How many films did you make on your OE? JOE SHEPPARD talks to the remarkably industrious Jess Feast, local director of Cowboys and Communists and guest at the Telecom 36th Wellington Film Festival, about her experiences in Berlin documenting the effects of Germany’s reunification on two very different characters.


JOHN WAYNE and Joe McCarthy have absolutely nothing to do with Cowboys and Communists, ‘a modern colonisation story’ about American and German gastronomy by the appropriately named Wellington filmmaker Jess Feast. Yes, you read that right – although the two nations are not exactly renowned for their haute cuisine, to Feast the differences between sauerkraut and a sloppy joe symbolises many of the struggles facing Berliners after the wall fell. The opening minutes of the film (viewable here: youtube.com/watch?v=zPWhp3tPg2U) – an animated explosion of cultural icons that abridges the last fifty years of history in the German capital – really grab hold of the viewer but also highlight the themes of change and continuity that are central to the story.

“To look behind what those images represent in a small way was what I was trying to do,” says Feast. “What does happen fifteen years on from an event like that where it’s touted around as ‘the big event’, ‘the big victory’?”

Feast used White Trash Fast Food – the late night burlesque burger bar run by tattooed Californian biker-chef Wally Potts – as the lens through which she could focus her documentary. During the Soviet years of East Berlin, a state-owned restaurant had served traditional German fare there, but after the reunification it was one of the first places in the east where you could get Chinese food before Wally took over and Feast got a job waiting tables there.

“When I first began I was very much focused on the restaurant as the kind of character,” says Feast. She interviewed previous waiters and owners, but in the end cut all that footage in order to centre on the more interesting and important issues that arose from her inquiries and ultimately gave shape to her project.

Enter Horst Woitalla. With his blue plaid shirt tucked neatly into tan slacks, held up by striped braces, he appears to be a throwback to the functional, drab style associated with communist East Germany. But as a former journalist he articulates himself persuasively, and in him Feast found the voice of a local community that resented the deafening parties at all hours from the building’s newest tenants. Horst and the residents’ association are from a world miles away from Wally and his entourage of DJs, diners and barflies. It was a clash of cultures and White Trash Fast Food became a microcosm for Berlin itself.

At the bottom of it, it was really just a zoning issue. And given the conclusion was satisfying to all parties, was it all just Sturm und Drang in a teacup? The strength of Cowboys and Communists lies in Feast’s empathy for her subjects and her unwillingness to surrender the personal to the political or vice versa. The Cold War had its losers, and history needs to hear Horst’s story.

Feast: “The entire formative years – forty years of his life, aged ten to aged fifty – he lived within that regime, within that set of ideas. He went to school, he was taught it, he worked within it. He wanted to make it work in some way; he believed in it. He was a Communist. He believed in that. And now someone comes in and says, “By the way – everything you were told? It’s all bullshit. Just put that all aside now and take on board these other views. Meanwhile, we’re going to take away your job and take away your security as well.” You can start to understand why those views become galvanised and why they might not want to change and why they might get sort of staunch about it.”

Feast also notes local parallels. “Think about Wellington,” she says. “People who choose to live in an inner-city apartment and then complain about a bar being noisy. It’s like, “Guys, it’s the inner-city. What did you expect?” Whereas in this situation it’s a little bit different because… back when [Horst] had this apartment it was a quiet place and it was designed around that.”

Originally from Wellington, Feast found herself working at White Trash after studying in Germany on a Goethe Institut scholarship. Since English was the lingua franca there, White Trash was one of the only places she could find work. Cowboys and Communists is the fruits of a highly productive OE, shot on a non-existent budget, juggling logistics and relying on the goodwill of others for eighteen long months. I can only imagine the state of ‘the production bike’ that Feast wistfully recalls, laden with hired sound gear and a borrowed camera. Funding never came until after the film had been shot, courtesy of the New Zealand Film Commission and Vanguard Films. The Gibson Group also helped out financially and even gave Feast her first desk job. Still, I noticed those finely honed hospo skills hadn’t blunted when she delivered my espresso and made sure the wobbly table leg was sorted out.

Feast agrees that the health and education in Germany are better than in New Zealand, but the last fifteen years have presented major economic and social problems for the united country, not least of which are severe levels of unemployment in the eastern states. Horst sees all that, she says, and wonders whether or not change at such a cost was really for the best.

As the title suggests, Cowboys and Communists explores many of the binary divisions modern Germany lives among. The Western, entrepreneurial party animals can be contrasted with the more reserved, community-minded east Germans. But such simple dichotomies are frustrated by greater questions about freedom and motive that cannot be easily answered. One of the great ironies of Cowboys and Communists, for example, is that Wally and his ragtag crew see themselves as quasi-refugees from a homeland that rejected them, yet the place they sought sanctuary was notorious as the former East Germany.

“These people genuinely left America because they do feel that it is an oppressive regime there,” says Feast. “They do feel oppressed by the politics of America, and they feel frustrated about them.”

“It comes back to this idea of freedom. America has always set itself up as the land of the free, and the fact [is] that you now have people who are having to get out of there because they don’t feel like their state represents them or allows them the freedom that they need. It’s quite an extreme situation, but what kind of freedom are they offering? Horst sees that as well. We have to think about what freedom is and what we want out of it.”

And what does Feast think freedom is? “In the case of the film it’s about the freedom to live the way that you want to live and have a place in society where you can do that, where there’s space for you to do that, whether you’re Horst or whether you’re Wally, and society somehow needs to provide for that.”

From Horst’s point of view, he is only trying to preserve his world against a foreign invasion, and Wally might argue that gentrification cannot be allowed to destroy subcultures. In fact it is surprising how many similarities the two men share, though separated by generations and continents. One of these is a sense of nostalgia. Feast regards Horst as “looking back in the same way that Wally’s looking back at the States – his Americana kind of world that he’s creating, this America as it should be, or as it could be, or it’s oppressive now or whatever. It’s kind of a nostalgic attitude. And Horst’s attitude is also very nostalgic and it’s kind of harking back to these ideas of what might be. It’s not reality.”

Another surprise for Feast was the reaction that different audiences had. Both Wally and Horst were happy with the way they were represented, which reflects well on Feast as a balanced documentary-maker. In my view the final decision was clearly the best way to redress the civil dispute, but the Germans that saw the film had a different standpoint.

“They look at these East Germans and it’s still this wall thing,” says Feast. “They still see that side as being ridiculous. That whole East German thing. I was actually really surprised by that.”

“Now is the time to record these stories. For me it was important to record a story that I had never heard before. I had never heard that side of it. I had never heard someone [from the East] say, “Look, I was actually okay from it.” Regardless of where he comes from or who he is or whether he was with the Stasi or not, that story – I’d never heard it. And a lot of Germans had never heard it. A lot of West Germans who saw that had never experienced someone like Horst first-hand. They had never heard his story before, or his attitude. And they were very surprised at how honestly he was able to express his attitude. Because they don’t get that voice in Germany, or anywhere.”

Feast’s dedication to the human stories that make up social histories deserves merit. It sounds like she also had a blast and managed to earn a living doing it to boot. What did she find most rewarding? “Getting to know people,” she says. “I love being able to have the opportunity to really talk to people. It brought me closer to the people at White Trash, and it also gave me this insight into life in East Germany that I would never have had if I hadn’t made the film.”