Mother Company | young choir gives community a fresh voice in docu-fiction

A choir of children in a disused factory telling the story of post-industrial malaise: the powerful creativity, storytelling and engagement in experimental docu-fiction short Mother Company has been making people sit up and start talking.

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Exeter Uni’s Professor Konstantinos Thomaidis picked up the Best Director Award at the Berlin Indie Shorts Festival for the doc, which he co-helmed with Alexander Raptotasios. Mother Company also bagged the Best Artists’ Film Award at the BAFTA-qualifying Aesthetica.

The past, the now, the promise

The film blends verbatim performance and choral music from a children’s choir in an abandoned power plant in Northern Greece. It’s part lost past, part grim economic and environmental now, and part a promise of a ‘Green Future’, which has yet to arrive.

It’s a move into a new medium for Konstantinos, who has spent a career in theatre and music. But he was drawn into film at an early age, when he found himself analyzing the medium in Besançon, East France, as a teenager attending a summer workshop.

“I got hooked into this idea about what you don’t see – what’s happening behind cameras to make what you see visible,” he says.

Communities and rurality

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The dive into documentary came through theatre. Off the back of a two-year theatre touring piece, featuring 20 choirs and as many venues, Konstantinos and co-director Alexander were commissioned to take that interest in communities and rurality into a film about regions of Greece that relate to energy production.

“I am from Northern Greece, so I’m quite familiar with what’s happening there,” says Konstantinos. “But it’s not very prominent in the national discourse, so I really wanted to tell that story.”

People need to know

That interest had been enriched during their touring. “We had three choirs and four shows there,” says Konstantinos. “We started hearing a lot of stories, and we said ‘this is something that people need to know about’.”

What followed was six months of field work, reconnaissance visits, 26 formal interviews, and a lot of informal interviews.

“Alexander was adamant that he wanted to involve the community,” says Konstantinos. They both wanted to avoid the singular sense of reality that pointing a camera can bring.

Current issues

“A lot of the voices that were coming forward to us were of a particular demographic, but I felt that these issues are very current,” says Konstantinos. “For me, it became, how do we think about the future?” That’s when they decided on having the children narrate the verbatim text from the interviews.

As a musician, Konstantinos was keen to use music and sound to make a further comment on the reality of the region.

The disused factory had the imposing age of the first one created after the war. It ceased working 10 years ago because of a fire accident. “But for me and Alexander, it became the building that we wanted to inhabit, because it had this trace of history and generations of workers there; and the good and the bad that happened in the region.”

They spent three months making it safe for the filmmakers, the crew and the 30 kids who would be on set.

A new way of looking

The use of children in the midst of an imposing and decaying building forced a new way of looking at the issues of health and environmental impact the old industry wrought on the area, along with the economic uncertainty of their future.

“We felt that children bring a new perspective, and they make you listen more.”

One of the surprises was how keen the young people were to take part.

“When we organized the topics that emerged from the interviews, the children selected which group they wanted to go to and which lines to use. It was another layer of agency.”

Putting music front and centre added to that newness.

“I created the choral music,” says Konstantinos. “And we collaborated with Jeph Vanger, who’s an incredible sound designer and he came with us to make recordings in the region.”

In one of the songs, the children reenacted the sounds of the machines and the labour that would have been heard there. Another is a traditional song from the region. “It’s a folk song. In my mind, it acquired a lot of metaphoric potency, because it talks about an apple tree that’s hanging over the edge of a cliff. And it says to people, ‘come, come, I’m going to feed you’.” One piece plays with the acoustics of the building, and becomes like a lamentation.

Committment

“What was incredible was how much the children wanted to do the project, and how much of themselves they put into the project,” says Konstantinos. “We wanted them to get something out of it, so we taught them songs. I taught them vocal warm-ups to use in their choir, and other songs that we didn’t use in the film.”

The response has been unexpected. The UK premiere at Aesthetica in York inspired memories of that area’s post-industrial heritage. Mother Company has gone to festivals, community workshops, and is part of a programme in Greece, run by the Ministry of Education, for films that are shown in schools. And it was selected by a global initiative, Art Speaks Out, that ran parallel to the climate summit that was in Brazil.

“It is great that it’s finding that kind of audience, one that’s not just interested in the form or the story, but also the environment and how communities can come together.”

The film also marks how sound and music can be so front and centre in an audio-visual documentary.

And it has inspired Konstantinos to double down on his commitment to projects that have some sort of social or community aspect.

Responsibility

“I do feel, ethically and politically, that we have a responsibility to intervene and to at least invite people into discussions through our aesthetic means,” he says. He’s found himself more actively pursuing those projects: working with disabled people and also with the trans community.

Konstantinos has started exploring film more, such as an artistic video in Coventry called Choral Afterlives, an exploration of the question “when the song is done, what do communities do with all the music you make with them when you leave?”

He and Alexander are also preparing for a new film.

With Mother Company he had one goal. “What I really wanted was to make something that the community would feel proud of and really involved in, and it took a while, but that’s what happened.”

Mother Company is being shown as part of the DocLab documentary strand at Two Short Nights at the Exeter Phoenix. Get your tickets.