The day she did her graduation film A Tomato Tragedy showed the world in the Amsterdam Eye Filmmuseum, documentary director Kiriko Mechanicus (28) suddenly had doubts. Did her work make sense? The film shows in a visually stimulating way how illegal immigrants pick tomatoes in southern Italy so that the whole of Europe can eat cheap canned tomatoes. A few hours after that first screening, the Rutte IV cabinet fell because it could not reach agreement on asylum measures. The relevance of Mechanicus’ film immediately became clear again, she says. “The Dutch must realize that the poor reception of illegal immigrants in the south of Europe also has something to do with us.”
How did you come to your study choice?
“As a teenager, I went to study history in Rome on a romantic whim. I wanted to be able to see, feel and live in the history around me. After five years I knew I wanted to specialize in culinary history. I then started to think and write a lot about food. I wanted to go to film academy to also tell visual stories about food.”
How did you arrive at your graduation project?
“I wanted to pay tribute to the tomato, my favorite fruit. When I found out that it stems from a form of oppression, I decided to travel to the place where the tomatoes in the Netherlands come from and see what remains of my love. The five of us drove to Italy in a van and secretly obtained the telephone numbers of pickers at various plantations. We already knew that many people would not want to talk to us, tomato cultivation is controlled by the mafia in many places. We met in the evening with the few pickers who wanted to cooperate. The film gradually took shape through what we saw, heard and felt during the conversations.”
In between the interview clips A Tomato Tragedy an Italian priest pays tribute to the tomato. “The way Italians speak and think about food hardly exists in the Netherlands. That a fruit or a dish represents who your mother is, your great-grandmother, your religion.”
What subjects are you and your fellow students interested in?
“We are a generation that takes to the streets a lot. Art often has a passive character: if you see a film in the cinema, you also walk away from the story afterwards. I see that many makers are now thinking about how film can be a means to set something in motion.
“The message of my film is not: don’t eat a tomato. But we gave everyone who came to see Eye a flyer about the Italian organization Casa Sankara, which has created accommodation for five hundred tomato pickers. We played a lot with them and asked the public to help them financially to build a launderette. As makers, we went to ‘get’ a story from them, so we wanted to give them something in return.”
Does the growing activism in the arts give you hope for the future of man and the arts?
“In general, I am gloomy about the future. My film also ends pessimistic. When I started studying I thought I could change the world with documentaries. In recent years I have seen more than three hundred documentaries and I have lost that conviction. Meanwhile, the world is increasingly on fire. At the same time, making art feels more urgent as a result. You feel: I’m doing this for something bigger than myself. I can not stop.”
Where will you be fifteen years from now, in your wildest dreams?
“I especially hope that I can still ‘play’ and dare to take risks. That I am not stuck in the film industry and, for example, work from subsidy application to subsidy application. That I, just like I did for my graduation film, still dare to go to Italy on spec and allow my films to be completely shaped by what I encounter.”
A Tomato Tragedy can be seen on September 23 at the Netherlands Film Festival in Utrecht and on November 25 on NPO3, just like other documentaries of the 2023 class.
A version of this article also appeared in the newspaper on August 26, 2023.