Still in Motion

I'll Be Your Mirror: Nan Goldin's Film Curation at CPH:DOX

Read my essay on American photographer Nan Goldin's film curation at last month's Copenhagen International Documentary Festival, featured in the Festival Reports section of the just-released issue of Senses of Cinema here.    

Interview: Marianna Kaat, Director PIT NO 8

I was privileged to be a member of the international jury at the eleventh edition of the International Documentary Film Festival “Flahertiana,” in Perm, Russia that took place last month (11 – 17 October).  We five jury members were tasked with awarding a Grand Prix, a Best Feature and Best Short film prizes.  We gave the feature prize to Estonian filmmaker, Marianna Kaat, for Pit No 8.  Here’s what we said in our statement:

“ . . . Kaat grows a unique and complex relationship with her main protagonists, particularly in her portrayal of one very powerful man who still resides in the body of an adolescent boy.  We observe how he and his family try to survive under unbearable social pressures with grace, dignity, and persistent resistance against the forces that might pull them under at any given moment.  They display clarity and fortitude, as does Kaat in her filmmaking.  Pit No 8 is an inspiring portrait of Ukraine, a country in painful transition, where there are no rules.  But Kaat shows us plenty of examples of the miracle of humanity amidst inhumane conditions.”

The Tallinn-based filmmaker’s new film is also an apt case study for a couple of complex issues nonfiction directors face on a regular basis.  In her quest for a main protagonist for her film on illegal coal mining in the Donetsk region of Ukraine, she met a teenager named Yura and he, in turn, introduced her and her crew to his two sisters.  When they met, the three children were living completely on their own, taking care of one another and surviving the best they knew how.  During the course of filming with Yura and his sisters, Julia and Ulyana, Kaat and her crew became so close to them that the usual lines drawn between filmmaker and protagonists started to blur, with the director, in particular, becoming personally involved in their lives—an association that still continues to this day.

As well, because Kaat is interested in making cinematic pieces that comprise aspects of what she calls “her vision,” there are re-constructed scenes in the film that she and her subjects created together, and so she plays with the timeline of some events for the purposes of stronger dramaturgy in line with the story she chooses to tell about their lives.  In essence, this documentary filmmaker plays with form and, in the process, has created an emotionally resonant film that has had profound repercussions in the country of Ukraine.  Quite candidly, she talked to me about these creative decisions and the journey that took her deep into the lives of her subjects. 

 

Still in Motion (SIM):  How did you find your way into this film?  How did you discover Yura and his family?

Marianna Kaat (MK):  As a documentary filmmaker, I’m always open to new stories, new characters; I’m always thinking about those things, even when I’m not actively making a film.  Ideas can come from news stories or meeting someone and I think, oh that would be a great subject or character for a documentary.  I’m always open for that.

I was a co-producer on a Ukrainian project, a fiction film for children that was shot in Estonia.  I was sitting drinking coffee with the Ukrainian producer and I told her that we now had to do something in Ukraine [laughing].  I already knew about this area, this Donetsk and Donbass area [the center of the coal industry in Eastern Ukraine]. 

I was born in the Soviet Union—we used to be one country, Estonia, Russia, etc., and I’m old enough to remember certain things that filled every day of my life, such as what was on TV and in films.  There were a lot of documentaries about miners in the Soviet period.  These men were considered the “aristocrats” of the labor-class. They were very well paid; their salaries were fairly high compared to what a lot of other people were earning at the time, and they were privileged.  They traveled to the best places for vacations in Crimea and the Black Sea area. When the Soviet Union collapsed, most of the state mines were closed. I also was aware of all the social problems in this area that were the result of massive unemployment when the mines were shut down. 

We found a retired guy, about 54, who still had this illegal pit but it was closed by the time we got there.  He was like a Don Quixote, fighting with the authorities because he didn’t want to pay bribes to the militia anymore to keep it open.  So the authorities made him a sort of unofficial Marshall, closing his pit with the presence of TV and the militia present and all this kind of thing, to show how they are fighting the illegal pits.  But, in reality, they are all connected to this illegal industry, somehow.  So I thought this might be my main character and we would follow him trying to legalize his pit, going to the different authorities.  Theoretically, it is possible to make it legal, but it costs a lot of money.  And it was obvious that there would be no way for this man to succeed in accomplishing that.

We even made some sort of trailer from this material and I pitched the project in different parts of Europe.  We received some money to go and shoot, and just as we were getting ready to go, I got a message that he had died from cancer.  But when we got there, I was absolutely sure that we would find a protagonist.  This area is full of very, very strong characters, responsible men who work for their families.  Usually the women sit at home and the men work.  When Ukraine received independence [in 1991], there were changes to these classical roles because so many men lost their jobs.  They could no longer feed their families.  It was both an internal and external tragedy for a lot of people.

We did think we had found another main protagonist in this young 22-year-old guy who, like Yura, had started working in the pits when he was fourteen or fifteen years old.  He had just gotten married and his wife was pregnant.  Yura actually mentions him in the film as “the kamikaze” who dug a hole underneath his own house. This guy mentioned that his neighbor was a fifteen-year-old boy, the grandson of one of the plant directors, and he worked in the pits.  For me, that was new information because I didn’t realize that children were working in the pits.  That was a discovery and something I had never read about anywhere.

One day when we were shooting on the street, this boy rides up to us on his bike and starts asking us who we are and what we’re doing there.  And then, of course, I realized that this is the same boy we had been looking for.  We were looking for him, but he had found us, a good sign.  And it was absolutely clear that he would be our main guy.

SIM:  What was it about Yura, in particular, that made you feel that strongly that he would be the person to lead the film?

MK:  He was extremely open from the very beginning—you can see this first encounter in the film.  When we were editing the material, we tried different approaches to introduce his story and then I realized there was no need to get very complicated about it and just showed how our first encounter happened since we filmed it.  He was open to sharing his thoughts and wasn’t afraid or shy.  And of course, there was the fact that he was working, a normal workingman, no different than anyone else there who decides to work.  Some of these working people, like him, are children. By that time, we had also learned that he was the grandson of this Soviet factory boss.  For those not living in the Soviet era, that doesn’t seem so important, but for those who lived during those times, the importance of this is key.  The factory was making materials for the military, so the person running these plants was very powerful.  For this region, the director of the factory was like a god.  There were no barriers or limits for this kind of person, you know?  So knowing this and knowing how his grandson is living makes for an enormous difference if we look at it in terms of legacy. 

SIM:  The ghost of the grandfather is there throughout the entire film.  People keep mentioning him, what a great man he was.  But what’s even more resonant in terms of this particular aspect, is that this boy, somehow, even without knowing what this legacy might mean, is imbued with this kind of nobility.  I see this noble class in him, not only in his confidence and his maturity, but in the way he feels so paternalistic towards almost everyone he meets and certainly in the way he regards his role as caretaker of the family.  He’s so much more like a father figure than a brother or a son.

After you filmed for about six months with Yura and his sisters, we come to a very interesting point in the film.  Other filmmakers would have, perhaps, made very different decisions about this and there are many, many discussions about this issue in documentary circles—one of the trickiest territories a nonfiction filmmaker has to traverse.  You state, very explicitly, that you decide to help the children by buying them a house.  It’s Christmastime and we’ve watched their situation deteriorate relentlessly, including some strife amongst them, particularly Yura and the older girl, Ulyana.

MK:  Well, in many discussions about this with viewers and audiences, I must say that it's always addressed as a kind of positive question.  No one’s blaming me or finding fault with that decision, except for one time when someone asked me how I could “just change lives like that?”

First of all, their lives did not change after I decided to buy that house for them.  It cost practically nothing for me, to be honest, 1000 dollars.  That was nothing to spend to provide a roof over their heads. I have two boys, close to the same age as Yura and Ulyana, 17 and 19.  When we started to film with Yura, I cried a lot. He was the one who was trying to encourage me and comfort me, “No, no it’s okay; why are you crying like this?”  [laughing]  I was looking at this situation as a mother, not as a film director.  I was having a hard time separating these two things.

SIM:  We never see or meet their mother.  Was there an attempt to film her at all, or did you decide early on that you were going to stay focused on the children?

MK:  We filmed once with her.  There were several moments when we could have shot with her, but Yura did not want us to involve her in this at all and when I first saw her, I understood why.  For me, it was like a shock.  The first thing I found myself saying to her was how beautiful her children were because the contrast was staggering.  She looked absolutely awful.  This wouldn’t have given anything additional to this film except an awful visual moment.  During the time we shot the film, she wasn’t involved in their lives at all. And the reality was they were completely on their own and I wanted to show that there is, literally, no one taking care of these children.  Not even any of the representatives of this commission that is supposed to be responsible for overseeing the well being of these families, came to us to ask us what we were doing there.  They knew that we were filming.  The only time they came around was when I bought the children the house.  They didn’t come to check on them; they came to check out the house out of curiosity to see what kind of gift the children were getting.

The house where they were living with the mother was very, very cold, with no electricity and the windows were blocked with wood to keep some warmth in.  The stepfather had sold the heater for scrap to buy alcohol.  The situation was absolutely awful and my heart was breaking.  Yura told me about this house being sold by its owner’s son, that he was dreaming to buy it once he had enough money.  So I told him that we should go and see it together.  I had decided that if it would be okay for living, I was going to buy it—I had already made up my mind.  I knew the price already.  I told my crew that we needed to film everything since you never know what you might need afterwards.  But I wasn’t sure I would use this material for the film then. 

Also, in talking with the owner, I realized that he would be the only adult person to whom I could call from Estonia to ask how the children were doing.  In case they needed something, I could manage things through him.  I decided right then and there to buy it.  Yura was in shock since he didn’t expect this at all.

In an earlier cut of the film, I didn’t use this section. But I started asking some people about it and understood that without this, something essential would be missing.  And once I decided that Yura would be the center of the film, I started putting some moments back in like this one, his problems at school, and also this “golden” moment at the end when everyone is happy and we can all believe that everything will be okay.  However, I did want to know if it did bother people if we explicitly stated that I bought the house for the children, illustrating this involvement I had which obviously went beyond the filming relationship.  I didn’t get any negative reaction.

SIM:  Yura does struggle greatly with this work / school dilemma, realizing that with all the other responsibilities he has, to manage both is not really possible.  Particularly when the relationship with Ulyana breaks down, he realizes he’s really the only one that can support himself and Julia, the younger girl. The kids who do go to school and finish, do they stay in the area, do they leave?  What’s going to happen to places like Donbass?

MK:  This is an area where the authorities are not involved very deeply.  It’s not a question of money—there is money there.  It’s how the system works and how it’s worked for a long time now.  So it still depends on family.  If the family is okay, then the children are okay.  If the family is not okay, then the children have a hard time.

In Ukraine, someone put this film up on YouTube without permission, no English subtitles.  I’m not fighting against it since it’s obviously to be shared with people there who otherwise would not have access to it.  I haven’t checked recently, but it’s received thousands and thousands of uploads from Ukraine.  I’ve received emails through Facebook or through YouTube from people who were born there, some who even worked in the pits and have moved out of the area.  They live in Kiev, some even in America.  They are very moved because they see themselves in this film.  But most people stay just because they simply don’t have any money to move.

SIM:  The ending of this film, the last shots particularly, are surprising.  In many ways, this portrayal completely goes against the grain of the rest of the film as it's quite idealistic, whimsical and, one could say, fantastical. Why did you choose to end the film this way, with Yura and his best friend, Dima, “riding off into the sunset” on a motorbike? Why was it so important to you to have this “happy ending”?  Most documentary filmmakers do not feel compelled to show resolution of any sort, let alone a happy ending.

MK:  This scene--the whole film, in fact--is my vision of things.  The motorbike ride shown at the end is a reconstructed episode.  For the children and for the audiences who watch the film, I want them to believe in something [laughs softly].  I’m a positive person in life because I choose to be.  I also, somehow, believe in signs.  I think if you put something very horrible at the end, something horrible can or will happen to them.  That’s not what I want for them, to have this kind of bleak future.  I put my emotions and my energy in these episodes to make everybody believe that it is possible to change something.

We shot this episode on the motorbike in the middle of our shooting period.  I knew then that I wanted this to be the finale of the film and I told my crew this.  So I decided what the end of the film would be in the middle of shooting, whatever would have happened.  Dima purchased the bike in the beginning of summer. He had taken out a loan from the bank to buy it. When we got there in the middle of summer, the bike was already ruined, you know?  The boys had been very rough with it and we filmed them trying to repair it.  I wanted to reconstruct this episode where Dima buys it and they're driving it when it’s new.  It was something he and Yura had done together during the summer but we’d missed that.  So we repaired the bike and shot them riding in the city, outside the city, what you see in the film.  The light was fantastic, etc.  I tried to make this motorbike a constant theme in the film.  When we show that they go to first see the bike in the store and ask how much it is, the bike had already been bought.  I wanted to get all these episodes on film—things that had already happened.  It becomes a manifestation of their dreams and instead of having them merely speak about it, I wanted to show them riding.

SIM:  I see this kind of nuance in the work of your cinematographer, Rein Kotov.  His camera work is really extraordinary.  These quiet, formally framed moments become so vital to a viewer’s emotional journey with these characters. We really get a sense of where we are and what it feels like. And a lot of it is really ugly.  He bothered to go and find a good amount of beauty there.

MK:  Rein is a very famous Estonian cinematographer who mostly works in fiction.  So I’m very proud that he works with me.  Obviously, I can’t pay him near what he makes in fiction and he’s very, very busy; he’s in high demand and works a lot.  My sound recordist, as well, is now a fiction film producer [Ivo Felt].  So I’m working with an extremely qualified and professional crew.  It was tricky logistically sometimes to work things out, where everyone could take time to go to Ukraine to shoot.  Sometimes we would only be able to go for three or four days at a time and it just came down to using what we had when we could get it, how to use what happened when we weren’t there, and how to incorporate those elements in the film.  This also included what might happen in the future that didn't yet exist at the time of shooting.

But all of us share a common understanding of the world and so we formed similar relationships to the protagonists.  It became vital to be able to shoot together and so I needed to wait for them to be available.  The children became close to all of us.  It gets dark in the Ukraine very early so the shooting day is very short.  There’s nothing to do there so we’d sit for hours in the evening together in restaurants and the children were always with us.  We acted very much like a family in this way when we were there.

I think this is crucial when you’re going to show very intimate aspects of people’s lives to have this kind of intimacy in reality.  That intimacy extends to your crew because I completely relied and trusted in them.

SIM:  What did the kids think when they saw the film?  Did they feel it was worth it to expose and share their lives like this?

MK:  They like the film.  We spent three years of our lives making it together.  It’s very difficult for me to divide things—it was, and still is, a very big part of my life, these relationships. I’m still in contact with them and I’m still dealing with them and I probably will until they’re grown.  I’m still trying to help them.  The film has had powerful emotional impacts on people.  When I showed it at festivals in Canada, at Hot Docs in Toronto and DOXA in Vancouver, there were some people who told me they were involved with a charity and wanted to know how they could help. 

The irony of the situation is that the Ukrainian authorities are so frightened by this film.  In fact, the film is prohibited from being shown in Ukraine.  Not prohibited in any “official” capacity, but none of the Ukrainian festivals will take it and my co-producer there, who has distribution rights for that territory, is not doing anything.  The Ukrainian Ministry of Culture is the only source for financing films and she is afraid that if she associates herself with this film any further, the financing for her own future projects will be compromised.

The head of one of the Canadian charities is from a different region in Ukraine and they have created some big projects affiliated with orphanages, one of which is where Julia is now. But these places would not let me in when I was asked to go there to negotiate on behalf of the Canadians.  The orphanage director in Ukraine was advised not to have contact with me and refused to meet me at all.  There was even talk of the possibility of putting together a scholarship for Yura to come to study in Canada at a cooking school.  [Yura dreams of becoming a chef.]  People have reacted so emotionally; they really want to do something to help.  But they are reacting to my vision of life there—not necessarily the reality.  Yura still works in the pits, you know?  He did finish school but he’s working in the pits again.

I’m not their mother. If he was, indeed, my son, I would just flat out tell him to do what I thought was best for him and there would be little discussion!  [laughter]  But I can’t say things like that to him. He knows about this proposal to bring him to Canada.  He needed certain documents and he didn’t bother to acquire those.  I haven’t heard from him in a couple of months, but through checking in with the sisters, I know he’s involved in working in the pits and he knows how I would take that and that’s why he’s not contacting me.  Because then he’d have to tell me what he’s doing and he can’t lie to me.  To be honest, I don’t see a good future for him.  Maybe the army can change something but I don’t know if he will go or even if he’ll be accepted or sent there since he has the two sisters.  I don’t know what the rules are regarding that.

And unfortunately, Julia, the little one, is too old for adoption in Canada, but these same Canadians were ready to establish some sort of fund for her support after she finished school at the orphanage. But all these things have to be done with the cooperation of the local people and I can’t do anything from Estonia.  I do understand as a professional filmmaker that you can definitely influence people with your films and gain something from it when there is the offer to do something about the situation of the people you portray in your films.  But in Ukraine, they are doing nothing and more than that, creating restrictions so that nothing can be done.

Viktor Yanukovych [the President of Ukraine] was born in this region.  The film doesn’t do much for the image of Ukraine or the region, quite obviously, since no one in power is interested in doing anything for people there, including the children.  I’m an outsider; I’m not a citizen there and to be honest, I really don’t know what to do, to whom I should appeal. I do want this film to help people and to change things, especially in the mines.  I know that several Ukrainian bloggers are writing about the film.  I saw one comment that said, “Yanukovych to the pit, and Yura for President!”  [laughing] 

SIM:  That would not be a bad start for change.

 

To stream or upload the film (with English subtitles), click here:  http://onlinefilm.org/en_EN/film/48972

 

The Art of the No-Hand Aerial: Tristan Patterson DRAGONSLAYER

Read my interview with Dragonslayer director, Tristan Patterson on BOMB here.

The Age

My beast, my age, who will try
to look you in the eye,
and weld the vertebrae
of century to century,
with blood? Creating blood
pours out of mortal things:
only the parasitic shudder,
when the new world sings.

As long as it still has life,
the creature lifts its bone,
and, along the secret line
of the spine, waves foam.
Once more life’s crown,
like a lamb, is sacrificed,
cartilage under the knife--
the age of the new-born.

To free life from jail,
and begin a new absolute,
the mass of knotted days
must be linked by means of a flute.
With human anguish
the age rocks the wave’s mass,
and the golden measure’s hissed
by a viper in the grass.

And new buds will swell, intact,
the green shoots engage,
but your spine is cracked
my beautiful, pitiful, age.
And grimacing dumbly, you writhe,
look back, feebly, with cruel jaws,
a creature, once supple and lithe,
at the tracks left by your paws.

--Osip Emilevich Mandelstam

OUTRO -- Life After Death

According to our wise friend, Wikipedia, “In music, the conclusion is the ending of a composition, taking the form of a coda or outro. Pieces using sonata form typically use the recapitulation to conclude a piece, providing closure through the repetition of thematic material, [creating] altogether unexpected digressions just as a work is drawing to its close, followed by a return to a consequently more emphatic confirmation of the structural relations implied in the body of the work.”  (italics mine) 

In Russian, the word outro means "morning" or "morrow."

Julia Panasenko’s film, Outro, which just won the Grand Prix at the Flahertiana documentary festival in Perm, Russia, last week is a fast and furious piece, clocking in at just 43 minutes.  For most of the first half of this brief three quarters of an hour, I was completely disoriented.  (A sensation I experience most of the time, so I don’t panic about it anymore.) And then once I was somewhat orientated to what was happening, the film became a revelation in how breaking every formal "rule" of documentary can take one on a journey of intense discovery, viscerally tapping into extremely deep emotional territory.  So much so, in fact, I found myself shutting down completely while watching it since I didn’t want my molecules to fly apart in front of everyone else in the cinema since that would be messy and embarrassing. I can say that this film has not left my frontal lobe since viewing it.

I've spent the last decade or so of my life pondering the ins and outs of documentary filmmaking in all of its formal aspects—the dramaturgical alchemy of successful nonfiction storytelling; the technical aspects of how you cinematically illustrate the lives of your subjects with vision and sound; how to tap into the most appropriate tempo and pace of your film’s various aspects to build to a satisfying whole; the rhythms of the very complex and intimate dance in which the maker engages with his or her protagonists. It’s bloody hard work and, when you’re doing it as a solo act, it's also a small miracle of an achievement.  (The filmmaker, pictured above.)

And then I see something like Panasenko’s film and realize that the spectrum of creativity in nonfiction storytelling keeps expanding to new depths, and all the parsing of this, that and the other amounts to so much nonsense, really. Panasenko produced, directed, and shot the film on a small digital camera.  The film is, for the most part, pretty raw—not retouched or color corrected, with distorted or bad sound quality in several places, since she didn’t have the resources to do any extensive post-production work.  Panasenko also expertly and intuitively edited the piece, creating a gorgeous and moving homage to a dying friend.  You can feel the filmmaker groping for purchase with her camera, frightened, intimidated, tentative—and then she is completely there, running right up to the precipice with her protagonist.  And then, letting go.

“Judging from my looks, I think I have like three weeks left.”  Time is running out for Svetlana Donskova (pictured below), a vibrant woman in her late thirties whose life force is palpable throughout the film, even though it is quickly dissipating, the last grains of sand in the hourglass accelerating in an unstoppable flow towards the void most of us fear, the last moments of our lives. 

Some of us have allowed certain inalienable beliefs to embed themselves in our psyches and these beliefs provide succor and comfort about what awaits us on the other side.  Others of us question, wonder and ponder endlessly and / or stop our minds from “going there” at all. Others of us are quite sure there is just nothingness—not only our corporeal selves dissolve, but our spirits and consciousnesses flicker out, as well, and only live on in the memories and hearts of those we leave behind, along with some photographs, some recordings, and other documented ephemera that make up a life. 

We experience other, smaller deaths during the course of our lifetimes--heartbreak, the death of a loved one, the loss of something that defines us, such as a job, an identity, a bank account.  Through illness or accident, we sometimes suffer the loss of a limb or an organ or a part of our mind.  And we are often defined (against our will) in terms of what others think of us, how they relate to us, how they judge us and peg us as "that type of person."  It's all somewhat of a trap unless you choose to, somehow, break free of any and all constraints and use most of your energy to craft a personality and presence that is uncompromising.

This last bit, as Panasenko portrays her, describes Donskova.  The tug-of-war in which she engages as she’s dying—with her mother, in particular—is a testament to this uncompromising force.  In a flurry of dialogues, monologues, phone conversations, she seems to be saying, This was my life the way I saw fit to live it, despite all the lack, all the doubts, all the un-leveraged benefits of being young and intelligent, creative and beautiful.  And this is my death, and I will experience it also as I see fit, no compromises. 

The mother has done damage—purposefully / unwittingly, innocently / cruelly, doesn’t matter—love is selfish, love is cruel, love is narcissistic. Donskova makes it clear that her mother will have the rest of her life to deal with the results of the rift between them since she has that privilege still, more life to live. Donskova is moving on relentlessly and bravely towards the end of hers because she has no choice in the matter.  The film contains so many beautifully composed moments of overwhelming emotion unexpressed from Donskova herself, her friends, her father, and, finally, her mother, as well, so many shouts and cries of anger and grief are suppressed, that everyone is imbued with the kind of grace and dignity Sveta’s “good death” demands.

After listening to a lovely, delicate, sweet song composed especially for her by her friend and neighbor, Dima, she says pensively, “I still can’t figure out what I am.  Am I bad or good?  . . .   At least now I know what I am in musical terms.” As her father’s big, rough hands caress the body of his dying daughter, he says to her, “Soon you’ll get rid of your physical self.  At first you’ll fly above us.  And we’ll remember you very, very long.” Her friend, Panasenko, has also left an imprint of Sveta’s spirit in cinematic terms, so she can stay with us all a bit longer.

 

 

XI International Documentary Film Festival "Flahertiana"

I recently had an opportunity to take my first trip to Russia and ended up in the small city of Perm (population just under a million), traditionally an industrial spot which is currently trying to morph into a cultural one, that sits at the foot of the Ural mountain range.  This also happens to be the place from which many, many people commenced their long walk (thousands of kilometers) to Siberia from the days of "Ivan the Terrible" onwards, a place of exile, imprisonment and death, a place where both criminal and political prisoners had been sent for more than three centuries.  Siberia makes up about 77% of Russia's territory, but has only 28% of its population.  Lots of elbow room for those looking for space and some peace and quiet.

Now, Siberia is becoming a place with a nascent documentary film tradition with the help of a new initiative called the EurasiaDOC Project run by Rebecca Houzel (France) and Nicolay Bem (Siberia), financed by the European Union.  More from me on Houzel's and Bem's work in a future issue of DOX Magazine.  The two will be running an inaugural workshop in Perm next February and were at the fesitval to introduce the initiative to interested participants who will come from all over Russia to develop their documentary film projects.  Supposedly, at some point in the future, I will be invited to Siberia to see for myself what's happening up there.  Hopefully, I will not be expected to come on foot.

In fact, I became quite appreciative of experiencing a place like Perm before having a chance to visit the bigger cultural capitals of Moscow or St. Petersburg.  And, of course, my experience was circumscribed within the context of a film festival, its namesake that of the legendary filmmaker, Robert Flaherty.  The trip was further circumscribed by the privilege of being asked to be a member of the jury of this year's international competition where we were tasked with awarding several prizes--a Grand Prix, Best Feature, and Best Short, with some special mentions, if we so chose.  A separate FIPRESCI jury was asked to award a film from the same selection.  (Photo of cosmonaut façade in Perm, courtesy Bayou Self on Flickr.)

It was a large and diverse competition, with nineteen films represented from eighteen different countries.  The films were all over the map stylistically, technically, narratively, and otherwise.  I juried with a Serb, a Frenchman and two Russians (I was the only girl), each of us as vastly different as five human beings can get.  But, somehow, we easily reached a consensus on the films we wanted to honor.

"The more your work corresponds to real life, the better it seems. . .," was said by Albrecht Dürer, a German painter, printmaker, engraver, mathematician and theorist from Nuremberg.  These words express the major aesthetic conception of the festival, according to its website.  Keeping this in mind, as well as the legacy of Flaherty, whose film work focused on prolonged observation to realize "the naturalness of a documentary subject's behavior in front of the camera," we all voted for films that pushed beyond the boundaries of all of these various philosophies, instead choosing the ones that moved us into such profound and deep emotional territories, we could barely articulate anything about them at all after watching them.  I don't know about anyone else, but this is the place I want to reach when encountering any work of art, an encounter that illustrates and illuminates all the pain and joy of being human and leaves you temporarily speechless in its wake.  However "staged" or "natural" that encounter might be is of no import to me, whatsoever--the emotional reactions and reverberations are the same, and they're staggering.  (I usually have some kind of emotional breakdown / breakthrough during festivals and this is why I love documentary.  It's cheaper than therapy.)

For the very first time in the Flahertiana's history, the Grand Prix was awarded to a short film; also, for the very first time in the festival's history, we awarded the grand prize to a Russian film.  I would, in fact, urge the selection committee to pepper the main competition with more films from the Motherland in future, and, perhaps, stay away from much more mediocre fare from the international scene since "diversity," in concept or fact,  never ever connotes quality. 

Here are the three prize-winners (and a special mention), and our jury statements about these films: 

"The jury gives the Grand Prix to Yulia Panasenko for her radiant film, Outro.  The jury was shocked at the rawness and immediacy of Panasenko’s piece. With an exceptional balance of intimacy and distance, as well as unabashed courage in her dramaturgical choices, Panasenko gracefully navigates the ever-increasing complexity of the territory she traverses with her main protagonist. She uses her camera like the most sensitive metal detector looking for treasure on a vast and wild beach and, in that process, has achieved a highly proficient, remarkably restrained and economical construction that left us all moved beyond words."

This 45-minute piece (my latest film mantra: 45 Is the New 90) will also play at this year's IDFA as part of the mid-length documentary competition, and this is the director's third prize for this film in Russia.  I will attempt to articulate my thoughts on Outro in my next post. 

"The jury gives the Best Long Documentary prize to Marianna Kaat for her film, Pit no. 8.  Kaat grows a unique and complex relationship with her main protagonists, particularly in her portrayal of one very powerful man who still resides in the body of an adolescent boy.  We observe how he and his family try to survive under unbearable social pressures with grace, dignity, and persistent resistance against the forces that might pull them under at any given moment.  They display clarity and fortitude, as does Kaat in her filmmaking.  Pit no. 8 is an inspiring portrait of Ukraine, a country in painful transition, where there are no rules, but Kaat shows us plenty of examples of the miracle of humanity amidst inhumane conditions."

Happily, Kaat has agreed to sit for an extended interview with me in early November from her home in Tallinn, Estonia, so look for that in the near future.  The film also recently played at the International Documentary Film Festival of Mexico City (DOCSDF), will have its German premiere at the Film Festival Cottbus in November, and will exhibit at IFF Watch Docs in Warsaw in December.  More on the film's website here.

"The jury gives the Best Short Documentary prize to Piotr Stasik for his film, The Last Day of Summer.  This Polish director achieves a deep and profound penetration into a culture not his own, in the process portraying a warm, wry, and very humorous ode to the strange poetry of childhood."  More on this superb piece in a couple of days.  And, lastly:

"The jury would like to give special recognition to Andrea Roggon’s feature documentary, Soy Libre | I Am Free. Roggon has realized an impressive début, displaying a precocious mastery of formalism that utilizes an incredibly rich visual language in her documentary images of the people of contemporary Havana, Cuba."

Roggon's film was selected for IDFA in 2010, where it exhibited in competition for best student documentary.

And, FYI, the FIPRESCI prize went to another Polish director, Jakub Stozek, for his 30-minute film, Out of Reach, already a multiple award winner, and so here's one more to add to his mantle for creating the best half hour ride of your life. 

Congratulations to all the filmmakers.  And a huge personal спасибо to the beautiful and exceptional La Casa de Olya.

 

BURDEN OF MY HEART - A Rwandan Lamentation

In early 2010, Finnish filmmaker, Iris Olsson, got a call from CPH:DOX, inviting her to a workshop where she would be paired with a director to make a film.  Still a student pursuing her Master's at the Finnish national film school in Helsinki, Olsson is already an award-winning filmmaker (Summer Child, Between Dreams.)  For CPH's program, she was partnered with a young Rwandan director, Yves Niyongabo.  Once she arrived in Rwanda, she realized there was a bigger story to tell.

Burden of My Heart is a portrait of the people left in the country, an empty, shattered place filled with the ghosts of murdered Tutsis sixteen years after genocide.  We have vague memories of this sixteen years on, don't we?  Under the orders of insane leaders, members of the Hutu tribe began killing people on 15 April 1994.  A mere 100 days later, 800,000 people were dead, and many of those who survived the slaughter fled in a mass exodus from the country of their birth, never to return.  We remember this, don't we?

Olsson, who shot the film herself, takes us through Rwanda in a stunning visual articulation of the unending grief and persistent remembrance of the few individuals who managed to survive and hang on, deciding to stay and live out the rest of their lives in daily vigil over both the physical and spiritual remains of their murdered families.  Without any exposition, with contemplative photography, Olsson and Niyongabo imbue their 45-minute piece with plenty of breathing space, allowing both participants and viewers to take in the internal experience of despair, the feeling of complete existential failure, the ways in which someone can struggle to find the words to express the absurdity of living a corporeal life when your spirit has already passed on, accompanying your loved ones into nothingness. 

There is balance here, as much as there can be, for Olsson and Niyongabo show us that, on the one hand, this grisly experience is so overwhelming that forgiveness is impossible.  But on the other side of this can be a deeply penetrating and profound experience of spiritual joy, serenity and peace of mind that can derive from faith, and the awareness of a presence that some have chosen to call God. 

A young man can speak eloquently of shattered faith and express understanding that his generation might be relieved of the obligation of forgiveness.  He acknowledges the loss of the "best part of himself," his ability to feel anything at all.  "I'm really sure there is a part of me that's dead; there is a kind of emotion, a kind of love, I don't have."  The only hope he holds out is that of a new generation, that will know only of this time through passed-on stories.  This is the only thing that keeps him alive.  He acknowledges that the next generation will have a chance to be born into a world where the entire spectrum of human feeling can remain active and intact.  His experience will be an historical one, repeated in rote recitation as part of a school lesson on genocide, like multiplication tables, or a poem, or a song.

We meet the constant mourners who have an open dialogue with God and shout not only their grief to that entity, but also their joy and gratitude at being alive.  There is the young mother of three young children, who had her legs cut off during the massacre, who has turned to the church for some solace so that she doesn't burden her children too much with her overwhelming grief. 

The burden of grief might be bearing witness long after everyone else has moved on, when just the "reconciliators" are left to try and mend some things.  Most of the world barely paid attention to what happened in Rwanda in 1994 until hundreds of thousands were already dead.  Olsson and Niyongabo capture a respectful portrait of those that remain.  They listen; they record; they  bear witness.  In that process, the two have created something all the more emotionally searing for its distance, its economy, its quiet observation.  (Niyongabo and Olsson, pictured)

Burden of My Heart will have its premiere this Thursday evening at the 54th International Leipzig Festival for Documentary and Animated Film as part of the International Young Talent Competition--Generation DOK program.

Rrugë e hapun / Open Road

Open road, speak to me of hearth and home

Vow to express your longing, loneliness,

and fevered future dreams

I am listening.

 

Rrugë e hapun, fol me mua për vatër e shtëpi

Betohu që ki me i shprehë lirshëm andjet, vetminë,

dhe andrrat plot ethe për ardhmëninë

Po ndëgjoj.

 

Image by Lindsay Isola

Translation by Sokol Ferizi

 

 

Imperatively Maybe: Rough and Tumble Serbian Cinema at Beldocs 2011

Back in May of this year, I paid my first visit to Beldocs in Belgrade, Serbia, at the kind invitation of the festival's founder, Mladen Vusurovic.  Reprinted here is my article on the festival for this season's DOX Magazine, out this month:

“Art is not a plaything, but a necessity, and its essence, form, is not a decorative adjustment, but a cup into which life can be poured and lifted to the lips and be tasted.  If one’s own existence has no form, if its events do not come handily to mind and disclose their significance, we feel about ourselves as if we were reading a bad book.  We can all of us judge the truth of this, for hardly any of us manage to avoid some periods when the main theme of our lives is obscured by details, when we involve ourselves with persons who are insufficiently characterized; and it is possibly true not only of individuals, but of nations.” --Rebecca West, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, A Journey Through Yugoslavia

 

When Mladen Vusurovic decided to create a film festival in Belgrade, Serbia in 2008, he consulted a community of filmmakers that comprised several generations, knowing that in the region in which he resides, over a span of just a decade (or less), life can look and feel completely different in all of its aspects.  Suddenly there is war; and then, a tentative peace, a reconstitution of all the parts that comprise a culture that is still trying to find its true north. Yet the same ideological struggles go on and on and on.  In more peaceful times, the artists in that place attempt to illustrate and provide meaning to those struggles. In deciding to create, what he calls “this cultural event,” Vusorovic and his colleagues offer a program of international documentary work, creating an opportunity where the seeds of dialogue about the universal human condition can somehow ameliorate the propensity of many of the Balkan region’s inhabitants to judge things solely on the basis of past injustices inflicted upon them. 

This is a way of life in a place where the very moniker, Balkan, connotes the admixture of honey (bal) and blood (kan).  “You can find honey here; but first, you have to bleed for it,” says a young musician in Ruggero De Virgiliis’ thoughtful and beautifully shot documentary, Balkan Curtains, which appeared as a selection in the festival’s Serbian Competition Program.  This is the first year in the event’s four-year life span that there is, in fact, an official Serbian film competition, in preparation, one supposes, for “an all-out policy for the development of creative documentaries in the country,” according to Vusurovic.

This year’s overall program, while not as well seasoned in a curatorial regard as some of the other more established festivals in the region, was substantial enough to fill the theatres, and there is much promise for the growth of this annual event in years to come.  A particularly wise programming choice, garnering an audience of close to 3,000 people, was to open the fest with Darko Bajic’s O, Gringo, a profile of Dejan Petkovic, a Serbian-born footballer who became a superstar in his adopted country of Brazil and is lauded as a local hero in his country of origin.  The especially good news in all of this, of course, for those of us who are obstinately continuing to produce, make, support and fund cinematic nonfiction stories, is that there is another fascinating spot on the globe at which to exhibit our films and, in turn, see films that aren’t shown very much outside the region in which they are made.

Serbian independent cinema is still finding its way in this new landscape of post-traumatic, quasi-neo-Europeanized, EU nation status-vying confusion. For the majority of the population, most especially the creative echelon of society, there is a sense of being “trapped” in their own country. They don’t necessarily want to leave for good. But they are hungry to see the world, to have the freedom (at least in their minds) to be allowed to be a part of the rest of the world.  This is why these major ad campaigns to induce people into thinking joining the EU will be the answer to everyone’s prayers have been so persuasive--and, somewhat, dispiriting since hardly anyone in the ex-Yugoslav states could begin to tell you why this is so important. I was, particularly, encouraged by a few selections coming from a fresh generation of filmmaker, and they weren't the ones coming out of any film school.  Instead, the makers of films such as Balkan Diaries: Bulgaria by Goran Gocic; Boye: The First Real Female Sound by Brankica Draskovic; Awakening by Irena Fabri; I Will Marry the Whole Village by Zeljko Mirkovic; Mila Seeking Senida by Robert Zuber; and In Memory of Dragisa and Ivanka by Bane Milosevic, all tapped into stories both from within, and without, the usual points of reference.  For most of the citizens of the Balkans (the “former children of Yugoslavia,” as one festival patron put it), there is nowhere to go except within.  (Festival founder and film director, Mladen Vusurovic, pictured above.)

A copy of Mladen Djordjevic’s fiction film Life and Death of a Porno Gang (2009) was given to me by friend Zoran Gajin, a local arts journalist who hosts the website, Filmske Radosti. (Gajin has since relocated to Warsaw, Poland.)  A wickedly clever and subversive film, Porno Gang is, as Djordjevic describes it, a sequel to his documentary film about the Serbian porn industry, Made in Serbia (2005).  There is a scene where a man from Berlin says to a young filmmaker trying to do something radical with his life and career, “From time to time I’ve traveled around the Balkans, since 1991.  Balkan is a great place—impressive juncture of cruelty and creativity.” 

Igor Toholj, a filmmaker and teacher born in 1968, is the programmer of the Serbian competition program.  He is very much preoccupied with this particular juncture that best represents the region in the sixteen films he chose to exhibit this year.  Like most regional competition strands, the selections were all over the map ideologically, stylistically, and otherwise, some works preoccupied with parsing unsolvable episodes of the past, some paying homage to a lost Fatherland, some recreating new contexts for historical conflicts. The films range from very rough, deeply personal efforts from journalists “armed with miniscule digital cameras but huge enthusiasm,” such as the aforementioned Balkan Diaries, to films many years in development and polished to a high level of proficiency, such as Mila Turajlic’s Cinema Komunisto, a nostalgic and highly entertaining look at the major movie industry in the ex-Yugoslavia, mostly through the memories of Tito’s personal movie projectionist.  This is one of the few nonfiction films from the region that has managed to make an international splash, appearing in competition this year at festivals such as New York City’s Tribeca Film Festival.  (Still from Ruggero De Virgiliis' Balkan Curtains, pictured above.)

In today’s marketplace where documentary experts continue to espouse the essential ingredients one needs in order to break out into the international marketplace, the phrase “personal stories with universal appeal” is de rigueur.  Which leads me back to the West quote at the beginning of this article. I cannot really decide if the fact that most of these Balkan stories are far from universal is a virtue, or not. If this universality is, in fact, a vital prerequisite for films that are trying to distinguish themselves on the international scene, then it is, indeed, a drawback right now.  But, at this juncture in the region’s independent documentary industry, it is my opinion that it is a virtue, and here’s why: perhaps Balkan filmmakers do need to concentrate on telling Balkan stories that speak more to local audiences than international ones—in their own vernacular, providing sorely-needed context, cogency to the transformation the current Serbia (and the rest of the Balkan region) is undergoing, “disclosing its significance,” and “sufficiently characterizing” the people that live there.

This is really the best thing to which this, or any other, nascent regional fest can aspire, particularly since, in this case, there have been so many major interruptions to the country’s creative growth. Festivals like this one that continue to showcase the strongest, most vital and articulate documentary work from its own pool of talent provide a chance for healing, moving forward, resolution, understanding, etc.  And by exhibiting some of the best of international cinema side by side this regional fare, new and innovative dialogues will emerge, creating opportunities for this isolation to eventually dissipate, perhaps.

Like many other cultural start-ups with lofty ambitions in the disenfranchised and still isolated Balkan region, the Beldocs fest must simultaneously react to, and participate in, the international marketplace. At the same time, there is an obligation to rebuild a new aesthetic (or refresh an old one, depending on whom you speak with) to better articulate the ways in which people are still enmeshed with a messy, war-torn recent past, and a future that not too many can describe or define with any confidence or clarity.  The old is new again, and the new must reflect the past—East and West overlapping, integrating, enmeshed.  It’s all utterly bewildering and extremely ripe with possibility.  One comes away from an environment like this wanting very much to return as soon as possible.

 

 

 

Dokufest 2011: Lo-Fi Films Take Prizes, Documentary in the Raw

As important as it is for an international festival to have a well-curated film program, its juries require careful curation, as well.  That is, if the festival in question means to distinguish itself as a distinctive voice in the landscape.  This year, as in all others, Dokufest curated the kinds of juries, that when gathered together to make decisions about "the best" of what they saw in their competitions, become a collective force for adventurous taste, brave choices, and thoughtful pondering (and arguing, hopefully) about why they want to give a prize to a particular film.  I was impressed by the jury selections this year and was happy to have a hand in curating them.  You can read about the other fantastic prize-winners here, but in this post, I want to try and put some coherent thoughts together about two of them, both pieces that illustrate the pure power of observation with very little interference, or the "noise" of a more sophisticated apparatus.  The best drama is the quiet, human kind, revealed in the contemplative spaces of our lives, when we think we can see things as they really are.  And still, we question.

Like most of us who love movies, I go faint with pleasure at a glorious display of breathtaking cinematography; I revel in well-composed, brilliantly-lit pretty pictures, especially when they're being projected on a big screen for a few souls gathered together in the dark to transport themselves outside their own mundane existences.  And I think most of the jury members feel the same.  But the Human Rights Dox jury--comprised of American producer Sandra Ruch, German journalist and human rights scholar, Sebastian Saam, and American / Albanian screenwriter, filmmaker and professor, Thomas Logoreci--chose a film that was mostly shot on cheap video cameras lodged immovably on the walls of an interrogation room to record what goes on inside.  We are hard-pressed to ever get a close, or very clear, look at the protagonists' faces, but we connect with them so viscerally, it is like we are in that room, sweating, scared, bewildered, caught.  The International Dox jury, in turn, chose a film for their feature selection entirely shot on a mobile phone, accompanied by a soundtrack of ambient noise picked up from a staticky scanner.  These five cineastes, all to a person--all award-winning filmmakers and writers, and a film curator from the Museum of Modern Art in New York, for good measure--were caught up in a reflection that revealed all the messiness, confusion and loneliness of real life.  And they recognized themselves.  This could be you; this could be your son; this could be your mother.  It's all so deliciously and harrowingly real.  (Photo of Prizren above, courtesy, Eroll Bilibani.) 

Luc Coté and Patricio Henríquez have both been making films for a long time.  But I don't think they have ever made (or probably ever will make) a film as important as You Don't Like the Truth--4 Days Inside Guantánamo.  The film's principal documentation is a filmed meeting of a Canadian interrogation team with a child who is a Canadian citizen.  The boy was arrested after an attack in which he was severely wounded, then detained, tortured and, consequently moved to a prison to be locked up without proper due process of the law.  He is accused of killing an American soldier.  Based on seven hours of recorded video (some sections of which have been censored by the Canadian Secret Intelligence Service--CSIS), the footage was declassified by the Supreme Court of Canada, and I'm sure after watching this film, they wish they'd kept it under wraps.  The interrogration lasts for four days in February of 2003, each day a new chapter with a heading that spells doom:  Day 1--Hope, Day 2--Fallout, Day 3--Blackmail, Day 4--Failure. 

Omar Khadr is a tortured child, and as we learn about the particulars of what happened to him in Afghanistan and the family history that got him there from Canada, we see this boy, still in need of medical attention, tortured even further by the very people he is hoping will save him and get him released and sent home to re-join his family.  He is tortured with false friendship, Subway sandwiches and McDonald's hamburgers; he is tortured by verbal taunting and bullying; and, most sinister of all, he is tortured by such a barrage of inarticulate, foolish banter from his unseen interrogator, that the expression "banality of evil" takes on new meaning.  Along with this recorded video, the directors went in search of everyone that has been involved with the teenaged prisoner since his arrest, including his fellow cellmates at both Bagram, where he was first detained, and the prison in Guantánamo, a name that will forever be associated with the worst of human rights abuses.  They all are filmed watching the footage of Khadr's interrogation and asked to speak candidly for the camera about their thoughts--and they do.  This is an exceedingly difficult and uncomfortable film to sit through.  But you must see it--if only to remind yourself that you are complicit in some way for this young man's plight--and many others like him.  Sorry to say, we are all complicit.  This is one of those films that makes that statement impossible to deny.

 

When I went to Prizren to work with Veton back in May, we madly traded films we loved and wanted the other to watch right now, like a couple of kids with a flush set of the coolest baseball cards around.  He handed me a copy of Boris Gerrets' hour-long film, People I Could Have Been and Maybe Am, and told me I had to watch it and tell him what I thought.  He didn't say anymore than that so I could make up my own mind, which is one of the many thousands of things I love about Veton.  After watching it and telling him it moved me so deeply I wouldn't be able to watch anything else that day, he told me he was thinking of putting this small film into the international competition.  I told him I thought that was a fine idea.

Gerrets is an award-winning filmmaker, editor and visual artist working between London and Amsterdam.  This is not some jerk who picked up a cell phone and decided to make a movie 'cause hey! he can.  To open his story, Gerrets uses the convention of a probing question that will set him off on an interesting journey:  What would it be like to enter the life of a complete stranger?  In most movies, fiction, non-fiction or otherwise, this kind of "tagline" often results in inane and stupid behavior displayed on the screen by gorgeous girl and boy actors.  We watch as they flirt, party like animals, get drunk, vomit on each other, kiss each other, fuck each other, botch up every single thing in their lives, and then get the girl / boy at the end, anyway.  Actually, come to think of it, Gerrets' film does have a lot of those elements.  But the characters he encounters are people he comes to care about deeply and that initial question blossoms into more profound questions about the role of the observer, the storyteller.  What are his moral obligations?  How complicit is he in what's happening in front of his camera?  What does he do now that he's emotionally involved with these people he met randomly as part of an art exploration?  What are his responsibilities, if any, in divulging his confusion, his angst, his fear, that he's created something unstoppable?  And it is unstoppable, life is, while it's being lived.  Then it does stop.  Full stop.  And then there are only photos and recordings and dribs and drabs of the person that shed that life left behind.  It's hard to imagine that in an hour's time, Gerrets was able to craft worlds upon worlds with so little, but he did.  His lo-fi film is a shiny gem.

Dokufest 2011: Mirko Ilic Does Prizren

One of the personal highlights of Dokufest this year was meeting up again with old friends, and making new ones.  We had quite a few illustrious lights of nonfiction filmmaking there, James Longely, Mohsen Makhmalbaf, Gary Tarn, Marshall Curry, Alex Nanau, Pietro Marcello, Michael Palmieri and Donal Mosher, etc., etc.  And then there was Mirko Ilic, wildman and creative force.  The guy is fly.  And while not a filmmaker, Ilic knows all about the intense power of the image.  Here is a "reprint" of the article I wrote for the DokuDaily during the fest after Ilic's talk there.  (Fisnik, you're a prince among men.):

Yesterday afternoon [24 July] in Prizren’s Hammam Museum, the great designer, illustrator and thinker, Mirko Ilic, delivered a talk to a packed house of young designers and artists in a lecture entitled, “Design of Dissent.”  The Bosnian-born 57-year-old runs a very successful three-person commercial design studio in New York City.  He was introduced by Prishtina-based designer, Bardhi Haliti, and later in the post-lecture Q&A, Ilic expressed intense admiration for the young artist, in fact, calling him “heroic,” since Haliti had chosen to give up a successful career in New York to come back and work in Kosova.

In his hour-long talk, the charismatic Ilic spoke eloquently and powerfully (and quite humorously) about his own personal journey to discover the power of good design and how it can be used to socially and politically charge a populous to think about the world around them.  And, in turn, protest and agitate for change.  In speaking specifically of the challenges young Kosovars might face in building a career in the industry, Ilic presented a cautionary tale.  Acknowledging that building a local vibrant economy in this young, burgeoning country is of utmost importance, he did mention that this is a designer’s great dilemma.  For if someone works for a commercial entity, he or she will constantly have to push products and ideas, which have little to do with the culture in which he or she is living.  It is a necessity to make a good living and build a sustainable career.  However, it can also sound a death knell for an up-and-coming artist’s ability to constantly create and present a singular vision and body of work that has substance, heft and meaning.  The age-old quandary of any creative in the face of a lucrative career is that that career will most certainly present an encounter with the ethics of design and advertising, which can be sticky.  (Portrait of Ilic by Lindsay Isola.)

Ilic “deeply believes in laziness,” and feels that the “lazy” creative—one who, say, might think about things six hours of his or her work day and actually produce something for about two—will, in essence, produce much more profound and meaningful work than the designer who “works hard” in front of his or her computer for a solid eight hours or more, for “thinking is the most creative aspect of this business.”  It is important to question why one is doing what one is doing for, historically, according to Ilic, “thinking has saved art.”  And the ability to produce socially and/or politically motivated work requires time to think.

In speaking specifically of designers and artists working in oppressive regimes, Ilic compared the landscape of working in a controlled and censored regime, or system, versus working in a totally free environment like the one in which he works in the US where he can create anything he wants and put it out for public consumption with little or no risk to his personal safety.  In systems of oppression, designers have had to learn to survive by mastering the subtle art of delivering the double message, becoming fluent in “double speak,” the encoded language that is hidden beneath the surface of a, seemingly, mundane symbol or image.  “Any idiot can do work that will land him in jail.”  It is the intelligent artist who will constantly dredge the depths of his or her creative vision to deliver a wallop subtly, and artfully, to his or her audience, in essence, saying to the client, “If you don’t trust me, I can always mess you up.  Trust me, and everything will be transparent.”  This takes risk and bravery from not only the artist, but also from the publisher of the work itself.

This led Ilic to talk about the importance of building a personal aesthetic, a personal vocabulary of protest through art, and protecting that at all costs.  He, himself, shills for big, corporate clients with big, fat budgets, creating commercials and other design work to sell television shows and other products.  However, he also constantly creates, self-publishes and self-distributes work that is not beholden to any paying client.  He says, “It is important to do work that protects the rights of others in order to protect your own rights.”  If artists can’t or won’t speak for the powerless, the oppressed, the imprisoned, the work is, indeed, meaningless.  “In order to be a good subversive, you need brains and the bravery to use them cleverly and clearly.”  Speaking specifically of gay rights, women’s rights, black rights, human rights, Ilic emphasized that “you must know your symbols to insult someone on purpose.”  In other words, effective insult never comes “by accident.” 

To wrap up his talk, Ilic shared an extended slide show of images that he has published in his seminal book co-created with Milton Glaser, The Design of Dissent, sharing the subversive work of artists from all over the world, work that could, and has, resulted in some serious trouble for its makers—imprisonment, expulsion from their homelands, and even, in some cases, death.  The book consists of designs that risk, particularly in their use of symbols and imagery of protest about what is happening in the artists’ own culture or country, protest “from within.”  An extension of this idea was addressed in the Q&A with the audience (many of whose comments Ilic summarily dismissed as naïve or misguided, urging people to go out and live a little and “then come back and tell me something worth knowing”). 

“Change must happen here,” Ilic stated emphatically to the audience.  For it’s all well and good, he says, for the very few who will get a chance to study abroad, or get opportunities to work outside their own country to build successful careers.  But for those who will stay and build an articulate creative landscape in their own country, the imperative is to have the bravery and intelligence to make a difference in your own backyard.

 

 

 

 

Dokufest 2011: A LETTER TO DAD

It's been exactly three days since returning to Berlin from Kosova and Albania, and as part of my massive decompression, between batting away writing deadlines, I am watching as many films as I can.  Something you would have thought I had done plenty of the last month considering I spent most of that time at a film festival.  But, I had other duties this year (which are listed handily on my Facebook page if you're at all interested).

While I did watch some films, of course, I wanted to start this first blog snog to beloved Dokufest with some thoughts on the small, but powerful, film that won this year's Balkan Dox competition, a strand with a staggering fourteen films.  The intrepid Balkan Dox jury--Alexander Nanau (whose film made in Romania, The World According to Ion B., won last year's Dokufest Balkan prize); American filmmaker, Donal Mosher (October Country), and Sara Garcia, founder and co-director of Play-Doc in northern Spain--gave Serbian, Srdjan Keca, the prize.  (As well, the jury awarded Cinema Komunisto's director, Mila Turajlic, for Best Newcomer.)  The evening the jury finished deliberations, Nanau told me that Keca's film is one that "really stays with you," and after watching it, I would have to say I agree.  The film is a highly personal and resonant film about trying to unslip the knots of a past that you lived through as a child.  Childhood, as we all know, is a time where you miss so much of what's happening around you, while simultaneously, sense memories are embedding themselves deeply enough to last a lifetime.

While this is not the 29-year-old's first film, for such a young filmmaker, he has a keen and sophisticated cinematic eye, a voice, both visual and aural, for solid storytelling.  I am a fan of the long, beautifully composed static frame in documentary; it provides a breathing space, a nonverbal contexualization in which a good director / cinematographer will indulge his audience, providing a resting spot for the eye and mind as the story unfolds.  These still lifes tell us much in their silence and poise, as much as the home movies show us that this family was one like any other--a parade of photos and moving images on fragile Super 8, filled with young love, marriage, children, birthday parties and living room shenanigans.

Marinko Keca, the filmmaker's father, has passed away from advanced stages of cancer without his family around him.  The burning question of his son, Srdjan, is why his father chose to die alone.  And while he never finds a fully satisfactory answer to that question, he does manage to piece together a powerful 45-minute film, a collaboration between generations, the younger member still here on earth and coping the best he can, the other the incorporeal manifestation of a whole generation of men and women who lost part of their souls to a war that none of them ever fully understood.

Keca's Serbian father and Croatian mother married in 1979, one year before Yugoslav leader Tito dies.  The union is considered ill-crossed--not at the time they first meet, but by 90s wartime, Keca finds himself the product of a "mixed" marriage, a relationship that founders mostly due to Marinko's intense post-traumatic stress disorder upon returning from the war.  In one scene in particular, Keca's camera work really shines: as he holds the camera steady, we see intermittent close-up images of old family photos with his mother's face a ghostly blur behind them; then, as he pulls focus, we see the pictures whisked away to reveal his mother's face clearly, grounded in the here and now.  In a very simple, understated way, Keca, in the language of cinema, traverses past and present, weaving some kind of bridge between the two with his lens.  It's a beauiful moment, filled with quiet eloquence about the internal limbo in which the young man is stuck trying to process his father's death.

There were many expert and subtle storytelling touches, particularly notable in the way in which he crafts the interviews with the three most important men in Marinko's life: his best friend, his business partner, and his brother, the filmmaker's uncle.  All of them tell Srdjan outright that they can't, and won't, talk about certain things regarding the war.  And then, to a man, they each proceed to deliver deeply emotional soliloquies about their own experiences, and those of Keca's father, a man they profoundly loved and respected.  He even gets them, in essence, to direct their own scenes:  "OK.  Now you hold the camera.  I'll start the engine, and we'll go slowly," says his father's friend as they're shooting on his boat.  And Marinko's business partner (after finger-wagging at his old mother for walking into the frame while he's being filmed) knows that with his big belly and "big Serbian soul," he will barely fit into the frame.  Knowingly, the director has already set up a pretty wide shot in anticipation, and the ebullient man fits just fine.

This is rich storytelling, and the jury prize is a well-deserved nod to a deep thinker, one that has left behind a career in theoretical physics (of all things), to pick up a camera.  Gracefully edited by Katharine Lee, Srdjan and Marinko Keca, father and son, crafted this film together in Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Romania over the course of twenty-two years, almost three-quarters of the filmmaker's lifetime.  As Srdjan notes at one point, both men hide behind the camera lens, their mutual concealment perhaps tying them complicitly together as fellow travelers through the ravages of their region's past. 

At the film's end, Srdjan comments to his father's ghost:  "You know, we always blame this war.  But the war is made by people.  Don't you think so?"

Berlinale Talent Campus 2012

The opening day for project submissions for the 2012 Berlinale Talent Campus (11 - 16 February), is set for this coming Wednesday, July 20.  The deadline is 5 October.  Reading the submission guidelines is important, of course.  But, in general, if you're wondering if you qualify, take a look at last year's participants.  You might be surprised at who gets to attend the Talent Campus, for the population is extremely diverse in terms of nationality, age and professional experience. 

In the interests of providing a unique POV on the Talent Campus, I asked my friend from Chicago, producer Lisa Gildehaus, to share her experiences from last year.  Every time I met with her for a quick coffee or dinner in Berlin during last year's fest, she was glowing with excitment and energy, telling me that it was absolutely the best way she knew to experience the Berlinale.  So without further ado, here is her guest blog for SIM; thanks so much for sharing, Lisa.

Why you should apply to the Berlinale Talent Campus (yes, YOU, 40 year old filmmaker, with a mortgage and a kid and a film that’s halfway done):

A year ago today, five days after I’d turned 39, I sat down to start my application for the Berlinale Talent Campus.  It was my second year in a row applying and part of me thought, "Am I wasting my time?"

But ever since I found out about the Talent Campus, I’d been harboring a dream to get accepted and spend February in Berlin. (A girl’s gotta dream.) The previous year, along with my rejection letter, I’d received one brief additional sentence: "The selection committee noticed potential in your work and we sincerely hope that you will consider applying again next year."

That packs a lot of promise into one little sentence. After exchanging a few emails with programmers, I received one other tidbit that made me feel even more optimistic.  It said, "We have a lot of people apply as directors. But you have a great deal of experience as a producer.  We strongly encourage people to apply in other categories if they’re qualified--as producers, editors, sound mixers, DPs etc."  So I took that to heart and, when the application opened on July 15, 2010, I sat down to get started.

On December 21, I got the email that said I was accepted. I was ecstatic.  (Although I was secretly convinced I was going to get an email by noon that said "Oops! We didn’t mean to accept you!"). By 5 p.m., I was terrified. Was I going to make a fool of myself? Was I qualified? Was everyone else going to be younger than me?!  (The answers to these questions are:  Maybe; Yes, I think so; and, No, not at all.)

If by this point you’re thinking, "I don’t really know what the Talent Campus is so I’m failing to understand why you’re so excited," I’m going to let the smart Sydney Levine (whom I met at the BTC) explain it to you in her excellent rundown of the 2010 BTC program.

Now let me tell you the most amazing part: In addition to panels and seminars and meeting people who are in the program with you and presenters from all over the globe, you get a magical badge when you’re in the BTC. That badge gets you into any movie in the festival, any event, any discussion, the European Film Market, Embassy parties (as we discovered), and generally anything you want to do. It gives you free reign to go up to people and introduce yourself, to join conversations and ask questions. It’s a free pass to learn and experience. Life after a week of that feels pretty lame.

In terms of my costs, the American Embassy covered part of my airline ticket. Some people got more, others less. The festival covers lodging at a totally decent hotel/hostel near the main train station. They’ll give you a dorm room that you share with five other BTC members for free or, for ten euros per night, you can upgrade to a room of your own, which is what I did. It was nothing fancy but it was clean and secure. There’s also a bar/lounge on the main level so there’s always a place to go looking for fellow Talent Campus participants.

If you’ve never been to Berlin, it’s a pretty damn awesome city. It's stuffed with artists and is incredibly cosmopolitan. The trains make it so simple to get around (although last winter was pretty mild so I did a lot of walking). And Berlin hosts an abundance of cheap, good eateries.  I hear it’s glorious in the summertime.  But the city has a special charge during the film festival that brightens up the grey February days.

I met dozens of filmmakers I’m still in touch with from Australia, Norway, Lithuania, all over Europe, Argentina, Nigeria, Hong Kong.  I've had great conversations with them about filmmaking in their home countries. I’ve started collaborating on potential projects with some people I met. I’ve also been in touch with some of the presenters and production companies. The BTC opened a vast network of connections for me, which was one of the stated goals of my application.

I’m a mid-career filmmaker but I’ve never done very well on the festival circuit. The Talent Campus and their incredibly hard working organizers are there to help you get out of it what you want, meet who you want to meet, get into the events you want to get into. But it helped me to go in with clear objectives and a sense of purpose… as well as a hunger to learn and socialize.

The prospect of spending a week at a film festival like the Berlinale and getting to meet 350 other filmmakers from around the globe lived up to everything I’d hoped it would. Wish I could apply again this year.

Black and white photos courtesy, Lisa Gildehaus.  Photo of Gildehaus courtesy, Berlinale Talent Campus.

 

Interview on BOMBLOG

Be sure to visit the BOMB site to read my latest interview with Australian director, Amiel Courtin-Wilson, and actor, Daniel P. Jones, about their new feature film, Hail.  Click here to read more.

DOKUFEST Rides Again, 10 Years Strong

The International Documentary and Short Film Festival, aka, Dokufest (23 - 31 July) is in the midst of launching its new website, and a new look, to celebrate its 10-year anniversary.  But in the meantime, you can read the daily blog by Ardit Bejko for updates and get the latest news about this year's extraordinary program, its largest ever.

Hamburg, Germany's own A Wall Is A Screen returns to the festival for the second year in a row to project fantastic shorts on the walls of lovely Prizren, Kosovo--the bank in the square, the mosque, whatever interesting surface might be available to them, as the audience walks around the town watching the program they put together.  The Stravinsky Portrait will play as a tribute to the recently deceased great Richard Leacock, one of the most influential documentary DPs in the history of the genre.  Patricio Guzmán's elegiac and deeply moving personal essay, Nostalgia de la luz will open the festival on 23 July.  Sheffield Doc / Fest's In The Nursery program will also be returning this year with an outdoor screening of Dziga Vertov's Man With a Movie Camera with live musical accompaniment at the Riverbed cinema.  Mohsen Makhmalbaf and James Longley's works will be spotlighted in special programs with both directors in attendance (pictured at top, Makhmalbaf, left, Longley, right).  There will also be an extensive Made in Switzerland program which you can read about here. 

As well, some powerful musical guests will be joining us, as English singer / songwriter, PJ Harvey (pictured middle), and Irish photographer, Seamus Murphy, present the twelve short films on which they collaborated for Harvey's recent album, Let England Shake.  The screening and a Q&A with Harvey and Murphy will follow the closing ceremonies on 30 July.  And lastly (at least for right now), The Sofa Surfers, Wolfgang Frisch and Timo Novotny, are creating a musical / visual evening especially for the fest.

I was invited by Dokufest's Artistic Director, Veton Nurkollari, to curate a strand of nonfiction films about artists, and we will be exhibiting eight fantastic films: Pietra Brettkelly's The Art Star and the Sudanese Twins; Gary Tarn's Black Sun (Tarn will be joining us in person); Jeff Malmberg's Marwencol; Jørgen Leth and Lars von Trier's The Five Obstructions (thanks, Thomas); Marie Losier's The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye; Wiktoria Szymanska's Themerson & Themerson; Zoran Solomun's Super Art Market; and, Jeff Feuerzeig's The Devil & Daniel Johnston.  More info on these and other strands will be on the site soon.

I am very excited and honored to be a part of this fabulous festival again.  I had the privilege of serving on the international jury last year, and that week in Prizren was one of the most magical experiences of my life.  And many of the same people will be returning to share the magic once again.  You can read my SIM blog posts from the fest from last year here and here and here and here. 

Viva Dokufest and përgëzime on your ten-year anniversary!

 

 

 

Interview: Zachary Levy, Director STRONGMAN

Zachary Levy's dëbut feature, Strongman, tells of a larger-than-life story writ small.  The film had its premiere at 2009's Slamdance and won the prize for best documentary.  So why do so few people know about this film, which is one of the most powerful and affecting vérité stories to come out of the US in recent years?  While I had certainly heard of the film and knew many people who loved it, this is one of those instances where, perhaps, the film will have a slower build, finding its audience slowly, there for discovery.  Levy and his main protagonist, Stanley Pleskin, aka, Stanless Steel, The Strongest Man in the World at Bending Steel and Metal, have a profound rapport which only grew deeper as the two shot together over the course of several years.  For some great insight into that aspect, and as an appropriate companion piece to the following chat with Levy, read Michael Tully's review at Hammer to Nail here:  "In showing one man's tirelsss quest to wrap the tips of his monstrous fingers around an even somewhat tiny piece of the American dream, Levy has produced a heartbreaking drama that would make Eugene O'Neill proud."

I only saw Strongman but a couple of months ago when Cian Smyth programmed it for the Maysles Brothers Competition at the Belfast Film Festival in Ireland.  I was positively floored by its impact on me and unable to shake the film from my head, I really wanted to speak to its maker.  Happily, Levy complied:

 

Still in Motion (SIM):  It’s interesting how certain films cross your radar at certain times.  It seems like I might be discovering this particular film a bit late?

Zachary Levy (ZL): [laughing] Yes and no.  I mean, it feels like in a lot of ways, it’s a largely undiscovered film; at least it feels that way to me.  It’s been out there for a while although still largely unknown.

SIM:  The second time I watched Strongman, this strange analogy emerged for me. Throughout the whole film, our hero, Stan, always receives a fairly underwhelming reaction to whatever he does—most oftentimes from the people closest around him, his girlfriend, Barbara, his family.  All the larger-than-life things he’s trying to do, his ambition and drive to be the best are on display and nobody’s ever paying that much attention.  This speaks to the pace and dedication in which you tell this story.  I realize how difficult it is to create pieces like this since it’s not really in fashion to do so, and perhaps the reaction from the “marketplace” only emphasizes that.  But it’s also so rare to see such a complete and dedicated relationship on screen as the one you have with your main protagonist.  Tell me about your initial draw to Stan.  What did you see in him that resonated so strongly for you?

ZL:  It was a gut feeling more than anything.  Certainly the contradictions and the complexity in him were pretty apparent when I met him.  There was also a great innocence and vulnerability, although those aren’t exactly the right words.  His openness and other things that were all in very tight proximity to one another was interesting.  I connected with all that quickly.  That’s just at the character level.  I felt he was a character that could carry a story and one I cared about, someone who resonated on a personal level so the film could be carried beyond the clichés of how people might choose stories.

It seems to me that filmmakers, way too often these days, are choosing things on their commercial merit, a story they’ve seen before.  On some level, too many people, I think, are choosing to make films that are, basically, copies of other films they’ve seen. It’s always hard to articulate why some stories resonate for certain people and others don’t.  But I did feel like it had those elements where it would resonate for many people.  However, that wasn’t the motivation for making the film.

SIM:  What sets this film apart is, of course, the relationship between you and Stan.  You allow us to hear you, but we never see you in frame.  But you do manage to be quite a forceful presence since he does turn to you for validation many times, especially during the more stressful moments he’s going through.  I think most people can feel that kind of authentic bond; it automatically makes you someone to be trusted, both by your protagonists and by your viewers.  There’s also no ambivalence on Stan’s part to being filmed and the sense that a documentary subject might be feeling less than secure always makes me a bit nervous.  I felt, in this case, that this documentation of his life and what was happening was often a lifeline for him, helping him to articulate all the things he thinks deeply about.  Both Barbara and Stan struggle with words and the way they’ve resolved that is to parrot what they’ve heard on TV, from books, from other sources outside themselves.  They don’t have the words so they re-purpose things to express their own feelings and points of view.  It made me realize that the ability, or inability, to do that carries a lot of weight.

ZL:  Yes, you’ve hit on something very few have really noticed and that is that as much as the film is about strength, both inner and outer, it’s also a film very much about language. Literally, Stan is looking for an announcer the entire film.  That’s the film.  And Barbara, too—she’s also looking for an announcer and her sister, for the most part, plays that role.  In Stan’s case, by picking Barbara to speak for him, he’s chosen a person who is largely silent in a lot of ways.  She has an extremely firm and strong voice when one strips back all the layers, but she doesn’t have a lot of confidence in it.  Stan can also say some pretty profound and deeply true things but he doesn’t trust that anyone will understand him. That tension, between the things we speak and the things we are silent about, that desire to be heard, is a huge part of the film.

SIM:  Concurrently with all those individual struggles, there is a very unique and very touching love story you capture between Stan and Barbara.  It sneaks up on you, the depth to which they can relate to one another, even though there are aspects of their relationship that are troubled given the way in which they have to deal with Barbara’s sister’s interference.  In fact, Barbara’s sister’s role in this drama is symbolic in a lot of ways as a physical manifestation of the conflicts between Stan and Barbara.  She was, in fact, the only one that seemed exceedingly uncomfortable in front of your camera and expressed as much.  She acts as some kind of weird Greek chorus, commentating on the “action” in their household.

ZL:  The other part of it, too, is that both Barbara and her sister are much more concerned about image than the other subjects.  Stan cares about the image in terms of his showmanship and his ideas about that, the presentation.  For him, what’s more important is something deeper than that, something more internal.  He’s not sure if Barbara has that or not, or understands who he is.  “Do you really get me?”, he seems to always be asking her.  That element of image does play a part in their individual relationships to the camera.

SIM:  Well, really the only time we get to see Stan shine in that aspect of showmanship is on the British game show and that comes very early in the film.  He’s such a natural showman, as if he was born to do that.  He loves the camera and it loves him back in that instance.  The audience is with him right away—he tells them he needs them.  What’s interesting in terms of the dramatic structure, is that you start with something like that where many directors would end on that note.  What follows, instead, is a pretty relentless slide.  One of the things Stan says after doing that show—and he’s kind of pissed off at the quality of acts that are also on there—is “You show craftsmanship.”  But right after that, he also says, “You show realism,” as if the two, somehow, go hand in hand.  It’s such an amazing metaphor for documentary filmmaking.

ZL:  Particularly for this film.

SIM:  How long did you shoot with Stan?

ZL:  I would say the active shooting took about three years.  The story arc you see in the film represents roughly a year and a half of filming.  I went back for several more years—it was a fairly long time to make this.  In some ways, an embarrassingly long time; it depends on how you look at it.  Perhaps other filmmakers would be impressed and wince at the same time.  I just wanted to capture anything that was changing dramatically as long as there was room to do that.  The editing of the film happened after all the shooting was finished.  There were about 135 shooting days over the course of the primary three years.  With any kind of documentary filmmaking, but particularly with this kind of documentary filmmaking, there’s a lot about it that has the element of a fishing trip.  You have to be willing to sit by the river for a day or two and nothing really happens.  I had never filmed anyone, however, where at the end of the day, I had so much footage that was usable.  There often were three scenes at the end of a day that could have been in the finished film.  It came to 230 hours of footage.  Which is, admittedly, a lot,  but these days you do see people shooting 400 to 500 hours.  Effectively, I think you lose so much when you’re shooting in that range. There’s the risk of missing something essential in the editing room because you have so much material to sort through.

SIM:  Contextually, so much of your shooting nonverbally illustrates some pretty profound statements in relation to Stan’s story, which is a very American story—a larger-than-life guy in a larger-than-life culture, a culture that consumes everything in its path.

ZL:  Well, Stan’s world was a very hard world in which to shoot.  What I mean here is in a physical sense, leaving aside the other emotional things.  The kitchen downstairs in his mother’s house where his grandmother lives was tricky. There are these ropes from which they hang wet laundry [laughter].  These laundry lines inside the kitchen are eight feet off the ground.  There’s horrible boom shadow in that room, anyhow, and with the ropes and everything, it becomes really difficult to maneuver. 

But one thing that is useful when shooting people for a while is that you get to really know their habits and actions, behaviors they repeat regularly.  When I’ve taught cinematography—or documentary making since it’s a storytelling lesson as much as one about cinematography—I always tell people that whenever you’re shooting vérité, one thing to really pay attention to are these predictable or repeating behaviors.  If you pay attention and your eyes are open, you’ll see a lot.  Stan would always sit in the same chair or Barbara would.  I could begin to anticipate where I should situate myself after a while.  You become more comfortable using these things as storytelling devices and to make your work a bit easier.  But you do miss things; it’s inevitable.  Sometimes they are things that seem incredibly important.  But I think that anything that’s important in life comes back, not necessarily in the same way that you missed, but it does come back and I learned that over and over during the process of making this film.  The confidence in the storytelling comes from not worrying so much about what you missed or what you lost because they will reappear in some other shape.

SIM:  Speaking of that, do you want to know my favorite scene in the film?

ZL:  Yes!

SIM:  I couldn’t tell you why this affected me so deeply, but I felt it was really when I totally connected to Barbara.  Stan, Barbara and another guy are sitting in his truck at night and the only light is coming from the light inside the car and the dashboard.  The guys are totally wasted and Stan is in an angry mood but trying to make himself feel better by rocking out to a song, singing at the top of his lungs right into Barbara’s face who’s sitting beside him.  It’s a scene where everything is just sitting on the edge of some precipice; everything’s at stake.  The shooting is extraordinary considering your space limitations but you get an awful lot of great stuff in close-up, great reaction shots, particularly of Barbara’s face.  And then there’s a point where you can only see her eyes and the look in them is indescribably sad and bewildered, a look of sheer entrapment.  It’s like she’s having some weird flashback to high school and just completely staggered that life is repeating itself in a nightmarish déjà vu.

This is one of those scenes—and there are a lot of them—where it plays out for quite a long time, much longer than most directors would choose to let them run, thus leading to your longer running time than the average feature doc these days.  Usually, seventy-five, eighty minutes and you’re out.

ZL:  That drives me crazy, that obligation to “proper” length because I have to tell you, if anything, I think this film might be too short.  The structure of the film probably works best at two hours and ten minutes. It doesn’t actually feel any longer at that length; it just breathes a little bit more.  But that’s a hard length to put on a shelf.  If this weren’t my first film, I probably would have had more confidence to do that.  There is this unspoken pressure that a feature documentary has to be 90 minutes or less.  It’s death to good filmmaking.

SIM:  Yes, but there are many feature docs that don’t warrant their length and seem way too long and indulgent, so I don’t know the answer to that.  What sets this film apart is the pacing of most of the scenes and this is a strong editing choice.  You don’t cut away with abandon; in fact, quite the opposite.  By letting things play out, you create a really profound connection for a viewer with these characters.  You catch those moments when they’re not actively performing or doing anything, really.  This is a rare thing since most pieces are edited with that eye blink pace that gives me a headache.  You allow us to really look and observe.  With your filmmaking choices, you were saying something about that.

ZL:  Yes, absolutely.  There are a lot of things to say about that.  So much of traditional film story is about change, transformation.  In a lot of ways, that kind of profound change is a fictional device.  Major change in who we are doesn’t happen in one moment or several moments strung together.  Or by just a surface change in one’s appearance or what have you. The problem may somehow be worse in documentary filmmaking these days than in fiction—this squeezing in of these kinds of forced story arcs which create a phony sense of storytelling change.  We don’t see a lot of change in Stan and Barbara.  But your understanding of who these people are is changing.  The change that’s happening is the internal changes the viewer is experiencing and that’s exciting when the film works on that level.  A lot of audiences don’t want that, or are ready for that; they don't go to the movies to experience that.  A lot of people would be fine if the whole film concentrated on Stan’s trip to the UK to do that TV show.

SIM:  Placed at the end, of course, since it’s his triumphant moment, so to speak.

ZL:  But it’s just the beginning of the film.  I’m starting there from a filmmaking point of view very intentionally; it's a very precise choice.  We’ve all seen that other story before, many times.  But, yes, you’re right, they’re not the choices many others would have made.  I like to think that most people who see it will have the same type of experience you did where they engage deeper and deeper as the story goes on.  That’s what I hope for.

It’s funny, Stan was watching the film not so long ago.  He’s seen it a number of times.  I asked him if he wanted to go outside for a bit and he said, "No, Zach, it’s involving!"  [laughter]  He got totally reengaged with it as an audience member and got involved as if he were watching other people.

SIM:  That’s part of what’s so fascinating about him.  More than most people, he has a really wide-ranging perspective for such a small-town, backwoods Jersey boy.  I notice in most autodidacts, there is an ability to focus that’s pretty intense.  Stan is so focused on his goals and dreams almost to the exclusion of everything else.  And when that focus is broken by what he considers to be an interference of some sort, he breaks down quite easily.  It’s so easy to make fun of that in a way, and even though there are lots of humorous moments specifically because of that, he’s for real.

I think of that strange scene in WalMart where he’s waiting for Barbara to finish shopping and some kids come to stand around to see what you guys are doing considering you have a camera trained on him.  His face flushes with pride because someone is giving him that much attention; his life is interesting enough to warrant that.  He’s getting so much out of the experience of being filmed, even more than you’re getting from filming him and that’s not such a common occurrence.  His true lack of self-consciousness is a real asset to a filmmaker.  Tell me a bit about your editing process for this long-term project.

ZL:  Well, unfortunately, as I mentioned briefly earlier, I didn’t edit as I went along.  Part of the problem was that I shot part of it on digibeta.  I used to work as a freelance cameraman for several people and I knew someone who had a digibeta camera.  A guy named Vic Losick used to have a camera rental business and he gave me a camera to use and told me that if I ever got money for the film, I could pay him back.  Of course then I didn’t know how long the film was going to take.  At the time, there weren’t a lot of 16 x 9 cameras out there so it made a lot of sense to shoot with that.  I thought I would shoot for six months and then be able to get some money to complete the film.  And that never happened [laughs] so I had all these digibeta tapes on a shelf and no way to watch them.  In essence, I was shooting blind while I was making the film.  There was an element of not really knowing what I had even though I did, essentially, have everything in my head, what I was getting and not getting.  I didn’t start editing until five years after the initial shoot.

SIM:  Did that make a lot of the earlier footage fresh for you?

ZL:  Yes it did, but it was also terrifying.  When I’m watching my own raw footage, I’m seeing very clearly every day’s shoot.  I see not only the actual footage but am also remembering everything that had gone into that day—from whether or not I could get a sound person that day or arrange the rental car or pick up the equipment—all the mess of production day in and day out for years, really.  It was a result of not having money so every day was a struggle just to get to the point of actually shooting.  I also remember the things that were happening in my life at the time.  When I’m looking at the footage, it’s almost like being in therapy [laughs].  I’m seeing all the choices I made and sometimes that’s hard. After so much time not seeing the footage, seeing it was often quite scary in some ways.  It was exciting, as well.  I could feel how alive the film felt for the first time.

SIM:  Who helped you out the most during that time of going through all that footage and settling in to assemble it?

ZL:  It was really just showing people I trusted the footage and gauging their reactions.  That was really helpful.  Not everyone got what I was doing.  I showed a lot of people.  I probably talked to fifty editors in New York, at least.  One person told me that he thought that Stan didn’t have a really expressive face.  I knew right away that was not the right person for me since I can’t think of anyone I know that’s more expressive than Stan.  But it wasn’t just professionals I would show it to; I showed many friends who aren’t filmmakers.  It was a process of finding the people that did connect to the work since that was my audience.  Luckily, the people I liked the most liked what I was doing and that was reassuring.  One of the biggest challenges of being a documentary filmmaker, especially one that works pretty much solo, is that it’s difficult to discern when you’re in the vacuum by yourself and when you’re not.  That was a challenge for me throughout the process.  But every encouraging word—any encouraging word, really—got me to the next day and then the next.  But from day one, there was a part of me that believed so deeply in this.  It was something that took hold of me and I wasn’t going to let go.  It goes back to what you were saying before about how so much of this film is about documentary filmmaking itself.

SIM:  Yes, especially because your story arc ends with the realization that these two people have found one another to be much more of a support system than they had supposed and that Barbara, somehow, does find her voice since she does the best intro ever for Stan at the very end of the film.  It is a really lovely moment, so playful and alive.  They even do a role-reversal of sorts, which is hilarious.

ZL:  Throughout the film, I’m trying to play with this tension of what an audience expects from a movie and what they would feel is “real life” in any kind of traditional way.  That’s why the film doesn’t end at the Hollywood moment when they kiss.  It ends thirty seconds later. 

SIM:  The post-Hollywood moment then.

ZL:  Their lives are not magically fixed in one moment but they understand one another more.  And perhaps then, we can understand ourselves a bit more.  We might see the roles or the parts that we’re playing.  But again, it all comes down to the audience and how they’re reacting, especially if you’re not presenting the Hallmark card variety story arc.  It’s way too easy to write half sentences in your filmmaking if you expect that your audience’s needs are quite basic and they don’t need or want any more substance than that.  To serve up familiar emotions with the accompanying visuals allows for a pretty insubstantial experience and there is certainly that kind of engagement, engaging with cues of what they’re supposed to feel, rather than the work as a whole.  I think a lot of people find that totally satisfying and don’t want or expect more than that. 

I think there are a couple of different audiences for a film like Strongman.  The people who seem to respond the most to it are either artists themselves or artistic in the way they engage, in general.  The other group of people that is responding, or has responded strongly to the film, know nothing about documentary filmmaking; they simply get involved in the story and the characters because it resonates on a very basic level.

SIM:  Like it does for Stan.

ZL:  Like it does for Stan. I really would like to say that what makes audiences engage are stories that take them to places they want to be taken but I don’t know if that’s always true since much less than that is enough to engage people who come see a movie, whether it’s a festival audience or not.  And that’s a challenge for filmmakers who aren’t interested in making that kind of film.  Ultimately, as a filmmaker, you have to trust that if you’re engaged, then there will be other people out there that will be, too.

SIM:  Yes, and with a film like this that doesn’t hit the market very hard, there is a chance for discovery, a long shelf life, if you will, since films like yours are distinctly not made for that fifteen minutes of glory, but rather the long haul.  You chose an incredibly inspiring protagonist, one who is rigorous in his efforts to always improve, who has the discipline to always pull himself back on track when things derail.  I would like to see more subjects like him.  We need these films that tap into things with which we all struggle.  There is a distinct lack of substance in almost everything we encounter these days, unfortunately. 

ZL:  I couldn’t have done it any other way.  It still is a film under the radar in so many ways.  But I’ve received both big and deep responses from people who have seen it and still think about it a year later and still want to talk about it.  My hope is that it will continue to resonate with more people.  The paying-the-rent part of all this is always difficult, but I’m optimistic about the long-term prospects.  At the very least, I hope it encourages more filmmakers to make work that is true to themselves and who want to push the door open a bit wider for other kinds of films.

 

Love After Love by Derek Walcott

The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other's welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.

 

Finland in New York

Next month, as part of the ongoing celebration of its ten year anniversary this year, the Helsinki-based DocPoint film festival, founded by filmmaker, Arto Halonen, will bring a slew of Finnish documentaries to New York audiences. There will be a program of 47 selections hosted by The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), Scandinavia House, 92Y Tribeca, UnionDocs, and Tribeca Film Institute.  The films will include festival faves and award winners from the past decade, student films, and selections from the always wonderfully curated program for kids, DOKKINO.  I have been privileged to be involved in this festival for the past three years, and cannot speak highly enough of the calibre of work coming out of this small country and the talent coming out of its film schools.

International multiple award winner, Steam of Life, by Joonas Berghäll and Mika Hotakainen, FInland's entry for Best Foreign Film at the Academy Awards this year, will be shown at the MoMA with five New York and five US premieres. Reindeer Spotting--Escape from Santaland (2010) will be the program's opener and will have a week-long run at the museum.

The program at 92YTribeca will include Mika Kaurismäki's ode to Brazilian music, Moro No Brasil (2002), Visa Koiso-Kanttila's Father to Son (2004), and Arto Halonen's Shadow of the Holy Book (2007).

Scandinavia House will exhibit twenty titles and host two panel discussions, one of which will be hosted by The Flaherty Seminar.  And, UnionDocs in Brooklyn will host a fantastic program of student work from Finland's fine film and technical schools.  The entire DocPoint NYC program has been organized collaboratively in New York with MoMA, Scandinavia House, 92YTribeca, UnionDocs, Tribeca Film Institute, The Flaherty Seminar, the Consulate General of Finland, and the Ministry for Foreign Affairs of Finland; and in Finland by AVEK--Audiovisual Promotion Center, the Finnish Film Foundation, the City of Helsinki Cultural Office, Aalto University, the Ministry of Education and Culture, and YLE.

You can check out the full schedule of films and other events at the links above. Don't miss out on any of these superb programs and experience the beauty and elegant storytelling of Finnish nonfiction filmmaking. Happy 10th anniversary, DocPoint! 

 

Interview: Alma Har'el, Director BOMBAY BEACH

 

Thinking of a series of dreams

Where the time and the tempo fly

And there's no exit in any direction

Except the one that you can't see with your eyes

Wasn't makng any great connection

Wasn't falling for any intricate scheme

Nothing that would pass inspection

Just thinking of a series of dreams.    --Bob Dylan

 

This interview originally appeared on the Hammer to Nail site.

Israeli-born filmmaker, Alma Har’el’s first feature film, Bombay Beach, premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival this past winter to quiet but consistent accolades, and will have its American premiere in competition at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York today, April 22.  Shot in the surreal environs of the Salton Sea, a man-made body of water that sits in the middle of the California desert, the film itself has plenty of surreal aspects of its own.  It is, in certain respects, a recognizable vérité piece about several people who inhabit the seaside town of Bombay Beach and the nearby community of Slab City. But Har’el is also an award-winning music video director and so has collaborated with her subjects to tell part of their stories in sequences where they interpret their lives through dance, accompanied by the haunting voice and horn of Zach Condon of the band, Beirut. In an article for New York Magazine in 2006, a very young (and exceedingly stage-frightened) Condon said of his music, “It’s impossible for me to play these songs and not feel joy.”  It’s impossible to listen to them without experiencing loads of it, as well.  The film also contains some musical selections from an upstart named Bob Dylan. 

Bombay Beach is a tremendously moving piece of cinema—human scale, intimate and warm—with gorgeous cinematography by Har’el, and tender and playful dance sequences choreographed by Paula Present, a long-time collaborator of the director’s.  A couple of weeks after the film’s début in Berlin, I had a chance to speak to Har’el via Skype at her home in Los Angeles about the magical encounters she experienced in making this piece of work.  And meeting and befriending an extraordinary little boy named Benny Parrish who will be making his very first trip on a plane out of his little hometown to New York City this week.  If you're there, you should go meet this little dude because he's spectacular.

Hammer to Nail (H2N):  Without any confines of traditional documentary storytelling, you went about making this film in a very low-key way, working intuitively and almost completely on your own. What are you learning about this film from audiences who are now sharing with you what they think about this unique collaboration that took place between you and your subjects?

Alma Har’el (AH):  I find myself quieting down quite a bit and listening intently to what people have to say.  And in doing that, it’s allowing me to learn about what it was I did do exactly. Because I’m not really sure what that was. [laughter]  It brings me a bit closer to understanding the film.

H2N:  What led you to focus your efforts on these extraordinary protagonists; how did you go about establishing such intimacy and trust with them?

AH:  Several years ago, very early on in my career, I worked for National Geographic, doing an interview show for them about the Middle East. At the time I was a TV presenter, hosting a music show on Israeli television.  When the National Geographic people offered me this presentation job, I told them I would only do it if I could also direct.  And they agreed.  A man with a high position there came to talk to our crew and he said something that has really stuck with me.  He was talking, in particular, about interviewing techniques and how to talk to people for the camera.  Mostly people will just show you what they want you to see, the story that everybody sees.  If you’re good, you might get to see some of their personal lives.  And, once in a while, you might get to see their secret lives.  The way he explained all this, I got the distinct feeling from how and what he told us, that you were supposed to steal these secrets, almost without them knowing. I knew he was right, that that’s what makes it interesting. But instinctually I didn’t really relate to it at all. There was something about it that didn’t click. 

Back then, I don’t think I really knew what intimacy was, but during the making of this film, I understood that I didn’t want to steal anything from these people.  I wanted to reach a state of intimacy with them that was genuine and to be honest about what I wanted to do.  Although neither did I want to completely ruin the magic of discovering things together by explaining too much.  The trust and intimacy was a process and the friendships grew as I continued to film with them.  We would do creative things together or I would help them out with certain things.  It was really special.  But saying that reduces the process, somehow, since I’m sure most documentary filmmakers experience that in one way or another.  But I think doing those creative things together gave them insight into what I was trying to do, making me less “the enemy behind the camera” who was trying to steal things from them, and more like a collaborator.

H2N:  It seemed to me that these people, considering where and how they live, don’t have that much to occupy their time and attention, making it a ripe situation for someone like you to come in and orchestrate something extraordinary—the dance numbers on the beach, the ways in which they can express themselves verbally, storytelling about their lives.  But there’s also a huge capacity to play and invent and break out of difficult existences.  They are playful; they do dance around; they do sit around and ponder things deeply.  You tapped into something intuitively that you must have recognized, which is to say that that childlike ability to improvise and play is still very much innate, perhaps because of the lack of other things to do. The strong creative aspect is still very much on the surface and not buried under more, let’s say, “sophisticated” ways in which we entertain ourselves.

AH:  This is the very thing I picked up on when I first came to that place.  I first went there to do a music video with Beirut and Zack Condon [their video, entitled, The Concubine, was shot partly on location in Bombay Beach in 2009]. That’s Mike [Parrish] Jr., Benny’s older brother, who stars in that video.  You can also see Pamela doing the dishes and Benny and Sarah, as well, appear briefly.  It was really hard to find the time to do this video and it was getting a bit frustrating, so I decided to go do a random location scout.  A friend of mine told me about this desolate Salton Sea area. The first time we went there, I became so intrigued by the place, I had to go back the very next day. California was the place I learned to drive since I never learned in Israel.  Being a really nervous driver, I never took the freeway; it just terrified me. I couldn’t do it. But I had to learn how to drive on the freeway to get to Salton Sea.

One of the first things that impressed me was just what you were speaking about—this direct connection to childhood.  I met these kids, the Parrishes and their friends, at the beach when we shot the music video.  They invited me into their house. And even though my family and my experience is so different, there was something about the easy access of this mode you can get into when you’re a child.  Your perspective is really limited to the world in which you’re growing up.  You don’t yet have any context to who you are, your country, where you live, your social demographic, or what have you. In a way, you’re in the most accepting place in terms of your family. 

I know many children are not like that.  CeeJay [one of the film’s three main protagonists, a black teenager who moved to the area to live with his father shortly after his young cousin was gunned down in a gang-related incident in LA] is an example of that; he certainly has perspective on his family and where he comes from and he definitely has judgments about all that.  He knew he wanted something different at a very early age, wanted to be the first of his family to go to college, and definitely did not want to be part of the violence he grew up with all around him. He has a lot of criticism for his family and the way they live their lives.

Opposing that, the Parrish kids and their parents are more romantic when it comes to their feelings about family.  No matter what happens, as a family, you hold on to this cohesive unit and infuse it with love all the time, into every relationship, even if they’re not so great or they’re dysfunctional.  But there is romance about life and a focus on what they do have together. I also didn’t really want to know anything about the Salton Sea, the place itself, its history.  I wanted to feel like one of the kids, more like how Benny feels about the place, this sea he lives beside with all the dead fish.  But the beach is a fun place, a place where you go swimming, “when you want to be happy,” as he says in the film.  When we remember our childhoods—at least when I do—we forget the “in-between” stuff and only very certain specific things remain in our memories.  I wanted to experience that with them in this place that feels like it’s outside of time.

H2N:  The way in which a lot of the scenes were shot did make it seem like you were on some abandoned movie set. It felt like a place unattached to the rest of the world, a universe unto itself. In my opinion, you really could have foregone the bit of archival info we learn at the beginning of the film about this place.  While it’s interesting and the footage is delightfully kitschy, it’s really not that relevant to the stories you tell about the people living there.  The dance numbers you stage with your protagonists, however, do feel quite organic; they might spring up out of nowhere at any given moment. It’s such a lovely, non-verbal way they’re able to express their feelings for one another.  That’s one of cinema’s strengths, and, perhaps, why people love the music video format so much.

AH:  Making this film was a real process for me and that includes discovering these various story arcs. I just landed in that place and decided to make a film, not knowing what I would find.  I knew I wanted to do something magical, with dance sequences, in this place.  When I moved there, I didn’t have any subjects.  I met CeeJay once in the street and met the Parrish family while shooting the video for Zach.  So when I got there, I just called them up and started to hang out with them.  I lived in Indio [a desert community in the Coachella Valley, about one hour’s drive from Salton Sea] for four or five months and drove back and forth every day—on the freeway.

Very early on in the process, I started editing as I was shooting.  I’d edit and then I’d go back every few weeks to shoot more.  This was my process for over a year—edit, go back, edit, go back.  So even then, I was weaving the stories together as I was shooting them.  I also knew where I wanted the dance sequences to be, based on what I was shooting.  For example, there is the scene where a group of older kids are making fun of Benny, telling him he can’t participate in their games because he has “no class,” leaving him out completely. Then they went outside and played with those carts that later became a part of that dance sequence.  After editing that scene together, the choreographer, Paula Present, and I rehearsed with them at the community center and we had them wear the same clothes that they wore that day and shot it over two days at the same time of day.  So it really looks like they just stepped out to play and then started to dance.  The gazebo dance with CeeJay and his girlfriend was shot more like a real scene, although a lot of their dialogue was improvised.  I record everything with lav mics so I don’t really have to be that close to them all the time; I can just film and let them talk in a more intimate way.  We were just finding things as we were going along.

H2N:  There is a real sense of discovery.  The structure of your film has all of these interwoven story arcs where we follow different protagonists.  We intuit they know of one another, yet in the film, their lives really don’t intersect.  But, for me, the spine of this piece is Benny’s story, specifically the story of his “illness and treatment.”  You have portrayed one of this country’s many drug-addicted children in such a pure way and I connected to him so viscerally. I can honestly say that my emotional attachment to this kid stemmed mostly from his victimization from a negligent medical establishment, something that enrages me like very few other things do.  The doctors’ and caregivers’ solutions to making Benny “better” is to bombard him with more medications and higher dosages until his poor little body and mind are malfunctioning.  You documented this deterioration over the course of the time you were shooting.  Obviously, you didn’t set out to make any kind of hard-hitting social issue statement about anything, but that’s the real beauty and artistry of the film.  The way in which it’s edited, however, very much drives home certain points about what has happened and is happening to these people and how they cope.

AH:  Yes, and the solutions that they’re offered. I was very aware of all of this while it was happening.  It was, and still is, something I deal with every day—how to react to it, how to be supportive of the situation.  I try to provide as much information as I can that might help.  But that’s as much as I feel I can do.  It’s tricky as a filmmaker and it’s tricky as a human being.  The people around Benny are doing what they think is the best thing to do. Bluntly, the truth is that that area is notorious for lots of doctors that are practicing there that have, let’s say, failed elsewhere.  There are a lot of doctors and health care people in that area who are in training, just starting practices. They don’t necessarily have the right information or attitude and the “expertise” they can offer is limited in many ways.

It’s particularly enraging, because to me, Benny is not only smart, he’s probably one of the most interesting people I’ve ever met in my entire life.  His spirit and imagination I would like to think will be stronger than anything that’s happening to him physiologically.  The only hope is that he won’t be damaged by all of this forever.  These people really do play a kind of Russian roulette with these kids’ brains.  It is unbelievable that they give those drugs to kids that age.  He’s been receiving them since he was four.  The amounts increase, the medications change, and the definition of “bi-polar,” which is what he’s diagnosed with—well, you can’t say that a kid has a bi-polar disorder.  That kind of condition is only diagnosable in adults according to the DSM-IV [Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders].  There’s no such thing as a bi-polar condition in children.  They impose that diagnosis because they don’t know what else to call it.  They might say, “Well, this is where we think it’s going,” and start doing drug trials.  They’re experimenting and don’t really know the outcomes.

But this film can only serve to show glimpses into some of the larger issues one can pick out from these people’s lives and the way in which they live their lives in this particular place.  All these things that can be perceived as wrong or right, or bad or good, all reside together, side by side.  This is the human experience of life and that’s what I wanted to illustrate more than anything, how things co-exist, all the wrongs and the rights together, the love and the violence, the broken dream and the persistence of dreams.  I hope the film gives a feeling of a more rounded feeling of life, not something dissected into pieces.  I don’t want to say if this certain thing or that certain thing was remedied everything would be okay.  I don’t believe in that.  Benny’s predicament is one heartbreaking element of everything else going on.  As a friend, I intend to do what I can do to educate and help with things.  But as a filmmaker, this is what I’m interested in illustrating.

My stance is not one of criticism for films that are more blatantly “social issue” films.  I watch those, too, and learn from them and think they’re so important.  But the film I made didn’t have room to supply that kind of information; that’s not what I set out to do. Going back to the context of the place itself:  up until the last minute, there was a debate on whether we should include the introduction that is there—the history of the Salton Sea and the genesis of this place.  I think the film would have been fine without that, too, because, in essence, not knowing where you are doesn’t matter.  But it does, of course, give context to this idea of the broken American dream. 

Red and CeeJay and the Parrishes all have so much to do with this kind of mythology for me.  I have only experienced this “American Dream” from afar as anyone who isn’t from this place does.  As I’ve gotten closer, I still see the “football dream,” the “success dream,” where one is lifted from your environment into a new destiny. Red is the traveler, the seeker, who worked in the oil fields.  He represents the loner with deep wisdom smattered with that deep-seated racism that has been handed down to him from older generations.  There’s Mike Parrish’s fantasy of being in the military, the obsession with guns and explosives as a form of entertainment, the love for family in a straightforward and honest way.  All of this is so evocative of America—or, this lost America, more accurately.  Even though the dream is broken, you can still see the people.  And in terms of the place itself, it’s like when you see an old woman: you know she used to be beautiful and vibrant and it gives her another dimension, not because it makes her tragic, but because it makes her heroic.  It moves her from being an object of beauty to being a subject with depth and history.  That place, for me, is redolent of that, a place sold to people as a dream.  And now it’s a place where you can meet yourself in a real way, a grounded way, and there’s beauty in that, too.  Because the only thing that’s left is the intimacy you can have with the other people who are there with you.

H2N:  Your collaboration with Condon provides a really lovely ingredient in all this, his voice and horn so evocative of something both melancholy and joyful.

AH:  That sound is how I feel when I’m honest about my life, that juxtaposition of melancholy and loneliness with the absolute enjoyment and happiness of being alive.  Ever since the first time I heard his music and his voice, it’s been such an influence and there are always wonderful surprises along the way.  I feel like that when I’m around him, when we work together.  We collaborated for three or four years doing all these music videos.  I started feeling a bit tied down to that form.  I did videos for other artists and just didn’t feel that inspiration, that spark or connection with other musicians as much as I did with him.  I wrote him an email at one point telling him I needed to do my thing, that the music video work was limiting for me at that point and that I had found something I wanted to make a film about.  I told him I would love it if he did the music.  I sent him the scene with Benny and Pamela and the pink wig at the beach, which was one of the first things I shot, and based on that scene, he started making music for the film.

H2N:  This bond, this relationship between Benny and his mom, is the absolute heart of this film.  She really is his only friend.  The parent/child relationship is so often portrayed as one of antagonism and strife these days.

AH:  I agree with you and I also deeply appreciate the deepness of their bond.  It’s a very honest, but very kind relationship.  Pamela's a mom that has energy and space left to explore the good parts of her children. She loves being a mother.  She also feels frustrated and, in a lot of ways, stuck on certain things but she wants her children to have what she doesn’t, which is also something very much a part of the American character, to make sure your children might have a different destiny than the one of the generation before.  That’s universal, of course, but the reward of that seems to be higher in people’s fantasies here.  But despite her high hopes for her kids, she’s still the one who gives Benny his medication, insists on it, making sure he takes everything the doctors give him.  Pamela does have a lot of problems dealing with his behavior and controlling it.  He takes up a lot of her time and energy.  But that’s parenting—you’re often the best thing and the worst thing to happen to your child.  But, I don’t know too many people who just do good things all the time.  The most important thing to give your child is love and acceptance because no matter what he has to deal with later, he will always have that.

H2N:  Then there’s the old man, Red, who’s totally estranged from his whole family and very much alone.  He seems like a very loving person, but he also seems like he might have been someone who was not brought up with a lot of love and acceptance.  Can you talk a bit about growing a relationship with him?  You’re a young woman “from the big city” showing up with your camera, an interloper.  What did he make of you?  I would imagine his attention and respect was hard-won.  He’s a great storyteller with a wonderful voice.  And he’s a hell of a snappy dresser.

AH:  I was hanging out at Slab City hoping to discover a great subject.  I met this guy who was a hitchhiker and filmed him for a bit.  He told me about a trip he took with a guy named Red.  He took me to see him and Red came out in a bright red shirt.  He was tanned and he worked every day in a little garden right outside his trailer.  There are very few men like him anymore.  He can sit outside in his chair and just think for hours.  He thinks deeply about things and then thinks about how to articulate those thoughts in a way that will capture people’s attention, almost as a poet would do.  He would come up to me and say, “You know, I sat outside my trailer today and was thinking about blah, blah, blah, and this is what I think . . .” and he’d be off.  He was definitely not very trusting in the beginning.  I was some girl from LA with a camera and he wanted to know what I wanted, what I was trying to get.  But he would go and sit with me on the beach and I’d ask him pretty general things, what he thought about certain things.  I was kind of trying to talk to him about things that were bothering me while I was filming the Parrishes, what he thought about love, travel, family, etc.  I was building up this Red library of beautiful things that he’d say.  So we ended up spending a lot of time together.  Initially I was thinking of using only his voice as some kind of narrator. I was touched by his life.

But he would ask me to call before I came and was angry when I’d just show up.  With the Parrishes, I’d just drop in, throw down my bags and hang out the whole day or sometimes I would stay the night on their couch.  That was my base camp.  But Red always had a very tight schedule [laughs] and would only give me an hour or so of his time, always scheduled in advance.  Once we became friends, he took me on a long trip on his dune buggy; we went on a four- or five-hour ride into the desert and you see some of this footage in the film.  It was beautiful and intense, sometimes scary.  I would think that if anything happened to him, we’d just be stuck there in the middle of the desert with no reception [laughter].  It was a real adventure.  From then on, after that trip, I was all right in his book.  He opened up to me a lot more. He was very surprised to get that attention, very taken by the fact that someone cared that much for him and was interested in what he had to say.  He definitely is lonesome and keeps certain people at a distance.  But he has a lot of friends and the ones that do get close to him love him dearly.  He has intimacy in his life; he’s not always alone.

H2N:  Circling back to this interview technique you were taught by the NatGeo guy, about how to get close to people to learn about their secret lives or intimate aspects of themselves they don’t normally share with just anyone.  Obviously, you are adept at getting people to trust you, open up to you, befriend you without stealing anything from them. It’s pretty exciting to think of other subjects with whom you can collaborate in this way.

AH:  I love a good story.  I also write and am working on a script right now.  You never know, but I have a feeling, whatever I will do, it will be wide open in terms of style or genre.  I don’t think it’s necessary to be confined to one thing or another.  Once I discover a story, I just want to feel free to use the things that I love in art in order to tell it, dance or what have you.  Film is such an incredible format to explore other arts.  I’m not a cinephile at all, one of those people that have been sitting inside a dark cinema since childhood watching every film that comes out.  I think the diversity of what inspires me will make its way into what I create. I like learning as I do something—it deepens my understanding in such a profound way.  Whatever inspires you in life can find its way into your filmmaking; it’s just a matter of feeling free enough to do it.  And you just hope that other people like it, too.

All photos courtesy Alma Har'el.

 

Senses of Cinema Issue #58

Read my début article in Senses of Cinema's latest issue on Harmony Korine's film curation at this past year's CPH:DOX here.

My 25 + 1

This will be the lazy woman's version of Jennifer Merin's very cool Top 25 list of docs by and/or about women that she feels are must-sees.  Here, instead of a description by me, you get a link to the film's website, or to a site that says something interesting about the film--infinite numbers of worlds to choose from, that I would never deny anyone.  Writing film synopses right now, not so much. 

However, I have supplied an extra added bonus--a special mention to a special film about girls/women that was one of the first things I saw that countered every rubric about genre in one movie, and made me weep like a baby, to boot.  (Herzog's Little Dieter Needs to Fly was another one, but Werner makes man-films, so has no place in this conversation.)  Apologies to my friends on the Continent if this is still too much of a US-centric list; I tried to give it some international flava.  We white Europeans overlook lots of stuff.  In no particular order, just as they came to me:

The Gleaners and I, Agnès Varda, 2000.  (Still above of Varda's hand holding a heart-shaped potato.)

The Devil's Playground, Lucy Walker, 2002.

Flag Wars, Linda Goode Bryant and Laura Poitras, 2003.

Prodigal Sons, Kimberly Reed, 2008.

Flying: Confessions of a Free Woman, Jennifer Fox, 2006.

Protagonist, Jessica Yu, 2007.

Blue Vinyl, Daniel B. Gold and Judith Helfand, 2002.

A Lion in the House, Julia Reichert and Steven Bognar, 2006.

The Boys of Baraka, Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady, 2005.

My Country, My Country, Laura Poitras, 2006.

Freeheld, Cynthia Wade, 2007.

Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer, Nick Broomfield, 2003.

To See If I'm Smiling, Tamar Yarom, 2007.  (Still pictured.)

The Mother, Pavel Kostomarov and Antoine Cattin, 2008.

Family Affair, Chico Colvard, 2010.

Off and Running, Nicole Opper, 2009.

3 Rooms of Melancholia, Pirjo Honkasalo, 2005.

O Amor Natural, Heddy Honigmann,1996.

The Monastery: Mr. Vig and the Nun, Pernille Rose Grønkjaer, 2006.

La Sierra, Scott Dalton and Margarita Martinez, 2005.

Edie & Thea: A Very Long Engagement, Susan Muska and Gréta Olafsdóttir, 2009.

Sisters in Law, Kim Longinotto and Florence Ayisi, 2005.

Billy the Kid, Jennifer Venditti, 2007.

Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo, Jessica Oreck, 2009.

The Art Star and the Sudanese Twins, Pietra Brettkelly, 2008.  (Still pictured.)

 

BONUS FILM!!  Rabbit-Proof Fence, Phillip Noyce, 2002.

I hope this helps to further generate an epidemic of lists of kick-ass women and their accomplishments--in film or in anything.  Personally, I think we should get rid of International Women's Day and just take over the world already.

 

 

 

INTERVIEW: Helena Trestiková, Director KATKA

The 13^th edition of the One World International Human Rights Documentary Film Festival will take place in Prague, Czech Republic next month from 8 – 17 March.  This has become one of the most important high-profile human rights film fests internationally, exhibiting over 100 films over the course of a week and a half.  It is there that I will get to re-meet Czech filmmaker, Helena Trestiková, a multiple award-winning documentarian who has been débuting her latest piece, Katka, on the international circuit this year.  Perhaps most people might not necessarily categorize Trestiková’s films under a “human rights” rubric.  She, herself, is quick to point out that she does not think of herself, necessarily, as any obvious kind of social activist.  (The filmmaker, pictured, on the ferry ride across the sea from Helsinki, Finland to Tallinn, Estonia, courtesy Evelin Kask, January 2011.)

What does distinguish this filmmaker’s work is her unique, and intense, involvement with her protagonists, most of whom she follows with a small film crew for well over a decade and her singular commitment to her subjects goes beyond filming them.  She shows us what it is like to be a particular human being in a particular set of circumstances—circumstances which are harrowing, off-putting for most, and all too real for the people acting out the passion plays of their own lives for years on end for her camera.  Katka is the most recent work in a series of films that are observational studies of people who find themselves utterly lost and cast adrift.  The first two are called René, released in 2008 and winner of the European Film Academy's Documentary of the Year Award, and Marcela, released in 2007, also a multiple award-winner. She has been following these subjects for most of the past 20 some-odd years and continues to do so today. 

When we first meet her, Katka is a gorgeous, vibrant young woman, a recovering drug addict in a halfway house, trying to relearn the basics of life as a drug-free person.  Trestiková spent the next fourteen years following her as she relies on precarious and violent relationships with two different men and embarks on misadventure after misadventure into a variety of criminal activities, including working as a street prostitute, to sustain her habit.  She never kicks it--even when awaiting the birth of a daughter.

This powerful film, like Trestiková's others, raises many complex moral and ethical issues concerning the filmmaker relationship to his or her subjects.  Nevertheless, Trestiková’s film is big box office in her native country since so far, over 100,000 Czech moviegoers have turned out to see Katka in cinemas. 

I sat with Trestiková, a very elegant and soft-spoken woman in her early 60s (hardly your average crusading, rampaging social activist) in a quiet café in the midst of the DocPoint festival in Helsinki Finland in late January. [Note to those who haven’t seen Katka yet, this interview contains “plot” spoilers.]

 

Still in Motion (SIM): As a teacher of documentary filmmaking at FAMU [Filmová a televizní Fakulta Akademie Múzickych Umení v Praze, Czech Republic's national film school], what are you seeing from young filmmakers in terms of certain philosophies or schools of thought about making this kind of vérité or direct cinema documentary?  The world moves at a particularly fast clip, for the most part, but your own films have a deliberate pace and timbre to them that requires loads of time, untold days and weeks over the course of several years.  (Trestiková pictured above with Marcela.)

Helena Trestiková (HT):  It’s true that young people look at the world and experience the world in their own ways.  And they don’t want to really imitate anyone.  They also have a very personal attitude and experience to certain topics and they want to help implement change by being active participants in their own films. They are one of the objects in their own films, directly in front of the camera.  Some of them admire someone like Michael Moore and his way of documenting his stories where he is very active in his own films; he wants to move a situation.  He wants to make the world a better place; this is a kind of social activism.  This is the main part of the young filmmakers’ activity.

Antithetically, I have an observational method.  I observe for a very long time.  And some of my students think that this is too passive of a way to make documentary films, that a filmmaker has to be active and change the world with his or her film.  My thought is that I will observe and record and the viewers of my films will think about things.  And, then, perhaps, something in their own mind will change.  It’s a much deeper reaction, I think, than watching someone crusade on behalf of others.  This other method can be problematic in many ways.  I would rather force people to think rather than to react.

SIM:  However, you are incredibly present in your films.  Your subjects interact with you in a very intimate way--they are addressing you directly in many instances.  Your lack of interference, at least on camera, speaks to giving the lion’s share of attention to your subject.  And that qualifies as social activism in a much more profound way by moving aside, allowing us to hear their voices and see their lives play out in a more authentic way—as authentic as one film can represent a whole life, that is.

HT:  No, stillness for young people is not their way.  They want to be seen and heard.

SIM:  What’s so staggering about what you show us in your long-form portraits is the persistence of your subjects in their self-destructiveness.  In the cases of René and Katka, they never reform; they never “get better,” or improve their lives in any way.  In Katka’s case in particular, things go from bad to worse quite relentlessly.  There simply is no happy ending in sight no matter how long you stay with this woman.  What is the general audience reaction to this, do you find?

HT:  Most of the viewers I’ve had contact with describe a physical, visceral reaction to my films and to the subjects.  There is an experience of physical pain.  The story is, as you said, relentlessly depressing.  But when I sat on a panel after showing the film to a group of young teens, ages 12 to 14 or 15, they said it was a good experience for them to see it.  In our generation, we had Christiane F—We Children from the Zoo Station [1981], such a personal story about someone’s relationship with drugs.  They realize, watching Katka’s portrait, the danger of beginning a relationship with drugs; there is a real fear.  But that’s only one aspect.  It shows how far a drug addict will go—the impossibility to do anything else with one’s life once the body and mind are addicted. And there is the attitude of society when encountering this kind of person since we have to understand that there is nothing anyone can do for a drug addict who does not want to be hospitalized or cured in any way.  I was asked why I didn’t take Katka to the hospital right away and I said it was impossible—a hospital is not going to take someone being brought there by force.  If it’s not his or her personal decision, then it’s impossible.  We all have free will and free will works the same way in that situation as it does in any other situation.  (Pictured above, a several months' pregnant Katka in Prague.)

What’s important about this long-term observation is that, as a viewer, you can see the whole story—it’s there for you.  But me, as the filmmaker, I don’t know at the start what I will encounter, what will happen.

SIM: I’m sure your own emotional state, your own innate hope that things will get better for this person you’ve come to care deeply for, must really be intense and quite difficult to sustain at times.

HT:  Of course, I had hope the whole time.  Especially when Katka was pregnant and told me that this was her motivation to get clean and find a home.  And I believed her, feeling that this would be a very good impulse for her stopping.  But it was probably this moment when she left her daughter in the hospital and escaped, that was the most difficult.  Because it was in this moment that I felt the greatest disappointment, the greatest doubt.

SIM:  That if she could give up her child for drugs then it was truly hopeless?

HT:  Yes.  There was just one day, just one day before she was to get her daughter back.  And she escaped.

SIM:  It is a great moment of despair because we really don’t want to believe that someone could do that.  And yet she does.  When I watched René, I had the same thoughts—can a person really do that?  Yes, he can really do those things and he does. In René’s case, there is the self-satisfaction of being so utterly irredeemable.  But this, of course, is not the case with Katka; she’s a prisoner of her own addiction and she stays chained there no matter what.  You, as an individual, must have to be capable of putting up some kind of wall at certain points between you and your subjects, just as you would have to do with anything or anyone that has a profound impact on your life in a negative way.

HT:  Yes, well, a viewer sees this film in 90 minutes.  I lived it for 15 years.  So it was not so intensive in that way because during that time, I also made other films, did other projects and so on.  But yes, also, there were moments and incidents shooting with Katka that were so horrible.  When she was a street prostitute, I discovered her there by accident; it was a chance meeting because I was shooting something else nearby.  At the time, I didn’t know she was working as a prostitute.  We were returning from a shoot and we saw her on the street.

In terms of this “wall” you mention: It’s my task to make a film.  And yes, I am a person, too.  The emotions I experience and how I handle all of it is complicated.  But I think and I hope that my position in Katka’s life is good because I want to help her.  I spent a lot of time with her without a camera.  We gave her some money or paid for her mobile phone.  One summer, she wanted to have a tent and asked me if I had one.  I didn’t but asked many friends and we got a tent for her.  For the times I filmed with her, I paid her.  But that’s my normal method.  I always give some money to my subjects, not only her.  But for her, this is the only legitimate money she’s ever made, a salary for her.  This gave her some pride.  She was contributing to the film and getting something in return.  Her only other financial resources come from stealing things in stores, prostitution and making drug deals.  Contact with me was okay for her because it was safe.  She wasn’t afraid and I always treated her with respect, asking if it was all right to film her.  I was one of the few people in her life that didn’t judge her or suspect her of doing bad things.  Her contact with me was not dangerous for her.

SIM:  The people who accompany you on your shoots do extraordinary camera and sound work and I know you always work with the same colleagues, so there is probably a very intuitive way in which you work together which is especially useful in some of the more dangerous or risky situations in which you find yourselves.  You’re not exactly shooting in very safe places most of the time since your subjects live very close to danger every day.  It’s also very obvious that they’re emotionally involved; that shows in the camera work and the way in which they capture things.  Can you speak a bit about those collaborations?  (Pictured above, Trestiková and crew filming with René.)

HT:  This is a stable of constant collaborators, yes, and so they are very intimate with the situations.  [The three DPs who worked on Katka over the years are Kristián Hynek, Vlastimil Hamernik and Martin Kubala.  The soundmen are Stanislav Hruska, Václav Hejduk and Jaroslav Jedlicka.] During filming, most of the time it is impossible for us to speak together about how to take these pictures.  But they know what is needed and they can work on their own without me.  Especially in this case of Katka and her life, it’s important because they’re not afraid of the situation.  It wasn’t always safe.  The railway station in Prague is especially not safe at night.  Katka and her friends were our friends and we were connected to them.  They were not in conflict with us, but there were some other people that didn’t want to be filmed so it could get complicated.  But nothing ever happened and we all survived.  But these cameramen always had to be ready for anything.

SIM:  I think it’s important to show how very dangerous life is for Katka every day she’s out on the streets.

HT:  Yes, we can’t close our eyes to that; such a world exists.   Life on the streets has special rules.  She never has a proper flat, anything stable or comfortable; she never owned anything except the clothes on her back.  This life on the street also requires her to always be in contact with a man.  She cannot be on her own.  It’s impossible for a woman to live alone on the streets.  If she has a conflict with her boyfriend and wants to leave him, she cannot.  (Pictured, Katka and her boyfriend, Roman.)

SIM:  Yes, she’s trapped there, too.  What’s your relationship with her now? Are you still documenting her life?

HT:  I am still filming her as I am the other protagonists from my films.  It’s a type of life for me.  I consider myself a chronicler.

SIM:  Your storytelling technique is like that of a novelist.  That’s the closest way of working creatively I can think of to describe what you’re doing in film.  Going back to someone like Michael Moore or many other documentarians working in the genre these days and the films they make “to change the world”—it’s a total contrivance, this idea that these films are made with the express purpose of creating social change.  They certainly can—some have.  But these films actually have very little to do with the protagonists and their lives.  We’re just not talking about the same level of commitment you display in the way you work.  What is so unique and beautiful about your work is that you provide absolutely no resolution where there isn’t one.  It’s a rare way to storytell.  Who do you admire in filmmaking today?

HT:  Obviously, I like highly observational films.  I think of Claudine Bories and Patrice Chagnard’s 2009 French film, The Arrivals, which also won the Golden Dove at DOK Leipzig the year René received the same prize there.  It was such a perfect study of the situation of immigrants and the problems and issues of the social workers and how complicated it is to help.  Frederick Wiseman’s work I admire so much.  These are some of my favorite colleagues.  Michael Moore is not my cup of tea [smiling].  In his first film, probably, yes.  But in Sicko, his portrait of the health services in Cuba is completely false.

SIM: I want to talk about this one particular scene in Katka that was deeply affecting for me.  Towards the end of the film, Katka and her boyfriend, Roman, are living in a little shed beside the railroad tracks and the police come to kick them out.  Roman is extremely frightened and because he’s also strung out, his fright borders on hysteria.  He starts calling you by name for help and he tells you how scared he is, as if to say it’s time for you to step out from behind the camera and become an active participant in what’s happening.  I love that moment so much because it’s so select.  You’re so rarely a physical presence on camera in your films but the times you choose to appear are very powerful for that reason and they speak volumes about your relationship to your subjects.  Can you talk a bit about the choice to include those moments in the film when you become an active participant, when we actually see and hear you?

HT:  The times when I am an active participant are many, much more than a viewer will ever see in the final film.  This particular situation you’re referring to was a real SOS situation.  They really thought they were going to be attacked by these policemen.  So I wanted to talk calmly to the police officers and try and allow them to stay longer in this little railway house where they were.  So we did resolve the situation and it was such a big victory since the incident happened without any attack or anything.  I always wanted to help her in any way I could but it often was very limited what I could actually do to help.  That was one situation where I could do something.

SIM:  It goes a long way towards establishing this relationship for the viewer, especially when it comes so late in the film.  I think most people do wonder what the involvement might be between Katka and you and your crew and this seems to be your answer to those questions.  Is this your solution to obliquely confront the criticisms of “merely” being an observer without any kind of interference or aid? It adds a layer of complexity at such a key moment.

HT:  There is such complexity in the relationship; it is unavoidable.  My relationships with René and Katka and the others--well, our “friendships” are obviously limited by the way in which we meet.  I am always the filmmaker.  Of course, most of the time I met with them it was without a camera but they cannot forget that I am a filmmaker and I cannot forget that they are the protagonists of my films.  It’s a persistent issue between us.  It’s the limitation of those relationships.  (Pictured, poster from the film René.)

SIM:  But those limitations serve both parties, in a sense.  You want a film; they want their stories told.

HT:  Yes, of course.  I often wonder how audiences from other countries can accept or come to my films, how they can connect with our daily realities in Czech Republic, the intricate ways these films are related to this nation and to the culture?  It’s always, somehow, surprising to me.

SIM:  Well, I can only speak to the country I come from, one that has dire immigration problems right now, social services problems.  All of it layered upon the persistent myth that the USA is still some “land of opportunity,” to which all are invited equally to partake of the riches there.  There are millions of US citizens living in abject poverty, no home, no health care, no protection from the state—in the midst of staggering wealth.  Just like life in any number of places on the planet—no different. 

It is a rare and wonderful thing to witness this kind of commitment, this kind of obligation, on the part of one human being to another.  This is what translates no matter what culture or language.  How has Katka received the film?

HT: After she saw the film, someone asked her what she thought she had managed to do in her life that she could redeem as something good, something positive. Katka replied that she had had a child.  And that she had “made this film with Helena.”  (Pictured, the director and her subject.)

 

"Trusting the Strength of Ordinary People": A Masterclass with Pirjo Honkasalo at IDFA

At this year’s 23^rd edition of the International Documentary Festival Amsterdam (IDFA), Finnish filmmaker, Pirjo Honkasalo, was invited to make the “Top 10” selection for the festival.  These were her choices—The Earth by Aleksandr Dovzhenko (Russia, 1930); The Mad Masters by Jean Rouch (France, 1955); The Earth Trembles by Luchino Visconti (Italy, 1957); Close-Up by Abbas Kiarostami (Iran, 1990); Kyoto, My Mother's Place by Nagisa Oshima (Japan, 1991); Quince Tree of the Sun by Victor Erice (Spain, 1992); Brass Unbound by Johan van der Keuken (Netherlands, 1993); Tell Me What You Saw by Kiti Luostarinen (Finland, 1993); The Smiling Man by Walter Heynowski and Gerhard Scheumann (Germany, 1996); and Blockade by Sergei Loznitsa (Russia, 2005). 

Perhaps, ten “exercises” one can fold into one’s film school curriculum.

All of these works were selections that resonated profoundly with Honkasalo while she was just learning the craft of filmmaking in her late teens. In the two-hour masterclass she hosted, moderated by Iikka Vehkalahti, commissioning editor of Finland’s YLE, we saw clips from these films filled with images that initially inspired Honkasalo back then—not just as an artist, but as a human being.  Listening to her talk, one feels quite strongly that filmmaking was just one of the many artistic avenues she could have explored, for this 63-year-old who “feels an attraction and attachment to the logic of the dream,” and who “trusts the simple poetry of image,” can capture the revelations of deep emotional intelligence through her camera lens like very few can.  I feel this might be true if she had chosen a musical instrument, a paintbrush, a quill and parchment, or what have you.

For me, watching a work by Honkasalo is a singular experience, one not easily described in words, particularly the limited language used for critiquing a work within the context of a certain cinematic style or milieu.  Even though she has worked in documentary for much of the latter part of her career, her definition of the genre speaks foremost to the craft of image making:  “Making the image for me is the documentary; the visual aesthetic is the essential part.” When she composes her stories, like the best minimalist musicians, it is in a very circumscribed and disciplined way.  During the talk, she laughingly recalled her producer’s predicament in the initial stages of making her latest piece, Ito—Diary of an Urban Priest, about a young Buddhist man residing in Tokyo.  She had come back to Finland from an extended stay with her subject in Japan, accompanied by barely any footage.  Her producer pleaded:  “Please start shooting something!"  (Masterclass still of Honkasalo and Vehkalahti, courtesy Felix Kalkman.)

Yet what engages Honkasalo is the steady pulse, or gradual transformation, of the smaller moments, her compass set for an interior quest for the answer to something only she herself might know she is investigating.  It struck me that calling this talk with this particular filmmaker a masterclass was a misnomer, of sorts. (Especially one set up as an over-lit chat show with Honkasalo and Vehkalahti sitting, seemingly, miles away from the “live audience.”)   Like most master filmmakers who have worked for decades at their craft, her personal process is one fraught with more mystery than practical advice. In fact, most of the ways in which she works is completely antithetical to what any “film expert” these days might have to impart to a budding film director.  But then again, not too many of us can create works of art from “fresh chaos,” particularly the interior variety which she is able to glean so eloquently from her protagonists.  Providing an opportunity to choose an infinite variety of ways for a viewer to “walk through the landscapes of my films” are of greater import to her than linear story, narrative, exposition.  “I trust the audience and that enables me to create a certain style.  I leave space to think your own thoughts.  . . . Film can talk about what we cannot talk about—there is the power of silence, the beauty of stillness.”  (Still from 3 Rooms, pictured above.)

As we now all live in a world of constant “image noise” (Honkasalo’s phrase), grappling with films like hers, like Dovzhenko’s, like Visconti’s, Erice’s, et.al., is akin to learning a new language, or rather learning to re-listen, to re-look. I have seen most of her films more than once, read numerous critical essays and reviews, have listened intently to her talk about her work when I’ve had the opportunity. Still, I oftentimes feel as if I am only scratching the surface of something innately impenetrable. Yet, the inestimable rewards have been glimpses of profound beauty (Mysterion, Ito—Diary of An Urban Priest); insights into devastating psychological traumas (3 Rooms of Melancholia); the searing personal, familial and cultural pain of her 1998 drama, Fire-Eater; unflinching intimacy and a magnificent portrait of stubborn dedication in Atman.  (Still from Ito, pictured above.)

Honkasalo’s films are complex, often disorienting, providing the polar opposite of any kind of conventional narrative structures we rely upon to ease our way into strange and foreign worlds. Acquiescence, a voluntary surrender, is required on the part of the viewer.  These days, especially, there is something liberating in drifting in a sea of ambiguity, always off-center, a giving of oneself over to someone who, in the core of her being, believes that something exists beyond the reach of our five senses; this is what she sets out to discover anew with each new project. In essence, this is her life’s work.  In return, this work is based on the director’s own erasure of self, a submission to the world around her, an obeisance to the uncontrollability of life. Her expansive interior stories are odes to the accidents of everyday experience, whether they be trivial or momentous—and who is to say which is which, she always seems to ask us. Consistently, she is able to intuitively calibrate all this through the agency of her camera, and bestow extraordinary cinematic gifts on us all.  (Still from Fire-Eater, pictured above.)

Like many of the master filmmakers to whom Honkasalo paid homage in her Top 10 picks, she leaves wide swaths of room in her films for personal discovery.  “If a personal self-discovery is experienced while watching a film, it’s a success.”  This speaks to the generous nature of a filmmaker who is intent on communion with her audience, not the opposite intention, of which works like hers are often accused.  She shares the very personal spiritual journeys she embarks upon quite generously in the language in which she is most fluid—the language of pictures.  Those pictures bring collective longings, fears and questions to the forefront, prodding our collective hidden psychic terrains. In the process, she is willing to expose her own weaknesses, her own vulnerabilities, doubts, half-formed beliefs, knowing that she will likely be misinterpreted and misunderstood.  Thankfully, she doesn’t really seem to care.  (Still from Atman, pictured above.)

Externally, I may not be able to interpret and articulate all this very well, but I recognize the strength of an ordinary person when I see it portrayed in Honkasalo’s films.  It is always a welcome sight—as is the strength of this extraordinary artist.

 

Expanded Cinema: New Vision at CPH:DOX

The NEW:VISION Award is CPH:DOX’s competition for experimental, innovative, reflective documentaries and the festival presented twenty-six diverse, genre-bending pieces this year.  In managing to watch them all, I experienced profound discoveries about expressing a deeply personal aesthetic in film. In a post-festival correspondence with programmer, Mads Mikkelsen, he told me, “Part of the project here is to not think in opposite terms of ‘documentary’ and ‘fiction,’ but to think in the very basic term ‘filmmaking,’ with a reference to the real. That said, there is a strong, current interest from the art world in what could be called the documentary project: reflecting on the world we live in from perspectives that acknowledge the formal potential of filmmaking. This is, of course, especially visible in the New Vision program.”

What was common amongst the films in this category was an original interpretation of that ineffable matter within us that keeps us connected to the world of dreams. Many of these film works act as amorphous metaphors for the secret sources of our spiritual and intellectual power, creating new myths in relation to our physical selves and the ways in which we interact subliminally with the physical world around us.  And while all of this might be hot stuff to creative programmers and adventurous cinephiles, I wondered what kind of feedback the festival gets from local audiences.  Mikkelsen again:  “Well, the fun thing is that I talked to people that are not cinephiles, who had a genuine experience of change from encountering these works in a cinema. I think that is vital to the cinema-going experience: to change.”  Part of his mandate from festival director, Tine Fischer, someone who is highly informed about currents in the art / gallery world, is “the very basic act of bringing these works to the screens of Copenhagen and to the public here. I do not think that the cinema space can be elitist, but perhaps that is too optimistic."

Perspective (from the Latin perspicere, to see through) is generally defined as an approximate representation, as seen by the eye, on a flat surface of an image. In their works, the makers in this category “saw through” the more impenetrable layers of our beings, transforming their material into rich storylines that animate some aspect of daily life. It is extremely encouraging that an event calling itself a documentary festival supports this kind of work.  Documentary has a propensity to be a genre that can become stale all too easily with its own self-referential and myopic way of telling true stories. Many of these pieces were a slap in the face to all of that, and I mean that in the most complimentary way.  (Still above from John Price's Home Movie.)

As the makers of these film and video works traverse deeply personal and quixotic territory, they often instigate an unfamiliar shift in a viewer’s perspective. Whether that intention is inadvertent or not is hard to say since so much of what these pieces offer is distinctly intuitive.  But there is no doubt that when watching these films, installation pieces and other UFOs, there is a focused attention to detail and nuance, where one’s experience of a “cinematic encounter” can be redefined.  But only if one meets the work at least halfway.  For there is work involved to be sure, and according to filmmaker, Ben Russell, that is quite intentional.

Russell, last year’s New Vision Award winner, is an American artist that executes visionary work in contemporary experimental documentary.  One afternoon during the festival, he and Canadian filmmaker, John Price, hosted a masterclass moderated by Mikkelsen. Both of these artists work on the forefront of this exploratory borderland. This year, Russell’s first feature, Let Each One Go Where He May, was part of the New Vision category, along with the seventh in his Trypps series, Trypps #7 (Badlands).  John Price's latest film, Home Movie, had its European premiere at the festival and is described as “a psychedelic science fiction film with a distant relative in Tarkovsky.”  Whatever you want to call it, it's gorgeous, tactile work.  As well, these filmmakers make work intentionally both for the cinema as well as for installation.  (Still above from Russell's Trypps #7 (Badlands)).

Referencing the historical avant-garde film tradition, along with a modern interpretation of “ethnographic” filmmaking, Russell mentioned the reinvention of cinematic space offered up by Gene Youngblood in his seminal book from 1970, Expanded Cinema. Youngblood talks about the passive versus active filmgoer encountering a cinema where there is no immediately evident structure. There is a lot of space for an audience member to exist, becoming a self-reflexive experience where one participates in that experience, actively creating meaning for that experience as one watches.  Russell: “I think to ask cinema to be a representative medium is asking it to do something much less than it can do, which is to produce some other experience entirely.  That’s the ambition with [my work], to create something else than what we see.”

The New Vision Award this year went to German philosopher/author/filmmaker, Hito Steyerl, for her sharply subversive and entertaining biography of an object, In Free Fall.  Steyerl credits her contribution as the film’s “recycler,” instead of its director. The jury was impressed by the film’s innovative approach “that moves between critical, documentary and personal,” a trademark of Steyerl’s distinctive work and, indeed, a trademark of all the films in this category.  (Still from film, pictured above.) 

Israeli artist Roee Rosen’s Out (still from film, pictured below) was given a special mention by the jury, and I want to give it a special mention of my own. This staggering half-hour piece, according to the jury, “dares to employ the radical methods in the form of bodily rituals to expose the prejudices that exist within us all.”  The reflections of one of the two female protagonists are especially poignant.  She is the one asked to perform an exorcism in a psychosexual passion play of ritualized dominance and subordination, unglamorously staged in a sparsely furnished living room. The demon she must exorcise from her sub is Avigdor Lieberman, one of Israel’s most extreme right wing politicians, a man with virulent nationalist and racist ideologies.  Quite eloquently, she speaks about him in relation to something that is inherent in the nation of Israel, as a whole. I, in turn, as the active viewer, extrapolated what she had to say into a more universal message, and it moved me deeply. 

After researching Lieberman in preparation for her role as exorcist, she states, “You cannot approach an exorcism with negative feelings only; you have to be able to identify with the demon, to find empathy towards him.” As a queer feminist activist born in Israel in 1978, she and Lieberman (born 1958 in Moldova) obviously come from very different places in just about every way.  Yet, she finds some things that will tie her emotionally to him. “I must say that I prefer Lieberman over most of Israel’s political system in one sense: that he tells the truth. His truth may be terrible, but at the end of the day, it is his truth.  . . . My main problem as an exorcist is that Lieberman is a very evasive demon.  He goes out of one body and enters another.  He resides, in fact, at the heart of our collective body. Lieberman is not the demon, but only one of its incarnations.  The real demon belongs to us all.”

 

Look for my article on Harmony Korine's guest curation at CPH:DOX in the next issue of Senses of Cinema, coming next month.

 

 

 

 

Middle East Focus at Sheffield 2010

In the current issue of DOX Magazine, just released and currently available at the EFM lounge at the Berlinale marketplace, I have three articles published which I will "reprint" here on this blog.  Even though these festivals happened in the autumn of 2010, I think the themes are still pertinent enough to share now.  I hope you agree:

As part of Sheffield Doc/Fest’s extensive and impressive program this year, there was a strand that focused on the Middle East, a place rife with underground work.  While some of these films are certainly getting a bit of play at some of the larger Middle East fests, making and exhibiting independent documentary in the Arab world is a challenge in several distinct ways.  Even with new film funds developing and alternative avenues emerging for exhibition, oftentimes, there is severe political and social censorship with which filmmakers from the region have to contend. How successful the outcome of certain projects is up for debate, for quite a few pieces are unpolished, filled with the kind of “gaffes” of which most Western filmmakers (and audiences) are highly critical.  We must also remember, however, that a lot of these important and timely stories never get the appropriate professional support to help enhance their "market-readiness."  Nonetheless, it is important that these films get some play outside their own region at high-profile festivals, and in this case it was thanks to expansive programmers like Hussain Currimbhoy that they played at Sheffield.

The Middle East Focus strand at Doc/Fest 2010 showcased ten films from Turkey, Lebanon, Palestine, Israel, Iran and Tunisia.  There were two feature-length films that were particularly striking, but for entirely different reasons.  While Zeina Daccache’s 12 Angry Lebanese: The Documentary is exceedingly well produced and executed, Mohammad Ali Atassi’s Waiting for Abu Zayd  is not.  In fact, at its conclusion, Atassi’s film devolves into a philosophical argument between the journalist and his subject, Atassi’s a frustrated off-camera voice expressing bewilderment to Zayd about the intellectual’s refusal to return to his native Egypt after 13 years of exile.  It’s an unintentionally morbid conclusion to what amounts to the only extensive documentation of Zayd’s life.

The two films have some palpable reverberations with one another since both say a lot about the constant struggle with creating contemporary meaning out of ancient Qur’anic traditions of Islam, and the complex social morés (and severe social restrictions) of being a good and faithful Muslim today.  In both cases, the films concentrate on these principles through interaction with state “criminals,” or exiles, in Zayd's case.

Fierce and fesity theatre director, Zeina Daccache, sets up Lebanon’s first prison-based drama project in Roumieh Prison, one of the most overcrowded penitentiaries.  The facility, built for 1,500 inmates, holds almost 4,000.  Over the course of a year and half, she molds a group of 45 actors plucked from the prison population and stages an adaptation of Reginald Rose’s teleplay from 1957, 12 Angry Men.  The story takes place in the confines of a deliberation room with 12 jurors deciding the case of a boy who is being charged for murdering his father. There is one man who decides to buck the unanimous vote of “guilty” which leads to a passionate interplay between notions of innocence and guilt.  As the prisoners themselves analyze all of the motivations of their individual characters, they start to work out deeply embedded personal, familial and social issues, all guided by Daccache in a magnificent performance of her own.  She stubbornly stays with her charges through all of their injurious self-doubts, through intense resistance to commit to the rigors of rehearsal, and the intimidating exposure of performance.  We learn immediately about the crimes these men committed, but the reasons why they find themselves behind bars (some for life) always surprise.  Yes, some blame their upbringing, their parents, their surroundings, but most reveal that the foibles of their own personalities are the “culprits” that led them to lose their way, resulting in  giving each of them much agency in their attempts at self-understanding.

The film documents Daccache’s work inside the prison, spending most of its time in the rehearsal / therapy process.  Monologues and song and dance routines that detail the prisoners’ life experiences are created and added to the spine of Rose's original play. Seen by many influential people in Lebanese government, the play (and the film) helped put into action a law from 2000 that was never enforced, which offers reduced sentences for good behavior. Two months after the staging of the play in which the characters talk about the need for the law's actual implementation, Lebanon’s Justice Ministry began approving reduced sentences.  Certainly, the existing structure of the original play, the play within the play, and the structure of Daccache’s CATHARSIS program (essentially therapy through enacting drama), has enhanced the dramaturgical work of this exhilarating documentary.  But the heart of the matter resides in the ways in which the inmates interact with the camera lens, with superb shooting by Jocelyne Abi Gebrayel, and sensitive and graceful editing by Michele Tyan. It is a focused and satisfyingly contextualized effort.

Syrian journalist and human rights activist, Mohammed Ali Atassi, who followed his protagonist for six years, is not as narratively successful in his film portrait of Nasr Hamed Abu Zayd in Waiting for Abu Zayd.  A brilliant and outspoken liberal theologian and intellectual, Zayd wrote several books challenging institutionalized interpretations of the Qur’an and Islam. Zayd was the victim of a ludicrous court battle that labeled him an apostate, resulting in his exile from his native Egypt. Atassi follows Zayd as he tours, lectures and comes face to face with a tightly controlled Middle Eastern press. One television station at which he is interviewed is owned by Saudi Arabians; any criticism of Wahhabism (the country’s dominant faith, and an austere form of Islam that insists on a literal interpretation of Qur’an) is a serious breach, and Zayd is told this several times before he appears on air.  But clearly at that point in his life, he was a man with nothing more to lose.  In 1995, he had been banned from his native country, an enemy of the powers that control traditional Islamic practices and laws, and Egypt’s religious authorities forcibly divorced him from his beloved wife, Cairo University professor, Ibtihal Younes.

Subsequently, Zayd spent his time in exile writing books and raging eloquently in public debates, calling for a more humanist, modern approach to being a faithful Muslim. For the last several years of his life (he died in July of 2010, two months after the film was completed), he resided in Leyden in the Netherlands, where he continued to give conferences and public debates about his positions, which hardly appear to be so radical in any other place outside of the fundamentalist regime in which he resided.

The film is enhanced by fiery testimonials from Younes (pictured left with Zayd), and Zayd’s friend, Mohammad Hakem, a leftist political activist and student leader (who has also passed away since the film was made). But films about thinkers and intellectuals, particularly one as straightforward as this (and feature-length at that), pose enormous challenges to both the maker and the audience.  In essence, it fails as a cohesive film, broken awkwardly into aspects of a TV journalism profile, personal diary, and poetic ode to an indomitable spirit.  Atassi’s homage to Zayd captures the man’s humor and humanity but the forays into song, strange montage, and other filmic “effects” throughout the piece ultimately create distance from the subject, instead of providing valuable context.  More importantly, a greater understanding and contextualization of Zayd’s surreal journey into exile is sacrificed. 

Near the end of the film, knowing full well the propensity of the media (and, perhaps, Atassi) to lionize him in some grossly inaccurate way, Zayd states, “I need to be modest so that our leaders can learn modesty.  The intellectual who claims ownership of the Truth is the other leg of the dictator.  When an intellectual claims to own the Truth, he becomes the dictator’s servant.”

 

For more information on the Sheffield festival and market, and to keep up to date on deadlines for this year’s fest, which moves from autumn to summer (8 – 12 June 2011), visit the web site at http://sheffdocfest.com/.