# You were born in Mongolia, please explain a little about your life after that event.

BORCHU: I was born in Mongolia and at the age of four or five years old, when I was a little girl, I moved to the GDR (German Democratic Republic), because my mother wanted to study in East Germany and both of my parents decided to live there. It was tough. We were surrounded by people who were intimidating and some Germans would say, “Go back to your country.” We were very much hated and troubled by Neo-Nazis who threatened our lives. My parents were always there, however, and I always had the feeling that, “It’s OK, I will get through this,” and “I have to become strong and go on living.”

# What was the reason that made you decide to go to film school and why did you decide to make a film?

BORCHU: Ever since I was a little girl, I was always watching movies, but I’d never imagined I could be a film director. I wrote poems because my father was also an artist. He would always question me about writing stories about my experiences and so he motivated me to explore my thoughts, because I think he knew that I had to express myself somehow.

# In this film Hedi’s grandmother in Mongolia plays a part. Do you have any special memories from when you lived in Mongolia?

BORCHU: Yes, I do. Although we moved to Germany, at one point it was possible for us to go on vacation for several weeks. We went back to see our other relatives and so that is a very strong memory. I still have strong relationships with Mongolian people because Mongolian was the first language I learned. I sang and talked in Mongolian and I learned to love others in a Mongolian way. Despite this, I wouldn't say that I am a typical Mongolian but I believe that I belong to the Gobi Desert because when my parents sing old Mongolian folk songs I see the colours of the Gobi Desert and I feel at home, but I don’t have an identity like my passport which is Mongolian or German or whatever.

# In the movie Hedi and Iva are very contrasting characters. Can you explain how you developed their personalities?

BORCHU: First of all, I met Catrina who played Iva and I was very inspired by her personality, how she behaves as a young woman in our male dominated society. I was more into women’s issues and so I knew that after all of the documentaries I made I wanted to do a visual art film giving my own vision, my own perspective on women in our society, and Catrina was the right person. She is actually a friend of mine.

# What sort of documentaries did you make?

BORCHU：They were documentaries, the first about young women getting to know each other in one apartment while naked. “Donne-moi plus.” That was my first film. It has a French title that means, "give me more." The other documentary was one where I met a very old woman, she was a violin player, and she was ninety years old. I contrasted her personality with my own. We spoke, we spent time together talking about life, love, passion and death.

# Hedi mentioned in the film that she’s not Lesbian and she says, “don’t look at me that way,” like the film’s title. Hedi doesn’t want to be bound by fixed ideas and doesn’t want to be fixed by bias. Does that reflect your ideas? Your way of life?

BORCHU：I really didn't think about what Hedi has to be. Now is a good time to come up with a female character like Hedi, because it's my own desire to be like Hedi. It’s a wish.

I have observed many women who are like Hedi in our society but society does not really see these women. Society prefers to view women who are more confined, who are in a box. I’ve learned from so many other older women and from young women how to behave. To be quiet in front of men, to be very shy. I was always asking myself, why is my mother telling me something like that? I want to be free like my brother and like all of my other friends who are male. I have the same wishes. I have the same desires for things. So Hedi, I think she’s one step closer to being a free human being who’s also female but she’s not a woman, because “woman” is a word already very connected to ideas like skirts and behaving in a way that some consider very feminine. Hedi doesn’t want to. She doesn’t fit in.

# When Iva’s father [played by Josef BIERBICHLER] comes into story, your characters also talked about love, life, freedom, those sorts of things, and he quoted Brecht. Why did you choose Brecht's poem?

BORCHU: It's a nice poem by Brecht. Josef BIERBICHLER is a very well-known actor. He has a very strong character. I met him frequently to try and convince him to play a part in my film. At one point, we weren’t talking about this film, we were talking about life and drinking alcohol and he quoted a poem by Brecht. I was very impressed by this. While shooting, I asked him to recite the poem again because I wrote the script without any dialogue in it, it’s all improvised, and I said to him, "let's say this poem again."

# I was very impressed Mr. ZELLNER's work, because you shot women very beautifully. It was very elegant. What was your way of working?

ZELLNER: It was a big adventure, because the idea was that she [Uisenma] had the script, but much of it was improvised. The dialogue was improvised and so was the blocking, so I never really knew what would be happening. It was like a documentary way of shooting because a scene would be going on and I had to react. I think that was like a big present for us, because scenes became continuous and I had no time to think, I could just act naturally. I also had to use all of my skills to get a beautiful picture in a good light because I did not have big lighting equipment. I just used windows as light sources. I really thought a lot about what direction I will shoot from and whether to have the light distances from the actors be close or far, and also how to move with them. It was a little bit like I was acting with my camera, too. This was a really big adventure and I think it’s a really great work. It’s so natural.

You can plan too much. You can never be better than the natural order of real life. I think real life is an important part of the film, because, for example, Hedi is a character that is, in a way extreme, but in reality there are a lot of woman like that, however, in the movies, there are not so many characters like her and so I think the film is trying to be like real life. This also happened to me as a camera person who had to become more realistic and more true to what was happening. So it’s very honest. There weren’t so many tricks we could do, because we never repeated the scenes. The scenes were just happening, and they were finished. We were very quick.

# On the one hand, in the film, there are realistic scenes from everyday life, while on the other hand, the Mongolian scenes are like a dream, and there is no border separating the two. So there was no thought of definition, no border, you have freely removed a lot of borders.

BORCHU：You never exactly get to know what these women work as, how old they are or where they’re living because I wanted to show a world without definition and without borders and limits. We live mostly in our own world, our own thoughts, these very much influence our reality. My head is full of thoughts and that’s reality for me. Thoughts allow us to start thinking that things happen in a certain way and that’s what’s in this film. Everything is combined, Iva’s thoughts, Hedi’s thoughts, their wishes, they are reality like when they were having sex. That’s why I chose this way of telling their thoughts.

# What is home for you?

ZELLNER: I asked once, and she told me that it’s not like a country like Mongolia. It’s like the Gobi Desert, the songs, the language of her parents. It’s also not Germany, It’s not country, culture, but an individual way in which we grow up, no country, no borders.

BORCHU：Now I think home is always where the heart is. Right now, when I go to my parents, they are my home, but I don’t have specific country, and I can’t say for certain. Many Mongolians say they’re proud to be Mongolian, but I'm not proud to be German. I'm not German anyway. I think I‘m just a person who’s living in this world and I have the right to go anywhere I want to go and nobody can stop me just because he thinks he belongs to a country more than I do. I can’t believe this is still going on and it’s actually happening in Europe right now. That’s a catastrophe.

Interview conducted by Yumi EGUCHI