Remembering Christophe
By Edward Girardet
CESSY, France -- Christophe de Ponfilly, the 55-year-old French film-maker, writer, and Afghan aficionado died on Tuesday, 16 May, 2006 by his own hand in a forest – one of his favourite walking haunts - outside Paris. For Christophe, it was a final act of romantic and melancholic desperation not only with his own life, but also the way Mankind deals, or fails to deal, with its fellow human beings...
But for me, a close friend of 25 years, Christophe’s decision – which I have to respect - at the end of a gun barrel represented the tragic conclusion to the remarkable life of a highly talented and passionate fellow journeyman. He was a man who constantly questioned the world but always saw a new challenge just over the next mountain pass. And yet, sadly for all who loved and admired him, he remained in torment, eventually concluding that he no longer had a place in the very world he was seeking to explore – and confront.
* * *
As a Paris-based foreign correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor newspaper, I first met Christophe in the early summer of 1981 in the Pakistani Northwest Frontier city of Peshawar. I had been planning a clandestine – and exclusive - reporting trip into northern Afghanistan with one of the resistance groups, Jamiat-e-Islami, who would be accompanying a relief team from the French voluntary aid organization Aide Medicale Internationale which was operating a health clinic in the Panjshair Valley. The objective was to meet a certain Ahmed Shah Massoud, an up and coming guerrilla commander, who was supposedly giving the Soviets a very hard time.
I was somewhat disappointed therefore when a Jamiat representative stopped by Dean’s Hotel where I was staying to ask whether I minded sharing the trip with two French journalists. They were preparing a documentary film for a French television network, he explained, and it would be better to combine our efforts. I reluctantly agreed. Of course, the two cineastes, Christophe de Ponfilly and Jerôme Bony, were equally suspicious of me, but after meeting for tea we agreed to travel together. They seemed a good, humorous bunch and we immediately got on well. To be fair, I was also glad of the company and the two men evidently appreciated that I had already made several crossborder trips by foot into Afghanistan since the December, 1979 Soviet invasion.
Leaving Peshawar with the three AMI doctors and nurses, plus Jean-José Puig, a French computer specialist who used to fish for trout in Afghanistan before the war and was now intent on helping the resistance cause, we proceeded by road up to Chitral and then Garm-e-Shishma, a small village blessed by ancient hot springs at the base of the snow-capped Hindu Kush mountains. Once serving as a transit point for Alexander the Great’s soldiers, it was now a staging base for the Afghan mujahideen. From there, Agha Gul, a mild-mannered former police officer with a drooping moustache and the look of a Sardinian bandit, took us under his protective wing to accompany us to the Panjshair. A Massoud confident, he was also in charge of a 150-horse caravan loaded with guns, food and medical supplies. Since then, Agha Gul was to remain a close friend with Christophe.
The journey was ideal for Christophe and Jerôme, who had pooled their resources to undertake this audacious film project. At the time, Christophe, a tall, thin man with short, military-style blond hair, was working as a frustrated editor with Laffont – supervising an encyclopaedia of sex no less – while Jerôme, an equally lanky individual with a thin nose and constantly bemused eyes, was a journalist with Antenne 2. Neither had much experience in film-making but had adopted the novel approach of using lightweight Super-8 cameras. Planning to transfer the film to tape for broadcast, they wanted to prove that it was possible to shoot professionally as part of a low-budget production while remaining mobile and without masses of equipment.
Over the next two weeks, swearing, arguing and laughing amongst themselves, Christophe and Jerôme filmed the arduously-moving convoy as it climbed 5,000 metre passes or manoeuvred gingerly along narrow trails across stony scree escarpments and verdant alpine pastures before descending through pine-forested ridges into the valleys below. At one point, a hapless mujahed stepped on an anti-personnel mine less than 20 metres from where we had stopped for tea. The doctors performed an on-the-spot amputation before dispatching him back to Pakistan for further treatment on a make-shift litter tied to a horse. One mountain pass beyond, Christophe and Jerôme stopped to film the doctors treating a small boy whose hand had been blown off by a mine he had picked up as a toy. The child, we later discovered, died from infection.
All this provided the team with precisely the sort of dramatic footage they needed to illustrate the devastating impact of this new Soviet war. Tens of thousands of anti-personnel ‘butterfly’ mines had been strewn by helicopter along the high mountain passes inflicting indiscriminate casualties amongst both guerrillas and fleeing civilians alike.
It also enabled them to begin telling the story – one which Christophe continued for years to come – of how a largely uneducated, but resilient peasant people were resisting one of the world’s Super Powers.
Crossing through Nuristan and Badakshan, we slept in lone huts or huddled together in our sleeping bags against the bitter cold behind stone-lined enclosures normally used by shepherds to shelter from the wind. It took me some time to get to know the two Frenchmen, but they were very much the Mutt and Jeff duo. Jerôme was the clown with his incessant supply of quips and jokes, while Christophe was the more serious, philosophical type, albeit not without a characteristic high-pitched giggling sense of humour. He also had a fascination for the martial arts, notably karate of which he was a black belt. Whenever we stopped for a break, Christophe would present us with a series of demonstrative karate thrusts and jousts before settling down, thoroughly content with himself, to eat or rest.
We quickly developed a congenial rapport of mutual mocking. Christophe was particularly intrigued by the fact that I hailed from a bizarre Swiss, American and British background, could speak French and was able to identify most of the birds and other forms of wildlife in the region. He also shook his head in dismay over my relentless note-taking and obsession for listening to the BBC, whether the news or agricultural programmes, on my short-wave radio whenever we stopped.
“What’s the point in listening to the radio when you can’t do anything about it, particularly in a place like this?” he once asked as he and Jerome lay exhausted, their backs against a rock. Both nursed their knee joints or complained about back problems from our daily regimen of twelve to fourteen hours of constant trekking.
“Well, you can always learn something,” I explained holding up the radio with a laugh. “They’re saying that the best cure for stiff knees and back problems is lots of walking.”
Nevertheless, over the years, Christophe would sometimes listen to my shortwave (which I carried on all my trips) in one of many valiant attempts to improve his English. Reluctantly, he had come to accept the need to learn the language for professional reasons, but he had the most excruciating accent and always gave it up as a hopeless cause, including several jabs at hiring a teacher. “There is no way I can ever learn this maudite language properly,” he lamented.
Wonderfully French, Christophe regularly criticized, sometimes in geste, but often deadly serious, what he called Anglo-Saxon “cultural imperialism.” British and American television networks never seemed willing to accept his “impressionistic” style of film-making, obliging him to produce “international” versions better suited to “Anglo-Saxon” tastes. Whenever we worked together, I always insisted on shooting separate interviews in English to be assured that there would be something of interest to the BBC and other networks. Too many French-language “talking heads,” I constantly had to remind him, were simply not acceptable.
Every time, however, Christophe protested vehemently, bemoaning the fact that the Americans would never take his work anyway, or wanted shortened versions with they could themselves edit, a stipulation he always refused unless he was himself involved. Sometimes, Christophe descended into a deep depression from which I had to gently lift him back up, often spending hours to persuade him that cultural versatility was absolutely necessary if he hoped to break into the English-speaking market, and that there was no pride lost if he could demonstrate such resourcefulness.
As a professional, Christophe was utterly engrossed by his passion for film and the risk he and Jerôme were taking with their Afghan production. Both then and in the years ahead, Christophe and I regularly discussed the intricacies of documentary making, but also, as he had already made thoroughly clear during my first trip with him to the Panjshair, his dream for producing feature films. And so today, in late May, 2006, I find it sadly ironic that he chose to leave us having just completed this dream of making his first full-length fiction film, about Afghanistan no less. The film – “L’Etoile du Soldat” – about a Red Army soldier both during and after the Soviet-Afghan war could have offered him so many more mountain passes to cross. Was this Christophe’s full circle, I wonder?
* * *
Naturally, too, when you spend so much time walking, you spend a lot of time talking, or being a “walkie-talkie” as my six-year-old son likes to describe conservations on country walks. Trudging along those Afghan mountain paths in the summer of 1981, Christophe and I chatted for hours on end about the art of living in Paris, our passions for women, the challenges of writing, and the food we relished. Or the reasons why Christophe, at the start of his adult life, had briefly joined a Jesuit seminary but then left when he realised – or so he maintained - that he could not survive without women.
For Christophe was the quintessential romantic. Often, we imagined entire menus from oysters washed down by cold, dry white wine followed by canard à l’orange or boeuf Stroganoff and a wonderful red burgundy to a chunky mousse au chocolat, all to be finished off with an expresse, bien serré of course, a Davidoff Cuban cigar and a cognac. As we trudged along those dusty mountain trails, our feet aching and hot, we could literally taste those oysters and that wine slipping down our parched throats. And the fact that neither of us really smoked or for that matter drank alcohol in excess did not seem to matter. When we later returned to Paris, we made a point of meeting up for dinner at the Cloiserie de Lilas so that we could indulge in our fantasies. Somehow, however, those meals never tasted quite as good as those imaginary clandestine repasts conjured up in our minds.
For both of us, our treks throughout the 1980s in Afghanistan represented a spiritual balm, a vital drug, for contemplating one’s life without the pollution or bland disturbances of the outside world. You were cut off for weeks at a time. The fact that Afghanistan was at war did not seem to matter because everything had been reduced to base survival. Life on the outside quickly lost its importance. You were dealing with an extraordinary country of overwhelming rugged beauty and a people whose profound sense of hospitality in the form of a handshake or a cup of heavily sugared green tea made you realise that nothing else really mattered.
Where else could you find the time to think so intensely and without interruption for hours, days, on end, where the physical art of living was so rudimentary, so simple, without the intrusions of the office telephone, the broken down washing machine at home or the bills one could barely pay? We both considered it indispensable that at least once a year, one should head off into the mountains or deserts for two or three weeks with only minimum food; bread, tea and some fruit would suffice, so that one’s stomach shrunk and one could focus, once again, on what really mattered.
Later, when the war wound down and you could travel into Afghanistan’s beckoning highlands or semi-arid expanses by car from Pakistan or Kabul, it was never again the same. The world, our worlds, had changed. Perhaps, too, it was a matter of growing up. Both Christophe and I agreed that without these spectacular treks ‘inside’ - as we referred to crossing clandestinely into Afghanistan - there was something strangely missing from our lives. Somehow, hiking in Corsica – as Christophe later did with his two sons – or my own trips into the Swiss Alps were never quite the same.
So now I wonder whether the lack of these “spiritual” journeys in the 1990s and early 2000s in their own way contributed toward Christophe’s thinking that there was no longer any point. That life was only a faint imprint of the romantic and spiritual notion of what he had set out to achieve.
* * *
Once in the Panjshair Valley, we finally met Massoud, an encounter - in the carpeted guest room of a bomb-damaged house lit by kerosene lanterns - that marked all of us for life. For Christophe, it was to prove the start of an extraordinary journey – and, above all, a friendship. This endured in life until Massoud’s assassination on 9 September, 2001, and in death until Christophe’s own demise only a few days ago.
During our several weeks in the Panjshair we travelled or regularly met with Massoud to discuss his resistance to the Soviets. At that time, the Afghan guerrilla leader had already thwarted several attempts by the Red Army to oust him from his stronghold and he was beginning to prove more than just a mere thorn in the side of Moscow. Massoud was galvanizing Kabul and other parts of the country with his exploits to step up their struggle to throw out these unwelcome invaders. We also reported on the work of the “French doctors” and the attempts by the local population to survive amid their bombed out villages, ruptured irrigation canals and burned fruit orchards.
On one occasion, we met with Massoud in a small village nestled away in a narrow sidevalley to discuss an attack early next morning against the strategic Salang highway. This was used by the Soviets to transport supplies down from the Tajikistan-Afghan border in the north. A pressure lamp hissed viciously as we pored over a map with Massoud. Red Army troops had entrenched themselves on the ridges less than one kilometre away, but this did not seem to bother the Afghan commander. Twenty minutes later, he stood up quickly, bade us good night and promised to pick up us up at first light to go on the attack which the French team hoped to film. We laid out our sleeping bags and I suggested to Christophe and Jerôme that they sleep with their boots on and with our packs ready to move at a moment’s notice. I was concerned by the proximity of the Soviets, who, I felt, must have had their informers on the ground. “It’s a gut feeling,” I explained, but both Christophe and Jerôme laughed and removed their gear.
Less than two hours later, we were rudely awoken by stomach-shuddering explosions and flashes of light. The Soviets were mortaring the village. They had clearly taken a sight on the house where they suspected Massoud might still be staying. With Christophe and Jerome cursing and struggling to pull on their boots in the dark, we took flight – shrapnel slicing through the mulberry and walnut tree foliage like hailstones – and surged across the fields in pitch blackness with only the mortar flashes to guide us. At least two people, it later turned out, were killed seconds later in the house where we had been staying. At one point, we came to a river, which we had carefully traversed only the morning before, and plunged in. Cold and wet, we made our way to an abandoned hut, where we collapsed to sleep. Just after dawn, Massoud appeared, cleanly dressed and relaxed, asking us with a grin whether we were coming. Still shaking, all three of us decided that we had witnessed enough “action” for the time being and sheepishly opted to return to the AMI clinic in Astana where we were staying.
Both Christophe and Jerome returned to France with the material for their award-winning documentary, Valley Against an Empire, broadcast in its entirety by the BBC. But Christophe’s relationship with the quietly confident and self-effacing “Lion of Panjshair” with the look of Bob Dylan developed into a fascination if not obsession (which Christophe did not accept). With all his strengths and flaws, Massoud represented in the late 20th century what many of us are not. It was Massoud’s ability to resist the Soviets and then his mujahed rivals and eventually the Taliban that struck such a chord with Christophe. He was challenged by the need to constantly explore – and record - what it was that enabled a human being to persevere for so long and against such overwhelming odds.
Some critics maintained that Christophe had gone over the top with his “sentimentalism” for Massoud, the Afghan, and this clearly upset him. But for me, it was evident that Christophe was not only intrigued by the whole concept of resistance (not just in Afghanistan) but the ability of a single individual to stick to one’s beliefs with such doggedness in what he saw was right. It is this that Christophe so admired.
All too aware of what had transpired during the Nazi occupation of Europe, and the reluctance, still grossly apparent today, of so many French to properly examine their country’s past, including Indochina and Algeria, Christophe felt that too many people today, regardless whether European, American, African, or other, lack the stamina and conviction to embrace our basic human and moral responsibilities.
This not only includes responding to the world’s humanitarian or conflict situations in a manner that is “right,” but also reacting with a decisiveness that can help prevent catastrophes in places like Rwanda, Iraq, Sudan, or the Middle East. For all too long, Christophe felt, the West – with all its hypocritical rhetoric - simply failed to deal with Afghanistan despite all the clear and repeated warnings by people such as Massoud. We choose to ignore what is too inconvenient, he argued, even if it is staring us right in the face. It was a subject that Christophe was to return to again and again in his films and in his books.
I remember only too well attending a dinner with about a dozen people in the 16eme arrondissement of Paris several months after Valley Against an Empire was broadcast on French television. There were several well-heeled bourgeois supporters of the French communist party at the table and somehow the discussion came to Afghanistan. One of them, a man in his early forties defended the Soviet invasion and dismissed the documentary as pure fabrication. He loudly pooh-poohed the film’s references to the existence of an Afghan resistance as if during World War II. No one supports this man Massoud, he proclaimed. I quietly asked him whether he had ever met Massoud. No, he retorted, but I have been to Afghanistan (before the war) and I know the Afghans. When I casually noted that I had actually been on the same trip with the two film-makers and had written my own newspaper series about the “Lion of Panjshair,” he shut up. It was then that I realised what Christophe had begun to achieve by alerting the French public to the role of Massoud and the determination of so many ordinary Afghans to fight back.
On our return to France, Christophe and I remained friends. We both retained our interest in Afghanistan, largely through the people we had encountered or knew with links to the situation there, such Dr. Laurence Laumounier of AMI, Pierre Issot-Sergent (the first journalist to report on Massoud), Dr Juliette Fournot of MSF, political science specialist Olivier Roy and ethnologist Mike Barry. Christophe and I would often meet for lunch in Paris or at his country place near Chantilly north of the French capital to hotly debate documentary films or journalism, or simply to discuss life and women, a preferred topic for both of us. We also began to work together on films or shared coverage.
Christophe considered himself very much the creative film-maker who found the necessity to stick to the facts an obtrusive burden. He did not consider himself a journalist; he even resented the term. While later working together in Africa or Asia, he often made fun of me with my insistence to put the same non-leading questions to different people.
“You know the answer, so why do you bother?” he would ask.
“Because I need it to be confirmed,” I said. “This is my way of being as accurate as possible.”
Deep down, Christophe agreed that the craft of straight reporting was indeed essential, but often lamented how difficult it was to make “true” documentaries because of the constraints imposed by reality. “It would be far easier to simply let fiction take over,” he said. “Then you can really tell the story.”
As a film-maker, Christophe considered it crucial to tell stories in a manner that allowed the human essence of his characters to seep through in an unadulterated a form as possible. For an “Anglo-Saxon” journalist, I sometimes found his commentaries too sinister or mushy. It was very French. Yet I had to admit that his approach could prove exceptionally poignant. He gave his subjects the opportunity to speak honestly, and with humanity. They also spoke with emphasis and with compassion, and often with powerful, meaningful pauses. Christophe was not one to believe in sound bites and had little time for American-style “bottom liners.”
At the same time, Christophe saw how mainstream television, both in America and Europe, increasingly ignored the realities or truths on the ground by pushing for cliché simplicity and focusing only on what made “good” television. Story manipulation masquerading as serious journalism was happening all the time. He eventually wrote about this in Les Gobeurs de Lune, a novel depicting an American journalist who deliberately fabricates a news story to see whether anyone can really tell the difference, or cares.
Of course, this happened with Afghanistan in the late 1980s when an American film-maker, Mike Hoover, deliberately staged shots– and even stole war footage from an Afghan cameraman who had risked his life - for a CBS documentary which won an award. For me, this was an affront to all the serious film-makers and cameramen such as Christophe, Peter Jouvenal, Ken Guest and others, who had spent months if not years painstakingly making serious documentaries or reports only to have some charlatan get away with falsification. Despite ample proof, CBS vigorously denied this and even sent Hoover back to Afghanistan to make further films. CBS’s response could have been straight from Christophe’s book.
* * *
In 1982, Christophe and I accompanied Rony Brauman, the head of Médecins sans Frontières, on an exploratory trip to Angola. The French relief agency had four seats available for journalists, two of them for Radio France Internationale, two for us. Although I reported mainly for my own newspaper, Christophe and I collaborated on a documentary, Les Rebelles de la Brousse, which won us a dubious award, the Prix Fou. For six weeks, we filmed with Jonas Savimbi, the South African-backed UNITA rebel leader, across half of Angola, including an attack against Munhango, a government stronghold along the strategic Benguela railroad. Whether jolting for hours through the bush in the back of a huge URAL truck or contentedly smoking huge reefers of Zairois grass in front of our base camp huts watching the setting sun, we spent hours talking and making elaborate plans for new projects. Christophe was determined to make more films and to write books. By 1983, he had set up his own production company – Interscoop - with his new partner, Frederic Laffont.
Once back in Paris, Christophe, who had been divorced from his first wife, Mathilde, and had been camping out in various temporary abodes, was in desperate need of a place to live. My then girl friend, Tala Skari, and I were just in the process of moving into a huge flat on the Rue Faubourg St Denis, and offered to share it with him. (It was Tala, whose daughter attends the same school as Christophe’s son Max, who called me on my cell phone from Paris last Sunday to alert me to his death.) For the next eighteen months, the house was constantly filled with film-makers, photographers, Afghan resistance representatives, international aid workers, and, of course, Christophe’s various women. While I spent much of my time travelling to Africa and Asia on assignment, Christophe was busy making new documentary films. In 1986, while I was crossing Africa on a nearly two-year-long trip for my newspaper, Christophe and his then partner, Anne, flew down to meet with us in Zimbabwe to shoot a film on white farmers, Une Autre Façon d’être Blanc.
Throughout this period, Christophe persisted with his fascination for Massoud and Afghanistan. Several more key films emerged, such as Les Combattants de l’Insolence and Massoud, Portrait d’un Chef Afghan.. Once, as I was returning by foot to Pakistan along one of the northern clandestine routes with French journalist Patrick St Exupery, we bumped into Christophe and his friend, Bertrand Gallet, just outside the Nuristani town of Kontiwah. They were making their way to the Panjshair to film just as we were heading back. It was like a chance meeting on the Boulevard St Germain. We embraced, slapping each other on the back, and chatted for several minutes. There had been a lot of bombing against fleeing refugee columns and casualties had been high. Soviet special forces, too, were trying to hunt down foreign journalists known to be operating in the region, so much of our conversation was about security. We promised to meet up for dinner back in Paris. We then continued on our separate ways.
At the end of the 1980s, Christophe and I again shared a huge flat, this time for almost two years, in the Rue Faubourg Montmatre in northern Paris. But I was travelling most of the time and spent less than two months in the apartment. With so much space, Pierre Issot-Sergent made a pied-à-terre in one of my rooms and Patti Norchi, an American musician, lived in another. Whenever I returned briefly, there was always some dinner taking place, even film showings. With new girl friends, Christophe would often place them in front of a video to watch his productions while he finished up some work before taking them out to dinner. On one occasion, just back from Namibia, I found Christophe holding a special screening of Autofolies, a documentary about obsessive drivers and traffic in Paris, with some 200 guests sipping wine, watching video screens and dancing to rock and roll.
On my return to Paris in 1990, Christophe and Frédéric Laffont asked me to work with them on an ambitious new project, A Coeurs, A Corps, A Cris, about Medecins sans Frontieres. Over the next 12 months, Christophe and I travelled on shoots to El Salvador, Sri Lanka, Mozambique and Liberia. While the main French version was three hours, I acted as writer for the BBC one, Frontline Doctors, with Daniel Day-Lewis doing the voice over. The 75-minute British cut helped raise so much money for MSF that the French aid group was obliged to create MSF UK. Many of my British television friends could not believe that BBC 2 had given such prominence – a Christmas holiday Sunday evening special – to a film made by the French. Clearly, this was a feather in Christophe’s cap, but he still niggardly begrudged the need to make a special “Anglo-Saxon” version.
The shooting of the MSF film was the also the time when Christophe met Florence, his second wife, and he was very much in love. From Miami on our way to Salvador, he asked me to call Florence, a striking and highly talented French-German woman whom he had just met. He asked me to pass on a message in German and to say that he missed her desperately. I was constantly amused by Christophe’s romantic affairs and the intenseness of his relationships. But even his loves proved a torment and he would often complain about how difficult it was to be with a woman, and to remain true to oneself.
During the MSF shoot, Christophe and I often went for long runs amid the overgrown, war-abandoned tea plantations in northern Mozambique or through the rice paddies in rebel-held Sri Lanka to keep fit. Such outings always turned into long existentialist discussions. Each of the MSF assignments lasted roughly three weeks and much of the time was spent sharing the lives of the teams. Often, we found ourselves unintentionally helping them with their own internal crises.
In Sri Lanka, for example, the lead doctor of one particular mission had had an affair with almost every woman on the team. No one was talking to each other. So Christophe and I decided to cook a huge dinner with fresh fish and fruit from the market, forcing everyone to sit down at the same table. Christophe was an excellent cook albeit with a limited but tasty repertoire of specialities. He also loved to regale everyone with his tales and exploits and there was always at least one female nurse or doctor to impress. Elsewhere, we provided distraction by arriving with special food packages of sausage, wine and other goodies. Christophe was always very good at stopping off at the airport shopping mall to ensure that we arrived with something for those we intended to film, particularly if they were stuck way out in the bush. It was good politics and our contribution to humanitarianism while on assignment.
Later, in 1993 following the collapse of the communist regime in Kabul, Christophe asked me to work with him on another film about Afghanistan. There was much shelling at the time, mainly by Hekmatyar Gulbuddin’s forces, and we lived in a safe house provided by Massoud. We shared a room on the second floor and, as the first volleys of rockets began to hit at dawn, we would lie in bed waiting to determine whether we would need to leap out from the warmth of our blankets and take cover under the concrete stairwell. Our warning system was based on the extent of the rattling and breaking of the windows as the rockets exploded closer and closer. Usually, we met with Massoud late at night when he suddenly appeared, often in the early hours of the morning, to play chess or to discuss the fighting, but also his visions of the future and his love for poetry.
Things were clearly not going well in Afghanistan. Nor for Massoud. The endless fighting was taking a toll on everyone. Kabul was looking more and more like Dresden. Christophe often talked about how he would like to make a final film about Massoud and Afghanistan, and be able to return with his wife and children with everything at peace. He always talked with pride about his boys, and later, his first daughter, Lola, now almost two years old, with his third wife Rim. How wonderful it would be, he said, to undertake those extraordinary treks with someone you loved. What he wanted more than anything else, Christophe extolled, was a romantic and peaceful end to the conflict in Afghanistan. But of course there is still no end to Afghanistan’s turmoil, even with the presence of NATO forces and the pouring in of billions of dollars worth of aid.
In 1996, I worked with Christophe again in the Indonesian-controlled territory of Western New Guinea on an adventure film about French explorer Patrice Franceschi, who was seeking lost tribes living within the Freeport mining concession area. Again, we spent hours and days talking about filming and writing, going for runs or walks, waiting for permits, and then shooting the actual documentary in the rain forest, where we slept in hammocks and trudged from village to village along narrow, muddy paths. At one time, while biding out time in Jakarta waiting for government paper work to come through, we took off for three days during a holiday weekend to Bali where we hiked in the hills and travelled impromptu by bus rather than spend any more time enduring the overbearing stultifying pollution of the Indonesian capital. As usual, Christophe constantly questioned his existence, but I put this down to the normal frustrations of producing a difficult documentary.
On our return to Paris that summer, I stayed at Christophe’s flat and learned of the death of my father, who had passed away during my absence. Christophe and I talked well into the night about life and death, and the need to leave behind some form of legacy, some form of contribution to life. Christophe was very concerned about this legacy and saw his books and film-making as part of it. Clearly, however, he felt that this would never be enough. Many a time during an assignment, Christophe would fall into deep or melancholic depressions. And then he would query the whole purpose of his creativity. I would spend the next several hours or days talking him back, putting an optimistic twist on whatever we were doing. In fact, I considered that my principal job when things got rough and Christope descended into one of his depressions.
Never once, however, did he ever discuss the possibility of suicide. I now wonder whether he was afraid of telling me and that I might consider it a weakness. Or maybe, he felt that much of what we were doing was a delusion and that we could not bear to admit our own limitations.
From 1996 onwards, I stopped living in Paris and soon moved to Cessy, a small French village near the Geneva border. I was now married to Lori and had two children of my own. I was also running a media foundation, Media Action International, which took up enormous amounts of my time. I saw much less of Christophe, but we often spoke to each other by phone, shared our mutual frustrations about attaining our goals, and met occasionally in Paris over lunch or a coffee in the Place Monges near the Interscoop office.
* * *
The assassination of Massoud on 9 September, 2001, was traumatic for all of us. I had been waiting for Massoud in Khoja Bahaoudin in northern Afghanistan while on assignment for National Geographic Magazine. However, I was obliged to leave in order to be back in Europe for Lori’s birthday on 13 Septemebr and made arrangements by radio to meet him several weeks later. While waiting at the Jamiat guesthouse, however, I found myself in the room next to two Arabs posing as journalists and who later killed Massoud with a suicide bomb. Christophe quickly phoned me in Geneva when he heard the news. We talked at great length and Christophe was clearly stunned by the death of his Afghan friend. It was a devastating blow. Even if one tried to keep an objective “journalistic” distance between oneself and the guerrilla leader, as I did but which Christophe disdained as “absurd,” one developed a close personal relationship simply by spending so much time eating, trekking, and talking with the man over so many years.
Some time later, Christophe came to Cessy with Florence, just prior to their breakup, and spent the weekend at our house. He was up every morning at four to work on a novel. I could not help but admire his perseverance. He voiced the usual frustrations of making films – funding, broadcasts, creative constraints - and, despite his problems with Florence, he seemed relatively pleased with his work. He seemed confident, too, that his feature film would finally get moving. In 2004 and 2005, I was spending more time in Kabul and was regularly in touch with Christophe by phone or by email. Much of our discussion was about the new film. He was excited by this although constantly seeking the money needed to ensure the project. We hoped that we would be able to see each other in Kabul once shooting began and he asked me for help him find good Afghan actors.
Some months back, I happened to be in Paris and met up with Christophe, Rim and Lola at the Gare de Lyons Train Bleu brasserie for a coffee. This was the first time that I got to meet his new family. Christophe had recently had his hips operated and was still in considerable pain. But he considered the intervention worthwhile as he hoped he would be able to walk and exercise as before once he had fully recuperated. He seemed visibly happy and very much in love with Rim. I asked him about having yet another child at such a late stage in his life and he said that nothing pleased him more. “It gives life new meaning,” he insisted.
Three weeks ago, Christophe called me from Paris leaving a message on the answering machine. He wanted to know what I thought of Hollywood’s plans to make a feature film about George Crile’s book, Charlie Wilson’s War. I was in East Africa at the time, and only managed to call him back on my return. I left a message with his office but never got round to chatting with him. Too much to do. Missed conversations.
So now I wonder if my talking with him could have helped change things in his mind. But these are the thoughts of all of his close friends. Based on the letters he left behind, his mind was made up. But for me, as with so many of us, Christophe was part of our lives. And he now leaves a jagged gap in our own personal domains, but as far as I am concerned, he has indeed left a legacy which makes us proud, and which, I know, will survive well beyond us.
EG Cessy, France, May 22, 2005.
