The
joy of heaven, the pain of death
Katherine Kizilos
The Age
On day one of the film festival, Paul Cox tells Katherine Kizilos
about the debt he felt he owed to the lepers in a Hawaiian colony.
KALAUPAPA is an isolated outcrop on the Hawaiian
Director Paul Cox told part of the story in his 1999 feature film
Last year he returned to make a documentary, Kalaupapa
Heaven, about the last 30 or so people who still live there.
As Cox tells it, these people have been free to leave since 1960. Modern
treatments mean that Hansen's disease, as leprosy is also known, is not
contagious if a sufferer is taking medication. But Kalaupapa
has become home to the people who live there; even those who are not disfigured
prefer it to any other place.
The interview takes place in Cox's Albert Park production office, Illumination
Films. Cox, an independent filmmaker who has made 22 feature films, has long
been based in
His next feature film, Salvation, about "that born-again Christian
rubbish" is scheduled to appear at the end of the year.
Kalaupapa Heaven was made for love, not profit. It's
an attempt to explain why the residents feel such an attachment to the
peninsula where they have known immense suffering. The documentary is partly a
plea for Kalaupapa to be preserved as a memorial to
those who have died there.
Cox says developers are already circling Kalaupapa,
and he has a horror for what the place might become. "There are so many
people lurking around that want to turn it into one of those (places) with
those hideous, hideous condominiums and golf courses," says Cox.
But he believes a preserved Kalaupapa could serve a
role as
The filmmaker is convinced that the residents at Kalaupapa
have much to teach the rest of us. "They are dear and wonderful
people," says Cox, who befriended many of the patients while staying at Kalaupapa during the making of
His identification with the residents was so strong that at one time he thought
he had contracted leprosy himself. "I had a spot growing on my arm.
I thought, 'Oh, oh this is it', but (I think) it was psychosomatic."
On reflection, Cox decided that had he become sick, he wouldn't have minded
staying on the peninsula."
Strindberg says true life is based upon pain and suffering and not on joy and
laughter.
When you go through deep pain, you become more human ... in the real world you
have real people and shallow people and the shallow people have everything. And
even if the real people have everything (in terms of worldly goods) it means
nothing to them." Cox adds that "real life is about being, it is
about giving, and these patients really know what that means".
Cox recalls that during the shooting of the feature film he and Wenham were
invited to spend a day watching the filming of Baywatch at a nearby beach.
He didn't want to go, but Richard Marks, the sheriff at Kalaupapa
was also invited and was keen. Marks, who was diagnosed with Hansen's disease
when he was a young man, tells his story on the documentary: of his separation
from his family and friends; of his luggage being doused with sulphur before travelling, a
measure he believes offered little protection but told everyone of his pariah
status; of not being allowed to visit his wife in hospital after she had given
birth, or, later, his dying son.
Cox says he was criticised in the
The word is not used by Cox, however, but by the patients he interviews.
"If they want to use it, that's OK with me."
The documentary was the first time the patients had allowed themselves to be
filmed, he says. Some have no fingers, some are blind, some are in wheelchairs,
some have faces distorted by the illness, while others
- like Marks - show no sign of the disease.
Cox says one of the consequences of their exile to Kalaupapa
is that the patients had no opportunity to pursue their education. But what is
striking about the interviews is how eloquently they speak about their lives
and what it has taught them. Old women speak about the pain of having their
babies taken from them. Olivia Breitha, 90, the first
person to speak in the film, says that despite what she has suffered she would
wish for no other life."
I'm not sorry, I'm happy, I'm glad because actually I learned how to find
myself, with my spirit. It's not only my body that makes me, it's my soul, and
I learned to contact myself . . ."
But to return to the Baywatch outing, which neatly reflected all of Cox's
feelings about the significance of Kalaupapa."
We had this hilarious day with these people with their hard faces and hard
knockers pushed out in all directions . . .
they thought they were all very important and very beautiful."
On the way back to Kalaupapa, Cox, Wenham and Marks
each had a turtle tattooed on their upper arm. The turtle is a sacred animal in
He then says that Marks, who is "79, 80" is very ill now and that
Olivia Breitha died last year. Kalaupapa
is beautiful, Cox agrees, but it is filled with bones. "The place is like
what Goethe says, 'one moment the joy of heaven, the next moment the pain of
death'."
Kalaupapa Heaven is, finally, Cox's attempt to
correct what he says was the violence done to his feature film
Cox says the film that was released in cinemas "bombed".
It also violated his artistic intentions and, in his mind, betrayed the people
of Kalaupapa.
Eventually, he says, the investors asked him to return and re-create the
original version, which is available on DVD.
The bitter dispute over the making of the feature, the uncertainty over the
future of the peninsula, even the controversy over the use of the word
"leper", are all signs that this dreaded disease, which has almost
disappeared from view, still has a powerful hold on our collective imagination.
In their own ways, both films ask the questions: who is well and who is sick
and what does it mean to be whole? Cox says they also ask another question:
"what does it mean to be human?" Kalaupapa
Heaven will screen at