| Several weeks ago, [archinect] featured Bregtje van der Haak's interactive documentary, Lagos Close and Wide: an Interactive Journey into an Exploding City, originally released as a DVD in 2004 and now available online. The project emerged from van der Haak's 2001 trip to Lagos, Nigeria with the architect Rem Koolhaas and their attempt to capture the city at a crucial moment in its emergence as the fastest growing city on the continent. ("Every hour, fifty new people start their lives in Lagos" states the film's description). The documentary utilizes a novel and innovative format in which the information is organized by distance – close-up, through the perspective of bus driver Olawole Busayo, and the more distant perspective typical of many urban studies. Users choose between these visual perspectives as well as various audio by Koolhaas and Lagosians. We recently touched base with van der Haak to better understand her motivations behind the project and experiences of making it. |
Lagos Close and Wide is – at least for me – a new way of experiencing a documentary. How did you develop this presentation format?
First I made a linear documentary film with Rem Koolhaas in Lagos, called Lagos/Koolhaas (60 minutes, video, produced by Pieter van Huystee Film & Television). It premiered at IDFA in 2002.
However, I was not satisfied with what we could show about the immense complexity and dynamism of urban life in Lagos in this traditional format. Also, we had collected 50 hours of unique footage. Very little documentation of Lagos existed and I felt we should savor it and make it available somehow. Filming public space has long been prohibited by military leaders in Nigeria in the past. Few filmmakers and journalists had made the effort to document Lagos extensively. It is costly, time consuming and can be dangerous at times. Therefore, when presented, I accepted the opportunity to work with designer Silke Wawro in a media lab funded by the Dutch cultural media fund to develop a new film format, that would do more justice to the complexity of Lagos and also provide a more immersive (inter)active experience of Lagos to viewers. I wanted to convey the experience of “being there”. That’s why, after reviewing the fifty hours of footage, I decided to focus on the perspective of Olawole Busayo, bus driver. He’s immersed in the city every day. I separated the close shots from the wide shots in the fifty hours of unused video and started to organise both the wide and the close shots in two parallel films, running each on a one hour time line. Together, they chronicle a day in Olawole’s life.
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