Still in Motion

Where Can I See CITY OF CRANES?

Several readers responding to an old post have asked me where they can watch Eva Weber's award-winning short film, City of Cranes.  You can still watch it on the P.O.V. site here.  You can also visit Odd Girl Out's website and see where her films are currently playing and/or order them online.  Click here for more info.  She's based in the UK, so if you're having problems finding where else the films might be distributed, drop them a line and they can direct you to your local distributor.

THE ENGLISH SURGEON Opens in NYC

If you read this blog regularly (and if you don't, why not?), you'll know that I've written about this gorgeous film many times before and love, love, love it.  The film's main subject, Dr. Henry Marsh (pictured) will be in New York for opening weekend, as will its director, Geoffrey Smith.  You can read my original review after seeing it at Hot Docs in Toronto last year here.

At the Cinema Village on East 12th Street, The English Surgeon will make its US theatrical début with Marsh and Smith in attendance at the 6:30 p.m. show this Friday the 24th; the 7:10 p.m. show this Saturday the 25th; and at the 3:00 p.m. show this Sunday the 27th. 

There will also be an opening night wine and cheese reception Friday night from 8:30 to 10:30 at the Ukrainian Institute of America (the film takes place mostly in Ukraine) at 2 East 79th Street hosted by the Institute and the Ukrainian Medical Association of North America NY Metro Branch to honor both men.  The film will have its Los Angeles opening next Friday the 31st at the Laemmle's Music Hall in Beverly Hills.

It's also possible to host your own screening of the film as an individual or as part of a larger organization.  Contact Outreach Coordinator, Krystal Lord, at englishsurgeonfilm@gmail.com to discuss how she can help tailor a plan for your organization or community and to also arrange for a personal appearance by Dr. Marsh and/or Geoffrey Smith.

Interview: Julie Goldman, Executive Producer CACTUS THREE FILMS

While it's always illuminating and inspiring to talk to filmmakers about the craft of making great nonfiction and experimental cinema, as an independent producer, I thought it would be equally as illuminating and inspiring (at least for me) to talk to one of the most prolific nonfiction producers working today.  Julie Goldman is one-third of Cactus Three Films based here in New York City.  Six years ago in 2003, Goldman and partners, Krysanne Katsoolis and Caroline Stevens, hung out their shingle offering a combination of production and co-production expertise.  They develop projects, as well as secure funding and distribution for a full slate of films at various stages.  They've produced works such as Easy Riders Raging Bulls, Doubletime, Once in a Lifetime, Darkon, What Remains and The American Ruling Class, among many others.  They have also produced hit television series for HBO (Family Bonds) and the Sundance Channel (Office Tigers).

Goldman, Katsoolis and Stevens are currently developing a Neil LaBute film based on his play, "Autobahn," and an animation series from Ken Petti.  Currently in production, post-production and release are several feature films such as Marion Barry: Not Down for the Count for HBO, Michel Negroponte's I'm Dangerous With Love, Goth Cruise, New World Order for IFC, CBGB's, Sons of Perdition, and 21 Below.  If you click on their names above, you can see their full list of credits, individually and collectively.  Prolific is the word that will certainly come to mind.

I had a chance recently to sit and have a weekday breakfast with Goldman, a New York native, in the midst of her everyday madness.  She was also waiting to hear about the latest addition to her family about to be born in Argentina to one of her brothers and his partner (a healthy baby boy, it turned out).  Goldman has a crackling sense of humor, an acute intelligence and an open, friendly demeanor.  It's also apparent after talking to her for about five minutes that she absolutely loves what she does.  Here's our conversation:

Still in Motion (SIM):  How long have you and Krysanne and Caroline known one another?
 
Julie Goldman (JG):  We've known one another for quite a while.  We all worked together at Wellspring.  (Goldman pictured right with another indie power hitter, Judith Helfand, at Hot Docs in Toronto, courtesy Ingrid Kopp.)

SIM:  So many amazing people came out of that place.

JG:  Yeah, it’s a riot, really.  Wendy Liddell who runs International Film Circuit, Michael Thornton and Sheri Levine who now run Forward Entertainment, Richard Lorber, so many.  That’s just from the last few years the company was around.  I ran the production division with Caroline, Krysanne did acquisitions and Krysanne and I worked together on co-productions.  The three of us started taking a look at the model that was forming then for most independent productions.  In the meantime, mind you, the company kept going bankrupt; Winstar [the parent company] tried to spin us out to keep us out of the bankruptcy.  It was a nightmare, a bad couple of years for the company.  Professionally for me, however, those years were great; there was a lot of dot.com phony money to play with that was floating around, and that enabled us to get lots of projects off the ground.

We were doing these various projects and what would happen was that we’d get the funding through third parties, but then the company would, once again, go bankrupt.  We also had to work within a very bureaucratic structure.  So if the home video people didn’t like the project, it didn't matter that you had raised the money independently.  You couldn’t take it and try to sell it elsewhere.  It was a really strange time, actually, very frustrating.

What the three of us noticed was this kind of gap in the works.  We were looking for gaps in the models within which we were working; we wanted to see if we could insinuate ourselves into one of those gaps.  Where was there a chance for us to be creative producers?  Filmmakers, in an ideal world, did not really want to go out and try to source finances for their projects themselves.  They would, and could, if they had to, but it was a real burden.  We knew that we had really deep relationships with a wide array of people in the business, both domestically and for international co-productions.  We could put all that together and take the business onus off the filmmaker so he or she could focus on what he or she wanted to focus on, mainly the creative work.  We also participate creatively when asked; we work in a liaison capacity between funders—financier, end-user, whomever—and filmmakers.

SIM:  Is it as complicated as it seems, getting funding for an independent feature, be it narrative or nonfiction?

JG:  It can be.  You could have two financial participants that aren’t really interested in seeing the same final film.  That gets really complicated—you have to make another version, deal with making everybody happy.  But we know people really well, their tastes, what their needs are, the changing needs, the endless changing needs.  We can anticipate those things.  Whatever entity they work for, we can tailor a development deal in a way so that we don’t end up with that problem at the end of the day.  Maybe we have to cut a film with a shorter running time, but we don’t have to make an entirely different version because we'll rarely, if ever, promise that.  When you’re a filmmaker and somebody is telling you that they’re giving you this wad of dough. . .

SIM:  Are we talking about potential broadcasters as the ones who are asking for different versions?

JG:  Yes.

SIM:  That must be tricky to navigate.

JG:  It is.  But it becomes easier when you’ve been doing it for a long time, as we have.  You can cut through a lot at a certain point, the morass of whatever current thing is going on [laughs].

SIM:  As far as your personal aesthetic about cinematic documentary—of which I can’t think of one you’ve produced that doesn’t have a substantive cinematic imperative—

JG:  Ideally.

SIM:  Yes, ideally.  What first sparked your attention or informed your sensibility to that way of telling nonfiction stories?

JG:  Well, I started my career at First Run/Icarus.  I worked for both Jonathan [Miller] and Seymour [Wishman].  [Miller bought out Wishman in 2008 and renamed the company Icarus Films.]  So I learned the ropes under some pretty knowledgeable taskmasters.  I was there for five years.  I worked more directly for Jonathan, but we all worked in the same office so we had a lot of interplay with Seymour, as well.  At the time, I was fascinated by the whole idea of the semi-theatrical release and knew I was working with some revolutionary minds in that regard.  It was a fertile learning ground for a young girl [laughs].  Then I went out on my own and worked as an independent producer for many years—doing documentaries, some narratives, some music videos, pretty much everything, commercials, etc.

SIM:  I come from that world, too, and you look at the budgets for the higher-end commercial projects and the end result—

JG:  You think about what you could have made with that kind of money—two or three films, at least.

SIM:  At the end of the day you have this hot-ass 60-second spot with all kinds of CG and all that jazz, having had something like eighty people working on it.  When I did start to make films myself, more "art-based" projects, let’s call them, I realized what people were doing with so little and it just blew me away.  I was so impressed and continue to be.

JG:  On what amounts to the craft services budget for a commercial, yeah.

SIM:  Exactly.  And they’re such beautiful pieces of work, even more beautiful because you know that individual who created it took every penny they had really seriously, made a lifetime endowment in their project.

There’s this whole notion that every producer’s job is to raise money, that that’s a really key role for a producer. At this point in your careers, I think you’re well-positioned to do that, very fluid in the way you do that—bring in the money while also imbuing the project with all your creative contributions, connections and knowledge of production and distribution flow.

JG:  It takes an enormous amount of time; the three of us have decades invested in doing this work.  I went to Winstar / Nonfiction Films, which eventually all morphed into Wellspring, one of the many companies that Winstar was buying up.  One of these places was expanding into making theatrical docs; that’s why I went there.  We’d just finished this film called Mob Law [:A Film Portrait of Oscar Goodman, 1998].  They were also doing this film called Munich ’72 which was renamed One Day in September.  [The film won an Oscar for Best Documentary Feature, 1999-2000.]  So I was so excited to work there.  The first thing I had to do was to get on the phone with John Battsek, someone I work with now but didn’t know at all then, and tell him that he needed to cut his budget in half. It was horrible!  Then, for whatever corporate reasons, sadly, the company pulled out of the project.  I then went on to work on a project called Gunfighters of the West.  Eventually, though, the inmates started taking over the asylum and the more we learned, the more power we had to negotiate and finance some really great projects.

SIM:  A group with good taste, thankfully.

JG:  Yes, a nice group of inmates—it was a "King of Hearts" kind of coup.

SIM: Cactus Three has an incredible roster of films to its credit.  Some kind of creative inspiration must be a difficult thing to go without if you don’t have to; that might be your company’s unofficial motto.

JG:  We live with these films a long time—at least a year, in most cases, longer.  You have to maintain your passion for the project and the only way you can do that over a long period of time is to love that project or the filmmaker that’s making it or, at the very least, have a strong belief in the filmmaker.  It isn’t the subject matter that will sustain that necessarily, although sometimes it can be the subject that does. There’s no science to it: some of the films we’ve done have been very weird.

As an example, we did Orthodox Stance about an Orthodox Jewish boxer and that boxer, that guy, was incredibly charming and riveting and lovable.  He drew us in right away.  And then we’ll have something like Black Sun, which also captivated us in a different way.  Sometimes it's a very ineffable factor.  There's something like Once in a Lifetime [: The Extraordinary Story of the New York Cosmos], which isn’t really about characters but says so much about a certain era in New York.  Our catalogue is very broad in that way.  For three women, we have a lot of sports films.  There’s something immediate about sports docs: you get what's at stake right away.  That’s why When We Were Kings [Leon Gast, 1996] and Hoop Dreams [Steve James, 1994] are some of the greatest docs ever made.  It’s not necessarily about the sport.

SIM:  It always plays, to me, as a really grand metaphor for life—becoming victorious over every obstacle, even if that victory is a mixed bag.  Incredibly inspiring.

JG:  Exactly.  It’s a story of someone playing "against the odds" but in a very different way than we generally encounter.  I’ve seen abysmal sports docs as well, ones that take all that's given with the subject matter and still, somehow, manage to make a staggeringly boring piece.  Which means the storyteller also needs to bring that same passion.  A film like Sweethearts of the Prison Rodeo—

SIM:  I’m a huge Bradley Beesley fan—he has one of the best eyes and instincts in the business.

JG:  He really does.  His Flaming Lips doc is one of my favorites.  He has a great sense of how he wants to tell a story.  Sweethearts is about the rodeo--but it’s really not about the rodeo.

SIM:  This is a filmmaker who definitely falls in love with his subjects and they, in turn, fall in love with him.  There’s a relationship there, one beyond “getting the story.”

JG:  That was exactly the case here.  There was a lot of trust and that was important, especially because he was a guy insinuating himself into a female world, a tough one at that.

SIM:  Have you ever had directing ambitions?

JG:  No, I can’t imagine directing anything.  I’m very locked into my producer duties, paying attention to details, watching over the whole production.  No way; I couldn’t do it.

SIM:  How do you see the independent film landscape right now?  Are you optimistic about things, in general, despite the economic downturn, hard times, etc.?

JG:  It’s always been hard.  Yes, it’s particularly hard now but it comes in waves.  Sometimes it’s harder when distribution dries up as it’s doing now and it’s a shitty period.  Sometimes, despite everything, it flows and you have a number of good films at once and doors start to open.  But it’s always going to be on one side of that curve.  Right now we’re on the downswing.  However, as more funding sources dry up, there are new ones that crop up unexpectedly, as well.  You have to be creative and clever and really work at finding those sources.

SIM:  What about the filmmakers who won’t do that, who refuse to look for money themselves?  They’re fine being on the fringe and doing their own work, self-funding, just getting by.  Mind you, at the same time, they’re complaining about it all and how hard it is.

JG:  It’s not unlike any business or industry in that way.  There are always going to be people that have a lot of incentive and initiative, that really make things happen.  And, there are going to be the people who just want to talk about how everything sucks or who feel entitled to something without doing the work, just assuming that a fabulous idea is enough to get funders to come running.  Some artists are too insecure or nervous to try to delve into that, convinced that that’s not what they do.  A lot of people really feel that you are either a creative or you’re a businessperson.  The most successful people are those that find a way to meld the two.  And the two do go together—it’s essential.  But there’s a fear, a real turn-off for some to spend the time and energy learning how to do that. But this business is one of relationships.  You have relationships in a creative way and you have relationships in a business way and they mix and mingle.

SIM:  Talk a bit about the producer/director relationship and the aspects of that relationship that you enjoy the most.  What brings you a lot of satisfaction in these relationships?

JG:  It’s exciting when someone comes to you and tells you, “Look, this is what I want to do.”  It’s a blank slate; that's where you get to begin.  We love that.  The ideas of how we're going to help create something out of nothing and support that effort from inception to completion—just that concept alone is what makes it exciting and challenging.  It’s actually the best part of it for us.  It starts with the question, what do we need to do to get this from right here to distribution, to getting it seen?  I love clean slates.  Once it’s out there, that’s when I just get kind of nervous, even though I’m confident in the work.  I know it’s a good film and I know that it’s a matter of taste whether audiences like it or not.  There can be a wide array of arbitrary factors.  We love the films but we're also not blind to the fact that there are going to be criticisms and we can agree with those criticisms sometimes, in fact.

SIM:  In a film like The Cove, for instance, where you’re credited with a consultancy role, what does that kind of involvement entail, where you’re not necessarily there from the clean slate-stage but asked to come in at a certain point to help a film find its true north?

JG:  It could be anything: helping to raise more funding, any number of things.  In the case of The Cove, they had shot the majority of it and Fisher Stevens had come on as a producer and brought us on as consultants.  He and I have worked together before and he was just completely devoted to this film.  It’s a tough film in its complexity; the cut at the time that we came on board was pretty messy, not at all close to completion.  Look, Louie [Psihoyos, the first-time director and a world-renowned photographer] wants to save the oceans; that's his explicit agenda.  This film is only one step in a very ambitious agenda.  At that time, everything had to be pulled together to carve out the story; it was all over the place in trying to showcase this crazy group of people who got together to go off and make this film.  The first question was, who would be a great editor?  And that’s how Geoffrey Richman was brought on.  Extra research was also needed.  We needed to find someone who was willing to go out and live in Colorado and work out there for a time.  So it was finding all these elements, pulling them in and getting everything organized so there was a workflow in place.  We also arranged lots of test screenings in New York and LA for feedback since it was changing so rapidly at that point.

SIM:  What about our domestic film festivals, particularly documentary-centric ones, and the transformations we’re seeing there?

JG:  I think festivals here are trying to be part of the distribution chain.  With all the specific festivals, as well, like the Jewish ones, gay/lesbian, etc., a filmmaker can get a pretty healthy run for a film.  The really sad thing, for me, is that I rarely get to see films at festivals.  It’s the singular biggest disappointment about the festival experiences I get to have.  I mean I go to my films.  But sometimes we'll have three or four at a festival and with two screenings each, maybe more, I’m always in those screenings with the filmmakers.  It doesn’t leave time for much else with everything else I’m doing there.

SIM: I’m lucky enough to make that a priority and see quite a lot since I love sitting in the theater with the local audience.  There are sophisticated audiences outside of New York and LA, really hungry for great documentaries and strong small independent narratives with wonderful scripts, stellar performances, etc.  Festivals are also the only places where there is a real interplay between filmmakers and audiences--probably the most impactful.

JG:  I think a pretty sophisticated film language, in general, has become common everywhere you go.  People "get it" in different ways. 

(Goldman pictured with Hamptons International Film Festival director of programming, David Nugent, courtesy Ingrid Kopp.)

SIM:  At Cactus Three, you have this  hands-on philosophy where all three of you spend inordinate amounts of time on each project.  Do you see that changing as you might grow in future years?  Do you have ambitions for the company to become more like a mini-studio, so to speak?

JG:  It’s always been the three of us with a great, but small, support staff.  We beef up when we have to.  We have talked about growing into something bigger and becoming more of a mini-studio.  But becoming more removed from the hands-on process is a concern.  A big part of who we are is in the relationships we have and having that day-to-day contact and connection with filmmakers.  I think, most likely, I will always stay in that kind of role, no matter what happens.  We’ll continue to split up things in different ways but I don’t see that aspect changing.

SIM:  Talk more about this threesome that has formed over the years.  Three is a very strong number; there are lots of possibilities for dividing and conquering.

JG:  Well, Krysanne was a lawyer for many years and concentrated on acquisitions, co-productions, the business side of things.  Caroline has a production background and I have a combination of the two.  So it’s a very good balance in that way.  We can take up the slack for one another, but we really complement one another's skills.  All three of us are executive producers for about ninety percent of the productions Cactus develops.  Sometimes, we do projects individually, as was the case with me and the Sergio film—our solo albums, so to speak.  But to your point, on every project, there is one of us that takes the lead role.  But then sometimes it shifts organically.  If it’s something with music clearance, Krysanne is likely to take the lead on that.  Caroline works on production-oriented issues.  I tend to deal with the broadcasters.  Projects flow very organically between the three of us.

SIM: What’s a comfortable slate for you in terms of numbers of films you complete in a year?

JG:  Currently, we’re finishing, on average, about eight to ten projects a year.  But that means that eight to ten films happen to be finishing at the same time—some projects may have been started several years ago, another might wrap up quite quickly, within a year’s time.  Just this past year, we happened to have had four films go out into the world simultaneously.  You can never predict when a documentary will actually be finished, no matter how much of a soothsayer you are.

SIM:  How do you navigate with broadcasters who do have definitive deadlines?  That must be difficult in terms of timing since you don't want to rush or compromise a project in any way.  Perhaps there’s a financier that’s expecting his or her returns by a certain date and it’s taking a year longer than it’s supposed to.

JG:  Oh yeah, that’s natural [laughs].  Happens all the time.  Having said that, we are pretty good at staying on track.  What I’m saying is you can’t predict the glitches that crop up, or you can't predict that a film will get into a certain festival in which you expected it to be in—those kinds of things present challenges, certainly.  Deadlines and dealing with deliverables is complicated.

I love delivering to HBO; I love working with them.  Everyone there is wonderful, in particular, Nancy Abraham, an amazingly supportive person and a center of calm.  Even if they’re just on the acquisition end of things on certain projects, they’re so incredibly easy to deal with.  They try and help you figure it out, a true partner, as opposed to some of the more corporate-minded entities with which one has to deal.  We work with them a lot—I’m currently delivering the Marion Barry film and Sweethearts of the Prison Rodeo.  I deal with the same group so we’ve been able to develop a fluid working relationship.  Plus, we did a series there called Family Bonds, a very long-term project.  Over the course of those couple of years, we were able to develop very deep relationships.  We know what to expect from one another.  When I’m dealing with a filmmaker, I can advise him or her in a very clear way about where we go for E&O insurance and the costs attached to that, for instance, and we can work out the whole thing clearly and easily.  Believe me, it’s rarely that way.  And getting to work with Sheila Nevins is a dream.  We were really lucky—during Family Bonds we got to meet with her for a whole day once a month going through footage, working on scenarios we wanted to develop.  It was an absolute treat.  Like a laser, she can pinpoint things that no one else is paying attention to.  Just a really wonderful talent, so incredibly supportive.

SIM:  At this point, you must have tons of filmmakers wanting to work with you.

JG:  We’re pretty open to hearing from people.  We get everything from cold calls to recommendations from people with whom we’ve worked in the past or people who know those people—again, established relationships, some kind of personal connection.  We’re also actively looking; we’re at the markets, conferences and festivals.  Our body of work is essentially our calling card for the kinds of projects we’re looking for. We had a period where we were working with a lot of first-time filmmakers and I think we’re going to streamline that process a bit [laughs].  An amazing idea, incredible passion and all of those things are great, but it’s really time-consuming and stretches you very thin.  We’re running a company, not a mentorship program.  It has to be irresistible, that's the bottom line, whether it's from a first-timer or a seasoned director.

SIM:  Have you ever had to make a decision to extricate yourselves from a project you've taken on and if so, what was the reason?

JG:  There have been a couple of instances where we really love and respect the filmmakers tremendously; however, the project starts to go in some direction that is really untenable for us, becoming a very different film from what we understood it would be.  There was one instance where Caroline and I watched a cut of something we wanted to be involved in very much.  But after viewing it, we decided that we couldn’t do it.  It had gone in a direction we didn't anticipate and really became more about the filmmakers struggling to make the film and the personal issues inherent in that. It made sense for those filmmakers to make it that way but we had to tell them how we felt and we parted ways.  It was really hard and somewhat awkward given the insularity of the community.  I had never done that before; it was very painful. 

I’ve also had instances where the financier is the one letting go of the filmmaker mid-way through a project and we had to switch to a different director—another very difficult situation, hard on everyone, but ultimately it worked out great for the film.  In one certain case, it was a film company that was the financier.  These days, especially, we try and find money where we can find it—sometimes the financier is in the film business, sometimes they're not.  There can be a pretty wide range of financing sources.  I still think television is the steadiest source of funding for documentaries.

SIM:  What would your recommendation be to a mid-career filmmaker who’s done a couple of projects, essentially out of his or her own pocket, they’ve had a modicum of success, perhaps making a bit of their money back, at least enough to do the next project, but they’re ready to kick it up a level?  They want to have seed money, a pot from which to begin pre-production and production, a good producer attached who can help oversee everything through distribution and sales.

JG:  The first thing I would do as a filmmaker is research producers out there who have done projects you admire and respect, and that have done fairly well commercially.

SIM:  But what does the filmmaker need to bring to the table in order to work with producers such as yourselves?

JG:  If someone comes in with a great story, total and complete access to the story and/or subjects, something written up, and, ideally, something shot from which a reel or trailer can be created—that’s the best-case scenario.

SIM:  And a prepared budget or something to show they’ve addressed the dreaded business side of things?

JG:  If, in fact, there's interest on our part, we can look at the budget together and review costs at that point. Those other factors are the important ones.  There’s no need to come to me with a budget.  It’s always either ridiculously low and the maker is not anticipating what the real costs are going to be, or it’s ridiculously high and you just can’t get those budgets anymore unless you’re Michael Moore or Morgan Spurlock or a name talent like that.

SIM:  Of the filmmakers with whom you’re familiar, who are you keeping your eye on?  Who do you think will go the distance and make a career of note?  Who would you like to work with again that you’ve worked with before?

JG:  I think Jeremiah Zagar is definitely someone to watch.  Gary Tarn is another really interesting guy; he’s got another really wonderful film to follow Black Sun.  I know what he’s working on and it’s very ambitious.  He’s determined and talented.  Of course, now I’m blanking when you ask me to come up with names—the usual suspects that most people are watching, I guess.  Eva Weber is an interesting filmmaker; it’ll be great to see what she’ll do in the future.  Gemma Cubero and Celeste Carrasco have a really fantastic film in Ella Es el Matador (She Is the Matador)—I loved it; I think it's gorgeous. 

In terms of people I’ve worked with before, I really like Matthew Galkin.  We’re finding something to do together.  He did the Pixies film and we worked together on Family Bonds for HBO.  He’s super solid and very smart.  And I would definitely want to keep tabs on Brad [Beesley] and whatever he might be working on next.  I would also love to continue to collaborate with producers John Battsek, Nikki Parrott, Ryan Harrington and Amy Dotson.

SIM:  What kind of stock do you put into the modern-day pitch session?  To me, even though the projects are interesting and there are a number of intelligent and adventurous commissioners sitting around the table, it smacks of more of a floorshow than anything else. 

JG: Yeah, they kind of remind me of watching the high school archetypes playing out their destined roles.  It’s kind of funny.  What I do very much like is what Sheffield does which are the Meet Markets—one on one meeting sessions.

SIM:  IFP does that, as well.

JG:  They do and they get better and better every year with the Independent Film Week and the labs, etc.  It is exciting to see emerging talent be fostered in that way.  They also have great instructional sessions where they take documentary filmmakers through absolutely every stage from pre-production to distribution.  They bring in great people.  I was really impressed—they presented what amounted to “Documentary Filmmaking 101.”  Knowing how to deliver a film is so key and no one ever teaches how to do that.  It’s invaluable information.  Also, knowing who key players are is essential.  So many filmmakers send their films to the wrong people; it’s a waste of time on everyone’s part.  Save relationships and connections for the appropriate time and the appropriate project.  Don’t show someone an hour-long cut when you should be showing five or ten minutes, just really practical stuff like that that could make all the difference.

SIM:  What would you say to independent producers who are constantly approached by first-time filmmakers who a) want you to work for free because they don’t have any money, also known as “working deferred,” and b) want that producer to, essentially, do all of the fundraising work for them?  I’m obviously asking this from personal experience and, I have to tell you, as a creative, independent producer, it’s a challenge.  I’m talking about something that goes beyond consultative or advice-driven meetings.  It’s watching cuts and doing the detailed work that helps to get a piece into watchable shape.  I think there’s a gross misunderstanding of what a producer-director relationship entails to a large extent. 

JG:  It’s difficult.  We all come across projects that we don’t want to get away.  And also the opportunity of being part of the initial creative process is important for some, having a role in putting together the creative team—editor, composer, etc. 

The bottom line is that life is short and, as producers, we want to do the best work we can with the best people out there. There’s so much talent out there to be tapped into.  If you know exactly what it is you want, it means you’re apt to come across it sooner rather than later.  And, in turn, when a filmmaker is serious about finding a good producer, he or she will find the resources to hire one.  Believe me, when someone needs to find a publicist or someone to do PR and marketing, they find the money.  They need to realize that if that money can be found, then finding resources to hire a producer shouldn’t be a problem either.  It doesn’t make sense to expect a producer to work for free, particularly if that person is instrumental in helping to find funding for the project.  It took me a long time to be firm about that but if someone is serious about working with you and it’s really meant to be, and they need you and they realize that, then they’ll find the money to hire you.  It’s important to legitimize these relationships.

Don't Miss Two Fantastic Outdoor Screenings This Weekend

This Friday and Saturday, July 10 and 11, Rooftop Films will be showcasing two wonderful documentaries in Brooklyn as part of their '09 summer screening series. 

First up, on Friday night, Aron Gaudet and Gita Pullapilly will present their inspiring and award-winning film, The Way We Get By.  Through greeting troops at the Bangor International Airport in Maine, a major US military deployment hub, three senior citizens not only transform their own lives, but touch thousands of others' lives, as well.  I've dropped into several Q&As for this at various festivals and audiences are always just completely over the moon--not a dry eye in the house.  Gaudet's and Pullapilly's first feature project has had a bountiful festival run and this will be the second time it has exhibited in the Big Apple.  (Thom Powers showed it as part of his Stranger Than Fiction series this past spring.)  You can read my laudatory review on the film here.  Festivities will be on the lawn of Automotive High School in Williamsburg.  Doors open at 8 for the regular drill: fabulous crowd, great live music from a local band, great film, after party with free drinks at Matchless on Manhattan Ave.  Click here to order tickets.

Gaudet and Pullapilly are also gearing up for the film's theatrical release débuting at the IFC Center here in New York on Friday, July 17, with the filmmakers in attendance at selected screenings throughout opening weekend.  Visit their website for more information and to read about the other special events throughout the week-long run with one of their outreach partners, Operation Homefront.  They currently have dates set for runs in Los Angeles at Laemmle's Music Hall (August 14) and in Boston at the Museum of Fine Art (August 27).  Repeat after me:  a successful New York opening weekend will enable the film to exhibit at more theaters across the nation!!

On Saturday night, Rooftop will present Bill Ross and Turner Ross' feature début, 45365, winner of the Grand Jury Prize for Best Documentary at this year's SXSW festival in Austin (the film's premiere), recipient of an honorable mention nod for the HBO Emerging Filmmaker Award at Full Frame, and a special jury prize at the Newport International Film Festival.  Many, many people think this is an exquisite movie-going experience.  I would be one of them.  A grandly cinematic piece, it's meant to be seen on a big screen.  So here's your chance to go see it on one.

Over the course of nine months, the brothers Ross shot this graceful and colorful portrait of their hometown of Sidney, Ohio--the title is the town's postal code.  We, as viewers, get to sit back and let imagery, from the sublime to the mundane, wash over us in a sensorial kaleidoscope of sound and vision.  It's a strangely relaxing experience with small jolts of exhilaration and glee.  There is no omniscient voice intoning inane (nor poetic) recitations about life in a small town on the soundtrack; there are no talking head interviews; there is really no discernible plot line.  What the film does contain are snapshots crafted to make the most of the mood and timbre and rhythm of a place and its inhabitants. 

Even if one was raised in the middle of a big, bustling city, there is some weird kind of universal nostalgia evoked through the lens of these native small-town sons.  Like the place it photographs, the camera's gaze is wide-open and friendly, most times keeping a polite distance while picking up intimate details in an oblique way (except for scenes like the full-on smooch in a bar, which is unabashedly voyeuristic, and the pulse-pounding physicality of the running-with-the-bulls shots at the football game).  The sound design is quite sophisticated, providing a contrapuntal element in both rhythm and harmony to the visual panorama, the passing snippets of vérité interwoven with transcendent sequences of flight and fancy.  There is a whole sequence shot on an amusement park ride that is absolutely thrilling in its beauty, creating an integration between "real life" and "art" that is evocative of first crushes and first drunken kisses and first rollercoaster rides and all those other seminal and intense human experiences we all hope we can recall over and over again, even into our dotage.  I can't think of a better summertime movie.

45365 will be distributed through 7th Arts Releasing.  The film will also be exclusively screened for one week starting Friday, July 31st on the SnagFilms.com Distribution Network, the second film of its online summer fest.

Why I Love New York, Reasons #849 - #854

Because you get to wake up in a Polish neighborhood in Brooklyn that's a throwback to 1978 Krakow, but with better shoe stores.  On the carpet in front of you are the two biggest, fattest, laziest cats to greet you with a blank morning stare, which uncannily matches their blank afternoon stare and their blank evening stare.  One of them (the female) has woken you up at some ungodly morning hour by trying to pounce on your head, but you've found the spiritual space in which to forgive her.

You then shuttle your way into the city with a coffee of Stumptown in your hand from the Variety Café on Graham, and arrive early enough at your first meeting point to breakfast alone with your book--a brioche and a cup of coffee, both the approximate size and heft of one of those aforementioned cats.

About an hour later, some absolutely lovely woman, who has taken a chunk out of her busy day to talk with you, sits across from you, orders some food and beverage and we then proceed to have the most wonderful conversation, gabbing like we chicks do.  That interview, with Cactus Three's Julie Goldman, will be posted here soon, so that's something to look forward to.  I learned a lot; I hope you will, too.

Then on to visit some of my favorite peeps in New York and get my bag filled with DVDs to view--the good, the bad, the ugly.  Again, I learn lots.  And sometimes, I'm lucky enough to see an entire film, finished by the grace of whomever,  a year after my last viewing of said film when it was just a few minutes long, dubbed a "work-in-progress," but, nonetheless, wrenched my sensibility around pretty good about my naïve relationship with history and the repercussions of what that naïveté might entail.  I'm obsessed with history right now for some reason and have luckily been asked to expound upon those thoughts for some articles--I'll keep you posted on that.  But suffice to say, that this imperative of nonfiction filmmakers today seems to be, not unsubtly stated, that we must take over where the world's corporate media stops short.  And it's stopping shorter and shorter lately, have you noticed that?

Then I met up with a filmmaker with whom I'm working who makes it possible for me to have a living, breathing model of what a graceful creature a human being can be.  That's a good thing to aspire to, I think; especially when I'm twisted up like a pretzel in all kinds of ways about my life right now.  It'll all be okay; we'll get through this.  Sentiments not spoken out loud, but expressed in the ways that she trusts you and has confidence in you and sees the worth that's hiding under a bushel.  I'll stop here 'cause I'm welling up.

Suffice to say that I did the pretentious, incomprehensible art opening bullshit and then went to have a lovely meal in a French outdoor bistro (where actual French people eat) with two of the most interesting people I've met in awhile, most interesting because they're so open and so enigmatic, simultaneously.  If the company you keep is any indication of your view of yourself, then things are looking kind of okay. 

LIFE. SUPPORT. MUSIC. Airs on P.O.V. This Week

Eric Daniel Metzgar's second feature-length documentary is a beauty.  A deeply personal film about one of his music partners and close friends, Jason Crigler, Life. Support. Music. documents an extraordinary journey of healing, love and sheer determination on one man's part to sucker-punch the odds of recovery from a  near-fatal brain hemorrhage from a very discouraging diagnosis to performing and recording again.  And learning how to become a father to a daughter whose birth he doesn't remember.

In 2004, Jason Crigler's future was bright.  He was one of New York's hottest young guitarists on the rise; his wife, Monica, was pregnant with their first child.  At a gig one evening, Crigler suffered a severe hemorrhage.  After assessing his state, his caretakers wagered he would never emerge from a mostly vegetative state, would be unable to feed or care for himself, and would be unable to walk or move around on his own, let alone write and play music again.  With his and Monica's incredibly inspiring families' unrelenting support and encouragement, he proved them wrong.

This Tuesday, Life. Support. Music. will make its broadcast début on PBS' P.O.V. series; check local listings for showtimes.  Visit the film's website or its page on the P.O.V. site to learn more about the Criglers' story, read an interview with Metzgar, buy the DVD from Film Baby (both home and educational versions are available) and to listen to some of Jason's fantastic music.  You can also read an in-depth interview I conducted last year with the wonderful and talented Metzgar on the Shooting People site by clicking here.

Playing directly after Life. Support. Music. will be an encore presentation of an extraordinary 6-minute experimental piece that débuted on PBS in 2007, Ariana Gerstein's Alice Sees the Light.

The Good Pitch at IFP's Independent Film Week

Just blew back in from the countryside where I did nothing but eat, sleep and swim for four days so am still blissfully flatlining.  However, wanted to mention, since it's sneaking up fast, that the deadline for entering your nonfiction project for the Good Pitch at Independent Film Week has been pushed to June 1.

The call for entries is now open for the Good Pitch's third forum in North America--the first was at Hot Docs in Toronto last month at the Toronto Documentary Forum; next up will be the one at SILVERDOCS (check the entire program, up since last Thursday, and the projects that have been chosen for the Good Pitch by clicking here); the third one will be in September at the 31st Annual Project Forum in New York City's Chelsea district.

In accordance with the UN's Millennium Development Goals, the round table format is designed to maximize the "powerful convergence of interests between issue-based organizations, documentary storytellers, broadcasters/funders/distributors, and audiences hungry for relevant, moving stories of our current realities."

The Man Behind the Conniption: Ben Steinbauer Unmasks the WINNEBAGO MAN

I attended a packed-to-the-rafters screening of this film in Toronto.  I can only imagine the response it got at its début in Austin, Texas at SXSW back in March.  The director and one of his producers are (adopted) native sons of the town, first off.  And secondly, SXSW audiences love their movies and music like nobody's business, according to the fest's new director, Janet Pierson, who spoke eloquently about her newly-adopted beast of a child and the intensity of the audiences in Austin at a panel on film festivals during Hot Docs.  (Director Ben Steinbauer and subject Jack Rebney at their SXSW premiere Q&A, courtesy Ingrid Kopp, From the Hip blog.)

There was much love in the house when the filmmakers came up for the Q&A, let's put it that way.  And in a town that loves documentaries like Toronto does, that's high praise because Torontonians represent a discerning, sophisticated audience that can think for itself, thanks very much.  I haven't seen so many people stay for Q&As at any other festival, really, so that's kind of impressive, and a very generous and precious gift to filmmakers, to bask in an audience's glow after they've seen one's film.  Director Steinbauer, producer Joel Heller, and producer, writer, and editor, Malcolm Pullinger, did their Q&A in the dark instead of a basking glow, thanks to a lazy theater grip (there were lights set up, but inexplicably they never got turned on).  But, no matter.  There was love in the house.

Winnebago Man surprised me in many ways, all of them delightful, and in much deeper ways than one might anticipate when watching a movie about an Internet phenom, merely famous for his RV (recreational vehicle) sales videos, or the outtakes thereof, to be precise.  The protagonist, Jack Rebney, the WM of the title, has had his life play out like a Zen koan.  In other words, the different aspects or "personalities" his life has taken on are inexplicable, not given to rational understanding; but intuitively, you know you're watching a life lived like a motherfucker.  (I know "motherfucker" is not really a Zen kind of word, but I'm speaking Jack's language now--a language of honesty and sheer, human rage at the indignities to which we sometimes have to subject ourselves for our own damned good.  Or something like that.  I get impatient with Zen stuff.) 

And then a nice, clean-cut boy shows up and, politely but obstinately, pulls him out of the obscurity to which he's fled.  I was conflicted about how to feel about the relationship between Steinbauer and Rebney for much of the first half of the film, I must say.  But that's as it should be since the relationship turns out to be very rich and substantive and complicated and throws curve ball after curve ball beyond your expectations of what kind of relationship these two people could possibly have besides the predictable one.  The story arc is highly satisfying thanks to crack dramaturgical work and graceful editing by Pullinger.  The story ebbs and flows in a way that makes you relax and sit back and know that you're in the hands of supreme storytellers.  And it is definitely a team effort: Steinbauer, as the driver (literally) of the film has a sure authorial voice and an unmitigated comfort in front of the lens, so that part works well.  But then, besides the aforementioned Heller and Pullinger, Steinbauer also has Bradley Beesley shooting for him most of the time and Beesley's one of the best cinematographers out there right now--he's a sensitive lensman with an eye for the real McCoy, able to frame almost everything with a deep pathos and understanding and humor, helping a viewer see things in a bit of a more profound way, let's say, than he or she normally would.  Talented guy.

This film is currently on its festival run and it'll be a good one.  The humanity of this story can certainly touch the lost part of our souls, but it can also revive our sense of mission in living an uncompromising life--no matter the complications one creates for oneself along the way.

My favorite moment of the film (among many)?  Jack Rebney getting shooed off the premises of a WalMart property by a scared-shitless store manager already on the phone to the cops before he's within shouting distance of Jack.  It's worth the price of admission to hear what Mr. Rebney has to say about that little scenario.

Go see this when it comes to a theater near you.  You'll have the time of your life and shed a tear or two.  That, and a bag of popcorn and you've died and gone to heaven, right?

Into the Archives

I know this blog is only two years old, but once in a while, I like to go through my scrap book and reminisce.  Just to see where I was a year ago, I looked over my interview with Iranian filmmaker and festival director, Massoud Bakhshi whom I met at Hot Docs in '08, and really enjoyed reading it again.  So I thought you might too (want to read it, that is) if you're not watching crap TV or flat-ironing your hair (be careful!).  It actually did my heart a bit of good since I just watched a really awful film and felt a bit depressed.  I hate bad films, especially bad films that cost a lot of money---gggrrrr.

Click here to read our conversation.  Merci, bonne nuit.

Renzo Martens' Macabre Passion Plays

Episode 3: Enjoy Poverty débuted at the IDFA last fall as the opening night film, and since then, has traveled a bit on the international circuit to various film festivals such as Thessaloniki in Greece in March (where I saw it for the first time), as well as at Hot Docs in Toronto last week (where I saw it a second time, met the director and listened to the post-screening Q&A). 

The film, however, for the most part, has played as an art installation in galleries and museums; Dutch artist, Renzo Martens, the creator of the film, considers it a work of art with "connections to documentary film."  For Martens, it is the relationship between the viewer and the image that he is most interested in exploring, and in his film, he plays the role of both the artist crafting and extrapolating upon that relationship, while also representing The Every (White) Man, exploiter and consumer of Africa's poverty trade.  You can watch the trailer here.

The film embodies the best of pugilistic agitation, radicalizing a particular point of view through a somewhat caustic DIY sensibility.  In speaking of the Situationists, Sadie Plant in The Most Radical Gesture: The Situationist International in a Postmodern Age (1992) says:  "The situationists' desire to become psychogeographers, with an understanding of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not on the emotions and behavior of individuals, was intended to cultivate an awareness of the ways in which everyday life is presently conditioned and controlled, the ways in which this manipulation can be exposed or subverted, and the possibilities for chosen forms of constructed situations to the post-spectacular world.  . . . it is precisely this concern with the environment in which we live which is ignored."

Modern-day "psychogeographer" Martens has decidedly chosen not to ignore this particular construction, but to utilize it quite conscientiously in his film work and he states that he's doing this quite openly.  In 2004, he created his Episode 1, a 45-minute film about his travels to Chechnya in the midst of a brutal war, the film centering on his investigation of what the Chechen and Russians thought of him, a comfortable, self-centered, handsome Northern European artist.  In doing so, he stages a compelling and not-so-subtle articulation of why war zones and poverty-stricken places exist; it's precisely because of this self-referential imperative we use as a distancing effect so we can cope with living comfortably on the same planet alongside the people in dire circumstances who won't be comfortable a day in their miserable lives.

In their absurdity and disingenuous manner, these films use the conventions of nonfiction cinema to manipulate attitudes and ideas, as Martens presents himself as both perpetrator/exploiter and documentarian of that exploitation.  In speaking of his filmic triptych in a January '09 interview with ArtSlant's Frances Guerin, Martens explains that Episode I and Episode 3 "are the side panels, representing earthly narratives.  The centerpiece will focus on divine love . . . . represent[ing] a conversation between two people the topic of which will be love.  As such it will offer a deeper solution to the consciousness of exploitation raised in Episode I and Episode 3, a consciousness I do not believe is limited to war and poverty, but is all around us."

I haven't seen Episode I, but I think Episode 3 is extremely sophisticated in its cinematic language and its use of hand-held self-shooting (there's nothing like it when it's done right).  Attention was paid to the brutal beauty, the almost pornographic regard we have for images of poverty--starving children, hollowed-out human beings (both physically and emotionally), bloated dead bodies from which the sound of thousands of flies and maggots echo in the air, white photographers gazing through powerful camera lenses at the death and desperation around them, framing everything in a LIFE Magazine glow.

And then there's the sign: a big, fat neon sign that Martens has carried into the middle of the jungle in the Congo so he can piece it together, hang it high, and illuminate it with a gigantic generator.  The extended scene (it goes on for several minutes) of the villagers dancing joyfully around the PLEASE ENJOY POVERTY sign, everything lit with a magical blue glow, is one of the most affecting scenes I've seen in a while.  You want to laugh; you want to cry; you do neither--that kind of thing.  A numbness that is all too  familiar since there are organizations and entities that want to inundate us with those images until we really don't take them in anymore, for very specific reasons, foremost of which is making them even richer than they already are.  Reaching into your pocket to "help the starving" is the most numbing action of all, I've found.

So I think this film is brilliant, one of the most intelligent ones I've seen.  I'm sure Martens would be happy for me to reference alongside this comment that it is akin to Sauper's Darwin's Nightmare, a documentary that scared me so badly just with its poster alone.  Even the exceedingly well-constructed and gorgeously shot, Sergio, which elicited in me such a severe emotional response I was literally choking back my tears for the last 30 minutes of the film, did not haunt my thoughts like this film does.  I think that it needs to get out of the rarefied air of the art galleries, Mr. Martens, and into the marrow of your average-Joe or Jane film goer.

The film has just had its national theatrical release in Belgium where Martens resides.  I'm sure a few of us can work on a New York screening or two.  New Yorkers robustly chew on films like this.  And then spit them up at breakfast.

Next and last Hot Docs post:  my review of Winnebago Man!  From the sublime to the sublime.  That's why I like film.

The Good Pitch Comes to North America

It has not escaped my notice that this is a wildly incongruous post following upon the heels of the above review.  But anyway--

The Good Pitch is the brainchild of the Channel 4 BRTIDOC Foundation, headed up by Jess Search, Katie Bradford and Elise McCave.  The Good Pitch utilizes the traditional pitching forum to bring together documentary filmmakers, not only with commissioning editors, broadcasters and funders from the international independent film community, but with other potential contributors and partners in audience-building, as well, underlining the fact that nonfiction cinema is a powerful tool for creating social change on a global level.  With the opportunity to pitch to ideal outreach partners--expert participants from foundations, charities, NGOs, campaigners, distributors, advertising agencies, and other third sector organizations--a selected group of filmmakers can maximize the impact of their films by forming powerful alliances with the likes of the American Civil Liberties Union, Amnesty International USA, World Organization for Human Rights USA, Save the Children Canada, WITNESS, and many others.

Partner, Cara Mertes, director of the Sundance Institute Documentary Program, says that "The Good Pitch is a new evolution in the pitch forum format.  It absolutely fits our focus on supporting human rights and social issue documentary films with broad impact.  The Channel Four BRITDOC Foundation has been a great innovator in the social issue documentary sector and we are enthusiastic partners in bringing the Good Pitch to North America."  The Toronto Documentary Forum, which runs concurrently with the Hot Docs festival, was the first stop on its North American tour; the TDF celebrated its 10th anniversary this year with new leadership by the dynamic Elizabeth Radshaw.  The Good Pitch will also be staged at the upcoming SILVERDOCS (entries are now closed; click here to see the final selection); and, in the fall, they will also be at the IFP's Independent Film Week (the deadline is May 25; click here to apply).

The emphasis of The Good Pitch is not on "advocacy," so much as on global social transformation.  With funding partners The Fledgling Fund and Working Films, The Good Pitch folks aim to help facilitate fruitful partnerships between artists and viable (and quite powerful) entities with hefty international constituencies.  (Pitch training and outreach consultancy was provided by Judith Helfand of Chicken & Egg and Robert West of Working Films.)  In fact, Search displayed marvelous skills straight from the yenta tradition in the form of relentless matchmaking, taking an enthusiastic response from an organization representative willing to talk about financial and other types of aid on a film project as a sign that there was about to be cause to plan a wedding.  Using their "pent-up idealism," as one representative from the American Bar Association Center for Human Rights put it, to her best advantage, Search made sure there would be follow-up meetings once the pitch session was over:  "You're going to go out in the hall and talk some more after the session breaks, right?  You're going to give this project some of your money, right?"  With fewer and fewer funding options for making and finishing feature documentaries, the Foundation team is hell-bent on finding other ways to support groundbreaking projects.  Ryan Harrington of the Gucci Tribeca Documentary Fund and IndiePix Studios says that it's the "most, worthwhile, uplifting and productive pitching forum I have ever taken part in."

The five projects pitched were:  Untitled Immigration Project by Marco Williams which examines the state of US immigration policy by documenting three facets of the immigration story beginning with the deaths that happen along the US/Mexican border and the effort to identify the bodies and then send them back home; the trend of local municipalities that create laws to stem the flow of Latino immigrants; and the impact of the deportation of those with proper working papers who have committed crimes in the US.  The Promise of Freedom by Beth Murphy, director of the powerful Beyond Belief, (presented with producer, Sean Flynn) focuses on the work of Kirk Johnson, a 27-year-old American aid worker trying to save thousands of Iraqis whose lives are in danger because they worked for the US during the war.  Our School by Mona Nicoara is a story of Roma ("Gypsy") children struggling against intense segregation in a small Transylvanian town.  The film follows three schoolchildren as they fight racism and hatred from their teachers and struggle for a good education that will break the cycle of poverty and cultural rejection by the rest of society.  Burma Soldier by Nic Dunlop (presented with producer, Julie leBrocquy) tells the story of Myo Myint, who left his refugee camp on the Thai/Burma border to be reunited with his family in the US after 20 years.  He was a soldier who turned against his own commanders, was blown up in a landmine, became an activist against the war and suffered imprisonment and torture.  Photojournalist Dunlop's powerful trailer brought tears to my eyes; his physical and emotional access to Myint is incredible, making for a very powerful personal story.  Lastly, there was Resilient by Sean Fine and Andrea Nix Fine (presented with producer Yael Melamede), Academy Award-nominated filmmakers for their War/Dance.  The film (gorgeously shot, unsurprisingly) is a celebration of women from all over the world who have lived through and triumphed over intense trauma and found an inner strength that motivates them into becoming activists with a vengeance.  Journalist, Mariane Pearl, will be the conduit that guides viewers through four profiles of women who are making positive change in their communities.

HOT DOCS Meme

My Hopalong Cassidy of a laptop has been on life support since Tuesday afternoon and has just been revived yesterday morning by some very generous (and quick-acting) Mac gurus.  So apologies for the blogus interruptus.  Still working through my Hot Docs coverage but firstly, in this post, I will respond to dandig's meme tag since that's Hot Docs-related:

1.  The film that pulled at my heart strings the most:  A Good Man by Australian director Safina Uberoi appearing in the World Showcase.  I love the cinema (both fiction and non) that comes out of Oz and am rarely disappointed; it seems to be a land made for tall tales and grand storytelling with plenty of larger-than-life characters.  Uberoi's A Good Man is a very quiet, intimate film about a family, but has the robust humor and earthy sensibility I've come to rely upon from the best Aussie cinema.  What initially caught my attention was the plot of this rare love story--macho Australian sheep farmer becomes a brothel owner to help support his quadriplegic wife, Rachel, mother of his two sons.  About sixteen years ago, Rachel experienced a severe brain hemorrhage that left her neurologically damaged and completely paralyzed (she communicates only with her eyes) while pregnant with their first child.  Once their first son was delivered safely, Chris Rohrlach married Rachel, knowing her condition would never improve.  Along with Rachel and Chris' parents as a wonderful Greek chorus, their story is sensitively and artfully told against the sweeping gold vistas of Chris' farm, which he is struggling mightily to hold onto, and the mid-sized, provincial town where he attempts to run a legal "sex parlor."  The film is chock-a-block with fantastic one-liners, my favorite uttered by Chris' business partner and friend: "Not only did I not like running a brothel, I fucking hated it."

2.  Strangest cinematic experience:  I'm not sure I would describe this as "strange" necessarily, but it was delightful.  After the Saturday night screening of Ben Steinbauer's Winnebago Man, Steinbauer got his star subject, Jack Rebney, on the line and we heard Rebney's booming, distinctive voice through the tiny mobile phone speaker from his mountaintop retreat in northern California, holding forth, answering questions from the enthusiastic (and loving) audience, and trading ripostes with Steinbauer just as they do in this delightful documentary.  I'll write more about this film in my review coming up shortly.

3.  Best party:  Why The British Drinks at The Supermarket, dahling.  Simply everyone who's anyone in independent nonfiction cinema was there.  Packed to the gills, it was a great place to meet up with old friends and new from all over the world and toast another year of survival (barely) doing what we love.  (The Conference Room F party at the Sheraton hosted by the Winnebago boys was a very close runner-up.)

4.  Overall high point:  Getting to observe the first North American Good Pitch at the Toronto Documentary Forum.  Also more on this in a bit.

5.  Favorite pitch:  Resilient by Yael Melamede (producer) and Sean and Andrea Nix Fine (directors) presented a pitch seeking post-production funding and sponsors/partners for their feature film wherein Mariane Pearl guides the audience through the stories of four women's lives.

I tag, in turn, fellow Hot-Doc'ers (who should tag another five people to see if we can keep this sucker rolling) Erin Donovan, James McNally, Steve Hyde, Joel Heller and Charlie Phillips.

HOT DOCS 09: Up the Ass of the Beast; Or, Finding Love in the Most Unexpected Places

First off, welcome to the refreshed SIM:  did a little make-over and brought out my spring/summer look--light, breezy, sophisticated, easy on the eyes.  You can whistle if you want.

Before you get all smart-assy on me, no, I did not pose for that sculpture.  It's an extract from a photo I took on a hot summer's day in a park in Prague filled with weird and wonderful art work by local artists.  The piece is highly evocative of how I aspire to live my life:  naked* under the sun and a deep blue sky on a high roof with an unobstructed view, desired by those who also spend inordinate amounts of time daydreaming or going to see films, which pretty much amounts to the same thing, doesn't it?  (*Consider the word "naked" a metaphor, please; I only take my clothes off in public for cash or multi-colored bead necklaces.)  Designer and filmmaker, Eliane Lazzaris, did me a kindness, so obrigada minha cara menina.  On with the show: 

When you go to a big international documentary festival like Hot Docs, you notice certain trends that are engaging the entire documentary community.  Not just the little insular one we have here in New York, fabulous though it is, but the larger community out in the world interested in pushing this fascinating art form to its limits.  There are seemingly higher and higher stakes involved for doc makers, creatively, narratively, cinematically, idealogically.  What you have in Toronto, as well, (twice a year, yet!) is some interesting force fields coalescing when you bring what amounts to one of the most sophisticated film audiences in the world together with some of the best and brightest cutting-edge filmmakers, smart people engaged in crafting work that truly speaks to the zeitgeist.  Even our 22-year-old waitress at dinner one night rushed us along, telling us we needed to go see (Audience Award-winner) The Cove or Winnebago Man or Episode 3: Enjoy Poverty, or something equally as wonderful in just a half hour, so she'd better bring us our check straight away.  That did my heart good, let me tell you.

The parties and various industry gatherings, too, bring an international flavor to North America.  We live on giant land masses here; we tend to get a bit myopic about the rest of the world.  Hot Docs was where I first met friend, Massoud Bakhshi, filmmaker and director of the new Iran International Documentary Film Festival which I was privileged to attend last year.  Through that connection, I met Orwa Nyrabia, filmmaker and director of the new DOX BOX in Damascus, Syria, which I also had the privilege of attending in March because I re-met Orwa in Helsinki, Finland at the DocPoint festival where I was a guest this past January because of meeting festival coordinator Helena Mielonen in Tehran.  And like that.  This is not unusual since festivals are the places where unique and exciting collaborations emerge: between filmmakers, filmmakers and producers, programmers and artistic directors, funders and fundees, and other industry folk who work to keep nonfiction, or factual programming, alive and flourishing.  And then you have Mr. Sean Farnel, one of the most talented programmers out there who also rockets around the planet making discovery after discovery so that Hot Docs can keep providing the wealth of riches it's been known for for the past sixteen years.  (Farnel, pictured, announcing this year's fest line-up, courtesy James McNally and photographer, Jay Kerr.) 

So without further ado, in the next few posts, I'll talk about some of the films I saw there that left a particularly deep impression, starting with my two faves--two films that, upon first blush, seemingly have very little in common.  What they both do provide are some of the most fascinating threesomes I've come across in cinema.  The triangle is fast becoming my favorite geometrical shape; when something is "triangulated," both the fixed baseline, as well as the angles that radiate from it, form a pretty damned accurate survey of certain systems and  relationships.  Interestingly, one film takes place in the rural hinterlands of South Korea (I know next to nothing about South Korean cinema), the other in the dystopic urban nightmare of  Pyongyang, North Korea (and no one really knows about North Korean cinema, do they?) which has gone out into the world as a Danish film, but it is very much a North Korean one, as well, a chilling and fascinating glimpse of that clandestine place.  One film is presented as a touching pastoral fairytale but turns out to be pretty much wall-to-wall laughs; the other a seemingly Python-esque charade played for laughs manages to provide plenty of fiercely sobering moments due mostly to a brilliant script master-minded by its director.

The Red Chapel's shorthand log line, if it needed one, would probably be something along the lines of "The Yes Men do North Korea."  (Take a look at part of it here.)  Shown in the International Spectrum, aptly-named Danish director Mads Brügger's wild adventure takes us into the maw of Kim Jong-il's secret empire.  How these Danes got permission is anyone's guess but we'll chalk it up to kismet since this filmmaker does not squander a moment of his time there to explore and extrapolate upon the nature of this country that has cut its population off from the rest of the world while eating hundreds of thousands of its own through mind control, starvation, torture and life-long imprisonment.  In other countries, one can be labeled a dissident and still go home and have dinner with the kids.  Not in the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.  You're "disappeared" permanently.  Enough of what goes on has been leaked over the decades to know that to, not only get in there, but to get in there with cameras, is an impressive feat, indeed.   

The chilling brilliance of this film shows itself in its leadership on both sides of the fence.  On the official site of Denmark, there is an essay on the personality of the Danes by journalist Victor Andersen that says, "Common to all Danes is their tendency to take the ups and downs of life with a touch of irony, often self-irony. . . .  They tend to say the opposite of what they think, in keeping with the nature of [that] irony."  In other words, they could make great spies and get away with a hell of a lot in a place that doesn't know what irony is. 

However, it says that over the years, "there have also been traces of local insularity, snobbery and conformity.  It was best not to be different or odd."  So a Dane might feel a certain sympathy with the North Koreans, perhaps, conformists par excellence?  Brügger brings some friends with him, namely, two young Korean comedians, both raised from a young age in Denmark; they consider themselves Danish, not Korean.  They are there to stage a comedy revue for a select audience in the capitol.  One is a big strapping, tattooed young lad called Simon, the other an 18-year-old spastic with a severe central nervous system disorder which affects his physical movements and speech, making most people think that he's retarded when he's far from mentally deficient.  He finds himself in a place where children like him are given away or hidden from the rest of society, or as is intimated more than once, done away with completely.

He is the deepest thinker, the most intensely emotional, most adversely affected subject in this whole shebang, incessantly articulating why following an ironical conformist into a conformist society with no irony can be a bloody dangerous thing.  And so young Jacob turns out to be the steadfast baseline of this particular, oddly-shaped triangle.  While Brügger is unscrupulously giving the North Koreans a run for their money, Jacob is questioning the evil nature of his own leader, the man who brought him there to help perpetrate a fraud on a grand scale.  This is not a highly nuanced film for the most part; it is broad and slapstick in nature, delivering punch after comedic punch while exposing the underlying dis-ease of an oppressed people. 

To Brügger, who constantly compares current-day North Korea with Hitler's reign (the title references a communist spy cell that operated in Nazi Germany), the mad clapping and smiling and crying and puppeteering that go on like a mass case of Tourette's amongst its citizens connotes sheer terror, a terror these people live with day in, day out with no respite since everyone is watching everyone else for the slightest sign of unrest or unacceptable actions and thoughts.  His earnest wish that the local people accompany Simon singing the Oasis song "Wonderwall" is his own idea of not-so-subtle thought control:  "And all the roads we have to walk are winding / And all the lights that lead us there are blinding / There are many things that I would like to say to you / But I don't know how.  Because maybe / You're gonna be the one that saves me / And after all / You're my wonderwall."  Like the Yes Men and others like them, Brügger is a ferocious cultural insurgent, the camera his most potent weapon.  I'm anxious to see what land he'll infiltrate next.  I'd actually love to see him focus the lens on his own culture.  Wouldn't that be ironic?

The love triangle in Lee Chung-ryoul's Old Partner involves a man, his wife and the man's best friend, an ox that's worked beside him for forty years.  The first South Korean film to compete for the Grand Jury Prize in Documentary at the Sundance Film Festival, the film played to enthusiastic crowds in Toronto, as well.  It also happens to be the most popular documentary ever in its native land, creating a groundswell of a fan base, many of whom troop out in a daily touristic mass to the quiet, rural land of farmer Choi Won-gyoon (which is kind of horrifying, actually).  In this film, which also exhibited in the International Spectrum, Chung-ryoul captures the last year of the ox's life as it limps out the last days of its existence as a beast of burden alongside his master, also a beast of burden.  80-year-old Choi steadfastly and stubbornly tills his plot of land no differently than a farmer of centuries ago would have done (albeit without the beat-up radio tied to the ox's harness).  He and his wife have put nine children through school and university with sheer, backbreaking labor, ensuring, of course, that none of their offspring will be farmers.

The funniest moments occur mostly because the ox and the old man display such similar personality characteristics.  When a creature, human or otherwise, nears the end of its life, it's not unusual to find that it's become somewhat intractable, unwilling to veer from a proscribed and deeply circumscribed course, especially if that course has been pretty consistent for decades.  A certain fortitude is displayed which trumps physical limitations and in this mutually faithful partnership of animal and master, we see true kindred spirits.  Choi says more than once that the ox is "his karma."  The foil comes in the figure of Choi's wife, Lee Sam-soon, a perpetually complaining shrew of a woman who cannot for the life of her understand why they don't deep-six the ox and use more modern conveniences for farming like machinery and insecticide sprays.  Through all of this, daily life on the farm, intrepid visits to the small nearby city (by ox cart) to get checked by doctors (the old man's been diagnosed with cancer) and have their funeral portraits taken, Chung-ryoul creates a deeply personal portrait of a dying way of life in Korean culture. 

Crafting a beautiful screenplay to accompany his gorgeous cinematography, the film does falter at moments due to scenes that are awkwardly contrived (versus gracefully contrived).  They're funny as hell, but obviously set up for the laugh or to force a particular emotive response as when he shoots a close-up of a tear falling down the ox's face when Choi attempts to sell him at the market.  The thing is old; it has rheumy eyes that spill water regularly.  This is romantic cinema-making at its best with lingering shots filled with transcendent light that speak volumes about the silent bonds between ourselves and the natural world that can never be severed, even after one's mortal coil is shrugged off for greener pastures.

In my next post, Conference Session 4: What's Next for Film Festivals and the first North American Good Pitch at the Toronto Documentary Forum.

Interview: Alanis Obomsawin, Recipient of HOT DOCS' Outstanding Achievement Award

World-premiering her 26th film, Professor Norman Cornett--"Since when do we divorce the right answer from an honest answer?" at this year's Hot Docs (April 30 - May 10, 2009), Alanis Obomsawin is also being celebrated with a retrospective for a body of work that is truly staggering.  A member of the Abenaki Nation, she is one of Canada's most distinguished filmmakers, the list of her awards and honors a good five pages long.  For over forty years, she has directed documentaries at the National Film Board of Canada (NFB) chronicling the lives and struggles of First Nations people and the issues that affect the Canadian Aboriginals.  She has brought about social and political change and awareness through her films, but more importantly, she has been the emotional archivist for the voices of her people, listening and chronicling stories for decades.

Obomsawin is also a musician, singer, sculpter, painter, teacher, educator and storyteller.  She began making films in 1967 with Christmas at Moose Factory.  Other films include Incident at Restigouche (1984), documenting a violent clash when the  Quebec police force raids a Micmac reserve; Richard Cardinal: Cry from a Diary of a Métis Child (1986), an examination of an adolescent's suicide; and No Address (1988), a piece about the homeless in Montréal. 

In the 1960s, Obomsawin was making her living as a professional singer in New York City; in '67, NFB producers, Joe Koenig and Bob Verrall, saw her on a television show and invited her to come work with the Film Board as an adviser on a film they were producing on the Aboriginal population.  She's been making films for them ever since.  Among many other posts, she was an original board member of Studio 1, the NFB's Aboriginal media studio, and an adviser to the New Initiatives in Film, a Studio D program for women of color and First Nations.

An incredibly beautiful and vibrant 77-year-old, Obomsawin met with me this week at the NFB offices in downtown Toronto to talk about her wondrous career, but more importantly, about her favorite past time, that of listening--hours upon hours upon hours of listening--to people's stories.  In turn, she translates these stories into superb works of art.  Here's our conversation:

Still in Motion (SIM):  Looking back on your career, which now spans several decades—which is amazing. . .

Alanis Obomsawin (AO):  [laughing] Which makes me Grandma Moses, you mean?

SIM:  No, it makes you an incredible gift to the communities in which you work.  Can you tell me, at what point, as you started making films--developing your relationship with the NFB, as you developed your own cinematic voice--was there a particular moment where you recognized yourself as a filmmaker "of note"?  Was it a surprise to you when you discovered yet another way of telling stories this way, how powerful it was?  You have many other forms in which you express yourself artistically.  What inspires you about this particular art form?

AO:  For me, it’s the word—to really listen to people.  I never get tired of it.  I’m always so amazed when people tell me about their lives, especially if I’m talking to older people.  When I listen to someone that is older, I just look at the person and in my mind, there’s a question that I never say out loud, but people feel it.  That question is, “How did you survive?” 

Every story that I hear differs from one person to the next but I’m always so moved by the courage of people, how they have managed to go on.  Every time I sit down with someone who talks about his or her life, to me it’s a very sacred thing.  I love it.  So it’s even more the word than the image.  Images are very important and can be very beautiful but you see, I come from a place where you had worlds of imagination only—we didn’t have electricity or running water.  At night, we’d see by the oil lamps and people would start talking and telling stories.  Each of the people listening had pictured a different story with different images.  So I lived in my imagination; we all did.  This is why I take a lot of care with sound.  I will sit with someone and listen to him or her for hours before I come with the camera.  I don’t start filming right away; I don’t really like to do that.

SIM:  Do you feel like the presence of the camera might be intrusive in a way?

AO:  Distracting.  So by the time I’ve listened for a long time, and have had everything transcribed so I can read it closely, I can tell if I’ve misheard something or I feel like I really know the story.  Then I can go back with the camera.  There’s also the idea of developing this trust and intimacy between me and the person with whom I’m working.  I will never get tired of it.

SIM:  You’ve filmed many incidents that are shocking in nature due to some intense violence.  There’s an immediacy, no one knows what’s going to happen before it does.  And this is a vast departure from what we were just talking about—the luxury of sitting with someone for hours to listen to his or her stories.  Knowing that you’re going to go back and craft a particular story around these incidents, you can play with time, placing things in a certain context in terms of what it is you want to say to your audience about these incidents in juxtaposition to the stories your subjects tell you. 

AO:  I certainly don’t pretend to be a camera person although I have shot many things myself.  It’s a matter of taste, also—how you shoot something, where you place the camera, etc.  You insinuate your camera into the best position possible and you try to make it as beautiful as possible.  In the worst situations.

SIM:  Is it difficult to disengage emotionally when something terrible is happening in front of the camera?

AO:  I would be lying if I said I didn’t intensely feel what’s going on.  If we’re talking about something like [Kanehsatake: 270 Years of] Resistance, it’s a very particular place to be.  It’s often very dangerous and very nerve-wracking.  There’s screaming going on, all sorts of things.  So, yes, you feel everything.  You have to be very centered in terms of what you’re doing, the reason why you’re there in the first place.  At the same time, I don’t want to capture something at all costs.  I feel sometimes that there are things that shouldn’t be filmed.  So I don’t.  For instance, in Kanehsatake, there were situations where they [the Indians] were doing ceremonies in the morning just before going back behind the barricades.  I remember one particular time, there were lots of cameras there and there was a request that the cameras be shut off at a certain point.  So I told my cameraman to stop shooting.  But I noticed there were several people who kept shooting anyway, despite the request not to and you could see this gleam in their eye, “I got it.  I got it.”  I’m not like that.

SIM:  It’s somewhat predatory; this is how the paparazzi operate—they don’t care about the people they’re photographing.  In all of your films, there is this innate respect that comes through, in the way things are framed, the way stories are told.

Do you think your gender is advantageous at all?  In almost every one of your stories, you highlight the very specific role women play in this culture and in these situations. There is a distinct delineation that pertains to gender in the culture.  Each gender brings something specific to the table in a subtle way.  There is always this group of women taking on a very specific role.

AO:  I don’t really consider it in advance so much, but I do feel as I go along, no matter where I am, that a woman has a specific role for a very simple reason: she’s the one that has the babies, the life-giver.  In my mind and in my heart, there’s no power higher than that.  Because of this, women always have a very special place.  Men have another role but women need a special recognition of their presence.  I think like that, actually, in my everyday life.

SIM:  Your latest film about Norman Cornett, premiering here at Hot Docs this week, is a real departure in many ways for you.  But it’s a story that resonates with your usual themes and there’s a relationship between the two of you as colleagues and friends.  [Obomsawin was one of the many artists, politicians, writers, filmmakers, musicians, Cornett brought into his classroom at McGill University for his unorthodox religious studies course.  He was abruptly fired from the University with no explanation.] 

AO:  I first met Norman in 2001 and that was the first time I went to his class.  It was an extraordinary experience.  Every year since meeting him, I would visit him and his students two or three times a year, sometimes more depending on what was going on, until 2007.  Some friends of mine wanted to make a film about him and asked me to direct it.  I said yes because it gave me a chance to give something back to him for his incredible generosity.  It was my way of thanking him for that experience.

Long before I was making films, my fight, too, was always about education.  In those days, we had the residential [boarding] schools.  I attended those.  I spent a lot of time in the 60s fighting against these schools, trying to acquire inclusion in the classroom, pushing ourselves into the classroom—that’s what we were doing. That’s where it all starts.  So to see his way of teaching was very, very special to me, to care so much for students and make them feel like they don’t want to miss one class; that’s how exciting it is.  It’s a loss not to have him teach anymore.

SIM:  Has there been any progress in the case at all since his dismissal?  Or is he still out in the cold with no explanation, no real reparations or hopes of getting his post back?

AO:  He has still not accepted their negotiations.  [McGill offered Cornett a small amount of money in the hopes that he would quietly go away and not continue to prod the institution for an explanation for his dismissal.]  He’s got nothing.  The University has remained silent.  I wrote them two letters to invite them to speak to me and they never even acknowledged that.  They were signed for, we know that, but there was no answer.  I find that behavior very strange.  They could have responded in the negative by saying they didn’t want any part of the film but there’s just silence.  Professionally, that doesn’t look very good.

SIM:  It is a bit insidious.  It does make you wonder what in the world is going on there.  It highlights a very important issue in all of our institutions, this kind of stonewalling act.  In your other films, you show that there is this intense brutality that exists on the part of institutions that seem to feel they are immune from decent human behavior.  Instead of violence, in this case, you have this very quiet kind of brutality where you kill someone’s spirit, take away everything that’s precious to him.  Your way of handling this subject matter, obviously, had to be very different, but it still has a personal, human-scale way of chronicling a tragedy.  It’s still silencing someone who’s threatening the status quo.  Documenting that silence seems to be your life’s work, in a way.

AO:  It’s incredibly sad, isn’t it?  It’s worse than being unfair; you wonder how they do that, treat people in that way, to negate someone’s existence.

SIM:  You’ve constantly pushed against that negation with your films.  It goes beyond petitioning for “rights” to something more, the demand for recognition after decades of silencing.

AO:  Humiliating is the word.

SIM:  In the US, the Native American people have very similar stories to the First Nation people here in Canada.  The aboriginal people, in any culture, have experienced this over and over again.  This canon of work you’ve contributed to the culture: do you feel the weight of any kind of responsibility, of being the bridge between your people, those silenced voices, and the rest of society?  Do you feel a sense of satisfaction, frustration?

AO:  Simply, I feel it’s my duty to do what I do.  I have a great love for what I do.  For me, it’s always been about giving everything and doing it in the best way I know how, the way things look and sound.  I work a lot with stock footage and still photos and it can be difficult sometimes to make all that look great.  The challenge is to somehow, technically, arrive at something much better than what you were provided.  I’m extremely lucky to be at the National Film Board; they’re so helpful, especially when I come with terrible footage [laughing] and don’t know what to do with it.  But the help and care they give towards the end product is really wonderful.

SIM:  Well, I get the impression, as wonderful as this relationship is with the NFB, that if they weren’t in the picture you’d still be somehow crafting stories.

AO:  Oh yes.

SIM:  What other stories are out there that are particularly fascinating for you?  What stories haven’t you yet told that you’d like to?  It hardly seems like you’re tapped out in that regard.

AO:  No, I’m not dry yet [laughs].  I tell you, everything excites me.  Everybody has a story.  If you really listen to anybody, to someone’s life, it’s important.  Some journalist who writes for a very important publication, who’s “done” with subjects once she gets one or two proper sound bites and has her story, once asked me how I could sit for hours with people.  She told me she’d get so bored.  I, on the other hand, never leave.

SIM:  Not too many people really have the infinite patience to sit and listen; our culture isn’t really attuned to that kind of discipline anymore.  It does take an innate love of other human beings.

AO:  It’s a different world.  When you’re working on documentary, it’s a luxury, because you’re given the time, or you take the time.  Time is precious.  I don’t want to give the impression that journalists don’t do their job; it’s a different discipline, a different way of working, a different need.  I couldn’t work like that, however.

SIM:  There are many, many ways you express your creativity and your vision outside of filmmaking—through fine art, music.  You are truly a multi-disciplinary artist; no wonder Cornett brought you to his class.  Can you imagine any other life for yourself?  I have to tell you, you are the most peaceful, happy person I’ve come across in quite a while—you exude a quiet joy that’s really lovely.  Most of us are frenetic and striving and hopping up and down and waving like mad to be noticed and loved, frustrated a lot of the time in our desperation to be understood, to be heard.

AO:  I don’t know what the answer is, either.  All I can say is that I see beauty in everything.  For instance, I make toys for children.  I’ve been doing this for fifty years.  When I started, I couldn’t afford to buy any toys or any materials to make toys.  In my early career, I spent a lot of time and energy pushing for education and I would tour around to schools.  In one month, it wasn’t unusual for me to do about sixty concerts at all the residential schools that existed at that time.  I’d go to a classroom and storytell, going from class to class.  At recreation time, I’d go run around with the kids outside and show them Indian games.

I would ask the children to do some drawings about what they saw and heard.  Children have a very particular way they draw people—it’s wonderful.  I would take the drawing and make it bigger and make a toy, like a stuffed animal figure, and make it look exactly like the portrait a child had drawn.  I would make a bunch of them and I’d go to another reserve and take these toys with me.  At Christmastime, I would dispense these toys and then I would have that school do drawings and make toys from those and give them away at another school.  The children loved those toys; it was the same language, the same way of seeing the world—how they see the world.  I did that for years and still do that once in a while when I can find the time.  It’s so much fun.  The adults look at these toys and are just puzzled—an eye here, another one there [pointing to different areas of her face].  Honestly, they’re easier for me to make because I don’t have to bother with “realism” [laughing].

People used to give me their rags because I really couldn’t afford to even buy material; I was making a very small salary.  I would have piles of rags in my house.  One time, some people were over having a drink and I was sewing away making this black doll.  And someone pointed out a kitchen curtain with the rings still attached in a pile of rags and said they would make nice earrings.  She said, “Oh, that would make a nice Aunt Jemima.”  After they left, I looked at this doll and wondered why in the world she had to be “Aunt Jemima” just because she was black.  I embroidered the faces on these dolls and it took me a long time to do that.  But I took it all apart and cut off all the thread and started all over again.  I had this piece of white satin and made a beautiful white dress with a high neck and big puffy sleeves.  I made this fabulous dress and gave her a fabulous hairdo and put beads around her neck; she looked like the Queen of Africa [laughing].  Away with Aunt Jemima!

SIM:  Who received that doll?

AO:  I gave it to a little girl in my village; she was around ten years old.  Many years later, she was getting married and I went to the wedding.  Her grandmother asked me to come upstairs with her so she could show me something.  On the bed of that girl that was getting married, there was the doll.  It looked brand-new, the same as the day I had given it to her.  Nobody had been allowed to touch it.  Isn’t that fabulous?  She makes her bed everyday and she’s got that doll there centered right in the middle, in a place of honor.  I was so touched by that.

SIM:  I imagine that doll will be given to her own daughter one day, maybe.  That’s a nice story.  Does the work you do inform other work or do you consider them completely different manifestations of your creativity?

AO:  I feel that everything is connected.  It’s all for the same reason.  It’s for love; it’s for sharing.  The etchings I do are similar.  I did one exhibition that I called Mother of Many Children.  I have a film by that title, also.  I etched a lot of women with children from old photographs from different nations; there were about thirty of them.  It’s very time- consuming, very fine work, scratching on copper or zinc—I love doing it.  It’s good therapy.

SIM:  Who tends to inspire you?

AO:  It comes, generally, from the people I work with, their stories.  It’s what they talk about that inspires me.  They give so much of themselves, influencing social change.  They want their stories to influence or help someone else.  The generosity is unbelievable.  It amazes me.  It’s very rich to spend a life like that with these people.  And those stories are for those that are not here yet. 

It’s a very powerful place to be, in film, for many, many reasons.  You can influence the world.  And your work gets disseminated and travels out into the larger world without you and lives its own life, influencing and creating change all over the place.  It’s really incredible.  When I was touring and singing, I had to be there, obviously.  That was the most amazing thing to me when I started to make films.  I don’t have to be there, but the work is being done.

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Alanis Obomsawin will be honored tonight at 7:00 p.m. at the Hot Docs Awards Presentation at the Isabel Bader Theatre.  I will have news of award winners, film reviews and more from Hot Docs soon.

Smörgåsbord

A little bit of this, a little bit of that whilst I'm in the midst of Hot Docs in Toronto, fast becoming my favorite nonfiction film fest (although T/F has a special place in my heart): 

Last week, I experienced my first Tribeca Film Fest since moving to New York a bit less than two years ago (missed it last year since HotDocs overlapped) and I think it'll probably be my last unless I have a film exhibiting there or go as a spectator to catch a flick or two.  The filmmakers were, of course, thrilled to screen in New York and vie for the big cash prizes, but the whole thing left me rather cold as a journalist (the press office really needs a lot of work, folks) and rather ambivalent, truth be told, as an industry guest looking for great fare to program elsewhere.  But I gave it a fair shake in my wrap-up on IDA's e-zine which will be posted soon.  I also have a couple of reviews posted on Hammer to Nail if you care to take a gander--both films, Defamation (which opens DocAviv this week) and Antoine--are also playing up here in Toronto.  Also, look for my interview soon on Shooting People with Beadie Finzi, director of Only When I Dance, a Top-10 audience fave at its Tribeca premiere.

I'm currently working on the transcription of my wonderful interview with Alanis Obomsawin; my first stop yesterday morning was to meet with her at the National Film Board of Canada's (NFB) offices.  The 77-year-old Obomsawin is receiving Hot Docs' Outstanding Achievement Award this year for her decades-long career working in conjunction with the NFB to shine a spotlight on the stories of her people, the Abenaki Nation.  For over forty years, she has directed documentaries that chronicle the lives of the First Nations people.  There will be a retrospective of her films shown here this week, as well.  Thank you to the NFB's Melissa Than for facilitating this meeting.

Filmmaker and producer, Ron Mann, is also having a retrospective here, curated by New York-based filmmaker and writer, Astra Taylor.  Last year, Mann produced her fantastic Examined Life.  As usual, most of my festival coverage, interviews and film reviews will happen post-fest since I will be running from screening to screening every day this week (and some parties, too) to gorge on the best of international nonfiction--there is a wealth of riches here for the documentary film lover and this town is also full of people who adore going to the movies, with the long lines and packed cinemas any time of day or night to prove it.

In other news:  congratulations to AJ Schnack.  indieWIRE reports today that his new film Convention will world-premiere at this year's SILVERDOCS as its Centerpiece screening (June 15 - 22 in Silver Spring, MD).  Schnack led a superstar team of filmmakers as they captured last year's Democratic National Convention in Denver, Colorado.  Schnack was joined by Laura Poitras, Paul Taylor (pictured with Schnack), Julia Reichert, Steven Bognar, Daniel Junge, Nathan Truesdell and David Wilson to capture the experience in grand vérité style through the eyes of the convention's organizers, reporters, police force and other denizens of the city.  I was privileged to see a bit of this at True/False a couple of months ago and I'm very excited to see the finished film and listen to the accompanying talk with all the filmmakers in attendance at the fest in June. 

I'd also like to mention one more item before I go submerge myself in films again:  Greenhouse has just opened their submissions with a deadline of June 1.  Now in its fourth year, the Tel Aviv-based Greenhouse is a program for the development of documentary films crafted by Mediterranean filmmakers from Jordan, Algeria, the Palestinian Authority, Egypt, Morocco, Tunisia, Israel, Syria, Lebanon and Turkey.  The program hosts between ten and twelve projects a year and the selected filmmakers are invited to participate in a year-long program, which meets three times annually, to develop an international production file and project trailer which, in turn, are presented at a pitching forum for international commissioning editors, funders, producers and distributors.  Greenhouse founders, Sigal Yehuda, Yair Lev and Sarah Assouline have shown really stellar results in a very short amount of time and have gathered together some pretty high-profile partners.  To learn more about entry requirements and submission information, click here.

More coming soon from HotDocs.  And, James McNally, we will hook up one of these days!

Camden Film Fest and P.O.V. Host THE WAY WE GET BY's New York Début

Last night at Thom Powers' top-notch screening series, Stranger Than Fiction, Aron Gaudet's deeply moving, beautifully realized debut feature, The Way We Get By, was co-presented by the Camden International Film Festival.  The festival's co-founders, Leah Hurley and Ben Fowlie, got in on the action early by recognizing a jewel-in-the-rough and showed a work-in-progress screening at their nascent nonfiction fest in Maine last fall; they've been championing this Bangor-based story ever since.  The other co-host was PBS' P.O.V. which will be broadcasting the film's television premiere some time at the end of this year.  (Keep checking local listings and this blog for updates).  Despite the fact that the Tribeca Film Festival is currently in full swing, it was an STF sell-out, as usual, with the filmmakers on hand for a charming Q&A afterward, a drinks party and a dance party.

Gaudet and his producer (and, now, fiancée), Gita Pullapilly, both come from the world of local television news and spoke about the specific challenges and skills inherent in producing and directing a nonfiction feature.  This is one of those instances where the filmmaker enters into the story through a very personal connection (Gaudet's mother is one of the main subjects), and tells the story in an intimate and singular way.  But what he also manages to do is parse together  many key themes so engagingly and gracefully, making new and relevant discoveries about how a few citizens (people who by any other definition, including their own, are now marginal, and marginalized, members of society due to old age and infirmity) choose to move up and out of their own circumscribed lives to reach out to the young men and women still serving overseas in a largely unpopular war, hundreds of thousands of soldiers leaving and returning through the Bangor International Airport.  These seniors have remained on call, literally, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week for the past six years to greet and see off over one million US troops at the tiny local airport which happens to be a major military deployment hub. 

The Way We Get By offers a unique (and very quiet and unpolitical) look at the toll the Iraq war has been taking on the individual citizens and families that comprise this nation.  Through touch, a smile, an encouraging word (and Fireballs!), these seniors tell each and every soldier coming through the terminal how grateful they are for their sacrifice and service.

Moreover, the film also tells stories of what it's like to be old and lonely in this culture, the isolation and the feelings of uselessness and the emotional losses that come with old age.  We enter into the lives of 73-year-old Jerry Mundy, 75-year-old Joan Gaudet and, the subject that touched my heart most of all, 86-year-old Bill Knight--all brave and honest souls compelled to keep going directly because of the work they're doing.  With patience and sensitivity, Gaudet and Pullapilly allow their characters to help breathe new life into an issue we all think has been pretty much tapped out.  Gaudet presents these wonderful subjects, albeit a bit frayed and tired, with dignity and grace, all to a person containing a life-force that transcends everyday concerns to offer object lessons in how to be a human being.

The next stop on their festival circuit will be the Hot Docs festival in Toronto next week.  Don't miss the chance to see this film wherever and whenever you can. 

An Englishman in New York (and DC)

Last night at Thom Powers' Stranger Than Fiction spring season opener, director Geoffrey Smith (pictured) and his subject, Dr. Henry Marsh, were there to talk about their superb collaboration in making one of the top nonfiction films of '08, The English Surgeon.  Smith reported that the evening was "brilliant, just brilliant.  Packed house and the most amount of love and awe you can imagine.  We will definitely be having a week in NYC at some point.  John Vanco [GM of the IFC Center] wants it, he just has to find a slot, so I will keep you posted."

Smith and Marsh were also fêted at Sunday night's Cinema Eye Honors with two nominations for the film, Outstanding Achievement in Music Composition by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis, and Outstanding International Feature.  (Cave and Ellis will be releasing a two-CD compilation of their soundtrack music for The English Surgeon, The Proposition and The Assassination of Jesse James this summer.)

I was lucky enough to see the film at last year's Hot Docs in Toronto where it took the top international prize for Best Feature.  Here's what I wrote after seeing it there:

The first thing I viewed was Geoffrey Smith's The English Surgeon (the subject of this beautiful piece, the brave Dr. Henry Marsh, pictured, and one of his patients, Marian Dolishny, pictured with his beloved cat).  Winner of the Best International Feature Documentary at Hot Docs, this film's assured storytelling craft serves its magnificent subjects well.  Emotionally and visually rich, the film tells the story of Dr. Marsh, an esteemed neurosurgeon based in London, his dark humor tinged with an unrelenting sense of mission and the lusty joy of, as he describes it, "the bloodsport of brain surgery."  There is obviously a profound and deep respect between director Smith and his subjects and they offer up their humanity in all its raw and glorious aspects. 

Henry Marsh has been going to Kiev for over 15 years to offer what assistance he can to doctors working within an antiquated, crumbling medical establishment,  one that ends up killing more people than it aids or saves, particularly when it comes to brain surgery.  We learn that due to negligence, by the time most people come for evaluation, there is absolutely nothing that Marsh and his Russian colleague, the beleaguered Dr. Igor Kurilets, for whom Marsh is both a mentor and benefactor, can do, the scans portending the inevitable news that these people are, indeed, living on borrowed time.  The scenes where the doctors have to sit and tell the person sitting across from them that they only have a little while to live are devastating--quiet, intense, hopeless.  Refusing to give false hope, the doctors must deliver the worst news possible to a long line of people that wait outside their offices to hear their fate.

The scene where we get to witness, from start to finish, the brain surgery on the young and devout Marian is beautiful.  Described as "horrible" and "gruesome" by some, I watched this scene with awe.  It reminded me of the ear reconstruction scene in Manda Bala and the open heart surgery scene in All That Jazz--certainly not as stylized and operatic as those, but fascinating in its portrayal of a collaboration between doctor and patient.  As Marsh says, his patients help make him "brave."  Marsh feels it's essential for the success of the operation that Marian stay awake throughout the entire process (including the first drill into the skull), so Marian can communicate with his surgeons as they work to remove the massive tumor in his brain. We are privileged to sit and watch a small miracle happen before our eyes.  And, odd to say, there are many laughs in this scene, as well.

Marsh is haunted by one failed case, in particular, and in the climax of the film, accompanied by Kurilets, pays a visit to the mother of a young girl he tried to save several years ago.  She greets the two doctors with a houseful of relatives gathered around her for emotional support, and a table laden with food.  As they share a meal (no one can really eat anything), the doctor lets her know how devastated he still is that his efforts to save her daughter, Tanya, caused more damage to the already sick little girl, violating, in his mind, medicine's most precious oath--to do no harm.  I can't even think about that quietly powerful scene without welling up.   

Incredibly, Smith shot this over just two weeks in the winter of '07 and manages to tell a deeply moving story of pathos and redemption, every shot illustrating with delicacy and grace (and loads of humor), a portrait of a true humanitarian.  Nick Fraser, the editor of BBC Storyville and with Greg Sanderson, the executive producer of the film, says, "There are very, very few films I love quite as much as this one."  I loved it, too.

For those in DC, you're in luck this week:  there will be a special screening of The English Surgeon presented by SILVERDOCS this Thursday, April 2 at 7:00 p.m. with Geoffrey Smith in person at the AFI Silver Theatre.  Click here for more info and to buy tickets.

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.

Who Decides? A Declaration from Ari Folman

Today, I did a lot of subway riding for some reason.  So in the interests of traveling light and knowing I would need something to occupy my hours of commuting time (seriously, Sunday's a bitch), I took along the Fall issue of FILMMAKER Magazine.  Good decision.  It's chock-full of great stuff, particularly the interviews.  Here's my favorite, favorite thing I read in there today.

It's an extract from the interview Nick Dawson does with Waltz With Bashir director Ari Folman (his film has been nominated for best picture from the IDA Awards):

Dawson:  Why did you specifically conceive this as an animated documentary?  It seems that almost anybody else would not have tackled the story in this way.

Folman:  Well, frankly, it isn't important to me.  I'm kind of tired of film formats and if I would have declared this film five years ago as a fiction film, I would have raised the money much easier and I'd be more secure and I would have completed it a year ago, at least.  I don't know why I declared it an animated documentary, but I did.  I mean, who decides?  Is there a committee who decides when a specific film starts off being a documentary and turns into fiction, or the other way around?  I wouldn't know.  I just don't know what to say, and I don't care.  I mean, this is the film, okay?  You're the journalist--you decide.  If you decide that for you it's a fiction film, I'm happy for you.  If, for you, it is in the structure of documentary or what you define as documentary, I'll go with you as well.  I think it's great that you can choose.  Why should I choose?

Dawson:  When I was scribbling notes on the film, I called it a "recalled documentary."

Folman:  I mean, would it feel more convenient for you if it were a fiction film based on true stories?  I don't think so.

Dawson:  I don't feel there's one easy way to categorize this film, and I think that's a real strength.  This was obviously the way that you felt you needed to handle the material, so the label that other people put on it is not important to you.

Folman:  Totally.

Does anyone know if this man's single? 

Interview: Astra Taylor, Director EXAMINED LIFE

Born in Winnipeg, Manitoba and raised in Athens, Georgia, 29-year-old writer and filmmaker, Astra Taylor is a good case study for a life well-lived.  Unschooled until she was a preteen and raised by two independent thinkers to become one herself, Taylor currently occupies herself with wrangling high intellectual pursuits and philosophical theories into wonderful pieces of cinema.  Her non-traditional upbringing, or as she calls it, her  "super weirdo hippy background," stood her in good stead, providing a strong sense of confidence and an affirmation in her own abilities and artistic vision.

When she was just 23, Taylor made her first nonfiction feature about Slavoj Zizek, called Zizek!, a post-Marxist sociologist, philosopher and cultural critic, and all around wild man.  This film was the second feature-length project of the Documentary Campaign, a nonprofit organization that worked to combine progressive politics with artistic filmmaking.  The film premiered in '05 at Toronto and is distributed in North America by Zeitgeist Films. 

Wanting to make another film about philosophers, Taylor luckily met with producer Ron Mann, who as it turned out, had been wanting to make an anthology film about philosophers, too.  (As mom always said, "There's a lid for every pot.")  Examined Life, as I reported earlier after seeing the film at the Woodstock festival, is an exceedingly well-conceived, visually stunning piece, linking together some of the most brilliant creative thinkers in modern society, taking what is usually reserved for the hallowed halls of academe and putting it out on the streets for public consumption.  It's a very rich feast of ideas, theories and social and ethical quandaries told in ten-minute vignettes as we accompany each of these philosophers on a walk through very concrete places--parks, lakes, bridges, city streets, airports and yes, even a garbage dump.  Most of the subjects that appear in Examined Life (Cornel West, Avital Ronell, Peter Singer, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Martha Nussbaum, Michael Hardt, Slavoj Zizek and Judith Butler) are people Taylor has worked with or studied under and to whom she feels a strong connection.  Ultimately, it was a graduate seminar led by Avital Ronell and the late Jacques Derrida that inspired her to try and take philosophy out of the university and into quotidian life.

On a lovely fall morning, Taylor and I met, appropriately, in Tompkins Square Park in the East Village for our chat.  She was accompanied by her sister, Sunaura, who also appears in the film in the Judith Butler segment, and is a staggeringly talented artist in her own right.  (Click here to see some of Sunny's work.)  As life went by, we sat on a park bench and talked about her unique upbringing, her discovery of expressing herself through making movies, and what and who inspires her as an artist and a human being:

Still in Motion (SIM):  The subject matter you’re choosing to use in the medium of cinema is really interesting, quite a departure from the kinds of stories to which we’ve become accustomed.  What was the genesis of that idea, to talk to modern-day philosophers about the world in which we’re living, of trying to cinematically tell philosophical stories?

Astra Taylor (AT):  I’ve made two films that are explicitly about philosophy.  I don’t see myself doing films in the future that are as explicit, but are more, perhaps, implicitly philosophical.  I always see myself grappling with ideas, whether it’s in my work as a writer of nonfiction or as a filmmaker. It wasn’t so much a passion for cinema that drove me to pursue filmmaking.  Instead, it’s more of a curiosity about ideology and culture and ideas that has always been with me.  As a child, I had this one intense creative pursuit and it was one of the happiest phases of my life.  I had a magazine called Kids for Animal Rights and the Environment (KARE). I published it every other month for three years.  I put so much love and work into this thing so, in a way, I’m just trying to recreate that experience as an adult.

SIM:  How old were you when you started it?

AT:  I was eleven.  I didn’t go to school so I got to work on it everyday and I was such a stickler for the whole presentation.  It was the beginning of desktop publishing programs.  My whole purpose for doing this magazine was to reveal the fact that children were innate vegetarians, were innately kind beings and that we were systematically misled by propaganda from adults.  Old MacDonald’s happy farm and the cows that gave us milk—it was just lies that the adults were perpetrating against us. I really thought that I was leading this kid revolution and that the magazine would cause a generation of people to overthrow the meat-eating adults.  By the time I was twelve, I discovered that there might be some flaws in my theory.  And then, out of loneliness, I finally went to public school; I’d been unschooled up until that point. When I got to public school, I became friends with kids who weren’t from my immediate super weirdo hippy background.

SIM:  Were you home-schooled with just your siblings?

AT:  There were, maybe, three other families we hung out with. This was in Athens, Georgia so most of the homeschoolers were conservative Christians, which we were resolutely not.  When I enrolled in school, I had this amazing friendship with this girl who ate meat.  How could I be friends with someone who eats meat?  I had this little crisis of moral relativism and a good deal of confusion about what’s right and what’s wrong.  I can’t overstate the profound nature of that crisis for me as a kid, and my dedication to this animal rights trip.  I didn’t know the word “ideology,” but I think that’s what it was.  How is there this ideology that makes it okay to kill and hunt and farm animals?  Animal liberation was something I believed in so strongly, and I was surrounded by people who didn’t share my belief system at all.  I was raised in such an intense bubble of affirmation.

SIM:  Did you want to go running back to that bubble, or was it too late?

AT:  No, I didn’t want to be sheltered.  It was just that I became fascinated by belief systems and how my beliefs do—or do not—correspond to those of most people. I think that’s really my motivating question.  I have these strong values and strong principles, but don’t see them reflected everywhere in the world. Maybe my beliefs aren’t correct.  For example, when it comes to animal rights, many smart, intelligent people don’t agree with me at all.

SIM:  Did that undermine your confidence in these strict ideologies?  Some might become yet even more fundamentalist in their beliefs in reaction to that.

AT:  It certainly made me less strident, I think.  Anyway, all this was the reason why I eventually got into theory and philosophy when I was a teenager, exploring ideology, exploring the history of ideas.  Why do people think what they think?

SIM:  Who were the first philosophers you discovered on your own that resonated with you in a profound way?

AT:  It was [Gilles] Deleuze and [Félix] Guattari’s, A Thousand Plateaus.  I think I was seventeen when I found this book.  It’s really a surrealist, Dada-esque work of philosophy.  It’s this creative, inventive hodgepodge that I thought was just the most mysterious, delightful thing I’d ever seen and in it were all these references to Marx and Beckett and James Joyce and Kafka and Lacan and Freud.  And I would pursue all of those references doggedly.  This book was really responsible for opening up a whole intellectual world.  Years afterward, I came upon this interview with Deleuze who said that his ideal reader was an ignorant sixteen year old for whom this is all new.  I was that reader.  It just so happened that the first American to ever write a book on Deleuze and Guattari worked at the University of Georgia at Athens and he was teaching a seminar; so I got to take a semester-long course with all these Ph.D. students just studying A Thousand Plateaus.  I was in heaven. At that point, I was on the path to graduate school and I went to the New School in New York to do theory.  I soon wearied of it, you know?

SIM:  Wearied of academia?

AT:  Yeah, deeply.  I’d gone to Brown University for a year right out of high school.  I thought it was horrible.  The place wasn’t for the smartest kids in the world; it was for the kids who most wanted to get A’s.  I was disappointed.  I thought I was going to find this intellectual community or something and I just didn’t fit in.  Long story short, I got an MA in Liberal Studies from the New School, but my final semester was spent dabbling in documentary.

SIM:  You’re not a very passive person or student, either. You’re demanding a lot when you seek and search.  You go to the mountain.  A lot of students feel like just because they’re physically there, sitting in a chair in a classroom, that that’s somehow enough to call it learning.

AT:  They do—they hand off their agency when they walk through the door in a way that I was never taught to do.  I was never indoctrinated into that.  Just last week when I was guest lecturing that really struck me, the passivity of otherwise intelligent people in the classroom.  How do you learn when you’re passive?

SIM:  What kinds of backgrounds do your parents have?

AT:  My dad’s a professor of medicinal chemistry.  I don’t think he got his Bachelor of Science, though, until he was 31.  He spent years as an undergraduate, partially dodging the draft but also pursuing a degree in classical music and playing in rock bands. He’s one of those wunderkinds that started college at fourteen but didn’t finish until he was 31. My mom was raised in this extremely counter-cultural environment in the 60s.  She didn’t go past seventh grade.  She did some community college studying theater and video and stuff like that.  They have very unusual backgrounds.  For me, especially when I was studying high theory in New York City, I was interested in the material but it felt so disconnected, so rarefied.  At the same time, there is still something valuable, intrinsic and wonderful about the subject matter. I just didn’t relate to the institution, the academy. It wasn’t where I wanted to be. During that time, I was also working at Verso Books, an independent publishing house, where I was publicizing these nonfiction books.  It was there that I started to see some examples of people who were public intellectuals, independent writers who didn’t have teaching gigs or writers who didn’t really have formal training in the field in which they were working.  These people became role models.

SIM:  I think that’s actually a very particular talent, to translate one’s thoughts and mental wanderings into something that you can share with other people.  We hope our teachers have that ability, but a lot really don’t.  Watching your films, I sense a generosity there to really want to share in that way.

AT:  I hope so.  My whole aspiration in both films was to build this inquisitive, affirmative momentum that carries on after the movie is seen.  The whole purpose is to take these intellectual pursuits off the pedestal.  I’m not trying to “impress” the audience at all.  In fact, I’m kind of trying to do the opposite.  People go into these films with such fear, certain expectations about how turgid and stuffy the subject matter’s going to be.  I’m trying to take it down a few notches but I also want to be inspiring at the same time, welcoming and inviting people into the process of critical thinking.  That’s really what I’m trying to do.

SIM:  When you were working on the conception of the film and its structure and the way it would play out on screen, what was the most important thing to you in terms of communicating with your audience?

AT:  I’m always thinking about audience.  This is not a work of self-expression coming from a place of personal conflict or desire.  I love those types of works of art.  I wish I could do that but that’s not my personality.  Certainly, I’m trying to communicate and inspire people to question things.  The audience is always there for me.  I’m constantly trying to balance the different audiences I imagine seeing the film.  For example, I want it to be accessible to the 16 year old who hasn’t been exposed to this stuff before.  But I also need to invite Ph.D.s, with a lot of expertise, into the film, as well.  Striking a balance for these different viewers is really first and foremost.

SIM:  With Examined Life, in particular, do you feel like you succeeded in doing that?

AT:  I had a really great moment just the other day.  I showed the film in Columbia, Missouri and this punk rock nine year old little kid watched the whole movie by himself without his mom and dad [laughs].  I thought, “Wow, maybe I did it.”  I’ve had lots of teenagers reflect on it and they pick up on exactly the sequences I thought would resonate with them—Peter Singer and Michael Hardt.  Revolution and consumerism!  I really thought of those two sections as being for younger viewers.

SIM:  That’s interesting because we don’t really think about that when we leave that stage of our lives behind.  How we’re taught to relate to the world and then, in turn, how we teach our kids to do that, is all about what we imbibe, what we buy, what we wear.  That’s a form of victimization that no one really talks about in the public sphere too often.

AT:  When you do meet socially aware young people, they’ve been raised in this neo-liberal society, a culture with a lot of libertarian sympathies, so you often hear them say, “fuck the government,” “fuck the Man,” and move towards this, sort of, anarchist perspective.  I think the revolution bit speaks to that.  I thought of my own sixteen year old sister when I was editing that section, who just joined Food Not Bombs and was discovering those kinds of politics for herself for the first time.  It also made me reflect back on myself, too.  And consumerism is definitely a central issue for youth.  They’re constantly being marketed to and are trying to find or express their identities through what they purchase.  Those two sections were the ones I assumed would resonate with young people the most.  (Peter Singer, pictured.)

SIM:  What de-radicalizes us, do you think?

AT:  This is probably the bias of my background, but I think it’s at least partly formal education or what has been called “compulsory” education.  Again, people don’t necessarily feel active in the learning process; instead, they’re like receptacles being filled with information, facts and figures.  There’s such an emphasis on learning by rote, on memorization, on testing, as opposed to experience-based learning or learning for its own sake. I’m always struck by the irony that I’m making films that are about Ph.D.s, people who are at the pinnacle of the academic system.  They’ve mastered the university universe, many of them teaching at Ivy League schools. My intention is to really bring them out into the everyday world, which I think is important since we live in such an anti-intellectual culture.

SIM:  Yes, we do.  This kind of fare that you’re offering is a tricky proposition.  You do have to be a bit clandestine about it, don’t you?  You also offer something visually quite rich.  The film is beautiful to look at and the aural and visual aspects play off one another in a really satisfying way.  You’ve taken advantage of how powerful cinema can be in reflecting and parsing these notions of who we are as human beings and all those funky questions we have all the time, passive folk excepted.

AT:  I think that’s why I’ve been so happy to discover this line of work. There was a period where I thought I was going to be a painter.  Then I realized that I couldn’t put any messages in my paintings that I found compelling enough; it wasn’t literal enough for me.  But months and months and hours and hours of my life I’ve spent painting and dabbling in music, too.  When I discovered documentary filmmaking, I was amazed. I got to frame things and think about color and think about sound.  One of the greatest lessons from filmmaking, for me, is learning about sound design.  I now experience the world in a new way—as a soundscape.

SIM:  Sound is where emotion lies—it’s through the ear, not through the eye.

AT:  I had this huge epiphany one afternoon when I worked on the first video project in which I was involved.  The sound was terrible. I realized that the picture can be bad and that’s okay; but if the sound is bad, your movie’s ruined.  I’ve read that with sight we gaze upon the world, but with sound, we’re in the world.  Blindness or deafness must disconnect a person in very different ways.  So yeah, working in film, you get to be a visual artist, a sound artist, an intellectual provocateur—it’s a great field.  I’m surprised everyone else isn’t trying his or her hand at this, too.

SIM:  Actually, everyone I know is trying!  If you do spend time in Brooklyn, you will find that everyone, and their mom, is pursuing filmmaking. Not too many passive folks you run into, that’s for sure.  I think it’s quite wonderful.

AT:  I do, too.  It delights so many of our senses.  Cinema is a really special medium.  But you’re right.  Most doc makers are not passive; neither are philosophers.
 
SIM:  These philosophers that you chose for this film, all to a person are people one would want to hang out with.

AT:  I’m glad you think so.  I feel that way, too.

SIM:  There’s such vibrancy, such an emphatic way of communicating in the way they all speak to us; it’s extremely dynamic and exciting.  Some even almost dramatize their thoughts.  How much directing did you have to do to get those kinds of “performances”?

AT:  I’m glad you use the word “dramatize.”  I had a nice moment with Martha Nussbaum where we were talking about her background as an actress when she was an undergraduate and how drama and philosophy aren’t at odds.  We’re trying to dramatize the human condition and I, too, find that really exciting. Performing for a good cause, making ideas engaging—to me, that’s a high calling.  I don’t assume that seriousness equals this brittle, bland form of communication.  Especially when you’re making a movie, you want to capture and convey emotion, movement, energy, beauty, excitement.  I think my subjects really understood this and so the directing part was great fun.  I’m often asked what my criteria for casting philosophers were and there was a whole constellation of concerns I was trying to navigate.  But, first and foremost, they had to be enthusiastic about the process and be willing to perform.  They also all had to be of a certain status as far as their careers were concerned; they all had to be people who focused on ethics and social responsibility, which are the main themes of the film, in a way, the heart of the film.  They had to be a mix of genders and races.  I did not want to make a philosophy film that consisted only of all old, white men.  I’m not here to reaffirm that as the image of the great intellectual.  I’m tired of that image.

SIM:  We all are; even the old, white guys are tired of it, I think.

AT:  There was affirmative action happening in the best possible way in my casting.  That was the case with my crew, as well, which was very diverse.  My producer is a black woman [Lea Marin], my cameraman is a Vietnamese immigrant [John M. Tran], my sound guy is half-Japanese and half-Indian [Sanjay Mehta] and our camera assistant was a white guy.

So, yeah, what was on someone’s CV was a factor.  But, there was also the personal, intuitive thing of asking myself if I connected with their work.  With almost every subject, there was some point in my life where they influenced or provoked me. I wagered that they would, in turn, have an influence on the audience.  Their work had to be intellectually rigorous, but it also had to be impactful.  The intellectual world isn’t disconnected from the emotional world, the embodied world.  I’m trying to embody ideas, to show that they emerge from human beings who are in the world, who move through space, who feel sad, hopeful, angry.  Again, the most important piece of criteria is what they answered when I asked them if they wanted to do this and if they thought it would be fun.  If they weren’t into the performative aspect of it, into going on an adventure, then it wasn’t going to work.

SIM:  It was, indeed, a fun journey because of that energy coming off the screen.  I think I was surprised at all the moments of humor; so yes, it was a good time.  I sensed the audience members at Woodstock were really enjoying themselves.  It was like being at a really cool dinner party where one could sit and eavesdrop on all these scintillating conversations with brilliant people.  It was a very life-affirming treatment.

AT:  I’m happy about that because I really don’t think that’s the assumption when people hear that it’s a film about philosophy.  They either think all the philosophers are dead and that I’m doing a historical piece, or they ask me how I’m going to keep the audience awake.  They expect a stilted, boring, stagnant, suffocating film.  Otherwise vibrant, engaged, curious, smart people respond like this is just the most deadly concept for a movie they’ve ever encountered.

SIM:  How do you overcome that and convince people to come see the film?

AT:  There is a whole subculture of people that live and breathe this sort of stuff.  There’s a captive audience; that’s a start.  But obviously, I’d like to reach beyond them, so I’m thinking about marketing and it’s tricky.  I’m trying to present these materials and the film itself as something that is the opposite of pretentious, to make it inviting, accessible, playful, entertaining.  That was my intention all along.  After all, I find this entertaining; it’s how I entertain myself.  I don’t think it’s such a huge leap that others might enjoy it.  However, there’s such intimidation and such a culture of fear around intellectual matters.  We’re so obsessed with credentials and that goes back to the whole academic trip.  I get asked that all the time: where did you go to school?  Which I hear as, who gave you permission to talk about this?  That is not how I was brought up to think.  Nobody gave me permission to be a filmmaker.  I decided one day to become a filmmaker with total hubris.  I’ve watched enough movies in my life to try and make one.

SIM:  For the first time, I’m living in a place where calling yourself an artist or a creative is not a snotty or pretentious thing to call yourself.  It can actually be a viable way you can construct a life and do important work and be satisfied in that work in a very profound way.  And that’s not to say it isn’t an exceedingly uncomfortable existence to lead, with your ass out in the wind all the time, no IRA in sight, or health insurance, for that matter.

AT:  Last week, I went to three different film classes as a guest lecturer.  To suddenly be on the other side of the podium, if you will, really struck me and got me thinking about that sanctioning from society and the credentialing process and all that.  It really bothers me.  I’m on the other side and I’ve been sanctioned.  I’ve been given permission.  I’ve been credentialed.  That happened to me when the film got to a film festival.  When my first film premiered at Toronto, I was recognized as a “filmmaker.”  This is something that Judith Butler and other theorists have written about, the speech act, the declaration.  When the authority says to you that “you are x,” you officially become “x.” Or another way we too often judge someone’s legitimacy is whether or not they make money doing their art.  I feel this reluctance, this ambivalence, a bit of reticence about that because I think you make films for yourself and if nobody accepts your films into a festival, you’re still a filmmaker, you’re still an art maker.  It’s about the act of doing it.

I’m certainly not against mentorship.  I’ve been very blessed with always having mentors.  I’m very curious about other people, very good at approaching people who are doing things I’m fascinated by.  It’s why I’m comfortable working with the philosophers.  I’ve always had amazing mentors and I’ve always pursued people for feedback, whom I feel could give me good advice.  So I don’t think we need to be totally self-made and autonomous and independent.  It’s just that we don’t need to get so hung up about going through the “proper” training and the “proper” credentialing to legitimize ourselves.

SIM:  Let’s talk about your active and passive presence in the film. 

AT:  That’s something I feel very ambivalent about.

SIM:  Well, I wanted to talk to you about that because your presence in the film could be described as ambivalent.  It was clear to me that you were trying to work out where, physically, you placed yourself in these scenarios.  It changed from segment to segment.  Sometimes we don’t see you at all or we see a sliver of you, a hand, your back.  Sometimes we hear you as part of some dialogue with your subject and sometimes we don’t hear you at all.  That was interesting to watch, you grappling with those decisions.  It was a physical representation of how we move through the world, how comfortable or uncomfortable we are in insinuating ourselves into any given situation.  Sometimes we know that we should hang on the periphery, that that’s somehow important, although we don’t know why, but we know that whatever is going to happen is probably going to be best served by us being “outside” the action.  There was a really interesting dynamic in the segments with Cornel West driving around in the car. I know that happened out of necessity for the most part, but his eye line looking directly into the rear view mirror was really interesting to me [West sits in the back seat directly behind the driver’s seat].  He engages you through that sliver of reflective glass and so the camera had to insinuate itself in a particular way in relation to him, but also in relation to you, the “hidden driver.”

AT:  This might seen a bit of a banal answer, but basically, the whole issue of my presence in these segments goes back to Zizek!, my first film.  I envisioned that as a film in which I was not present at all, partly because of the whole self-reflective filmmaking trip, showing the crew, etc.  It’s all been done before and it’s a dicey proposition.  And the film wasn’t about me.  But we were in production with Slavoj and I kept trying to arrange scenarios where we’d encounter people, where he would have to interact with someone to show what it is he does when he meets someone, to act the way he acts all the time wherever he happens to be.  These encounters were not manifesting in the way I’d hoped.  There’s one scene where a fan approaches him for an autograph but that was about it. In the editing room, we cut something together in which I wasn’t present and it felt really claustrophobic.  So my editor and I made the decision to include me a bit. We did so much filming, so there were some things I was just in because we would be conversing about something and we happened to like that moment and wanted to keep it in the film.

But yes, I was ambivalent and self-conscious.  And then, that self-consciousness was affirmed when the New York Times reviewed it.  In that review, the critic [AO Scott] basically calls me “a groupie,” and that became the meme that went through every review.  You’ve got a 24 year old woman making a film about an older man, and the assumption is that she wants to sleep with that man, which is an insane assumption.

SIM:  The whole Svengali thing where you're under someone's "spell."

AT:  Yeah.  There are lots of young men who make reverential portraits of other human beings and are never accused of the same thing.  The Amazon.com review says it’s a reversal of the love story, Harold and Maude.  What?  I love Harold and Maude as much as the next person, but come on.  However, I became really self-conscious after the film came out, even though I wasn’t at all self-conscious when I was making it.  When I began to propose my new movie, [Examined Life] I said that these are all going to be straight-up monologues, no presence of the director.  That would have been just fine; however, in my conversations with Avital Ronell (pictured with Taylor) leading up to the shoot, she basically told me that she wasn’t doing it unless I was on camera and we have a filmed conversation.  I asked her why.  She said, well, we’re going to talk about the fact that we’re filming because that’s what we’ll be doing and it just doesn’t make sense to me, it doesn’t fit my philosophy, to deny that you’re present there with me.  I said, well, Avital, I’ll tell you what: I feel very vulnerable and insecure doing this because of what happened with the last project. She said, too bad; I thought it was just fine that you were in your last film; don’t listen to all that.

Also, after Judith Butler invited my sister, Sunaura, to be in her section, Sunny told me that she wasn’t going to be in my film unless, at some point, I was in the film, as well. So I was kind of cornered!  In each scenario, I had a different position, sometimes due to geography or sometimes because of how I conceived of the specific sequence. In the Peter Singer segment, he’s speaking directly at the camera.  I’m not there.  It didn’t feel as though I should be there.  With Cornel West,  I had instructed the cameraman not to film me.  Now, I didn’t know what Cornel West would be like once that camera was on, but he was so intensely making eye contact into that rear view mirror just as you pointed out.  He was looking into my eyes with such urgency that the cameraman couldn’t help going back and forth between us, as you would do in a conversation. He told me that he just had no choice but to shoot me, that it was too bad that I told him not to [laughs].  Ultimately, I’m happy with it, mostly because I’m driving my 1990 Volvo and it shows how we were working.  We didn’t have the money to rent a town car for the evening.  That’s why he’s sweating; I don’t have AC.

SIM:  There is a real robust physicality in all the segments in various ways.  I think of the constant sound of the squeak the oars make as Hardt rows around the lake in Central Park.  And in the garbage dump with Zizek, you almost want to plug your nose; there’s a visceral quality to that, too.

AT:  Thoughts are visceral.  The motivations for thinking are often visceral ones, for example, when our body responds to what’s happening in the world and we’re overcome by grief or empathy or joy.  Deep feelings inspire us to think seriously about things.  This common perception of philosophy as something that just happens in the brain, as something that’s cold or calculated and emotionless, doesn’t make sense to me.

SIM:  Again, that speaks really well to your point of wanting to be as far away from the ivory tower way of approaching these great thinkers.

AT:  I do love the ivory tower approach in terms of seriousness, diligence, research, care and discipline.  I love all that.  I just don’t think those traits are exclusive to the ivory tower.  Now I see my presence in the film as still somewhat anonymous when I watch it and hopefully kind of low key.  Not “Astra’s having this great conversation and she’s so smart talking to these philosophers!” Instead, I am the inquisitive presence, interjecting here and there, raising a few down to earth questions.  I really tried not to be overbearing but sometimes there’s a tangent and it doesn’t make sense unless some sort of set-up or line of inquiry is established.  The only person to ask the question was me.  Thus, I’m in the film!

SIM:  I think you struck a good balance—as a viewer, I want to see and hear you sometimes; you’re our conduit into these worlds, our scout leader, if you will.  We want to know who’s driving the car; we want to see who West is speaking to.

AT:  We watched the first ten minutes in one of the classes in which I spoke last night and then when I came on screen, I had that uncomfortable feeling again, wanting to defend myself and say that I’m not that narcissistic; I’m not in the whole film!  But, then again, even if I’m not in it every minute, the whole film is me in that it’s a rather subjective film in terms of who I cast and in the way in which I approach them.  It’s a very gentle movie because I’m a gentle person.  I had certain ground rules.  I didn’t want to create any atmosphere of infighting or having them attack one another or directly debating one another.  There’s a lot of implicit debate happening and different perspectives, but it’s pretty subtle or understated. Philosophy is known for its argumentation and smack-downs, believe me.  It can be a brutal field.  But that stuff’s not in Examined Life (pictured, Taylor with Zizek).

SIM:  What inspires you cinematically?

AT:  The very first film I ever saw that resonated with me in the sense of me possibly doing something was Agnès Varda’s The Gleaners and I.  It occurred to me that I didn’t know the term “essay film.”  I had never come across anything like that in school or in life.  I walked out of the theater and thought, wow, you can write with a movie.  I always assumed I was going to be a writer, that that was my path.  Writing with a movie was such a cool idea; it’s like a book but with moving images. So she’s been a huge influence even though I was really disappointed by her latest movie (Les Plages d'Agnès).  I thought it was vain. She was constantly reminding us about how great she is, which is something we already know.  We’re at her movie. But it doesn’t matter.  She made The Gleaners and I, and I love Vagabond and Cleo From 5 to 7—I really love her movies.

Another filmmaker who’s actually had a big impact was Ross McElwee, the king of the personal documentary.  In Time Indefinite, he merges the personal and the philosophical so well and with such wonderful humor.  I have to say Examined Life would not exist without Bright Leaves.  There’s a scene where this rabid film theorist pushes him [McElwee] around in a wheelchair and screams at him that interviews should not be conducted while sitting down; you have to get out and move, cinema must move!  That caused a light bulb to go off in my mind.  I also love Manufacturing Consent, the Noam Chomsky film, because that was something that showed me that these intellectual subjects could be really fun and animated without being pedantic.

But, I’m not really an avid movie watcher.  I’m more of a reader.  I covet my ignorance as far as filmmaking is concerned.  I think sometimes you can study too much; you can study too hard and be overwhelmed by influences and other people’s techniques.  There’s something about approaching a project with nothing but my own inventiveness that’s really key for me.  But sometimes I feel a little ignorant at these film festivals.  Everyone’s talking about things I’m not really clued in about.  I feel dumb.

SIM:  I would wager to guess a lot of filmmakers experience that at festivals.  I’ve heard similar sentiments from a lot of first-timers.  It’s a bit of stage fright, maybe, and you’re getting a lot of attention (one hopes) in a very concentrated way—it can be overwhelming.

AT:  We all have imposter syndrome.

SIM:  What other films do you see yourself making?

AT:  I was just talking about this with Sunny yesterday.  She’s at a similar point in her painting.  I’m not sure what the content of my next film is but I can imagine its form.  I always approach things like this.  Before making films, I had this feeling of the kind of path I should be on—this kind of intellectual path but without a university.  I had this feeling that I wanted to create a specific sort of space for myself in which I could live a creative life of the mind, and I’ve kind of succeeded at that. Right now, I have this vague sense that I want to make a film that’s about ideas but with lots of emotion, without a conventional storyline.  I can sort of taste the direction I want to go in, but I really don’t know exactly what it is.  I’m also at a point where I’m being approached to do director-for-hire type projects that could be quite big by my current standards. I want to be able to feel confident enough to say no to that.  Even if my next film is very small, it should be the one I want to make.  These are not easy decisions.

SIM:  Those kinds of pressures can be confusing.  You feel like you might want to grasp those opportunities now since they’re being offered.  Maybe that won’t come around again, who knows?

AT:  It’s total insecurity.  You have to be realistic.  I’m a very pragmatic person.  I want to make movies and have a budget and a crew and all of that.  But I don’t want to make movies so badly that I would ever make anything I’m not totally connected to.  My desire isn’t to be a filmmaker, per se.  It’s a medium to explore a sensibility.  If it’s not the best medium, then I’ll do something else. 

Going back to influences and the notion of whom I really want to be when I grow up: the person I really admire, as far as the form and content and productivity of his work, is John Berger.  I’d like to be a John Berger in the sense of his literary pursuits, his beautiful nonfiction books that are basically documentaries on the page.  I just watched Parting Shots from Animals [a film from 1980 based on Berger’s essays].  What a multifarious, unique and earnest body of work he’s produced.  I’m so envious of it.  He does it with such sincerity.  He can use this direct address to the camera and you just go with him.  I watched about five of his films the other day and I was having the nicest conversation with him in my mind.  I just loved it.  If I can give people something remotely analogous to that, I would be so happy.

SIM:  He fully engages you.  I love that phenomenon when you are convinced that the person you’re listening to and watching is speaking directly to you; it’s so personal.  You know that if you sat in a room together, there’d be a connection.  Those that are going to appreciate the kind of work you do are going to take it in in a very personal way.

AT:  Right. I mean if you’re not willing to go with John on this trip he’s offering to you, you’ll just ignore it.  I’m sure there are people for whom his work is just completely irrelevant and odd and some would exclaim, “That’s not a movie!  Nothing happens!”  But if you’re there and you’re submitting yourself to it, it’s really delightful.  He expects a certain level of seriousness and commitment and engagement from his viewer and I really like that.  You should expect the best from your audience.

SIM:  Again, we’re talking about the importance of a non-passive audience; you need an actively engaged viewer for your film to be successful.  I personally like when I have to work a bit and ponder things while they’re happening.  It can be kind of exhausting but you’re so much the richer for the experience so you can’t complain too much.  Those of us who create things rely upon that willingness to participate in our vision.  We’re not making car commercials here.

AT:  You want to start a conversation.  That’s why it’s amazing to have people come up and share a flash of insight or how they might disagree with something someone said in my film.  Moving beyond working with philosophers, for me, the question might be will I assume a more active role in terms of presenting the theories that fascinate me instead of having these proxies presenting them? When my parents watched my film they thought it was amazing.  They saw that I had gathered all of these philosophers together talking about all the things that have mattered to me since I was five years old!  Still, John Berger is certainly the person with the career I’m most intrigued by.  Again, I’m surprised that there aren’t a million people trying to do what he’s done.  How can there just be one?

SIM:  Maybe most of us don’t think it’s possible to do what he does, otherwise there might be more. 

AT:  Or we assume that there’s no audience when there actually is.  Berger’s making these videos which he calls “television programmes,” that commissioning editors and producers and, even people on the street, would probably tell you are a terrible idea.  Typically, people in this line of work are obsessed with story and character development and all these things that are great, but we’ve shown that human beings can do them a million times over.  Why not try something different?

SIM:  When you and Ron pitched this at Hot Docs, how did it go over?

AT:  Oh my god, it was a disaster.  I meant to tell people this story last night.  I was trying to tell the class stories of my embarrassments and failures just to kind of keep it real a bit.  Not that I’ve been so successful really.  It’s just that I think it’s good to encourage people to be tenacious.

SIM:  Did you originally pitch Ron?

AT:  I had this proposal that I just hid in my desk assuming nobody was going to go for this.  It was just an ensemble piece with philosophers; I hadn’t devised the walking concept yet.  I met Ron for coffee and he said that he’d been wanting to do an anthology film about philosophers for a long time.  And I said, oh really?  Me, too.  And I emailed him my paragraph and he said that we were on the same wavelength; let’s go!  

So we took off together and TVO (TVOntario) came on board, which was awesome.  Then we signed up for the Hot Docs pitching forum.  I was the only person out of about 30 people who had not even begun production.  So I had no footage to show which put me at a distinct disadvantage.  It just bombed, went over like a lead weight.  I was told by one person that people in the Netherlands weren’t into "this sort of thing.”  One guy literally attacked me for my attraction to these “ponderous academics!!!”  He wanted to know how I could even think about doing this.  What could possibly attract me to philosophy, was what he wanted to know. And he said all this in the most antagonistic way in front of 500 people.  It was a really negative experience. For the remaining three days of the festival, all kinds of people (all 500, seemingly) were coming up and patting me on the back, telling me, “Oh, so sorry, philosophy girl. That was brutal.”

In the end, I was lucky because I didn’t really need any other pre-sales because TVO, a public broadcaster in Canada, a channel that really takes risks and trusts its viewers, had signed on.  It would have been a real disaster if I had desperately needed the support of the commissioning editors that were seated around the table.
 
SIM:  Well, there’s more to life than the fabulous pitch.  There’s no guarantee a commissioned piece is going to be any good either; it’s just that you have a ton of people standing by to pummel it into some sort of watchable piece, if need be.

AT:  I felt participating in the pitching forum was a useful experience.  But will all this make it easier for me to do a similar project in the future?  I don’t know.  We don’t know where the economy is going.  We don’t know where documentary is going. The filmmakers seemed to like my pitch, though. To them, I was pitching this unmarketable, uncompromising film that didn’t fit into the conventional television box. But the commissioning editors, obviously, have a strong idea of what their audience wants to see. And I just picture John Berger.  His ideas would also bomb in that context.  Yet, I think they’re brilliant.  He’s found an enormous audience.  So I’m not sure anyone really knows what audiences do, or do not, want to see, after all.

SIM:  Well, regardless, it’s a beautiful gift to be able to give yourself the opportunity to realize something that’s imbued with so much meaning for you.  Even if you never make a film again, you made a very distinctive piece that only Astra Taylor could have made—two, actually.  To me, that’s what’s so amazing about nonfiction filmmaking.  You don’t really ever have to have much else but that seed, that idea, of the story you want to tell. And life brings it to you in very organic and serendipitous ways and it gets made.  To a person, every filmmaker that’s completed a film speaks to that phenomenon and their awareness that that was what was occurring.  That does not exist in any other kind of cinema, not in that way.

AT:  I would agree.  I was thinking about serendipity in the midst of trying to give more concrete advice to these filmmakers in the classes I visited.  Being open and making connections is everything.  That’s what it’s like when you’re shooting your documentary; you’re actively looking for those magical moments.  You’re directing and you’ve got your vision and you know what you want.  But at the same time, you’re waiting for something to happen because it would make it even better.  So much of it is that innate gut feeling and tapping into that.  It’s not something you can mastermind and control.  I’ve never made a fiction film, but I would imagine once you’ve gone through your creative process writing your script, then you’re actualizing it. It’s about control.  Documentary film is not like that, as far as I can tell.

SIM:  Or the control comes much later in the process.

AT:  Those can be horrible moments when you think you might have gone down the wrong path and you’ve wasted precious time.  Or you’re shooting and you know you’re never going to use it but you just keep going in the hopes that it’ll get better.  I quite like that.  The lack of control can be terrifying and anxiety provoking, but that’s what’s so much fun about it.  Who wants to know what the day’s going to look like?  It does cause me a lot of stress, though.  I’m a worrier.  But if I didn’t take things so seriously, I don’t think I’d do anything.  Part of that anxiety is because you know you want to do a good job.  You want something ineffable to go right.  So much of it, too, is luck, getting to do this professionally, finding the resources and support, meeting people who will help you.  That stuff is a little murkier.

Making something that’s so singular and personal and not being so overly concerned about how much money you raise or how well it does, I think it’s very important to keep that in mind.  I do see people with their careers going, and getting more and more frustrated at how difficult it is to find support or reach an audience.  That’s something that I’m thinking about as the future looms.  If you’re making work that is unusual and quirky then you kind of have to be prepared to have a very small audience.  It’s about managing expectations.  I often think about who my heroes were when I was younger and how few books they sold, how few albums they sold, how they truly fared in real life.  It’s so much better to resist the common expectation that every film you make has to be bigger and better and gain a wider audience. When you make this kind of work, it’s just as hard every time.  But, of course, it’s totally worth it.

Los Angeles Has Pomegranates! and Gogol Bordello

Massoud Bakhshi's wonderful nonfiction film, Tehran Has No More Pomegranates!, is having a limited theatrical engagement in Los Angeles, a rare opportunity to see this remarkable, beautifully realized and engaging history of Tehran shot on 35mm.  Written, directed and produced by Bakhshi, the film was made over the course of five years.  We follow its director and his crew on their ambitious mission to make a film about the unwieldy, chaotic city they call home.

With much humor and sarcasm, they find frustration, at every turn, in getting their film made and they explain to their overseers at the Documentary Film Center why this project cannot, ultimately, be completed.  They decide amongst themselves to explore the city's past in order to give the Tehran of the present day better context.  What ensues is a comedic narrative about the city's transformation from a small, but sophisticated, village into a place of increasing urban decay, pollution (having just returned from there, I can vouch for the horrific air quality), inadequate housing,  stratification of a once-homogeneous society and, of course, the fatal destiny of the city's poetic symbol of the pomegranate fruit.  (According to the Koran, they grow in the gardens of paradise and the prophet, Mohammed, is said to have encouraged his followers to eat pomegranates to ward off envy and hatred.)

For 68 minutes, one is flooded with rare and beautiful archival footage from the past 150 years, unconventional photography, mock interviews that are really hilarious, and a wondrous and cacophonous soundtrack, most of it incredibly nostalgic for Tehranis.  Variety says that it is "an imaginative and engaging history of Tehran that uses a petulant barbed humor to deliver a steady stream of irony about this drastically transformed society."  I think the huge population of Iranian Americans in Los Angeles (both those born there and here) will appreciate and adore this film.  You can click here to watch the opening sequence of the film narrated by Nosrat Karimi and featuring music by Mohsen Namjoo.  You can also read my in-depth interview with the film's director here.

The four screenings will be on November 5 and 6 (next Wednesday and Thursday) at 7:00 p.m. and 9:00 p.m. each evening at The Landmark Theater in Westwood Village.  Click here for more info or to purchase tickets online.

Another film which I had a chance to view recently, and really liked, is having its North American debut, also in LA, at the AFI International Film Festival this week, playing there on the 1st and 5th of November.  The star subject of Gogol Bordello Non-Stop, Eugene Hütz, is very much in the spotlight right now, currently starring in Madonna's new flick, Filth and Wisdom, now playing at New York City's IFC Center.   Margarita Jimeno, Non-Stop's director, editor and shooter, gives us an up-close-and-personal experience of the genesis and growth of this now world-famous band of gypsy punks: musicians and performance artists ranging in age from 25 to 50, its members hailing from many diverse places and cultures.  Following Hütz over the course of several years starting in 2001, she captures the popular groundswell of the raucous party atmosphere that the band serves up wherever it plays, from its early days in the Russian disco scene of lower Manhattan to the tireless global tours on which it embarks, truly going non-stop, "instigating creative hell and attacking people's passivity," in the words of its dynamic founder.  Go to the AFI fest site's film guide for more details on the screenings.

An American in Tehran

Just winged in from Iran last night on my '08 Poverty Jet Set tour.  It's hard to believe that Tehran is just a bit over 6,000 miles from New York because it feels like the other end of the world.  So I'm jet-lagged and am finding writing about my experience there attending the incredible 2nd annual Cinema Vérité Iran International Documentary Film Festival almost as overwhelming as the actual trip turned out to be.  Suffice to say, that it was a distinct privilege, as an American, to get to visit the Islamic Republic of Iran.  Like the United States of America, it is rife with contradictions, has incredible beauty and diversity in its people and its land, and contains gazillions of human beings just trying to live happy, productive, meaningful lives while jockeying for their place in a very chaotic and trying world thanks to traditionalist governments (that's the most diplomatic word I can come up with right now).  It ain't easy.  (For the record, I do have several rolls of film that are now being developed.  I am still that dweeb that shoots film stills instead of digital; I know it's antiquated, but that's the way it is, so you'll just have to be patient.)

I could do a whole essay just on experiencing Iran as a woman--and I probably will, but will save that for another time.  I have major stories.  In the next couple of posts, I will talk about the festival itself, the films, the special guests that attended, the people I spent time with, new friends and discovered talents, and will share part of a post-mortem conversation I had with festival director, Massoud Bakhshi, and a few others to access how it went, the issues and problems as well as the triumphs and accomplishments, and a look forward to next year and years to come.  It was a loose advisory panel, but it was very exciting to be a part of a nascent international film event that will, no doubt, become hugely significant on the world stage.  They are strong out of the gate and mean to go the distance.  In Bakhshi's words, "The festival is here to answer all the demand that exists in this country."

"This country" has many stories to tell and they are telling them in floods of films--not all of them up to snuff in terms of quality, to be sure.  Due to the country's imposed isolation, the filmmakers rely on the dribs and drabs that come in through the veil of censorship (or those that are able to leave the country and return).  So their sense of what makes good cinema is sort of akin to "naive" art. And like d'art naif, it has a fierce but clumsy beauty and a very distinct sense of the world that doesn't easily gibe with, or translate into, what is considered great cinema.  I, for one, appreciate that enormously when so much of what we see and taste and smell and hear is generic garbage.  Because of this dearth of "information" (and we know how dubious that can be), they use their imagination, their emotional intensity, their creativity and their wondrous humor to tell their stories.  It may be sloppy sometimes, but it's so alive.  A gallery owner I was introduced to said to us, "Oppression does wonders for the arts and literature."  (The cover of this year's film catalog, pictured.)

What was really interesting is that the gentlemen that were being feted this year (Richard Leacock, Peter Wintonick and Jorgen Leth--all of whom could save the world with their charm), the invited guests, and the special strands of Finnish and Polish and American films and other programs were also not your run-of-the-mill fare.  It was a very peculiar mélange, a type I've never quite experienced before.  It was really weird and wonderful.  And I felt very much at home.  (Despite nearly choking to death on the pollution of Tehran; let's get with the emissions standards, people!).

And the brilliant James Longley is there filming his next project.  He arrived the day after we did having finally been granted his visa (which he had expected to get seven months ago).  We chatted a bit at a party and he also appeared at the cinemas a couple of days later; they had slipped in his films for exhibition at the last minute, a wonderful treat for the festival attendees which reached tens of thousands in number over the course of the five days--all local to Tehran and its environs.

This festival has astounding statistics:  it's received 1,300 national applications since its inception and the Documentary and Experimental Film Center (DEFC), the folks who put on the festival, co-finance and co-produce a lot of these films (300 documentaries a year!) with other local independent film companies.  And they are truly independent since a lot are not state-funded.  This is an option they themselves choose, so they're ready to say what they want to say and there are consequences for that.  These films that get made may still not be able to publicly exhibit in Iran.  That's the price one pays--your own countrymen don't get to see your wares in a theater or on TV (sound familiar??); however, there is an enormous DVD market, both above- and below ground, and a very large and very hungry audience.  On the plus side, the negative labs are subsidized by the state.  And while the government does have its hand in absolutely everything, it is invested in the film industry financially and makes it possible for someone like Bakhshi, who wanted to shoot his film, Tehran Has No More Pomegranates! in 35mm, to do so for about $100K.

There are 200 theaters in Tehran.  (That's a lot; but until you've been there, you cannot imagine the size of this city.  I come from Los Angeles.  I know from big, unwieldy cities with urban growth challenges.  But this city is the Godzilla of cities.  You have to be tough to hang in that burg.)  But another similar situation with which the film industry there deals, as do we, is the content/distribution quandary.  (The DEFC is also a major distributor.)  How to get it out there; how to get it seen once it makes it out there.  And what to do with it after it's been publicly exhibited.  On the DVD black market there, one can buy both Iranian, American and other foreign fare for a buck.  A "legal" DVD is still only three to four dollars.  But the major, major difference between here and there is that a cinema ticket there is about $1.20.  One can actually afford to go to the movies!  It's actually encouraged!!  Is someone paying attention?  Maybe it's time to bridge the gap between what it's costing to make movies these days and what it costs to see one, eh?  And "free" really shouldn't be an option, in my opinion.  We pay for the crappy PEOPLE magazine at the checkout; we can certainly pay for a good flick, even on the Internet.

There are a lot of self-organized festivals in Iran from very small, specifically-themed ones to larger, regional ones, but the Cinema Vérité festival is the only international festival in the country.  They experienced a 30% increase in international submissions from last year, receiving close to a thousand films from abroad, mostly from Europe and South America.  For the last three years, Bakhshi has been staging an "images from the east" strand at the festival in Sao Paulo, laying some expert groundwork for international exchange.  They've also started a doc fund that encourages Iranian filmmakers to go outside the country first before coming to shill for funding in their own country--that's truly revolutionary, I think.  Bakhshi really wants to open things up, including the average Iranian artist's scope of things.  He also courted the amazing Nisi Masa group, and for the first time, a festival outside of Europe had a wonderful daily magazine with interviews, person-on-the-street photos and comments, reviews and festival highlights.  Impressed?  We were.

Okay, now for the drawbacks:  because many of the Iranian-made films come sliding in at the last minute with no regard to a submission deadline, a lot that were exhibited in the cinemas hadn't had a chance to be subtitled.  That's a problem if you truly want to court an international audience.  The other issue is, when they are subtitled, the idioms used and other language boo-boos sometimes make them nearly incomprehensible or garner laughs when something distinctly unfunny is happening on the screen.

The viewing schedule was packed to the gills.  Tehranis are used to glut, but for visitors, it was untenable to try and get everything in.  (Admittedly, this was due to just sheer exhaustion and confusion.)  This is fairly normal for a festival where you're working, and those that traverse them regularly know this.  So we lucky few can retreat to a viewing library.  This is another area that will need a lot of organization and work.  The viewing library only contained DEFC-produced fare and even then, a lot was not available.  It was particularly important to at least have all of the national competition films.  Again, I think this was just due to the time crunch they faced getting a festival of this magnitude up on its legs.  But, all in all, it was a challenge to see films for visitors or non-Farsi speaking people. 

The cinema complex was always packed and there was a lot of foot traffic on all three levels.  However, the cinema space itself could be used to much better effect.  There were just gobs of people everywhere with no sense of organization or where to go to ask for what you needed, whether you were a filmmaker looking to meet a particular producer or film executive, or a press person wanting to chat with a particular filmmaker.  They did their best by having this absolutely amazing team of coordinators helping to connect people, but if this group hadn't been so sharp and on it (Bakhshi admitted this was an issue last year), it would have been utter chaos with missed opportunities for meetings and other important encounters one relies on having at an event like this.  There weren't even any parties with filmmakers.  The guests were fed, watered and squired around like we were royalty which was fab, but we never really got to mingle en masse with filmmakers and this was a shame.  We came there to meet them and they came there to meet us.  There should be more of a meet market approach, the kind that Heather Croall is praised with creating at Sheffield. 

The space where the actual market was could have been better conceived.  It was a bit too exclusionary and a very static and unwieldy space to navigate, even though it was housed in a beautiful gallery conveniently across the street from the cinemas. 

Having said all that, the tribute sessions and panels were very well-attended with Maestro Wintonick giving a five-hour session to a small group of filmmakers (that's including translation time, but still!).  Everyone worked hard, audience included, to make this event all it could be.  It was quite easy to connect once you figured out who you wanted to connect with--it just took a bit of time, that's all.  But a bit more organization and forethought will come with experience, I've no doubt about that.

In my next post, I'd like to share a 100-second film by an Iranian woman who made her extraordinary piece for $110 (and impressed the hell out of me with her sales skills), and to also talk about another (already accomplished) Iranian filmmaker that many of us are certain has a long and solid career in front of him for as long as he desires.  These and a few others will be coming to our shores soon, inshallah.  More in a bit.

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.

Interview: Massoud Bakhshi, Director TEHRAN HAS NO MORE POMEGRANATES!

Filmmaker, Massoud Bakhshi, grew up in the city of Tehran, the capital of Iran.  Born in 1972, Bakhshi's formative years, unfortunately, collided with a very rough time in his country's history.  In September of 1978, demonstrations against the Shah led to riots in this sprawling city at the foot of the Alborz mountain range and martial law was installed in the wake of the ensuing revolution.  From 1980 to 1988, Iran and Iraq were at war with one another and the ancient, beautiful city was the recipient of repeated Scud missile attacks and air strikes against random residential and industrial targets, resulting in thousands of civilian casualties.  Millions of refugees flooded Tehran and today, the city contains a mix of various ethnic and religious minorities, just like any other large city in the world.

Bakhshi spent about seven years making this tour-de-force experimental film, an ironic, imaginative and engaging melange of mixed media, a passionate (and very humorous) ode to his hometown.  Tehran Has No More Pomegranates! clips along and, in just a bit over an hour, we are taken on a wild journey at breakneck speed through the sea changes this capital city has experienced throughout its history.  The film has played in festivals all over the world and the filmmaker has received many accolades in Iran this past year, including Best Director at the 11th House of Cinema Film Festival, Best Director at the 25th Fajr International Film Festival, the Avini Prize for Best Documentary of the Year (established by the Experimental and Documentary Film Center to commemorate the martyr, Morteza Avini, the writer and documentarian who chronicled the Iran-Iraq war), and the Audience Award at the Cinema Verite International Documentary Film Festival.

I met Bakhshi in Toronto at Hot Docs where his film was showing as part of the festival's Spotlight on Iran program.  Along with producer, Michael Burns, and IDFA programmer, Rada Sesic, he also served on the jury for the Canadian feature competitions.  As the festival was wrapping up, I was lucky enough to grab some time to chat with him about his wonderful film, Iran's rich cinematic legacy, and our personal takes on our respective cultures:

Still in Motion (SIM) :  You’ve made a very  rich cinematic piece, something, I think, that will become part of the essential archive about your native city.  It's a piece in which you've used all the tools in your arsenal to make one of the most original and innovative films about a city that I’ve seen in a while. 

At this point, your film has played for Western audiences at various festivals and been very well-received by both spectators and critics.  Did you have any presuppositions about how the film would be perceived?  Six, seven years is a lot of time to invest in one project.  What are your thoughts now that it has exhibited at festivals and is about to go into movie theaters here [Canada] and in the US?

Massoud Bakhshi (MB):  Honestly, I never really thought of Western audiences at the beginning of this project.  At the beginning, I only had this idea to make a film about Tehran, for the people of Tehran.  My directive to myself was to put a mirror up to the people of Tehran to see themselves and the world in which they’re living.  If you are from Tehran and you’re living there, you have this advantage to travel to all the big cities around the world.  Suddenly, you start to compare your city with these other cities.  When you’re living in Tehran, in this time and in this present situation, it’s very important to know in which part of the world you’re living and the importance of that part of the world today.  Tehran is the capital of Iran and Iran is located in the heart of the Middle East, which is somehow a very important region in this time in which we’re living.  Tehran is also the capital of one of the oldest civilizations in the world.  The contradictions, things that are clearly opposing themselves, to me, somehow, are clearly captured in this film. That was the first feeling I had towards this city, its contradictions. 

Then, there is this language of cinema, the fabulous thing of art, you know?  You have to make something for the universal audience, not only for yourself.  Generally speaking, art is for human beings, out of the realm of race or nationality.  I have a problem with the notion of nationality, honestly.  I think that human beings, generally speaking, need to free themselves of all of this nationalism, which is, by the way, a Western notion that came to the East in the 18th century.  It’s only been about 200 years that we’ve been talking about “my” country, “your” country.  Before, we were living in a bigger world.  In the East, what linked us together—someone like me, someone from Turkey, someone from Afghanistan, someone from Turkistan—was the bigger notion of Islam.  That’s something really nice, because at the heart of this religion, there is no prejudice or discrimination.  The Iranian people accept this way and have done for 1,400 years.

To answer your question, I have to say that from the beginning I wanted to make a film for the Tehrani people.  But when I came to the editing stage, I understood that I have to make it in a delicate way, for it to be, somehow, more understandable for a Western audience.

SIM:  What were your solutions to accomplish that?

MB:  All of the successful efforts to do this were in the editing.  I worked on the edit for more than two years—that’s a long time for a documentary film.  I cut it in different steps, making it shorter and shorter, compressing,  condensing.  But, at the same time, I wanted to keep the heart of the reality of it, the heart of the story in it.  The first version was something like 90 minutes, a "feature-length."  At the end, I didn’t really care about television or theater, or however it was going to exhibit.

SIM:  You didn’t let that dictate the length.

MB:  No.  I have problems with this kind of thinking, to cut a film or have it at a length to serve a better distribution ideal.  I don’t make films to be sold; I spend anything I have and put seven, eight years of my life into it, so I don’t care if there is somebody that won’t buy the film because it’s too long, too short.  It’s the length it should be. 

So I cut it shorter, to 75 minutes, after about three weeks of very hard work, working with Ali Mohammad Ghasemi, one of the best new filmmakers in Iran right now.  I executive produced his first film, which was presented in Venice three years ago, a fabulous film called Writing on the Earth [2006].  When we finished his film, we came back to my film, and in three weeks, we accomplished the fine cut.  I know for the Western audience right now watching this version, there might be some points or things that they just won’t get, as an Iranian filmgoer would.  Things that are easily understandable to an Iranian stem mostly from the sarcasm and the different nuances, the metaphoric theme of the film.

But for me, everything I know about American society is through its cinema, its film history.  Everything I know about Berlin, I don’t know from having traveled there several times.  It’s because I watched and loved and criticized and reviewed, more than I can count, the films about that place—the Golden Era of German cinema.  I’ve learned lots of things about history, about sociology, about psychology, about anything, through film.  To understand Iranian films and, especially my film, which is very Iranian, people have to study, to do a little work to get closer to the film, the world of the filmmaker, the soul of the film, to understand it.

I know that film is considered as an entertainment.  But for us, and the difficult world we’re living in, it’s not only entertainment.  It offers something much more.  Filmmaking for the young filmmakers in Iran is not only about making films; it’s a way of self-expression.  This is very important.

SIM:  That self-expression carries responsibility with it.  That’s what I’m hearing you saying.

MB:  Yes, exactly.  I felt really responsible to my generation to show the images of the past and present of Tehran and allow them to compare and to come to personal conclusions, everybody for him- or herself.  That’s why I use lots of old footage and present images of modern Tehran together, to provide a visual field to do a quick comparison and, at the same time, to think about this comparison.

SIM:  I love the still portraits of the people—it’s used to such a good and unique affect, those static shots of the people who live in the city.  Those portraits convey a tremendous amount with no “action,” no words.  And the amusing way you take these very quick popular polls of what the random members of the population of the city think about certain things is really great.  In what profound ways do you think Western audiences would miss something essential that you’re trying to say in the film that would be obvious and easy to understand to an Iranian who lives in Tehran?

MB:  There are lots of small jokes in the film that might escape people.  There's also the music.  It’s very nostalgic for the Iranian people; they are living it.  That’s the main difference, I think.  That’s the soul of the film.  Surely, you still get something from the film—you have this chance to know more about the history, the development of the city during different eras, during the Shah’s time, and during the revolution, etc., but Iranians live it.  They get something a bit more out of the humor, this sarcastic, self-deprecating tone.  There are so many of those cues; we worked really hard on those kinds of details.

SIM:  Like any good city symphony, it’s an ode, of sorts, to not only the place, but to the population that calls it home.  The film is in that tradition.

MB:  Exactly.  For example, at the end of the film, there is this shocking earthquake coming and lots of people in Iran are embarrassed.  The film has a humorous, funny tone throughout, but at the end, it gets serious.  Reporting the earthquake at the end of the film, we use this funny music and so we’re still joking about the English rats and this kind of stuff.  Obviously, this is something serious, but part of the edict was to express it in a funny way, to continue to be funny even in the midst of tragedy.  And, you know, that’s the only solution you have when you’re living in such a country.  Life is not easy.  You have to joke; you have to play with it to make it bearable.  It’s not bearable otherwise.  You have to make it tolerable.

SIM:  In your opinion, what is intolerable right now about living in Tehran?

MB:  It’s intolerable in the sense of urban things.  It’s a very urban observation, as well as an environmental one.  I think the intolerable things in the film itself we talk about are the pollution, the sewage, urban problems, the disaster of urban “planning” for a big city.

SIM:  I come from Los Angeles, so I know from botched urban planning!

MB:  Filmmakers such as Scorsese portray this so well in films about New York, after Robert Moses implemented all these vast changes in service to the development of New York City in the 50s, and before.  Something is lost that is more than the identity of the city in this “progress.”  New York is obviously getting more and more modern in its development, but something is lost for the people living in those streets of Brooklyn or the different districts of Manhattan.  There was kind of a collective identity and collective memory, which is getting lost.  There is a neighborhood that one is really attached to and then there’s a highway running through it and so the neighborhood is no more.  It’s a destruction of memory.  That’s the horrible thing, you know?

The old architecture of Iran is the only common thing.  When you go downtown, to the center of Tehran, the south part, you still have the memory, the smell of the past.  The pomegranate has to be more than a symbol of something—it represents all of the perfumes of the past, the good things about the family, the city, the architecture, human relationships.  It’s all getting lost day by day in this modern, mechanical way of life.  We call ourselves a modern people living in a modern city but it’s not really true.  We’re losing a collective identity.  My film passes through certain ages, particular eras with their particular governments in place, but it expresses a more general, visceral feeling of the loss of that collective memory.

I can really sympathize with Baudelaire in Fleurs du Mal when he’s talking about his intimate feeling for Paris under its fast development, the creation of these big boulevards, the streetcars starting to bring the food, the crowds in the city.  He, as a poet, as an artist, needs to have a more intimate, close, personal and, maybe, private relationship with his city.  There have been many works of art coming out of these feelings.  It’s probably something very difficult to explain.  My film is a simple documentary; I don’t want it to be compared with Baudelaire or the films of Scorsese.  But in the whole process in the making of the film, I really seriously studied this idea of modernity and modernization, which are two different things, and sometimes the ideas of these things are misunderstood by people, the people who modernize a country. Especially when the governors or the state directors think that if they modernize a country, things will get better.  That was the big mistake of the Shah.  He thought he could make Tehran something like Paris or London.  The idea of globalization—the idea that everyone has to move in the same direction, or think in the same way.  It’s ridiculous.  You can’t make, for instance, African people conform and behave in the same way, or have the same attitude towards things, as the American people.  It’s the same for Asian people.  It’s important to keep things in a particular tradition.  There is real suffering about this—things are getting lost.

SIM:  I think it’s a danger in any society.  I come from a place that colonizes with missionary zeal right now in the name of democracy.  The idea of going into a place and changing someone’s religion or to change someone’s idea of God or change someone’s relationship with their own spirituality is evil.  It may come from good intentions, I suppose, but in essence, more is destroyed than is created.  That’s always scared me a bit, that notion, that presumption on the part of one nation in relation to another.  I never really saw the point.  Have those people’s lives really changed for the better in any way?  Have they been enriched in any way?  I’m not talking about money, either.  Do they even understand what’s going on?  I don’t even understand how that happens, to tell you the truth.  It’s always been a mystery to me, this notion that someone can convince someone else to just drop their heritage or the idea of who they are and their place in the world like so much excess baggage.  References like the ones you make in Pomegranates, come from cinema, from the arts, from music.  The politicians aren’t preserving, the governments aren’t preserving anything.

You’re out in the world at large, constantly traveling; you’ve lived in different places for a time.  For young Iranian, Arab and Afgani filmmakers, that talent that’s coming up right now, what is their stance on all this?  Do they feel disenfranchised in any way in terms of where they place themselves in their own society?

MB:  The hard situations in which they’re living have lots of disadvantages.  But they do have the ability to study more about their role in their own lives and to understand the roots of the problems that exist.

SIM:  How have young Iranians responded to your film?

MB:  As I said, this is something, somehow, very obvious for them.  Here, people may need to study or think about the film, but in Iran it is something really clear and direct and obvious.  Telling a joke in Iran by using sarcasm as metaphor is something really normal.  If you study Iranian literature, that’s the heart of Iranian art, the sum of Iranian civilization.  Anyone in the society, no matter who they are, knows lots of poems by heart, which is not the case in most countries of the world.

SIM:  Certain places in South America have that tradition of everyone knowing certain poems by heart by their great poet authors.

MB:  Yes, they have these stories that they know.  Reciting a poem by heart and knowing these works, the most difficult and richest lyrics, is normal.  For example, Hafiz had this power to inspire Goethe at the age of 63—when he discovered Hafiz, he became like a crazy man!  He said that he felt like he was 20-years-old again; he fell in love; he was rejuvenated.  Every Iranian puts Hafiz beside the Koran.  You can never say this in any other Arab or Muslim country—they never put anything beside Koran.  But for Iranians, his poetry is divine.  This is our difference.  As well, we are the only nation that refused to change the language [Farsi]; we kept the language with lots of sufferance.  Every other country in the East, when converting to Islam, adopted Arabic.  Not in Iran.

For Iranians, this film is exactly the mirror I wanted to put in front of them.  They understand that and that’s why they really love the film.  They recognize.  This is a film, fortunately, that people want to watch over and over and over again—because of the music, because of the structure of the film, the fast way it’s edited.  All the films coming out now in Iranian cinema are structured very differently.

SIM:  It's definitely not like any Iranian movie I've ever seen.  The film just floods over you—it plays out almost like a dream.  It’s disjointed and zips around here, there, everywhere, but it’s still all of a piece, somehow.

MB:  It’s very kind of you to compare it to a dream.  It’s kind of a re-view of history.  We always repeat our historical mistakes.  We need to study over and over again our history.  This film reviews, very fast, the history of this city’s past.  That’s something we need. 

SIM:  Every culture does.

MB:  Maybe Iranians even more because we have experienced many important and history-making events in only one century.  The revolutions of the century—the constitutional revolution in 1901 and the last one in 1979—all these reforms in contemporary history.  I remember when I was just 15-years-old, I felt like I was a 50-year-old man.

SIM:  Why?

MB:  I suppose because from a very early age, we started to know about the problems we had—that life was not as sweet and as easy as it was written in the fairytales.  It could be a horrible experience, too.  It could be not being able to sleep under the bombardments of Tehran during the course of those years in the 80s [under the Ayatollah Khomeini’s rule during the Iran-Iraq war], to see the images of the martyrs everywhere coming back from the Front.  This is when you’re a child.  My generation grew up like this.  You always have this feeling that life is too short.  So I felt an urgency to make something that reflected this.  Before making something for the world, I wanted to make something for my own people and do it in the right way.

SIM:  Listening to you talk, I feel, in an odd way, reverberations of what I feel about my own country, as young as it is.  Unlike Iran, it’s a baby--a  loud, crying infant that’s prone to temper tantrums; that’s how I see the US right now.  When a kid has tantrums, everybody suffers; that’s the whole point of having a tantrum.  Even as young as we are though, we took a turn somewhere and now we don’t know where we are.  We have a government in place that makes sense to no one.  We’ve lost our way.  The difference between my culture and yours, I think, is that we don’t have that rich tapestry in which to wrap ourselves, to remember where we came from, that strong touchstone that Iranians have with their own history.

MB:  But, at the same time, you have this big advantage of these modern values.  We shouldn’t forget about this.

SIM:  What modern values are you talking about specifically?

MB:  All the fruits of modernity that have been built.  Someone has said that America is modernity without subtitles—it’s pure in its modernity, in other words.  But you speak of this feeling of feeling responsible, taking responsibility.  That’s the main thing we need.  American artists, American people, American government in general—you are the biggest country in the world benefiting from the fruits of modernity, benefiting more than any other nation in the world.  This is the country of Washington and Lincoln, as you used to say.  Make it in a way to deserve this legacy, not to destroy it.  You are young, like a kid, compared to these old civilizations. These old civilizations have a kind of dignity.

SIM:  A self-possession.

MB:  Exactly—they are calm and wise.  It seems like when you talk about India, for example, it’s such a beautiful background, the cradle of democracy.  In the heart of the culture, especially in India, they have this ability to rely on that history and this gives them a kind of image that’s really dignified.  But with American people, it’s just the opposite.  So you have to find your role; you have to re-create your image for the modern time.  Otherwise, it’s going to be destroyed.  History is so cruel.  There’s no other way.  If you don’t believe in justice and are always thinking of just yourself in a very aggressive way—that’s what the American government does.  Look at history—we should never forget the history.  Those big empires—the Roman, the British—they are all gone because of this.  Becoming the masters of everything, becoming so big.  History is so cruel.  In a small way, in a personal way, aggressive people lose more, ultimately.  You have to be giving.

SIM:  I think my biggest source of grief in all this is that I know the American people to be very much that way—giving, I mean.  But, again this wrong turn, this leadership we have.  Having said that, I truly believe that we have the government we deserve.  Sadly, that's true.

MB:  That’s in a very important verse of Koran.  It’s fantastic what you said.  It’s written in Koran that the fate of every nation rests with its people.  The people get what they deserve in direct accordance with how they are, how they act in relation to their own government.  It’s a logical idea.

SIM:  Yes, because due to passivity, due to having so much comfort, we’ve created a nation of drug addicts.  By this I mean that as long as the vein is fed with whatever it takes to keep people complacent, we will continue to be distracted by the need to fill this, seemingly, unending need for material wealth.

MB:  And when it disappears, you feel sicker and more lost than before.  So you need more.

SIM:  It’s really a death sentence.  It will kill you, in the end.  We see this over and over again in the movies, in a lot of our art.  Through our artistic voices, it’s the only way we can keep calling attention to this.  There are huge swaths of the population that still are not heard.  I like your analogy of using cinema as a mirror held up to your own people, to your own culture, your own society. The best documentary does that—it says, “This is us.”  It’s silly, it’s ugly, it’s funny, it’s beautiful.

MB:  As I listen to you, I think about how essential it is to go far enough back, or get to view things from a high enough angle.  You can see more, more of what’s going on in the world, not just the personal problems we are thinking about for ourselves, thinking about tomorrow, my vacation, my car, my house.  It’s really heartbreaking to see that the people in the West are in this state. 

When I was studying in Italy, I would sit with friends there and we would talk about the main differences I saw in Italian life and in Iranian life.  I used to answer that, in Iran, we are usually thinking about deeper problems about life and there, they are thinking about buying a new car and where they will go on vacation.

SIM:  I lived in Italy, too, and have a lot of friends there who are, also, currently so discontented, unhappy, depressed, pessimistic—they suffer from the same “modern” malaise that a lot of us experience.  In my world, it’s normal for me, and my friends, to have an existential crisis every five minutes.

MB:  Something that is really heartbreaking for a young documentary filmmaker still based in Tehran, is that when I come here, I see all these people sitting around watching the TV.  And they learn that every day, “30 people were killed in Iraq,” or something like this.  They just turn off the television and go have a glass of wine or go about daily life—there is absolutely no impact on a human level.

SIM:  Yes, it has no real meaning for most people.  It has nothing to do with our daily lives at all.  Another filmmaker friend, in talking about the same thing, said that there’s no indication in our own country that we’re at war.  It’s something that’s happening “out there” somewhere.  Our daily lives are not affected or impacted in the least, rarely making any connection between how we're living and people dying in some faraway land.  It’s a dangerous road we’re on.  Our leaders tell us that if we don’t wage war, our way of life will be destroyed.  This is what’s keeping us “safe”—our strength is our wealth, a mass delusion that’s been very effective for a long time.

MB:  I think through these conversations and through sharing our work, we can continue to remind ourselves of how much we can collaborate on a better future.  As I said, we need to keep ourselves aware of the past, and always use that to inform our journey forward.

Interview: Iris Olsson, Director and Annukka Lilja, Editor SUMMERCHILD

Making nonfiction cinema offers a filmmaker many storytelling choices.  Depending on several different factors, including the director's stubborness to stick to her aesthetic guns, a story about a Russian girl who has taken herself to an orphanage because things are so bad at home and then is adopted for a short time by a wealthy Finnish couple offering to take care of that child during their vacation time as part of their "charity" work, could be a grim, didactic treatise on all kinds of social issues.  But instead, filmmaker Iris Olsson, decided to tell this story from the point of view of the child and, in just an hour's time, we go on a journey of discovery as told by 11-year-old Svetlana, a brave, highly emotional and expressive pre-pubescent girl who takes her own destiny a hell of a lot more seriously than the adults around her do.

It's quite an accomplished piece, made under the auspices of the University of  Art and Design in Helsinki, Finland, where Olsson and her editor, Annukka Lilja (pictured at right) met to create a  film called Summerchild (Kesan Lapsi).  They will both soon receive their Master's Degrees from the TaiK.  Having made just one student film before Summerchild, Olsson relied tremendously on her small crew to realize her vision and is still very much discovering her cinematic "voice."  And even though Lilja is still technically a student, her editing chops are first-rate; she has a born storyteller's instinct.  She's also been on the festival circuit this year with another award-winning film she edited for Elina Hirvonen called Paradise--Three Journeys in This World, which I saw at the IDFA last fall.  I met a very jet-lagged Lilja on the long shuttle bus ride from downtown Durham to the Hilton one afternoon at Full Frame and met Olsson there soon after.  They won the President's Award at that fest and a couple of weeks later, we met up again at Hot Docs where the film was a finalist in the mid-length documentary category.  We got a chance to sit and chat for a bit in Toronto about the making of Summerchild:

Still in Motion (SIM):  Finding your storytelling voice as an artist is a lifelong pursuit, but from the looks of this film, yours is already quite a defined one.  The solid structure is there; you’ve made some strong choices and you’ve, obviously, made your film for an intelligent audience.  There’s no exposition, no explanation; you just take us right in and trust that we’ll find our way.  I love those close up shots where the camera is running alongside the little girls' feet as they romp in the playground, juxtaposed with a steady, lingering shot of your main subject, Sveta, as she watches the other children at play from the window of her room. She is so unselfconscious in front of the camera, as if she’s been in front of one her whole life.  What, in your opinion, made her such a perfect film subject?

Iris Olsson (IO):  I think it was boredom.  I think she’d given up at some point.

SIM:  How do you think she interpreted your presence in her life?

IO:  It’s hard to say.  Someone in the audience asked this at the screening at Full Frame.  And I said that I cannot answer for her.  But, I think when we came, she thought that we would be fun, more people to play with.  We would be giving to her; we would be admirers.  She would be the subject and we would be the followers.  She very soon realized the advantages of being the center of that kind of attention.

SIM:  How old was she when you shot the film?

IO:  Eleven.

SIM: And how did you find her?

IO:  I first found out about the [Russian] home for orphans from a doctor in the east of Finland.  He told me about the charity projects they run there.  I wanted to find people who were doing this kind of “adoption” for the first time.

SIM:  Was this the subject you specifically set out to find for your film?

IO:  No, I was researching a totally different subject and that’s when I ran into this doctor.  All I knew was that it was time to make a film and I’d just have to go out there and find a story.  What struck me about this one, in particular, was a small phrase he used in describing it.  He told me that there were these children coming here [from Russia to Finland], and after a short time spent with some people involved in this charity, they would then return to the orphanage.  I already saw the possibilities just from hearing that and I knew that it had strong themes.  I immediately had so many questions.  My first reaction to hearing this was a very stereotypical one—they get to come here to Finland, this rich and wealthy land to stay with a family and then they’re sent back to that godawful orphanage.

SIM:  Yet we see that the orphanage is far from "godawful."

IO:  Yes, but before I went there, I imagined it was a horrible place.  It’s a very easy stereotype for someone from Finland, or anywhere in the Western world for that matter, to picture something specific when you hear the words “Russian orphanage.”

SIM:  The children are very well taken care of there and, obviously, loved.

IO:  Definitely, yes.  I was intrigued with my stereotypical images.  And in starting the film, I was committed to finishing it.  It took on a different aspect from what I anticipated.  There was more going on there than what I thought of as “charity,” in my mind.  Some of these children are social orphans—most have families in the community.  Due to social conditions that exist at home, it’s better for them to be in a state-run facility.  Svetlana took herself there; she was the one to walk away from her house.  That, to me, makes it even more tragic.  For an 11-year-old to leave her family, the situation must have been really, really bad.

SIM:  During the course of filming this, what surprised you the most in terms of what she allowed you to capture?  We never really see her cry or breakdown until the very end.  We hear about her crying fits, but we never see one until there's talk of bringing her to Finland for good.

IO:  We really only wanted scenes of her crying that we thought were cinematic and within the style in which we wanted to make the film--that is, not having her talking to me or interacting with me or the camera in any way.  That was something I decided I wanted even before I found the story for this film.

SIM:  This was a personal aesthetic challenge to yourself?

IO:  Yes.  I wanted to do a purely observational piece, to go “old style.”  I wanted to see if it was possible.  It’s so much harder to get the story from “real life,” one that has no dramaturgic structure.  That was something I wanted to do.  The other challenge was to get a film on television.  Not that that compromised or informed my artistic decisions, but it was a hope for me, that it would be of such good quality that it was worth broadcasting.

SIM:  Most filmmakers I know make work for public consumption.  You have to think about that if you want to survive on doing what you love.

IO:  During the editing phase, we were screening roughs and, of course, it was very important for other people to weigh in.  And, of course, the criticism was geared mainly to using voiceover narration or a lot of cards to establish what was going on.  We were deep into it and were feeling insecure and unsure of what we had.  I wasn’t thinking of audience when I made this.  I was doing it for myself.  I also think, though, that I’m a good audience.  I want to see a good film, to be taken into a film.  We were working on the dramaturgy a lot.  We used the Post-It method [laughing] in the editing room, just trying to combine the Russian and Finnish footage in a good way.

Annukka Lilja (AL):  We were trying to figure out how much information the audience needed to know about each place at the beginning.  The material looks so different between the two places.

SIM:  One scene that I found particularly devastating was Svetlana's first journey from Russia to Finland.  We hear Peter [the “adopting” father] telling us that during that ride, he observed Sveta's slow realization that she was traveling a vast distance and going very, very far away from home.  He describes how upset she was, crying and throwing up.  That was one of many parts, too, that felt like a fairytale to me—the little girl going into the dark and forbidding forest; however, she’s forgotten the bread crumbs she’ll need to help her find her way back.  It did also feel a bit like an abduction, especially as it got later in the day and the light started to go.

IO:  I don’t understand how she had the strength for it.  Of course, we were there.  I think she felt a small sense of security in that.  Those people were kind of new to her and to just hop into a car and drive away with them was very brave.  She also comes from an environment where there’s a lot of alcoholism, prostitution.  She could have been taken and driven anywhere!  She didn't have a mobile or any way of contacting anyone.  My nerves, as a child, could never withstand that.

SIM:  How unobtrusive were you really?  How much did your presence contribute to what played out in front of the camera?  That’s a tricky thing, especially in a story as intimate as this one and especially when you're dealing with a child.

IO:  There were a lot of issues surrounding that.  The couple [Tiina and Peter] didn’t really know how to be with the girl at all.  To my disappointment, I found that they were spending more time with the film crew than with the girl, I think because, perhaps, they were looking for some security from us, being at times uncertain how they should act as "parents."  That took me by surprise.  So, after a couple of days of shooting, I had to sit down with them and tell them that they needed to really start acting as if the film crew didn't exist.  And the essential thing to explain to them was that we weren’t really there for them, but for Svetlana.  That was hard, telling them not to talk to us.  I wasn’t even really thinking about the film, so much as I was thinking that I did not want our presence to compromise or hinder anything that was to go on between them and her.  She wouldn’t be forming any kind of relationship with them and that, in turn, would affect her future.  So we kind of had to push them away, force them to pretend we weren’t there.

SIM:  How long was your shoot?

IO:  In total, about 23 days. 

SIM:  Did you edit or structure as you shot?

AL:  No, it all happened afterwards.

SIM:  How many hours of footage did you have to work with?

IO:  Thirty-three.

SIM:  That’s very economical.

IO:  It was a lot for us.

SIM:  I’m used to talking to filmmakers that sometimes produce well over 100 hours of footage.

IO:  I also pre-selected from those hours what I wanted to digitize, so we edited through only 14 hours, ultimately.

AL: The only thing I did for the first week was to watch about seventeen hours of pre-selected footage.

IO:  When we did the first rough cut, we were at two and a half hours.  For a long time, we were at 1:30, and I kind of liked it at that length.  There was also a one hour and ten minute version I liked.  But it came down to broadcast industry standard, so we cut down to 59:30.

SIM:  What’s the theatrical distribution scene like in Finland for documentary?

IO:  At this stage in my filmmaking career, I don’t even think of that.  I just wanted to make a film, to complete a film.  But I was thinking in a cinematic way all the time, envisioning this on the big screen.  Being in film school, you get used to seeing films screened that way, but in thinking about where a film might be distributed, you only think in terms of film festivals.  I know I will always make films for the big screen.  A friend of mine in Finland wanted his feature film to go into theaters and he told me at the end, it would have been cheaper for him to give a DVD to all the people that bothered to come to the movie, plus seven euros, you know?  It cost him a ton.  In Finland, I think for a feature documentary, you might get about 700 people coming to the theater.  It's really not worth it.

SIM:  Your film was financed by the film school.

IO:  Yes, that and people working for free kept the budget very low.  We were given a small budget that went to production expenses, traveling and color correction.  Other things like camera rental, I facilitated.

SIM:  What kind of camera did you use?

IO:  We shot in mini-DV using a JVC-HDV camera.  In Finland, there’s still a huge incompatibility issue with digitizing HD footage, so the cinematographer [Anssi Leino] chose it for its mobility; it felt good in his hands.  It’s also a great camera for hand-held work which was very important.  We used a top-of-the-line lens, as well.

SIM:  How did you choose your crew?

IO:  Well, since it was produced out of the film school, Annukka was suggested to me from a professor.  I had done another film there and didn’t want to use the same editor.  For the cinematographer, I had someone besides Leino in mind, but he had a scheduling conflict.  I’m very happy I went with Anssi Leino—he’s also a student there.

SIM:  His shooting is really great.

IO:  Yeah, it is.  He’s a very open person; there's somewhat of an innocence about him.  And he also has a small child.  Before film school, he was a skiing coach for the Finnish Para-Olympics, where people in wheelchairs compete.  He’s very sensitive, caring, fatherly.  He felt very "safe" and he’s very personable, a good conversationalist—he was perfect for the project.  In the beginning we shot some research material, which for a long time we thought we would want to use in the film because it had an exceptional scene.  It was the first time that Sveta met the parents.  We were trying out things and the situation was sudden for us, as well.  We didn’t know it was going to happen so we had no preparation time.  Ultimately, it was a bad shoot; we used a research camera, so the material looked terrible.  We had to make a choice in terms of the cinematic criteria.  I wanted the piece to look like a movie.  I just couldn't use that shitty-looking material, even though it contains a great scene, an essential scene.

SIM:  I think that’s a common problem, especially in the beginning of a project.  There would be plenty of filmmakers that would decide to use it anyway in service to the story.

AL:  It would also have colored the whole story in a different light.  It was a weird scene.  The girl was sitting there and they were commenting on her, “Doesn’t she have beautiful eyes?” etc.  They weren't really looking at her as a person.

IO:  She also had a temperature of 40 degrees [100 degrees F]; she was very pale.  Tiina was trying to touch her and was talking at her, “Come, come.  You want to come to Finland with us?”  She didn’t even understand the language.  I hadn’t thought of that material since the edit.  If I start thinking of all of the films that we could have done with that material or second-guess what we should have done, it really doesn’t do much good.  It doesn’t come naturally.  When I watch the film now, I don’t think about what we should have done differently.  We had only small hints there in the film on so many things; we chose very carefully what to keep in and what we wouldn’t use.  Maybe that’s for the DVD extras or something, to include those kinds of scenes. 

SIM:  There's that scene where the granny comes in when Sveta is at Peter and Tiina's house.  There’s a whole room of people and they’re all talking about her as if she’s not in the room.  And during all this, as the camera stays still and focused on Sveta, we just hear the dialogue going on around her.  She’s almost catatonic.  That scene is very powerful; it says so much about her isolation.

IO:  We did a lot of work to get to that point—trying to find a way to film and focus on certain things.

SIM:  Sometimes there are a lot of happy accidents, too.

IO:  We had a lot of those.

SIM:  But the only way to capture those happy accidents, or be aware of them happening in the first place, is to be open and intuitive in the middle of everything that’s going on and realize that it will translate cinematically in a successful way into something highly effective and dramatic.

IO:  I have to say that the relationship I had with Anssi was essential for this.  There was only me, a sound person [Pietu Korhonen] and a camera person.  That means that, for example, if we were shooting in the children’s home and other children know you’re shooting in a room, they come peek; they want to play.  Somebody’s got to take sound and somebody’s got to take pictures, which means it’s the director who’s outside holding the door so the children don’t come in while we’re shooting.  At those times, I thought, I can never do this again!  Or sometimes I would have to take Tiina and Peter away, so Anssi could spend time with Sveta in a separate room to get something.  So, there was a little bit of game playing, but not too much, in my opinion. We were honest with them in what we were trying to do but the crew had to work together to orchestrate things sometimes so we could get what we needed.

We would all sit and review the daily rushes after every shooting day and sometimes I would give a really rough critique.  I was simultaneously creating a script with Post-Its while we were shooting and would re-write based on what we got that day.  I could also figure out what needed to be shot the next day.  For example, the great scene where Sveta is trapping the bees into the coffeepot in the yard—I was inside the house with Tiina, and Anssi was out there playing with Sveta.  It’s easy to get stuff like that with digital; he could just play with her and keep rolling.  It gave him the confidence to go ahead and shoot that material, even though I wasn’t there.

But we would also fight over things.  The shots of the trapped bird, for instance, on the windowsill.  I have a more poetic sensibility than Anssi and so I wanted to take that footage of the bird.  At first he objected but then he filmed a bit.  I didn’t like what he was doing so we started to fight about it.  If I have a cinematographer, I want him to take the pictures.  I can use the camera myself, but I want him to do it.  But at this time, I took some footage of the bird to show him what I wanted; I had definite ideas of what I wanted.  We filmed that bird for almost an hour to get the right image and when we got to the image that I knew would work, the other bird came [another bird appears on the opposite side of the window and the two birds, the trapped one and the free one, communicate frantically].  It’s hard sometimes to be a director because you have to criticize the work of your co-workers or demand certain things.  It’s a delicate balance, but I won’t forgive myself if I don’t do what I know will work.  So unless we had spent that hour getting that footage of the bird, we wouldn’t have gotten that shot.

All of the films in my head that I’d like to do, do not involve me doing the shooting.  I want to use a cinematographer.  I would use Anssi.  He does fiction, as well.  For me, it’s important to trust the cinematographer and I have great trust in him.

SIM:  What kinds of stories are important for you to tell?

IO:  There is something which comes from a quite personal place within me.  A friend actually pointed it out.  It is the theme of the guilty feeling of innocence.

SIM:  What does that mean to you?

IO:  It’s the situation of someone who is innocent, like a child, but they feel guilty, as if they’ve done something wrong.  There’s no reason for them to feel guilt.  It’s not their fault but they still feel guilty.

SIM:  Does Sveta represent that?

IO:  Yes, I think so.  The emotion I’m trying to explain is very personal.  You feel you’ve done something wrong, but you haven’t.  You feel you’re not good; you’re guilty.  But you’re not.  I think it’s a typical feeling for a child at times.  For her, she has a strong sense of responsibility; she cares so much; she worries.  This is the strong theme that runs through most of my ideas for telling stories.

SIM:  When it came time to edit, and considering the two of you didn’t know one another and had never worked together before, did you experience similar creative tussling (which, to my mind, is a very positive sign that more than just the director is invested in making a great film)?  Tell me about your creative partnership in the edit room.

AL:  Yes, it was the same creative back-and-forth in the editing.  It came out of our discussions from all the raw footage.  We were working really hard.  It was supposed to be a 30-minute film and knowing that it would be a longer piece, we were a bit rushed.

IO:  We kind of kept it a secret, how much material we had.

AL:  The school has its criteria for how long it was supposed to be.  Iris was in the editing room a lot to discuss everything she wanted to do.  She was, understandably, freaking out and I tried my best to calm her down [laughter].  I like to work like that, having those intense discussions between me and the director.

SIM:  What kinds of rhythms did you find in the piece?  I find most editors have their own particular way of finding the pace that’s right for the project.

AL:  I do think the material dictates that and in which direction you move.  Like most projects, it took a while to find that, and we really hit our stride towards the end when putting the fine cut together.  For Paradise--Three Journeys in This World, it’s shot extremely differently—very slow pace, long lingering shots, more meditative and so that's how it was edited. 

IO:  People do mention the rhythm and we actually never talked about that.

AL:  No, it came pretty naturally.  It was just a matter of re-working and re-working until we found it.  And we went with the emotions, using the moments that were relevant to emphasize what was happening emotionally with the subjects.

SIM:  When did the other production components come in, music, sound design, etc.?

IO:  The music actually came before filming.

SIM:  That’s interesting; tell me about that.

IO:  I don’t know how to feel about this, and I don’t know if it’s good or bad that I had in my mind already some kind of emotion that I wanted to have in this story.  I don’t know if it’s good that it came from me and not from the reality of the situation.  When we were starting to film, I had found this music in my roommate’s CD collection.  It was sort of electronic; it sounded like crystals touching each other.  Listening to it, I felt it was very innocent, child-like music, pure innocence.  I really loved it and I thought it expressed something essential for me.  I had written a lot about what I wanted to say with this film, in thinking of themes.  For a while, I was contemplating doing a film where the presence of the adults would be missing completely and it would be some kind of tribute to children or childhood using that world only.  That music, to me, had that innocent beauty of a child.

It was an Icelandic band so I was convinced we’d never have money to use this music.  We had a composer that did some music that wasn’t right.  I got kind of hopeless about it and, at one point, gave him the CD to listen to.  I remember telling him, "Just try and copy that!"  It was still terrible and wasn’t what I wanted at all.  In the meantime, we were using this music in the edit, but then we hit the final stage.  In my first film, I made the mistake of using a very expensive song in the edit and got so emotionally attached to it.  I, of course, had to change it and it tore my heart out.  I used a song from the movie Amélie, which was a stupid idea, I know.  I said I wouldn’t do that in this project. 

And then I was in a bar and was talking to a Finnish musician about this group, Múm, and wanting so much to use their music.  He told me that they have a Finnish member in the band.  I never Googled them or anything so I didn’t really know that.  I was convinced that I would never be able to afford to use this music so I never fully researched this.  So I called him [Samuli Kosminen, aka Son of Yoda] and he did the music for us! 

SIM:  A good soundtrack should be like another character that adds an emotional layer to the picture and sound.  It is tricky to get it right, that resonance, that emotional connection through the music.  What was the biggest lesson for you in making this film—besides the music issue, which, fortunately, worked out for you in that lovely serendipitous way?

IO:  To learn to trust myself.

SIM:  That’s a good one.

IO:  Yes, trusting myself, and learning that it’s not just about making the film.  It’s learning to deal with the feedback afterwards and dealing with the small success that it’s had.  At Full Frame, I was at the screening and was convinced that the audience was hating the film.  They weren’t laughing in the right places or reacting in any way.

SIM:  I was just talking to another filmmaker who said the exact same thing—that awful feeling in certain screenings that everyone watching it dislikes it.

AL:  Well, this feeling of hers happened also in the editing process.  She has a really strong vision and she was constantly second-guessing herself, saying, “This is not what I meant to do,” etc.

IO:  Yes, over-talking, over-thinking all the time.

AL:  Even afterwards, she was not confident.  People started to say how much they loved it.

IO:  Even then, I didn’t trust that.

AL:  I think you’re past that now [laughing].

IO:  Yes, well you learn through something like this to believe in yourself.

SIM:  Creating something like this is such a huge risk in so many ways—it’s scary.  For some, it gets more difficult with each project they take on, and while you may have built up confidence in certain ways, you still feel the same insecurities with each new endeavor.

IO:  Well, especially in documentary, there are so many things that can heavily dictate what happens with your film.  With the industry the way it is, I think the biggest challenge is not in creating the film but in being able to make it in the first place, to find funding, support.  You know that a lot of energy is going to go into that before you even get to the creative aspects of what you’re trying to do.  That’s the biggest challenge now.  You have to be a salesperson, to sell your idea to the right person, to convince them of what you have to offer aesthetically before you’ve even shot a frame.  In this instance, we all worked for free so I didn’t have to sell it so much, but for my next film, that will be the next challenge.

SIM:  Will you two work together again?

IO:  Yes.  There is a trust now.  I have a hard work ethic and I need that trust—to know that, just as I am working very hard to accomplish something, the people helping me will do the exact amount of work as, or even more than, I would do.  That creates the trust to know that they’re willing and able to do that.  When I feel like I’ve found these people, it means so much.  Otherwise, I just worry more than I already do.  That’s why things worked so well with Annukka; she has a good head on her shoulders.  After 10 hours of working and editing in a day, she would tell me, “Okay, now we stop.  Let’s go home now.  See you tomorrow morning.”  And I would have a fit and want to keep going through the night, thinking we could keep going and going.  At 11:00 p.m., I would tell her, “But we have a good four more hours to work!”  She was very firm with me and would tell me, “No, I’m going now.  See you tomorrow.”  If she hadn’t done that, we would have been going in circles.  You can really mess up a film like that.

SIM:  So ultimately you are very proud of this, right?  You do realize that the reception the film’s received here at these festivals is some very real validation?

IO:  Yeah, I’m proud of it.  I’m also proud of the girl, Sveta.

SIM:  It shows.  It’s a very weird but satisfying ending where she’s staring into the camera lens for several seconds.  We see this child that is the author of her own destiny and that is very much the way she will navigate through her life.  She’s nobody’s victim.  That’s a very beautiful thing to come away with.  Tell me about that last lingering shot of her in close-up.

IO:  We have this idea in our teaching we call “first image.”  That image is to be guarded within you, the first image that comes into your head when you start to make the film.  That was my first image.  Sveta has had a heart operation and actually, the image I saw was of her without a shirt on, a medium shot showing the scar over her heart as she gazes at the camera.  I didn’t want to ask this girl to take her shirt off, this young pre-pubescent girl.  Ultimately, it was a bit touchy for me ethically. 

So we did it with her clothes on.  For a long time, I wanted the film to start with that image.  For me, it’s a “reality check” shot.  When you go to watch a film, as a spectator you want to feel something, to experience your own emotional reaction to something that you see.  And that shot of Sveta is to say to the spectator, “It’s me.  It’s my life and it’s real and I will go on from here.”  She’s the one that has caused you to experience what you did—the laughter, the sadness, whatever authentic feelings come up for you watching this story.  We are looking in her eyes so that we can understand that.

SIM:  I like that you give her a chance to stare back at us, in a way, just as we’ve been staring so intimately at her.

IO:  For me, that was the important, essential shot, that image of her.  And, ultimately, while the scar over the heart shot for me was important, she would have been too bare.  She’s already exposing so much.

AL:  When I saw those images of her, I was really blown away.

IO:  Well, this is a funny anecdote, actually.  Because that was the only serious moment we could get from the footage—she was laughing so hard.  I was trying so hard to get her to look into the camera and not laugh.  It was the longest time in which she was looking serious and could be still.  We cut that exactly one second after she stopped laughing to the last second before she started again!  I want to say here that we did have an "actor agreement" with her.  After the first three days of filming, she totally blew us off.

SIM:  That’s not unusual for a subject to do that, especially at the beginning of a project.

IO:  And not unusual for a child to do.  She used us quite a bit.  She told the caretakers at the home that she was going to go with us and do things that were not permissible for her to do.  So we made this deal with her and also with the two other girls in her room.  We created a "contract" that stated that she would be an actor in this film and she got to ask for what she wanted as “payment” to cooperate and appear in the film.  At first they asked for TVs and stuff like that, which was too much.  They wanted make-up bags filled with shampoos and things like that, so we went to the store and let them take what they wanted to have their own pink make-up bag and that made them very happy.  That was the actors’ salary [laughs]. 

We ran into a lot of questions about all this while we were filming, so we handled that in the best way we could.  This contract was just a piece of paper torn from a ledger and done in pencil but it was also for her to understand that we wanted to do this film about her and we would give her something for her participation and cooperation.  It also clarified that this was something real, something important.  We had a lot of talks about that with her.

SIM:  It would be interesting to follow up with her when she’s older.

IO:  Definitely.

SIM:  Has she seen the film?

IO:  Yeah, she’s seen it.

SIM:  What did she think?

IO:  She liked it.  I, unfortunately, couldn’t be there when she saw it, but I totally trust the director of the home who watched it with her and she said she liked it.  It’s hard to talk on the phone because of the language barrier and it’s a day’s journey to go there; you can’t go without a visa, etc.   But she talked with the translator and so I know she liked it, but, ultimately,  really found it to be nothing that special.

I think from all this, Tiina and Peter will pay for her education, at least, and so all of this has created a big turning point in her life.  I don’t know what will happen in terms of them adopting her permanently.  There's also a chance that she could be adopted by a couple in the US.

SIM:  That would be a whole other story with its own set of wild circumstances.

IO:  Yes, that’s the sequel right there [in a mock "coming attractions" voice]:  “Sveta 2: Driving to America.”