Still in Motion

Separation Anxiety: Babai

At its international premiere at this year’s Jubilee edition of the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, Visar Morina’s intense and immediate father/son drama, Babai (The Father) was awarded with a jury prize from the Europa Cinemas Label. Along with our FIPRESCI jury, the ECL was one of four non-statutory juries with the task of awarding a film from the Official Selection Competition and speaks to a film's potential to stand up to the grandeur of the big screen.

As well, this year’s International Jury awarded Morina its Best Director prize for his inaugural feature, an intensely sweet victory for a project that took its writer/director eight years to make, and a significant consortium of funders, co-producers and commissioning editors – twelve, to be exact – to help realize the film’s completion. Its dark subject matter and rigorous adherence to cinematic storytelling in all of its aspects would not have made this an easy film to make in the current landscape of derivative adaptations that conform to the kind of trivial dross that passes for competent storytelling in many quarters.

Morina was born in the capital city of Prishtina in Kosovo in 1979, just one year before Josep Broz Tito’s reign over a united Yugoslavia came to an end. Tito diluted Serbian power by establishing autonomous governments in Serbian provinces, including Kosovo, the major province to the south. That autonomy – at least formally – was fairly meaningless until, after many brutal wars throughout the 20^th century, the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) was founded in 1990, one decade after Tito’s death. (Morina would have been eleven years old at the time; he and his family immigrated to Germany.) To this day, the fragile, young Republic continues to face substantial emigration, its population rapidly dwindling. It is estimated that about a third of the people of Kosovar descent currently live outside the country, the vast majority of them in Germany.

Babai tells the story of 10-year-old Nori, played by Val Maloku in a subtle, and powerfully contained performance. The small but sturdy boy chases after his dad who has gone to Germany without him. In the father’s first bid for “freedom” by leaving everything behind including his only son, the boy literally throws himself under the bus that is about to take his father away from him, a clear sign that this is a child that will not be deterred. As the boy is recovering in hospital from a head gash, his father has just gotten on another bus and left.

After stealing the money he needs from his uncle, Nori embarks upon a harrowing journey, one that is urged on by sheer will and a not insignificant amount of choking rage at being abandoned by a passive and feckless father. Gezim, sensitively played by Astrit Kabashi, is a lost and bewildered man who has also been abandoned by his wife, and Nori’s mother. Their individual escapes – along with that of so many other men, women and children – take place in the period of the third largest phase of Kosovo’s emigration, during and after the devastating war of 1997 – 1999.

For the last five years or so, I have been living in Berlin and working in the country of Kosovo. Both cultures continue to hold much puzzlement and misunderstanding for me, but, in essence, through friendships with Kosovars both here and there, I have come to have a deep and abiding sense of pathos and respect for their continued battles for sovereignty and independence, both as a nation, and as individuals seeking a better destiny. I have seen many, many films out of the region about the war and its effects – in fact, it seems as if there is no other topic sometimes – and Babai is one of the most transcendent pieces I’ve come across where the issues of unending post-war trauma, ancient tribal customs that are embedded in the population’s DNA, and the wild and violent temperament that accompanies those customs dictates not only the ways they learn to navigate in the larger world, but in the ways in which they view themselves and one another outside of the confines of their small country. In Morina’s fine and spare script and in the performances of his lead actors – first film roles for both – there is a forthright and unabashed nod to the ways in which survival requires constant vigilance and an unchecked brutality, even when it’s between father and son. Both Maloku and Kabashi give superbly nuanced and naturalistic performances, yet another sign that an assured and brilliantly talented writer/director is at the helm.

In its social constructs and familial contracts, this is a completely patriarchal culture, but one that has been emasculated by constant war, trauma and deprivation. In the head-on negotiations and collisions of Nori and Gezim, we see the stoic way in which a male must navigate, never showing doubt, fear, or trepidation in the face of adversity. But when all that you face is adversity – financially, physically, emotionally – you learn to fight like a street dog for what’s yours.

The major part of Nori’s visceral chase after his father is enhanced by highly proficient and urgent handheld camera work by cinematographer Matteo Cocco who uses the black of night to appropriately suffocating affect, and exceptional sound design by Malte Beiler and Igor Popovski. The boy’s secret and relentless journey towards the only stability he knows is so fraught with betrayals at every turn that by the time he reaches his destination, his suppressed fury at his abandonment explodes and we realize that any vestiges of the child he was are gone, replaced by an utterly defiant and deeply damaged and haunted persona, most likely assuring that the boy will enter a manhood that may very well resemble his father’s – an existence that is harsh, aggressive and unforgiving, the newest betrayal at the hands of friend or foe (oftentimes indistinguishable), loving and hating, in equal measure, who and what you are. Not even the escape of an exhausted slumber can keep the nightmare of a barely-coherent existence at bay, particularly when your sole guardian’s perverse and misplaced sense of pride fails you time and time again.

 

The System Is Broken: What a Wonderful World

In many of the films I viewed at the 30^th edition of the Warsaw Film Festival, the complex and unsettling relationship between oppressor and oppressed kept emerging in many of the selections. Manifested in myriad cinematic presentations of form, structure and narrative style, power plays of one sort or another were explored in ways from deceivingly subtle and opaque to explicit orgies of sadomasochistic violence, and everything in between. What happens when the tables turn and the oppressed decide to revolt against deeply ingrained and habitual feelings of inferiority – physical, material, psychological, emotional, and otherwise – cannot help but pull into sharp relief the interdependent psychoses of victim and victimizer.

In the last several years, we have seen a re-emergence of people’s movements all over the world, "everyday rebellions" of fed up citizens taking to the streets in protests that echo the repressed agonies of suffocating under the oppressive fist of a small group of people that does its utmost to create as dystopian a society as they can get away with, staying on top through various means of manipulation, propaganda, and iron-fisted controls. Sometimes, when there is a particularly bad seed wielding power, this manifests in kidnappings, false arrests, hidden torture and public executions.

There are the high profile events we’ve all read about ad infinitum that the media, in its relentless and voracious search for prolonged hysteria, make the headlines regularly. And then there are places like Moldova, a small country that emerged as an independent republic following the dissolution of the Soviet Union. The small state, among many other invisible places, has been scratching for survival since then. And its corrupt leaders, including a sadistic police force that wields power with impunity, use this invisibility from the rest of the world to help ensure that yet another generation suffers the same deeply internalized inferiority they themselves possess.

One of the most powerful portrayals of this scenario was in emerging Moldovan film director Anatol Durbală’s début feature called What a Wonderful World, our FIPRESCI winner at Warsaw. Tasked with judging a very specific category of first features by Eastern European filmmakers, our jury encountered extremely immature cinematic works, rife with underdeveloped or derivative elements that ultimately made for distinctly non-transcendent work. A couple of the selections were no better than the rankest TV movie melodramas and why they were programmed in a competition is still puzzling to me.

[Which thought leads to a digression: Our jury was a bit dismayed to see that Ukrainian director Myroslav Slaboshpytskiy’s The Tribe was in this category, for even though it is a feature début, it has been more than established, including by FIPRESCI, that his film is a masterwork. We all understand that this young director is probably well on his way to becoming a potent voice in world cinema and it was for this reason that we had to persuade ourselves into discounting it from becoming a contender for the prize. It is a work that sat distinctly far above any others in its category and, therefore, ironically because of its excellence, we felt it had to be disqualified. Not to belabor the point, but it would be like putting an early etching by da Vinci into a competition with other beginners – a distinct curatorial flaw on the part of the programmers of this competition. We were not the only jury faced with this, for Slaboshpytskiy did not walk away from this festival with an award.]

Durbală’s film, as well, has its flaws, certainly. However, his voice and point-of-view should be encouraged because through this film he shows much promise and possesses strong dramaturgical chops, distinctive, specific and unique. As well, since its independence in 1991, Moldova is a country with virtually no film industry and this is pure guerilla-style filmmaking at its best despite the lack of resources. Told with urgency and intensity, it is a deceptively spare take on a wrong-place-at-the-wrong-time scenario, deftly weaving the events of a violent populist uprising by a generation whose time has come to display their rage and mistrust of a backward-looking government.

It is in the penultimate scene – that has a running time of close to 20 minutes – that presents the set piece that illustrates how a generational divide of just two decades can draw two men who could be father and son together into a fight to the death, the elder scrambling for his relevancy in a world he knows is slipping away. Here Durbală has written and directed a scene that distinctly shows that it is the oppressor, the party or individual in the power position, that has also developed its own particular psychosis, every interaction attempting to convey an image of superiority and its correspondent self-image – to be maintained at any cost. For once upon a time, as was his father and grandfather before him, he was a victim of similar oppressors and he has learned well. We know right away that there is no misunderstanding of events; there is no such thing as the truth or a lie. There is only damage. Actor Igor Caras-Romanov who plays the interrogating Major delivers a startling performance where we see this quite explicitly. It is this that is heartbreaking, for despite his purported love of country, god and family, his sanity is gone, beat out of him when he was Petru’s age. Petru is the main protagonist played with low-key, but privileged, confidence by Igor Babiac.

The film re-enacts a portion of events from April 2009, a period in the young republic’s history when there was one parliamentary construction and dissolution after another creating an exceedingly unstable, fragmented era, and an atmosphere of flourishing and flagrant corruption. Young Petru is unwittingly caught up in the rioting that took place in the capital city of Chișinău when young people stormed and looted the building where the Parliament is housed. Coming home after two years of study at a prestigious university in the United States to visit family, oblivious as to what extent troubles have been brewing in his home country and preoccupied with his American sweetheart, Petru is caught up in a relentless scenario, mistaken for a looter as he is walking down the street with his own computer monitor he has gone to collect from a friend so he can Skype with his girl back in Boston.

After the cacophony and chaos of a series of scenes of police brutality – the rioting young people are thrown on the cement, kicked, dragged into a van, truncheoned and bloodied and thrown in a dark cellar with no air to breathe – Petru is brought to the Major’s office for interrogation, the supposition that if he confesses, he will be sent home. Gently stirring his tea ceremonially and speaking to the 22-year-old in a soft “reasonable” voice, using the diminutive of Petru's name like a scolding papa, the Major quickly begins to splutter and rage, intermittently commanding himself to stay calm. He cannot. He speaks with disdain at the privileged, ignorant boy before him. As he devolves into near parodic rage, things tip over into hysteria when he discovers that Petru's girlfriend is a Puerto Rican mulatta. When he interprets that to mean that Moldavan women are not good enough for Petru, and he has a woman also being held captive brought in for Petru to rape, we quickly discern that the young man's fate is irrevocably sealed.

“Why was I brought here?” he asks. “The one who asks questions is me. You answer,” says the Major. Here the camerawork is handheld and urgent, moving back and forth between young Petru and the Major as they negotiate the netherworld between their individual worldviews. What the Major sees before him is a 20 years younger boy with all the privileges he never had. They are face to face but the divide between them is so deep and wide, the truth has no place here. Only one truth exists, that of the dictatorial, that of the system, a system that is going down swinging with its last gasps, the Major representing the generation that cannot and will not adjust to the new order coming, dread-filled that he will soon be marginalized in a quickly-changing world. Like dogs in a cage set upon one another, there is no draw, no false holdout for reconciliation and understanding.

When the fictional world that Durbală has created has reached its shocking climax, the director shifts to documentary footage from April 2009 shot by participants of the riots and the local press. But instead of seeing the protesters on the bloody end of the stick, we see that it is the police who are attacked, brutalized, one officer walking by someone's camera holding his bleeding forehead, a group of men in riot gear running for their safety, using their own shields to cower in a tight circle to protect themselves from the baying, angry, looting crowd who are throwing heavy bricks at them. Who are the criminals? Who are the criminalized? Who is the oppressor? Who is the victim? As the footage plays, we listen to an emotional rendition sung in Romanian – Ce Lume Minunată– of What a Wonderful World, a song made famous by a black American jazz trumpeter and singer born in 1901 named Louis Armstrong. Despite its flowery, gentle lyrics, Armstrong sang it filled with a deep and abiding sadness emanating from his hoarse, quavering voice as a lament for himself and his fellow Negroes, trying to survive in a country that to this very day still has not let go of the legacy of its own master-slave relationship.

 

La Estancia: Hiding in Plain Sight

In milky pre-dawn light, a small group of men and women of various generations moves silently through lush greenery, assisting one another across a narrow path in what appears to be some kind of clandestine border crossing. There is nothing outwardly urgent in their demeanor but they move with purpose. In the series of carefully framed and composed tableaux vivants that follow, director Federico Adorno stages a pantomime illustrating the aftermath of something terrible, an event that has decimated a small population of farmers on an estancia in the countryside of Paraguay. The realization surfaces slowly that they are “trespassing” back onto the land they call home.

La Estancia, Adorno’s spare and elegant 14-minute film, world-premiered as a selection in this year’s international competition at the 60^th edition of the Internationale Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen / International Short Film Festival Oberhausen. By festival’s end, the international jury awarded the film with the highest honor of The Grand Prize of the City of Oberhausen.

Adorno’s film is a ghost story told in fragments, based on a deadly clash that occurred in June of 2012 on Campos Morombí in the city of Curuguaty. Currently, five landless peasants stand accused of taking part in the killing of eleven farmers and six policemen during a land eviction procedure, such cases being common in Paraguay, a country where over 80% of the land is in the hands of less than 2% of the population. Illegalities abound and cases of blatant corruption between the elite and the state are the norm. Landless individuals have no rights in this place. They are invisible, dispensable, powerless, voiceless.

Adorno’s cinematic vision is not concerned with the task of providing any kind of facile re-enactment of an actual event. Many films in the Oberhausen program this year dealt in myriad ways with re-enactment, the ritualizing of selective memories staged in anonymous rites or rituals of celebration or mourning, often using the warp and weave of grand landscapes to encounter secret, inchoate histories. Because of the breadth of its brutality in a place where brutality is the currency of the entitled, this particular case of the peasants in La Estancia is a story that has been recorded. Yet Adorno represents them in the complete and authentic isolation that is the only reality that truly belongs to them. They cannot even seek refuge in the stolid permanence of land appropriated by others more powerful than they. They are chased away over and over again. The cows can stay. The people who tend them must flee.

Subdued ambient sounds from the natural surroundings are the only aural elements to orientate us. There is no score, nor is there any text to accompany the passion play that unfolds before us. Abandoned by these reliable signifiers, we are left with the eerie tranquility and stillness in the aftermath of unspeakable things. Adorno uses the short film form as a master writer uses the short story: catching the essence of a moment, the shock and devastation where the unwritten, undocumented part of all this – the never-ending, stunning grief of voiceless people – is absorbed by the landscape, a landscape where they are able to hide in plain sight. The surprise comes from how easily they blend in. In most every scene of Adorno’s story, after a few moments of looking around, we conclude that there is no one there. And then like ghosts inhabiting corporeal form for brief moments as ghosts do, they appear, looking out at us from the underbrush, praying and administering over their dead loved ones, standing silently watching, ensconced in the living tomb of their brothers, sisters, parents and children. There lays a single small black rubber boot on its side in the mud, there a delicate white plastic rosary, amongst other unidentifiable detritus at a ravaged campsite. There is nothing else but the breaking daylight and the soft susurrations of the breezes to accompany the survivors as they go about discovering and recovering the ones that have fallen, also left like so much detritus scattered across the suddenly abandoned landscape.

A couple of months ago, in March of this year, the five peasants being held responsible for the massacre went on a hunger strike for more than thirty days in order to demand justice and freedom, seemingly their only source of protest in a country where their lives are less than incidental. After watching the poetic precision of Adorno’s film, we can begin to understand that wasting away, eventually disappearing altogether, is something the state and the land-grabbers rely upon them to do. And so they play their parts. They play them so heartbreakingly well.

In a statement read at the closing ceremonies in Oberhausen, the filmmaker expressed his solidarity with the people that are the inspiration for his film. From Paraguay, he had written to express his gratitude to both the festival and the jury for the honor, but felt he needed to forego an opportunity to travel to Germany. He needed to remain by their side.

More on Oberhausen at the FIPRESCI site here.

 

 

 

 

Anna Odell, Director THE REUNION

Swedish artist Anna Odell’s début feature is causing quite a stir. When one starts watching The Reunion (Återträffen), particularly when it’s part of the international competition at CPH:DOX, a festival that’s renowned for presenting work in the genre-free zone, one at first takes it in for the “re-enacted documentary” it’s meant to be. But then things start to get a bit complicated.

The opening scene is a high school reunion, where classmates who graduated together 20 years ago have gathered. But there is a guest among them who has something to say to all of them – something they really don’t want to hear, especially at a celebration. Shot like a feature film with three-camera coverage and superb acting, the first part of the film is a passion play of a “what if?” situation when someone confronts her childhood bullies head-on. The second half of the film was meant to be the individual meetings the director requests from her classmates to show them this short film of their reunion, get their reactions and have further dialogue. But this goal is thwarted and so Odell continues the reenactment, this time based on actual conversations she had (or might have had) with her former schoolmates.

Subtly raising many questions on the theme of bullying and group hierarchies – something the artist is intent on exploring in all of her work – the film becomes a terrific medium in which to provoke a larger discussion on the ethics involved in dealing with real people and events. It offers a complex construction, based in fact, but completely fictionalized within the context of a narrative film –emotionally engaging, thought provoking and thoroughly entertaining.

The Reunion was awarded the FIPRESCI prize for best début feature in the Orrizonti and International Critics' Week sections at the 70th Venice Film Festival. Last November, I sat with Odell in Copenhagen to talk about her process of making the film.

(Part of this transcript appeared in the Fall 2013 issue of DOX Magazine. I am re-publishing it here following the news that The Reunion has been nominated for the Doc Alliance Award 2014; the winner will be announced at Cannes.)

 

Still in Motion (SIM): The Reunion is quite moving in a very surprising way. Even though you're constantly shifting and changing your narrative tone, it’s cohesive. The emotional through-line never wavers.

Anna Odell (AO): In the way I can work as an artist or a director, I can realize those things to which I have only had a long internal process of thinking and feeling, to see what would happen if it got played out. In my work, I am very interested in this topic of bullying and in using my own experience. I started to write the speech I deliver in the beginning scene at the reunion, because it had been 20 years since this class of mine had left school. I wanted to go to this reunion and deliver it to them like I do in the film. But I got a message on Facebook from a girlfriend that it had already happened. Everyone had been invited but me. At first I was really disappointed because I wanted to start this art project at the reunion.

SIM: Was the plan to have someone there document what happened when you read the speech to your classmates? Would that have been possible?

AO: Yes, I wanted in some way to document it. If I couldn’t somehow film anything, I would record it. For me, it’s really important that I don’t expose people who don’t want to be exposed, but I also want to be able to use any material I gather as I want. After getting this message, I had to start re-thinking things, to find answers as to what they were afraid of by encountering me again, and what could happen if they had invited me. But ultimately, it turns out, that it was even better that I wasn’t invited because otherwise this film wouldn’t have happened.

However, it was still important for me to meet my old classmates because as an artist, I want to use a real experience from which to launch my work. I really don’t want to talk about my feelings. I want to examine relationships. So this is how I decided to do this first part of the movie. Then, the process of contacting my classmates began. The meetings you see in the film are re-enactments of these meetings, not with the real people, but with actors. But not the same ones as in the first part.

SIM: It’s a fairly high level of difficulty to work both behind and in front of the camera. The film language you use is very sophisticated, even for an experienced director.

AO: Yes, it was all a new experience [laughs]. I wanted to make it work as a film. But probably the process was really different from the way most would make a movie. In Sweden, we can apply for funding from the Swedish Film Institute and from the television station. Usually, you have to have a very tight script, completely finished. But I just had this idea and a vague script of the first part of the film at the reunion. The idea was how it might be worked out in the second part but with nothing really developed. But they believed in the project and gave us some money for research and so I began to figure out the different ways to approach it, working with actors and shaping the narrative. We started a casting process where we would ask the men and women to tell us their own experiences from school. The actors, for the most part, have similar experiences in terms of where they fall in this hierarchy as they do in the film. So I gave them my idea of how they were as kids and then, together with their real-life experiences, we created the characters.

 

In the first part of the movie, we figured out the dramatic arc and what we were going to speak about by letting them use their own words. It was really important to me that it had this kind of authenticity. It was, therefore, risky for them, too. To create a safer environment, we rehearsed together a lot, but never the scenes from the movie. We were always our characters and got to know one another as the characters that we had created together. I think all this work is evident when you watch the film.

 

SIM: It’s evident mostly because you let things take a hugely dramatic, pretty violent course of action. We go from a somewhat subdued situation to something quite intense and extreme in an eyeblink. It's shocking. But you also really believe these people have known one another for decades.

 

AO: They needed to treat me as if I was a freak so that they felt fine bullying me. But then I’m also the director. To ease this process, we went back to school and acted together as if we were all 15 years old again. They could experience me not as someone they had to listen to, but be able to express this power they felt they had over me. Sometimes, it would just be me and one other person, or a small group of us, some all together, so the relationships could be built.

 

SIM: What does this one man who is always by your side in the second half – who plays one of your worst antagonists in the first half – represent? He becomes your ally or even, I could say, your intermediary, your collaborator, in the dealings with your former classmates.

 

AO: There’s almost too much to say about this because the process was so big and so intricate, and there are so many things we ultimately cut away from the film, a lot of really good stuff. But, somehow, it didn’t fit in to the main story. This is the case with Rikard [Svensson], the man you’re talking about. He’s the guy on the roof with me at the end. But my editor, Kristin Grundström, thought we looked like overgrown teenagers who were in love with each other and that was wrong. I wasn’t in love with him but something happens when we are together. But for the overall film, it just didn’t work.

 

SIM: It works on maybe some subtler level because you are so alone, so isolated with no one by your side and then in the second half – when you are taking control – he’s always there with you.

 

AO: Yes, it shows that I’m not alone anymore and that it’s not just me searching for revenge. It’s me, as a mature adult, who wants to examine these relationships.

 

SIM: Your presence, even though you are reliving a tortuous experience, is very light and most of the time very funny. There’s something so delightful in this little, delicate person with big eyes obstinately standing there and not going away until she gets answers.

 

AO: I think the answer lies in the fact that I am free from my history. Now, I’m interested in how it all works, this hierarchical structure that put me at the bottom. The first part of the film was very stressful because I’m dealing with a lot of people and three cameras. It needed to be very strategic, organized, meticulously choreographed. The other stress was the question: Can I really meet my classmates? How could I act to make it possible for them to talk to me and not feel like I wanted them to feel guilty and view me as still coming from that low place? How do we speak about that history together? It was really problematic. I didn’t necessarily want this confrontation where I would corner them and say, “You are a bully!” I really wanted to know how they saw it.

 

Almost everyone would answer when I called the first time. When I tried to then coordinate meeting with them, they didn’t answer. We have this famous investigative journalist in Sweden called Janne Josefsson. My editor told me, “Anna, you have to be like Janne Josefsson.” [laughter] But, interestingly, their reactions were reminiscent of how they would avoid me when I would ask to play with them at school. Now I was calling and calling and calling because I wanted something from them. It wasn’t for my own feelings this time, but for the film. But I think for them it was really much the same as the other and they just wanted to avoid me and came up with every excuse not to meet with me. All of a sudden, they had a new number or they lost their phone or had no time for the next three years [laughter].

 

SIM: I want to ask you about one of the last scenes, another point at which you shift things again to talk about this idea of representation and recreation. One of your subjects approaches the actor who plays him in the film, and they proceed to have this discussion about what it’s like to have yourself fictionally portrayed. It becomes a very funny and surreal discussion, and in the same light-handed way, you broach a topic that is rampantly – and quite seriously – discussed in documentary circles. Why did you include this in your script?

 

AO: In some ways, I wanted to tell the audience I was aware of what I’m doing in this film or in the way I chose to make it. And that it’s highly problematic. Maybe I did hurt some people along the way in the way I portrayed them and that they feel like I’m using them. I wanted to express that I’m aware of all that. But I hope it’s not too much. I’m also very interested in these layers of fiction and reality. My favorite lines are when the real guy – who is an actor – says to the actor who portrays him that it’s not every day you meet the guy who plays you in a film. And the actor says, well, it’s not every day you meet the character you’re portraying in a film. The scene didn’t happen, but it could happen. Maybe it will happen. [laughter]

 

SIM: How was the medium of film essential in the way you constructed this project? Why didn't you stage it as an installation piece or something along those lines?

 

AO: I chose this way because I thought it was the best way to explore this theme. At the beginning, I really did think I could make the second part possible, but then I did realize that it was going to be really hard, or impossible, to get to talk to them. And then it all had to be a re-construction. I had a really strong idea but so many different angles I could have explored and there were many alternatives I had to put away. 

 

This was a really, really good experience and fun to do this movie. I would love to do it again. But, for me, the most important thing is the theme, to keep exploring this interest of mine. There might be another film but there might also be another way to keep exploring it. I am very influenced by how people react to power, the role of the victim and the role of the person who has the power and how that relationship happens. My last project turned out to have so many different outcomes, some of which really surprised me. [Odell created and performed a highly controversial and divisive art installation called Unknown, woman 2009-349701, where she enacted a psychotic episode on a bridge in Stockholm. She was later fined for violent resistance and fraudulent practice.]  

 

SIM: Yes, but here we can then talk about the hierarchy of art and film criticism, which is something that fascinates me personally. In reading about your other project and the various reactions to it – both as an art installation and as this irresponsible stunt done by this woman calling herself an artist – you see the ways in which this power is wielded. Most of it, not surprisingly, is quite chauvinistic in nature, including the criticisms The Reunion has received.

 

AO: Yes, you can see in the ways that certain people react to the movie, what kind of person it is. I read the review in the Hollywood Reporter. The guy that wrote the review said that this was the work of a narcissistic artist who wanted to put herself front and center and that really, I am not interested in analysis at all. He writes a bit about my earlier art piece and seemed to take his information from the people in the media who didn’t like it and called it a suicide attempt. This is not the truth. I never pretended as if I was going to take my own life. In fact, no one who was there thought I was going to take my life. They called the police because I was underdressed for the cold and displaying this behavior that made them feel as if they just couldn’t leave me there. Those who also said I was violent and hitting people at the hospital were lying. I did no such thing and it was proved that no such thing happened by the eyewitnesses who were there. But once this information is out there, then people cannot change their minds about what they “heard” had happened. It’s too late to re-think things. Many people in Sweden still believe this version reported by the media.

 

I mean, I’m not saying that people can’t have a negative reaction to what I do or think this film is a bad piece of work. As the artist making the work, I find all this really, really interesting because all of this happened not because of me as a person – no one really cared about that or even knew who I was – but that it had been staged as an art project. This was where the real controversy was. So I saw this misuse of power first-hand from the media and from the courts and also how people perceived art and what art is. I got so much out of it! I expect the same from reactions to this film.

 

Interview: Marianna Kaat, Director PIT NO 8

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

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

The Age

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

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

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

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

--Osip Emilevich Mandelstam

OUTRO -- Life After Death

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

XI International Documentary Film Festival "Flahertiana"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

Dokufest 2011: Mirko Ilic Does Prizren

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

 

 

Dokufest 2011: A LETTER TO DAD

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

DOKUFEST Rides Again, 10 Years Strong

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

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

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

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

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

Viva Dokufest and përgëzime on your ten-year anniversary!

 

 

 

Interview: Zachary Levy, Director STRONGMAN

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ZL:  Particularly for this film.

SIM:  How long did you shoot with Stan?

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

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

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

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

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

ZL:  Yes!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SIM:  The post-Hollywood moment then.

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

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

SIM:  Like it does for Stan.

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

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

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

 

Finland in New York

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

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

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

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

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

 

Senses of Cinema Issue #58

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

My 25 + 1

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

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

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

The Devil's Playground, Lucy Walker, 2002.

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

Prodigal Sons, Kimberly Reed, 2008.

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

Protagonist, Jessica Yu, 2007.

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

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

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

My Country, My Country, Laura Poitras, 2006.

Freeheld, Cynthia Wade, 2007.

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

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

The Mother, Pavel Kostomarov and Antoine Cattin, 2008.

Family Affair, Chico Colvard, 2010.

Off and Running, Nicole Opper, 2009.

3 Rooms of Melancholia, Pirjo Honkasalo, 2005.

O Amor Natural, Heddy Honigmann,1996.

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

La Sierra, Scott Dalton and Margarita Martinez, 2005.

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

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

Billy the Kid, Jennifer Venditti, 2007.

Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo, Jessica Oreck, 2009.

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

 

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

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

 

 

 

INTERVIEW: Helena Trestiková, Director KATKA

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Expanded Cinema: New Vision at CPH:DOX

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

 

 

 

 

It Was Waiting for Me: A Conversation with Marie Losier

Filmmaker, artist and curator, Marie Losier, was born in France in 1972, and has been living and working in New York City for the past seventeen years. She creates singular portraits of vanguard filmmakers, musicians, composers and artists, although many of them are far from obscure.  Losier has given her distinctive filmic treatment to the likes of Mike and George Kuchar, Guy Maddin, Richard Foreman, Tony Conrad and Genesis P-Orridge, the subject of her latest piece called The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye. She also has intimate friendships with all of these talents.  Here’s what filmmaker Charles Burnett wrote to her in 2006 about her work, “I sit with a smile on my face. I wish there were more people like the characters in your films, in the world. It takes you on a ride that weaves the real and surreal.” And Maddin has dubbed her “Edith Sitwell’s inner Tinkerbell.”  

Her films have shown widely in museums, galleries, biennials and festivals all over the world, including P.S.1 in New York City, New York’s Museum of Modern Art, The Whitney Biennial, Rotterdam International Film Festival, La Fondation Cartier, The Tate Modern, The Wexner Art Center, Luxe Gallery, White Column Gallery, the Ismailia International Film Festival in Egypt, Anthology Film Archives (where she also curates experimental film and video shows), Ocularis, British Film Institute, the Musée d’Art Contemporain, among many others. She was recently the subject of a full retrospective at the Buenos Aires Festival of International Cinema.

Since 2000, Losier has also worked full-time as the film curator at The French Institute Alliance Française in New York City, where she presents a weekly film series and has hosted the likes of Raoul Coutard, Claire Denis, Chantal Akerman, Jane Birkin, Jeanne Moreau, Jackie Raynal, and Anouk Aimée.  As well, she has performed in films by George and Mike Kuchar, and Jackie Raynal, and in plays by Juliana Francis and Tony Torn.

Her work with Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, born Neil Andrew Megson in Manchester, England in 1950, has been a seven-years-long collaboration, and has resulted in her first feature film, which will début as part of the Forum at this year’s Berlin International Film Festival. The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye is a glorious pastiche that features the story of the incredible love between Genesis and Lady Jaye. Tragically, in the midst of creating this project, Lady Jaye Breyer P-Orridge unexpectedly passed away at the age of 42 on October 9, 2007.

Most famous for the bands, Throbbing Gristle and Psychic TV, the 63-year-old Genesis  currently resides in the house in Brooklyn, New York where he lived together with Jaye.  There, Genesis reads, paints and writes.  He also tours extensively, giving lectures, talks and performances throughout the world.  As part of the Forum Expanded section, Genesis and Tony Conrad will perform an improvised violin concert together on February 19^th at Berlin’s Hebbel-am-ufer Theatre.

During a trip to New York at the very beginning of this year, I met with Marie at the charming East Village coffee and pastry palace, DeRobertis Caffe.  In walked a tiny figure, bundled up in a long coat and chapeau against the winter chill—an utterly charming and warmly-smiling gamine—to talk to me about her latest project, her unique and intimate relationship with Genesis, and the long and hard road she traveled to complete this film:

 

Still in Motion (SIM):  I think it’s always pretty easy to tell when the subject or subjects of a film have encountered the maker that’s meant to record their story.  I’ve seen wonderful examples of that several times in the last few years.  You have a distinctive way in which you do portraiture in film. Some of the first footage I saw of this piece was where you and Genesis were playing a game of hide-and-seek amongst the shelves of a gigantic home archive. It was so playful and so lovely.  And, of course, it’s an amazing and deeply moving love story.

Marie Losier (ML):  Very moving.  Gen is amazing.

SIM:  When and how did you first meet one another?

ML:  Seven years ago, I went to see a concert of Alan Vega with Suicide at the Knitting Factory [in New York City].  I was really excited because I loved his work but, unfortunately, it was a terrible concert—really bad.  However, the third part of the concert was Genesis, of whom I didn’t know anything.  It was Three Majesty, her third band.  So it was Bryan Dall, Genesis and Lady Jaye on bass, and she was reciting poems and it was so amazing, her energy and her presence were astounding.  I had no idea who they were.

The next day I went to an opening—which I never do—right in Soho.  I walked into this gallery and it was a show about music and painting.  It was packed with so many people.  I was crushed against a wall because I’m so small and I stepped on someone’s foot.  I turned around to apologize and it was Gen. She looked at me and all I saw were huge gold teeth in a big smile.  I told her that I had seen her concert the evening before, told her how beautiful I thought it was, how moved I was.  She looked at me for a couple of seconds, gave me her card and asked me to call her.  When I called, she asked me to come over.

When I got there, I was introduced to the basement where she greets people when she doesn’t know them.  I was sitting on this gigantic plastic chair shaped like an open palm. She was staring at me and then called Lady Jaye.  Jaye walked down the stairs, looked at me and asked me if I’d like a coffee.  She asked me what I did, what kinds of films I made, so I talked a little bit about my work. 

Something passed between the two of them and Jaye looked at me and said, “She’s the one. She’s the one who’s going to film our life.  We’ve been waiting for you.”  Ten days later, they took me on tour with Psychic TV. I didn’t know their music at all, but it had been a dream of mine to go on tour with a band.  It was really intense.  I jumped in.  That’s how we met.

SIM:  It sounds like you had no choice in the matter.

ML:  It was like it was waiting for me, yes.  I always wanted to be in a rock band and this was it.  And then, through the years, I learned about Gen and Lady Jaye.  I lived with them for a time.  It was then I saw the love story.  Also, filming the concerts and being on tour made me really sure I didn’t want to do a film about a rock band.  It’s very repetitive and a bit cliché.  I wanted something more.  Discovering their archives made me realize how much was there.

SIM:  The film belongs to Genesis, in essence, since he, she?  I notice you refer to Gen as “she.”

ML:  Yes.

SIM:  She’s front and center in this film.  It appeared to me that Jaye, at times, was a bit reticent about being filmed.  She could ham it up for the camera like in home movie fashion, but she seemed to almost shy away a bit once in a while.

ML:  She was more of a private person.  But also she had a very strong personality.  They would do everything together.  There was a complete energy balance with everything they did, all day long.  The pandrogyny project was as much Jaye as it was Gen. They were muses to, and for, one another.  So I saw something really balanced.  Jaye was much less comfortable being filmed.  I first did spend more time with Gen because she was so open. And then, suddenly, in 2007 Jaye died.

I thought that would be the end of the film, really, because it was so tragic, but I kept filming up until last year, 2010. I did really think that would be the end, though.  Her death was a complete shock and Gen was completely devastated.  It was the end of the band; it was the end of everything.  Gen stayed at home crying for about a year.  I spent a lot of time there and she said to me that she didn’t want me to stop.  She wanted me to keep making the film in memory of Jaye.  I had to adjust to both taking care of her and supporting her and also to keep the film going. It was just really painful and hard, so heavy.  I film alone so it’s not like I have a crew to make it a bit less intimate, so it tends to be very emotional.  You have to be careful—sometimes, you get taken into things you don’t want to and it’s very painful and, at times, very forceful.  Sometimes you see things you really don’t want to see and there’s no protection.

SIM:  One senses that vulnerability.  There is one scene where she’s sitting listening to a song and starts to weep and the camera gets put down immediately as you go to her.  There would be a lot of filmmakers that would have just sat there and kept shooting.

ML:  I’m really close to Gen; she’s a very dear friend.  We’ve been through so much and she knows me inside out.  She also knows how hard I’ve worked on this and that I’ve done it entirely by myself, including negotiating music rights, archival rights, credits, and other things where I really have no idea what I’m doing.  It’s endless—building a website, on and on.  Steve Holmgren, who came on as a producer after the film was made, is helping, but I’ve had to do everything else by myself.  Not to mention the fact that no funding for which we applied came through.  It’s been a hard film to pull out since I also work fulltime so it’s been one roll [of film] at a time.  I think the film is just too experimental for many funders, and I think Gen scares some people.

SIM:  Ironically, their story has been an inspiration for other films.  I think of Jake Yuzna’s Open, which won a Teddy at Berlin last year, for instance.  Also, the times that they lived through and the incredible people that Gen calls friends and colleagues is pretty damned impressive.  You’ve captured an important piece of literary, art and music culture in the 20^th century.

ML:  Yes, William Burroughs, Brion Gysin, the list goes on and on.

SIM:  It’s possible you would have been supported more extensively if you had been making this film in Europe.

ML:  Well, it was also one of those instances where I just started filming.  There wasn’t a choice in the matter and I have never really worked with a producer before so I didn’t have one on this film either.  To then look for money three or four years into the project was difficult.  Thankfully, I had a few grants that supported me during that time. But the film was basically self-funded. I also didn’t want to bend at all in my creative vision for this piece.  When I did the IFP market, I met with a lot of people who really wanted to help but the film needed to be a bit more “commercial” for them to be able to do that, more of a traditional bio-pic, I guess.  So that made it clear that I just had to keep making my film my way.  I have so much material that is not going to be in the final film.  I’ve done many, many interviews that I’m not using and I have interviews of people who are no longer here, like Peter “Sleazy” Christopherson of Throbbing Gristle, who died a month ago, people like Gibby Haynes [of the Butthole Surfers], Peaches [Mermaid Café, The Shit].  I decided in order for me to really make it my piece, it would have to be Gen’s voice and Jaye’s voice.

SIM:  There are also these wonderful, whimsical interludes that you use where you dress Gen up in costumes and do little “passion plays” and such.  You externalize the flights of imagination she’s used throughout her career to express herself.  For anyone who knows your work, “playtime” sessions with your subjects are de rigueur.

ML:  I also live this way.  I do a lot of that playtime type of thing in my daily life with my friends.  It was great to push Gen to do it without a lot of thought; she just trusted me and dressed up and did what I asked.  She’s always portrayed as a rock icon, very posed, the whole concert/fan thing.  But I know the Gen who can be so whimsical and so out-there in another way.  I wanted to turn her into this other character.  She lives her life as a sort of fiction, anyway.  Gen fears nothing.  Yet she’s the most sensitive and emotional person, and quite shy, actually.  She loves being alone, reading books.  Everything else she releases on stage.

SIM:  Berlinale is, of course, one of the most important film festivals in the world.  Are you excited, intimidated, nervous?  You’ve exhibited films there before, but this time, Genesis is also going to perform a live show with Tony Conrad at the fest, which should be amazing.

ML:  Gen is nervous.  I introduced her to him for a scene in my film about Tony.  She saw the film [Tony Conrad DreaMinimalist, 2008] and just fell in love with him and asked me about him. She didn’t know his music or anything.  And I knew Gen’s favorite instrument is the violin.  So I set up a scene where both of them are playing the violin. I organized something more formally, since people really wanted to see this unique collaboration.  We made it into a two-day concert at ISSUE Project Room and also did an album.  They became really good friends and now are touring together.  I should be an agent [laughing].  So in Berlin, they’ll do their concert, which will be totally improvised.  (Still of Tony Conrad and Genesis in "Slap the Gondola," 2009, photo by Bernard Yenelouis.)

The curators in the Forum Expanded section are really amazing about pushing the edge, creating events for the festival. Vaginal Davis and Bruce LaBruce are always creating something really unique and special there, all these amazing artists that live in, or come through, Berlin regularly.

SIM:  What’s so delightful for me, always, is the fabulous sense of humor that accompanies all this madness. It’s great fun.  Gen, too, is a very funny person, almost like an old vaudeville performer.  The sections without synch sound are so evocative of the silent movie era

ML:  Well, the use of no synch sound in the film was a bit scary.  I worked for years without that.  I was afraid it would put a viewer too much outside the film.  But I think I found ways to bring a viewer in.  Gen’s always worked with cut-ups.  So, in a way, certain parts of the film act as kinds of cut-ups.  It works with the subject.

SIM:  Have you edited the whole film on your own, as well?  It’s beautifully edited.

ML:  Yes, essentially, but the editing started with the support and help of friend, Charlotte Mangin.  She went through all the footage with me and helped shape and build the story.  I also had invaluable help after eight months when everything was assembled, including sound.  My friend, Marc Vives, came in and helped me to move things around when I couldn’t see anymore.  The story needed some shaping and I wanted it to have more of a feature narrative storyline.  I’m not a narrative person.  And I couldn’t move the pieces anymore.  I’ve always edited my own films; it’s an essential part of the process for me.  It wouldn’t have my touch otherwise.  I had about 20 hours of 16mm film and about 60 hours of interviews on HD.  I also have non-HD video; there’s a lot.  I could make many movies [laughing].

SIM:  I would think that someone, at some point, would be very interested in the archive you’ve gathered.

ML:  Yes, I always keep an extensive archive.  Gen’s used some of the material for music videos or projections for her concerts.  You see some of that footage being projected during some of the shows—a movie within a movie.

SIM:  The way in which Genesis has recreated herself over and over again speaks to that way in which your footage will probably be manifested in several different ways. That’s the joy of making art and, to me, that’s apparent in all the film work you do.  Your pieces remind me in a way of handmade quilts, excuse the quaint analogy.  I guess what I’m saying is that no one else can weave together these elements like you can considering your emotional proximity to your subjects.

ML:  I’ve also learned so much from living next to Gen for so long.  As an artist, it opened many doors in ways of thinking about things and ways of being.  I see someone who is fearless, who doesn’t have a lot of money but lives in this uncompromising way and keeps going, really experimenting.  To me, that’s the key of life—that freedom.  It’s really hard to do it.

SIM:  How does she survive?

ML:  She sells some of her paintings.  Now it will be a bit difficult since Throbbing Gristle doesn’t exist anymore.  That was paying a good amount touring with that band.  Psychic TV also doesn’t exist.  There will be some shows here and there, but not enough to make a living.  She also lectures, sells artwork.  (Lady Jaye, second from left, and Genesis, center, in a Psychic TV publicity still.)

SIM:  Can you talk about your impressions of the pandrogyny experiment, this living art piece that Genesis and Lady Jaye created together?  It’s been called performance art.  It’s been called a lot of different things.

ML:  Well, I will say that, for me, that was not the subject of the film and not something I was interested in focusing on.  Their “credo” about all that and why they did it was not really the interesting thing for me, so much as the love it expressed.  What I saw in all that, almost exclusively, was the love story.  To do a story on two people who engaged in plastic surgery to transform themselves to look like one another as a piece of performance art wouldn’t be up my alley, frankly.  But I’ve known her for years and have an archive of rock music and so that pandrogyny was part of the cut-ups, being male and female simultaneously.  It’s part of the “performance” but it’s also so much about being Gen and Jaye and their love.  It became something else for me.  People might be disappointed because this is not a “fan” film about Throbbing Gristle or Psychic TV.  It’s a disturbing love story.

It was a bit difficult for me since I was moved by both Gen and Jaye, as people.  But I was compelled to tell this story of this unique transformation.  These are real people.  As strange as it is, when you think about what they go through, it’s just a human story.  For Gen, it’s not about becoming a woman or being transgender.

SIM:  But the “he” has become a “she.”

ML:  She likes being “she” right now.

SIM:  A way to stay close to Jaye.

ML:  Jaye is always there.  She’s unbelievably present.  Gen still uses the pronoun “we,” not “I.”  It’s both of them, all the time.  I’ve only known Gen as a “she,” so it’s pretty straightforward for me.  It’s much harder for people who’ve known Gen as a man to say “she,” the daughters, for instance.  They call her Dad.

SIM:  To me, the most important thing this portrait of a life says is that all of us are separate but equal to everyone else and we can do whatever we want with our lives. Genesis is inspiring in that way of never asking permission from anyone about how she feels she needs to realize and validate her existence.  I really hope audiences will tap into that more than anything else in your film.  That and the amazing music she creates.

ML:  Yes, the music is something that has attached me most strongly to the film.  Seeing her perform makes me remember that, how much I love the music she makes, her voice, that singing / talking voice that carries everything.  Gen’s voice, for me, is just beyond.  I want this film to be a musical ballad; this is why that word is in the title.  It’s also, of course, a love ballad.

SIM:  There must have been moments over the past several years when it all became too much for you considering this devotion you’ve had to Gen and Jaye and their story.

ML:  [She laughs, shaking her head.]  There were moments when it was really hard and I wasn’t really that strong yet.  Gen was hard on me, as was the band, at the beginning.  They were testing me.  I had to go through a lot.  And there were some really heavy times, emotionally.  I was fragile and sometimes it ate me up.  There were times I wanted to stop.  I was also making other projects and keeping up with my everyday life.  It’s hard to only be with one person for so long.  Gen also saw how stubborn I am and has discovered other things I do, all the friends I have, the life I have.  But she also knew I would never give up on her and the story and the project.

But now that the project is finished, I am looking forward to just going to a movie together with her, eating ice cream together, and not be filming everything!  But I relate to people mostly through my work, working and collaborating on something.  And our relationship is based on this creativity so I’m sure we’ll keep doing things together.  And we have several months ahead touring together with the film, of course.

SIM:  Gen’s life, post-Jaye—what does that look like?  I know from what you say, Jaye’s presence is always there, but do you think she will want to spend the rest of her life alone?

ML:  She explains it this way: Jaye was the ultimate love of her life.  She told me that in order to be with someone else—which she would love because it’s hard to be alone all the time—that person would have to love Jaye, as well, and accept that Jaye will always be there.

SIM:  That would take a pretty expansive individual. It sounds highly romantic, but difficult.

ML:  That person will be very hard to find.  Most of the time I see Gen, she’s alone and she seems to be okay with it because Jaye’s there.  And she’s also surrounded by a few, genuine, really good people who care for her deeply and have been a part of her life for a very long time.

SIM:  You chose a very open ending for this film which is, obviously, appropriate for a life far from finished.  What were some of the harder editing choices you had to make for the cut audiences will see at festivals?

ML:  There were some really, really beautiful scenes with Peaches dancing that were really great.  There were some fantastic and funny scenes with Gibby Haynes. Those kinds of things were hard for me to let go.  There were some with Sleazy.  But it became too cliché to have those scenes in the film.  They really belong to any kind of “extra” material.  Ultimately, they distracted from the main story.  There were also some beautifully shot, very whimsical scenes with Gen with great costumes and things that were hard to let go.

SIM:  What’s the distribution plan post-festival run?

ML:  The only thing I know for sure right now is that the film will be distributed by Arsenal in Germany.  Stephanie [Schulte-Strathaus, co-director of Arsenal—Institute for Film and Video Art, member of the selection committee of the Berlinale Forum, and founding director of Forum Expanded] was the first person to show my work at a major festival and has had a huge influence on my ability to exhibit my films.  I owe her a lot; she’s been an incredible mentor. 

But other than that, I don’t really know.  Steve has some ideas.  It’s so nice to have someone working with me with so much passion and excitement, someone who’s working so hard without getting paid.  It’s such a gift to have such a dedicated producer; I’m not used to that.  Also, I must mention, too, that Martin Marquet, a dear friend, is working on the producing and publicity aspect.  And Elyanna Blaser-Gould, my assistant, has my eternal gratitude.  Without her constant support, I could not have done any of it.

SIM:  I’m looking forward to meeting you and Genesis in Berlin.  People there will love the film; I know it.

ML:  We’re both so nervous and anxious, but also incredibly excited.  Yes, see you there!

 

(All photos courtesy marielosier.net, with the exception of Psychic TV still, courtesy Dan Mandell, www.danielmandell.com.)

 

 

 

Animated Standard Time

At the 53rd International Leipzig Festival for Documentary and Animated Films back in October, I spent most of my time immersing myself in the wonderful animation programs, some of which I'm hoping to bring to Berlin soon for Kino Satellite with the cooperation of curator, Annegret Richter.  Here is a reprint of my article on the programs there from the newly-released Winter 2010 / 2011 issue of DOX Magazine:

 

Time works differently in the animated world.  In just five minutes’ time, we can travel through wide swaths of space, live many lifetimes, extract the essence of a complicated emotion or event, or unravel a deep human mystery.  These stories are mostly told nonverbally with sound effects, music and glorious image replacing traditional narrative styles. With abstract images, absurdist plots, and a very liberal sense of time and space, a distinctive universality emerges that transcends culture. 

At the 53^rd International Leipzig Festival for Documentary and Animated Films, the artistic and narrative diversity on display in the animation program was truly remarkable.  The International Competition consisted of four themed programs with a total of 32 films; the International Panorama showcased 27 films; there were two Animadok programs exhibiting 16 films; 22 films of Neue Deutsche Animation; 19 films in the Anima Für Kinder program; and, Pink Elephants, the best of the young international animation scene. 

In addition, there were three curated programs by Latvian-born animator, Signe Baumane, also one of the competition jurors, along with Olaf Encke from Germany and Andy Glynne from the UK. Finally, in a special encore, there was “Battle of the Sexes—Animated!,” a show that Baumane and Bill Plympton débuted at the IFC Center in New York City this past spring.  Plympton, “the king of indie animation,” was also at the fest to lead one of the master classes. It all amounted to a boatload of cartoons.

Much has been written of late about the power of animation in documentary film, specifically its ability to deal with difficult subject matter, or the ability to re-create historical events in which no recorded film footage is known to exist.  Yet, in the daily AnimaTalks held in the café next to the animation theater, all the visiting filmmakers, whether they are making fiction or nonfiction, talked about the elasticity, the freedom, to create whole worlds in accelerated time.  Animals act like humans; humans act like animals; an identifiable creature turns into something we’ve never quite seen before; a person can tell his or her story just using voice and other aural elements accompanied by illustrated abstraction. 

Or the image is quite literal, drawn in a clearly delineated style—we recognize what we are seeing because it is “life-like.”  But perhaps it is the soundtrack that is shattered into abstraction, using non-realistic interpretations of what the event sounded like as it was happening.  Real life can be intensely surreal, and there is no better cinematic tool to explore surrealism than animation.

Not all, but most of the pieces in the programs, whether they were fiction or nonfiction, were pretty brutal, exploring dark themes and difficult material.  Viewers were taken on a multitude of journeys into the subconscious minds of the creators of these stories, stories told in brooding, or outright violent palettes creating emotional dislocation, a waking dream—or nightmare.  In this vein, the films in the international competition reflected these dislocations in a myriad of ways.  In a program entitled Kein Kinderspiel (No Child’s Play), seven filmmakers explore the relationship between parents and children, and the role of children in the family from the child’s perspective. Ann Marie Fleming in her film, I Was a Child of Holocaust Survivors (Canada, 2010), adapts a memoir that explores the influence that a parent’s very dark past can have on his or her child.  These films dealt with divorce, the death of a parent, abuse.  A family only communicates via technology when they’re sitting around the dinner table together in Daniel Greaves’ Speechless (UK, 2009)—a story for the modern-age, to be sure. 

Yet in the program called Reiseaussichten (Chances of Traveling), other filmmakers turn to whimsy, using extremely bizarre humor to explore journeys to different worlds—from the ones taken right in our backyards to trippy travels in alternate universes.  Some of the creatures making those travels cannot even be seen by the human eye, as in Matray’s hilarious Babioles (still pictured above), which won the Silver Dove in the competition and clocked in at a cool 4 minutes 40 seconds. The coveted audience award went to another traveling animated piece, a documentary of one man’s travel diary, Bastien Dubois’ Madagascar, carnet de voyage (still pictured below), an absolutely exquisite piece of storytelling at a more satisfying 11 minutes 30 seconds.  The illustrations, the color palette, the music, the sound design of Dubois’ film, were all so thrilling, I would gladly have sat through a feature-length piece.

This brings us to the more practical aspects of making animation—the costs and the inordinate amounts of time it takes to put together a piece of animated cinema.  Bill Plympton talked a lot about this in his master class.  Even though he speaks of making animation as being “god-like, creating all these characters and creatures by hand,” he also talked a lot about the practicality of the work itself in terms of the marketplace; he’s a fan of the "short, cheap and funny."  This is the case for Signe Baumane, as well, an artist who worked for Plympton when she moved to New York from her hometown of Riga in the mid-90s .  “I like to eat and I like to fuck, so my films always are about food and sex,” she told a delighted audience at one of her late-night shows.  Ironically, both are currently working on feature-length animation films.  Baumane shared a few minutes of her work-in-progress with me called Rocks In My Pockets, an autobiographical account told in her own voice of the time she spent in a mental institution in her native Latvia.  Like a lot of the best animation, it is both riotously funny and profoundly sad.

Leipzig has a special program for animated documentaries where they screen the best new films of the genre, and explore the boundaries between fiction and nonfiction as the best doc programs these days do. In Vom Menschlichen Wert (Stories of Personal Value), curator and new head of the animation program at Leipzig, Annegret Richter (formerly the artistic director of Filmfest Dresden), showcased films “with a very personal perspective that raise fundamental political questions.”  Standouts, for me, in this program were A Kosovo Fairytale, a student film by Anna-Sofia Nylund, Mark Middlewick and Samantha Nell, which tells the story of a family torn apart by war—one parent Serbian, the other Albanian.  The filmmakers animate the family's escape from their war-torn homeland minus the youngest son, who stays back in Kosovo with his grandparents because he is too young to make the days-long journey in a dark, cold truck that carries the rest of them to a better life in Finland.  White Tape (still from film pictured), a painterly film that only lasts for two minutes, is based on five seconds of video footage from the project “shooting back,” initiated by the Israeli human rights organization, B’Tselem.  The organization gives Palestinians video cameras to document life under occupation.  The extraordinarily moving and inventive film, Shall We Take a Walk?, tells the story of a blind Korean boy who takes his hospitalized older sister on an imaginary walk through a world that he’s created in miniature with his own two hands. 

The other anima-doc program called Nobody Is Perfect was “a smorgasbord of bizarre stories.”  The great Swedish animator, Jonas Odell, opened the program with his latest, Tussilago (still pictured right), a beautifully drawn film accompanied by a narrated story from a terrorist’s girlfriend, who explains in a ravaged voice how she got caught up in some bad business in 1977 which ruined the rest of her life.  Netherlands’ filmmaker, Rogier Klomp, creates an eerie atmosphere with drawings, graphics and voiceover to explain the amalgamation of the world’s media companies in his 4-minute film, This Is Propaganda: Part A—The Masters of the Media.  And Daniela Sherer from the USA interviews her 83-year-old grandmother who tells her about one night when she was a frightened 17-year-old in 1941 Krakow, Poland, and her memory of a small kindness from a stranger when she was in hiding from the Nazis.

At this juncture in our cinematic evolution, we see that animated films can go beyond stories that show things that can’t be filmed.  That’s no longer the point, really, although animation can be a creative refuge for difficult-to-relate stories, whether it is because there is, indeed, no visual record, or because of the personal trauma the subjects have experienced. Collectively, we are discovering that even though documentaries capture what appear to be spontaneous happenings, animated true stories rely solely on the artistry of a singular human creation.  The quantifiable aspects of time and space are loosed from their moorings in reality, allowing filmmakers the ability to re-chart the course of those elements so that they can be experienced in a more malleable way.  Hopefully, the debate will never stop raging about what can call itself documentary, and what cannot.  But seeing so many diverse and creative pieces of animated fiction and nonfiction only makes me believe that much more strongly in personal vision—its freshness, its immediacy, its originality, its artistry.

 

Look for my review of the partially-animated new feature documentary, the devastating and artfully-told, The Green Wave, as part of Hammer to Nail's upcoming Sundance coverage.

 

 

 

Palmieri and Mosher on the BOMB Blog

Read my latest interview with the directors of October Country here.

Interview: Jeff Malmberg, Director MARWENCOL

Upon discovering the captivating photography work of Mark Hogancamp in an issue of ESOPUS Magazine, an arts journal that is published twice a year featuring "aspects of the contemporary cultural landscape," Los Angeles based editor, Jeff Malmberg, got in touch with Hogancamp in hopes of doing a short cinematic portrait of the man and his work.  Four years later, after dozens of self-funded trips from his home on the west coast to Mark's home in upstate New York, together, Malmberg and Hogancamp came out the other side of an incredibly intense and life-changing journey for both of them.  (The director, pictured left, next to his subject, Mark Hogancamp.)

The result of their magnificent collaboration is a feature documentary--Malmberg's first--called Marwencol.  (Be sure to check out the film's fantastic website to read about Mark's story and to see his creations).  The film débuted at the South by Southwest festival in March of this past year, and walked away with the grand jury documentary prize, the first of many festival awards including the Cinematic Vision Award at Silverdocs, Der Standard Readers' Jury Award at the Vienna International Film Festival, and the Jacqueline Donnet Emerging Filmmaker Award from the International Documentary Association.  An unabashed critics' darling, as well, the film received The Boston Society of Film Critics' Best Documentary award and voted Malmberg Best New Filmmmaker of 2010.  Marwencol is currently rolling out what is proving to be a very successful theatrical release through New York-based distributor, The Cinema Guild in the US and KinoSmith in Canada.  The film and its maker have gathered a slew of nominations, including four from the Cinema Eye Honors, and Best Documentary and Truer Than Fiction noms from the Spirit Awards.

When the film played at the 2010 Sheffield Doc / Fest in the UK in November, I moderated the Q&A for one of Marwencol's screenings with Jeff and his wife and producer, Chris Shellen.  Both are engaging, open-hearted people and it was clear they were having the time of their lives (although they both had flu and Jeff had injured his arm).  The audience was deeply moved by the film and obviously charmed by Malmberg and Shellen--as was I.  Between theatrical engagements in San Francisco and Berkeley in Northern California, and the film's opening in Denver, Colorado, Jeff took some time to chat with me over Skype from his home in LA about the past five incredible years of his life. 

Still in Motion (SIM):  How’s the rock star tour going?  Does it feel like a rock star tour?

Jeff Malmberg (JM):  It does, except for the budget and no wild stories.  But other than that, it kind of does feel like that, yeah.

SIM:  And congratulations, as well, on all the nominations and critical acclaim—that must feel pretty wonderful.

JM:  It does.  But the audience reaction to the film is really the big thing.  It’s so amazing to see how Mark’s story goes over.  It’s really interesting to see.

SIM:  Has he been able to accompany you to theaters some of the time?

JM:  No, but occasionally we’ll call him so we can do a phone Q&A for a couple of minutes.  He likes doing that and the audience really likes hearing from him.  He came down to New York for the opening there [at the IFC Center].

SIM:  I would think it still must be very difficult for him to be in large public spaces with lots of people around.

JM:  Yeah, but I think it helps him to know that everyone's on his side.  He’s not comfortable flying and not comfortable with a lot of people who don’t know him.  It’s usually not really what he’s up for.  He handled the New York thing really well because I think he felt like everybody there was going to protect him.

SIM:  I’ve had the opportunity to see firsthand an audience react to the film and to Mark's story. Why do people love this film so much, do you think?  What is it tapping into, in your opinion, in terms of the zeitgeist right now?  What are people responding to?

JM:  There’s something about Mark that’s really honest—a lot more honest than probably most everyone is in the course of a normal day. A lot of us convince ourselves of certain things that maybe aren’t above board and we know it.  Mark is so incredibly honest.  He made a promise to himself that in his "second life," as he calls it, he would never lie.  In the film, for instance, when he’s explaining how Deja Thoris' time machine was built, he doesn’t necessarily want to tell you those details, but he has to, you know?  [laughing] 

The other thing I think the film taps into is the notion of alter egos, alternative creations, being another person or representing yourself with some kind of avatar, either online or what have you.  Here’s this person that’s taken that concept to the nth degree.

SIM:  My admiration for Mark is in his absolute monk-like devotion to what he’s doing, how he’s living his life, tending to his own wellbeing with everything he has. You, in turn, display that kind of attention and nurturing in the way you record him. There are lots of other—quite distracting—elements in this story.  Obviously, we want to conduct this interview without divulging any spoilers since those “surprises” are such an essential part of the human being that’s being revealed to us.

JM:  I agree.  But what we can say is that he’s one of those really special people who is just not kidding around.  Initially, it might be easy to dismiss him in one way or another.  You think you understand this guy or you can see what he’s doing as just kind of sweetly “playing with dolls,” or whatever.  But as I got to know him, and as audiences get to know him, you realize that he’s one of those people who is on a mission.  He’s using every moment in his day to try and scale this mountain, so to speak.  And it is a really beautiful thing.  Frankly, it’s just downright inspirational.  What he’s created is monumental, mentally and physically.

SIM:  The film is remarkable, too, for the way in which you juxtapose the footage to the events in the unfolding story.  It psychologically matches the relationship that developed over the course of those years you were filming, as you were growing a relationship with one another.  I think the way in which you put this piece together really speaks to that, and totally justifies the liberties you decided to take with the chronology of how things were revealed to you.  Your intuitive decision-making in that regard was really in high gear.  To me, that is the essence of a really good documentary filmmaker.  It’s so obvious to me when someone has that.  The curator from ESOPUS that discovered Mark’s work and took it public has that instinct, too.

JM:  You’re hitting on the most interesting part of the process for me and one I don’t really get a chance to talk about.  I first encountered Mark through his photos and this backstory of his that was so fascinating.  But it was one of those experiences where you really need someone who’s ready to go down that road.  Many people at Q&As ask me how Mark let me in; everyone wants to know about this access I had to this person. 

The short answer is that I met someone at a time when I really wanted to get down to it in a pretty serious way as a filmmaker.  The smart things I did, looking back, were going to see him and film him by myself for the longest time.  I never set up any lights or reflectors; most times I didn’t even take a tripod, I would just balance the camera on my knee.  So all that was helpful.  But more than that, I had encountered a person who was really ready to let it all go.  We were two people who wanted to go down that same road, a road of discovery.  We both knew certain things, but there were also other things we didn’t know, things we didn’t yet understand.  He certainly didn’t understand it all when we started.  Our quest was the same one and together we could figure it all out.

I had a lot of scenes, for instance, of us going to the courthouse, or to meet the woman who found him on the side of the road the night he got beat up, Nora Noonan, who is this really wonderful person.  We went with her to see the spot where she found him.  But somewhere along the way, I realized that these scenes weren’t necessarily really germane to the arc of the story.  It was, however, important background that we had to do together.

SIM:  Sounds like an archeological expedition.

JM:  It was totally like that!  I was filming from 2006 to 2010, six to ten years after his attack.  One thing that struck me as I was getting to know Mark during that time, and that I hope is reflected in the film, is the process he goes through as a victim of an incredibly violent incident.  He’s constantly chewing on these negative equations of this post-traumatic stress disorder.  He’d been doing that for close to a decade. It would have been better, of course, if his therapy hadn’t been cut off like it had; maybe he wouldn’t have been in this situation of having to figure things out for himself.  That being said, if you’re going to do a documentary about someone and that someone is going to open up everything to you, it’s important to make sure that he’s going to get something out of it, too.

SIM:  Well, what’s a bit ironic—and I’m sure I’m not the first to point this out—is that I don’t think any expert or therapist, or what have you, could ever have accompanied him on the journey he takes, the one you took with him with your camera in tow.  That is the most moving thing about this film for me, Mark’s self-salvation, with very little help from anybody.  We live in a society where it’s very common to look outside ourselves for help, for aid, for support.  

JM:  In order for us to show up, all the other people have to show up.

SIM:  There was no one there for Mark, and this was someone who really needed help!  His discovery of this incredible inner reserve as a newly born person is, indeed, inspiring.  There’s no other word for it.

JM:  The biggest thing I learned during this whole thing was that there is no replacement for using your heart.  A documentary from fifty years ago or a doc made today—if they’re well made, they have this overlap, this idea of kindness and appreciation.  If you look close enough at anything, it’s possible to see beauty.  I didn’t expect to find a teacher like Mark.  I thought I was making a little eight-minute short of somebody who plays with dolls in his backyard, who’s created this really rich fantasy world and photographs it.  I didn’t expect to go on this journey.  This might serve as some sort of template for me as I continue to make more films.  Go find something that fascinates in some way and jump in.  And take your camera with you.  I don’t expect all of these ideas to pay off in the way this one did.  My wife and I joke about our “doc-of-the-week” ideas.  Let’s go make that film!  And next week, it’ll be something else.  Sparks are easy.

SIM:  Short attention span cinema.

JM:  Exactly.  I think it’s best to always just think of these potential projects as short films and let it be a surprise when it turns into a feature.

SIM:  Not a bad strategy.  Let’s circle back to the onslaught of regard for this film.  As a début feature director, it’s obvious you’ve splashed big, at least in the American market which is probably the toughest market there is, particularly for documentary.  And as documentary makers, it seems the world toys with us endlessly to see if we’ve really got what it takes to make nonfiction films.  Most of the best makers I know just have this inexplicable devotion to the craft of making nonfiction and the rest seems like so much background noise as they go about their work, as you have done with this film.

JM:  I think I’d be extraordinarily lucky to meet anyone like Mark again and I was incredibly lucky in meeting him when I did.  But there’s always the next step: what do you do with this “stroke of luck,” do you know what I mean?  I always want to get inside people’s heads; it’s an interesting place to be.  It’s something you can do in documentary that you can’t do in narrative.  It happens in novels, maybe.  Mark let me inside his amazing head. 

There’s really nothing to understand about the “business” end of things in making these kinds of films.  It’s mind-boggling.  I really appreciate the response this movie is getting right now.  But you know as well as I do that on another level, this was not a “grant-able” or fundable film.  All these dynamics I encountered during this project were kind of through a side door.  What I can tell you is that now I do want to buy some new equipment [laughs].  I just bought some sound equipment and now I’m looking at cameras.  I just want to be in a place where the next time something comes across my path that I want to do, I can just go out and shoot it.

SIM: You started out with the intention, as you said, of making a short film about Mark.  When you realized you had a feature on your hands, to whom did you turn for advice besides your inner circle of producers? 

JM:  It always was only that inner group, the four producers on the film—my wife, Chris Shellen, and my friends Kevin Walsh, Tom Putnam and Matt Radecki.  And me. That was it.  We didn’t really show it to anyone at all.  We didn’t know anyone to show it to!  It’s only now after moving through this festival tour that I’ve met all these great people with whom I do want to consult and show cuts to the next time.  It would be great to have that input.  As an editor, I really thrive on that, and I need it.

SIM:  All that input can be a mixed blessing sometimes, too.

JM:  Yes, definitely, it’s got to be when you’re ready for that.  I didn’t even show anything to those four producers for the longest time.  I wanted to get lost.  At least in this case, it was appropriate to get lost.  Mark had created this world that was so vibrant, I wanted to get lost in it.  I also knew those four people would make sure I didn’t get too lost [laughing]. 

Once the film was at rough-cut stage, it was really Janet Pierson [the director of the South by Southwest Film Festival] who saw through the crummy video output to the film’s real beauty.  She could see what it was going to look like and was the first one to really champion it and program it. That was everything for us in terms of launching this film.

SIM:  Well, considering you walked away with the documentary grand jury prize, her instincts were spot-on.

JM:  It was a dream come true.  I remember calling Mark from the bathroom after it happened.  “Mark, Mark, we just won the grand jury award!”  In his mind, grand jury means something else completely.  So he goes, “Grand jury!  . . . Is that good?”

SIM:  That puts things in their proper perspective pretty darn quick, doesn’t it?  [laughter]

Do you find the festival junket and constant Q&As a surreal experience?  I’m asking this for a specific reason since I conduct a good number of Q&As with artists and filmmakers regularly.  It’s such a weird experience to present the person who made the work to an audience that just experienced something pretty intense, pretty wild.  This instant dialogue is meant to happen when people are still processing.  But there’s the expectation that there’s this amazing opportunity to talk to the maker—ask brilliant questions--go!

JM:  I know exactly what you mean.  It’s a bit unfair to an audience. Everyone’s still processing what they just saw, the lights come up and I bound up there and say, “Hi, I made the movie.  What do you want to know?!” You can kind of see a certain anxiety on a lot of people’s faces, especially if it’s not a festival environment.  Chris and I were just in San Francisco and Berkeley this past weekend and I saw that on their faces there.  This was a weeklong engagement at a Landmark theater.  There’s this weird adjustment period that can be very awkward. 

But I will say what we realized doing all these Q&As was that it’s really important to always make sure that you work on a subject that you don’t mind talking about for a solid year—or longer.  The great thing about Mark and Marwencol is that I don’t have all the answers to that; I never will.  I’m a pretty studied person on all this and, in part, can be everybody’s tour guide, but the audience actually informs me and makes me rethink things constantly.  It would be really tortuous otherwise.  We find that the questions people ask, for the most part, are very subjective in nature.

SIM:  That’s the best litmus, I think, for the success of a film. Do people take it to heart and really resonate with it in a personal way?  This guy is, or could be, any one of us.  But how many of us could self-heal like Mark does, in that particular artistic way?  And not to sound completely cheeseball about the whole thing, but you really feel the love you have for him—it’s there in every shot.  Yikes, I sound like a Hallmark card, sorry; I can hear you laughing.

JM:  I’m laughing because I’m not necessarily that person all the time.  But that kind of love and devotion was required.  I was talking to you about this at Sheffield when we were discussing how every movie should match its subject—the form of it--especially in documentary.  You don’t really know what the form of what you’re making is ultimately going to be.  You really can’t if you’re doing it with any amount of integrity.  And you really need the person you’re shooting to be on the journey with you.  You don’t really know the “genre” your film will fall into until you’re done shooting.  As I was shooting, all I really knew was that I wanted to bring it, because I just care for that guy so much.  That soaked through, I guess.  And hopefully, it’s representative of how the audience feels.  I just read a review that said, “Movies rarely let you inside someone’s head.  But this movie pops open Mark Hogancamp’s head and lets you jump in.”  That made me really happy because that’s sort of what I was going for.  What is it like to be on the other side of that crime?  So often we hear from the aggressor’s side, the prosecutor, perhaps, but the victim is always this kind of MacGuffin in that his or her situation gets the story going and then they sort of take a backseat to the "action."  But I wanted to try and show what it’s like to really be that victim, on the other side of evil.  What does it take to get the trauma ground out of you, and can you ground it out?

SIM:  Or the ways in which you just can’t.  You don’t supply any nice, happy ending, that’s for sure.  What’s so beautiful about docs is that you show one aspect, one part of a real person’s life.  The movie may end here but that life goes on.  It’s one thing to admire a fictional character, but it’s quite another to know that this person you just spent an hour and a half with is still out there somewhere just living his life, still processing what happened to him in his own distinctive way, still creating all this remarkable art work because it’s the only thing that makes it possible for him to go on. The role of artists in our society right now is a really dire one, I think.  It’s really rare to find someone that pure in the way they express themselves.

JM:  Mark brings up a lot of questions that I’ve always been interested in, particularly this idea of “outsider art.”  What exactly is that term supposed to mean?  Outside of what, exactly? He’s somebody who has to do this; he has no choice.  He’s not doing it to impress people.  He’s doing it because he wants to express something about himself, to himself.  When those people are labeled “outsider artists”—I don’t know.  It’s so incredibly ridiculous to me.  I’ve never understood that and I didn’t really want to make a movie about that.  To me, Mark is the perfect example of why that term is owned lock, stock and barrel by the commercial art world.

SIM:  It’s just one more thing to commodify.  What you just expressed really nicely articulated something I’ve been thinking about lately.  As someone who writes about art, I’m currently going through what I can only call a severe case of paralysis about writing something about anything anyone is making anymore.  It seems so pointless, such an inane exercise in many ways.  I don’t even know what I’m writing about.  A movie?  A social cause?  Some artistic phenomenon?  It’s fabulous to celebrate good work but I’m really questioning the exact value of doing that.  It’s all a self-referential nightmare after a while.  [Malmberg laughs]  Anyway, I really like what you just said.

JM:  We had some people from New York see it recently who are from the art world—you know, capital A, capital W.  Their reaction to the film was really interesting.  I don’t think they quite knew what to make of Mark.

SIM:  What were their impressions?

JM:  It was their lack of impressions.  They said, “Thank you very much,” and they left.

SIM:  Well, I suppose you can be flattered if you left people like that speechless.  That's something, I guess.

JM:  I hope it shook them a little.  I don’t know.  That’s why I always subscribe to ESOPUS.  I think a lot of what that publication does makes you question those boundaries, those lines, those rules.  Mark naturally brings up all those questions.

SIM:  But he had a taste of that gallery world and we see how confusing and, ultimately, meaningless it is for him.  It's like a Martian landing in the midst of that  world and you see the people there trying to adjust to his frequency, some willingly, some not.  But he is really not able to adjust to their frequency at all.

JM:  As much as I got along with Mark from the beginning and really felt a kinship with him, it wasn’t until we got to the art show that it really sunk in for me what this movie was going to be about.  Thank god for videotape or a card where you can just keep rolling.  You just never know.  I remember that moment very clearly when he asked me outside the gallery what in the world he was supposed to do. I could see how bewildered he was.  The whole last period of time that I’d been shooting with him, which was pretty substantial, immediately ordered itself in my mind.  I think the audience gets set up in this, as I was set up, in thinking that somehow the art world was going to solve all his problems, that we were going to go on that typical narrative journey where getting to the "big art show" was going to make him better.  We want him to be better, right?  We’re used to narrative fixing people, in books or movies, or whatever.  But in real life that’s not always really the case.  Your use of the word Martian made me think of that.  That’s what it felt like for me.

Now that the movie’s done, I can say that I feel like the time for analysis and discussion is before or after the making of a film.  But if you’re engaging in any of that during, you’re sunk.  There’s a time where the work is pure muscle; you’re just showing up every day with your camera.  Then there’s time to do the work with your heart and there’s a time to intellectualize with your mind.  I have to be very careful in these interviews to really convey that I did not know ahead of time a lot of what I discovered.  The mystery and loss of control was the wonderful thing about it, the best part, to my mind.  I would hate for some wanna-be first time filmmaker to get the wrong idea.  In a lot of interviews I do, it seems like the person interviewing and crafting the conversation is setting things up to make me look a lot smarter than I actually was about all of this.  It’s just not true.

SIM:  Were you fearful a lot of the time you were shooting with Mark?

JM:  Yes!  There were many periods where I had no idea what I was doing.  And here I am with all these wonderful prizes and nominations for my directing and editing work.  So, the next time I’m that frightened, I’ll just think, “Oh wait.  I must know what I’m doing somewhere.  The last time this happened, I got nominated for awards!”  Maybe I don’t have to be so frightened next time [laughter]. 

Seriously, the real honor is that I had a subject with whom I could get that lost and get so upside-down about.  But I hear from filmmakers all the time about how they set out to make a certain movie; it was going to take exactly one year from start to finish; and they made it, the end.  And these are mostly movies I don’t really vibe with most of the time.

SIM:  So what I hear you saying is that fear and uncertainty are good.

JM:  As long as you’re willing to work through them, they are.  You’ve got to keep pushing.  All I can say to someone considering making documentary films is that you’ve just got to have an undying, burning desire for it.  It’s really a format that can be very user-friendly if you’re willing to go for scaling the wall, for a crazy idea.  Or something that really matters.

 

 

 

Ken Jacobs at KINO SATELLITE (and Other Paraphernalia)

A quick post betwixt fests:  just coming down from Sheffield Doc/Fest and a very active marketplace--wow!  I just filed my report for DOX Magazine; look here for film reviews in the coming weeks.  Loved, loved, loved Marwencol (and felt very honored to host the Q&A at Sheff).  This was the film's UK premiere and during the Cinema Eye Roller Disco party, it was announced that the film had garnered nominations for Nonfiction Feature Filmmaking (CEH's version of "best film"), as well as nominations for outstanding achievement in direction, editing, and début feature.  The film opens this Friday the 12th at the Landmark Nuart in LA, Malmberg's hometown.  Don't miss it!

I also saw The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceausescu, a 187-minute tour de force from director, Andrei Ujica, and also a nominee for a Cinema Eye Spotlight award.  Banksy's Exit Through the Gift Shop was another film I was lucky enought to host with its producer, Jamie D'Cruz, and editor, Chris King.  Exit is nominated for six Cinema Eyes: best film, production (award goes to the producer), editing, international feature, début feature, and the audience award.  Quadrangle, an outstanding piece directed by Amy Grappell, was a film I saw at the last SXSW, but I had a chance to see it again at Sheffield where it played with Catfish.  (I loved Catfish so much!)  Quadrangle is one of the nominees in the CEH best short film category (which is new this year), along with Andreas Koefoed's Albert's Winter, Arsy-Versy by Miro Remo, an amazing student film that has won many awards around the world, James Blagden's Dock Ellis and the LSD No-No, and Vance Malone's The Poodle Trainer.  I also got a chance to see the world premiere of Jerry Rothwell's excellent Donor Unknown, a totally ready-for-primetime doc--that's a compliment.  Delights out of the Scottish Documentary Institute Focus strand:  Calling Home, Surpriseville and Twinset.  More coherent thoughts beyond "I loved it!" on all of these outstanding films at some undefined free moment in the future.  And to see the rest of the categories and nominees for the Cinema Eyes, taking place at The Museum of the Moving Image in Queens on January 18 (and broadcast on The Documentary Channel), visit the site here.

Early tomorrow morning, I fly to Copenhagen for CPH: DOX to spend a few days taking in their incredible program.  I've already seen quite a few pieces out of there which has just whet my growing appetite for more visionary programming.  I mentioned to a colleague recently that it's getting harder and harder for me to watch more traditional docs when I see all the innovative ways in which young filmmakers are stretching, mashing and creating new ways in which to storytell.  Very exciting stuff, indeed.  Look for articles on the New Vision category out of CPH in DOX and on the program that Harmony Korine curated for the fest this year on Senses of Cinema.  (Pictured, still from Israeli artist Roee Rosen's staggering film, Out.)

The call for entries is open for the International Women's Film Festival Dortmund | Cologne.  The theme for 2011 is NOW WHAT:  Films About Getting Out of Here.  They are looking for films by women directors that deal with topics on Quest for Meaning, Orientation, Confidence, Antagonism, Rebellion, Utopia.  There are no restrictions on genre, running time or year of production.  You can find more detailed information here.  Entry deadline is 29 November. 

There is also an International Fiction Feature Competition endowed with 25,000 Euro; that entry deadline is the 7th of January and the film must have been finished within two years of the festival date in April.  As well, there is a National Director of Photography Award endowed with a 5,000 Euro prize for fiction, and a 2,500 Euro prize for documentary.  This is an advancement award for an up-and-coming German cinematographer/DP.  They also accept films by DPs who either live and work in Germany, or finished their training here.  Entry deadline is 31 January.  Vist the web site for updates and to download entry forms.  The festival will take place in Köln, Germany 12 - 17 April 2011.  (Pictured, still from Susan Muska and Greta Olafsdottir's Edie & Thea: A Very Long Engagement, 2009.)

In New York, the Margaret Mead Film & Video Festival opens once again at the Museum of Natural History, 11 - 14 November.  On Saturday the 13th, the festival will present the New York premiere of Human Terrain with filmmakers David and Michael Udris and their collaborating Watson Institute Research Fellow, James Der Derian, for a post-screening discussion.  In a co-presentation with the Goethe-Institut in New York, the festival's opening night will honor Veterans Day with Dustin Grella's Prayers for Peace and the New York premiere of Jens Schanze's Plug & Play, a documentary starring some of science's most famed researchers.  In another strand, the fest will celebrate The World's Children with films that address the unwavering hope of children around the globe faced with difficult circumstances.  Featured films will be Born Sweet, Shelter in Place, Jean-Pierre Duret and Andrea Santana's exquisite Because We Were Born, and one of the most moving shorts I've seen this year, Carol Salter's Unearthing the Pen.  Visit the web site for more info and on how to purchase tickets.  (Pictured, still from Unearthing the Pen, 2009.)

Lastly, but far from leastly, our second KINO SATELLITE show happens tomorrow night in Berlin with a selection of work from filmmaker, Ken Jacobs.  We're pleased to present a program of recent works by the legendary filmmaker, one of the pioneers of the New York avant-garde.  The program includes the German premiere of his most recent film, a loft, which just premiered at the 2010 Viennale (still from film, pictured).  The show will be introduced by Ekkehard Knörrer of Die Tageszeitung, Cargo and Perlentaucher.  We will show The Day Was a Scorcher (2009), 8 minutes, color, silent; an excerpt from THE SKY SOCIALIST Stratified (2009),19 minutes, color, sound, music by Olivier Messiaen and Michael Schumacher; Capitalism: Slavery (2006), 3 minutes, color, silent; Capitalism: Child Labor (2006), 14 minutes, color, sound; Ron Gonzalez, Sculptor (2009), 20 minutes, color, sound; and, a loft (2010), 16 mintues, color, silent.  I will, of course, be in Copenhagen, as mentioned above, but Andrew Grant will be on hand to welcome you to Direktorenhaus--doors and bar will open at 7:30 p.m., and the screening will start at 8:00. 

Goodnight, London.