Still in Motion

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Interview: Kim Longinotto, Director HOLD ME TIGHT, LET ME GO

Filmmaker Kim Longinotto has been building her extraordinary body of documentary work over the past couple of decades.  The vivid, intensely dramatic stories she tells are centered around strong female entities, women not known, certainly not celebrated, nor even noticed, really, by the societies in which they live and work.  Yet, in film after film, Longinotto discovers the heroic and the extraordinary in the most unlikely of subjects.  Sometimes co-directing with another woman, always working solo accompanied only by a sound recordist, she bears fierce and stoic witness to quite painful and intimate stories, and consistently renews our sense of hope by shining a light of love and recognition on these unsung human beings.

Longinotto studied camera operating and directing at the National Film School in London.  Her first student project called Pride of Place took a critical look at her boarding school (which she still talks about with, decidedly, not fond memories).  Before helming her own films, she worked as a DP on a variety of documentaries for British television.  Collaborating with filmmaker Claire Hunt, she made Fireraiser, Eat the Kimono, about Hanayagi Genshu, a Japanese dancer and activist, Hidden Faces, about Egyptian women, and The Good Wife of Tokyo about women, love and marriage in Japan.  Working with Jano Williams, she made Dream Girls about the Takarazuka Theatre revue in Japan, and Shinjuku Boys about women in Tokyo who choose to live as men.  Divorce Iranian Style, co-directed with Ziba Mir Hosseini, is a groundbreaking film set in a family law court in Tehran, Iran.  Gaea Girls came next and was about women wrestlers in Japan, and then she made Runaway, set in a refuge for girls, also in Tehran.  The Day I Will Never Forget is about young girls in Kenya challenging the tradition of female circumcision (the title is taken from a young Kenyan girl's poem).  The multiple award-winning Sisters In Law, which debuted at Cannes in 2005 (where it won the Prix Art Essai) was filmed in Kumba in South West Cameroon, and tells the story of two extraordinary female judges.  Just this past June, the film was awarded a Peabody.  This was the first film I saw of hers when it showed at the Los Angeles Film Festival on its circuit that year, and  I promptly spent the next month watching all the other films she made before that.  At the IDFA this past year, she debuted a film called Hold Me Tight, Let Me Go about the Mulberry Bush School in Oxford.  A special jury prize was awarded to this extraordinary piece.  Women Make Movies distributes most of her catalog in North America; all photos are courtesy of their web site.

When I contacted this non-stop dynamo, she had just finished editing her latest piece about five extraordinary women working to save children in Durban, South Africa.  She is working once more with long-time collaborator and friend, Ollie Huddleston, who also edited the beautiful We Are Together.  (Rise Films is also producing the South African project).  She invited me to come meet her at Molinare on D'Arblay Street in Soho, and I must say, it was one of the absolute highlights of my stay here in London (thank you very much, Sandra Whipham!).  The film will debut this fall in Amsterdam. 

I found myself asking very personal questions of this prolific artist, curious to know how her own personal narrative informs and influences her work, the inner compulsions that accompany her on these deep forays into the heart of the stories she tells.  Here's our conversation:

Still in Motion (SIM):  You stand behind your camera and move yourself into these disparate worlds.  You don’t know where you are, really; there’s no real strong point of reference except maybe the physical latitude and longitude of the place.  Have you always had that kind of adventurous spirit, the kind that purposely makes you want to place yourself in these situations?  Can you pinpoint a time when you knew that that would be the way you would experience the world?

Kim Longinotto (KL):  I don’t see it so much as an adventurous spirit.  It’s more like a curiosity to find out about other people.

SIM:  It’s an impulsive curiosity, though, and seems to be only satisfied viscerally.  Maybe most people’s curiosity would be satisfied by books, or research or some other passive way of “finding out about other people.”  Where did that impulse "to get in the face of it" come from?

KL:  You know, that’s a really good question [laughing].  I haven’t a clue.  I suppose I had a very sheltered childhood, a boring childhood, a rather depressing childhood.  Maybe it was a reaction to that; I don’t know.  I know that I grew up with a great unease with authority.  I went to a very strict boarding school.  I don’t know if you have them in the States the same as we do here.

SIM:  Somewhat yes, and a good amount of scandal has come out of those institutions, as well.  The things that go on there “pop out” into the public sphere once in a while, which is only an indication of what must go on at these places that are sheltered, gated.

KL:  They’re like that because the people that run them have complete power.  My school was right in the middle of the countryside.  They weren’t accountable to anybody.  You’d go home and say things to your parents but your parents didn’t really care because they wanted to get rid of you.  And you didn’t really want to be with your parents, either.  There was no way out of it, really.  I suppose there was very much a feeling for me of actually trying to find people that I could like.  Until I was of the age where I was old enough to leave home, I’d never really liked anyone I’d met.  To me, that’s the absolute joy of making films.  Every time I go and make a film, I meet wonderful, wonderful people that I, sort of, fall in love with.  It makes me feel good about being alive and about being a human being.  So, if I had to think of a reason, that would be it.  But I don’t even know if that’s the reason at all.

SIM:  What is it then about film, specifically?  How did you discover that that would be your tool in order for you to find those people?

KL:  When I was living at home on some of the holidays, I lived very much through books.  I used to read all the time.  I didn’t really see my parents very much.  I always thought I’d be a writer.  I always knew I would want to tell stories, and I suppose filmmaking was just the way I found to tell stories, rather than writing.  If I’m going to be honest, it’s probably that I wasn’t able to be a writer.  I tried and it just wasn’t something that came naturally to me, whereas making films did.

SIM:  Writing could be seen as just more kind of isolation, as well.  That’s one of the bigger challenges of that particular craft.

KL:  Definitely; a continuation of a really lonely childhood.  I love working in a team and I love being with people, getting to know them and filming their lives.  People always ask if I keep in touch with the people I film. I suppose I do, up to a point.  I leave it very much to them.  The two women of Sisters In Law [Vera Ngassa and Beatrice Ntuba, pictured below], they email me all the time.

SIM:  I met them in Los Angeles, actually.

KL:  Did you?  Oh, wow.

SIM:  I saw the film as part of the Los Angeles Film Festival, the first year they held it in Westwood Village, and they were there.  It was funny because the audience was so disappointed to learn you weren’t there.  But when they announced that Vera and Beatrice were, everyone cheered; we were so thrilled to have an opportunity to talk to them in person.

KL:  They’re very special.  You can imagine what kind of thrill it is getting to know people like that.  It’s very strange, this thing of making films because you get incredibly close to people; you’re right in the middle of their lives, on a day-to-day basis.  You’re watching them go through these very powerful experiences.  It can never be like that again.  I’ve met some of them quite a few times since; we’ve been to festivals together and stayed at hotels together and have had lovely chats.  It’s much more equal now.  When I was making the film, they were very much “up there,” the big, important people, and I was on the sidelines watching.  They feel more like friends now.  You can never get that incredible intensity of really living through someone.  It’s not just me; it’s a mutual thing.  We’re very good friends, but we’ll never be as close as we were during that time.

SIM:  It’s kind of a like a passionate love affair, in a way.

KL:  That’s exactly what it is like.

SIM:  I think your films reflect that.  There are these various schools of thought about narration, about the lightness or heaviness of the storyteller’s hand or presence, etc.  Somehow, you’ve organically found your cinematic “voice.”  It’s also in vogue these days for the filmmaker to actually put him- or herself in front of the camera.  I notice there’s a much lesser propensity for a female to do that than a male, unless it’s directly her own story she’s telling.  I don’t know what that says, actually.

KL:  No, neither do I!

SIM:  But, it’s a whole different way of storytelling, isn’t it?  Yet, when I watch your films, this very palpable benevolent presence is there.  It’s an unrelenting gaze, but a loving one.  I think Maysles has that, too--he's obviously not female.  It makes me, as a viewer, connect so much more quickly with these individuals.  I'm spending this time with these people and, initially, I think that I don't have anything in common with them.  But then, I walk away loving them just as much as you obviously do.  Does that result from what you bring as an individual, or do you consciously try to create that intimacy as quickly as you can?

KL:  I suppose what I’m consciously trying to create is a feeling in the audience that they’re there. 

SIM:  So you’re aware of "audience" from the outset?

KL:  Well, to me, that audience is just one person.  It’s either my editor, Ollie or it’s Peter Dale [former head of documentaries at Channel 4]—just one person that I know.  I imagine that they’re me and that they’re seeing it through me, when I think about the audience.  What I try and do is make it as direct as possible, so that there’s nothing between them and what’s happening.  When somebody’s talking to me or when something’s happening, then they’re being spoken to.  They can feel that that person can be their sister or that person could be their mother, that kind of bond can be felt in an emotional way.  I don’t want the audience to feel like they’re being told to feel anything or that they’re being “taught” something.  It’s sort of ironic because I never ask anyone to do anything or set anything up, ever. But I hope that the overall effect of the film is more like fiction than conventional documentary.

SIM:  In what sense?

KL:  In the sense that when you’re watching a fiction film, when it works, you forget you’re watching a film.  You’re just in the action; you’re going through an emotional experience.  You come out and you feel like the people are living in you and the scenes are living in you.  Things come back to you; you’ve actually gone through something very deep.  I’m gradually learning to get better at doing that.  I want to enable people to really be in that place and be with those people in a very open way.  It’s very much the kind of film that I, myself, like.  I don’t like films where I’m being told things through a commentary or have facts and figures coming at me.  You don’t really take them in anyway, when you’re told lots of things that way.  You learn things in a far more lasting way by experiencing it.  We all know this; it’s an obvious thing—one learns by experience.

SIM:  It sounds very basic, but it’s such a difficult transition to make—from the idea of wanting to do that to creating something cinematically where that intention comes through quite clearly.  You’ve been doing this for a long while now.  Is there a bit of self-consciousness of which you have to be careful about more than when you started out?

KL:  It doesn’t seem like that to me at all.  When I work, it’s just me and a sound recordist [another female, most likely, Mary Milton, Jano Williams, long-time collaborators].  Nobody knows who we are.  Nobody’s heard of us.  Nobody takes us that seriously because we’re two women.  We’re usually pretty dirty from kneeling in the ground to get shots.  So it’s the opposite of being self-conscious.  Actually, what’s very strange is that, at the beginning, it’s quite difficult.  When you’re making a film, you have to be very humble.  You lose everything.  You lose your home; you lose your friends, everything you’re used to.  And you’re in the middle of this world that belongs to other people.  It doesn’t matter what country, even if it’s here at Oxford at the school [in Hold Me Tight, Let Me Go].  You’re in a foreign place, a strange place.  You have to go by other people’s rules.  People can boss you around and tell you what to do and be angry with you and tell you not to film—whatever.  You’re completely at their mercy.  This is something that seems to get more powerful each time.  With each film, I seem to have less self-consciousness, less power, and am more open to terrible doubts, I might add.  Things I thought were certain in my life become less and less so.

For example, in Hold Me Tight, when I went, I had this very strong sense that family wasn’t that important.  That very much stems from my own experience in how I survived my own childhood.  It didn’t matter who your parents were; that had no impact on the person you would become.  I had parents that I very strongly disliked.  I never wanted to be with them and supposed that that was how lots of people felt.  It wasn’t important, that relationship.  And then I go to this school where there are these children that have been very badly treated at home quite often and not wanted by their parents or abused by them in some way.  And they want their parents.  I remember that that was one of the first things that really shocked me.  I thought, gosh, here are these children and they’re in this wonderful school, much nicer than any school I could think of and they have this longing to be with their families, no matter who their fathers are or what they’ve done to them; they want their fathers.  So that was the first shock.

The second shock was being in a place where children weren’t punished.  My school was all about punishment. You had this very strong sense as a pupil that none of the adults really liked children; they were just putting up with you.  You didn’t feel like a child.  I don’t think that any of us had a sense that we were children.  We were called by our surnames and, sort of, very regimented.  One didn’t have a sense of childhood at all.  Then you go to someplace where childhood is seen as something precious and they’re trying to give back a sense of childhood.  When children behave badly, they’re not punished.  They’re asked why they’re doing it.  I thought that it seemed like such a wonderful, wonderful thing. Every day at that school, I would go, “ah!”  Everything I thought before was being shocked and opened up and I started looking at my own life.  I looked at how I treated other people in the past.  If you’ve grown up not really caring about anyone and they don’t really care about you, then you think that’s the norm.  Not with your friends, but in relationships; you think, actually, they’re not that important.  So there were lots of things I had to face up to.  That’s happened with every film.  It always does it to me.  Every time I think it’s going to be easy, something will come round the back, and it’ll teach me some lessons I’d maybe rather not learn.

SIM:  You’ve scooted around the globe quite a bit, from Asia to Africa to the Middle East where you find your stories and you ensconce yourself in these various cultures.  I would assume, at a certain point, that the world gets very small for you, in a way.  I’m not so much talking about differences or similarities between disparate cultures or what the mode of life happens to be, how “strange” the customs are, but in the people that you meet along the way.  Do you feel like you really could go anywhere on the planet and find some sort of safe harbor that feels like “home”?

KL:  It’s very weird, but what I find in every film, in every project, in every culture, are these very strong women.  Every time I go to the next place, I find women that I really, really admire.  At the school [Mulberry Bush], there were these very lovely, gentle men who were very nice to little boys.  That was so nice to see.  But also very strong women teachers who are people that wouldn’t be recognized or who even thought what they, themselves, were doing was amazing.  Every day, they were able to give out all this love and patience and calm and affection in the midst of being spat at and beaten and hit and all those things. 

With this last film that I’m just finishing now, there are these incredibly brave women who go into quite violent, difficult situations.  It’s set in South Africa, in Durban, about these five amazing women, two white women and three black women.  They work as a team.  For me, it was a very good film to make because my dad grew up in Johannesburg and throughout my childhood, I would hear about South Africa.  Both my parents were intensely racist.  I’ve come to realize, it was good for me, actually.  I didn’t like them anyway.  And what I realized through being a child was that the more racist you are, the more unhappy you are.  It’s everything against life.  My parents were so unhappy and bitter and being with them was really kind of cold, nothing good.  I don’t remember them laughing much.  The only good people [in their eyes] were white Germans or English people.  I can’t think of anything else that met with their approval.  And then they had to be titled.

SIM:  Did they approve of one another?

KL:  When my dad got older, my mum really disliked him.  I think she was frightened of him.  When she stopped being frightened of him, she was able to dislike him.  So I’ve known that kind of person all my life, learned about all the things that were wrong, who you don’t want to be.  They didn’t show me the kind of person I wanted to be.  That’s what I’m still learning—what I want to be.  That’s what these people teach me that I need to know, the good things to be.

SIM:  What are these women doing as a team?

KL:  They’re rescuing children.  They’re arresting rapists.  They’re supporting each other.  They’re part of a small organization that fights child abuse in South Africa, which is a really big problem there.  I suppose they’re ordinary women in the way that the teachers in Hold Me Tight are ordinary women.  But they are extraordinary women.  I suppose that’s what I meant to say to you earlier.  You meet people that you think of as being ordinary but they are extraordinary, stronger than I ever could be., more patient, more loving, more giving, more generous, all of those things that I could never be.  But what I can do is that I can film them.  I can show them to the world.

One of the teachers in Hold Me Tight went to America with the film.  She learned from the audience that what she’s doing is worthwhile.  She never really thought she was doing anything special.

SIM:  That’s a wonderful gift that you’re bestowing, as well, on people like her. There’s an exchange there.  You’re not the only recipient of something life-changing.  I think you’re aware, too, that by focusing your lens on someone like that, who’s “just doing their job” or what have you, that is a huge gift, that validation of a life lived.  For me, that’s where the emotional resonance of your films happens.  That’s something, as a viewer, that moves me deeply, in your work, and in works that I see that celebrate that, especially when you know very well that it’s not normally celebrated at all, especially by them.

KL:  Beatrice [Sisters In Law] had that same experience.  In that first screening at Cannes, the audience stood right up (which they do very well in France), and gave them a standing ovation.  They [Vera and Beatrice] were absolutely dumbfounded. They had had no real sense of what they were doing; they were just going to work every day and doing what they’ve done for eighteen years.  And then, suddenly, here were people saying, “You’re wonderful women; we want your autograph.”

SIM:  Do you go to films?  Do you watch a lot of films?  What gets you excited?

KL:  I watch a lot of fiction, actually.  I love telly.  I love “The Sopranos.”  They remind me of my dad, I suppose [laughs].  I could never get enough of “Sopranos.”  I love Larry David.  I love telly, actually; I watch a lot of TV.  A feature film I love is The Lives of Others, the German film—I loved that.

SIM:  Me too—it was devastating.

KL: That film has changed my life.  That was really important to me, that film.  It was all about authority and about being inspired by looking at someone’s else’s life.  I didn’t realize this until about a year after seeing that film, but I suppose that what I’m trying to do is similar to when that man was looking at, spying on, that family and fell in love with them.  I’m hoping that people will do that through watching my films, that they watch these lives and they fall in love with these people and it enriches their lives, opens their minds, in whatever way it can do, in the small way that films can do.  You have to be in the mood for it and ready for it, you know?

SIM:  That’s true.  But I think those moments, if they do impact you in that way, are very strong and they can carry you through a lot.

KL: They can.

SIM:  It also resonates in ways that you aren’t really conscious of or aware of until much later after viewing it.  Sometimes, it’s so powerful, you simply can’t process it at the time.

KL:  I remember just sobbing at the end of Lives of Others, and hardly being able to stand up.  It sounds so over the top.  I remember going outside and thinking, “What was that?  Why did I get so emotional?” But I felt incredibly uplifted; it was an extraordinary feeling; I was so full of energy and happy.  And then I could look back and realize, it’s actually a film about the redemptive power of books and music and art.  It made me feel so hopeful.

SIM:  It’s interesting, because those people who are truly, truly in love with what they do, those that create art or whatever they decide to call it, talk about that so much.  That’s almost what might be the hidden imperative in any of us that want to create something.  We try to match that ability to do that for other people in the same way that we’ve been affected, impacted, changed.

In the stories you think about, the ones in your imagination, what do you anticipate might be out there in terms of what you might want to tell.  Do you have any idea?

KL:  That’s precisely why I love documentary.  Because, what happens is—well, for example, this last film [in South Africa].  I have an idea of what it’s going to be. And then it’s miles bigger, more life changing than I ever thought it could be, the experience of it and the things that people are doing.  I thought it would be a film about people rescuing kids.  It’s not about that at all.  It’s about those five women.  They go through these incredible life changes.  I feel very weird about it because there were two deaths while we were filming and they happened to the two people we were closest to.  People very close to them died.  I was trying to film it as best as I could, so that it will be accessible for people to watch. But at the same time, I’m thinking, god, this terrible thing has happened and I’m grieving for my friends, feeling very split while the filming is going on, do you know what I mean?  I’ve found that in every film, more happens than I could have imagined.  That’s why I’m not a writer.  I feel like my imagination can only go so far.  Reality is always much more surprising and shocking and tricks me and does horrible things to me, as well, more than I was expecting.  One thing this film did do for me was that I felt that, somehow—I’m not quite sure how—that by making a film in South Africa about black and white people working together and about the hope for change and, in a way, a celebration of the new South Africa, somehow laid a few little ghosts, little gremlins, to rest, from my dad.  I can’t forget about him, really.  When I was back here and editing it and felt safe, I could think about that.  I didn’t tell anyone there that my dad had grown up in South Africa or what he was like or thought.  But things would come back.

I remember that I once ran away from home and went to my grandmother.  She said, very casually, “Oh, your dad had a pickaninny he used to play with.”  That’s what she called it.  And then she said, “And then your father started dancing and so we drove into the bush and we left the child there.”  I remember saying, “But, Grandma, what happened?”  And she said, “Oh, they live in the bushes.”  She was thinking of black people as though they were, sort of, feral.  It was just this weird, really shocking thing.  I was very young and I remember being really shocked and thinking, oh god, my grandmother’s the enemy, too; she’s really evil—and having to get away from her.  I was surrounded by all these people.  I don’t consider them evil now.  There’s no such thing as evil.  But they were disturbed, deluded, destructive people who saw things completely from their own point of view and couldn’t relate to other people as human, or as anything, really.  I suppose that’s what I’m trying to do in my films is to get people to make that imaginative leap and live in other people’s lives.

SIM:  As I’m sitting here listening to you, I’m thinking about how you could have turned out so differently, so much more like them, if not exactly like them.  Was there a conscious moment in your young life when you decided that that was absolutely not how you wanted to be?  I suppose that they were a product, too, of their upbringings, society, what have you.  That just doesn’t happen by accident.

KL:  Yeah, I’ve thought about this actually, because I’ve read a lot of books about children of the Nazis.  There’s one called Hitler’s Children that’s quite interesting.  The people that seemed to have been the most damaged are the people that like their parents.  Somehow, they try to identify with who their parents are or maybe they hang on to it.  You hear of old people who are still Nazis.  But, I knew from a very young age that they weren’t nice people and I think that really protected me.  It meant that I was able to not be upset by them or what they thought or felt.  I knew they were bad people.  I knew the way they lived wasn’t a nice way to live.  I could see that.  I’m much luckier than people who like their parents.

SIM:  Who was the first person that you did like, someone who presented ideas and thoughts and ways of seeing life that did make sense to you?  Obviously, from an early age, all this other stuff didn’t make sense to you at all.

KL:  I think when I was about thirty, or when I was in my late twenties, I met a really nice man.  [We both laugh.]  And I really liked him.  But I behaved very badly because I didn’t know how to do that sort of thing and I destroyed it all.  But the first person that I really loved was my best friend, Penny, at school.  She was half-Indian; her mum was Indian and her dad was an Irish doctor.  She was really nice.  I couldn’t work out why my parents didn’t like her.  They sent us to separate schools to keep us away from each other.  I really liked her.  But when you’re very young—well, it’s something I held on to all through my school years, you know?  I had had a really nice friend.

SIM:  You’re a parent now.  You have one grown son and he also makes films [Moby Longinotto].

KL:  He’s lovely; he’s really nice.

SIM:  And very much his own person who’s found his own voice and been given the confidence to explore on his own, create his own identity.

KL:  He’s a nice person; I’m very lucky.

SIM:  And considering your theory, you really had nothing to do with that, right?

KL:  I don’t know what to think, really.  But I have to believe that parents don’t have much to do with how their kids are.  Otherwise, that would be too frightening for me.  I tell myself that it’s nothing to do with it.  A lot of it is just chance in terms of who they are.

SIM:  You’re going against hundreds of years of psychotherapeutic theory!

KL:  I don’t think parents have a lot to do with who their children are.  I don’t know.  For me, I think it was more the books that I read.  I can’t remember many conversations with my parents.  They were just these figures that . . .

SIM:  Loomed?

KL:  Yes.  They didn’t hurt me.

SIM:  I don’t know too much of what it’s like here in the UK, but in the States, it seems that documentary has become rather sexy—or at least those of us who work in nonfiction like to think so—in a way that it really hasn’t before.  And that nonfiction filmmaking can match fiction cinematically, emotionally, in every way that captures an audience.  You’ve been working under this supposition for years, it seems.  Do you see what you do changing at all in terms of capturing a larger audience through documentary storytelling?

KL:  It’s what I’ve always thought.  I think what’s happened is that people have started thinking that you’re not going to have a boring time watching a documentary.  Before, it might be the short before the main feature or it was a subject on which you were doing some kind of thesis or something.  A few films have turned people on to thinking, “Wow, we can go to the cinema and really get something that relates more directly to our lives that we’re not getting in fiction.  I love “Sopranos” because it reminds me of people I know, but I very rarely am going to walk into a bar where there are people shooting one another.  Let’s hope, you know!

But what “Sopranos” doesn’t do is that it doesn’t give you a whole lot of information about the Mafia as a kind of text or voiceover.  You just live in the Mafia and you realize things.  You know that lots of people have lived through things; there’s a sense of realness to it.  And not.  You learn to see.  I think audiences are much more sophisticated than old-fashioned documentary commissioning editors thought they were, that they don’t have to be told everything.  They can go on the ‘net if they want to find out more.  People even ask me why, at the beginning of the film [Sisters], I didn’t put how many women judges there are in Cameroon.  Okay, well there are 148.  But maybe twenty of them are like Vera and Beatrice, trying to find justice in what they do.  It would have to be a long thing because they really care about justice; they’re not just in it for themselves.  They’re not corrupt.  Maybe the same amount of men are the same.  And then all the rest are. . . .  You know, you’d have to just go on and on and on to explain it all.  They can find out on their own.  Who cares how many there are who are actually like them?  It would have given the wrong idea that there are 148 Veras and Beatrices, which there are not.  There was one judge that worked in the same compound as Vera and Beatrice, the same complex.  She used to push people off the road if they were in the way.  She had a sort of sidekick and he used to push people out of the way so she could walk through and not be bothered.  That was a female judge.  I’d have to put her in another category.

Some think that if you give people "facts"—well, what they don’t realize is that actually facts, themselves, are political.

SIM:  Facts are sometimes false.  A fact is not necessarily a true thing.  We know this from Wikipedia, for goodness’ sakes.  We know this from all kinds of things.

KL:  Exactly.  Why are you putting those particular facts there?  And what do you mean by it?  Someone I do love, also, is Michael Moore.

SIM:  He’s quite the divisive figure in documentary criticism, and in the community itself.

KL:  I know.  I think a lot of people are jealous of him.

SIM:  That’s kind of my theory, too.

KL:  I remember seeing Bowling for Columbine.  What was happening in the world left a lot of us feeling so distressed, so angry, feeling so powerless.  And you go see this film and you feel empowered.  And you can laugh at the things that frighten you.  As an audience, you can feel you’re together.  Moore is this shambolic, rather overweight guy with a baseball hat on and he’s putting himself into situations where you can laugh at him, and also with him.  I’m not saying there’s any one way, but his way is hugely entertaining.  I think that’s what people are realizing is possible.  He was at the vanguard of that, about changing people’s ideas of what a documentary is.  You can go to the cinema and see a Michael Moore film and have a really good time.  You feel better about life.

SIM:  I think that’s what the best documentaries can do, really, to highlight that spirit of community, that sense of recognition that we’re all in the boat together.  It doesn’t have anything to do with the issue at hand or with the history of how these people came to be, the social or political context. 

The several films you made in Japan show this to such great effect.  That’s such a wild, mysterious culture to so many people—a lot of what happens in that society is inexplicable to many Westerners.  But you just dove right in to the wildest aspects of it, no holds barred, [she laughs] and showed that even those “fringy” characters are very real people, people that struggle with the same issues of identity, questioning everything about their place in life, but yet finding something that they can hold onto.  It’s tremendously reassuring.  We all feel like that inside.  They’re very brave and I know you recognize this and show this to us because they acknowledge that they’re “freaks.”  The difference between them and most is that they wear their freakishness on the outside, as well.  Most of us do not—we’re too afraid of what others will think.  We hide it; we internalize it.  It’s secretive.  It’s a lovely way to recognize a little bit of yourself in that kind of human being.  You, as a filmmaker, penetrate all those other layers with such grace and respect.  I look forward to seeing other stories you’ll tell in this way.

KL:  So do I!

SIM:  Let’s segué into festival talk for a moment and then I’ll let you get back to your work:  the festival phenomenon is booming, mushrooming, both in the real and virtual worlds.  I think that’s a positive thing, both for the film-going community and for filmmakers.  How have your festival experiences changed over the years? 

KL:  I suppose what’s changed is that now, what I want to happen is that I want the people in the films to go with the film to festivals.  That feels right.  I remember when we were in Amsterdam, when we showed Sisters In Law.  When the film finished, me and Mary Martin, the sound recordist, and Ollie, the editor, were standing on the stage.  There was polite applause.  And then the woman on the stage said, “And we have Vera and Beatrice in the audience.”  And they shone a light on them and they stood up.  The audience went wild with cheers.  They want to see the people they’ve just watched.  They want to learn from them.  They want to ask them questions.  It’s a real blast when you go to a film when the people that are in it are there.  So, more and more, I’m trying to organize it so that the people in the film can go.

With the film I just did: the three black women have never been out of Durban, let alone South Africa.  It’ll be just so wonderful if they can go to all these different countries and just see different things.  It’ll be absolutely amazing for them.  Yesterday, in the edit room, we were watching a scene where one of the main characters, Mildred, is speaking and saying some things and Ollie commented on how much of a gift she’s giving us.  She’s being so honest.  She gave us an incredible gift of trust.  What we can help her do is to go and have a nice travel and see the world a bit.

SIM:  And the gift of love and appreciation for them as people.

KL:  People are going to absolutely love her.  I love her so much.  I love all five of them.  People are going to absolutely love them; I know that.  We’re almost there; we’re just putting the subtitles on and, hopefully, we’ll debut at IDFA in Amsterdam in the fall.  And then we’ll try for Sundance, and then who knows after that.

SIM:  Kim, thank you so much.  I’ve really loved talking with you.

The Robert Drew Kennedy Films Collection

Today, Docurama has announced a tremendously exciting release: three seminal and historic documentaries of JFK, made by the legendary, Robert Drew.  In one two-disc set, they are offering Primary (1960), Crisis: Behind a Presidential Commitment (1963) and Faces of November (1964).  The street date is the 29th of this month, but you can click on that big, fat yellow box to your lower right to order your own copy now.

Three of the most intimate and candid films about a US President ever captured on celluloid, Primary, Crisis and Faces portray John F. Kennedy's life from his time as a young senator from Massachusetts to his challenging years in the White House, to the aftermath of his assassination in November of '63.  Drew is one of the godfathers of modern cinema verité, and this is a must for anyone's collection.

I also want to mention here another staggering and intelligent piece of nonfiction cinema on the ramifications of Kennedy's death by director, Robert Stone, called Oswald's Ghost--you can read my thoughts here and order it through Amazon, another click to the right.

Let the Spirit Move You: Two Beauties to Go See in Theaters

Starting this month, there are two films playing in theaters in NYC that I'd like to recommend:  Bari Pearlman's Daughters of Wisdom is screening every Wednesday from July 23 to the last Wednesday in August at the beautiful Rubin Museum of Art.  The filmmakers entered the Buddhist Monastery called Kala Rongo in Nangchen on the northeastern plateau in Tibet.  An order of nuns lives in this remote, exclusively female, retreat.  It's an extraordinary look into a hidden culture and the amazing women who live there.  The film won the Audience Award at the Brooklyn International Film Festival last year, and also played at Mill Valley and Full Frame.  Click here for more info. 

Because I was up at Hot Docs back in April, I missed a lot of the Tribeca fest this year, but one thing I was sure to catch was a special screening of Lou Reed's Berlin by Julian Schnabel.  The movie is exquisite, and the other treat that night was getting to listen to Reed and Schnabel talk about the genesis and evolution of this cinematic dream.  (The moderator, Vanity Fair's music critic, Lisa Robinson, was apparently on the rag and was rather bitchy to audience members, but Schnabel made up for it in his warm and friendly way.)  The back story is that in 1973 when Reed released his haunting and poetic album, Berlin, it was critically panned and disregarded--a commercial flop, in other words.  Consequently, it had never been performed for live audiences in the thirty-three years since its release.  Then, in December of 2006, at St. Ann's Warehouse in Brooklyn, the entire album was staged for five consecutive nights in front of sold-out (and pretty damned lucky) audiences.  

Musicians Fernando Saunders and Steve Hunter are some of the musicians who played on the original album and they, among others, join Reed on stage at St. Ann's with such unmitigated joy, it's really beautiful.  And it looks gorgeous, as well, thanks to Ellen Kuras' lush and intimate cinematography.  The Brooklyn Youth Chorus adds angelic backup singing and you can see that most of these kids (born decades after the original release of the album) have the same passion for this music and these songs as Reed and Schnabel do, even though the subject matter is dark, sexual, depressing, some might say, perverse; despite their youth, or maybe because of it, they convey all the pain and the transcendence inherent in these stories.  Add to this, a cinematic backdrop of fragile, slow-shutter black and white films directed by Schabel's daughter, Lola, with the stunning and highly emotive, Emmanuelle Seigner (one of the actors in Schnabel's recent work of genius, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly) portraying Berlin's protagonist, Caroline.  Thanks to Schnabel's long-time producer, Jon Kilik, and producers Tom Sarag, Stanley Buchthal and Maya Hoffman, Schnabel and Reed resurrect Caroline and her lovers, and they live on in a joyous and celebratory film.  You cannot walk away from this without falling in love with Lou Reed.  And if you've always loved him, you'll love him even more.  Reed has plans to tour Europe this summer with the stage show as the film, released by Fortissimo, opens worldwide.

More Cool Stuff from Britdoc

As mentioned previously, this year Britdoc is celebrating music in film as part of this year's festivities, and they've just announced a very cool program with some of the most talented short-form filmmakers and composers around.  Composers Michael Nyman, Nitin Sawheny, Radiohead's Jonny Greenwood and indie band, Saint Etienne have been collaborating with Britdoc and Susology.com for a special series of "3-Minute Wonders," broadcasting on Channel 4 here in the UK next week, as well as screening at the festival next Wednesday.  Right now, you can watch one of them, called Pockets, directed by James Lees (Apology Line) with a score by Saint Etienne by clicking here.  (Hopefully, that'll work!)  The rest should be available to view shortly--I'll keep you posted.

The other three collaborations are Home by Chris Allen and Rob Rainbow, scored by Michael Nyman; Pinny Gryllis' piece called Hearing a Smile, Seeing a Song, scored by Jonny Greenwood (her 10-minute film, Peter and Ben, is one of the most brilliantly beautiful doc shorts I've yet seen--talented girl!); and Nick Hillel's King of Laughter, scored by Nitin Sawhney.

Reflections of a Former (and Future) Film Critic

Thanks to Jennifer Merin of the Alliance of Women Film Journalists for sending this along.  Click here to read Mary Pols' article.

Strangers in Strange Lands at Maysles Cinema

As reported in an earlier post, the Maysles Institute's new Maysles Cinema, devoted to nonfiction fare, is open for business and they have a wonderful summer series playing right now.  They are presenting "Strangers in Strange Lands: The Explorations of Great French Directors," from July 13 through August 6, featuring eleven rarely-seen films in five different programs by directors such as Louis Malle, Jean Vigo, Chantal Akerman, Jean Epstein, Agnes Varda and Jean Painlevé.  Screenings are open to the public with a suggested admission of just seven bucks (be supportive--pay more).

The series features seminal works of avant-garde documentary, traveling through many terrains, physical, emotional and conceptual.  The series was guest-curated by the Museum of the Moving Image's Livia Bloom.  Bloom states, "The films are entirely site-specific, distinct products of their own place, their own time, and their creators' strong authorial voices.  Yet as each toys with traditional expectations of documentary, travelogue and narrative, they capture the universal experience of being an explorer, a foreigner, and a stranger in a strange land."  All films will be shown in their original versions with English subtitles.  Here's the program:

Sunday, July 13 at 1:00 p.m.  Louis Malle's Phantom India

Tuesday, July 15 at 7:30 p.m.  Jean Vigo's A Propos de Nice and Chantal Akerman's News From Home

Tuesday, July 22 and Wednesday, July 23 at 7:30 p.m.  Agnes Varda's L'opéra Mouffe and The Gleaners and I

Tuesday, July 29 and Wednesday, July 30 at 7:30 p.m.  Jean Painlevé's  The Love Life of the Octopus, The Sea-horse, The Vampire and Freshwater Assassins.  The program is also accompanied by the US premiere of a documentary about Painlevé callled Jean Painlevé: A Dream for Marine Biology.

Lastly, on Tuesday, August 5 and Wednesday, August 6 at 7:30 p.m.  Jean Epstein's Finis Terrae, a US premiere of a new restoration of his 1929 black and white silent film with a brand-new score.

Enough to make even the most cynical cinéphile drool with pleasure, right?  Take a summer's night out in Harlem.

Films in Competition at Britdoc

One week from this Wednesday, the annual festival called Britdoc, fast becoming one of the premiere documentary festivals on the international scene, will welcome filmmakers, producers, commissioning editors, and other industry folk to Keble College at Oxford for its third iteration.  The themes this year are Comedy and Music, and they've announced their competition lineup, special guest appearances, and other programs.  I will be covering the festival this year and am very excited to attend.  (The fest's programmer, Maxyne Franklin, is also a member of the esteemed nominating committee for the Cinema Eye Honors.)  An initiative of the Channel 4 British Documentary Film Foundation, the Britdoc festival brings together filmmakers and funders in an intimate setting and, currently, stages the only international pitching forum in the UK.

In honor of the comedy theme, The Yes Men (one of the funniest and most brilliant duos to appear in  film, fiction or non- I've seen) will be showing a work-in-progress.  And as part of the special music program, the fest will be presenting Robert Flaherty's seminal Nanook of the North (this man has been a big part of my life this year!) with a live soundtrack from the Shine Synchro System.  This sounds just as cool as the screening I saw in L.A. a couple of years ago of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, accompanied by a score from Sparklehorse.

The ten British documentaries in the feature competition this year are:  Blood Trail by Richard Parry; Chosen by Brian Woods; Day After Peace by Jeremy Gilley; Heavy Load by Jerry Rothwell (we played this at the Brooklyn Fest, but no one came, alas; his Britdoc pitch from '06 where he found his American funding for this feature is actually in the film); Life After the Fall by Kasim Abid; Man On Wire by James Marsh (already a multiple-prize winner); Starstruck aka Son of Eurovision by Jamie J. Johnson; The End by Nicola Collins; Thriller in Manilla by John Dower (as a rabid boxing fan, I will not miss this); and the well-loved Young@Heart by Stephen Walker, which has already had a very successful theatrical run in the States. 

There will also be a Best of Fests strand where programmers from the major international fests bring a prize-winner, i.e., Trouble the Water from Sundance; Up the Yangtze from the IDFA; Heavy Metal in Baghdad from Berlin; Obscene from Toronto; and At the Death House Door from SXSW.  Lastly, there's the Fourdocs British Short Doc Competition featuring five stellar short-form nonfiction pieces:  The Solitary Life of Cranes by Eva Weber; My Name is Karl by Moritz Siebert; Made in Queens by Nicolas Randall; Valley of the Goats by Leon Dean; and Sanctuary by Lovejit K. Dhaliwal. 

And, an exciting side note for moi:  This week, I will have an opportunity to interview one of the most prolific and intelligent documentary filmmakers around, the UK's own Kim Longinotto.  Her voice is an important one to add to my growing canon of female doc voices, and I'm thrilled that I'll be able to speak to her in person while here in London.  Thank you to my lovely friend, Sandra W., from More4! 

More about Britdoc in the coming days. . .

Calavera Highway and The Exiles in New York

Thoughts on the films and filmmakers I encountered at the Flaherty Seminar last month still reverberate, and I think back constantly on how impressed I was with the way everything fell together so gracefully, even though it was a lot of work--yes, it can be a lot of work sitting and watching films for nine hours a day.

Renee Tajima-Pena was a guest of the Flaherty this year, along with eleven other filmmakers (one of whom, Bahman Ghobadi, could only be there via the magic of cyberspace).  She brought her My America. . . or Honk If You Love Buddha from 1997, which we saw in a (chilly) outdoor screening on the beautiful grounds of Colgate University after a lovely lakeside picnic.  She also brought a wonderful short video called Skate Manzanar which she created for Roger Shimomura's "Amnesia," which premiered at the Bellevue [Washington] Art Museum in 2001.  The last piece we saw of hers at the seminar is a feature film that will have its broadcast debut on September 16 as part of this season's excellent PBS series, POV, executive produced by Simon Kilmurry.  Calavera Highway is the story of Armando Pena (Tajima-Pena's husband) and his brother, Carlos.  They carry their mother's ashes back to South Texas where they reunite with their five other brothers.  On this emotional and haunted journey, a long-buried secret is revealed, and many puzzles that have never been solved about their mother's life and the disappearance of their father during "Operation Wetback," the 1954 US government program that deported over a million Mexican Americans, are finally resolved.

This month, New York audiences will have a chance to see the film in the theater before the broadcast at its New York  premiere at the HBO/International Latino Film Festival.  It plays at 1:30 p.m. on the 23rd, and at the screening on the 27th at 3:30 p.m., filmmakers Tajima-Pena and Evangeline Greigo will be in attendance for a Q&A.  Both screenings are at the Clearview Cinemas at Broadway and Columbus.  

At Flaherty, we were also privileged to have an early morning screening of Kent McKenzie's The Exiles, made in Los Angeles in 1961 (a still from the film pictured above).  Starting Friday, July 11, for one week only, it's playing at the IFC Center.  Made forty-seven years ago and never released, The Exiles (which makes me incredibly nostalgic for a Los Angeles I remember from my early childhood) chronicles one crazy night in the lives of a group of young Native Americans who have come to the big city from reservations in New Mexico and Arizona.  They live in downtown L.A.'s Bunker Hill district near the Angel's Flight funicular.  With its astounding black and white photography and sophisticated cinematographic language, it's a work of art salvaged by Milestone, who distributed Charles Burnett's Killer of Sheep last year.  Visit www.exilesfilm.com to learn more about the film's resurrection story and to watch the trailer.  If you can manage to go see it at IFC, I strongly encourage you to do so.

You Won't Believe What's Happening in the California Desert . . .

You also won't believe what's happening in the deserts in and around Dubai, but that's another story.  With which I will regale you as soon as I can talk about it coherently.  In the meantime, I've just reached London this afternoon from that crazy place, and even though it's pissing down rain, I'm glad to be here!

Jesse Moss and Tony Gerber's Full Battle Rattle is having its theatrical rollout at Film Forum today.  Please go see this in the theater--not only to support these talented guys and their amazingly accomplished and exciting nonfiction film, but because the film should be seen on the big screen.

I got to interview Moss and Gerber for Shooting People and our extensive conversation is up on their site right now.  Please enjoy by clicking here.  Bring a snack; it's long.  But it's well worth reading about their experience making this prize-winning piece.  You can also read my review about the film after seeing it in Toronto at Hot Docs here.  Yes, war is that weird.

NEXT, Please

It seems fitting that my 200th post features a film made by a filmmaker who was one of my very first in-depth interviews with an artist of the video persuasion.  I met Pablo Aravena at the AFI International Film Festival in Los Angeles in 2006, where his documentary, NEXT: A Primer on Urban Painting, had its US debut.  I grew up knowing some of L.A.'s most notorious graffiti artists and have always had a love affair with this outlaw art form.  And Aravena's is one of the best films I've seen (five years in the making) on this global underground movement that transmigrates through cultures, languages and states of mind about the world in which we live.

There's a revamped web site on hand as the film moves from its long trajectory on the festival circuit (Aravena has been rocketing around the planet with it for several years, and its international screenings are usually accompanied by some kind of art exhibit, installation or special show featuring some of the film's featured artists) to a more retail-oriented model.  There will be an online store opening this fall that will sell DVDs of the film, as well as original artwork.  DVDs will be on the market in North America in November.

In the first commission to use its riverfront facade, and the first major public museum to display street art in London, The TATE Modern will present the work of six internationally acclaimed urban artists this summer.  Aravena is curating a two-day, six-film street art documentary program at the museum August 16 - 17.  This independent producer has created a superb case study in how to market and prolong the life of your film, and has expanded his oeuvre as a filmmaker into curating (both art and film), producing live events and shepherding his first film through the gauntlet of various indie distribution scenarios.  You can read my conversation with this sharp-minded and hard-working dude here.  Congrats on a great run, Pablo. 

IFC/Media Lab Studios' Documentary Production Grant

Currently, the Independent Film Channel is unveiling some production initiatives for filmmakers.  At Media Lab Studios on IFC.com, they are hosting an initiative to stimulate independent documentary filmmaking by asking for three-minute nonfiction pieces to be uploaded to the site by the 20th of this month (it's, suddenly, July!).  It can be a short or a three-minute trailer or preview for a longer project and can be on any subject.  They are offering $7,500 to the best of the lot and $2,500 to the runner-up.  The grant site is here, if you're interested in learning more.

Flaherty at MoMA: The Films of Bahman Ghobadi (and More)

I'm just back from the 54th Annual Flaherty Film Seminar, The Age of Migration, brimming with ideas, inspiration and lots to say in the coming weeks about my experiences there, but wanted to mention once again that from June 27 (yesterday) to July 7, MoMA will be showcasing the work of Iranian Kurdish director, Bahman Ghobadi.  Ghobadi was one of the filmmakers showcased at this year's Flaherty where we saw his Half Moon, Life in Fog, A Time for Drunken Horses, and some of the pieces he's produced recently for up-and-coming filmmakers, On That Day, The Piggy Bank That I Found (follow the links to watch these on YouTube as part of the Postcards from Iran series), and an impromptu documentary of his made in Iraq called War Is Over!  Because the US government denied him a visa to come to the States to attend the seminar, we spoke with Ghobadi via Skype about his films and the current state of making art in Iran.  ("Things for me now are very black."  He's been waiting two years for approval to film his new project.)  As was done at Flaherty, there will a chance for MoMA audiences to engage in a dialogue with Ghobadi via the Internet.  I will have more on the films of Ghobadi and the very emotional exchange between him and the seminar attendees in a later post.

Also tonight, over at Union Docs in Williamsburg, a couple of my fellow Fellows from Flaherty, Christopher Allen and disco queen, Hillevi Loven, have curated a screening of some of the films we saw with the filmmakers in attendance, so if you can scoot over there, it's very much worth your while to do so.  This was put together just in the last couple of days, so I don't have many details, but you can call over there for more info, or just show up tonight and expand your mind with the superb cinematic fare on hand.

Here are the films we saw and the other filmmakers we came to know this past week:

Oliver Husain  Q; Shrivel (a still from this piece, pictured); Squiggle; Green Dolphin.

Laura Waddington  Cargo; Border. 

Lee Wang  God Is My Safest Bunker; The Backyard Border. 

James T. Hong  The Form of the Good; Lessons of the Blood; 731: Two Versions of Hell; This Shall Be a Sign.

Pedro Costa  Colossal Youth; Tarrafal; In Vanda's Room; Casa de Lava.

Renee Tajima-Pena  Skate Manzanar; My America. . .or Honk If You Love Buddha; Calavera Highway (debuting on PBS' POV this season). 

Ursula Biemann  Black Sea Files; Sahara Chronicle; Contained Mobility. 

Lonnie van Brummelen and Siebren de Haan  Grossraum; Monument of Sugar: How to Use Artistic Means to Elude Trade Barriers (an absurdist comedy, believe it or not).

Allan Sekula  Lottery of the Sea; A Short Film for Laos. 

Alison Kobayashi  Dan Carter; From Alex to Alex.    

Sylvia Schedelbauer  Remote Intimacy; Memories; False Friends.

We also saw Robert Flaherty's The Land (1942), Ellen Kuras' and Thavisouk Phrasavath's The Betrayal (Nerakhoun) (2007), and Kent MacKenzie's The Exiles (1961), releasing theatrically this summer (July 11 in NYC at the IFC Center).

I think that's about 34 films viewed in five days, plus discussions, debates, breakout sessions, bowel-blocking meals three times a day, parties until 4:00 a.m. every morning and several daily walks up and down the 137 steps between the dorms and the theater.

I'll have more thoughts and impressions on each of these filmmakers and their stunning works, both here and in other spots in the blogosphere, and more from this year's Flaherty.  A big thank you to Chi-hui Yang for an amazing and mind-expanding journey, to the filmmakers who so generously shared their time and talents with us, and to Mary Kerr, a woman who has become a personal inspiration, for staging a flawless event (and seemingly never getting her feathers ruffled even when confronted with a complaint from an attendee that the cafeteria had run out of chocolate ice cream; and no, unfortunately, this is not a joke).  Also, I'd like to extend congratulations to Irina Leimbacher, this year's Fellows Coordinator, who will be curating next year's seminar.  I've already calendared myself to be there.

Without the Pretense of Understanding

The curator for the 54th Robert Flaherty Film Seminar, Chi-hui Yang, told us the first day we were here that we were probably going to come away from this week more confused and with more questions than we would answers.  But we would come away with more ideas--about the art we make and watch, about the world we live in, about one another.  The attendees are building our own community and that will inform part of what we take away, back into our individual lives and realities.  So we are one imagined community of many.  In accepting this vagueness, this constant liminal state of conflict and creative tension, we can explore the myriad ways in which this can be represented visually.  When I called this "doc summercamp" in an earlier post, that was really a misnomer.  We're seeing what we've come to define as documentary, certainly.  But we'll also see narrative fiction, narrative nonfiction, avant-garde cinema, experimental works and other not-so-easily definable forms of visual representations in film and video.

It's early Monday morning and I've been here since last Friday afternoon, just a handful of days.  The small group of Fellows were gathered together ahead of time and so we got to bond a bit, catch a glimpse of some of one another's work and move into that state of openness and non-preconception that Frances Flaherty wanted to create in honor of her husband who passed a few years before this seminar was even created.  It's quite a legacy, one of which I'm very proud to be a part.  And unlike my attendance at last year's Sundance Producers Conference, I feel like I'm ready, like I belong here, a grand resting post to fill my depleted tank, a place between the volume of work I've done this past year, both personal and professional, and what I'm about to step into--my own migration, in other words, into uncharted territory.

We've only had an evening and one full day of screenings and we've already seen ten films.  With four more full days to go--well, do the math; our imaginations will be overflowing.  The curating and programming is quite brilliant; that's already apparent.  We don't know what we're going to see until the lights go down in the theater and, for the most part, Yang is programming three films at a go.  The screenings are followed by intense reflection and discussion with the filmmaker and with one another and ideas and arguments and concepts flow freely about our own dreams and thoughts about the disorientation, disjunction, joy and pathos in how we interpret modes of migration.  Mostly what we will see here will be glimpses of worlds where the "master narrative," in Ursula Biemann's words, is lifted.  All of the artists here are sharing their journeys in trying to find what's there once that's gone, "roaming around the lesser degree" of our normal waking realities.  The artistic attempt to "organize complexity versus documenting reality" gives a whole new meaning to what we, as filmmakers, can define in what we're doing, producing that "hidden knowledge" about our current global state that's begging to be revealed and just might be the secret key to our continued survival as a species.

There are twelve international filmmakers here sharing their work and we will see more than one piece from each of them, which is something I like a lot.  Pedro Costa arrived last night to share his Colossal Youth.  Oliver Husain is here with several of his surrealist works, as is James T. Hong with his own remarkable interpretations.  We'll get to know the work of Laura Waddington, whose articulation of her vision is just as poetic and moving as her visual storytelling (the title of this post is courtesy of her, as is the still from her gorgeous piece, Cargo).  We saw the resonant Half Moon by the brilliant Bahman Ghobadi, and we all acknowledged the fierce irony of his visa denial by the US government to come here to share with us his ideas of the Age of Migration, the theme for this year's symposium.  And yes, we've also seen a Flaherty film, his least-seen and most atypical, The Land, a piece commissioned by the US Department of Agriculture in the early 40s.  I will be writing and reflecting on these films in the months to come.

I realized this before I got here, but now know even more definitively, that I will not be blogging from this event as I would from a festival or other film screening.  I just simply can't.  There is too much time that needs to be devoted to watching, discussing, pondering, submerging, and I really don't want to miss any of it.  The fact that I'm writing something before I've even had my coffee is astounding but, I wanted to document the beginning of this journey for myself because I'm pretty sure this week will inform a lot of how I see my own work and the works of others in the next few months, and beyond.  I'm sharing company with a lot of academics--not makers, but folks who watch and think about and write about and parse (sometimes down into molecules and atoms) works of cinema.  It's intimidating (and some of them are actually kind of bitchy!), but I do appreciate the opportunity to expand my ideas about this art form that is becoming increasingly important to me. 

So maybe I won't really care so much about being turned down for a press pass from some film festival or being ignored by indieWIRE, whom I've been pitching for over a year to let me write for them or just link to my fucking blog.  Maybe I'll be so inspired and encouraged to be braver, to take more risks personally and artistically, that I can finally take the deep sea-dive into my own work and start to do what's really important.

Shooting People Interview with Filmmaker Eric Metzgar

Last month, shortly after the Full Frame Festival, the good folks over at Shooting People asked if I'd be interested in doing an interview for them with Eric Metzgar, director of two extraordinary documentaries, The Chances of the World Changing and Life. Support. Music.  Being a fan, of course I said I'd love to, and now you can read our conversation by clicking here.

Metzgar, also a singer/songwriter/musician, has a very moving and quite intense music video called "Song for Morris Mead," currently available to view on his myspace page and next Thursday, the 26th, he'll be playing at Banjo Jim's.  Jason Crigler, the subject of Life. Support. Music., will be a featured player, as will Noe Venable.

Life. Support. Music. is currently in competition at Silverdocs for the Best Music Documentary Award.