Scopofile: The Last Breadbox Press

Aired Monday, April 26th, 2004: Triple R radio, Melbourne, from Mercury Rising with Nina-Marie Petrik.

NMP: And as I mentioned the Real: Life on Film documentary festival is going to be on
at the A.C.M.I. And one of the feature documentary filmmakers is Melbourne documentary
filmmaker Sam Voutas. Sam was actually raised in Beijing.... Can you tell us a little bit
about your background and what you were doing, or what your family was doing, in Beijing?

SV: Sure. To start, there's probably about 200,000 foreigners living in Beijing at the moment.
So it's kind of like Canberra's population in Beijing. So it's not all that rare. But in terms of
why I was there, I was studying as a student....

NMP: So how did you cope with being put into a foreign school and a completely
different culture?

SV: For starters, I think it's a real shock. Because overseas, people aren't really that aware
of Australian culture.... You have to realize that everything you knew here,
all your footy legends and all you favourite TV shows, nobody's heard of overseas....
It also gives you a chance to meet people from corners of the world that you wouldn't
otherwise have met. People from Africa, Japan....

NMP: But I like how we're talking about Australian culture. "Sam Voutas", of course Voutas
is a Greek name. So it's sort of like a Greek-Australian influence in there.

SV: Well, it's an international world we're living in now. And there [are] so many
foreigners in China at the moment. The investment is just going through the roof.
It's just a melting pot.

NMP: I guess in a sense that's exactly what your documentary film is about.
You focus on the Beijing bid for the Olympic Games. And it's an interesting piece because
you basically interview taxi drivers. And I suppose in many ways, [and] in many cultures,
the taxi driver is the barometer of everyday life. They pick up people all the time, they have
a sense of what's happening to ordinary people. They're often ordinary people themselves.
But of course their lives are different when they go home. I was curious to know how
you met [them], because you're focusing on three characters in this documentary.
How [did] you meet them, and what made you think they were
good subjects for this documentary?

SV: Luckily with cab drivers... you can hire them to take you from one place to another.
It's a good way to meet them.... So we'd get them to tell [us] stories basically. You know,
"Tell us about your life". And by the time we got to the destination if we thought
they were interesting, I'd say, "Hey, do you reckon if we took out the camera you could tell us
some of your stories?" Ninety-nine percent of the time they said "no", but eventually we managed
to get three who were very excited. And in the end we got to spend a good deal of time with [them]....
I really just wanted to tell a human story about individual struggles and try to focus on
the more everyday tales of the working class in Beijing.

NMP: What's interesting is that you call the documentary The Last Breadbox, and of course
the breadbox is indeed a description of the old taxis that they used to have in Beijing at the time.
And [there's] the effect the Olympic bid, and of course winning the bid, has [had] on at least one of these
particular taxi drivers. So could you tell us a bit about his story?

SV: Unlike here, where the taxis are pretty much the same, in Beijing in the eighties and nineties
they had these vans that were really very flimsy and were quite dangerous. They didn't have seatbelts,
but the characters that drove them were just amazing. And the cars themselves had so much character.
Similar to when you do travel around Asia, every different Asian country has a different amazing
taxi culture. Unfortunately, after Sydney won the Olympic Games, Beijing thought,
"We better get our act in shape if we're going to win the next one". And also they were
a terrible hazard. If you had a car accident you were pretty much forgotten.

NMP: Yes, I was a bit concerned when one of the characters, the one who was
most effected by it, said, "Oh ya, if I get in the car that kind of safety thing is really for decoration.
My legs would be severed!" I guess in some ways one could argue that it's a good thing that
they're no longer on the road. But at the same time there [are] the people who are
effected by that adversely.... I'm just sort of amazed, how do they make a living at all?
It sounds as if they must be constantly in debt or something.

SV: I think they're just constantly working and struggling. It's a really hard life;
it's long hours waiting in lines at airports. It's not an easy life. But as the lead character that
you're talking about says, it's the life that he chose, it's his thing in life. It's the one thing that
he does well and he enjoys doing. Even if he could find something else he would still prefer
to be doing taxi-driving.

NMP: I think what was interesting at the beginning was, he mentioned that his relationship with
his family was pretty sketchy, simply because he did do long hours driving in a cab. What was the
relationship with his family after he lost his job? I guess he became the house-husband in a sense.

SV: He did become the house-husband, which is a lot rarer in Beijing than it is here.
So I think there's probably a bit of loss of face there, also a lot of frustration - having to
do the groceries. He says [that] in the old days, when he was working, he never saw his family.
He'd go home at night and say, "Hi kid, how are you?" And then he wouldn't see him again until
the next day when he got home. Now he's the one who's waiting until the wife comes home,
because the wife was employed, and the son was employed as well.

NMP: So he still didn't get a chance to know them all that well! [Laughter]

SV: That's right....

NMP: Another interesting character, which I thought was really great in the documentary,
was the female cab driver, because I take it that's a fairly rare thing.

SV: That was one thing that I really wanted to get: a female cab driver. It's even quite rare here,
but to get the feminist's point of view, and the woman's point of view, her struggle being
a woman in a male dominated industry, was something that interested me a lot.

NMP: I thought it interesting that some of the comments she got from other men were:
"Can't your husband support you?" And she says, "He can support me fine, certainly feed me".
But she's a very independent person.

SV: She really wanted to have her own independent life and be a good example for her daughter.
[To] let her daughter know that you don't have to just be a wife, you can go out and
do whatever you want. I really admired her for that. She is an incredibly strong character,
and I think that comes across in the film....

NMP: She was real positive force, which was really terrific to see.... What seemed to be a focus
of the Olympic Games bid was to show the outside world that [China's] changing,
that they're developing. Whilst they still wanted to keep foreigners out of their domestic politics,
like any country wants foreigners out of their domestic politics, they still wanted to show
that they were a good people and a modern people. When you were there, as the bid was going on,
and things were building, how did it change in Beijing? What kind of feel did you get on the ground?
I know you were telling these characters to tell their stories in their own way, but [from] your
experience as a filmmaker - you're an insider and an outsider in these things, and you have
a really good view of how things are shifting in Beijing at the moment.

SV: I think for starters, the Chinese people as whole, and especially the people in Beijing,
have been a lot more affected by winning the Olympics.... Here, if I remember rightly,
there was a party, and then everyone sort of forgot about it, [and] had a hangover the next day.
There was a lot of national pride I think. And fair enough, it's the biggest country in the world....
So certainly in the days leading up to it, there was an enormous amount of anticipation.
Even Guo Jun, who's this female taxi driver that we've just been talking about, even her daughter,
she put up a calendar everyday which said, "I support the Olympics"....

NMP: I love they way her mother was saying, "You could actually be one of the helpers there".
She's going to be seventeen when it happens! So she views that as possibly the time of her life,
a springtime for her. It seems that everyone sees this as a golden time.
I just hope they're not disappointed! [Laughter]

SV: I hope so too. It's interesting with the Athens Olympics in mind. Just because it seems
there hasn't been as much buzz for this coming Olympics. So I think when the China Olympics
come around, China is going to be the place to be. I know businesses are already running over there.

NMP: I think it's a very timely thing.... And I suppose with the new DVD technology it makes
it a lot easier, a lot cheaper, to be able to do your own digital film work and all that sort of stuff.
So the costs are not as high. Certainly not if you're doing documentary work, because it's [by] yourself.
You just have to check the sound and the lighting and away you go, which is fantastic....
I'm speaking with Sam Voutas. We're talking about his film The Last Breadbox, which is nearly
54 minutes long, and it's going to be showing at A.C.M.I on Sunday the 2nd of May,
[at] the Real: Life on Film Festival....

SV: I have to stress that there's no other festival like it in Australia. If you make short films,
pretty much at every other pub these days you can have a screening venue, but [regarding] a place
where the general audience can actually watch doco films, it's very rare. So it's a real opportunity.