07/08/2023
One day filmmaker Armel Hostiou discovers he has a second Facebook account: a fake Armel who has real photos of him and many female friends, all of whom live in Kinshasa. Fake Armel invites them to audition for his next film, which is supposedly set in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Faced with the impossibility of closing this account, the filmmaker decides to go looking for his double. As a result of this journey, he created the feature documentary “The Other Profile”, which incorporates a search with many funny moments but also many issues to think about.
The film had its screening at DokuFest on Sunday, followed by a Q&A session with the filmmaker Armel Hostiou, who explained the initial idea to make this film.
“When I discovered this fake profile I had no clue about making the film. My first reaction was to close this account. I checked Facebook, notified them regarding the identity theft, and thought naively that it could be solved quickly. When I received the answer from Facebook, two weeks after, telling me that this was not a fake account and that it won’t be closed, it looked to me like a beginning of a script, for an absurd or strange film. It was like a calling to do this film”.
According to him, the film is a lot about illogical logic.
"In the novel "Double" by Dostojevski the main character wakes up in the morning in St. Petersburg and discovers that he has his double in the city and that he does the same job. Slowly he discovers that double makes things better than him, and nobody is worried that he has a double...There is something I liked in this absurdity, in the concept of double, so that's something I kind of built during the shooting... The idea at the end is a bit like in Dostojevski's novel where my double picks up the film and makes it better than mine.”
Filmmaker Armel Hostiou told the audience that the film through its characters, music, landscape, and events touches upon colonialism and exploitation issues, which according to him are not over yet, and are still going on in invisible ways.
He also acknowledged that the fake account is still working but it doesn't announce casting anymore, while with his double Comix, he is in constant touch, also regarding the screening of the film in Prizren.
Photo: Tughan Anit
