Sean McAllister » Page 15

Author: Sean McAllister

Documentary Filmmaker from Hull, England, specialises in giving the voiceless a voice

Looking for a film – Dubai

Coming back to Dubai was a big thing for me. I was last here in September 2008 looking a film for the BBC. Then this place was still booming, now it feels like it is on the brink of going bust. My cab driver from the airport was moaning that he had only had 3 jobs in 4 hours. Crazy on a Friday night. He’s thinking of leaving and going back to his family in Egypt. After 14 years in Dubai he says he’s never seen it so bad, as I get out of the cab he whispers “Dubai is finished”.

Maybe that’s my story.

I check into my cheap dilapidated Indian-run hotel near the creek in old Dubai. Yes there still is an old dirty run down area in bright shiny new Dubai. I feel at home here. The hotel reminds me of the one I had in Baghdad 2004… but without the danger. Well, without any obvious danger.

The hotel manager shows me 7 hidden cameras in the run-down foyer, they are there for my safety he insists. “But this is the safest place in the Middle East” I tell him, “Yes” he replies, “It is safe BECAUSE I have my cameras”. He also makes it very clear that I cannot have ‘guests’ in my room. In other words the female hookers who work hard at pleasing the ex-pats and tourists that litter Dubai by night.

The manager tells me that some hotels here are down to 20% occupancy. Tourism is down and much of the major construction has stopped or been put on hold. Later I meet Ray and Sarah in a sports bar, they tell me the credit-crunch has hit Dubai big style. Many ex-pats they know have lost their jobs in the last 2 weeks, some have huge financial commitments having paid 12 months rent up-front whilst others are panicking because they have expenses such as their kids schooling fees to find. They said each week hordes of ex-pats are leaving, often to escape the massive debts they have run-up. Easy-credit means many people have been living far beyond their means.

And for the non-western labourers housed in the dense labour camps on the outskirts of Dubai life is even tougher on wages of £4 a day, from which they still manage to send money home. At least their squalid accommodation packed 10 to a room for 11 months a year is free!

This reality is far from the Dubai dream Piers Morgan created in his fantasy ITV documentary last week. The guys in the bar were fuming when they saw it. They were pushing me to make my film here, to show the world what it was really like. If truth be told this place and everything it represents is ugly. But I don’t want to simply confirm that in a film, there has to be more to my documentary if I am to make one here, and, as always, I need to find the right person.

This morning I woke to the call for prayer, I opened my door and stepped onto my balcony, down below was the noise from the bustling street, textile shops everywhere, a very Indian scene, I felt happy to be here, an oasis, my refuge from the huge shiny buildings that are the new Dubai. I leave my hotel and stroll through what could have been Delhi to my favourite humus restaurant on the creek, which is where I write this now, in between watching the water-taxis pass by.

Today I hope to meet Roberto or Marina or Ray who will hopefully lead me to the guy I am looking for… But, if I am honest, he still feels a long long way away.

Oliver Twist in Japan

I was out looking for the luxurious hotel where Lost in Translation was shot. I wanted to re create that scene in the panoramic bar with me staring over a beer into the midnight sky, staring into space. Outer ‘Space’.

This is my Japan. I said to a friend the other week despairingly, “Being in Japan is like living on the moon. Japan is my new prison”. We walked amidst the luxurious hotels that towered above us, but I was still moaning, “I hate Japan”. I declared to my patient Japanese friend.

In the distance I saw a queue of homeless people; I mean hundreds of them standing in lines of three shamelessly outside The Crown Plaza Hyatt Hotel. I had to go look closer. Bowls of rice were being handed out at one of Japans many soup kitchens. I watched the faces of the poor old men and women who come begging for food. None of them drunk, all of them dignified and grateful to the 20 odd volunteers who were serving up the bowls of rice.

Each line of three people would emerge take a bowl of rice and bow thanking the volunteers. They would move away and eat as the next three dark dirty faces emerge. It was Oliver Twist in Japan. I felt sad, sad for these people and the country that they’ve all worked so hard to build, a country which after economic recession provided no safety net for them as they fell from grace and onto the streets. Many of them lost their jobs after the economic crash in the early 1990’s. They rely on day-work for £35 a day if they are lucky.

Later I traveled around Shinjuku Park visiting the many makeshift homes with the volunteers. Tokyo city council is finding apartments for the homeless now. It is officially estimated that there are 25,000 of them in Japan, although the real figure is expected to be twice that. Many of the homeless feel free of the pressure of being in the rat race. Some described their life in tents in parks as ‘free’. Free is my favourite word in Japan. I think about it everyday as I watch this machine-like society plough ahead; where to? No one really knows or seemingly stops to think.

Later I find myself in a panoramic bar having a beer and a plate of chips. I am lost in my translation staring into the ‘space’ that is my new prison, that is my Japan. From the panoramic window I notice the empty spot where the soup kitchen and hundreds of homeless once were. Now it is vacant, they too have all disappeared into space.

My Kind of Man

So here I am back in my Tokyo hotel now fully-commissioned for a feature-length documentary co-production between BBC2 and NHK. It is a great opportunity to make a film of my choice with no brief.

But Japan presents my biggest challenge so far in making a film that gets under the skin of what is going on. This closed society is hard to crack, on my last trip 8 months ago I left never wanting to come back. But since then I have recharged my batteries and have been introduced to a character called Naoki who lives in Yamagata about 3 hours out of Tokyo.

Married 3 times, divorced 3 times he ran a bar called ‘Night Dew’ named after a famous shampoo brand here but after getting into a fight the former communist found himself in hospital for 3 months. His bar closed and now he rides a Honda 90cc everyday for the post office dreaming of re-opening his Night Dew bar. He lives with a woman half his age that used to drink at the bar. Naoki sounds like my kind of man.

Last of Japan. Or so I thought.

I’d decided to leave Japan after 10 weeks of research with what felt like no results. I was more confused than when I arrived.

Paul Weller was playing Tokyo so I treated myself with a gig before leaving. I’d arrived late hoping to buy a cheap ticket off a tout but there were no touts about just an orderly queue of people.

Growing up the UK my life had been a series of Jam, Style Council and Weller gigs. They were always as riotous as the audience was. I always felt a part of such crowds. It was interesting to see how Mr. Weller was going fit in here. The packed house was seated and silent as they waited for him.

As I blinked I missed his arrival. Suddenly there he was on stage. The full house remains well ordered and offered a controlled hand clap. No cheers not even a murmur from the audience. The atmosphere felt like a school concert with an amateur rock band on stage. Weller looked bemused but did his best and continued.

I was at the back of the Circle. And like my attempts over these last 10 weeks I felt desperately outside what was happening around me. I felt the same frustration in the concert hall that I felt at not getting inside Japan. I instruct my Japanese friend to follow me in an effort to get closer to the stage and thunder out of the Circle and down some stairs to the main hall. My friend is warning me that we do not have the right tickets, “fuck them”. I am angry at my failed attempts at getting inside Japan and want to at least enjoy this gig before I leave. It stirs great memories of growing up with Weller gigs as a kid.

I storm the main hall doors expecting a polite young Japanese ticket collector to stop me. Two ticket men demand tickets I thunder past them and run down the aisle followed by my friend, pushing more ticket collectors out of my way. I end up 6 feet from Weller at the front. Close up I wanted to feel the gig and enjoy it more. But close up I could sense Weller’s bemusement more than I could from back. Weller was doing his best to enjoy himself. Blasting through the set. The crowd would sway to the songs and clap between them. There was an eerie silence amongst the crowd that Weller found embarrassing. He would amuse himself by making jokes, knowing no-one was really understanding him.

“Just keep clapping a little longer while I change my guitar…”

Clap clap clap

Weller was struggling through his set like I had struggled through my research-time in Japan. No matter how hard he tried he never got closer to his audience they always kept themselves at arms length. Swaying through songs and clapping between them. I could really identify with him. This Weller concert was a monument to my time in Japan.

To amuse himself he would make more jokes with the audience who he didn’t understand and who didn’t understand him.

“It’s a great pleasure to play back in this hall in Nakano. I played here 26 years ago when I started out with the jam and …” he smiles knowing he is talking to himself. “It was a fucking nightmare then and it is now” he hammers into another song laughing to himself.

This concert was more personal than most and it felt like an epitaph to my time Japan. A grateful goodbye to 10 long weeks of alienation, confusion and disappointment. Weller kept looking round to his young band members and breaking into fits of laughter. I kept thinking ‘oh why does Japan make itself so alien’.

I remember an english teacher telling me when I first arrived. ‘The problem with the Japanese he said is that they always live up to their worst stereotypes.’

Weller returns to the stage for the encore. A Jam number, ‘Town Called Malice’… he cannot get the first line out for laughing; it’s a private joke with other band members who are also laughing. As he sings the first line the joke becomes clear to me but is missed on the thousands in the audience…

‘you better stop dreaming of the quite life because it’s the one you’ll never know…’

Weller can hardly sing for laughing now.

I leave remembering the good old days of growing-up with Weller gigs in the UK. I struggle to find what Japan means to me. 10 weeks in Japan had sort of destroyed my soul. I thought fuck Japan I will never come back I simply cannot relate to this place.

6 Weeks Later

I’m back in UK recovered and behaving as if Id never been to Japan. I am thinking of making a film in Africa then the phone goes, it’s the BBC they love the last idea I sent about Japan and would love me to make it. Furthermore they are offering the best part of 200k to do so. The Japanese network NHK will match that with a further 100k.

I’ve been raising money to make this film for the best part of 3 years … the money allows me to make a film the way I want with the luxury of a year in which to make it. This was always my dream.

The problem is now my dream has become my nightmare.

Bored Japanese housewives and their salarymen husbands

I was on the subway train tonight watching people sleep. There was a whole family crashed out in front of me, father, mother, son and daughter. An amazing sight. I had to photograph them. Around them were commuters who never batted an eye lid. I’d been out visiting English languages schools investigating a film about looking at bored Japanese housewives wanting to learn English.

I was sat thinking of a story told to me by a housewife who was explaining how house trained her husband wasn’t. she’d been ill and laid up in bed for a week and he was forced to help out. It was his first experience in the kitchen. He was making her an egg sandwich. When it arrived the toast was burnt and the egg frazzled. Her husband could not find the toaster so used the cooker fire to make the toast and did not realize that you need oil in the pan to fry an egg!

Another woman shook her head saying that she has to pour her husbands breakfast cereal for him each morning. The others sat around the table mumbling to themselves in agreement. “One day I make him continental breakfast the next Japanese breakfast with rice and soup…” another says that she was up at 5am to make her husband, who is a doctor, breakfast, she will have his evening ready meal when he returns at 11pm.

There is a great power balance that goes on between the housewives lifestyle and their salarymen husbands who are always blamed for not being around.

The women are accused of hanging around cafes with each other moaning about being bored… the husbands are accused of never being there, of always being tired.

In Japanese society the working day officialy finishes at 5.30, but no-one leaves until the boss leaves, the salarymen live in fear of what others salarymen may think. What is this all about? George Orwell’s 1984 Japan style…

Many single women in Japan also think that the housewives have it easy compared to their husbands who must work such long hours with so much traveling. It reminded me of my factory working days when I left school at 16 and worked in an engineering company. I remember discussing the very same subject with my work mates who were married with kids. They were tired, cold and covered in oil every day. All of them said given the choice they would swap their jobs to become house husbands. It would be interesting to measure their happiness levels with some of the Japanese. I’m sure they were relatively similar except that if unhappy the British wives could file for divorce.

Until recently divorce was not accepted here in Japan at all. Today it is becoming more popular, in fact very popular, although there is still a stigma attached to it.

After the English class finished one of the women tells me privately that none of the housewives are happy in their relationships. That marriage here is a duty; they are to look after the children and the house. “No-one said anything about happiness.” She told me many exist in marriages known here as ‘mask relationships’ which are sexless, loveless marriages. Often the husband has a mistress and the housewife knows but does not challenge him. I’d heard about housewives learning English with the sole intention of jumping in bed with the English teacher. A way of rebelling from their constrained life.

But life here in Japan is still very much dominated by the male, the man. I think women will have more rights in china before Japan. There is something so entrenched in the archaic way of thinking here that stops Japan moving forward and joining the modern world in its ‘way of thinking’.

Japan is ‘technologically’ the first world, but ‘mentally’ it is a third world nation. The years after the Second World War saw it race ahead and grow but with it came its feudal past still so evident in day to day Japanese life.

But things are changing slowly. Divorce is becoming more accepted here freeing women up from unhappy marriages. It is common amongst couples once their last child has finished university and amongst childless couples. It is also very popular for retired couples who never see their husbands for 30 years of marriage then they retire and stick to them like ‘wet leaves’. Retired housewives with ‘wet leaves’ wait for their husband’s pension to arrive then file for divorce. The husband is often shocked and spends the rest of his life wondering why his wife divorced him.

As the train pulls into my station I wonder about the family sat in front of me. They are still asleep. The woman sits on her own asleep, her head slumped ungraciously forward with the daughter on her knee and the father slumped with his son’s head on his knee. At first I thought they were Chinese or Korean immigrants but I was assured by a friend that they are Japanese; a great image of modern Japan.

In a funny way they all look equal in sleep.

The same friend assured me that they will wake automatically at their station, it could be one or two more hours yet but they will wake up. The Japanese always know when it is their stop.