Silent horror: the director of The Tribe on his brutal film about life in a deaf school

http://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/may/13/the-tribe-deaf-school-drama-myroslav-slaboshpytskiy

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Myroslav Slaboshpytskiy is remembering his secondary school and the deaf children who attended the state boarding school that sat opposite it. “We used to hang out with the deaf kids,” he says. “But usually we’d just fight.”

Slaboshpytskiy, a great shambling bear of a man, traces with his hands a sweep of children running towards a focal point. “A boy from my school or one from theirs would pick on each other,” he says. “And the whole of my school would run to join in and defend him, and the whole of their school would run to defend their kid, and there would be these two walls of confrontation.”

Did this happen a lot? He offers a slow shrug of his shoulders. “The school I studied in was like a prison,” says the Ukranian writer-director. “And it produced a lot of people who I’m sure are now in prison.”

Slaboshpytskiy recalls looking at the deaf children as they were corralled into the fight, threatening to knock him out with hard swoops of their hands. He thought how similar he was to them, but how different their experiences were. “Even as an 11-year-old, I was mystified by their gesture language,” he says. “The idea for a film appeared a long time ago.”

Slaboshpytskiy, who has turned these memories into his debut film The Tribe, has not parted with this information easily, although on this bright spring morning in Soho, London, he does seem to be enjoying his first moments in the spotlight. Stretched out on a sofa with his wife, Elena, a film producer, and sharing private jokes with his translator, the 40-year-old easily positions himself in the great sweep of his nation’s history. “Ukraine is under assault as an independent state,” he says, “and The Tribe is the most successful movie of independent Ukraine. Since 1895, since the birth of cinematography, it’s the most rewarded movie in the history of Ukraine.”

He may have a point. When the film premiered at Cannes last year, Slaboshpytskiy was hailed as a great new voice in independent cinema – precisely because he does not use voices. The Tribe, using his 2010 exploratory short film Deafness as a base, is communicated completely in sign language – without voiceover, subtitles, added music or anything else that might help explanation. It’s performed by an ensemble cast of non-professional deaf actors – “children from the streets” – leaving us to work out the characters’ dynamics through gestures and symbols. As the trailer states: “For love and hatred, you don’t need translation.”

Related: The Tribe review – one of the most disturbing films of the year

And then there’s the story itself: a dark, unsparing portrait of the violent power structures of schools that exist beyond the control of teachers. The deaf school in Slaboshpytskiy’s film is controlled by gangs of older pupils, who extort the younger students – particularly the girls – into coarse acts of crime, thuggery and disinhibited sex. Yet the film is so well composed, so accomplished in its execution, that these strange, unfathomably violent relationships are communicated with just a few opening scenes. “Rehearsals and rehearsals and rehearsals,” he says of creating a film that often resembles a silent, nightmarish ballet.

Until last year, Slaboshpytskiy was an unknown entity in the west, even for the most ardent arthouse aficionado. But The Tribe has been in the making since he studied film-making at university in Kiev. “Even then, I had this idea of creating a contemporary silent movie,” the director says. “Using only silent language.” The film screened at Cannes on the same afternoon as Maidan, Sergei Loznitsa’s documentary about the Euromaidan activists who occupied Kiev’s Maidan Nezalezhnosti (Independence Square), eventually leading to the downfall of the country’s president, Viktor Yanukovych, in 2014. Almost inevitably, The Tribe was regarded as a parable for Ukraine’s shadowy fall into war, even though the script was written in 2011, years before the Maidan protests.

How much of what is in The Tribe has Slaboshpytskiy seen with his own eyes? “The episodes you see never actually took place in that order,” he says. “But if you take each scene individually, they’re testimonies from that society – from students I’ve talked to, from teachers. And some of those scenes I’ve experienced personally, at school and as a crime reporter.”

Some of the scenes I've experienced personally, at school and as a crime reporter

That was his first job out of university, and he reported from crime scenes across Kiev for the city’s broadcaster. Some of the footage is, apparently, on YouTube. I ask if he’s seen Nightcrawler, the 2014 noir-thriller in which Jake Gyllenhaal sells footage of crashes and murders to local news channels. He laughs heartily. “I think Nightcrawler is too romantic, too gentle,” he says. “I saw much, much worse.”

Slaboshpytskiy left Kiev for St Petersburg, spending his time writing and directing soaps for TV. In 2010, he returned home to work on his own projects. “There was a great renaissance in Ukrainian cinema,” he says. “Suddenly, the state was supportive of cinema, and 50 movies were made in three years. The Tribe was one of them.”

The film has won three awards, including the Critics’ Week grand prize at Cannes, where the French press dubbed it “un OVNI”, or a UFO – a film so strange, so lacking in familiarity, no one quite knows how to respond. Did he anticipate the reaction? “When it came to Cannes,” he says, “I was looking for an opponent, someone who would challenge my idea of silent cinema. It didn’t happen, so it made me feel like a pioneer.”

Instead, the film has been universally lauded, with rights sold in more than 40 countries. “We have to go to every country to talk about The Tribe,” says Slaboshpytskiy. “I’m getting used to having lunch with distributors. In France, they love the sex – no problem. But they struggle with the violence. In the US, they sit me down and say, ‘You see my man, the violence is no problem, but the sex might a deal-breaker.’ I don’t know where Britain is on that scale.” Producers from around the world have also been rushing to get in touch. “I’m suddenly a cool guy,” he says. “I’m now very hot property.”

His next film will be a depiction of the Chernobyl disaster, building on his 2012 short Nuclear Waste, funded by a German production company. Is this out of necessity, I ask, given the situation in Ukraine? Another laconic shrug. “After the change of the government, support for cinema in Ukraine collapsed again,” he says. “But I’ve told them any funds need to be used in Ukraine, it has to be in the Ukrainian language, and it has to be shot in Ukraine.”

In France they love the sex, but struggle with the violence. In the US violence is no problem, but sex is a deal-breaker

In one of the scenes, Ukraine is shown on a map as part of Europe, not Russia. Like the undeclared Russian troops that cross the borders of Ukraine, the figures that exert their control over the deaf children of The Tribe remain opaque, at a distance, scrupulously unaccountable.

Given how personal The Tribe is, given how much he has mined his own past to create it, does Slaboshpytskiy have a problem with the perceptions of his work as geopolitical allegory? “I have studied film history,” he says. “It says in books that German expressionists sensed the coming of fascism and that was reflected in their films. I was not very entertained by that idea. I thought it was a foolish statement. We had no idea what would happen to Ukraine when we started The Tribe. And I fear that, when I cease to be, some student will read the history of Ukraine and see The Tribe as a prophesy.”

But, as he was shooting the film (in his old school), the Maidan protests were appearing on the news every day. Surely that effected his mindset? “I was not aware that Maidan would take place,” he repeats. “But I lived in Kiev and breathed the same air as the people who took to the streets of Maidan. I felt the same problems, I was part of that life, part of that community. On some emotional level, maybe I felt Ukraine was going to end up the way it has. But all I can do is make cinema – and hope.”

• The Tribe is out 15 May.