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.

 

Anarchy and Perspective

Just as many schools of thought as there are on both the topics of anarchy and perspective, so are there as many impressions and shifts in mental acuity that happen when you travel and come back to the place that, for all intents and purposes, for better or worse, is your new home.

And not only my ability to be a bit more flexible in my daily views is the sole benefit. There is also the disturbing realization that I have been sleepwalking through most of the last couple months of my life in a fairly anarchic place and I'm still in one piece, actually more mentally healthy than I was when I first got there.

This means that people are looking out for me. I have good luck, generally, in not encountering too many assholes since my sense of smell is really keen and I move in the opposite direction post-haste. I hate bad smells.

But this surpasses mere good luck, I think, the daily encounters I make and the people that are stepping up to become my friends. For some reason, all of this sassy hoopla became clearer to me once I left Tirana for some days and switched up my environment--a privilege that never ceases to escape me, trust me, airport security fuckwads, notwithstanding.

My recent stupor is due to the bends, pure and simple. I have never lived anywhere where I feel more uncomfortable and lonely. And the longer I stay here, the more obvious it becomes to me, that these perceptions, these perspectives, lie well within my core, not anyone else's. And they lie really deeply is the other surprising thing I find. How did I learn to submerge things so much that I literally forget that they're there? It's a rude bump on the shoulder when these things surface, depending on how secure I feel at that given moment in my life. I've been feeling incredibly insecure lately.

When you're off-kilter, disoriented and really wondering what the answer might be to what the hell you're doing in a particular place, this is the time to just completely relax. Not the opposite, as I thought. Being in overdrive when you don't have a clear road map might be mysterious and exciting, but in random wandering comes the danger of encountering deep truths about yourself in an atmosphere that doesn't want to see you do particularly well. It's not a malicious thing, really, it's just ingrained modes of reaction, I guess. It exists in every culture to some extent, of course, but in the one in which I'm residing at the moment, the ways in which people keep one another down. . . well, it sucks. So we always must seek higher ground. That's all. Just climb a bit higher.

All of this comes on the day after having a new friend come over to my flat last night (the first night home in a week) and sit around and drink wine and talk. Just talk about anything that comes to us. It was so inspiring and felt so fresh and I realized during these hours that this was happening because I was ready for it.

I really want to connect to the environment around me but am intimidated and worry about what I perceive are the questions being asked about me. What does she want? What is she doing? Why is she here? Well, let me answer those questions for you right now because it won't take long: I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. And then the thought of, how do you know anyone even gives a shit or notices, comes fast upon the heels of that. And so on.

I'm looking forward to meeting the people that can, perhaps, help answer these questions. Maybe not just for me, but for themselves, as well.

Sound and Vision: CPH:DOX's Sound Design Workshop

The following article appears in the current issue of DOX Magazine.

 

In testing the permeability of the various borders and boundaries between fiction, nonfiction and visual art, the conversations in Copenhagen this year, as in any other, went beyond genre into the actual artistry of storytelling in film. While many filmmakers, artists, and professionals from other disciplines that feel compelled to make films, move deeply into this process in a fairly intuitive way, there are few established festivals and forums that specifically nurture, showcase and help find support for film work that falls into undefined territories.  Continuing to creatively riff upon its founding ethos nine years ago, the Copenhagen International Documentary Film Festival pushed even further with this year’s impressively diverse and challenging program selections, as well as in the 27 projects that were chosen to pitch at this year’s CPH:FORUM.

As part of its ever-growing roster of talks and workshops, this year festival programmer, Niklas Engström, put together a wonderfully inspiring master class / roundtable of filmmakers and sound designers called Sound Design in Documentary Films. In a two-hour discussion, the panelists shared samples of work—most appearing in this year’s program—to illustrate how soundtracks and soundscapes are used as an integrated part of a film’s language, “exploiting all the countless possibilities that exist to support, expand and shape narration,” discovering a film’s identity through the exploration of sound and music in creating cinematic pieces.

I tend to concentrate on the New: Vision and New: Vision Expanded programs when I go to this festival because I know some of my deep-seated ideas about narrative structure and storytelling in film will be turned upside-down and backwards. And this was so, this year more than ever, in terms of how soundscapes not only enhance, but shape, narrative structure. Every natural (or unnatural) sound reproduced by art “colors” the space in which it is presented to the public, not of the space it is supposed to reproduce. If we hear a storm, the howling of the wind, a clap of thunder, etc. in film, we hear it in the timbre appropriate to the soundtrack, not in the timbre of an actual forest, or ocean, or voice, or whatever the scene is supposed to represent.  Every sound bears the stamp of the space in which it is actually produced, but this sound can also be created in a studio with effects, a live orchestra, creating a bespoke aural palette made specifically for a certain story.

Just as a film shot preserves the viewpoint of the camera, a sound recording orientates, as well, whether it is through abstract sound, non-sync sound, collected sound, delayed sound, or effects created in a studio using symphonic instruments. Sound, even more than vision, in film can release the fixed, immutable distance between the spectator and what is happening on screen. Not only as viewers, but as listeners, we are transferred from our seats to the space in which the events depicted on the screen are taking place.  The shapes of visible things have several sides, right, left, front and back. Sounds have no such aspect and layers of sound do not necessarily tell us from which “side” a shot was made.  Thus, using sound filters enables a visual artist to build a defined character for images that might be clichéd in some way, whether the shots are of a person speaking, a portrait of a city or place, or, perhaps, the life of a building, as in Pedro Urano and Joana Traub Csekö’s HU Enigma, which is actually more of a portrait of an idea, about as abstract as one can get in film. 

During the session, when asked about the mechanics of finding one’s way into this kind of aural portraiture, Urano said, “It comes down to being true to yourself; you create it yourself.  It’s a personal thing, organic in essence.”  Urano and Csekö’s 75-minute film from Brazil, features the crumbling structure (and eventual destruction) of a university hospital complex as its main protagonist, an exposed “body” or representation of the past. While the film’s visuals are stunning, it is the sound design that makes this piece incredibly powerful.  Through the perspective of this completely manufactured soundscape, a viewer can constantly alternate between the objective appreciation of the pure beauty of the architectural images, and a more personal relationship with not only the building itself, but the place and time in which it was built and the ghosts of the thousands of people who worked or convalesced there.

Phillippe Grandrieux’s film, It May Be That Beauty Has Strengthened Our Resolve - Masao Adachi, won the prize for the New:Vision Award.  This feature documentary, also showcased in the workshop, offers a beautiful example of how a film’s unique aural culture can be increased like any other, how composite sound enables us to “see” the dimension of space and its place in time.  The ear can distinguish more delicate nuances than the eye, and Grandrieux, as a filmmaker in love with sound, knows that there is a considerable difference between perceiving a sound and identifying its source.  He used this knowledge to great affect in his film about the criminalized and long-suffering life of Japanese director, Adachi.  (Pictured above left, Danish sound designer, Peter Albrechtsen, and filmmaker, Phillippe Gandrieux.)

We are accustomed to drawing conclusions about visual things from the sounds that accompany them.  This “defect” can be used nicely in film since the slow recognition of a sound may cause a far more profound tension than the approach of something visually unrecognizable. These possibilities for meaningful dramaturgy create a slow and gradual process of recognition, enabling the natural resistance of the consciousness to give way to a “reality” that is easily audible.  (Film still below from It May Be That Beauty.)

Danish sound designer, Peter Albrechtsen, another participant in the workshop, did the sound design for Vibeke Bryld’s short film, Bedtime Stories from the Axis of Evil, which appeared in the Amnesty Award program.  In Bryld’s film, we visit three countries, all of which are governed by authoritarian regimes.  But, they are also three countries with vastly different cultural narratives, and so Albrechtsen created three distinct and allegorical soundscapes for Baghdad, Tehran and Pyongyang, North Korea. Acoustic “close-­ups” make us perceive sounds which are mixed in with the accustomed noise of day-­to-­day life, but which we never hear as individual sounds because they are drowned in a general din of noise. If a sound can be featured in “close-­up,” such a sound immediately makes us aware of its effect; at the same time, its influence on the action is made manifest.  This appears to be Albrechtsen’s particular forte in his sound work.  After Albrechtsen recounted the director’s shocked reaction to watching her film once the sound mix was added to the fine cut, Bryld told me later that she was, indeed, speechless and immediately needed to view it again, since she was hard pressed to recognize the film she had cut together without these enhancements.

As in a silent film, or a segment of a film whose only sound is silence, film sound can be scarcely perceptible, intimate things conveyed with the secrecy of an eavesdropper. Subtle associations and interrelations of thoughts, emotional or intellectual linkages, can play a decisive dramaturgical part in building emotional resonance for the images. It could be the (authentic) sound of the song that chimes when it’s time for Japanese children to go home for dinner from the playground, as it is in a transcendent scene from Grandrieux’s film.  Or a ticking of a clock in an empty room, a slow drip from a burst pipe, the moaning of a little child in sleep. 

In a close-­up in which the surroundings are not visible, a sound that seeps into the shot sometimes impresses us as mysterious, simply because we cannot see its source. It produces the tension that arises from curiosity and expectation. This use of asynchronous sound, then, acquires considerable importance, for if the sound or voice is not matched with the picture of its source, it can, and does, grow beyond the dimensions of the latter. The creative means by which a director can convey pathos or symbolic significance is precisely to use sound asynchronously, something experimental and jazz musicians have known for decades.  (Film still from Bedtime Stories.)

It is the business of sound in film to reveal for us the acoustic environment, the aural landscape in which we live, the sounds that move beyond human speech, that speak to us in the vast conversation of life going by. Poets hear these significant sounds of life and try to describe them in words. Sound designers allow them to speak to us directly from the screen.  Sound contextualizes story and creates emotional resonance that visuals unaccompanied by sound cannot begin to tap into.  In order for a director to open him- or herself up to a story’s most profound potential in this way, he or she has to create the capacity to go deeply into the “truth” of a story.  There, the right sounds will emerge and in the words of one filmmaker, “You will hear your movie.” 

 

 

EurasiaDOC--European Producers Discover Artistic Points Unknown

The following article appears in the current issue of DOX Magazine:

Most documentary filmmakers in Europe looking for support take it for granted that they will have significant access to workshops, courses, programs and other mentorship opportunities to assist them towards their goal of making and finishing a film project.  However, this is far from the case for makers in other regions of the world. EurasiaDOC is an initiative financed by the European Union and produced and run by Ardèche Images, an association based in Lussas, France that runs its own creative documentary film festival. Based on the successful experiences of its ongoing AfricaDOC program, which began in 2003, the small Ardèche team now brings its three-week scriptwriting and editing residencies to places such as Yerevan, Armenia (in partnership with the Golden Apricot Film Festival), Kazakhstan-Kyrgyzstan-Mongolia, and Siberia. EurasiaDOC’s expanded three-year initiative will enable the Lussas team to continue to offer regional scriptwriting workshops and access to the international film trade where select projects will be presented to European-based producers, distributors, broadcasters and financiers.  (Pictured above, Siberian director, Valentina Varaksina.)

This past autumn, I was a member of the international jury at the XI International Documentary Film Festival Flahertiana in Perm, Russia (11 – 17 October).  There, I met Nicolas Bem, the artistic director of the Siberian Studio of Independent Cinema, and Rebecca Houzel from Ardèche.  They were there to introduce a new workshop that will take place in Perm in February as an extension of a five-year Ural-Siberian regional initiative. Bem and Houzel have been working together in Krasnoyarsk, Siberia (Bem’s hometown), and at the behest of Moscow-based filmmaker, Marina Razbezhkina, who was a tutor in Krasnoyarsk, are now expanding their program in the region in partnership with the Flahertiana.

The residencies—offered at no cost to selected applicants—host between eight to ten directors. According to past experience, more than 30 creative documentary films will find European co-producers.  Developing these projects successfully takes strong partnerships; one of the program’s bigger goals is to forge many more alliances between European producers and Eurasian filmmakers. Perm, known as the easternmost city of Europe, is a natural spot for staging workshops, and the call for applications will bring candidates from all over the Ural region.  (Three film stills from Alexander Kuznetsov's début film, Territory of Love, shot on location in Siberia.)

In 2007, Bem met Christophe Postic, the artistic director of the Festival du Film Documentaire de Lussas, who had come to Krasnoyarsk with writer, translator and filmmaker, Hélène Chatelain, who has a great interest in the area and wanted to work with some young documentary directors in the region by offering a workshop. Bem wanted to participate, but his ideas were associated only with fiction.  Excited and encouraged by Bem’s commitment, the team agreed to work with him anyway, and he ended up making his film. Six months later, Postic asked him to organize some more workshops in Krasnoyarsk, and thus, the SiberiaDOC project was created.

In 2010, Bem showed a film at the festival in Lussas and was introduced to Houzel who speaks fluent Russian.  Two months later, Houzel went to Krasnoyarsk as an instructor.  She and Postic also decided to form a co-production with Bem on a documentary film he was producing called Territory of Love by local photographer, Alexander Kuznetsov.  Kuznetsov participated in the workshop to further develop his film project.  He had been photographing the residents of a psychiatric group home for years.  Some of the residents formed a small traveling singing and dancing troupe and he wanted to make a film that used the group’s travels by bus through Siberia as a metaphor for Russia.

Bem told me, “We all know that in Russia there are very strong traditions of cinema. But within this huge territory, there are only two cities where you can get a filmmaking education, Moscow and St. Petersburg. In each region (such as Krasnoyarsk, Novosibirsk, Irkutsk), there are documentary studios, which receive some funding from Moscow.  But, at this juncture, these studios do not receive sustained public support. If you are a young filmmaker living in Siberia, and you want to make a film, you have to go to Moscow because it is the only chance to train and professionally work in cinema. But maybe I don’t want to leave Siberia, and that is why these French producers became, for me, like a ‘lifeline’. To develop a cinema tradition, you need to organize local educational programs, find new authors, create an independent network of cinemas and go to the audience yourself, to organize production of films. We are trying to do all of this because the potential here is very big.”  (Pictured above, Christophe Postic and Hélène Chatelain.)

Houzel says, “The residencies are geared to the individual filmmakers; no rules, or set aesthetic, is laid out by workshop tutors.  The directors are free to express and shoot their stories the way they want or feel they need to.  We are there to assist and help shape things, offer guidance, and help the makers tackle dramaturgical and logistical challenges.” Postic reiterates these points:  “I believe real creative documentary exists—in the context of the subjects of the films and the cinematographic form the film itself will take.  It’s important for the workshops to help makers find their own artistic way into their film, their own approach.”

When I asked him how, specifically, the tutors help “pull out” this artistic expression from a filmmaker’s idea, he told me, “The main challenge is that we work with participants who have no experience watching film—they have no context, no experience in analyzing narrative. Their main exposure to documentary is what they see on TV.  One of the most important aspects of these workshops is sharing as many styles and genres as possible with the participants, supplying them with a visual vocabulary in which to express their own ideas. A documentary filmmaker must show us something complex; filming ‘reality’ is not simple, not easy. But it is essential that the storytelling be as complex as the reality it represents.”

He continues, “In the workshops, we ask many, many hard questions to drive the directors forward.  We also continue to recommend films to view, not necessarily about the same subject matter as their idea, but more to define ways in which a story can be told in a personal way. This can be discerned even in the application, this necessity of the project on the part of the filmmaker. The Russian language, in particular, is very strong since sometimes in a few sentences, one can imagine the film. They are thinking about and articulating images, sounds.  As experienced professionals, we can see the film, even if the director cannot at the beginning. It’s a very arduous process, but very useful.”

By the end of the residency, the makers should trust their own project and be committed to doing it, enough to move forward and figure out the rest.  It is this “figuring out the rest” part that has been the main impetus for the workshop leaders to become active producers on certain projects as they did for Territory of Love, and other projects they feel are strong.  They want to be able to continue to help these isolated filmmakers access the European documentary funding structure, as well as European co-production markets.

Postic feels it is imperative for the program to be able to help produce certain projects post-residency, further guiding them along into production, post-production, exhibition and distribution. “In their native places, these makers are totally alone.  With this European alliance, they can have strong partners. People of diverse backgrounds will come together because of cinema, enabling them to make both personal and complex representations of the world they live in.”

For further information on these initiatives, visit http://www.lussasdoc.com/

 

 

 

 

 

 

I'll Be Your Mirror: Nan Goldin's Film Curation at CPH:DOX

Read my essay on American photographer Nan Goldin's film curation at last month's Copenhagen International Documentary Festival, featured in the Festival Reports section of the just-released issue of Senses of Cinema here.    

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.

 

BURDEN OF MY HEART - A Rwandan Lamentation

In early 2010, Finnish filmmaker, Iris Olsson, got a call from CPH:DOX, inviting her to a workshop where she would be paired with a director to make a film.  Still a student pursuing her Master's at the Finnish national film school in Helsinki, Olsson is already an award-winning filmmaker (Summer Child, Between Dreams.)  For CPH's program, she was partnered with a young Rwandan director, Yves Niyongabo.  Once she arrived in Rwanda, she realized there was a bigger story to tell.

Burden of My Heart is a portrait of the people left in the country, an empty, shattered place filled with the ghosts of murdered Tutsis sixteen years after genocide.  We have vague memories of this sixteen years on, don't we?  Under the orders of insane leaders, members of the Hutu tribe began killing people on 15 April 1994.  A mere 100 days later, 800,000 people were dead, and many of those who survived the slaughter fled in a mass exodus from the country of their birth, never to return.  We remember this, don't we?

Olsson, who shot the film herself, takes us through Rwanda in a stunning visual articulation of the unending grief and persistent remembrance of the few individuals who managed to survive and hang on, deciding to stay and live out the rest of their lives in daily vigil over both the physical and spiritual remains of their murdered families.  Without any exposition, with contemplative photography, Olsson and Niyongabo imbue their 45-minute piece with plenty of breathing space, allowing both participants and viewers to take in the internal experience of despair, the feeling of complete existential failure, the ways in which someone can struggle to find the words to express the absurdity of living a corporeal life when your spirit has already passed on, accompanying your loved ones into nothingness. 

There is balance here, as much as there can be, for Olsson and Niyongabo show us that, on the one hand, this grisly experience is so overwhelming that forgiveness is impossible.  But on the other side of this can be a deeply penetrating and profound experience of spiritual joy, serenity and peace of mind that can derive from faith, and the awareness of a presence that some have chosen to call God. 

A young man can speak eloquently of shattered faith and express understanding that his generation might be relieved of the obligation of forgiveness.  He acknowledges the loss of the "best part of himself," his ability to feel anything at all.  "I'm really sure there is a part of me that's dead; there is a kind of emotion, a kind of love, I don't have."  The only hope he holds out is that of a new generation, that will know only of this time through passed-on stories.  This is the only thing that keeps him alive.  He acknowledges that the next generation will have a chance to be born into a world where the entire spectrum of human feeling can remain active and intact.  His experience will be an historical one, repeated in rote recitation as part of a school lesson on genocide, like multiplication tables, or a poem, or a song.

We meet the constant mourners who have an open dialogue with God and shout not only their grief to that entity, but also their joy and gratitude at being alive.  There is the young mother of three young children, who had her legs cut off during the massacre, who has turned to the church for some solace so that she doesn't burden her children too much with her overwhelming grief. 

The burden of grief might be bearing witness long after everyone else has moved on, when just the "reconciliators" are left to try and mend some things.  Most of the world barely paid attention to what happened in Rwanda in 1994 until hundreds of thousands were already dead.  Olsson and Niyongabo capture a respectful portrait of those that remain.  They listen; they record; they  bear witness.  In that process, the two have created something all the more emotionally searing for its distance, its economy, its quiet observation.  (Niyongabo and Olsson, pictured)

Burden of My Heart will have its premiere this Thursday evening at the 54th International Leipzig Festival for Documentary and Animated Film as part of the International Young Talent Competition--Generation DOK program.

Imperatively Maybe: Rough and Tumble Serbian Cinema at Beldocs 2011

Back in May of this year, I paid my first visit to Beldocs in Belgrade, Serbia, at the kind invitation of the festival's founder, Mladen Vusurovic.  Reprinted here is my article on the festival for this season's DOX Magazine, out this month:

“Art is not a plaything, but a necessity, and its essence, form, is not a decorative adjustment, but a cup into which life can be poured and lifted to the lips and be tasted.  If one’s own existence has no form, if its events do not come handily to mind and disclose their significance, we feel about ourselves as if we were reading a bad book.  We can all of us judge the truth of this, for hardly any of us manage to avoid some periods when the main theme of our lives is obscured by details, when we involve ourselves with persons who are insufficiently characterized; and it is possibly true not only of individuals, but of nations.” --Rebecca West, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, A Journey Through Yugoslavia

 

When Mladen Vusurovic decided to create a film festival in Belgrade, Serbia in 2008, he consulted a community of filmmakers that comprised several generations, knowing that in the region in which he resides, over a span of just a decade (or less), life can look and feel completely different in all of its aspects.  Suddenly there is war; and then, a tentative peace, a reconstitution of all the parts that comprise a culture that is still trying to find its true north. Yet the same ideological struggles go on and on and on.  In more peaceful times, the artists in that place attempt to illustrate and provide meaning to those struggles. In deciding to create, what he calls “this cultural event,” Vusorovic and his colleagues offer a program of international documentary work, creating an opportunity where the seeds of dialogue about the universal human condition can somehow ameliorate the propensity of many of the Balkan region’s inhabitants to judge things solely on the basis of past injustices inflicted upon them. 

This is a way of life in a place where the very moniker, Balkan, connotes the admixture of honey (bal) and blood (kan).  “You can find honey here; but first, you have to bleed for it,” says a young musician in Ruggero De Virgiliis’ thoughtful and beautifully shot documentary, Balkan Curtains, which appeared as a selection in the festival’s Serbian Competition Program.  This is the first year in the event’s four-year life span that there is, in fact, an official Serbian film competition, in preparation, one supposes, for “an all-out policy for the development of creative documentaries in the country,” according to Vusurovic.

This year’s overall program, while not as well seasoned in a curatorial regard as some of the other more established festivals in the region, was substantial enough to fill the theatres, and there is much promise for the growth of this annual event in years to come.  A particularly wise programming choice, garnering an audience of close to 3,000 people, was to open the fest with Darko Bajic’s O, Gringo, a profile of Dejan Petkovic, a Serbian-born footballer who became a superstar in his adopted country of Brazil and is lauded as a local hero in his country of origin.  The especially good news in all of this, of course, for those of us who are obstinately continuing to produce, make, support and fund cinematic nonfiction stories, is that there is another fascinating spot on the globe at which to exhibit our films and, in turn, see films that aren’t shown very much outside the region in which they are made.

Serbian independent cinema is still finding its way in this new landscape of post-traumatic, quasi-neo-Europeanized, EU nation status-vying confusion. For the majority of the population, most especially the creative echelon of society, there is a sense of being “trapped” in their own country. They don’t necessarily want to leave for good. But they are hungry to see the world, to have the freedom (at least in their minds) to be allowed to be a part of the rest of the world.  This is why these major ad campaigns to induce people into thinking joining the EU will be the answer to everyone’s prayers have been so persuasive--and, somewhat, dispiriting since hardly anyone in the ex-Yugoslav states could begin to tell you why this is so important. I was, particularly, encouraged by a few selections coming from a fresh generation of filmmaker, and they weren't the ones coming out of any film school.  Instead, the makers of films such as Balkan Diaries: Bulgaria by Goran Gocic; Boye: The First Real Female Sound by Brankica Draskovic; Awakening by Irena Fabri; I Will Marry the Whole Village by Zeljko Mirkovic; Mila Seeking Senida by Robert Zuber; and In Memory of Dragisa and Ivanka by Bane Milosevic, all tapped into stories both from within, and without, the usual points of reference.  For most of the citizens of the Balkans (the “former children of Yugoslavia,” as one festival patron put it), there is nowhere to go except within.  (Festival founder and film director, Mladen Vusurovic, pictured above.)

A copy of Mladen Djordjevic’s fiction film Life and Death of a Porno Gang (2009) was given to me by friend Zoran Gajin, a local arts journalist who hosts the website, Filmske Radosti. (Gajin has since relocated to Warsaw, Poland.)  A wickedly clever and subversive film, Porno Gang is, as Djordjevic describes it, a sequel to his documentary film about the Serbian porn industry, Made in Serbia (2005).  There is a scene where a man from Berlin says to a young filmmaker trying to do something radical with his life and career, “From time to time I’ve traveled around the Balkans, since 1991.  Balkan is a great place—impressive juncture of cruelty and creativity.” 

Igor Toholj, a filmmaker and teacher born in 1968, is the programmer of the Serbian competition program.  He is very much preoccupied with this particular juncture that best represents the region in the sixteen films he chose to exhibit this year.  Like most regional competition strands, the selections were all over the map ideologically, stylistically, and otherwise, some works preoccupied with parsing unsolvable episodes of the past, some paying homage to a lost Fatherland, some recreating new contexts for historical conflicts. The films range from very rough, deeply personal efforts from journalists “armed with miniscule digital cameras but huge enthusiasm,” such as the aforementioned Balkan Diaries, to films many years in development and polished to a high level of proficiency, such as Mila Turajlic’s Cinema Komunisto, a nostalgic and highly entertaining look at the major movie industry in the ex-Yugoslavia, mostly through the memories of Tito’s personal movie projectionist.  This is one of the few nonfiction films from the region that has managed to make an international splash, appearing in competition this year at festivals such as New York City’s Tribeca Film Festival.  (Still from Ruggero De Virgiliis' Balkan Curtains, pictured above.)

In today’s marketplace where documentary experts continue to espouse the essential ingredients one needs in order to break out into the international marketplace, the phrase “personal stories with universal appeal” is de rigueur.  Which leads me back to the West quote at the beginning of this article. I cannot really decide if the fact that most of these Balkan stories are far from universal is a virtue, or not. If this universality is, in fact, a vital prerequisite for films that are trying to distinguish themselves on the international scene, then it is, indeed, a drawback right now.  But, at this juncture in the region’s independent documentary industry, it is my opinion that it is a virtue, and here’s why: perhaps Balkan filmmakers do need to concentrate on telling Balkan stories that speak more to local audiences than international ones—in their own vernacular, providing sorely-needed context, cogency to the transformation the current Serbia (and the rest of the Balkan region) is undergoing, “disclosing its significance,” and “sufficiently characterizing” the people that live there.

This is really the best thing to which this, or any other, nascent regional fest can aspire, particularly since, in this case, there have been so many major interruptions to the country’s creative growth. Festivals like this one that continue to showcase the strongest, most vital and articulate documentary work from its own pool of talent provide a chance for healing, moving forward, resolution, understanding, etc.  And by exhibiting some of the best of international cinema side by side this regional fare, new and innovative dialogues will emerge, creating opportunities for this isolation to eventually dissipate, perhaps.

Like many other cultural start-ups with lofty ambitions in the disenfranchised and still isolated Balkan region, the Beldocs fest must simultaneously react to, and participate in, the international marketplace. At the same time, there is an obligation to rebuild a new aesthetic (or refresh an old one, depending on whom you speak with) to better articulate the ways in which people are still enmeshed with a messy, war-torn recent past, and a future that not too many can describe or define with any confidence or clarity.  The old is new again, and the new must reflect the past—East and West overlapping, integrating, enmeshed.  It’s all utterly bewildering and extremely ripe with possibility.  One comes away from an environment like this wanting very much to return as soon as possible.

 

 

 

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?"

 

Berlinale Talent Campus 2012

The opening day for project submissions for the 2012 Berlinale Talent Campus (11 - 16 February), is set for this coming Wednesday, July 20.  The deadline is 5 October.  Reading the submission guidelines is important, of course.  But, in general, if you're wondering if you qualify, take a look at last year's participants.  You might be surprised at who gets to attend the Talent Campus, for the population is extremely diverse in terms of nationality, age and professional experience. 

In the interests of providing a unique POV on the Talent Campus, I asked my friend from Chicago, producer Lisa Gildehaus, to share her experiences from last year.  Every time I met with her for a quick coffee or dinner in Berlin during last year's fest, she was glowing with excitment and energy, telling me that it was absolutely the best way she knew to experience the Berlinale.  So without further ado, here is her guest blog for SIM; thanks so much for sharing, Lisa.

Why you should apply to the Berlinale Talent Campus (yes, YOU, 40 year old filmmaker, with a mortgage and a kid and a film that’s halfway done):

A year ago today, five days after I’d turned 39, I sat down to start my application for the Berlinale Talent Campus.  It was my second year in a row applying and part of me thought, "Am I wasting my time?"

But ever since I found out about the Talent Campus, I’d been harboring a dream to get accepted and spend February in Berlin. (A girl’s gotta dream.) The previous year, along with my rejection letter, I’d received one brief additional sentence: "The selection committee noticed potential in your work and we sincerely hope that you will consider applying again next year."

That packs a lot of promise into one little sentence. After exchanging a few emails with programmers, I received one other tidbit that made me feel even more optimistic.  It said, "We have a lot of people apply as directors. But you have a great deal of experience as a producer.  We strongly encourage people to apply in other categories if they’re qualified--as producers, editors, sound mixers, DPs etc."  So I took that to heart and, when the application opened on July 15, 2010, I sat down to get started.

On December 21, I got the email that said I was accepted. I was ecstatic.  (Although I was secretly convinced I was going to get an email by noon that said "Oops! We didn’t mean to accept you!"). By 5 p.m., I was terrified. Was I going to make a fool of myself? Was I qualified? Was everyone else going to be younger than me?!  (The answers to these questions are:  Maybe; Yes, I think so; and, No, not at all.)

If by this point you’re thinking, "I don’t really know what the Talent Campus is so I’m failing to understand why you’re so excited," I’m going to let the smart Sydney Levine (whom I met at the BTC) explain it to you in her excellent rundown of the 2010 BTC program.

Now let me tell you the most amazing part: In addition to panels and seminars and meeting people who are in the program with you and presenters from all over the globe, you get a magical badge when you’re in the BTC. That badge gets you into any movie in the festival, any event, any discussion, the European Film Market, Embassy parties (as we discovered), and generally anything you want to do. It gives you free reign to go up to people and introduce yourself, to join conversations and ask questions. It’s a free pass to learn and experience. Life after a week of that feels pretty lame.

In terms of my costs, the American Embassy covered part of my airline ticket. Some people got more, others less. The festival covers lodging at a totally decent hotel/hostel near the main train station. They’ll give you a dorm room that you share with five other BTC members for free or, for ten euros per night, you can upgrade to a room of your own, which is what I did. It was nothing fancy but it was clean and secure. There’s also a bar/lounge on the main level so there’s always a place to go looking for fellow Talent Campus participants.

If you’ve never been to Berlin, it’s a pretty damn awesome city. It's stuffed with artists and is incredibly cosmopolitan. The trains make it so simple to get around (although last winter was pretty mild so I did a lot of walking). And Berlin hosts an abundance of cheap, good eateries.  I hear it’s glorious in the summertime.  But the city has a special charge during the film festival that brightens up the grey February days.

I met dozens of filmmakers I’m still in touch with from Australia, Norway, Lithuania, all over Europe, Argentina, Nigeria, Hong Kong.  I've had great conversations with them about filmmaking in their home countries. I’ve started collaborating on potential projects with some people I met. I’ve also been in touch with some of the presenters and production companies. The BTC opened a vast network of connections for me, which was one of the stated goals of my application.

I’m a mid-career filmmaker but I’ve never done very well on the festival circuit. The Talent Campus and their incredibly hard working organizers are there to help you get out of it what you want, meet who you want to meet, get into the events you want to get into. But it helped me to go in with clear objectives and a sense of purpose… as well as a hunger to learn and socialize.

The prospect of spending a week at a film festival like the Berlinale and getting to meet 350 other filmmakers from around the globe lived up to everything I’d hoped it would. Wish I could apply again this year.

Black and white photos courtesy, Lisa Gildehaus.  Photo of Gildehaus courtesy, Berlinale Talent Campus.

 

Interview on BOMBLOG

Be sure to visit the BOMB site to read my latest interview with Australian director, Amiel Courtin-Wilson, and actor, Daniel P. Jones, about their new feature film, Hail.  Click here to read more.

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! 

 

Interview: Alma Har'el, Director BOMBAY BEACH

 

Thinking of a series of dreams

Where the time and the tempo fly

And there's no exit in any direction

Except the one that you can't see with your eyes

Wasn't makng any great connection

Wasn't falling for any intricate scheme

Nothing that would pass inspection

Just thinking of a series of dreams.    --Bob Dylan

 

This interview originally appeared on the Hammer to Nail site.

Israeli-born filmmaker, Alma Har’el’s first feature film, Bombay Beach, premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival this past winter to quiet but consistent accolades, and will have its American premiere in competition at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York today, April 22.  Shot in the surreal environs of the Salton Sea, a man-made body of water that sits in the middle of the California desert, the film itself has plenty of surreal aspects of its own.  It is, in certain respects, a recognizable vérité piece about several people who inhabit the seaside town of Bombay Beach and the nearby community of Slab City. But Har’el is also an award-winning music video director and so has collaborated with her subjects to tell part of their stories in sequences where they interpret their lives through dance, accompanied by the haunting voice and horn of Zach Condon of the band, Beirut. In an article for New York Magazine in 2006, a very young (and exceedingly stage-frightened) Condon said of his music, “It’s impossible for me to play these songs and not feel joy.”  It’s impossible to listen to them without experiencing loads of it, as well.  The film also contains some musical selections from an upstart named Bob Dylan. 

Bombay Beach is a tremendously moving piece of cinema—human scale, intimate and warm—with gorgeous cinematography by Har’el, and tender and playful dance sequences choreographed by Paula Present, a long-time collaborator of the director’s.  A couple of weeks after the film’s début in Berlin, I had a chance to speak to Har’el via Skype at her home in Los Angeles about the magical encounters she experienced in making this piece of work.  And meeting and befriending an extraordinary little boy named Benny Parrish who will be making his very first trip on a plane out of his little hometown to New York City this week.  If you're there, you should go meet this little dude because he's spectacular.

Hammer to Nail (H2N):  Without any confines of traditional documentary storytelling, you went about making this film in a very low-key way, working intuitively and almost completely on your own. What are you learning about this film from audiences who are now sharing with you what they think about this unique collaboration that took place between you and your subjects?

Alma Har’el (AH):  I find myself quieting down quite a bit and listening intently to what people have to say.  And in doing that, it’s allowing me to learn about what it was I did do exactly. Because I’m not really sure what that was. [laughter]  It brings me a bit closer to understanding the film.

H2N:  What led you to focus your efforts on these extraordinary protagonists; how did you go about establishing such intimacy and trust with them?

AH:  Several years ago, very early on in my career, I worked for National Geographic, doing an interview show for them about the Middle East. At the time I was a TV presenter, hosting a music show on Israeli television.  When the National Geographic people offered me this presentation job, I told them I would only do it if I could also direct.  And they agreed.  A man with a high position there came to talk to our crew and he said something that has really stuck with me.  He was talking, in particular, about interviewing techniques and how to talk to people for the camera.  Mostly people will just show you what they want you to see, the story that everybody sees.  If you’re good, you might get to see some of their personal lives.  And, once in a while, you might get to see their secret lives.  The way he explained all this, I got the distinct feeling from how and what he told us, that you were supposed to steal these secrets, almost without them knowing. I knew he was right, that that’s what makes it interesting. But instinctually I didn’t really relate to it at all. There was something about it that didn’t click. 

Back then, I don’t think I really knew what intimacy was, but during the making of this film, I understood that I didn’t want to steal anything from these people.  I wanted to reach a state of intimacy with them that was genuine and to be honest about what I wanted to do.  Although neither did I want to completely ruin the magic of discovering things together by explaining too much.  The trust and intimacy was a process and the friendships grew as I continued to film with them.  We would do creative things together or I would help them out with certain things.  It was really special.  But saying that reduces the process, somehow, since I’m sure most documentary filmmakers experience that in one way or another.  But I think doing those creative things together gave them insight into what I was trying to do, making me less “the enemy behind the camera” who was trying to steal things from them, and more like a collaborator.

H2N:  It seemed to me that these people, considering where and how they live, don’t have that much to occupy their time and attention, making it a ripe situation for someone like you to come in and orchestrate something extraordinary—the dance numbers on the beach, the ways in which they can express themselves verbally, storytelling about their lives.  But there’s also a huge capacity to play and invent and break out of difficult existences.  They are playful; they do dance around; they do sit around and ponder things deeply.  You tapped into something intuitively that you must have recognized, which is to say that that childlike ability to improvise and play is still very much innate, perhaps because of the lack of other things to do. The strong creative aspect is still very much on the surface and not buried under more, let’s say, “sophisticated” ways in which we entertain ourselves.

AH:  This is the very thing I picked up on when I first came to that place.  I first went there to do a music video with Beirut and Zack Condon [their video, entitled, The Concubine, was shot partly on location in Bombay Beach in 2009]. That’s Mike [Parrish] Jr., Benny’s older brother, who stars in that video.  You can also see Pamela doing the dishes and Benny and Sarah, as well, appear briefly.  It was really hard to find the time to do this video and it was getting a bit frustrating, so I decided to go do a random location scout.  A friend of mine told me about this desolate Salton Sea area. The first time we went there, I became so intrigued by the place, I had to go back the very next day. California was the place I learned to drive since I never learned in Israel.  Being a really nervous driver, I never took the freeway; it just terrified me. I couldn’t do it. But I had to learn how to drive on the freeway to get to Salton Sea.

One of the first things that impressed me was just what you were speaking about—this direct connection to childhood.  I met these kids, the Parrishes and their friends, at the beach when we shot the music video.  They invited me into their house. And even though my family and my experience is so different, there was something about the easy access of this mode you can get into when you’re a child.  Your perspective is really limited to the world in which you’re growing up.  You don’t yet have any context to who you are, your country, where you live, your social demographic, or what have you. In a way, you’re in the most accepting place in terms of your family. 

I know many children are not like that.  CeeJay [one of the film’s three main protagonists, a black teenager who moved to the area to live with his father shortly after his young cousin was gunned down in a gang-related incident in LA] is an example of that; he certainly has perspective on his family and where he comes from and he definitely has judgments about all that.  He knew he wanted something different at a very early age, wanted to be the first of his family to go to college, and definitely did not want to be part of the violence he grew up with all around him. He has a lot of criticism for his family and the way they live their lives.

Opposing that, the Parrish kids and their parents are more romantic when it comes to their feelings about family.  No matter what happens, as a family, you hold on to this cohesive unit and infuse it with love all the time, into every relationship, even if they’re not so great or they’re dysfunctional.  But there is romance about life and a focus on what they do have together. I also didn’t really want to know anything about the Salton Sea, the place itself, its history.  I wanted to feel like one of the kids, more like how Benny feels about the place, this sea he lives beside with all the dead fish.  But the beach is a fun place, a place where you go swimming, “when you want to be happy,” as he says in the film.  When we remember our childhoods—at least when I do—we forget the “in-between” stuff and only very certain specific things remain in our memories.  I wanted to experience that with them in this place that feels like it’s outside of time.

H2N:  The way in which a lot of the scenes were shot did make it seem like you were on some abandoned movie set. It felt like a place unattached to the rest of the world, a universe unto itself. In my opinion, you really could have foregone the bit of archival info we learn at the beginning of the film about this place.  While it’s interesting and the footage is delightfully kitschy, it’s really not that relevant to the stories you tell about the people living there.  The dance numbers you stage with your protagonists, however, do feel quite organic; they might spring up out of nowhere at any given moment. It’s such a lovely, non-verbal way they’re able to express their feelings for one another.  That’s one of cinema’s strengths, and, perhaps, why people love the music video format so much.

AH:  Making this film was a real process for me and that includes discovering these various story arcs. I just landed in that place and decided to make a film, not knowing what I would find.  I knew I wanted to do something magical, with dance sequences, in this place.  When I moved there, I didn’t have any subjects.  I met CeeJay once in the street and met the Parrish family while shooting the video for Zach.  So when I got there, I just called them up and started to hang out with them.  I lived in Indio [a desert community in the Coachella Valley, about one hour’s drive from Salton Sea] for four or five months and drove back and forth every day—on the freeway.

Very early on in the process, I started editing as I was shooting.  I’d edit and then I’d go back every few weeks to shoot more.  This was my process for over a year—edit, go back, edit, go back.  So even then, I was weaving the stories together as I was shooting them.  I also knew where I wanted the dance sequences to be, based on what I was shooting.  For example, there is the scene where a group of older kids are making fun of Benny, telling him he can’t participate in their games because he has “no class,” leaving him out completely. Then they went outside and played with those carts that later became a part of that dance sequence.  After editing that scene together, the choreographer, Paula Present, and I rehearsed with them at the community center and we had them wear the same clothes that they wore that day and shot it over two days at the same time of day.  So it really looks like they just stepped out to play and then started to dance.  The gazebo dance with CeeJay and his girlfriend was shot more like a real scene, although a lot of their dialogue was improvised.  I record everything with lav mics so I don’t really have to be that close to them all the time; I can just film and let them talk in a more intimate way.  We were just finding things as we were going along.

H2N:  There is a real sense of discovery.  The structure of your film has all of these interwoven story arcs where we follow different protagonists.  We intuit they know of one another, yet in the film, their lives really don’t intersect.  But, for me, the spine of this piece is Benny’s story, specifically the story of his “illness and treatment.”  You have portrayed one of this country’s many drug-addicted children in such a pure way and I connected to him so viscerally. I can honestly say that my emotional attachment to this kid stemmed mostly from his victimization from a negligent medical establishment, something that enrages me like very few other things do.  The doctors’ and caregivers’ solutions to making Benny “better” is to bombard him with more medications and higher dosages until his poor little body and mind are malfunctioning.  You documented this deterioration over the course of the time you were shooting.  Obviously, you didn’t set out to make any kind of hard-hitting social issue statement about anything, but that’s the real beauty and artistry of the film.  The way in which it’s edited, however, very much drives home certain points about what has happened and is happening to these people and how they cope.

AH:  Yes, and the solutions that they’re offered. I was very aware of all of this while it was happening.  It was, and still is, something I deal with every day—how to react to it, how to be supportive of the situation.  I try to provide as much information as I can that might help.  But that’s as much as I feel I can do.  It’s tricky as a filmmaker and it’s tricky as a human being.  The people around Benny are doing what they think is the best thing to do. Bluntly, the truth is that that area is notorious for lots of doctors that are practicing there that have, let’s say, failed elsewhere.  There are a lot of doctors and health care people in that area who are in training, just starting practices. They don’t necessarily have the right information or attitude and the “expertise” they can offer is limited in many ways.

It’s particularly enraging, because to me, Benny is not only smart, he’s probably one of the most interesting people I’ve ever met in my entire life.  His spirit and imagination I would like to think will be stronger than anything that’s happening to him physiologically.  The only hope is that he won’t be damaged by all of this forever.  These people really do play a kind of Russian roulette with these kids’ brains.  It is unbelievable that they give those drugs to kids that age.  He’s been receiving them since he was four.  The amounts increase, the medications change, and the definition of “bi-polar,” which is what he’s diagnosed with—well, you can’t say that a kid has a bi-polar disorder.  That kind of condition is only diagnosable in adults according to the DSM-IV [Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders].  There’s no such thing as a bi-polar condition in children.  They impose that diagnosis because they don’t know what else to call it.  They might say, “Well, this is where we think it’s going,” and start doing drug trials.  They’re experimenting and don’t really know the outcomes.

But this film can only serve to show glimpses into some of the larger issues one can pick out from these people’s lives and the way in which they live their lives in this particular place.  All these things that can be perceived as wrong or right, or bad or good, all reside together, side by side.  This is the human experience of life and that’s what I wanted to illustrate more than anything, how things co-exist, all the wrongs and the rights together, the love and the violence, the broken dream and the persistence of dreams.  I hope the film gives a feeling of a more rounded feeling of life, not something dissected into pieces.  I don’t want to say if this certain thing or that certain thing was remedied everything would be okay.  I don’t believe in that.  Benny’s predicament is one heartbreaking element of everything else going on.  As a friend, I intend to do what I can do to educate and help with things.  But as a filmmaker, this is what I’m interested in illustrating.

My stance is not one of criticism for films that are more blatantly “social issue” films.  I watch those, too, and learn from them and think they’re so important.  But the film I made didn’t have room to supply that kind of information; that’s not what I set out to do. Going back to the context of the place itself:  up until the last minute, there was a debate on whether we should include the introduction that is there—the history of the Salton Sea and the genesis of this place.  I think the film would have been fine without that, too, because, in essence, not knowing where you are doesn’t matter.  But it does, of course, give context to this idea of the broken American dream. 

Red and CeeJay and the Parrishes all have so much to do with this kind of mythology for me.  I have only experienced this “American Dream” from afar as anyone who isn’t from this place does.  As I’ve gotten closer, I still see the “football dream,” the “success dream,” where one is lifted from your environment into a new destiny. Red is the traveler, the seeker, who worked in the oil fields.  He represents the loner with deep wisdom smattered with that deep-seated racism that has been handed down to him from older generations.  There’s Mike Parrish’s fantasy of being in the military, the obsession with guns and explosives as a form of entertainment, the love for family in a straightforward and honest way.  All of this is so evocative of America—or, this lost America, more accurately.  Even though the dream is broken, you can still see the people.  And in terms of the place itself, it’s like when you see an old woman: you know she used to be beautiful and vibrant and it gives her another dimension, not because it makes her tragic, but because it makes her heroic.  It moves her from being an object of beauty to being a subject with depth and history.  That place, for me, is redolent of that, a place sold to people as a dream.  And now it’s a place where you can meet yourself in a real way, a grounded way, and there’s beauty in that, too.  Because the only thing that’s left is the intimacy you can have with the other people who are there with you.

H2N:  Your collaboration with Condon provides a really lovely ingredient in all this, his voice and horn so evocative of something both melancholy and joyful.

AH:  That sound is how I feel when I’m honest about my life, that juxtaposition of melancholy and loneliness with the absolute enjoyment and happiness of being alive.  Ever since the first time I heard his music and his voice, it’s been such an influence and there are always wonderful surprises along the way.  I feel like that when I’m around him, when we work together.  We collaborated for three or four years doing all these music videos.  I started feeling a bit tied down to that form.  I did videos for other artists and just didn’t feel that inspiration, that spark or connection with other musicians as much as I did with him.  I wrote him an email at one point telling him I needed to do my thing, that the music video work was limiting for me at that point and that I had found something I wanted to make a film about.  I told him I would love it if he did the music.  I sent him the scene with Benny and Pamela and the pink wig at the beach, which was one of the first things I shot, and based on that scene, he started making music for the film.

H2N:  This bond, this relationship between Benny and his mom, is the absolute heart of this film.  She really is his only friend.  The parent/child relationship is so often portrayed as one of antagonism and strife these days.

AH:  I agree with you and I also deeply appreciate the deepness of their bond.  It’s a very honest, but very kind relationship.  Pamela's a mom that has energy and space left to explore the good parts of her children. She loves being a mother.  She also feels frustrated and, in a lot of ways, stuck on certain things but she wants her children to have what she doesn’t, which is also something very much a part of the American character, to make sure your children might have a different destiny than the one of the generation before.  That’s universal, of course, but the reward of that seems to be higher in people’s fantasies here.  But despite her high hopes for her kids, she’s still the one who gives Benny his medication, insists on it, making sure he takes everything the doctors give him.  Pamela does have a lot of problems dealing with his behavior and controlling it.  He takes up a lot of her time and energy.  But that’s parenting—you’re often the best thing and the worst thing to happen to your child.  But, I don’t know too many people who just do good things all the time.  The most important thing to give your child is love and acceptance because no matter what he has to deal with later, he will always have that.

H2N:  Then there’s the old man, Red, who’s totally estranged from his whole family and very much alone.  He seems like a very loving person, but he also seems like he might have been someone who was not brought up with a lot of love and acceptance.  Can you talk a bit about growing a relationship with him?  You’re a young woman “from the big city” showing up with your camera, an interloper.  What did he make of you?  I would imagine his attention and respect was hard-won.  He’s a great storyteller with a wonderful voice.  And he’s a hell of a snappy dresser.

AH:  I was hanging out at Slab City hoping to discover a great subject.  I met this guy who was a hitchhiker and filmed him for a bit.  He told me about a trip he took with a guy named Red.  He took me to see him and Red came out in a bright red shirt.  He was tanned and he worked every day in a little garden right outside his trailer.  There are very few men like him anymore.  He can sit outside in his chair and just think for hours.  He thinks deeply about things and then thinks about how to articulate those thoughts in a way that will capture people’s attention, almost as a poet would do.  He would come up to me and say, “You know, I sat outside my trailer today and was thinking about blah, blah, blah, and this is what I think . . .” and he’d be off.  He was definitely not very trusting in the beginning.  I was some girl from LA with a camera and he wanted to know what I wanted, what I was trying to get.  But he would go and sit with me on the beach and I’d ask him pretty general things, what he thought about certain things.  I was kind of trying to talk to him about things that were bothering me while I was filming the Parrishes, what he thought about love, travel, family, etc.  I was building up this Red library of beautiful things that he’d say.  So we ended up spending a lot of time together.  Initially I was thinking of using only his voice as some kind of narrator. I was touched by his life.

But he would ask me to call before I came and was angry when I’d just show up.  With the Parrishes, I’d just drop in, throw down my bags and hang out the whole day or sometimes I would stay the night on their couch.  That was my base camp.  But Red always had a very tight schedule [laughs] and would only give me an hour or so of his time, always scheduled in advance.  Once we became friends, he took me on a long trip on his dune buggy; we went on a four- or five-hour ride into the desert and you see some of this footage in the film.  It was beautiful and intense, sometimes scary.  I would think that if anything happened to him, we’d just be stuck there in the middle of the desert with no reception [laughter].  It was a real adventure.  From then on, after that trip, I was all right in his book.  He opened up to me a lot more. He was very surprised to get that attention, very taken by the fact that someone cared that much for him and was interested in what he had to say.  He definitely is lonesome and keeps certain people at a distance.  But he has a lot of friends and the ones that do get close to him love him dearly.  He has intimacy in his life; he’s not always alone.

H2N:  Circling back to this interview technique you were taught by the NatGeo guy, about how to get close to people to learn about their secret lives or intimate aspects of themselves they don’t normally share with just anyone.  Obviously, you are adept at getting people to trust you, open up to you, befriend you without stealing anything from them. It’s pretty exciting to think of other subjects with whom you can collaborate in this way.

AH:  I love a good story.  I also write and am working on a script right now.  You never know, but I have a feeling, whatever I will do, it will be wide open in terms of style or genre.  I don’t think it’s necessary to be confined to one thing or another.  Once I discover a story, I just want to feel free to use the things that I love in art in order to tell it, dance or what have you.  Film is such an incredible format to explore other arts.  I’m not a cinephile at all, one of those people that have been sitting inside a dark cinema since childhood watching every film that comes out.  I think the diversity of what inspires me will make its way into what I create. I like learning as I do something—it deepens my understanding in such a profound way.  Whatever inspires you in life can find its way into your filmmaking; it’s just a matter of feeling free enough to do it.  And you just hope that other people like it, too.

All photos courtesy Alma Har'el.

 

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.