A Child - A Shot - A "Family Affair"

The director and producer, Chico Colvard, who is situated in Boston, USA, has made a fascinating and important film about family issues. He is the son of a German-Jewish mother and an African-American father.
Colvard is also a lawyer and teaches "race, law and media" related courses at the University of Massachusetts in Boston.

Claus Friede spoke with Chico Colvard in Berlin, Germany about his film.

FAMILY AFFAIR - by Director | Producer, Chico Colvard from chico colvard on Vimeo.

 

Synopsis:
 

At 10 years old, Chico Colvard accidentally shot his older sister in the leg. This seemingly random act detonated a chain reaction that exposed unspeakable realities and shattered his family. Thirty years later, Colvard ruptures veils of secrecy and silence again. As he bravely visits his relatives, what unfolds is a personal film that's as uncompromising, raw, and cathartic as any in the history of the medium.

Driving the story forward is Colvard's sensitive probing of a complex dynamic: the way his three sisters survived severe childhood abuse by their father and, as adults, manage to muster loyalty to him. These unforgettable, invincible women paint a picture of their harrowing girlhoods as they resiliently struggle with present-day fallout. The distance time gives them from their trauma yields piercing insights about the legacy of abuse, the nature of forgiveness, and eternal longing for family and love. These truths may be too searing to bear, but they reverberate powerfully within each of us.


Claus Friede (CF): There are people who write poetry, paint or compose. You have chosen the genre of film. What motivated you to this decision?

Chico David Colvard (CDC): I think three things: First and most obvious is my personal commitment to the story.

Secondly, what brought me to the film was my legal background and ability to pay attention to details - to the writing. Writing was very important to the film, both in terms of applying for grants, trying to raise money around the project, but also to take me deeper into an understanding of answering the question: "Why am I making this film?"

And then, thirdly, I think was a creative writing piece which I think really helped to drive the narrative structure of the film, because for me if you can visualize the editing system, you have your visual tracks, you have your soundtracks on the bottom, your music and your special effects. For me, it always begins with the story, always about being true to the story, with the language, with the dialogue, with the narrative. And then I built everything else up around it. So there would be these major holes, visually, but I knew that the story really had to hold up and the visuals came second to me.

So I think my personal relationship to the film, coupled with my legal background and commitment to story telling are what motivated me to choose film.

CF: Have you always had a preference for film as a media? Do you have any childhood memories regarding film?

CDC: The first film I saw was “Blazing Saddles” by Mel Brooks, with my dad in Germany, in Bad Tölz. Growing up in Germany on a lot of military bases we would get one or two channels, this is late 1960s or 70s. And it would be “The Honeymooners”, “I love Lucy”, “Night Gallery” or “Alfred Hitchcock presents”, but it would all be German voice over dubbed. But because we weren’t allowed to speak German in the house we were solely relying on my mother to tell us what was happening. So late at night these great shows would come on and we kids were all supposed to go to bed. And I always sneaked out into the living room where my mom and dad were watching Alfred Hitchcock or something and I just was always mesmerized by these images and my mother was sort of story telling. I was never sure if it was an exact translation or if she was making things up, but I remember when they first got films in English. I guess it was a satellite feed... it was a big thing! Everyone around was like: “Oh yeah, Alfred Hitchcock is in English tonight” and getting the permission to stay up to watch that. I just love images and I think in images, I problem solve in images. Moving images has also very much informed what I teach. I teach race, law and media related courses; for me it has always been an intimate part of my identity.

CF: Is “Family Affair” your first film?

CDC: It’s my first documentary that I have been working on for nearly 9 years. I hear other people at a workshops talking about their filmmaking war stories, saying: “I have been working on this film for three years…” I guess It's relative. But yes, this is my first film, it has been quite an education. The people who have got involved in this project are better accomplished filmmakers, decision makers and players in the film business. So I learned a lot from them, but I still have a lot more to learn.


CF: You named the film “Family Affair”. Could you briefly state what the movie is about?

CDC: When I was about nine years old, I discovered one of my father’s firearms, a rifle, and I used to watch Chuck Connors in the Western series “The Rifleman”. So while my sisters were busy cleaning and doing whatever, I went down to the family room, watching TV, the “Rifleman”. So one day I must have found not only my father’s rifle but the bullets too, and I would put the bullets in. I went upstairs in the kitchen, where my sister was washing dishes and I remember pointing the gun at her head and remembered thinking: “Rifleman wouldn’t do that”. So I actually pointed at her leg, thinking: “Rifleman only shoots people in the leg”. Because people would get shot in the leg and they put a band aid on and they would get back on their horse and then they were fine. I don’t remember pulling the trigger, as they say, but the gun went off and it hit her right in the leg. Then I remember the fire coming out of the barrel and the smoke and the sound. And then it seemed from that point on, my life as a child stopped.

My sister obviously was taken to the hospital and unlike in the movies, where people get shot in the leg and get back on the horse and go on with life -- they thought that she might not make it, she lost a lot of blood and so she thought that she might die. And it was there, believing that she was going to die that she had revealed to my mother and then later to the police that our father had been sexually molesting her and my other two sisters for years. And so my father went to prison for less then a year. Our family fell apart. We went in separate directions. I never really understood the full magnitude of what my father had done until years later and then stopped having a relationship with him, but my sisters have maintained a relationship with him all the while after he was released from prison.

CF: Even after that?

CDC: Oh, yes. And once I understood what he did I couldn’t understand why they would have a relationship with this man. I had not seen my dad for 15 years, until one day my sisters invited me for Thanksgiving and I found out just moments before that my dad was going to be there.

CF: In which year did you receive the Thanksgiving invitation?

CDC: This was in 2001. I always imagined that I would confront him, burn a cross in his yard and everyone would get behind me and we would beat him up (laughs).
And then he walks in the door and everybody runs up to him, hugging and smiling and laughing… But this was absurd, and you know – I felt that I was the outsider. And at the same moment, I also realized that I was afraid of him, that I feared him. Even though he was overweight, and had suffered several heart attacks, and I knew he couldn’t physically hurt me, l still was looking at him through the eyes of a terrified child. So basically, I hid behind this little camcorder, this little camera that I had and I felt like a coward.
I got back to Boston, where I live and I remembered saying to somebody, that if I thought I was going to make a film or a documentary or start something like that, I’m a complete failure because I didn’t confront him. And somebody said to me “I think that is your film. Your film is about: Why is everybody running up to him, accommodating this man? Why were you afraid? Why were you hiding behind the camera? Why is everyone treating him like nothing happened?” So for me that became what the film is about.

CF: Isn’t the title of the film too harmless?

CDC: I don’t think it is harmless at all. On the surface it seems like its harmless…

CF: In the first moment it seems like that, however there has to be a second reason why you chose it…

CDC: “Family Affair” occurred to me right away. It is a play on the sitcom from the late 1960s. “Family Affair” was about a wholesome family, where Uncle Bill raised Jody and Buffy, the kids. They have a butler and they live in a nice penthouse apartment in New York. And everything is very kosher.
I wanted to do a play on the title because, on the surface to an outsider, if you didn’t know this history, it would seem like “Family Affair” - in the best sense of the term – is about a happy, harmonious, perfectly, sort of well adjusted family, sticking together, but once you dig beneath the surface, then the term ‘affair’ becomes something rather seductive and insidious, like cheating on your partner. I thought it brought double meaning to the title and I wanted to play on that.

The title was right there and interesting, no one has ever asked me that questions!


CF: To which extent and how did your feelings towards your father, mother and maybe even sisters change during the shooting (filming)?

CDC: The change for me was my understanding of my sister’s relationship with our father. I realized that what they were creating is something very basic, very universal... something that we all ‘desire’ and that I had given up on, they continued to pursue. Everyone wants a loving mother and a loving father. Everybody wants a warm place to go for these special occasions, for holidays and for special events. Nobody wants a child to grow up to have to go school and to get the shit kicked out of them because they have to admit that their father or their grandfather is a child’s molester and that’s why they have no place to go for Thanksgiving. And so they fought really hard to give their children something they’d never had. They fought really hard not to have to constantly explain to people why they don’t have a relationship to their father. And so that was a real learning experience for me. I really understood that. For me I gave up all hope of a better past. I didn’t feel the need to reconstruct a better past with my father. I see him for what he is, but I don’t feel the desire, the need to have this superficial relationship with my father so that the rest of the world can treat me the way they should treat me. Instead I decided to make a very public film, to expose him for what he is and to say to the world that I should not be held hostage to the sins of my father. I should not have to pay for what he did. I refused to. Here you go world, here is what he did. I’m not that person. I’m the apple that fell very far away from the tree.

My mother wanted to have a relationship with me. I didn’t expect her to open the door after 18 years. I didn’t think there was anything she could say that would explain why she had left. But I thought she had made a very convincing argument for why she left and as an adult, I got it. So, she wanted to have a relationship with me but not my sisters. But for me that was not really an option. I wasn’t going to betray my sisters.

CF: Let’s elaborate a bit on your mother. As I watched the film, I already noticed in the first scene, with which joy she had opened the door for you, she seemed so free and uninhibited, and especially willing to give you information. She spoke over her story, her background and at that moment I realized that the film was interweaving three storylines and topics. The first thread is apartheid; the second is about violence and lastly the cultural differences. Your mother comes from Germany and your father was an African-American soldier. How do see these issues in reference to each other?

CDC: I think all of these issues are intimately connected to one another. And I tried to address this in the film. I think that my mother was as much a victim as my sisters. Here is this very young vulnerable foreign German woman who meets this Afro American military guy who grew up in the segregated south of Georgia in America. He comes to Germany and he promises her all of these dreams of going to America, he used to buy her these little 45 Elvis recordings. “This is what I can offer you: America!” He gives her these stuffed animals. He gives her his GI check and tells her to go to the stores and buy whatever she wants. And attempts to try and convince her that they can overcome the obstacles of apartheid, of segregation and racism, that banned interracial marriages in the United States. So they got married in 1959, the ban against interracial marriage criminalizing interracial marriages didn’t happen until 1967, the year I was born. And the attitudes were still there after 1967.
So he takes her from her environment in Germany. He places her into an environment that is radically hostile towards their relationship. He in fact keeps her hostage on this little island. That’s what he does. She can’t go back home, she can’t run to the police, she can’t go to the community in the neighborhood. She is trapped. So at this point my father could do whatever he wants to do with her. And he always has the threat: “I can keep your kids. I'll have you deported. You can’t go to the police” because they’d call her: "A nigger lover” and tell her that she deserves whatever punishment my father would hand out. "This is what you get for marrying this black guy" the police would say whenever she'd call them.

CF: Evidently, and this you had already said at the beginning of the interview, you were not allowed to speak German at home. It sounds to me as though fear of a different culture was predominant. Specific conflicts had already existed at the beginning of the relationship, which had been inevitable and insoluble…

CDC: There was this conflict. But here is the “masterful art” of a pedophile. These men, who do these things, with this particular pathology – and looking back we can say, it appears that there was a conflict from the very beginning. And my mother is the first to say. The first time he raised his hand to her, she should have been out of there. But it’s not that clear cut.
So he didn't just say: “I am removing you from your heritage, you can’t speak German” because I’m insecure about it, because I want to strip you of your identity. Nobody would say that. And anyone who did say that to someone would be like “you’re crazy, I’m out of here, bye…”.

Instead he used the political climate at that time, which was the cold war, which was this military environment, which called for all foreigners to assimilate. Wanting to become American is to speak English only.
To speak another language was at that time to be anti American, un-patriotic. That was what he used!

CF: Sometimes in your film you change the narrative and formal perspective. On the one hand you’re the one behind the camera, who is seemingly neutral, yet on the other hand you’re in front of the camera and actually involved in the scene. Was that always intended?

CDC: Extremely, very deliberate. When you say that, I see my wall with all the color coded index cards. The different colors were assigned to one of the subjects in the film - myself, my sister, my parents, or to a topic… The color code, for me, was visual, because, if I saw too much purple and not enough yellow, or blue, then I knew that I needed to see a more even balance of color to help with pacing and to ensure that I wasn't spending too much or too little time on one person or subject. I needed to have the same amount of treatment of yellow and purple, as blue. This is mostly how my editor and I worked.

Initially, I didn’t have myself in the film at all. It was just going to be a tribute to my sisters. It was all about them. Period! And I got a lot of push back on that and I resisted inserting myself in the film for years. Every time I would go through and log and digitize the footage… and every time my voice even came on, that was my out point. That was my queue for where to cut. And at first I cut ALL of me out of the film. But then, four or five years into the project, I had to go through all the footage and find my voice and find a way to work it in again. I cut some major scenes of me in the film because I didn’t feel comfortable with the way it compared me to my sisters. It showed me teaching at the university, a world somewhat removed from my sisters' daily lives. It just seemed like a distraction from the main story. So it became a delicate balancing act trying to figure out exactly how much of myself I wanted to place in the film.

CF: We spoke about images. An essential part of the film for me is the music, which you had chosen. I consider it as suited, calm, reduced and to a certain degree even classic, the piano is dominant and it has a recurring melody. How did you come to this music selection?

CDC: The composer is Miriam Cutler and she is a phenomenal film composer. She has worked on a number of documentaries. She has worked on a number of films with Rory Kennedy, like ”Ghosts of Abu Ghraib” and “The Fence” and I was using some of her music for my temp music plus some of the temp music from Babel, Syriana I was sort of tapping into that kind of tempo, the essence of that sort of music which is haunting. It is composed, it is not just a “bed” of tones, it has a presence and is clearly doing something underneath the dialogue and images. But what I would do is, where things where really volatile, uneasy, is to have the music play just beneath the rough ocean current. And where things where really calm I wanted the music to come out of the water and play above the surface... if that makes any sense? Yes, I did want there to be a theme, certain familiar melodies, but I didn’t want it to be redundant. I did not want you to feel like we were looping it over and over. So we would use different instrumentation. Sometimes the clarinet would pick up the theme, sometimes the piano.

And initially, its sort of the way I work with the editor, with anybody. I want to give them the freedom to just go. In my head I know what I want but I refrain from telling them because I want to be surprised. I want to be open to something that I haven’t even considered. And that happens and that’s wonderful when it happens. But then you get to the point where you are up against the clock and you have to step in, you have to make a call. And so she had over composed a number of cues and I would go in and strip them down. I wanted a very pure sound, no synthesizers, just real instruments that were somewhat under stated. And there did come a point when I flew to her studio in LA. There we had an intense two day session; working 16 to 18 hours a day side by side and it was one of the most productive, creative moments on the project that I ever had. We just sat and went through each cue, over and over, until we got it where it needed to be and I’m really happy with the end result. It’s understated without being absent. It’s composed, without being over composed and I don’t think it gets in the way of the dialogue. There was one point with my sister Chiquita, when she talks about enjoying the sex with our father. I wanted the music to be really dramatic. I wanted the music to compete with her bite. I wanted the music to challenge the dialogue or for her searing dialogue to challenge the music. And it was totally contrary to anything else I was instructing my composer to do on the film. So much so, that my composer didn't trust me -- because everything else I was telling her was to “strip that track. Get rid of that, get rid of that…” She was conditioned by me to get rid of layers, not build them up. Then in this one moment, with only days before my Sundance deadline, I was like: “Over compose!”.

CF: There is a scene in the film in which your sister Chiquita asks you, why you are so fascinated with your camera and what motivates you. To me it seems, as though you're not really answering...

CDC: No, I do answer. She takes a sip of wine, we let it play, out she looks and she says: ” What gives you the drive, why are you so fascinated with the camera? What gives you the drive to do it over and over and over?
And I answer! I say: “You!”
And she says: “Me? I am not that fascinating. I’m just as normal as anybody else…”

But sorry, you had not finished your question…


CF: Okay, I don’t consider your answer really convincing and I wonder and question if there is more to the „you“ than the eye can see.

CDC: Yes, certainly. The question was what gives me the drive to do it. The answer was the right answer. My sisters! They drive me they fuel me to continue and to do it over and over again. Every time when I wanted to quit and give up I thought about what they have gone through, the struggle. My father used to say: ”If you're going to swim half way across the ocean and then get tired – don’t swim back, it’s the same distance ahead. Keep going!”
And that’s part of the drive too. At that point, after you start shooting, you place yourself in these emotionally and physically draining situations. After awhile it is like you have such an invested interest in it. You don’t know what the outcome is going to be, but you have to sort of see it through.
My sisters gave me the drive to continue!
But yes, there were certainly other motivations: I needed to have certain answers to my questions. I needed to get my father to tell me why he did what he did. But as in the hospital scene, I realized it was not important what he had to say, but that I find the courage to ask the question. And as soon as I asked the question, it was one of the most liberating experiences for me. I actually edited that scene in a way that I experienced it. I had the headphones on, sound check was good and I’m sure I heard his answer, but I didn’t. Which is why in the film I turn the volume down on him, because it didn’t matter what he had to say. There is no real excuse or explanation for what he did. At that moment, the loudest voice in my head was that terrified little boy I used to be; jumping up and down, crying: “We are free! We are free!”. It was really the first time for me, 38 years old, where I felt that I was a man. I was free and liberated from the hold my father used to have over me. I wasn’t afraid of him any more.

CF: Which topic will follow after such an autobiographical film, which also carries such a taboo story into the public discourse?

CDC: For me this film is not just liberating in terms of my identity as a human being and being able to move forward and be free from this terrible past, it also allows me the possibility to make all the films I always dreamt about when I was a child. So there are at least three projects that I’m considering right now, but I'm only going to focus on one. It's a love story about racist memorabilia.

CF: You showed this movie during the Sundance Festival 2010. What were the reactions?

CDC: I never made the film with an eye toward getting into “Sundance” or any other festival and I never would have been able to finish the film if that would have been my motivation. Getting into “Sundance” and in competition really exceeded my expectations. It was quite an honor to be there and quite a magical and intense experience. For me the real reward was the audience reaction to the film. They really responded to it in such a raw and emotional way. To have people stand up in a crowd of hundreds of people... strangers and tell their stories about family crisis, survival and forgiveness... and to know that "Family Affair" is the film that gave them the permission to talk about it for the first time is quite a humbling experience. This seems to take place after every screening, either immediately after the Q&A or later in an email or facebook.

CF: Can one even answer each and everyone?

CDC: It’s becoming a real challenge. I feel a deep sense of commitment to everyone who takes the time to write, because I know where they at. And I know what courage it takes to reach out like that; to make yourself vulnerable to someone else. I know how unsafe that can feel and how alone they can feel. And it’s such a journey and I feel a tremendous sense of obligation to answer and respond each of them.

CF: Isn’t it like a kind of avalanche? And you don‘t even have a crew, which supports you and answers their e-mails…

CDC: Yes, it is an avalanche and a simple copy and paste job won't do. Not to compare, but I think about Obama, his crew has to respond to all kinds of crisis: Haiti, unemployment, oil in the gulf.
This is the one little thing that I can do. I can honestly respond to these e-mails. I can make the time for that. Usually, I'll sit at my desk, have a glass of wine and respond. It always matters to me, whenever somebody I'm looking to connect with or seek advice from actually takes the time to thoughtfully respond.

CF: Did your sisters receive any reactions regarding the film?

CDC: They were there for the first two screenings at Sundance. And they took part in the “Q&A”. The audience responded to them and it was so intense and emotional as I mentioned earlier.

One of my sisters said to the audience: “We didn’t know how the audience would respond to us. We believe that this is an important story that needs to be told and needs to make its way out into the world in a very public way. But you never know. Hearing your response to us makes us feel like in some way as if you are the extended family, who cares for us in ways that we never had growing up”. It was a very powerful statement. I always believed that the audience would be as much a part of the film as my sisters are -- and not merely as passive viewers, who would be drawn in at a safe distance, but that they would see themselves embodied in my sisters' story. And so far, that seems to be the case.


Chico Colvard - Director|Producer
Chico was born in Augsburg, Germany, the son of a WWII German-Jewish mother and African-American father raised in the segregated south of Georgia. After pursuing a career in theatre arts, Chico received his J.D. from Boston College Law School and now teaches "race, law & media" related courses at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. He is a former Filmmaker-in-Residence at WGBH, a member of the Producer's Lab at Firelight Media and former Sundance Institute Creative Producing Fellow. FAMILY AFFAIR is Chico's feature-length documentary debut, which premiered in competition at Sundance and has since shown around the world. FAMILY AFFAIR has received Audience and Best Documentary Feature Awards and was the first film acquired by Oprah Winfrey for her new cable channel, OWN. FAMILY AFFAIR was selected by the International Documentary Association to Oscar qualify during the 2010 DocuWeeks Theatrical Showcase in L.A. and NYC.


Web: https://www.c-linefilms.com
Photo credits: Chico Colvard, c-line Films
Image 5 (gallery): Claus Friede with Chico Colvard, Berlin, 2010.