Still in Motion

RETURN OF THE HONEYBEE Fundraiser

This Friday April 3rd in northern California, there will be a fundraiser for a documentary-in-progress called Return of the Honeybee (formerly titled, The Vanishing Bee).  The film takes a hard look at the economic, political and ecological implications of the worldwide disappearance of the honeybee.  A solution-oriented take on this impending disaster, the film will provide audiences with practical, quotidien solutions about how all of us can make changes in our daily lives to help ameliorate the situation of the ongoing massive and mysterious disappearance of the species.  Bees have been disappearing all over the planet, and no one knows why.  To read more about the film, click here.  To see the trailer, click here.

This is an independent production currently in process and the filmmakers are actively seeking funding and support to finish the film.  If you can't participate in the house party Friday night in Cali (221 Hillside Avenue in Mill Valley at 7:00 p.m.), you can donate online.  If you're nervous about donating through the site, you can also send a check or money order to Hive Mentality Films, 1837 Grace Avenue, Los Angeles, CA  90028.  This issue is vital to us all.

IN A DREAM's Theatrical Release

Jeremiah Zagar's first feature film is a beauty.  It's fresh off the festival circuit (it world-premiered at SXSW last year) where it has garnered numerous awards.  I saw it at Woodstock in October where it won for Best Documentary and Best Editing; you can read my impressions here.

The film releases theatrically in the next few weeks starting with a four-city run, and will then expand to other cities in April and May.
 
Zagar's In a Dream was one of fifteen films shortlisted for the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature and is nominated for two Cinema Eye Honors this Sunday night for Best Achievement in Music Composition (a new category) and Outstanding Achievement for a Debut Feature (which Jennifer Venditti won last year for her film, Billy the Kid). 

International Film Circuit will exhibit the film in New York at The Cinema Village, starting Friday April 10; in Philadelphia (where the Zagar family resides and where the film takes place) at the Landmark Ritz at the Bourse and in San Francisco at The Roxie, starting Friday April 17; and in Los Angeles at the Laemmle Music Hall, starting Friday April 24.  Spring is in the air and the docs are at the neighborhood cinemas--yes!

Interview: Heddy Honigmann, Director EL OLVIDO (OBLIVION)

If there's one thing I've learned in the years I've been interviewing artists, it's that you've just got to jump into the fray whether you're prepped or not when a wonderful opportunity presents itself.  I would wager to guess, after talking with her, that filmmaker Heddy Honigmann would feel the same.  One always has one's agenda in the old back pocket, of course, but there's something extraordinary in those serendipitous moments when life tells you you're participating in something special, perhaps the one and only chance you'll get. 

Honigmann's career is filled with those moments and she shared some of them with me when I sat with her on a rainy evening in Thessaloniki, Greece, just a few days ago.  She had just arrived from her home in Holland and was quite tired with very little time between her arrival and the first screening of her new film, El Olvido (Oblivion).  An extremely gifted storyteller, Honigmann is also an extraordinary listener, no secret to the many subjects that have sat in front of her camera over the course of her twenty-plus year career to share their tragic and triumphant stories.  (Photo of Honigmann from the 2006 International Film Festival of San Sebastian, courtesy Getty Images.)

El Olvido was filmed in the city of her birth Lima, Peru, the second film she's done there.  She left Peru after university to study filmmaking in Rome at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografie and started shooting documentaries in 1979.  I'm sure the prizes and the awards and the adulation she's received over the years are very dear and meaningful to her, but it is the work itself that brings a light to her eyes and a warm lilt to her voice when she relates how she met this subject or that one, and how together they create a cinema of "profound emotional honesty," in the words of Sean Farnel, director of programming for the Hot Docs International Documentary Film Festival in Toronto.

I hope this will be merely the first of many conversations we have together.  Here is our talk about behind-the-bar stories of terrorism and corruption while shaking up a batch of Pisco Sours: 

Still in Motion (SIM):  This is a film about your hometown, Lima, Peru.

Heddy Honigmann (HH):  Yes, it’s a film about my home, about the city.

SIM:  Did it create a different experience for you because of that?

HH:  No.  Many people might think it’s like that.  The only thing might be that I know parts of this particular city and I know a bit more about the way I have to talk to people there, which for a documentary maker—no, for a filmmaker who makes documentaries—is something that you should be able to do anyway, no matter where you are.  You must know how to move in New York or Beirut or in India and in Lima. You have to get to know a place pretty quickly.  But, in this case, it was a little bit easier to know it because I was born there.  But I did go to areas where I’ve never been before, so in a way, it was the same experience as going to a place where I’ve never been.  There was exploration.

And the city has changed so much.  But I have seen that already; I have been there researching so the surprises weren’t there so much, which is better because the film is not at all about me and my discoveries.  But without this initial exploration, you risk just filming the exotic things about a place or things that don’t match with the general idea you might have about the film if it’s the first time you discover it.  It would be different if I had wanted to make a film about a city I didn’t know.  Then, the amazing surprises and the unbelievable things you see would take a different amount of time; there would be a different sense of time in order to make certain types of discoveries.  I went back to the same places; there is a reason why I got to know certain places and I got to know the people much better by going back to those places again and again.  That’s another kind of discovery.  For me, it was not super special because it was Lima for this reason.

SIM:  But was there a deeper resonance for you as you were talking to these people?  Your subjects are so integrated into the place itself; they are the place.  They embody the history and the memories there.  You have an incredible knack for calling out deep emotional memory, a sense of memory that is quite visceral memory, in your subjects.

HH:  That’s in all my films.

SIM:  Yes, it certainly is.

HH:  I remember when I started this project.  I had a one page description, which I gave to some television programmers.  They were afraid that there would be a lot of [historical] information in it that people wouldn’t understand.  I was so angry with these people.  I said, sorry, you have produced three or four of my films already; did you ever hear or see anything that was a pure historical or political piece of information?  They never answered, of course, because I don’t play the intellectual who knows how things are. 

For instance, in the first film I made in Lima in 1993, Metaal en Melancholie (Metal and Melancholy), somebody says, “And when Il Chino won the election. . .,” I said, “You mean Fujimori?”  “Yes, Fuji, Il Chino.”

SIM:  You clarified the colloquial expression as if you didn’t know.

HH:  Yes, exactly.  Or something like, “The Shining Path,” in talking about the guerillas, “has caused a general strike.”  I asked, “What do you mean?”  “I mean, nobody can come out of the house.”  The whole city was empty, a void.  So, obviously, I know what happened.  That was an incredible moment of integrating the people of the city with that kind of historical information by creating a very emotional scene with a subject by the conversations I have with him.  It’s because I’m not interested in this “historical” information, in and of itself.

SIM:  These people are just living their lives in what are extraordinarily difficult situations and I think that by portraying them in this way, you show the incredible resilience in the face of that.  No matter what craziness is going on or how absurd the situation might be (which creates a lot of funny/sad moments), these people are under the thumb of some pretty insane “leaders.”  But there is this sanguine quality, nonetheless, because they still have to live under those circumstances and make the best of it.  This is what you capture so beautifully, I think.

I want to talk about this bartender in El Olvido, Mr. Kanashiro.  He’s our journeyman through this terrain and he’s so smart.  His stories are just absolutely brilliant and teach us so much about the country.  He's our history teacher.

HH:  He’s great.

SIM:  How did you meet him?

HH:  My core researcher, Sonia Goldenberg, found him and told me about him.  He was giving lessons [in a school for service and hospitality workers].  I talked to him in a café, just him and me, and little by little, he opened and talked about things he’s seen and done.  I’d already watched him teach these lessons and knew he was a good talker.  I also knew that one of the boys we met on the street [David Gutiérrez] was taking lessons from him.  So, there was that connection and there was the Pisco Sour everywhere [the “official” cocktail of Peru] in both the high-class and the low-class restaurants, everyone drinks it, all the presidents drink Pisco Sours—that’s what you do in Lima in a good bar; you probably don’t ask for a whiskey on the rocks.  Well, maybe an American would [laughs]. And, in my head very quickly, when I was talking with him in the café, he became the character who would come back over and over, behind the bar serving the Pisco.  I wasn’t sure if he would dare to talk quite so openly like he did for me in the film.  So I asked him very directly, “Mr. Kanashiro, so you agree to film with us?”  “Yes, of course.  I will make the Pisco.”  “Yes, but there are a lot of stories you can tell.”  “Mmmm, I don’t know.”  But I knew he would do it the day we filmed.  He is such an enthusiastic man; I could feel that he really wanted to give me a good story.  His teaching sense, his humor, his wit, his sense of irony—all of this comes through.

The first scene, which is a kind of conversation off-screen as he’s preparing the Pisco, I knew would be a great start to the film because I would have Pisco and, also, in a very open and easy way, I would have the history of Peru, the history of South America.

SIM:  He’s a member of the service class, as well, that hears and sees everything but remains discreet.

HH:  It created a way of editing the piece in a very beautiful way.  [El Olvido was edited by Danniel Danniel and Jessica de Koning.]  We did it in two takes and I was able to mix them.  In one shot, you don’t see his face as he talks.  In the other, he is showing us the mixture of ingredients that go into the drink.  And he is saying it all even though you may just see him cutting a lemon or something.  I continued to shoot as he was making the Pisco.  After this off-screen conversation we had, he was so hot to tell these other stories in his particular way.  And, in this way, he becomes such a strong element; you are happy to see him and you appreciate his openness and his wisdom because he’s telling you all these bad things that happened in the country, the gravity of the situations there.  But his stories are funny and entertaining.  That’s what great comedians do.

SIM:  But this is also where the character of the country comes through so sharply, as well, a country that’s been through so much and still goes on.  Everyone you speak with is like that—deep reserves of emotion but always displayed with great depths of humor--laughter and tears mixed together.  Like the Pisco, there is sweetness in the sugar and bitterness in the lemon and then, of course, the wallop of the alcohol.

HH:  It’s something you need to have to survive in such a country.  And the Peruvians really have it.  The Indians in the mountains are much more reserved, but they have it, too.

SIM:  This thought leads me to want to talk about another extraordinary subject in the film.  There are quite a few heartbreaking moments throughout; but, for me, what cracked mine in two was this 14-year-old boy named Henry.  I wanted to ask you about this title of “Oblivion,” because to me, titles are very important, what you decide to call something is key.  And so I thought about this word a lot when watching the film.  There are many ways of interpreting it; it’s a complex idea, really. When I saw and listened to Henry explaining that he really is just a shell of a human being, at just fourteen years old—well, he was the physical manifestation of oblivion when it’s defined as the condition or quality of being completely forgotten.  It’s a lost life.

In your years of making films, have you ever stumbled upon someone like that, someone that young?

HH:  No.  But I can tell you that I was looking for someone like that.  The title existed before I met Henry.  It’s not only related to him but I was looking for him, somebody who has no memory, whose life is so sad that it amounted to a zero, nothing.  Can you imagine zero?

SIM:  It is hard to imagine, but I believed him.

HH: I would have dinner with my crew—just the sound man [Piotr Van Dijk], cameraman [Adri Schover], assistant director [Ester Gould] and me.  Most evenings we went to eat by ourselves to unwind.  They laughed when I asked the question, “So guys, are we finding the steps that go down to reach Hell?”  My intuition was telling me that I would find Henry, that if there was a Kanashiro in that country, a country with centuries of exploitation and misery, then Henry should be there, also.  In fact, there are a lot of Henrys.

So why was I asking that question?  Because in order to find Henry, to make his presence possible in the film, I myself would have to create the steps to get to him, to that particular hell.  Without those preliminary steps, his presence would be too shocking, like inserting a corpse into these [vibrant] surroundings.

We always parked the car in a certain square when we shot in the center [of the city].  One day, there was another person taking care of the cars rather than the regular guy.  This was Henry.  He greeted us and told us that the regular guy who took care of the cars had to go do something for several hours and had asked him to take care of the cars.  When we asked him to take care of the car, he told us that, of course, he would.  After we took our shots, he was there still.  I don’t know why, but I asked him his name and asked him if he wanted to eat something.  He just nodded his head, no expression on his face. 

So he came with Ester and me while the guys were tending to the equipment.  He walked like an old man.  He made a big impression on me, the way he was walking.  He went to sit at the table with a lot of reservation.  He was looking around and you could see that he was checking to see if he was doing okay, as if he could be punished, telling me that his life hasn’t been easy.  Maybe he had been punished by doing the wrong things.  He wanted milk.  Because he couldn’t decide what to order, the waiter told him that maybe he would like toast with cheese.  And then we saw a little smile, the only time I saw that—a smile brought on by toast and cheese.  I’ll never forget the way he took the milk.  He didn’t drink it, but consumed it with a spoon, one spoonful after the other.  It was impressive.

SIM:  He was really savoring it.

HH:  Yes, exactly.  It was heartbreaking.  Then I decided to film with him and I asked him if he was always in that square and he told me he was.  He showed me his hands.  "I clean shoes; that’s why my hands are black and brown."  Taking care of the cars was an exception.  He told me he was always in the square.  I asked him if we came to see him if he would be willing to film with us. He didn’t ask anything about what we were filming but just told me, “Yes.”

So there was an appointment with Henry and the day we came, he still asked nothing.  We shot with the tele-lens as he went from client to client and then I asked him to sit in the square and have a conversation with me with him still not knowing what we were doing or why.  And that was it.  It was very short.  I think that he was very sad after the conversation.

SIM:  Do you think it was because that was the first time he’d ever really articulated his lack of memory?  That it was a discovery for him to realize that?  I’m sure he’d never been asked those questions before or thought about those things.

HH:  After he stopped talking, he looked directly into the camera for a long time, as if to say, “Why did you force me to say this?  Because I’ve never said it.”  I was very sad.  We were all totally down after that.  We had reached a kind of bottom by discovering this young boy with no hope.

SIM:  There’s a point in the scene when the camera moves away from him and seems to focus on something else for a moment before coming back to his face.  Was that done on purpose?  It’s strange.

HH:  Yes, that happens only for about ten seconds.  I don’t like it very much. The cameraman himself doesn’t really understand why that happened.  There is nothing in focus when he does that.  He doesn’t understand Spanish, maybe only a few words.  Was the sadness of the boy so powerful he couldn’t take it any more?  He really couldn’t tell me why he did that.  He knows that he shouldn’t have moved the camera away from the boy; there was no reason to do that.  It was like he abandoned him.  So, we don’t know.  I didn’t ask him to do this and he doesn’t understand why he did it.

SIM:  You decided not to cut there, though, to excise that little portion.

HH:  No, no.

SIM:  Well, it’s actually very evocative, in a way, because the scene is really almost unbearable and so it does feel like an intuitive “looking away” from something that’s extremely hard to handle.  It works quite well, actually.  Your personal gaze as a director is extremely respectful.  But it’s also relentless.  You will look and look and look, and so we look, as well, even in those moments when we want to turn away.

I also love that people recite poetry for you.  They just happen to have a book, or maybe you give them something to read, and they read it out loud for the camera.  And they really get into it—it’s dramatic and deeply moving.  People reading poetry out loud in public is somehow “unseemly” for a lot of viewers.  I’ve had people tell me that watching that is very uncomfortable for them, which is curious, since it’s something I really love—it makes me well up like nobody’s business.  You're so unafraid to be unabashedly romantic.

HH:  Absolutely.

SIM:  You celebrate the part of all of us that reacts to certain pieces of music or a certain passage of literature, or what have you, in a very visceral way; we might be embarrassed or shy about those reactions, again because it’s touching such a deep, personal place.  The scene of the couple sitting on their bed and listening to the song from his home village in the mountains while the camera watches them listening is so wonderful.  Again, it evokes the power of memory that no words can express.

HH:  It’s true: I’m not afraid of romanticism; I’m not afraid of pain.  I’m shameless, almost, when I film.  But I don’t do it as a voyeur.  I’m also there with them.  Many times, I’m broken.  I’ve learned to control this because I remember my mother used to cry a lot and listening to her cry so much makes me comfortable with tears. I can cry a lot too when watching films when there is really anything happening, a death, a divorce, whatever.  Or something romantic—when two people finally kiss.  So, yes, I’m like that.  When I’m filming, my tears can fall, but I don’t want the audience to see or know about it as if it’s some manipulative thing on my part.  That’s the last thing I want.

The strange thing is that my subjects don’t seem to notice.  I’ve been sitting with someone as close as you and I are sitting from one another, just one meter away, with the camera beside me. For instance, I remember filming the soldier who was in Srebrenica [Crazy, 1999], saying at a certain moment that he had memories of the people who were being taken away by the Serbs asking for help.  They weren't saying anything, but just by their faces, they were asking for help and he couldn’t do anything.  And he’s like Henry—there is no outward expression of any emotion but the memories are very strong; he’s full of memories haunting him.  It must have been so terrible that any outward expression has disappeared, as if it’s almost erased.  I think of Edvard Munch’s painting, The Scream (pictured).  This man’s face is one second after this scream.  Everything is gone after such a scream.  That was his face and that was Henry’s face.  I thought about this afterwards when we were editing.  But I was crying in front of this man and he just continued talking.  I don’t think he noticed.  In fact, nobody noticed.  Also, nobody understood that it was roll number nine with him.  I had reserved ten rolls [of film] for this guy because I knew that he could never be rushed.  He would have to go through every little thing until he reached that point.

SIM:  This is a constant search, I think, for you too, to get that moment.  Your subjects must also be sensing something in you that is searching for these moments.  People want to reveal; we want to reveal ourselves.  We don’t want to conceal, really, although we think we do or we try, but we really want to be found out, especially when someone is there and she’s really wanting to know; she’s saying “tell me,” and it doesn’t matter how the story is delivered, whether you cry, whether you don’t.  The expression serves the memory in whatever way it comes out, especially after a long period of repression.  It’s the “still waters run deep” idea, I guess.  That’s what resonates the most for a viewer, as it does for you.

HH:  I had another title in mind at the beginning, very early on when I was only thinking about waiters and bartenders.  They have heard so many stories.  But nobody’s ever asked them anything.  It was like it was the "word of the mute."  La palabra del mudo.  Nobody interviews someone like Henry. 

Maybe in a film about women in Lima who work very hard this would happen, but no one would really go with Lucía to her house.  [Lucía lives with her mother on a very high and isolated hill above the city in a ramshackle house, working in the city six days a week, twelve to fourteen hours per day.]  Nobody would really be interested in Kanashiro and his story about clandestinely putting the vodka in the orange juice to make an important Peruvian politician or general fall to his knees in public because he’s so drunk. 

SIM:  Yes, his own personal coup d’état was deeply satisfying to hear--an exquisite and very funny story of quiet, anonymous revenge.

HH:  Yes, at this moment, it was all I could do not to laugh out loud.  I was delighted.  I was practically dancing.  You are right about what you said, we want to tell.  Many times, we are people who are in love and we’ve been left by our partner.  Or we are in some kind of terrible pain.  We want to tell and tell and tell, ten times, twenty times, the same story, as if telling the story will bring the person back.  We have this need to tell stories.  But we don’t always have a listener.

Many of these people I meet in all my films, nobody is ever interested in them.  And then, suddenly, there is this little lady standing in front of them who is very curious.  I’m always asked, “What is the secret of how you get these stories?”  Of course, there is no secret.  I’m interested in what and whom I am filming.  I’m not filming concepts; I’m not filming ideas.  I’m filming people.  I hate films about ideas. 

(Honigmann talking to old men in Père-Lachaise cemetery in Paris, 2006, for her film Forever.  Honigmann's US distributor, Icarus Films, will be releasing a special edition DVD of this film on April 21 to coincide with the New York theatrical release of Oblivion--see below.)

SIM:  Those people you film are us.  That’s what we’re interested in, after all—our own stories, which is what we hear in your films.  I have nothing in common with Mr. Kanashiro, this bartender in Lima.  But his humor and his strength and his resilience impress me.  I like to think I would have those qualities, too, if I were in his place.  I would be strong and silent with a smile always on my face as I served Pisco Sours to unscrupulous politicians and corrupt military men.  He’s mastered his performance, the one he acts out every day, as he instructs his students to do.  And he’s also performing for you and for me and for whoever will watch this film he’s agreed to be in. But he’s showing us also the secrets to that performance because you’re creating an environment and an opportunity to make that a safe thing for him to do.  It’s a unique and very enticing collaboration.

HH:  This is something natural in me, I think.  I made a little documentary in 1978, or something like that, in film school in Rome.  The first three days of shooting were really terrible, really bad.  When the camera showed up, I got totally frustrated.  And I was directing heavily—“If I ask you this, you will tell me that.”  And so on.  Like directing fiction.  I didn’t know what was happening—I was “there” one moment with all these people with these incredible stories and now everything was getting ruined with the presence of the camera.  I will never forget that.

And with that thought, her mobile rings loudly, her producer, Carmen Cobos, on the other end of the line telling her she must come quickly to go to her first screening of El Olvido at Thessaloniki.
I look forward to continuing this conversation with her--some other place, some other time. 

El Olvido (Oblivion) will open at New York's Film Forum on April 15 for one week only.  Tickets will be available online beginning Wednesday, April 8.

PBS' P.O.V. Announces Its 2009 Season

Check out the top-notch nonfiction films that will be beaming straight into your living rooms later this year courtesy of the excellent folks at P.O.V.  By going to the program's site, you can read descriptions, see previews, check local listings and get air date reminders sent to you so you don't miss one of these fifteen stellar movies.  I have the privilege of traveling the festival circuit and this season, as is always the case, the programmers and directors have chosen the best of the best from all over the world.

The season starts June 23 with Jennifer Maytorena Taylor's New Muslim Cool and ends with Steven Sebring's Patti Smith: Dream of Life in a special broadcast slated for January 2010.  Click here to read more about these films and the rest of the season's pickings.  The strand also offers full-length and short films for online viewing.  What more could you ask for?  Support public television.

FORBIDDEN LIE$ Coming Soon to US Theaters!

Anna Broinowski writes from Oz that her brilliant nonfiction romp will be opening in theaters here in the US.  Roxie Releasing will exhibit the film at New York's Cinema Village starting April 3, at the Sunset Laemmle in Los Angeles starting April 10, and at Chicago's Gene Siskel Film Center beginning April 24. 

I saw Broinowski's multi-award winning film at the True/False Film Festival in '08 where it caused much excitement and glee.  To see a "doco," as the Aussies call it, this hilarious and entertaining is rare, and to say that the director plays with form and content with extraordinary innovation would be an understatement.  It is a roller coaster ride from beginning to end and you will never forget Norma Khouri, a con artist and femme fatale par excellence, a woman who even took Broinowski for a ride. 

If there was a category for Best Performance by a Documentary Subject, Khouri would certainly walk away with the prize.  And then she'd sell it to the highest bidder.  Do not miss the opportunity to see this in the cinema!

New York Premiere of FRONTRUNNER with Dr. Massouda Jalal in Person

Join Vital Voices and WomenRULE next Monday the 30th of March for the New York premiere of Virginia Williams' amazing film, Frontrunners, presented by the Paley Center for Media. 

In 2004, Williams and her film crew gained unmitigated access to Dr. Massouda Jalal's run for president of Afghanistan in that country's first-ever democratic election.  By stepping into the fray where no woman had been allowed before, Jalal paved the way for hundreds of Afghani women to run for parliament a few months after the elections.  Needless to say, Dr. Jalal is a mesmerizing figure--articulate, soft-spoken, highly intelligent with a sharp sense of humor--an incredible inspiration to millions of Afghani men and women.

Since the time of that election, the media has reported that there are increasing acts of violence by Taliban insurgents, a growing concern about the democratic movement being squelched by this fundamentalist group's efforts.  A panel called Change Amidst Adversity: Women's Progress in Today's Afghanistan, will take place after the screening to discuss the reality behind these reports and how this instability will affect the progress Afghan women are making in local and national politics, in business and in the domestic sphere. 

From 6:00 - 6:30 p.m., there will be an appetizer reception at Bamiyan Restaurant and then at 6:45, Frontrunners will screen at the Paley.  Directly after the film at 8:00, the panel will begin with special guest, Dr. Massouda Jalal.  It will be moderated by David Marash, special correspondent for PBS' Worldfocus, and will include panelists, S.K. Guha, Program Specialist, UNIFEM; Shireen Zaman, Vital Voices' Director, North Africa and Middle East; and other guests to be announced soon.

Tickets can be purchased online now by clicking here.

Winners from the 11th Thessaloniki Documentary Festival--Images of the 21st Century

I've just returned from the Thessaloniki Documentary Film Festival in Greece (just a few more days for me in Italy and then home again, home again--at least for a bit).  I will have lots more coverage to share on the IDA e-zine, as well as film reviews here and on Hammer to Nail in the next week before the tidal wave of my hometown fest, Tribeca, hits the airwaves.

Thessaloniki has just announced the award winners for this year, and here they are: 

The Hellenic Red Cross Audience Award for a film over 45 minutes in the International Selection with a prize of 4,000 euros went to Anders Østergaard's Burma VJ, Reporting From a Closed Country from Denmark.

The Hellenic Red Cross Audience Award for a film under 45 minutes in the International Selection with a prize of 2,000 euros went to Flowers of Rwanda by David Munoz from Spain. 

The Hellenic Red Cross Audience Award for a Greek film over 45 minutes with an (astounding) prize of 30,000 euros (and no, that's not a misprint) went to National Garden (Ethnikos Kipos) by Apostolos Karakasis.  (These massive prizes for Greek filmmakers are to "upgrade the documentary film genre in Greece."  Right on.)

The Hellenic Red Cross Audience Award for a Greek film under 45 minutes with a prize of 20,000 euros went to The World Naked Bike Ride Project in Thessaloniki (Vgikame Apo Ta Rouha Mas) by Elli Zerbini. 

Now for the FIPRESCI Awards (International Federation of Film Critics):

The Greek selection was Eva Stefani's Bathers (Louomeni) and the International selection recognition went to US filmmaker Kimberly Reed's Prodigal Sons (yay!).  Reed's film will also be part of the traveling festival selections that play in local theaters throughout Greece, including Athens, this week.

The Amnesty International Award for the best film in the Human Rights section went to Burma VJ.

The World Wildlife Fund (WWF) Award for best film in the Habitat section went to Joe Berlinger's Crude (USA, Ecuador, UK).

The ERT3 (Greek public television) Broadcasting Award with a prize of one broadcast on the channel, equivalent to the sum of 3,000 euros, recognizing the best film in the Habitat section, went to Ferenc Moldoyanyi's Another Planet: Masik Bolygo from Hungary. 

And last, but certainly not least, the ERT channel inaugurated the Doc on Air Award this year, given to the best Pitching Forum project by the tutors who participated in the '09 forum called Docs in Thessaloniki, run collaboratively with the EDN.  The award of 7,000 euros went to director Kate McNaughton's Rush for Life (Takas Films, UK).  Oddly, this was the last pitch I saw today before leaving for the airport and she did one hell of a job, receiving extremely enthusiastic responses from all of the international commissioning editors, one of them going so far as to say that he had fallen madly in love with her subject just by watching the three minute extract.  Impressive.

Congratulations to McNaughton and all of the award recipients.

I would like to express a very special thanks to filmmaker Heddy Honigmann, who, even though exhausted, an interview the last thing she wanted to do, sat with me last night in her hotel room for a wonderful conversation smack between flying in from Amsterdam and the evening screening of her latest (and quite beautiful) nonfiction piece, El Olvido (Oblivion) (still from film, pictured).  It was a privilege.  Our conversation will be posted here very soon. 

Efcharisto poli to Lilly Papagianni, the Foreign Press liaison (who made said interview possible) and to Stella Stavrinodaki for her warmth, hospitality, humor and efficiency--what a combo!  And a very big thank you to Dimitri Eipides, an extraordinary spirit who is helping to, indeed, upgrade the documentary film genre, not only in his native Greece, but all over the world.

Writing the Documentary: DOX BOX Wrap-Up

This year DOX BOX launched a workshop for Arab filmmakers called "Writing the Documentary," an intense three-day curriculum that included developing narrative story structure, writing a treatment and learning to pitch a film project to commissioning editors, producers and distributors.  Six filmmakers with developing projects participated (with a couple of others auditing the workshop).  Seasoned Danish film consultant, Tue Steen Müller, and the chairman of the board of the European Documentary Network (EDN), Mikeal Opstrup, led the attending artists through an intensive stretch of creative brainstorming to prepare them to be able to write and pitch their projects proficiently, confidently, professionally.  And they had to do it all in English, a second, third or even fourth language for most of them.

The overriding goal was to structure the projects for the utmost appeal to an international audience, so the artists had to stretch themselves beyond their comfort level in many ways, even those who had attended film school and/or had worked professionally in the region as directors, editors or shooters.  To develop a language of verbal visualization for a documentary project is quite challenging, and from the consultancies I had with the filmmakers, most are on their way to getting that hard work done.  At the end of the workshop, all the projects were gathered in a dossier that can travel to international markets and funders.  I will be sharing some of these at my next stop--see below.

The majority of these projects are personal in nature, the filmmaker the central character expressing a first-person, often quite intimate, narrative.  This, of course, makes things infinitely trickier since the "film as therapy" or "film as personal discovery" is quite dangerous creative territory to traverse; a project can quickly devolve into something that is unappealing or irrelevant to a general audience and makes some commissioning editors shut down automatically when they hear the words, "This is a personal journey about my . . . "  Those personal films that do transcend do so for a variety of reasons, mostly due to cinematic proficiency and/or use of cinematic language in innovative and original ways; they are also rigorous in their narrative structure.  This approach is the polar opposite of stumbling upon a story, picking up a camera and shooting, without any forethought to story structure until one enters the editing phase where a lot of nonfiction pieces find their "true north."  There are always surprises along the way in any creative endeavor, of course, even in shooting a fiction project with a highly-realized script.

On the part of these filmmakers, there was also the expectation (quite unusual for American nonfiction filmmakers who don't expect this at all) of having funding in place before production begins, the notion of using personal funding for a project quite a startling concept for most, even for those that have never helmed a project before.  Sourcing funding and financing for independent projects is a very tricky proposition these days no matter where you reside.  Production status in the region is already antithetical to making creative nonfiction.  (When I use this term, I need to make clear that I am not talking about the "television documentary," even though most funding still comes from broadcast commissioning editors in the European market.)  Exploring the international co-production market is something that most American filmmakers don't even bother with, so in essence, by being schooled by mentors like Müller and Opstrup, who are deeply ensconced in this world, these regional filmmakers already have a huge advantage.  Festival directors Orwa Nyrabia and Diana El-Jeiroudi are also amazing resources since their company, Proaction Film, is the first and only independent documentary film production company in Syria. 

However, as we know, a lot of nonfiction projects have an urgency and timeliness that precludes any kind of waiting to lock in funding, and there was an urgency of this nature in a couple of instances, i.e., loss of a subject due to old age, or loss of access or a certain point in time in someone's life that is seminal to the message of the film, as was the case in another.  Sometimes, you just have to leap and begin without looking back, knowing that creating a strong trailer or teaser for your project, at the very least, will make it infinitely easier to raise funding.  No matter how proficient and eloquent your written treatment, there's nothing like being able to show your filmmaking and storytelling chops visually, for after all we are working in a visual medium.

Needless to say, I also learned a lot and am constantly inspired by artists forging ahead, knowing that some are prepared for the long haul and some, distinctly, are not, this due to a variety of reasons.  Let's just say I've met a few people who have great ideas but just can't get out of their own way to execute them.

But I cheerlead anyway, knowing that there will be plenty of quashing of the creative spirit along the way from various quarters--I don't need to add to that pile.  As a creative producer, I consider myself an artist, as well, (sorry if that sounds pretentious, but that's the way I feel) and, I too, constantly face the delicacy of my own viable career in this market where people want my talent and time for free without giving much in return.  I am still figuring out what I need "to prove," but I just hunker down and work my ass off and carry on despite the dire landscape.

I will say that there were a couple of projects I strongly believe will go the distance and this is due to a combination of the artist him- or herself, the story, and the clarity of the filmmaker's vision.  With the right partners and the right opportunities, they are highly viable for an international audience.  I won't say more than that now because they are at such a delicate stage, but it's exciting when something comes across your radar like that.  Whether I am, ultimately, personally involved or not, I will track and watch some of these talented people with interest and offer any support I can along the way.

And so now off I go to yet another fest--this one much more substantial, bigger, faster, stronger, etc.  A different kind of world where I am still finding my footing and learning at the knee of long-time professionals and mentors.  Look for my festival coverage of the 11th Thessaloniki Documentary Festival: Images of the 21st Century (which opened last Friday and goes through next Sunday) for the IDA's online e-zine, and other film reviews and encounters from Greece, here on SIM and on Hammer to Nail.  If you're going to be in Thes at the festival, come by for the panel on "The Social Role That Documentary Festivals Play" where we'll be discussing ways for nonfiction filmmakers to make the most out of a festival experience.  We're at the John Cassavetes theater on Tuesday the 17th at 11:00 a.m.  

Αντίο για τώρα.  :)

Voices of Women at DOX BOX 09

Just last Saturday, CNN.com reported that two Saudi male authors were arrested for seeking a female writer's autograph at a book fair in Riyadh.  The novelists ultimately weren't charged with any crime and are now demanding an apology from the Muslim kingdom's Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice (hello, George Orwell).  This religious police force monitors, among other things, enforcement of dress codes, mandatory observance of prayer times and segregation of the sexes.  Saudi Arabia follows a strict interpretation of Islam called Wahhabism and punishes unrelated men and women who are caught "mingling" in public.

And so just as much as we read the disgusting statistics of the abuse of women perpetrated by men (the majority of whom are their husbands, fathers, brothers) not only in these kinds of societies, but all over the world, including the "enlightened" West, both sexes suffer from this lack of freedom, these strictured ways of how we fulfill our roles and interact with one another.  Saudi Arabian writer Badreyeh al Bashir eloquently wrote, "I used to think that men are freer than we women, but I realized that men are just as dazed and confused, but in another sphere.  I held conversations with my male cousins.  I found out that they only enjoy the freedom of place, but their lives are obscene without the partnership of sisters, wives, mothers, [female] colleagues or [female] acquaintances.  We are both captured in a world of a single gender, with only one difference: women get the houses, while men get the cold streets and restaurants.  What can this isolation and solitude lead up to regardless of the difference?"  (Film still above from Eva Mulvad's prize-winning, critically-acclaimed, Enemies of Happiness, 2006.)

At the DOX BOX festival, women's voices, women's presences, women's points of view were quite prominent.  The seven films shown in the sidebar program called Women's Voices included beautiful and cinematically stunning pieces of work from all over the world, all helmed by women except for French-Moroccan, Brahim Fritah's The Woman Alone (2004), an example that not all women's stories need be told by females.  In his luminous film, we hear Akosse Legba narrate her story of enslavement in France as Fritah films the luxurious Parisian apartment where she works.  It's a beautiful and chilling piece.

Today, more than ever before, Arab artists, fillmmakers and writers, both male and female, struggle greatly to search for an identity, figuring out ways and means to tell riveting and bold--and very risky--stories.  As in Haifaa Al-Mansour's case, when she shot her film in Saudi Arabia, she was forced to use a very small camera, pretend her subject matter was something other than what it was, and have the presence of her husband or another male accompanying her during her interviews with her female subjects.  She is struggling greatly right now to launch a fiction project that she wants to shoot part of in Saudi, even though the project has received a lot of international exposure in places like Rotterdam, Berlin and Dubai.  Many Arab filmmakers create their cinema outside of their own countries because of so many restrictions, but as Syrian filmmaker, Meyar Al Roumi, director of Six Ordinary Stories, who works in both Syria and France, says, "I only find myself in the arms of Damascus; my relation with France is strictly professional."

March 8, the 5th day of the festival, was International Women's Day and DOX BOX celebrated with a seminar moderated by Rasha Salti about documentary cinema and female directors.  (A subject very close to my heart and the main reason I started this blog.)  Festival director, Diana El-Jeiroudi who programmed the sidebar (and is a filmmaker herself) said that the idea of allocating a good portion of the fest to women was not "a feminist activity," so much as a tool to establish a base for women filmmakers in the Arab world.  While many women's organizations focus on rights and honor crimes and other societal issues, El-Jeiroudi wanted to specifically focus on women's presence in film and art.  "Just as we're working very hard here to ensure that cinema won't disappear, we are working equally as hard to make sure that the disappearance of women's voices and talents in cinema shouldn't be allowed."  In talking about the Gender and Cinema Journalism Workshop, Salti thinks it's vital not only to create a space for women's issues in the festival, but to also hear and read the female perspective in film criticism and cultural analysis.  (Film still above from Turkish filmmaker Pelin Esmer's The Play, 2005.)

Published in both English and Arabic,  the daily bulletin, "Point of View," was the physical manifestation of the workshop's curriculum, led by Ulla Jacobsen, Chief Editor of DOX Magazine (based in Copenhagen) and Nanna Frank Rasmussen, a Danish film critic.  They were also joined by KVINFO representative, Louise Voller.  The European women worked with female journalists from Morocco, Syria and Jordan, their practicum that of covering the festival and special events, conducting artist interviews and doing daily film reviews.  I often saw them huddled over a laptop in the lobby of the festival hotel working away to create a throughline of themes and important topics, from their particular point of view.  From what I could gather from the participants I spoke with, it was a very rich and rewarding experience.

I leave you, for now, with some statements from the great Latifa al-Zayyat, an Egyptian critic, writer and intellectual activist who lived from 1923 to 1996:  "When I start writing, I omit the censor, keep it away from my creative action, as if I am someone else.  That is why I cannot escape the sense of fear when I read what I write.  I keep telling myself when I write, that freedom and lying are opposites and they cannot be combined.  That is why I try to free the world by capturing its reality no matter how obnoxious and irritating.

" . . . Freedom is a collective war against lying and deception and against the mechanical distractions of rotten slogans.  Freedom is a human revolution against institutional, fabricated revolutions that treat creativity as a form of re-writing, while I climb that ladder that leads to the upper spacious heavens where no father, husband or any of those bound by authority lies nor where daily pretentiousness can reach me."

DOX BOX '09 Damascus, Syria

The 2nd Annual DOX BOX documentary film festival in Syria is now touring Tartous and Homs (through tomorrow), small cities north of Damascus.  Jackie Reem Salloum, the Brooklyn-based director, producer and editor of the rabidly popular, Slingshot Hip Hop, is touring with them (her film won the Audience Award at the fest), as is Holland-based Moroccan filmmaker, Fatima Jebli-Ouazzani, with her beautiful film from 1997, In My Father's House.  Both films played at the festival in Damascus this past week and I had the distinct privilege of participating in this nascent film event, an astounding feat of organization and perseverance on the part of festival organizers, Diana El-Jeiroudi, Orwa Nyrabia and Samer Khwaiss and their incredible team--friendliness and efficiency in equal measure.  (A special personal thanks to Bethany Randell.)

The eight-day event was jam-packed with activity and there was an excited buzz in the air as there always is when you bring artists from disparate cultures together in a place in which most never expected to be.  With two sidebar film programs, Voices of Women and Screenpeace: Notes on War; twenty-two official international feature film selections (all screenings were free to the public); three Best of Fest selections (Pavel Kostomarov and Antoine Cattin's gorgeous film from Russia, The Mother; Geoffrey Smith's transcendent, The English Surgeon; and Helena Trestiková's tour-de-force, René); guest master class artist, Nicolas Philibert; a "Writing the Documentary Workshop" (including 1-2-1 Consultations with international industry) led by Tue Steen Müller and EDN Chairman, Mikeal Opstrup, for filmmakers from Syria, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon and Egypt (more on this in a bit); an Open Day with industry guests presenting information on funds and festivals from all over the world (I represented the Tribeca Film Institute in the US); and a Producers' Meeting, a roundtable forum discussing producing an independent documentary from conception, funding, completion and distribution within a contemporary Arab world context--well, it was an exhausting week.  I also don't want to forget to mention that a daily bulletin also managed to get published called "Point of View," prepared by the Gender and Cinema Journalism Workshop.  The hands, minds and spirits of women were imprinted everywhere (again, more on this in a bit).

As is the privilege of traveling to foreign lands as someone's guest, we all also experienced the beauty and hospitality of the inhabitants of the city of Damascus, were wined and dined with the freshest, most exquisite food and drink, got to visit a Hamman (Turkish bath), and were hosted at plenty of parties where there were opportunities to chat about mutual passions, make new friends and give our hips a shake or two on the dance floor to the latest regional hits.  (Photo, above, from Haifaa Al-Mansour's Women Without Shadows; Mansour is the first native female Saudi Arabian film director.  To say she made her film "on the sly" is a gross understatement.)

This was the first time that an industry platform was launched in order to facilitate the development of creative relationships between international and Arab documentary filmmaking communities.  We here in the States have our challenges, to be sure.  However, the obstacles and challenges that face an independent artist in these regions is a whole other ball of wax.  As for the festival itself: while it was under the auspices of the Syrian Ministry of Culture (thus our rock-star treatment at the airport, both coming and going), there were compromises aplenty.  There was no actual funding that came from inside the country.  DOX BOX is totally dependent right now on financial and in-kind support from the international community, entities ranging from the KVINFO in Denmark to the British Film Council (UK) to the IDFA (Holland) to Hot Docs (Canada) to the Heinrich Böll Foundation, FIDMarseille (France), the Arab Cinema Directory (the Re:frame project of the Arab world), ARTEEAST, DocPoint (Finland) and Cultures of Resistance, among others.  Because of this generosity, visiting filmmakers received screening fees, as well as a daily stipend during their stay.

Because the theaters were provided by a governmental entity for free to exhibit the films, no Q&A sessions between visiting filmmakers and audiences were permitted, nor was there much of an opportunity to exhibit films by Syrian filmmakers, which is mighty odd since the event takes place in Syria.  But, alas, most of the independent feature docs being made fall prey to the censorship boards and so cannot be exhibited within the country in which they were made.  (This is a problem filmmakers in Iran face, as well.)  One hand giveth, the other taketh away, and this permeates the modern culture in ways that a visitor isn't even aware of unless they're curious enough to ask how things work there.  And I'm a curious person.  (Taxi window decal of President Bashar al-Assad, his image ubiquitous everywhere you turn in Damascus.  Photo courtesy of Emma Piper-Burket.)

Syria is bordered by Turkey, Iraq, Jordan, the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights and Lebanon with a small stretch of coastline along the Mediterranean Sea.  Like most ancient Middle-Eastern cultures, there is an amalgam of religions, languages, peoples, histories and terrains that makes for a place that is impenetrable to a foreigner that is visiting for just a handful of days.  But, as is our wont in our tiny little world of making creative nonfiction cinema, the main focus of discussion at formal events and casual get-togethers alike centered on Art vs. Commerce and the ways and means, both clandestine and overt, we must run the gauntlet of finding funding and support for our artistic endeavors and what compromises and choices present themselves along the way. This is why nurturing and collaboration with developing artists from wherever they happen to be living and working is an imperative for the international industry, for it is at this time and place in our civilization where that is becoming more and more possible.  We have the ability to help one another not only usurp and trump governmental, religious, and other fundamental, roadblocks like the aforementioned, but to continue to educate one another and use our access to information and technology in ways that go beyond "friend-ing" one another on Facebook (although that's nice, too--except when you hear from your ex).

Since this post is getting a bit unwieldy (and I'm in Rome and it's a gorgeous day), I will end here for now.  In my next couple of DOX BOX posts, I will continue this discussion by talking more about the A vs. C debacle, Voices of Women and "the dreams of making the films that we dream of making" (thank you, Mr. Omar Amiralay).

"Truth as Casualty": This is Getting Old

After just seeing Anders Østergaard's Burma VJ, Reporting from a Closed Country at True/False, I've been trolling around the Internet reading other reviews as I'm wont to do when a film impresses the hell out of me.  Not only impresses, but moves me deeply--as this fine piece of work certainly did.  I'm far from the only one with praise for this prize-winning film, but I came across Andrew Marshall's review at Time.com and, frankly, it pissed me off. 

Marshall, a reporter who covered Burma's tragic pro-democracy uprising for TIME magazine in 2007 (the central event of the film), recalls the stunning imagery that we see in Østergaard's film, monks holding their upside-down alms bowls high above their heads to indicate that they will not accept offerings from the military; the citizens marching in the streets beside them, many of them recording what was happening on cell phones and cameras.  Some of those armed with cameras were undercover video journalists (VJs), working for the Oslo-based Democratic Voice of Burma.  These images were transmitted out of the country via the Internet and across the globe through all the major media outlets, at great personal risk to the reporters and their families.

Østergaard reconstructs a meticulous aural dimension to the story to reflect the line of communication that helped coordinate this clandestine effort.  The phone conversations are orchestrated between Joshua and the reporters on the ground during the  uprising.  Joshua is a 27-year-old journalist who has been fired from the Burmese government newspaper, and goes to work for the DVB from a safe house in Thailand.  He is our narrator and our connection to these brave men and women who risk their lives to capture these images.  He still resides in exile.

The footage of the crowded streets and packed rooftops and balconies where people chant "our cause, our cause!" over and over with raised fists is thrilling.  Led by the monks in country-wide protests, ordinary citizens put themselves in the line of fire, all of them prepared to die, if necessary, for the freedom of their homeland.

With this phone communication used as the spine of the film, the filmmaker can also protect his subjects and make a "virtue out of necessity," as he puts it.  For the protection of these people is utmost on his agenda and he spent a very, very long time trying to figure out how to tell this story and still protect them.  He even expressed mixed emotions about the film's success, afraid that he would be exposing and calling attention to people who are still in hiding, and would be in a world of trouble if found.  In his research, he used Google Earth to help construct the hundreds and hundreds of hours of unmarked, unidentified footage he had to sift through to simulate an accurate time line of this communication.  Once he started to put that time line together, he says the film began "to speak" about the collective experience of what it must have looked and felt and sounded like.  The soundtrack by Swedish composer, Conny C-A Malmqvist and sound design by Martin Hennel also help to establish a "here and now" immediacy and gives it a haunting lyricism that adds much to the experience.  Through this rigorous process, the director has crafted a piece of cinema that transcends beyond this particular story, and speaks to the universal aspects of revolution from within.  To my mind, the film is flawless in its execution.

Which begs the question, how the hell else would he have been able to do this without this reconstruction, this craft, this cinematic imperative to make the story come alive?

Yet Marshall is stuck on the d-word and the inherent "purity" of what he feels documentary should present.  He wants to call it a "docudrama" which is a term I, personally, loathe since it smacks of those god-awful stilted recreations that I see all the time in stories of the "Wild West," or what have you.  Some of the most highly regarded nonfiction films of this past year--Man on Wire, Waltz with Bashir, My Winnipeg, Up the Yangzte--are brilliant reconstructions of true stories.  (My Winnipeg calls itself a docu-fantasia, for goodness' sakes.)  Marshall feels that these dramatic reconstructions in Burma VJ are a "handicap, undermining the film's credibility and dishonoring the very profession its subjects risk their lives to pursue."  This kind of statement makes me froth at the mouth, seriously.  He then goes on to say that he soon began "to anxiously question the authenticity of every scene."  Really?  I thought you were there, dude. 

But he is hung up on the semantics of what to label the film and that, my friends, is becoming mighty tiresome.  "It is still hard to simply re-categorize Burma VJ as a well-made docudrama and leave it at that--not as long as its makers insist that it is a documentary [who's insisting anything?], or that it is composed largely of the work of undercover reporters, when at least half of it seems re-enacted [not seems, it is re-enacted, that's the whole damn point; no one's denying or hiding that].  The cause of Burma's democrats is ill-served by hyperbole [!] and the reconstruction of events to fit a version of the truth."  So whose "version" should the filmmaker have told?  Someone else's?  I'm confused.  Are we supposed to watch Joshua shrouded in shadow, sitting in a chair in a darkened room with his voice robotized talking directly to the director and telling us what happened?  Would that fit a better "version of the truth"?

As our friend, Werner, has said, "Technology has a great advantage in that we are capable of creating dinosaurs and showing them on the screen even though they are extinct 65 million years.  All of a sudden, we have a fantastic tool that is as good as dreams are."  Or how about this one: "For such an advanced civilization as ours to be without images that are adequate to it is as serious a defect as being without memory."  Østergaard's Burma VJ serves as a conduit to our universal memory.  This is the magic of great cinema, no matter how it's constructed, no matter how it's labeled.  Come join our advanced civilization, everyone!

Burma VJ is the recipient of True/False's True Life Fund.  In 2009, the Fund hopes to raise $10,000 in aid of the DVB for equipment and other needs.  Fund raising got started before the festival with local events in Columbia with the director making appearances at high schools and other local places to discuss the film with the community there.  To learn more about the True Life Fund, click here. 

And with that diatribe, I leave you to go on yet another journey to other far-away lands.  I did see other films I'd like to talk about at T/F but that will have to wait for a later date.  Tomorrow, I depart for Damascus, Syria (with a quick stop in Rome), where the second iteration of DOX BOX is taking place, as we speak.  I will join them for their Open Day with industry professionals to share what's happening over here in terms of funds and festivals and to work with young filmmakers there in one-on-one consultancies where they will share treatments and pitches of their nonfiction projects. The festival is in Damascus from the 4th to the 11th and then will travel to Tartous and Homs.  I will also be attending the festivities in Thessaloniki and I'm very excited about that, too.  Look for my coverage on the IDA web site, here on SIM, and wherever else I can yak about docs.  Or reconstructed realities.

The Cold Calculus of Journalism and the Perils of Bearing Witness

The True/False Film Festival is not an overtly "themed" festival in any way, but one topic that did emerge in quite a strong way, at least for me, in this year's program, reflected in both the workshops and films, was that of journalists bearing witness to world events through the camera lens, and the moral issues inherent in that activity.

Friday afternoon, I joined filmmaker Ian Olds (Occupation Dreamland), video journalist and filmmaker Richard Parry, and his documentary subject, photojournalist Robert King in a discussion called "The Frontline Club: Lessons on Shooting and Being Shot At."  (Unfortunately, Vaughn Smith, the slated panel moderator and founder of the Frontline Club in London, didn't make it on time.)  All three men have been in combat zones armed only with a camera.  Parry and King have been doing it for decades and have documented many of those journeys in an incredible film called Blood Trail, which was exhibited at the fest.  Why a theatrical distributor (or any other kind, for that matter) hasn't grabbed this piece is beyond me, for it is a viscerally potent document of what it is to be a witness to war, knee-deep in blood and body parts and dodging mortar fire, trying to capture on film the atrocities happening in every corner of the world.  Are these men who go willingly into battle zones to get the story incredibly brave or incredibly foolhardy?  King, a sensitive and profoundly introspective man, says that, "You never come away untouched."  He also says, simply, "This is what I do."  (Photo above courtesy of Robert King.)

Photojournalists are our safeguard against historical revisionism.  Once the shutter is snapped, the film (most of the time clandestinely) shuttled to an editor and the images printed in the paper, it is irrevocable, events branded upon the collective consciousness in a way that dozens of stories written by Nicholas Kristof could never convey (more about this in a moment).  Yet Olds expressed quite strongly that he would probably never put himself in that situation ever again, his moral confusion and "profound unease" as that kind of witness forever irreconcilable with his desire to document an important story, no matter how compelling.  Parry's film explores this harrowing issue through King's narrative, the constant grappling and coming to terms with the strange kind of passivity inherent in the job, the weighty decision of whether to continue to document or to put down the camera and do something always hanging in the balance.  What we learn is that in most cases that would be foolhardy, at best, deadly for all involved, at worst.  King explains that after doing this for so many years, his world becomes finely honed to what he has framed in his lens; the only other thing he listens for is a shell or bullet headed his way--everything else goes away, the screaming, the smell of burning flesh, the carnage he steps over.  It's only until he's somewhere safe that those senses come alive in his memory.

The audience was made up of mostly local people, many of them young journalism students (the event was held in the gorgeous Reynolds Journalism Institute at the Missouri School of Journalism in Columbia).  What is top of mind for them is how journalism needs to be reinvented, or more accurately, how journalistic ethics must change to meet the challenges of the 21st century. While it is infinitely easier to get digital files sent out of a war zone versus rolls of film, the issues about working in a war zone only seem to thicken and congeal into ever-expanding quandaries, for now we know too much about what goes on.  Or do we?

This is one of the questions Eric Metzgar's new film Reporter grapples with, the irrefutable fact that journalism, as we've come to know it, has profoundly changed.  Newspapers and other printed sources are shrinking, foreign bureaus scaling way back or closing altogether.  With the loss of objective and in-depth reporting rampant in our news organizations, the fear is that there will be a huge loss of the kind of comprehensive knowledge and understanding we've come to rely upon from our most intrepid journalists.  Reporter focuses on the work of New York Times' columnist, Nicholas Kristof, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winning journalist who almost single-handedly put the crisis in Darfur on the world's radar.

Metzgar, who directed, shot and edited the film, accompanies Kristof to Congo.  As he does in all of his films, he shares his own story and his own insights about his experience accompanying someone on a complex journey through his sensitive, but forthright, narration, although this time he experiences a kind of fear he's never encountered before, for he visits a place that instinctively scares everyone, including the man who has led him there.  For over a decade, a brutal war has been waged in the Democratic Republic of Congo.  Over 5 million people have died as a result and despite interventions of floods of money and peacekeeping missions by the international community, including the UN, the fighting that is taking place there now is the most destructive since 2005.

But the long, bloody and intricate history of the place and the staggering statistics reported from there are, let's face it, a surefire way to completely deaden any interest.  There is a wall of pain and suffering too tall and wide and deep to penetrate with any kind of compassion, and feeling not just helpless, but numbed in the face of all this, we turn away to other things that are much easier to digest over a bowl of cornflakes.  Kristof knows this and so he's learned that the unwieldy story needs to be writ very small, the larger narrative told through a singular one.  The two stories he chooses to tell (and Metzgar documents) are of Yohanita (pictured above), a 41-year-old, 60-pound woman dying of infection, displaced from her village by the warring lords of the region; and the story of one of those warlords, Laurent Nkunda, "sent by God" to protect the people, sporting a "Rebels for Chirst" button.  What Kristof and Metzgar know about him, as well, is that he spends most of his time overseeing a great number of troops that are busy raping and killing hundreds of innocent villagers.  After explaining this heady "mission" of his, he invites them to stay for dinner.  It is a surreal nightmare along the lines of Coppola's Apocalypse Now.  But this is very real and very strange, really no place for white men with cameras and laptops to try and document and understand the terrain.  It is a brash and reckless and heady task.  But no one else is doing it, now are they?

In my next post, I'll talk about Burma VJ, Reporting From a Closed Country, another extraordinary film I got to see at T/F in which a filmmaker decides to use the artifice of cinema to protect his subjects and ends up creating a collective experience beyond politics, beyond belief.  As Ari Folman did with his animated masterpiece, Waltz with Bashir, Anders Østergaard has created a magnificent nonfiction thriller and a true testament to the courage of journalists.

The Truth Is the Truth!

So states Marc McKerrow, emphatically, unequivocally, to his brother, filmmaker Kimberly Reed, towards the end of her intimate family-portrait film, Prodigal Sons. 

Did I just mess up my pronouns?  No.

For this is a story of two brothers still working out the psychic traumas each has experienced individually, and have also unwittingly inflicted upon one another throughout their childhoods, adolescences, and on into adulthood.  These traumas persist, in part, because Kim transitioned from male to female as a young adult and still hasn't really dealt with the abandoned identity she's left behind; and, in part, because Marc has sustained a severe head injury and concomitant mental illness due to a car crash he was in as a young adult that resulted in having part of his brain removed. 

But the story goes back long before these seminal events in each of their lives occurred, and Reed, in this deeply moving investigation of her family legacy, intrepidly sets out to uncover and reveal, layer by layer, the dark heart of sibling rivalry.  The film received an emotional standing ovation for several minutes at the morning screening I attended at True/False, so it speaks in a mighty profound way, obviously, to all the ways in which every single one of us "covers up" from those closest to us and, especially, from ourselves.

Let's get the short synopsis out of the way so we can get to the essence of what this film means to say, because the story's a doozy and would have any novelist or screenwriter drooling with envy:   "Prodigal Sons follows three siblings — a trans-gender woman [Reed], a gay man [little brother, Todd], and their adopted brother [Marc] who also discovers he’s the grandson of Orson Welles and Rita Hayworth (!) — back to their Montana hometown, where a powerful story of an entire family’s transformation unfolds."  (Marc's grandma and grandpa, pictured above, starring together in The Lady from Shanghai, 1947.)  Only from the bosom of Middle America. . .

This film mirrors Reed's uncertainty when she realizes that her own story of transition will have to be an essential ingredient in the story she wants to tell about Marc's legacy.  Because of Marc's unresolved issues, Kim cannot help but be pulled into the vortex of his anger and resentment which has much to do with her.  (The recurring image she uses of herself as a young high school athlete on the basketball court covering his face when he notices the camera on him is resonant and deeply affecting, speaking to her own experience of discomfort and dissonance throughout her life, even though to the outside world, she was a superstar in every way.) 

Because of Marc's  seizures and constant struggle to stay on his meds, his rage erupts so explosively that the family soon comes to realize that intervention is the only solution to make sure that something irreversibly tragic doesn't occur.  Reed captures a man both transformed through music (the mystery of his prodigious musical talent is solved during the course of the film, for he doesn't read a note of music but has always been able to play the piano beautifully), and a man so filled with rage, his tantrums are truly frightening, as he threatens physical harm on Kim and on himself.  His self-hatred is so virulent and deadly that in one episode at a family Christmas dinner, things tip over the edge for everyone as they all realize that if they don't do something to help him, he will end his own life, possibly taking someone with him.

Several members of the audience praised Reed for her bravery in wading into the deep and painful terrain of this Cain and Abel story but she gives most of the kudos to their mother, a quiet but steely widow who handles her children with plenty of acceptance and love but with hard and fast boundaries about what she expects them to outgrow at this juncture, all but demanding that old, useless rivalries be left behind for good.  For she knows that what needs to be dealt with is Marc's illness; she wants so much to help him find himself at last, for that is the only way the rest of them can find peace individually, and as a family.

I love the way the film floats back and forth between the nostalgic, innocent world of childhood, the way we remember ourselves in home movies, everyone looking happy and acting goofy, and the raw footage of capturing the emotionally painful and violent moments of dealing with an adult child's rage and illness that will bring everything he holds dear down with him.  The final shot of Marc staring out into the middle distance, deep in thought, makes us hopeful that he can finally find solace within himself and within the family who loves him, a family that stubbornly pushes away their own fears and confusion to stay by him.  Interestingly, Reed gives Marc top billing with a music credit, followed by her own name.  A name she is thinking about changing back to McKerrow. 

Still without any traditional distribution deal, there are so many different audiences that this film can speak to outside of festival ones.  (Prodigal Sons will next appear at the 11th Thessaloniki Documentary Festival in Greece this month).  Like most independent filmmakers, Reed is now strategizing on how to reach those various audiences with a film that shows a family in the throes of leaving behind all the coerced conformity they've lived with all their lives.  It's a beauty of a film.

Also see:  Brooke Sebold's, Benita Sills' and Todd Sills' deeply moving Red Without Blue and Lisa Leeman's ground-breaking Metamorphosis: Man into Woman.

 

Journeys to the Center of Our Hearts--True/False Film Fest 09

This post would have happened a day sooner, but on Monday, I found myself stuck in St. Louis, MO unexpectedly, having only made it halfway home (the drive from  Columbia to the airport is as long as the flight from St. Louis to New York).  So as winter snowstorms continued to wallop the eastern seaboard, I sat with other stranded friends enjoying the Manager's Happy Hour at the Embassy Suites near the airport, drinking margaritas, munching on little goldfish crackers and flirting with military men who were there for a conference on whatever it is military men do these days.  One guy told me that his job was to tell the generals what to do; all righty then. 

(Awesome photo of freshly-landed alien from the March March parade, courtesy of Ingrid Kopp.)

A fittingly weird end to four days of finding myself in one unexpected place after another, albeit while sitting in jam-packed cinemas watching stellar nonfiction films.  I also think I can better articulate something I noticed about this festival last year and it is this:  something incredible happens in this small college town between the visiting filmmakers and the denizens of Columbia, both populations walking away the richer for the experience in ways that help propel this particular art form (telling cinematic true stories) into the local collective consciousness, then resonating out into the larger world. 

That may sound a bit precious or crunchy (or both), but hear me out:  one of the top-of-mind issues that we festival junkies talk about a lot is the relevancy of said festivals, especially our domestic ones.  (Addictions to karaoke, taking self-portraits while partying like a rock star and other inexplicable symptoms may also occur.)  What one notices quite quickly is that there is a very tight circle of influential, highly passionate and active industry members who stay abreast of business developments and shifting landscapes in marketing and distribution, precisely in order to advise filmmakers (especially novices) about strategies that make sense for that particular filmmaker and his or her particular film.  The dedication that these distributors, festival directors, producers, filmmakers and programmers bring to this exchange cannot be overestimated.  They are our modern-day talent scouts.  This is, to my mind, what is so key right now since marketing and distribution plans absolutely need to be tailor-made in order for a project to successfully run the gauntlet and get seen and appreciated by the audience for which it was made.  Sometimes that will extend beyond the festival circuit for certain films; sometimes it will not.

The current trends of audience sourcing and doing precise and tactical market research and outreach is vital to a film's success, and it appears as if festivals, especially the intimate ones or the ones that exhibit nonfiction and more experimental work exclusively, like True/False, provide a fertile atmosphere for this kind of collaboration in a casual atmosphere--real conversations that push aside the "business speak" and get down to brass tacks about how a film can be crafted to be the best product it can be before being showcased to the world.  We really must turn to the festivals to find this kind of tender loving care for challenging work.  And this is what True/False provides like nothing else I've seen (except for Britdoc, and they were there, too, this year) and what festivals like Sundance have lost and festivals like Tribeca still haven't figured out. 

Time and valuable talent isn't wasted staging panels where talking heads spout the same script over and over and over again, some blatantly using the platform for shameless self-promotion, followed by stale (and, frankly, lame) Q&As.  And you only have stale and lame Q&As when whatever's preceded it is deadly boring, and no one's really listening in the first place.  Here instead, you have brilliant, highly crafted sessions called workshops (free and open to the public) with composers (Instant Soundtrack), reporters and journalists making nonfiction cinema (Frontline Club), a conversation between a filmmaker and her editor, in this case, True Vision Honoree, Kim Longinotto and Ollie Huddleston (The Kim and Ollie Show).  This year, there was a roundtable of filmmakers and industry folk parsing out the trajectory of a made-up project (Hypothetical Hit: Building a Better Doc), where a film project by a first-time director is explored from idea to distribution.  Click here to read more descriptions of debates and workshops.  (Film still, above, from festival fave, Havana Marking's Afghan Star, courtesy of the filmmaker.)

Another way in which this festival shines is in its commitment to its community, the one in which both festival directors, Paul Sturtz and David Wilson, reside.  They are well-loved native sons and have taken this tremendous opportunity to create a specific sort of civic pride and a real concrete investment, both financially and socially, in their community, hosting a festival in which the whole town has a stake--individuals, businesses, churches, etc.  When the audience is invested in wanting to see great nonfiction cinema and learns to be critical in a meaningful and generous way (which these folks have, obviously, learned how to do), then the exchange between audience and filmmaker can really help generate excitement to which even the most glamorous premieres cannot begin to compare.  It is not surprising then that this is becoming an absolute-must destination for both filmmakers and industry, a place ripe for the kind of substantive relationship building both of these populations seek.  I may have to eat these words, but it appears as if T/F may be a Sundance-of-the-doc-world in the making, perhaps even expanding beyond documentary, at some point.  As Redford does now, Sturtz and Wilson might be scratching their heads in several years' time wondering what happened to their tiny, little indie festival in the middle of nowhere where they showed sneak previews and secret screenings and small-scale, but riveting, work to a captivated audience. 

In my next couple of posts, I'll share thoughts and impressions on some of the films I saw, posting here on SIM and at Hammer to Nail.  More soon.