Still in Motion

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.” 

Watching Ourselves Watching Ourselves Make War

For the last installment of my Hot Docs wrap-up (I will definitely stay for more of the fest next year), I'll talk about one more film I saw there; about Thom Powers' wonderful talk with Ricky Leacock; and lastly, the presentation screenings of the finalists of the International Documentary Challenge.

Jesse Moss and Tony Gerber's Full Battle Rattle played in the International Spectrum strand which included twenty-eight outstanding nonfiction pieces from around the world.  I will be interviewing Gerber and Moss very soon for Shooting People, but wanted to write a bit about the film here.

The film had its world premiere at the Berlin Film Festival, Panorama this past winter, and followed that up with a special jury prize win at SXSW.  The doc opens theatrically this summer at New York's Film Forum, and something tells me the piece will do well with its theatrical exhibition.  I think it will do well, not only because it's damned good filmmaking, but because it showcases to wonderful affect such an absurd situation in a way that lets a spectator draw his or her own conclusions.  I love what the London Times' James Christopher has to say about the film: "The deadly serious manner in which the American soldiers deal with all this nonsense gives rise to some of the greatest and most surreal comedy I've seen.  I now know that the occupation of Iraq is utterly doomed."  No shit.

In the tradition of films like Attenborough's Oh! What a Lovely War (which I just blogged about a couple of days ago) and Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove, Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, Full Battle Rattle's storytellers step back fully on any political or philosophical stance they might take (the story says it all) and step in fully with their cameras to make us part of the game. 

The game, of course, is war.  In the middle of the Mojave desert in California, the US Army has built a "virtual Iraq."  To build this simulated occupied urban town, the military has spent about a billion dollars.  Hundreds of role-players have been hired to play its Iraqi citizens.  The filmmakers divided and conquered, Gerber posting himself with the army brigade in training, Moss living in the fictional village of Medina Wasl.  This tactic allowed them to document both sides of the fake war.  The camera work is stellar in the best "you-are-there" fashion.  Well-paced and edited superbly by Alex Hall and Pax Wassermann, I literally did not know when I was supposed to laugh or cry--I felt emotionally whipsawed, in other words, and I really have come to love that sensation when watching a film.

Without giving too much away, one of the most powerful elements for me was the character of the Deputy Police Chief, played by Nagi Moshi.  This man's personal story provided an extremely strong emotional backbone to this absurdist tale--an illegal immigrant from Iraq, he applied for political asylum in the US, but was facing deportation.  This is a man who is helping our war effort (albeit, within the context of this costume drama) and, desperately, does not want to be returned to his native country, for obvious reasons. 

I loved the way they ended the film, as well, with those very real soldiers that have been playing these games in the California desert leaving for the very real war in Iraq.  As they are deployed, the tone takes on one of intense loss and sadness, particularly on the part of the soldiers' families.  Despite the privilege of "practicing" to fight and die for their country in a safe place, they were all, at the end of the day, mere fodder for the war machine.  Heartbreaking.

In talking about their style, Moss and Gerber state that ". . . in Full Battle Rattle [we] found the ultimate subject in which we could walk a line between the real and imagined--a subject in which the distinction between the two is beside the point."  I can't wait to talk to these guys more about their experience making this film.  Good stuff.

Answering a question about "fly-on-the-wall" filmmaking, the legendary Richard (Ricky) Leacock, in his characteristically acerbic way had this to say: "Flies aren't very intelligent.  You have to know what you're looking for.  That's when I start observing, and start getting the things that I love."  Leacock was this year's recipient of the festival's Outstanding Achievement Award.  Late Saturday afternoon, right before a screening of Leacock's Jazz Dance (1953), part of a programmed retrospective of his films, the intrepid cinematographer sat with Thom Powers to talk about "The Feeling of Being There."

A couple of years ago, Leacock suffered a minor stroke which erased a lot of his memory.  Fortunately, he got his autobiography written before that incident and was also able to call upon parts of his life contained in the letters he wrote his wife and partner, filmmaker Valerie Lalonde, who kept every single one of them.  What's resulted is an interactive memoir containing 17 hours of film on DVD--as he talks about the making of a certain film, one can watch portions of it as he goes through his creative process.

His oeuvre is vast, spanning most of the 20th century, and his contributions to the craft of nonfiction cinema and the development of all the inherent philosophies about how "documentary" has come to be defined, cannot be overstated.  His cinematic eye has granted us the privilege of the kind of immersive experience we've come to expect from well-crafted verite.  As is the way with a timeless artist or craftsman, Leacock has sought new ways in which he can capture those "things that he loves," developing advancements in sound technology and wholeheartedly embracing the digital revolution.  At Power's behest, he showed us his bag of tricks pulled from a small camera pouch by his feet.  Inventing ways to keep as mobile as possible, he has indulged his insatiable curiosity about the world for decades, and we have been the lucky benefactors.  His directive to keep finding reasonably-priced, more manageable filmmaking equipment has been in service to his support for experimentation and freedom of expression.  His legacy was palpable in the selections I saw at the screening later that evening that presented the finalists of the 3rd Annual International Documentary Challenge.

After a superb dinner of Indian food at a local spot, I took a friend to go see the Doc Challenge program.  This is one of many timed filmmaking competitions where teams from around the world had five days, March 6 - 10, to make a nonfiction film.  They were given the theme--"Change"--and a genre (character study, first person, music, political, etc.) on the morning of the 6th, and off they went.

The Best Film award with a $1,000 cash prize went to Reel Grrls from Seattle for their film Click Whoosh (the genre was "historical").  They were quite grateful since that money would help them towards purchasing another camera since they damaged theirs while making their film.  The American Documentary/P.O.V. Short Film award with a prize of $1,000 in cash went to Team Juicebox (also from Seattle--lots of gung-ho filmmakers up there!) for Ars Magna (the genre was "biography/character study"), a wonderful laugh-out-loud piece that was a delight to watch.  And Eric Daniel Metzgar, director of The Chances of the World Changing and Life. Support. Music. also entered the competition and won the Original Vision award for his piece called Beholder (genre, "first person"), a meditative personal essay on his growing disenchantment with New York City.  You can check out the entire list of award winners here.

Finally, if you'd like to take a gander at the photo gallery of the awards presentation and closing reception from Friday night, you can click here.  It was a lovely ceremony, well-produced, and hosted wonderfully well by CBC radio personality, Jian Ghomeshi. 

Not as much fun as Cinema Eye, though.  ;)

Hot Docs '08: Spotlight on Iran and An Art Star's Exploits

I started  my second day in Toronto at the Doc Shop scrolling through films and doing some research for a project I'm programming in the Gulf region.  Again, this kind of access for me is worth the price of admission in attending something like Hot Docs--fabulous.

After downing a "cleansing" smoothie that tasted like dirt, I dipped into the theater once again for another flick.  At 1:30 on a lovely spring weekday the 300-seat venue was packed with spectators. The New Zealand director of The Art Star and the Sudanese Twins (both the title and the image,  at left, were a large part of what drew me in), Pietra Brettkelly is an extremely prolific filmmaker.  However, I don't really know her work; this was the first film that I've ever seen of hers (she's made ten films before this one).  Yet, I quickly felt that I was in the hands of a master storyteller and the cinematography by Jacob Bryant is first-rate.  The film had its North American premiere at Sundance this past January and this screening at Hot Docs was its Canadian premiere.

Not since seeing Tierney Gearon: The Mother Project, a brilliant film about another artist / mother (and I put the word "artist" first on purpose), have I been so ambivalent about my feelings towards the main subject of a nonfiction film--I love her, I hate her.  I admire, I abhor.  I respect, I sneer.  What a fun ride.  It also reminded me of Anna Broinowski's film Forbidden Lies, where filmmaker and subject perform a fascinating and complicated tango, the subject complicit in the process of telling her own "true" story.  Even though we never see Brettkelly in the film, artist Vanessa Beecroft talks to her constantly throughout as if she's part of the action.  She, also, constantly invites the filmmaker to accompany her wherever she goes.  The filmmaker, in turn, is obviously fascinated and pulled into her subject's powerful vortex of provocation, emotional instability and artistic brilliance, willingly led on a journey that leads to unexpected places. 

In a great in-depth article in Now, a free local Toronto paper, we hear from both the director and her subject.  Not surprisingly, Beecroft, a world-renowned visual artist, whose ground-breaking human installations are extraordinary for their shock value and raw depictions of victimized female beauty, feels exploited, saying that when she saw it she felt "unfairly, selectively exposed.  There were no scenes of motherhood, of my devotion to my children and family [actually there were several], no nursing scenes in the US or Africa (at the time Brettkelly shot, I was still nursing my younger son) [actually there were several in Africa]; too much emphasis on the eccentricity and persistence and no idle time, which is not reality."  Strange that she would be so naive about the creation of a piece of art.  However, it was one over which she had no control and there's the rub, eh, Vanessa?

However, Beecroft repeatedly touts her own emotional imbalances as part of why she's such a successful artist; it's part and parcel of the work she produces.  And her notions of "reality" are, admittedly, defined by those eccentricities and imbalances.  For me, the subjects of cross-national, cross-racial adoption, motherhood and art, took a back seat to the fascination I had with the relationship between subject and filmmaker.  It was a giant leap of faith on both their parts, and it makes for a complex and multi-layered journey.  This is one of many nonfiction films I've come across recently that would exhibit fabulously in theaters.

I had to forego staying for Brettkelly's Q&A, unfortunately, so I could be on time for a panel called Iran to You, part of the Spotlight on Iran strand the festival had on offer this year.  The panel was awkward and disorganized and the moderator got things off to a really wobbly start by asking a question that was misconstrued by both the panelists and the audience.  It had to do with boundaries and borders and limitations--everyone in the room mistook this for yet another push towards a political discussion of what it's like living and working in today's Iran and that country's relationships and hostilities towards the West.  Honestly, I forgot I was in Canada several times.  Governmental and national relations between the US and Iran are tentative, filled with trepidation, distrust and a hyper-awareness of imminent armed conflict lurking uncomfortably close to the surface.  This seems to be our only preoccupation with that country that offers up so many cultural riches, including the spectacular cinematic storytelling that's come out of there for several decades now.

Before we heard from each filmmaker (there were a half dozen in attendance; filmmaker Rokhsareh Ghaemmaghami, director of the brilliant Cyanosis was missing due to a denial of her visa application; she's pictured at left during the production of her short film), we saw some footage from each of the Spotlight selections.  Most of the filmmakers were a bit reticent or shy to say anything at first and merely stated (some through an interpreter) that they were happy to be there to share their work.

What was really fascinating about this designated hour was the missed opportunity for discussion about the craft of filmmaking, the very thing these filmmakers were looking forward to discussing.  Frustrated by the guidance of the conversation on the part of the moderator, (whom, to her credit, realized what kind of misguidance her statements had evoked and took sole responsibility for that--at one point, an audience member chastised the whole Hot Docs organization for the botched opportunity!) a panelist raised her voice in exasperation, saying, "We are not politicians; we are artists!!"

The small audience, I must admit, was equally to blame for their shortsighted and unimaginative questions that did, indeed, concentrate on the politics of Iran and what role these artists played in disseminating that information.  As an American, I know that we have our own PR issues to deal with, and in a weird way, I felt a kinship with this phenomenon of being so strongly associated with your nationality.  No matter what you say or do or portend to stand for, you are your country in most people's eyes and are expected to answer for your nation's missteps and political blunders.  You are not an individual but a symbol, somehow, of the fundamentalist stance your political leaders display in the name of Democracy, Allah, Islam, Jesus, whatever.  What a fantastic learning experience that was for me.  Why is it so hard to stay focused on craft, focused on the discussion of art when faced with a nation known for its hard line, war-mongering, soul-destroying leadership?

To quote my friend and producing partner, Jenna Arnold, president of Press Play Productions, a small boutique production company that just opened offices in Dubai, UAE, "Having worked at the United Nations headquarters here in New York as an education officer for two years, and having sat in on many meetings about policy and legislation, I was never convinced that that was the direction of peacemaking.  That's not going to happen at big, round tables in the UN or on the Hill [in DC].  I see it happening through art, through film, through media, through the convergence of creative voices expressing these ideas of our common humanity."  I concur.

Oh, Canada: Hot Docs '08

The weather was mighty fine in Toronto during this year's iteration of Hot Docs (its 15th), and even though the city looks like one big construction site and the subway and commuter train workers went on strike at midnight Friday night, getting around to all the venues for the festival was super easy.  I arrived towards the tail end of the fest, and considering it was my first time attending, I got myself acclimated quite quickly.   And, as I witnessed my first time attending the Toronto International Film Festival, Torontonians and other locals were out in droves, packing every screening house to the gills.  It's nice to see that kind of excitement, especially for nonfiction cinema.  They're quite proud of Canada's documentary legacy, and it shows in the stellar programming and appreciative audiences.

Almost immediately, I ran into some friends in the delegate lounge I haven't seen since True/False, and checked out the surroundings of the Doc Shop (modeled on the excellent set-up at the IDFA where you can watch any film  in the program through a centralized database system). The ease with which I can navigate a major festival has become paramount in determining how rich of an experience I have there.  Between screenings, filmmaker interviews, Doc Shop-viewing, parties and panels, I couldn't find the time and the think-space to write much, so my next couple of posts will be wrapping up highlights from my time there, the emphasis on the films I saw and the filmmakers with whom I spoke.  I had two fantastic in-depth talks that I will also be posting this week, the first with Finnish filmmaker, Iris Olsson, and her editor, Annuka Lilja, makers of a deeply moving film called Summerchild, a finalist for best mid-length doc, and recent prize-winner at Full Frame for the President's Award.  (The prize at Hot Docs went to Iranian filmmaker Mehrdad Oskouei's It's Always Late for Freedom, a stunning verite piece on a correctional center for young people in Tehran.)  My other in-depth conversation was with filmmaker, Massoud Bahkshi, maker of Tehran Has No More Pomegranates, an experimental tour de force about his hometown of Tehran.  It was one of the most fascinating and exciting conversations I've had in a while.  His film is quite brilliant, too.  (Bahkshi served as a juror at this year's festival for Best Canadian Feature Documentary.)

As I said, this was my first foray to Hot Docs, and since it's the largest doc fest/market in North America, an important one to attend.  I was, indeed, shut out of the Forum completely, and it goes on mysteriously behind locked doors.  Even participating filmmakers get the "privilege" of peeking behind the curtain only for a bit, as if to say, this some day might be you, just not right now.  It seems to me that commissioning editors are out of touch with what's happening in nonfiction.  For the most part, they are not artists, not filmmakers and their aesthetic sensibility is questionable, at best.  The gatekeepers should remain cognizant of what's transpiring in international nonfiction cinema and should attempt to stay more relevant in that regard in their decision-making and, in particular, their attitude towards filmmakers.  Is it really necessary to create this lion's den atmosphere?  Where, for goodness' sakes, is the much needed support for artists?  Even the festival's Outstanding Achievement honoree, Richard Leacock stated that he can't get his work played on television--this is one of the godfathers of documentary cinematography, who has been contributing groundbreaking work to the nonfiction canon for decades.  And it didn't sound like he was retiring anytime soon.

Okay, on to the other important stuff: the films.  Lucky me, the first thing I viewed was Geoffrey Smith's The English Surgeon (the subject of this beautiful piece, the brave Dr. Henry Marsh, pictured above and one of his patients, Marian Dolishny, pictured left 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.

I watched the first twenty minutes or so of Tamar Yarom's To See If I'm Smiling at the IDFA last fall at Docs for Sale and then had to dash somewhere.  (It won the Silver Wolf award there.)  What I saw continued to haunt me and I knew that I needed to see the whole thing the first opportunity I had. Missing it again at Full Frame (argh!), I did finally make it to a late night screening at Hot Docs. 

Winner of the festival's International Special Jury Prize, the film portrays, in just one powerful hour, the personal accounts of six young Israeli women, all giving intense accounts of their (mandatory) army service in the Occupied Territories, that circle of hell known as the Gaza Strip, where things for all of them went horribly awry. 

It's not so much "the female perspective" on the moral challenges these women face encountering the Palestinian population daily (and also dealing with their male fellow conscripts) that makes this film so interesting and vital.  It's a soldier's story, one in which these officers look back critically at the way they handled the power placed in their hands at just eighteen years of age.  Courageous, articulate, emotionally scarred, the six young women recount in stomach-clenching detail, the horror stories and crimes against humanity they witnessed and, in some cases, instigated.  This is a film that makes the notions of where one falls on the political spectrum in this decades-long territorial debacle moot.

Yarom has a Bachelor's in Psychology from Hebrew University, and she delicately, but persistently, guides these women through the minefields of their psyches as they bravely recount their stories of the corrosive effects of power in an occupied zone.  Their anguish pierces the heart.  This is one of the strongest films on the price of war and occupation on the part of the occupiers I've seen.  Jews vow "never to forget" the Holocaust and, with fierce vigilance, keep the memories of the horrors of that occupation alive and well in our collective consciousness decades later.  Yarom has contributed a vital piece of cinema to help us remember who's paying for the cost of this one.

Hot Docs Announces Projects for 9th Annual Forum

On April 23 and 24 in Toronto, Hot Docs will host its ninth annual Toronto Documentary Forum (TDF).  Thirty-five projects have been selected for presentation from a record 231 entries received from around the world.

Co-financiers and co-presenters of the selected projects include ARTE France, BBC, Bravo!, HBO, PBS/ITVS, The Sundance Channel and ZDF-Arte.  The 35 projects originate from twelve countries and this year, 50% of the projects originate from the Americas, with the balance coming from Europe and Australia.  This has become an essential market event in North America but the Forum is a limited-seating, separately accredited event within Hot Docs requiring advance registration (although I'm politely, persistently, assiduously trying to pull the same thing with the press office there as I did at IDFA to get in for a bit to observe; it worked in Amsterdam, so we'll see if it works in Toronto).

Here are the projects selected from the US:

Jr Ping Pong, Jonathan Bricklin and Bill Mack, Ridiculous Inc.
The Calling (mini-series) Danny Alpert, The Kindling Group
Goold's Gold, Tucker Capps and Dan O'Meara, Pan Productions
Informant T-10: Rogue Actor, Eugene Jarecki, Charlotte Street Films LTD
Skydancer, Katja Esson, Penelope Pictures LLC
The Tiger Next Door, Camilla Calamandrei, Rolling River Films LLC

You can go on the Hot Docs website to learn more about these, and other, projects set for exhibition.

3rd Annual Doc Challenge Returns to HotDocs

This year's International Documentary Challenge takes place March 6 - 10 and registration is now open for the third iteration of the contest.  Filmmakers have just five days to create a short nonfiction film.  You can click here to find out the nitty gritty on rules, regulations and registration deadlines.

The contest is produced by Doug Whyte of KDHX Community Media out of St. Louis, Missouri and sponsored by HotDocs, the IDA, the Documentary Organization of Canada, SILVERDOCS, Big Sky Documentary Film Festival, Film Action Oregon and the creators of the 48 Hour Film Project.

Finalists will be premiering their work in April at a special screening during HotDocs in Toronto, April 17 - 27.  I got to hit the IDFA this year and I'm determined to get myself to Canada for this in the spring. 

Go make a doc--quick!