at first, he tried to control it, believed he could steer everything himself, and filmed himself the way he likes to see himself. Later he accepted his fate and tried to deal with the advancing illness as calmly as possible and to enjoy his final time with friends and relatives.
The image he sketches of himself in the first part of the film encompasses opinions and convictions that are revised in light of the observations of his daily life in the second part. The viewer notices that this person has greatly changed in just a few months.

Question: In the course of the illness, Christian realizes that the question of why merely burdens him with guilt. Did this realization help him accept his fate?

J.G.: I posed the question of why again later, after his relapse. At first he tried to repeat his earlier answer, which was that one shouldn’t pose this question. In the end it became clear to him that this answer had lost its validity for him. If you reject the question “Why did this happen to me?” then you also reject your fate. By the time he knew he was dying he had grasped his illness as an opportunity and accepted it.

Question: The viewer sees Christian filming himself in front of reflecting windows or mirrors. What significance do these aesthetic means have?

J.G.: In part, these pictures emerged from a certain necessity: someone wants to make a film about himself, by himself – and where does he see himself? On the other hand, I also always sense in this footage the attempt at selfconfirmation: What do I look like? Who am I? Christian’s body changed radically in the course of the illness. At some point, his face looked completely different from before. I think that, with this footage, he sometimes asked himself: Is that really me? He was in a phase in which he didn’t want to or wasn’t able to completely grasp his situation, in which he didn’t want to deny his disease, but still thought: this is an episode that I will gladly look back on later, when it’s over and I can say I overcame it.

Question: Christian’s family plays a smaller role in the film
than his friends do. Why?

J.G.: In this film, I’m not primarily a filmmaker, but Christian’s friend. Accordingly, I didn’t approach this story from the outside by deciding that my protagonists should be persons X, Y, and Z. I already knew Christian’s friends much better than I did his family, long before we made this film. That influenced my perspective. Additionally, I spent a lot of time alone with Christian and, when his brothers or parents came, I often left, to respect his privacy. But I am very happy that his parents supported this film and permitted me to film them. In his last time, Christian’s family was extremely important to him.

Question: Christian went on tour with the Mundartisten; his trip to India is shown, a boat trip, and again and again trips on trains, rails, tunnels. What trip does the film take the viewer along on?

J.G.: The journey the viewer shares in has a lot to do with the realization that this good-looking young man, who was just leaping into a cotton field in India, carries a deadly disease in him and will ultimately die. A simple plot line: a young man has to die. But in the film you see what that
means. Death and dying – that all sounds very sad. And yet we laughed even in his last days. Of course, sadness came; of course you miss this person when you see that he’s no longer there. But at the end of the journey, the viewer should be able to say: I can accept that he has died, it was his path. Some viewers may hope that a turning point comes and Christian will recover. That this doesn’t happen shows the viewer at the end of this documentary movie that death will stand at the end of his own journey, too.

Interview: Tina Balzer, January 2007