Related movies

• 37 Uses for a Dead Sheep
• Borat: Cultural Learnings of America For Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan
• La Dolce Vita
• The Nine Lives of Tomas Katz
• Nosferatu the Vampyre
• Simon Magus

Related people

• Federico Fellini
• Derek Jarman
• Michael Powell
• Ben Hopkins
• Werner Herzog
• Peter Greenaway
• Ken Loach
• Andrew Kötting
• Sacha Baron Cohen
• John Hardwick

Triumph of the Wool

Dave Calhoun speaks to '37 Uses for a Dead Sheep' director Ben Hopkins.

Nov 10 2006

A colleague of mine in the TO film section swears, tongue-in-cheek, that Ben Hopkins owes his career as a filmmaker to him. Back in the mid '80s, the director of 'The Nine Lives of Tomas K atz' and the new documentary '37 Uses for a Dead Sheep', which opens at the ICA next week, regularly used to pitch up to Hampstead's Everyman Cinema. The same colleague was working as the cinema's manager and used to turn a blind eye as an eager young Hopkins slipped in and out of screenings of films that he was legally too young to watch. 'It started when I was 15,' Hopkins laughs, now 37 and slightly embarrassed by the anecdote. 'I grew up in north London and discovered cinema through a teacher, and it was then that I started going to the Everyman. I saw Herzog's 'Nosferatu' one day and Fellini's 'La Dolce Vita' the next. That was it. I was off.'

Hopkins enrolled on the filmmaking course at the Royal College of Art. He made short films and two features, the period Jewish tale, 'Simon Magus' in 2000 and the wonderful and surreal tale of the apocalypse coming to London, 'The Nine Lives of Tomas Katz' in 2001. His second film especially was a breath of fresh air – weird, comic and clever – and put him firmly in a camp with similar leftfield, British filmmakers of his generation such as Andrew Kötting and John Hardwick. But it's hard to make films in Britain when your vision is inspired by the works of filmmakers like Herzog and Fellini. When you ally yourself with those who see cinema not as a mirror to reflect reality but as a poetry to interpret it, you win few friends in funding circles.

'I've almost always been defined in opposition to the mainstream of British cinema, which is realism,' says Hopkins. 'I find realism limiting. There are great realists: Ken Loach is a great director. But it's not what I'm interested in. I'm not interested in going to the cinema to see what it's like to live on the Holloway Road. I live on the Holloway Road. I want to see something transformed a bit by imagination.'

As Hopkins goes on to explain, we British prefer our films either as realist dramas or as broad comedies born of television. 'There is a third tradition,' Hopkins reassures. 'Which is Michael Powell, Derek Jarman, Peter Greenaway. And they always have a very hard time.'

Hopkins suffered his own hard time after making 'Tomas Katz'. He directed a television documentary, 'Footprints', in 2002, about cluster bombs in Afghanistan, but he couldn't attract money for other projects that he was researching. He was ready to give up and concentrate on writing a novel when his producer finally gathered enough money to realise one of his planned films, '37 Uses for a Dead Sheep'.

Now on the cusp of release, '37 Uses for a Dead Sheep' is a fascinating, odd documentary about the Pamir Kirghiz, a central Asian tribe that over the course of the twentieth century has travelled from its home in north-east Afghanistan to its current base in a village in eastern Turkey. It's a story of tradition usurped by modernity, of a people affected by geopolitical shifts and forced to adapt to outside pressures, from the Cold War to opium. Only the older members of the tribe – now about 2,000 in number – speak Kirghiz or have been to Pamir. An older interviewee tells Hopkins that he dreams nightly of Pamir, while a young man explains that he dreams daily of opening an internet café in Istanbul.

'37 Uses for a Dead Sheep' is an intriguing film, both for its story and its execution. It tells the story of the various journeys of the Pamir Kirghiz using a mix of interviews and reconstruction. But Hopkins’ particular schtick is to re-enact key scenes from the tribe’s history – such as the social and economic impact of the opium trade in the '70s – using members of the tribe as actors, which adds a more emotional level to his enquiry. He explains at the film's opening that it's a 'film not about . . . but with the Pamir Kirghiz' and he co-directs the film with Ekber Kutlu, a Kirghiz artist and intellectual. There's an element of gonzo: we follow Hopkins and his crew and the film's title emerges from a conversation that Hopkins has with an old man: together they list the varied uses for dead sheep. 'I think showing the interaction between filmmaker and subject is more human, more realistic actually. It gives more scope for more interesting things to occur rather than the standard pseudo-objective ethnographic approach.'

Considering Hopkins' rejection of the mainstream staples of British cinema, it's fitting that his latest film could be seen as the anti-'Borat' movie. Or at least the intelligent alternative. While Sacha Baron Cohen pokes fun at foreigners, Hopkins immerses himself, fascinated, in the culture of a tribe. 'I heard about the Pamir Kirghiz while making 'Footprints' in Afghanistan and I thought it was an amazing story, like Moses and the Israelites.'

Hopkins made the film last year and has since won several awards at documentary festivals. He's in an upbeat mood and says that he now hopes to make his first drama since 'Tomas Katz'. Things are looking up. The novel remains unwritten. Thank God for the Everyman.

'37 Uses for a Dead Sheep' opens at the ICA next week. Thanks to Don Boyd.