Still in Motion

La bocca del lupo: "An Excavation of Memory"

The Dokufest jury for the international competition awarded the Best International Feature Documentary to Italian filmmaker Pietro Marcello's La bocca del lupo (The Mouth of the Wolf) "for its haunting, lyrical and gorgeous depiction of one city and one remarkable love story."  We are not the first jury to give this beautiful film top honors since its début in 2009.  At this year's Berlinale, it won the Caligari Award, as well as Best Documentary at the Teddy Awards.  It also took the Film Critics Prize for Best Film at the 2009 Torino Film Festival, the first time in the northern Italian festival's 27-year history that the prize was given to an Italian film.  It's an exquisite, distinctive work, its director creating a layered story with unrestrained romanticism, a love letter to the port city of Genova in the Liguria region, founded by "abandoned castaways" washed onto its shores by the sea to create a unique culture of its own.  Marcello, in turn, has made a unique film that is hard to define by one genre alone.  Shot in luscious 35mm, it is an epic poem, an elegy, an archaeological excavation, a city symphony, and a true love story for the ages, told in a disorienting, mysterious dreamscape, using sound and vision, spoken word and music, brand-new footage residing beside ancient, fragile pieces of celluloid.

While in the midst of researching this utterly-transformed place for the San Marcellino Foundation, the Jesuits of Genova (an organization that offers aid to indigents and the marginalized, including ex-cons), the director met his extraordinary protagonists by chance.  He met Vincenzo (Enzo) Motta (pictured right) outside a bakery, a ruggedly handsome man who promptly engaged the filmmaker in conversation, showing him the bullet hole marks in his leg from a shootout he'd had with the cops decades ago.  Enzo's wife of 20 years, Mary Monaco, was a bit more reticent to participate, but the two ultimately agreed to share their incredible love story for Marcello's camera.

Enzo is front and center throughout most of the story--visually and aurally, his coiled presence and vibrating machismo and sexuality, the engine that moves us through time and space.  We only hear Mary's voice (and see a couple of photos of her when she was young) through most of the film.  We finally see her when she is sitting by Enzo's side for one of the most captivating interviews ever captured on film.  Marcello purposely fools us into thinking we are seeing the woman who is speaking time and time again.  We realize at the very end of the film, that she is one of the very first images we see, hiding in plain sight, a silhouette in repose.  When we do see her, she is still mostly hidden in shadow, tentative and shy, but her eloquence and emotionalism, the beautiful language she uses to describe their first encounter, her impressions of him, how they saved one another, the synchronicity of their bond, will melt the most stoic heart.  Enzo sits beside her mugging for the camera and flexing his muscles, then turning to her to sing her a love song, a born ham if ever there was one.  He does make one hell of a movie star.  Unfortunately, he's spent most of his life behind bars due to a talent for finding trouble from a very early age, never quite succeeding in getting out from under his own violent temper and hubristic "rule of law." 

The story, like all good fairy tales, has a happy ending, the two lovers living their dream in a small, shabby farmhouse with their dogs, Enzo munching herbs from the ground like a goat as the camera gazes from a high hill overlooking the now-ugly, industrial city built upon the rubble of the old one, that world forever submerged.  "Small, great stories, that's what it was."

There were many films we saw at Dokufest that pushed form, that found new and innovative ways of spinning a true yarn.  Our deliberation was that much more difficult due to the stellar programming, not just in the competitions, but in the festival, as a whole.  Yet a film like La bocca rose above a field of outstanding work because of its unabashed ode to all that we love about cinema, how it can transport and enrich us, capture our imaginations, allow us to be swept away by sheer beauty. Kudos to its creator, and a particular salute of respect to editor and archival researcher, Sara Fgaier, and composers Marco Messina, Massimiliano Sacchi and Nino Bruno (ERA).  Bravissimi, tutti.

Coda:  Sadly, Mary passed away very recently and so this film, in essence, must become a tribute to this remarkable woman, transformed throughout her life in many ways most of us will never experience, or understand.  (Pictured, Mary, Marcello and Enzo celebrating in Torino last year.)

Dokufest Balkan Documentary Competition Winners, Part 2

Turkish filmmaker Doga Kilcioglu's Kamerayla Izdivac (Married to the Camera) won the much-coveted audience award at this year's Dokufest.  The award was calculated from votes cast by the general audience.  It's a very meaningful award to any director and Kilcioglu's film is certainly a crowd-pleaser. 

Made for television and commissioned, in part, by ARTE/France, the film focuses on the unknown faces that make up the audience of a hugely popular show in Turkey called "Marriage with Esra Erol."  A take on The Dating Game, the aim is to match-make in front of the camera and get people married as quickly as possible (and not always for love).  The film also follows some of the contestants, ranging in age from early 30s to 75.  In one hour's time, the filmmakers capture a rich and multi-layered world that reflects the riotous warp and weave of a very complex and complicated culture. 

What's so enjoyable about the film is that everyone on camera, both those that create the show and those that provide the Greek chorus commentary, i.e., the audience members, is willing to reveal and talk about the absolute fakery and artifice that goes into making a television show that means to take a nation by storm in a very competitive medium where everyone is gunning to out-sequin and out-spangle the other shows that rely on both staged audience participation and the cult of personality of their hosts.  Without the audience, it's an empty exercise and they are encouraged to participate, schooled by the crew in the ways in which they can become celebrities, too--and possibly find a bride or groom of their own!

In the opening scene, a restless mob of spectators stands in the hallway, having been kept waiting an exceedingly long time to get into the studio, their bags and bodies searched as if going through airport security.  One of them shouts impatiently, "Let us in!  We aren't terrorists!  We're the audience!!"  To my mind, one of the best movie lines ever.  (Pictured above, sophisticated but superstitious hostess, Esra Erol, praying backstage before the show.  Her dream is to become her country's Oprah.)

For this piece, which she co-edits, Kilcioglu (pictured) partners with her brother and producing partner, Can Kilcioglu, who does wonderful camera work; soundperson, Ögünc Hatipoglu; and co-editors Pierre Haberer and Cem Yildirim to create absolutely wonderful vérité, the camera stealthily capturing subjects in incredibly funny and unguarded moments--that is, when they're not directly engaging with the camera since most have become super savvy in the ways of entertainment.  One such unguarded moment which made me laugh out loud was when the president comes to visit a houseful of women to listen to their grievances and to "acknowledge their oppression."  One of the regular audience "plants" for the show is also a campaign worker and organizes citizen meetings with campaigning or elected officials.  (Television = Politics--one nonexistent without the other.)  The consummate politician walks through the door and someone shoves a child in his arms as flashes frantically pop away.  He grins for the media's cameras, but it is Kilcioglu's camera that lingers to capture him practically dropping the little girl to the floor when the lights go off, his smile simultaneously cascading to a frown of annoyance.  Married to the Camera is a delight from start to finish.

Romanian filmmaker Alexander Nanau's The World According to Ion B. (a co-production with HBO Romania) won best film in the Balkan Documentary Competition, the jury noting that, "the director's filmmaking skill merges seamlessly with the character he portrays, leaving no opportunity wasted in the telling of his story.  It is a deeply intimate portrait told with a grace and humor that won us over unanimously."  Nanau's portrait of late-to-the-dance art celebrity, Ion Barladeanu, is indeed, full of grace, the most graceful aspect, at least to this viewer's mind, the relationship between subject and filmmaker.  The partnership in making a personal cinematic portrait of an individual is everything in documentary, the energy exchanged between subject and filmmaker through the agency of a camera lens a mysterious and alchemical process that is either successful--or not.  When it's not, it's obvious.  When it works, it's great.  But when there is a profundity that goes deeper than merely capturing a story, it is transcendent and makes for an exhilarating journey for the viewer.  And that doesn't happen very often.  (I saw one other film at Dokufest where this is also the case which I will talk about very soon.) 

The fact that Nanau accomplishes this in just 61 minutes is remarkable, the economy of scale between meaningful dramaturgy and high emotional impact impeccably balanced--please take note all you "feature-length" filmmakers!!

In 2008, when the filmmaker discovers him, Ion B. is still living on the streets, or more precisely in the back alley of an apartment building in Bucharest, a place he's called home for over 20 years, taken in by the building manager and kept like a pet in the backyard.  Ion B. is also a drunkard and as his story unfolds, we learn little by little why he felt the need to anesthetize himself from his past.  In these alcohol-infused years, Ion has created an astounding body of work, making 900 brilliant drawings and collages dating from the 70s to the mid-90s.  In one of the most affecting opening scenes in recent memory, as Ion is addressing Nanau's camera, telling him that he'll "die where he lays in an alleyway, a drunkard and a useless piece of junk," someone from an upstairs window starts throwing their trash down onto the street, the detritus falling several stories and crashing loudly onto the ground around Ion where he lolls on his pallet.  This, we learn, is the genesis of his art, the flotsam that people discard.

Then Dan Popescu comes along, a young successful art gallery owner who recognizes the absolute goldmine in Ion's work and goes about marketing his discovery to the art world.  "We'll have a normal artist / gallery owner relationship," he tells Ion.  Yet, there is nothing "normal" about this man's life and he would never in a million years be able to insinuate himself into the art world no matter how hard Popescu tries to pull a My Fair Lady number on Mr. B, a new set of choppers notwithstanding.  There are many humorous scenes that transpire from this (seemingly) mutually beneficial relationship, but time after time, Ion is unwilling or unable to play along.  He doesn't want to understand his work in the context of Warhol and Otto Dix--he doesn't know who they are and he doesn't care.  When they read the culture section of the local newspaper together, which bestows the title of "Forefather of Pop Art" on Ion, he asks Dan what Pop Art is.  When Dan tries to explain the late-60s, early 70s art movement, he also notes that during that time, Romania was run by dictator, Nicolae Ceausescu, who blocked any information from the West.  Ceausescu damaged Ion's life in many ways, as he did most of the population of his country, and the artist used the image of the dictator in his art quite a bit.  We realize that he would probably be a dead man if his art had been "above ground" at the time.  Ion's own father, a communist activist and leader and Ceausescu supporter, in fact, at one time had Ion and his brother arrested.  But instead of engaging in any direct (and exceedingly painful) discussion of his former life before coming to Bucharest, Ion rubs his bushy eyebrows and proclaims, "I really need to get a haircut today."

I won't describe the entire journey this film takes (one of the stronger sections is when Ion returns to his native village of Zapodeni after a 17-year absence to confront his past), but by the time the film finishes, Ion B. is a very famous art star, showing at the Basel Art Fair in 2009 where the word "genius" is pronounced by one pretentious art denizen; his works are exhibited in London together with works by Andy Warhol (who?) and Marcel Duchamp; and in February of this year, he had his first solo exhibition at the Anne de Villepoix gallery in Paris.  What's even more encouraging, however, is that after a decade of not making anything new, he's created 160 new collages.

As for the "normal artist / art gallery owner relationship"?  I hear there's a lawsuit brewing, big surprise. 

Dokufest Balkan Documentary Competition Winners, Part 1

Jurij Meden, the Slovenian director of 1717 Kilometrov Poletja 2009 (1717 Kilometers of Summer 2009) and Bilijana Garvanlieva, the Macedonian director of Tabakmädchen (Tobacco Girl) shared the Best Newcomer Award at this year's edition of Dokufest.  Tobacco Girl also garnered a special mention for the Human Rights Award, its jury saying that Garvanlieva's film takes the form of a "poetic confrontation of established social norms and multi-layered inequalities."

These filmmakers aren't exactly newcomers in terms of making films, but the Balkan Documentary Competition jurors (Emel Celebi from Turkey, who won the Best Balkan Documentary Award last year for her Sisters of Lilith; Michael Palmieri from the US; and Sissi Korhonen from Finland) decided that they wanted to recognize the fine work these directors presented, particularly since they work so independently, or without direct support from their own countries.  In fact, in her acceptance speech at the awards ceremony, Garvanlieva noted that she's made her films, including this one, "no thanks to my country" of Macedonia.  Recognition and support have come mainly from Germany.

Both half-hour films, in their own unique way, artfully show the traditional versus modern dilemmas and contradictions of their regions, each beautifully illustrating the speed at which life can move when one is determined to rocket through time and space.  In Meden's case, it is a physical journey by car of almost 2000 kilometers through six countries; in the young girl, Mümine's case, she traverses centuries of tradition in an attempt to land squarely in the midst of modern times.  The growing pains are intensely palpable, both for her, and for her family.

Tobacco Girl opens with a haunting song telling of the 600-year-old history of the people that inhabit the high mountain regions of Macedonia, part of the Turkish minority that resides on the land.  As a family unit--mother, father, two daughters and two sons--they do backbreaking work in the tobacco fields, the crop their only source of income.  As the tobacco is meant to be sold for survival, so are the children who work the fields, for they are just as precious a commodity to their parents as the substance they sell at market.  In her direction Garvanlieva shows, to wonderful effect, the claustrophobia of their lives, and I cannot praise highly enough cinematographer Susanne Schüle's camera work, which is absolutely exquisite.  The vibrant, multicolored traditional costumes the women wear stand out in bas-relief, not only from the dun-colored background of the village's dirt and wood, but also against the Western wear the men sport--leather jackets, T-shirts, jeans, all shades of brown, black and gray.

What is so appealing about this story is that instead of presenting some boring ethnographic treatise on these mountain people, the director tells the story from the 14-year-old girl's point of view, gossiping with her girlfriends, flirting with boys, talking incessantly about their crushes and obsessions, their dreams for the future.  But Mümine wants more.  She describes sorting tobacco with her family as pure "agony," and is determined to educate herself enough so that she can marry the person she wants to marry, so that she can move to the capital city of Skopje to go to school and do well enough to become a teacher, in the process, totally breaking "the laws of nature" her people have followed since anyone can remember.  The intimate scenes with the family are painful in their complexity--no raised voices or overly dramatic scenes, but plenty of fierce looks and reprimands, particularly from the matriarch who threatens the girl with permanent expulsion from the family if she runs away to the city. 

Yet the whole family is moving into modern times, using their earnings to buy a new house--but still compelled to sacrifice a goat in honor of their new dwelling; shopping for new appliances--but still discussing marrying off their children for the highest financial advantage, first the eldest son, then the eldest daughter, and then Mümine.  It is determined the youngest girl will fetch the highest price because she is so pretty.  However, the boy she loves is poor, and this angers her mother no end.  The camera consistently captures Mümine's universal beauty throughout the film, yet, oddly, when we do see her in modern dress at the end visiting the school in Skopje decked out in jeans, tennis shoes, hoodie, hair tied back in a ponytail, she appears to be just an ordinary, average, modern teenager.  Yet this is exactly who she wishes to be.

Jurij Meden is a freelance film writer and curator, his catalog bio consisting of this meager information:  "born in Ljubljana in 1977, film worker."  In his glorious experimental piece, 1717 Kilometers, we journey through his native Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia Herzogovina, Serbia, Montenegro and Kosovo.  The film is a super 8mm record of summer, filmed by Meden and Vlado Skafar, "filled with idiotic excursions, false goals, prodigal waste, disappointed loves, galling personal insufficiencies, and half-witted associations."  It is a thrilling road movie on speed.  As visually stunning as the piece is, the sound design and score must be noted, as well.  Created by Paulo Raposo, a sound and media artist based in Lisbon, Portugal, the music and ambient recordings add a totally appropriate psychological element, capturing the essence of the hallucinogenic quality of a long road trip, the world flying by, hour after hour, day after day, from the confines of an automobile. 

The film's physicality reflects how much ground gets covered, geographically, emotionally and otherwise.  The road becomes an alternate universe, road weariness creating its own dreamscape, the monotony and hypnotic cast of it all, life passing by as if it's one extended mirage, image after image floating out of the emptiness that surrounds the strip of road one follows until it turns into total and utter abstraction, one image blending into another, coming in and out of focus, one moment the colors overly-saturated, then everything blurry and opaque.  The distinct world of the constant traveler is one of feeling, somehow, captured, even though the journey is through one's own auspices, the "freedom of the open road" a siren call for many, a rite of passage.  But there is a feeling of isolation that is contradictory to the freedom of movement, a feeling that there is no one else in the world that knows where you are since your physical location changes every moment, you're always somewhere different than you were just a second before.  Lost, you have the effortless freedom of a ghost and feel as if you could float on the wind and blow through solid obstacles without touching them.  It is a fantastic journey, one simply signed at its close, as if it's an art piece (which it is), JM 2010.

Eau de Vie, Or: Self-Transformation Through Raki

I don't visit too many places where I meet a third-generation carpenter carrying on the work his grandfather started refurbishing the wooden staircase that leads up to the bell tower in an Orthodox Cathedral.  This particular church is in the center of the town of Prizren, Kosova and is guarded by armed policemen.  It was badly damaged during the ethnic riots of March 2004 and is almost fully repaired, but is still not open to the public.  However, they let me in to take a look in a casual, friendly manner. 

I don't visit too many places where I, and my young, female guide, can interrupt three ancient men engrossed in conversation on a bench in the garden of a mosque (one of several in the town) to ask if they will let us inside the locked sanctuary.  (Oddly, there is a modern LED display board on the side of the building like the ones you see at train stations and airports that informs passerby of daily prayer times.)  With a slight downward tilt of his capped head, one of them shuffles to the front door and unlocks it, gesturing for us to slip off our shoes, but not concerned that our heads aren't  covered or that our arms and legs are bare.  He leaves us to take in the beautiful and peaceful interior, caustics of soft sunlight bouncing on the walls that reveal the private spaces where men meditate and pray.

I don't visit too many places where a waiter in a restaurant that I frequent becomes a friend, someone I look forward to seeing every morning.  He calls me Miss Pamela and I call him Mr. Love, not because his name is Ashkan which means "my love" in Turkish, but because he just is Mr. Love.  A small group of us adopts him as our Balkan mother and he feeds and fusses over us several times a day, only asking for a bit of sympathy when his hands go numb from carrying too many hot, heavy plates of food.  He tells us next week is Ramadan and people in the town are celebrating in a frenzy--several wedding processions pass by every day, there is much eating and drinking, and much promenading in the streets, disco music thumping everywhere.  The place pulses like Ibiza, but it is calm, calm, calm.  I have never met lovelier people.  (Pictured, Ashkan serving breakfast to grateful filmmaker, Rowland Jobson, director of the outstanding short fiction piece, A Girl Like Me, filmmaker, Michael Palmieri, who served on the Balkan jury, still sleeping behind his RayBans.  Unbeknownst to their owner, said shades fell under the table one night, but were found and returned by--you know it--Mr. Love.)

I don't visit too many places where I stay up until 6:00 a.m. every morning, the recorded call of the muezzin at a bit before 5, when the sky's black starts to turn a deep violet, announcing that a new day has begun.  We find ourselves still glued to our chairs around a table in the town square engrossed in conversation, eyes sparkling, faces smiling, nonstop laughter, the proprietor patiently bringing us glass after glass of homemade raki and, occasionally, something to eat--bread with cheese, a plate of spicy meat, pommes frites with lots of salt--nary a sign indicating that he wishes us to get the hell out of his place so he can go to bed.  Instead of stumbling off to our own beds, we slide by our hotel to grab our cameras and go exploring, no one awake in the still-sleeping town except the occasional baker pounding dough to the accompaniment of Arab pop softly playing from a small radio, or the wild pack of dogs that roam the streets, occasionally stopping so that a couple of them can hump for a few seconds before the group moves on.  We refrain from retiring just yet, not because we're that keen on taking pictures (although we are), but because we simply aren't ready to give up one another's company.  Not just yet.  It feels like the beginning of a love affair when you can't stand to be out of someone's presence for a moment. 

Okay, raki, or "rakifuel," as Miss Sonja calls it:  we're puzzled.  Normally, when one stays up all night drinking alcohol, especially something as pure and strong as this anise-flavored spirit quaffed in Turkey, Bosnia and the rest of the Balkans, also known as Lion's Milk (!), one gets completely blotto, right?  Barely able to speak, let alone climb a steep hill to the fortress overlooking the town.  (To be honest, we were a bit wobbly when we reached the top.)  But because we fortify ourselves regularly with food, a local assures us that yes, one can stay up for days drinking raki, carrying on one long, rambling conversation, a mad dialog that fuels the imagination and the soul, that makes everyone as witty as Dorothy Parker, as wise as Socrates--a regular gathering of geniuses, I tell you.  At least that's how it seemed to us.

I don't visit too many film festivals, like Dokufest, which staged its ninth iteration this year, that marry both its program and its surroundings so perfectly.  Executive director, Aliriza Arënliu, and artistic director, Veton Nurkollari, presented an amazing program of international feature and short documentary work, one of the best I've encountered.  And Samir Karahoda's short fiction program was a revelation.  Ironically, since there are no cinemas there besides the ones created specifically for the festival, you can see audiences grappling with how to watch a movie.  They, literally, don't really know how.  So there is usually a lot more going on than movie-watching.  But, somehow, because of the open air venues--on the river, up on the fortress wall, the big outdoor amphitheatre in the middle of town--it only adds to the celebratory quality of the proceedings.  The directors of Hamburg-based A Wall Is A Screen used this to glorious advantage and presented a fantastic shorts program that floated through the town one evening, projecting films on the walls of a bank, a mosque, a restaurant, a residential building, to great effect, a large crowd following along for the 90-minute program.  

It was a very special week and I can only offer up these quixotic and scattered impressions to describe the spectacular experience it truly was.  What I can offer up in a more concrete fashion (more or less) are future posts which talk about some of the films.  In my next installment, I'll start with the stand-outs in the Balkan competition program, some selections from the international competition which I was privileged to jury along with AJ Schnack, Doug Block, Sonja Henrici and Adriatik Kelmendi, and other fare that played in the five competitions, as well as in other special strands.  Stay tuned.

Dokufest!

The 2010 edition of Dokufest in the ancient city of Prizren, Kosovo, starts tomorrow, July 31, and runs through the 8th of August.  Like many small areas with nascent film industries, lucky local audiences and international guests will get a chance to partake of a program containing 156 films from 34 different countries, a truly international selection of the best of world nonfiction film.  Because of where Prizren is located, audiences will also get to take advantage of warm-weather screenings amongst the naturally beautiful terrain--a river does, indeed, run through it.  (Pictured, one of three open-air theaters at the festival, the new Fortress Cinema, installed on the highest peak of the town.)

Executive director, Aliriza Arënliu, visionary artistic director, Veton Nurkollari, short film programmer, Samir Karahoda, and their team have put together a fantastic program with five competitions, a look at the best of international cinema (out of competition), a special strand of films from Finland (have we figured out that something special is happening in Finland, yet?), a spotlight on Afghanistan, a Zelimer Zilnik retrospective, a shorts program by Philippine wunderkind, Khavan De La Cruz, Cities on Speed, and much more.  As well, there is special programming for kids, workshops, and tours of the local area.  Sean Farnel, Hot Docs' head of programming, has called Dokufest "one of the best festival experiences I've ever had."

Look for impressions, wrap-ups, and reviews here on SIM, Hammer to Nail and in DOX Magazine from the new Republic of Kosovo.

Neue Anfänge - New Beginnings

This New York to Berlin transition is proving to be a bit tricky in the context of what I want to choose to write about on this blog right now.  Unlike my move to New York three years ago, my expectations are tempered with the knowledge that I am not a member of the native culture (although, seemingly, foreigners are starting to outnumber Germans), nor do I speak its language proficiently (yet), nor do I know the specific social mores and aspects of living comfortably and happily here (yet). 

I would suppose they're similar to how one does that anywhere, but I've been getting earfuls about the, sometimes, rocky terrain that can exist when you're living as a "foreigner" in the German culture.  But I like the energy of the city of Berlin; it allows for a certain sense of breathing space, a human pace to the days.  The rabid drinking and partying all night is familiar, though--but it's summertime when everyone is trying to soak enough warmth into their bones to last through the long winter ahead.  (Photo courtesy of Lindsay Isola.)

So, it's not that I don't care anymore about the things that I cared greatly about while residing in NYC, but they do have a different impact on my daily existence.  And while I will certainly continue to celebrate the successes and accomplishments of friends and colleagues there, I hope to spend more time doing the same in a different milieu for new friends and colleagues and those whose work I admire and feel a need to call attention to.  I will admit that there is a feeling of tedium for me in writing about certain things at this juncture and I look forward to new discoveries, both personal and professional, that might help to replenish my depleted tank.  Emotionally and otherwise, I have been running on fumes for far too long.  So here's some select "new stuff," both from NYC and here:

Sara Kiener, former manager of exhibitor relations at Magnolia Pictures (and my former outreach partner-in-crime) and Merrill Sterritt, former head of the production assistance program at Women Make Movies, have partnered to create Film Presence, a marketing and outreach company serving the independent film community.  Continuing the work Kiener started doing independently, the company will produce "event-based theatrical screenings with strong outreach partnerships to boost box office sales and maximize the word of mouth leading up to theatrical engagements."  Their summer/fall slate includes Tamra Davis' Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child which opened recently at New York City's Film Forum; Yael Hersonski's A Film Unfinished; the incredible Frederick Wiseman's latest, Boxing Gym; and Doug Block's newest film, The Kids Grow Up.  Visit their newly-launched website to learn more about what they do.  Go, girls.

Producer Christian Niedan has launched a great new blog called Camera in the Sun.  Neidan will write on how film and television have shaped how we view various places around the globe.  Starting domestically, he will soon be posting interviews with film commissioners across the US, and then expand to include Mexico, Canada and countries in northern and western Europe.  Check in at Niedan's blog here.

There are a few new spots open at Brooklyn's UnionDocs Collaborative for both residents and non-residents beginning in September.  The deadline to apply is next Sunday, August 1st.  The collaborative is a one- or two-year program for emerging media producers, offering both a rigorous platform for exploring contemporary approaches to documentary (with an emphasis on cross-media work), and a process for developing a group project using ever-burgeoning innovations in the field.  The program focuses on mentorships, structured exchange with visiting artists, regular group critique, and exposure through a toured exhibition and/or publication of an annual project.  Click here for more info and the application.

First Run Features has some new DVD releases for July, most notably, Kimberly Reed's Prodigal Sons and Judith Ehrlich and Rick Goldsmith's The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers.

Philadelphia-based filmmaker, Cheryl Dunye, has just arrived in Berlin to begin production on her new work, Mommy Is Coming.  Her most recent film, The Owls, played at the Berlinale this past year and has been touring the festival circuit in the States.  Billed as a raunchy adult comedy of errors, Mommy should placate the audience member who complained at Dunye's Q&A at Newfest in June that The Owls didn't have enough great lesbian sex scenes in it.  Dunye's response was, "Wait until you see my new film."  Produced by Jürgen Brüning Filmproduktion, principal photography begins here in early August.

From July 15 - 27, The Arsenal Institute for Film and Video Art is hosting a retrospective of Canadian filmmaker Bruce LaBruce's work simply called, LaBruce.  On opening night, the show consisted of five short pieces ranging from his early work in the 1980s with Candy Pauker to more recent selections, including a commissioned work from the ladies that make up the Toronto-based burlesque collective, The Scandelles, called Give Piece of Ass a Chance (still from film, pictured).  LaBruce was in attendance (the director and "reluctant pornographer" is currently living and working in Berlin), and the program was followed by a conversation moderated by Marc Siegel with LaBruce, Susanne Sachsse (star of 2009's The Bad Breast Video and 2004's The Raspberry Reich  which will play tomorrow night), and the hilarious and whip-smart, Berlin-based Miss Vaginal Davis (who also stars with Sachsse in Bad Breast).  Click here to see the full program.

Triple Canopy hosted a talk this past Wednesday at PROGRAM, the initiative for art and architecture collaborations.  The editors of Canopy, in partnership with the editors of 032c, XYM and Fillip, discussed how print culture is being changed by the manifold forms of online publications.  The discussion centered around the changing nature of publishing and its related artistic and business practices (design, layout, defining audience(s), circulation, archiving back issues, etc.).  032c is a Berlin-based magazine of contemporary culture published twice a year; XYM is a Norwegian online publisher of temporarily available PDF projects; and Fillip is a Canadian magazine of art, culture and ideas published three times a year.

This Wednesday the 28th at PROGRAM (Invalidenstrasse 115 in Mitte) at 7:30 p.m., artist Oraib Toukan will talk about The Equity Is in the Circle, a "corporate intervention" that purports to auction off nation states under 100-year-old leaseholds. For this project, Toukan has contacted international market advisors and consultants about the steps needed to auction off territory.  This has led to a branded initiative called Nayruz Holdings: The Middle East Auction.  The Jordanian-born Toukan is a multimedia artist currently residing in Berlin.  Her work looks fascinating to me.

Also on Wednesday from 9:00 - 11:00 p.m., I will be hosting what will be the first in a series of international film curations at the MMX Open Art Venue (Linienstrasse 142 / 143, also in Mitte) run by artists Rebecca Loyche, Jonathan Gröger, Daniel Wilson and Philip Eggersglüss.  At the end of last year, the four of them transformed the 1000 square meter space from a dilapidated squat into one of Berlin's most popular alternative art scenes with hundreds of people drifting through the space during opening and closing exhibitions.  Wednesday's program entitled, Quiet City--Helsinki, Finland, consists of two experimental pieces, the 13-minute Maa Jossa Voi Leikklä Elämää (Land for Playing Out Life) by Sanni Priha, the 31-minute Valon Lapset (The Illuminous Ones) by Jaakko Ruuska, and the 74-minute nonfiction piece, Kansakunnan Olohuone (The Living Room of the Nation) by Jukka Kärkkäinen.  Thank you to Ina Rossow of Deckert Distribution here in Berlin for generous permission to show Living Room.  Next month, I will be hosting an evening of selections from the Andrzej Wajda Master School of Film Directing in Warsaw, Poland and, another program of selections from the Balkans discovered at this year's Dokufest in Prizren, Kosovo where I will be jurying next week (more on this in a bit).

Lastly, I'd like to give a shout-out to new friends, Laurie and Barrett, for successfully launching the first-ever taco truck in Berlin, bringing yummy and authentic Mexican food to the city's jalapeño-starved denizens.  Look for Tacos Berlin coming to a location near you!

Missive from Berlin

The latest news from one of my favorite distribution companies (and filmmaking teams) and one of my favorite film festivals (and festival directors):

Carnivalesque Films has just announced their fall slate of releases, four of the strongest  documentaries I've seen in the past couple of years:  Donal Mosher and Michael Palmieri's October Country; Darius Marder's Loot (an extremely overlooked gem despite its top-prize win at LAFF '08; still from the film pictured); Bradley Beesley's Sweethearts of the Prison Rodeo; and Sam Wainwright Douglas' Citizen Architect: Samuel Mockbee and the Spirit of the Rural Studio.  Douglas' film will be the first to market, available the 24th of August following its broadcast on PBS on the 23rd.  The company and the film's director will be co-releasing the film.  (Be sure to add it to your Netflix queue.)  The film premiered at SXSW in March, and is currently traveling around the US on an extensive screening tour.

The kind and generous, Ben Fowlie, the founding director of the wonderful Camden International Film Festival (September 30 - October 3), writes to remind everyone who reads this blog (all five of you) that there is less than a month left to get your submissions to the programmers there for the sixth annual fest.  CIFF is fast becoming a domestic nonfiction festival of note--just ask AJ Schnack.  Both of us were a few of those privileged to be invited up to Maine last year, Schnack with his third feature doc, Convention, and I to jury the international competition and to help launch their new industry initiative for local filmmakers called Points North.  (Pictured, me and IFP's Danielle DiGiacomo in an intense powwow before our panel discussion at last year's fest, 'scuse my back).  Check the CIFF website for more details and information.

Currently, I am working from the lovely city of Berlin doing various film curations (more on this in a bit), developing some film and installation projects, and trying to learn some German.  The scene here is quite vibrant and I'm looking forward to diving in.  Look for more news in coming days.  Then, at the end of the month, I will be making my way to Prizren, Kosova for Dokufest (July 31 - August 7) to jury the international competition there.  My hope is to be able to return to Berlin after that, but like much in my life, as always, that's up in the air.  Tschüss!

DOXITA III

Film curator, Karen Cirillo, is bringing another great short documentary program to the IFC Center next month on July 19.  Doxita is her traveling festival of short nonfiction.  This program's theme is "Life Is a Progress," focusing on stories of people's survival and their various coping mechanisms.  It's a great collection, one you won't want to miss.  All of these films have won multiple prizes around the world:  Steel Homes by Eva Weber (UK, 10 minutes); one of the more sobering pieces of animation you'll see, Slaves, by Hannah Heilborn and David Aronowitsch (Sweden, 15 minutes); The First Kid to Learn English From Mexico by Peter Jordan (US, 20 minutes); and, 12 Notes Down by Andreas Koefed (Denmark, 30 minutes).  Click here for more info and to order tickets.

Matthew Porterfield's Nostalgic Realism on BOMBlog

Read it here.

Interview: Marlo Poras, Director THE MOSUO SISTERS; RUN, GRANNY, RUN; MAI'S AMERICA

By most accounts, filmmaker Marlo Poras had reached a pinnacle of success several years ago, albeit in the very circumscribed world of New York-based feature film editing.  She had moved to New York to pursue her true calling, despite discouragement from concerned parents since they felt that filmmaking was not a viable career choice.  She quickly shot up the ladder In a very short time, from someone doing "crap PA jobs," to working beside the top feature editors in Manhattan at the time.  These days, she is on her way to completing her third feature documentary called The Mosuo Sisters.  The project has received funding from Cinereach, The Jerome Foundation and The LEF Foundation, and was also recently named as one of the recipients of a 2010 Gucci Tribeca Documentary Fund grant. 

The Mosuo Sisters, which Poras is co-producing and co-directing with Yu Ying Wu Chou, is about two sisters from China's last remaining matriarchal society, the Mosuo, a very small ethnic minority of about 40,000 people.  Working in Beijing, the two young women are caught up in the worldwide economic downturn that has hit China very hard, and lose their jobs.  Jua Ma and La Tsuo head for home in a reverse exodus, just like millions of others who have come to the big cities to make their way and support families back home.  Jua Ma and La Tsuo's home is a remote village in the foothills of the Himalayas.  Having been exposed to the modern world, financial independence and the endless possibilities open to them, their views are irreparably changed in relation to their native traditions.  The filmmakers have been following the sisters for close to two years as one gives up her education to stay on the farm and help their ailing mother, while the other heads back to the city to pursue her dreams and to try her luck as an entertainer.  The story and cinematic scope of the project are a bit of a departure for Poras, director of Mai's America and Run, Granny, Run, both multiple award-winning films, the first broadcast as part of PBS' P.O.V. series in 2002, the second broadcasting on HBO in the fall of 2007.

Poras is an extremely likable, open and friendly person, a bit shy and quite modest considering her accomplishments.  And she is full of excitement and passion when talking about the craft of documentary filmmaking.  Born on a US army base in Kentucky during the Vietnam War, she graduated from Washington University in St. Louis with a degree in history.  Soon after moving to New York, she became an assistant editor to Thelma Schoonmaker and went on to assist on  several feature films. 

She and I talked a few weeks ago on a glorious spring day, sitting on a park bench in the Cobble Hill section of Brooklyn amidst a plethora of dogs chasing balls, kids chasing dogs, and contented picnickers sprinkled everywhere under the cherry blossoms.  With the relentless trill of a big ice cream truck parked right behind us, we talked about the perils of becoming successful (and boxed in) doing work that, ultimately, is not that meaningful, the trajectory of the career she always dreamed of having, and the joys and inspirations of mentoring young, precocious Brooklyn teens as they make their first films.

Still in Motion (SIM):  This new project is quite a departure from anything you've done in the past.  Even though, as in your other films, you're concentrating on a small-scale story, you're shooting in a culture and in a language not your own.

Marlo Poras (MP):  Yes, that's right; I speak remedial Mandarin, at best.

SIM:  Why this story?  How did it come across your radar?

MP:  I lived and worked in Vietnam for two years in the 90s, where I made a film about an exchange student from Hanoi who comes to the States to study.

SIM:  Mai's America, which is a really wonderful film.  I liked it even more the second time I watched it.  There's a lot of wonderful stuff going on there.  It's a really graceful film. 

MP:  That's so nice to hear, thank you!  During that experience, I was fascinated by the radical changes happening in Vietnam.  I thought I was going to be able to work that into Mai's story, but the film ended up becoming more about America than Vietnam, which was disappointing to me in certain ways.  When I lived in Vietnam, a friend who was working for an NGO in Hanoi helped me find work producing HIV/AIDS education videos for ethnic minority teenagers.  Working on the videos, I witnessed first-hand the complicated issues ethnic minorities face as the modern world seeps into their everyday lives.  The changes I saw happening in Vietnam were vast, but China has recently been going through a period of seismic change and I've been fascinated for years by how ethnic minorities are faring there.  After completing Run, Granny, Run, I was itching to return to Asia, China in particular, to explore making a film.  When I found out about the Mosuo, I was hooked, inspired by their matrilineal traditions, and by the fact that they think that the institution of marriage is an attack on the family.  Their traditions are so unique and go against the grain of most mainstream societies, including China's, including ours.  In a way, this film has been a return to some of the issues and themes I didn't get to explore in Mai's America.

SIM:  Did you train as a filmmaker?  Was this career intentional?

MP:  No, I didn't go to film school.  I wanted to study film in high school but there weren't any classes or programs available then.  Today, I look at these kids at Reel Works where I've been mentoring.  I'm jealous of all these incredible video programs for young people out there now! 

SIM:  The Tribeca Film Institute just implemented a major program all over New York City to get cameras into kids' hands, especially at the high school level.  They're getting to learn to express themselves and be heard in their own jargon, with their own distinct points of view.

MP:  That's great to hear.  Reel Works is exceptional because of the fantastic staff who provides a mentoring program using professionals in the field.  The program gives structure and feedback in a way that I think the kids learn so much from.

SIM:  The caliber of the mentors is pretty amazing, as well.  You've got the superstars of the documentary world going in there and dedicating their time and attention with such enthusiasm and devotion.  Lucky kids!

MP:  Rodney [Evans] is doing such an impressive job.  There was nothing even close when I was in high school.  But I was always fascinated by film and spent all my free time watching movies.  I wanted to pursue a career in film, but my parents talked me out of it.  "Not realistic."  "It's too competitive."  They didn't want that for me.  So I was a liberal arts student and studied history which is not really any more "realistic" in terms of making a living!  I'm actually very, very glad that I did study history.  I learned how to write and I learned how to research, how to listen, and those skills are invaluable.  I moved to New York after college because in my last year, I started thinking a lot more about film.  I had taken the one documentary class offered at the university which was tremendous and I had a wonderful teacher.  So I had a bit of an academic introduction, at least, to film that made me realize that it was definitely what I wanted to pursue.

After moving to New York, I had a bunch of crap PA jobs, chopping strawberries into ten pieces each for very high-maintenance commercial directors.  I started asking around about other possibilities and most people recommended that I learn a craft; I then could make a living at that craft while exploring ideas about my own films.  I kept being drawn to the edit room.  It might have been because that was the easiest transition from history and research and writing, story structure and things like that.  I was fascinated by editing.  People told me that if I wanted to do editing, it would be better for me to start in features, meaning it was easier to branch out from there to documentaries, to commercials, corporate work; it would give me more job options down the line.  I was more interested in documentary but I heeded the advice given to me.

Like most people starting out, I had a pretty pathetic resume and wondered how the hell I was going to get a job.  This was before the ease of the Internet and I, somehow, was able to find numbers and addresses of people and I would write to them or call them and offer to take them out for coffee.  I can't quite fathom how that was all possible without the Internet, but I did it!  I met mostly male editors in their 40s and 50s, all of whom hated directors and were very crotchety and tried to talk me out of it altogether.  What did they know, all those old, unhappy men?  But the one thing they did say that was useful was that I should visit The Brill Building and visit the different editing houses there, just walk around and meet people and give them my resume.  I was so nervous, so beside myself.  What did I have to offer?  I knew nothing, had no experience.  The night before I was planning on doing this, to go around knocking on doors, I didn't sleep at all.  I was a total wreck with my stack of pathetic resumes.  I get out at Times Square and I was, literally, shaking.  I was walking down the street and that block, for some reason, was totally empty.  No one was on the street.  I looked up and Christopher Reeve was walking towards me.  This was before his accident.  He saw me and looked at me and smiled at me.  And that smile coming from Christopher Reeve at that moment saved me.  It thought, if Superman can do it, so can I!  [laughing]  A highly cheesy moment, but I got my first internship that afternoon.

SIM: And you learned on the job.

MP:  Yes, and it was a great way to learn.  Interestingly, I kept getting jobs that other people who I thought were much more qualified weren't getting.

SIM:  And why do you think that was?

MP:  I was told more than once by employers that my competition were all these 21-year-old, NYU film school grads who thought they were directors already.  They came into the editing room with a lot of attitude, wanting to take direction from no one, least of all the director of the film.  I was a sieve, taking everything in, learning really quickly, having absolutely no ego about any of it.  It was such an amazing learning experience.  And I learned to edit film.  I prefer editing digitally, but I'm so glad that I had that exposure.

So I worked my way up and I finally got a job working under Thelma Schoonmaker, Martin Scorsese's editor, which was pretty tremendous.

SIM:  Yeah, I would say so!

MP:  Yeah.  It was within three or four years of starting.  I got exactly where I wanted to be; it was incredible.  I got into the editing union and everything.  But after a year, I decided that I wanted out of fiction film; it wasn't the right place for me--all of the money, all of the egos, the serious workaholic syndrome, as in "no life."  It really turned me off, the ways in which this very high end fiction film world operated.  It's your whole world; you live and you breathe it all the time.  It also involved one or two all-nighters every week, working six, seven days a week and it just made me ask myself if that was really what I wanted out of life.  As an apprentice and assistant editor, I only worked on one film that I really loved, Daytrippers [1996].  I thought, in a lifetime, maybe I'd work on four or five films that I really believed in.

SIM:  It's interesting that this happens to many people--one reaches a "pinnacle" of sorts in one's career and realizes that there needs to be more.  Now what? 

MP:  It's a type-A kind of attribute, I think.  You fixate on a goal and do all you can to get there, but in the process, you ignore the warning signs because you're all about the goal.  Once you achieve it, you realize it's not the be all, end all; you want more out of life and then end up pushing in a different direction.

SIM:  I don't know too many creative people that don't go through that on a regular basis.  It's part of the deal.  It's always a bit of a traumatic moment, no doubt, because you're looking into the void again; you feel like you're starting over from scratch.

MP:  You want all that groundwork to pay off and mean something in the end.

SIM:  In essence, it does, but never in the way in which you anticipate.

MP:  Leaving the feature film world led me to documentary, so it did pay off.  Luckily, the second editor that worked under Thelma was someone I became very close with and he saw something in me that was different from other people working there.  James Kwei made it his cause over that year to talk me out of continuing in fiction film.  He ended up leaving, as well.  Jimmy had worked for Scorsese for twenty years or something like that, work most people would die for.  He ended up becoming a veterinary assistant and he's so much happier.  To this day, I'm so grateful to him.  I appreciate and actually savor the work of talented feature film editors, but it wasn't the right place for me at the time.

So then I ran away to Vietnam, very confused, and thought I was getting out of filmmaking altogether.  As I said, I'd always been fascinated by Asia.  I was born on an army base during the Vietnam War and had a particular interest in that country.  I thought I would go for a couple of weeks and ended up staying.

SIM:  How did you meet Mai?

MP:  Well, it was while I was there that these digital cameras came out for the first time, cameras that could shoot something that produced broadcast-quality material.  So after about a year of trashing film and saying I was never going to work in the industry again, reading about the Sony VX1000 pulled me back in.  I was in such a unique position in Hanoi, being exposed to North Vietnamese stories that no one was hearing about in the States.  So I went and bought a camera.  Right around that time, one of my roommates was teaching a group of exchange students from North Vietnam, all of whose parents had fought in the war against America.  These kids had such a strange attitude towards the States.  They were really cocky because they'd won the war.  I, for one, had never really thought about that vantage point, despite having studied that time in history, thinking I knew every nuance of what went on.  They did win that war against this behemoth of a country and had intense national pride about that.  But they also had this stereotypical fascination with everything American--TV, Hollywood, all things Western.  I just felt it was such a novel launching point for a project.

It took me a whole year just to get access to film the students.  I chose four girls to follow over the summer in Vietnam and then I visited each of them when they got to the States.  Luckily, David Sutherland, a wonderful documentary filmmaker, became my advisor.  [Sutherland is also executive producing The Mosuo Sisters.]  I really didn't know what I was doing.  I was in over my head in terms of trying to figure out the storytelling aspects of all of it.  It was also, economically, not feasible.  It was overly ambitious to follow four characters.  He sat me down and gently asked me all of the right questions and really pushed me in honing down the focus of the film.  It was hard because all of the girls were living in such unique and unexpected places in America, even more unique than Mai's situation.  There was one girl who was placed with this very angry Iranian woman in Oregon who thought that Monica Lewinsky was a Jewish-Israeli spy.  Another girl was with one of the few Caucasian exchange families, but they lived on a Hopi Indian reservation.  She was really racist towards all of the Native Americans when she first got there.  Ethnic minorities are very looked down on in North Vietnam.  Very complicated stuff.  So it was actually very hard to narrow it down.  But Mai was the most comfortable in front of the camera, a natural. 

SIM:  How in the world do these people qualify to accept an exchange student?  In the film, there's a lot of discomfort that this girl is just not in the right place at all and it sounds like that was the case for most of these girls.  These families seem inadequately prepared or equipped to take in a foreign exchange student!  Were there any home visits at all?  There's such a distinct lack of cultural sensitivity that it just seems like a recipe for disaster and puts these students in a very vulnerable place.

MP:  I had a lot of problems with the agency that was placing these girls and I let them know it.  That could have been a whole separate film about this exchange program and the state representative and the city representative that placed Mai.  That whole backstory is like a Montel Williams show, really.  But it made me think a lot about what America is and how we define America.  None of the girls expected America to look like the communities in which they landed.

SIM:  We get a sanitized and simplistic version of what this country is, as does the rest of the world.  In your films, you have a talent for capturing these unexpected slices of life that are America, whether we want to acknowledge that or not.  You capture that in Run, Granny, Run, as well.

MP:  I do shy away from stereotypes but when you film people--well, you just never know what to expect.  It's always surprising.  The lived life I've filmed is never anything I could have come up with on my own.  It's a thrill when things expose themselves that way, all of the complexity and strangeness.  Once I started filming these girls, once I started filming Mai, I was totally hooked.

SIM:  Talk a bit about your relationship with her, your first documentary subject?  It was very much a collaboration since she gave you so much.

MP:  We did collaborate a lot and I would tell her what I was after.  We had very long conversations to try to figure out what she was thinking.  Sometimes things would be murky for her and when she could find a way to articulate things from her own unique perspective, it was very exciting.  She enjoyed the process.  She was very alone there and so she loved being seen by the camera.  Growing up, she was always a bit of a shining star.  She appreciated being seen in a place where she was kind of invisible.

SIM:  Your treatment of her sexuality, and that topic in the film in general, is treated with a great deal of nuance.  It's never something that's discussed really overtly.  Her friendship with Chris / Christy is so fascinating, and then he does this 180 turn that's very bittersweet, both for her and for the audience.  You're right; you could not have written that.

MP:  It did turn out to be such rich material and it was completely serendipitous.  The treatment of those identity issues was oblique because it was what it was.  Mai was interesting because I don't think she really ever played around with her sexuality.  She's pretty straight, although I think when she was in Mississippi, she felt so asexual because nobody was interested in her.  I was shocked when she shaved her head.  But in certain parts of Asia, that became a trend for young girls to do that, sort of a reaction against the typical hyper-feminization that's part of the culture.  I think she found it inspiring that people here in the States played with those defined roles.  In that way, meeting Christy was very liberating for her.  I think she also connected with him deeply because, as a transvestite in the rural South, he was another outsider.  It was clear that many people in Mississippi didn't think that Mai was fully human so she connected a lot with him about that.  It was as shocking to anyone as it was to me when he "straightened" out and returned to the church as a heterosexual man.

SIM:  I actually found that incredibly sad.  My heart sank a bit.  And there was a part of it that seemed contrived on his part, even though you realize it really is a genuine desire to fit in and go back to what's familiar and comfortable, I guess.

MP:  The rural South can be so vibrant and surprisingly diverse, but it can also be very oppressive.  The gay bar where he performed was hidden down a long, narrow country road.  Chris' life was very dangerous.  Growing up, he loved being a part of the church, being part of the community, and it was crushing for him to have to leave that behind when he came out.  He wanted to be "normal," to fit in again.  I think his family was pushing him a lot, as well.  He loved his family, was a total mama's boy.  He lived with his parents but had moved out while we were filming.  I think he was so happy to be back in the church, happy to be part of that community again.  But that only lasted for about eight months.  The last time I talked to him, he was living in New Orleans and he told me that he had found someone there to sponsor a sex change operation.  His story could have been a whole separate film. 

SIM:  For your first film, landing a P.O.V. slot was awesome--a promising start to your career as a documentary filmmaker.

MP:  It was amazing.  David Sutherland also helped me along so much.  It got funded by ITVS which was extraordinary, to have that kind of faith in me for my first film.  I'm still very grateful for that.  It got a national broadcast, won some awards.  More than anything, it was my own self-styled film school and I was happy enough with it as just that.  So for it to actually have legs and the kind of life that it had was extremely gratifying.

SIM:  So you could call yourself a filmmaker after that--when did that realization hit you since this was a new transition?

MP:  I think it hit me while I was making Mai's America.  I was going full throttle, living it and breathing it and spending twenty four hours a day doing it.  I put my life on hold for the film.  By the end of it, I knew I had to pursue a career as a documentary filmmaker.  It's what I had been wanting to do all along.  Having said that, there are moments when it does feel absurd, times when I completely lose confidence and feel like I don't know what I'm doing.  My lack of formal training catches up with me and I feel like a hack.  And yet, at other times, I feel very much like an increasingly experienced filmmaker.

SIM:  Going into your second film, what was your mindset?  Did it feel like starting from scratch?

MP:  Each film experience is so different.  The main part of Run, Granny, Run was shot over the course of four months.  I was on location with Doris and the campaign ninety percent of the time.  It was a very transporting experience.  I hadn't done that before.  When I would film Mai, I would visit her depending on what was happening in her life, usually for four days to two weeks at a time.

With Doris, I loved being completely subsumed in what was happening in a concentrated way.  It was a world I never thought I would have penetrated and it was very surreal.  She and her campaign workers were living hard, pursuing a dream they were so deeply passionate about.

SIM:  Did a close bond form between the two of you right away?

MP:  I adored her right away and she was incredibly warm with me, but it took a little while for her son, Jim, and her closest advisor, Dennis, to trust me.  A lot of people had approached her wanting to do a documentary piece on her.  They had dealt with a lot of well-intentioned but slightly flaky people who would talk a good game but rarely came through in any substantive way.  They were warm and welcoming, but I didn't necessarily get the access I wanted right away.  Whenever they'd have an argument or Doris would lose her temper, Dennis would put his hand up in front of the camera and ask me to stop filming.  Everyone around her was very protective.  They didn't know what my intentions were--for all they knew, I was planning to do some kind of Granny smackdown [laughing].

Doris was 94-years-old and had dealt with the media for a long time, so was often on autopilot.  I wanted to do something a little bit different than what she normally gave the media.  She was a really dynamic, incredible woman, but after dealing with the media for that long, it was just very hard for her not to talk in sound bytes, and I was media, even though I didn't think of myself that way.  I didn't know if I was going to be able to get under her skin in a different way.  There's a scene in the film where she was going for one of her first morning walks back in New Hampshire.  Dennis was going over issues with her while she was walking, training for a bigger walk.  She'd been on the road in a van for about a year so she wasn't in the best physical shape and her emphysema was kicking in that day.  She was exhausted and he was pushing her on the issues and she lost her temper and snapped.  But he didn't put his hand up in front of the camera that time.  He trusted me from that point on, trusted that it would be a balanced piece.

I told them that I wasn't interested in hagiography.  What Doris did was so extraordinary, walking across the country at ninety, becoming the Democratic nominee to the US Senate at ninety-four.  Her feats felt almost super-human.  But I knew she fought hard to achieve those things.  She fought the liabilities of old age, the doubts of nay-sayers.  She fought the weather; she fought death.  I wanted to show her for the human being that she was.  I wanted to show that she did have moments of suffering and things were difficult for her sometimes, she did lose her temper and she did get exhausted and overwhelmed.  And yet, in spite of all these things, she was still able to live harder and accomplish more in her 90s than most of us do in a lifetime.  I wanted the film to show her trajectory, how her flinty determination to get through those challenges she faced often led her to accomplish exceptional things.  To me, those human moments, those struggles, made her achievements more heroic, and also more accessible.  [Doris "Granny D" Haddock died at the age of 100 at her home in Dublin, New Hampshire in March of this year.  Poras wrote a wonderful tribute to her on AOLNews.com.  You can read it here.]

SIM:  Well, that access, especially to a subject like that, should be hard-won.  I think that's the real secret to a successful nonfiction filmmaker, really, because that's what you need, that trusted relationship and collaboration with your subjects to really tell a substantive story.  It's not something that can be faked.  You wait for those magical moments and hope they keep coming to make a whole film.

MP:  Oh yeah, those moments are like crack.  But being able to build them together and create something that's layered, that has highs and lows, that's what does justice to the person you're documenting.  I see a lot of documentary portraits that are quite one-dimensional.

SIM:  What we're talking about is actually making me think of your work with Illeen, your Reel Works mentee.  With your help, she was able to create a piece where you can see how that kind of stuff can resonate so strongly.  I know a bit about what her original intention or idea was but this was something quite raw and, as you say, layered.  And it does have those strung together moments where she's getting these genuine reactions.  Not to mention the fact that it's ultra-personal; she took a big risk in so many ways, with camera in hand. 

MP:  Yes, her film is raw and she was very brave in making it.  She is amazing.  She had had her heart broken by this guy and sometimes she would feel victimized and get angry about him, thought he was a real asshole and would swear at his face on the screen while we were editing.  But she was touched that he agreed to be filmed and she really didn't want him to come off negatively in the piece. She wanted him to be able to see the film and still want to be friends with her.  Impressive for a 17-year-old who'd had her heart broken!  She wasn't really interested in making a revenge piece.  Her film was much more complicated and more about what it means to be in love and to then go through hard times with somebody, to give and take, and how we hopefully learn about ourselves in the process.

SIM:  Would you ever think about doing something so personal like that?

MP:  When I was younger, I very much wanted to do a film on my grandmother who had survived Nazi-occupied Germany.  I was just out of college and experimenting with a high-8 camera.  She had a hard edge to her, a unique personality.  She'd been through hell and back and had some amazing stories. But whenever I would try to interview her, she would say [affecting a thick German accent]: "Oh, that was a very hard time, very difficult.  I don't have anything to say about it!  I don't want to talk about it!"  I kept at her for a while, but she always answered the same way.  So I scrapped the film idea because I didn't think I could get anything interesting out of her.  Now, I think I could do something dynamic with that kind of material, with her insistence on not talking about tough times, on burying the past, but back then, I had no clue how to work with it.  Otherwise, I doubt I'd ever do a personal film; I'm too interested in other people's stories.

SIM:  Let's circle back to this project you're working on now, The Mosuo Sisters.  Where do things stand now?  You're almost done shooting, correct?

MP:  We are.  We've been filming Jua Ma and her younger sister, La Tsuo, and their family for the past year and a half.  The process has been much like my other films in that I could not have anticipated the unlikely twists and turns the sisters' lives have taken while we were filming.  It's been far more telling than what I initially thought might happen.  When Yu Ying and I began filming the sisters, we had no idea that the bar they worked in would soon close leaving them out of work just as the global financial crisis was hitting China.  It's been a pivotal year in both their lives, with almost too many dramatic threads to include in the final cut.

Otherwise, we're continuing to fundraise for each stage which is always difficult.  I really admire those filmmakers who can raise money with relative ease.  That's one of my next goals is to figure out how the heck to do that.  Everybody's trying to figure that out, I suppose.  I started this project using my own funds from money I had made on the DVD sales for Run, Granny, Run.  That was my start-up money.  It seems like part of the investment you have to make.

SIM:  It also makes you a self-sustaining artist and that's a huge accomplishment, to use money you've earned from other projects to keep yourself going.  It's a good business model and should be very satisfying, actually.

MP:  I was very happy I was able to do that.  It's just that it's particularly hard with the kinds of stories I tell because I never know where they're going to go at the beginning.  I can't go to a broadcaster or a funder and say that these are the themes I'm interested in exploring and this is the person through which I'll explore them.  Every time I've made a film, it ended up going somewhere radically different than where I thought it would in the beginning.  To me, as a filmmaker, that's tremendously fulfilling, but I think for funders it's nerve-wracking.  It's a little bit easier for filmmakers who are doing more issue-related films or historical films, something with a definitive story arc from the beginning.

Also, the translations for what we've been shooting have taken a long time.  The sisters speak Mandarin when they're with Chinese people, but when they're with one another or their family, they speak Mosuo which is a language only about 40,000 people speak.  We've finally found the right person for the translation job who is meticulous and has that high level of skill to find the nuances in what they're saying.

SIM:  Your co-director, Yu Ying Wu Chou, is Taiwanese.  This is the first time you've had that kind of relationship, sharing that directorial role.  Why did the collaboration take that form?

MP:  The language had a lot to do with it.  She's a native Mandarin speaker and with this kind of film, relationships and gaining trust is fifty percent of the filmmaking.  So that's what she's doing; she is the relationship with the sisters, both when we're filming and when we're not.  She talks to them regularly.  It's all about trust and communication.  She's so trustworthy and has such a beautiful relationship with them and the family.  She works mainly as an editor.  It's her first time as a filmmaker.

SIM:  Another filmmaker would not have necessarily made her a co-director or would even consider that.  She would garner more of a producer role, perhaps.  That's why I asked that question.

MP:  Well, as I said, I really do feel like the relationship with the subjects is half of it for this kind of film since without that collaboration, you really don't have much of anything.  I don't know, is that a producer's role, is that a director's role?  All those roles feel fluid for me.  She was going out on a limb as much as I was, including financially since she put some of her own money into it in the beginning.  I felt like sharing the director credit was fair.  In terms of the actual nuts and bolts directing, that's my job.  But she has a very solid sense of character development and brings good ideas to the table in that regard.  She's getting better and better as we go along, having more vision in that way.  It's a constantly-evolving partnership.

SIM:  The footage I've had an opportunity to see is really, really beautiful.

MP:  It is.  I've always shot all my own stuff, more out of financial necessity than anything.  I just never had the money to work with a DP.  And, I must say, I do really enjoy shooting.  But my shooting is solid, not elegant.  I'm able run around after people and capture important, unexpected moments, but I never felt like my images had tremendous artistry.  When we met these women and spent some time with them and decided that they would be in the film, we immersed ourselves in the bar and their world.  I just felt like there was no way I could have done it justice cinematically all on my own.  It's such a visual story, much more so than anything I've done before.

We had met this cameraman, Al Go, who works in Beijing for BBC China.  I had seen his images and he was eager to expand his shooting horizons and work on something a bit different than the news pieces he normally does.  I had seen his work, which is often exquisite.  He shot and co-produced a BBC mini-series called "White Horse Village" and after seeing that, I thought I'd be lucky to have him on board.  He's only able to join us, however, when he has time so I'm still doing most of the shooting.  I've learned a tremendous amount from him about composition, depth of field and light.  His work has really upped my game, made my shooting skills stronger.  I can do justice to the sisters' world, capture the visual complexity that's necessary for that.

SIM:  I think, as a director, it also helps you to understand the context of certain things you otherwise would not be able to given that you don't speak the language; this is a culture radically different from your own.  What are your expectations for this film?

MP:  My hope is that it will have national and international broadcasts and a solid festival run.

SIM:  And theatrically?  It's a very cinematic piece.  I would love to see it on a big screen.  But, then again, I'm a huge proponent of cinematic nonfiction and think there should be more of it, as financially unrewarding as hell it may be.  I was just wondering if you perceive this piece differently in that way from your other work.

MP:  I think about that, I do.  It would be wonderful.  It's just that it's hard to imagine that.  It feels like the theatrical world is just continuing to fall apart.  I guess I've always felt a bit ambivalent about theatrical for this kind of film, an independent documentary, because it has such a small potential release, a handful of people in New York and Los Angeles would be interested in seeing this exhibited that way, maybe a couple of other cities.  The amount of work and the financial loss is significant to say the least, and I'm always exhausted at the end of a film, deeply, deeply exhausted.  But power to those people who decide to get their films in theaters, for people who fight hard to get their theatrical exhibition.  I don't mean to demean it at all; I'm actually in awe of someone accomplishing that.  It's interesting that so many films out of China have been making me feel that theatrical can be a possibility for this one.  Up the Yangtze [directed by Yung Chang] and Last Train Home [directed by Lixin Fan] are incredibly fantastic cinematic experiences. Those films are just powerhouses.  Damn them for raising the bar so high!  Really inspiring. 

SIM:  That challenge can be worth it, you never know.  A lot depends on opportunities and the right champions with the right resources to help you realize that.  Tempering expectations is probably the best tactic at the end of the day.  What other work have you seen in the recent past that's inspired you artistically, that might inform the way in which you do future work, especially with portraiture in film?

MP:  There are specific films that I've seen that have totally transformed the way I think about making documentary.  [Pernille Rose Grønkjaer's] The Monastery rocked my world.

SIM:  Mine, as well!  I love that film so much; it's extraordinary and so is its maker.  I did a wonderful interview with her in May of 2007.  [It's on this very blog right here!]  That is one of those films that totally transcends genre--I don't care what people want to call it, it's a magnificent piece of filmmaking.  I can't wait to see what she does next.  She dedicated almost a decade of her life to that film.  An extraordinary collaboration between director and subjects.

MP:  She's one of those creative behemoths, someone that has that agility to figure out the story in a situation like that and add that level of visual poetry to it in her shooting.  It took my breath away.  I was at IDFA watching it and I was sitting directly behind her.  I leaned forward and hugged her halfway through the film!  I was so overjoyed.  Here in the States, there's such a tendency towards socially conscious-driven, activist filmmaking, a lot of which I respect.  But it's not necessarily what drives me.  To see her exploring a story that's so deceptively simple, that was not issue-driven and yet speaks to the human condition in such a profound way was so, so inspiring. 

SIM:  When did you start working on The Mosuo Sisters?

MP:  Including pre-production, almost exactly two years ago.

SIM:  So you're looking at probably another year to finish?  Three years for a big project like this is quite efficient, actually.

MP:  Sometimes it seems like a hell of a long time, but three years does seem reasonable.

SIM:  Are there other stories or subjects out there that have grabbed your attention, that are occupying your mind?

MP:  The stories I want to tell are always character-driven so it comes together when I meet that person, or persons.  There are a couple of subjects I'm currently interested in, but we'll see where it goes.  It's like falling in love--things have to click a certain way, and I'm picky. 

The important thing is to keep exploring ideas.  But I do want to do something closer to home next time.  Traveling great distances, going back and forth is exhausting.  It's thrilling, as well, but we've made eight trips to China in two years.  Just the idea of doing something in New York is so titillating.  There are so many amazing stories here and just to be able to take the subway or a taxi to a shoot would be the lap of luxury!

Carnivalesque to Release OCTOBER COUNTRY on DVD--Queue It!

David Redmon and Ashley Sabin, filmmakers extraordinaire and co-directors of Carnivalesque Films, their distribution company, have added another title to their growing catalog of independent films.  In October of this year (appropriately enough), they will be releasing Donal Mosher and Michael Palmieri's multiple award-winning film, October Country. 

The reason I'm writing about this now is that, at this juncture, it's imperative that all you fans of the film out there add October Country to your Netflix queue to maximize overall interest for the film since they pre-order DVDs based on the amount of requests in a film's queue.  You can click here to add it. 

Also, the new DVD package will include some great added bonuses in the extras!  And in yet another bid at shameless self-promotion (and isn't that the whole reason Facebook exists--that's enough about me, what do you think about me?), I am honored to say that one of the two critical essays included in the package for sale is written by moi, the other stellar one written by the brilliant Dodie Bellamy.

Indocumentales: US/Mexico Interdependent Film Series

A traveling program of films opens tonight in NYC presented by what moves you?, Cinema Tropical and the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies at NYU.  The documentary film series is committed to enriching the discussion on a wide variety of issues pertaining to Mexican immigration to the US.  All films are in Spanish with English subtitles and all screenings are free and open to the public. 

Indocumentales launches tonight, Cinco de Mayo, at 7:00 p.m. at the King Juan Carlos I of Spain Center auditorium on the NYU campus with Al Otro Lado by Natalia Almada from 2005.  The film will be preceded by Subterraneans: Norteña Music in New York by Gaspar Orozco and Karina Escamilla.  Other films in the series are Los que se quedan/Those Who Remain by Juan Carlos Rulfo and Carlos Hagerman from 2008 which won the grand jury documentary prize at the Los Angeles Film Festival that year.  Also exhibiting: Mi vida dentro/My Life Inside by Lucía Gajá, and Farmingville by Carlos Sandoval and Catherine Tambini.  The screening series is at various locations throughout Manhattan and Brooklyn, so be sure to check the website for locations, dates and times.

Two Items of Note in NYC

I've just come to accept the fact that whenever I'm at a major film festival (or even a not-so-major one), I experience virulent sensory overload in just about every way.  This year at Hot Docs, I've been a participant in the first CFC Media Lab's "Leave the Walls at the Door" workshop they've done in collaboration with the festival, which was intense and wonderful.  More on this in a bit since it was just this afternoon--man, the world's wide open for some real substantive and innovative media, gaming, social change stuff--exciting. It's something I will have to process a bit before I write on it all, but honestly, I was quite honored to be in such an illustrious group of media producers and filmmakers.  Suffice to say, it was an energetic group that cooked up an afternoon's worth of puzzling and innovative ideas for interactivity in documentary projects.  The possibilities are endless.  I also attended lots of micro-meetings with Canadian broadcasters to get the low-down on co-pros and such, and tomorrow I have a full day of moderating a panel in the morning and then diving into an afternoon of pitching.  So I ain't just a blogger, got it?  However, to take a moment to blog in the midst of all this about some things of note happening in NYC is a bit of a respite.  And they are things I care about deeply.

Yance Ford, series producer of PBS' P.O.V. series sent word today that the top-notch series, our country's premiere broadcast showcase for independent documentaries (take a look at this season's offerings here), has launched its annual call for entries for the 2011 season.  Ford is always available to talk to filmmakers with questions about the application process and can be reached at [email protected].  All subjects, approaches, and lengths are welcome to submit; this includes short-form work.  Completion funding is also available; read the complete guidelines on the website here.  Every applicant must fill out the online submission form; the deadline is Wednesday, June 30.

Laura Poitras' The Oath opens this Friday, May 7, at the IFC Center.  On opening night, Karen Greenberg will moderate a discussion with Carol Rosenberg and Abdul Ghani.  Rosenberg will have just returned from Guantánamo where she is covering the Omar Khadar military commission.  Poitras, cinematographer, Kirsten Johnson, and co-producer and editor, Jonathan Oppenheim, will also be there in person.  Do not miss a rare opportunity to see this award-winning, incredibly artful and important film by one of the most talented directors working today--in any genre--on the big screen.  Read my recent interview with Kirsten Johnson here.  The Oath will also air on P.O.V. this season; check the series' site for its air date later this year.

THE LIVING ROOM OF THE NATION Plays Brooklyn Independent

Monday, May 3 at 7:00 p.m., the Brooklyn Independent Cinema Series run by filmmaker, Joe Pacheco, will present this award-winning Finnish film at Barbès in Park Slope.  This was the opening night film at the DocPoint festival in Helsinki last year, and had a very successful national theatrical run in its native land.  They are currently looking for international distribution.  Not only did I fall in love with the film, but also with its director/producer team, Jukka Kärkkäinen and Sami Jahnukainen (I know, those Finnish names are a killer), two young lads who have been known to do their Q&As in the nude, or to sing songs in response to difficult questions from the audience.  These are filmmakers to watch (and not just for their shenanigans).

An homage to Swedish filmmaker Roy Andersson's Songs from the Second Floor, Living Room is a poetic tribute to every day Finns, six of whom are shown in captivity in their living rooms.  Humorous, touching, irreverent and profound, the film is beautifully shot in wide-angle, static portraiture with the subjects (all men) acting out their stories in mini-passion plays.  These are human stories of life changes, loneliness and the irrevocable passage of time.  These men are in different phases of life, each of them looking for understanding and communion.  You can watch the trailer here.  The screening is free and you can drink booze while watching!

Sheffield Doc/Fest Funding Workshop with Hussain Currimbhoy

He finally made it through volcanic ash, just in time!  Programmer of the Sheffield Doc/Fest, Hussain Currimbhoy, will be here in New York this weekend at UnionDocs in Williamsburg to present a funding workshop, UK-style.  (Currimbhoy, pictured left, in longer-haired days, with filmmaker, Sandi DuBowski in Sheffield, UK.) 

The evening is co-hosted by Shooting People, the IFP and DCTV.  Currimbhoy will lead a workshop on the current state of documentary funding in the UK and provide insights into how docs are being financed and what filmmakers can expect when trying to get projects funded beyond US borders.  His talk will cover an overview of Doc/Fest's financing initiative, the MeetMarket, and touch on the various aspects of European funding sources.  He will also speak about his experiences programming international nonfiction, and what distribution possibilities are out there for films post-festival circuit. 

The workshop will be from 4:00 - 6:00 p.m., Sunday the 25th.  At 7:30 p.m., there will be a screening of Amiel Courtin-Wilson's film Bastardy (Australia, 2008), a big hit at last year's Doc/Fest, with a Q&A with the director following the screening.  Click here for more info.

6th Annual New York Polish Film Festival

Next month, there will be three major film festivals in Poland: the 7th Planete Doc Review Film Festival in Warsaw (May 7 - 16); the 35th Polish Film Festival in Gdynia (May 24 - 29); and the 50th Krakow Film Festival (May 31 - June 6).  Can't make it to Poland?  Well, there's the 6th Annual New York Polish Film Festival right here, April 30 - May 5, at the Anthology Film Archives presented by honorary patron Andrzej Wajda. 

The fest will exhibit recent films from Poland, such as All That I Love by Jacek Borcuch, Snow White and Russian Red by Xawery Zulawski, and Reverse by Borys Lankosz.  As well, there will be a tribute to director Janusz Morgenstern with a retrospective of his films.  There will also be screenings of shorts, documentaries and animated films, including the award-winning, Oscar-nominated, Rabbit à la Berlin by Bartek Konopka, Mother by Jakub Piatek, and Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired by Marina Zenovich, among many others.  You can visit the festival's website here for more information on the program and how to purchase tickets.

Little Bit of Brooklyn Comes to Toronto

A very exciting collaboration will take place next month at the HotDocs fest (April 29 - May 9) in Toronto when Brooklyn's own Rooftop Films partners with the festival for some outdoor screenings.  (Photo courtesy of blursurfing.com and Jonathan Castellino, Toronto.) 

There will be three open-air screenings in a new Rooftop Docs series which will exhibit on the top tier of the Citipark Cumberland Garage, Thursday, May 6 to Saturday, May 8.  Along with the screenings, there will be live music, locally brewed pilsner courtesy of Steamwhistle Breweries, and free popcorn courtesy of Whole Foods Market. 

On the 6th, Meghan Eckman's comedic doc, The Parking Lot Movie, will play and on the 7th, Jeff Malmberg's award-winning and critically-acclaimed Marwencol will play.  Rooftop will also present an international doc shorts program on the 8th, which includes films by James Blagden, Jake Chirico, Miro Remo (love Arsy-Versy), Sergio Oksman and Amy Grappell (love Quadrangle), among others.  Funding for Rooftop Docs is provided by the Government of Ontario.  For more info, visit the HotDocs site.

Stranger Than Fiction Exhibits Two Brand New Films

As usual, Thom Powers and Raphaela Neihausen, have a fabulous line-up for their '10 Stranger Than Fiction spring season which began last week with Steven Soderbergh's beautiful ode to Spalding Gray, And Everything Is Going Fine.  I was lucky to catch this at True/False in February since the STF screening sold out very quickly.  Here's what I wrote about the film on Hammer to Nail:

Soderbergh has pieced together a loving post-mortem video portrait of performer/writer/actor/philosopher Spalding Gray through live performance footage, several talks with him over the course of his career (with a wacky array of interviewers and venues), and family home movies. It is an exceedingly intimate look at a man who shared just about everything there is to share about the human experience through his intensely personal monologues performed live on a stage with very little in the way of accoutrements—a table, a chair, a microphone, and his notebook. Throughout the film, Soderbergh vigilantly showcases Gray’s rarest trait—to masterfully perform live, while simultaneously experiencing crippling inner turmoil and severe emotional distress, deriving “order from chaos,” and sharing with us all the bottomless absurdity and searing pain of life. I miss his voice so much.  (Pictured, Powers and Soderbergh at the IFC Center.) 

This week, STF will host new filmmaker, Chico Colvard.  His film, Family Affair, which world-premiered at Sundance in competition, will play this Wednesday, April 14.  Here's my review on HTN from when I saw it back in January.  (I'm planning on seeing it again tomorrow.):

On the surface, those of us who have never had to suffer severe abuse at the hands of a parent, be it verbal, physical or sexual, do not necessarily look (or act) any differently from those children who have. As childhood and teenage photos of what appear to be three happy, well adjusted, doted upon, beautiful girls floats across the screen in Chico Colvard’s feature documentary debut, Family Affair (world premiering in the Sundance US Documentary Competition), the insidious nature of how deep and well-hidden a family’s dark secrets can go becomes almost too much to bear.

For Colvard, the beginning of exposing his own family’s dark secrets started, unwittingly, innocently, as a little boy. In the kitchen of their home in Radcliff, Kentucky in 1978, he accidentally shot one of his sisters, tempted to pick up one of his father’s guns and, unfortunately, finding some bullets after watching his hero on television, The Rifleman. This explosion of violence shattered the family: father arrested and sent to prison after Pauline (Paula), believing she was going to die, tells their mother what is going on; all four children separated and scattered to different relatives’ homes; mother having to face the fact that the man physically and verbally abusing her was also having “affairs” with all three of their daughters. When the father (a black man raised in the segregated South, also an abused child, and on his own since 13 years of age) leaves prison after serving less than a year, the daughters run back to him, loyally, willingly, continuing to see him and have relations with him. The mother (a white German Jewish woman) then flees, abandoning the family entirely, profoundly betrayed by her own daughters. They never see her again. A story of Shakespearean proportions.

Fifteen years later, Colvard, who has not spoken to, or seen his father in that time, goes to Thanksgiving at one of his sister’s houses, only to confront, not the demon in the flesh he expected to find, but a pretty normal family holiday scene, one just like any other in millions of households across the country—laughter, teasing, hugs and kisses, family photos, a celebratory communal meal. Staggered by the “normalcy” of his sisters’ relationships with their father, he sets out to try and figure out, and reveal, the many complexities that reside within an abusive parent-child relationship.

Family Affair is a straightforward, but intense, investigation as to why, to this day, “There are certain things we don’t talk about,” despite childhoods that were irrevocably damaging, where “no help came for so long,” no rescue in sight. These girls—Angelika (Angie), Chiquita (Chici) and Pauline (Paula)—fully adapted themselves to the situation—so much so that they continued relations with their father even after they were grown and could, ostensibly, defend themselves. Angie, pregnant for the first time at 14 by her father, says she prayed for someone to “give her a way out” from the ages of five to thirteen. But she acknowledges unequivocally that after that point, she became “the girlfriend, the wife, the seductress.” And Chici tells an unsettled Colvard, “I enjoyed sex with my father.”

What this filmmaker does so simply and generously, and what makes the piece so emotionally resonant and rich, is he hands the reins of the story over to his sisters and they tell him, in astoundingly open ways, what it was like for them when they were girls. Throughout, they offer unapologetic, non-histrionic, sometimes humorous testimony, straightforward talk from the mouths and hearts of three exceedingly strong women, all of whom still suffer the ramifications of the intense abuse they experienced at the hands of their father. Touchingly, they also share and articulate the ways in which they worry about heredity when they talk about their fears and insecurities about raising their own children. It is riveting and painful and Colvard meets his own feelings of inadequacy with an unrelenting and deliberate journey into the most complex parts of who we are as parents, children, and siblings.

There are never pat answers or neat resolutions on offer, although he does go see his mother after eighteen years and walks away better understanding her side of things, as do we. She is a woman who, with the help of a new husband and her steadfast faith, has moved on, forgiven. But not forgotten. There is no tearful family reunion; there is no contrived circle of love and healing at the end of the film; there is no simplistic redressing of the morass of plain wrongness that has transpired between this parent and his female children. There is just moving on, living, dealing. Some might say there are massive amounts of denial on display. This viewer thought there was very little of that, actually.

Except for a haunting and beautiful score by composer Miriam Cutler, and a few artfully done recreations of certain memories the girls describe, the film is pared-down, gritty, never devolving into anything slick or overly produced. And except for one brief visit with Colvard to a doctor who specializes in treating victims of long-term incest (and I have a feeling this was something that was imposed in the interests of marking this as an “issue” film), the documenting of this story, the collaboration inherent in the telling of it, with everything in plain sight, is its strongest aspect, its healing force, a sort of gift that Colvard bestows on the three sisters who, in turn, share with him the utter hell that has been their lives, telling their story with dignity, grace, humor, refusing, at least on the outside, to live as life-long victims of a childhood probably very few of us would have survived intact.

What kind of public reception this film will have, how it might affect the way families and therapists talk about these things in the future, is really up for grabs. I took it in as an incredibly moving testimony to the power of human resilience and an example of the child-like faith that can enable us to move beyond the worst of what can happen to us when we’re vulnerable and small and at the mercy of the custodians that cross our paths. Or live under the same roof with us. 

Next week, another new film will have its New York début at STF, Doug Block's much-anticipated The Kids Grow Up.  In another intensely personal family story which follows up on his 51 Birch Street, Block parses the ways and means of his own parenthood this time out, his only child, Lucy, the focal point, a girl who has been "documented" by her dad most of her life.  The film last played in North Carolina at the Full Frame Film Festival and is moving on to the Sarasota fest next before coming to STF.  Block's film will also be part of this year's program at HotDocs in Toronto next month.  I'm very much looking forward to seeing this.

For the full spring season program and other treats, visit the Stranger Than Fiction website here.

The Glass House

Educational and non-theatrical DVDs of this moving and intimate documentary by Hamid Rahmanian are now available in a limited release to coincide with No-Rooz, the celebration of the Persian new year.

The Glass House tells the story of Omid-e-Mehr, a center for girls in the heart of Tehran.  The Omid-e-Mehr Foundation was founded in Iran in 2004, in London in 2006, and in the US in 2008, by the formidable Marjaneh Halati, an Iranian-born, London-based social psychologist and psychotherapist.  Under her guidance, the workers at the center are tasked with providing a holistic (and loving) approach to helping the young women that come there in realizing self-awareness, self-determination and self-sufficiency in modern Iranian society.  These young women come from abusive homes, are motherless, have drug addictions, or just do not have the supportive resources at hand for growing up as healthy and happy members of a still quite repressive society for women.

Director Rahmanian gains deep trust and intimate access to Halati and some of her charges.  The film was an official selection at the Sundance Film Festival in 2009, opened the IRI-Continental Film Festival in South Africa, won the Human Rights Award at Dokufest in Kosovo, and was also a selection of the IDFA last year.  There are a series of community screenings set for this year that various individuals are hosting around the world.  The newly-released DVD includes scenes not included in the final cut of the film, an extended interview with Halati, and a short film called Saman.  Visit the film's website to learn more about the film and its makers, and to order the DVD.

Call for Entries for the 5th International Documentary Film Festival of Mexico City

DOCSDF 2010, the 5th iteration of this doc fest in Mexico City has announced its call for entries.  The festival takes place October 21 - 31, 2010.  There are many categories in which to enter your project(s):  for best long feature, there are the international, Ibero-American and Mexican competitions; in the short doc film section, there are competitions for international, Ibero-American and Mexican; and in the best TV doc category, there are competitions for best international and best Mexican selections.

An online entry form must be filled out here, and then you send your entry to Mexico--more details on the web site.  The deadline for all international categories is April 30th (soon!) and the deadline for all Mexican categories, July 15th.  Suerte!

Spring! Sex! Cartoons!

Now that a hint of spring is in the air, it's a great time for the Woodstock Film Festival and the IFC Center to present The Battle of the Sexes, animation-style, on Monday, April 12 at 9:00 p.m.  (Still from Bill Plympton's How To Make Love to a Woman.) 

The screening will be followed by a Q&A session with some of the animators and the programmers.  Woodstock Film Festival's animation programmers, Bill Plympton and Signe Baumane, square off, each showing a selection of the funniest, sexiest animated shorts they could find in a 5-round match to discern which gender makes the hottest cartoons.  The audience gets to decide the winner. 

The five selections from the ladies will be:  The Teat Beat of Sex by Signe Baumane, Vessel Wrestling by Lisa Yu, Time for Carla by Saray Dominguez, Carnival of Animals by Michaela Pavlatova, and Girls Night Out by Joanna Quinn.  Representing the gents' side of the matter:  Chirpy by John Goras (friends who have seen this say it's quite remarkable and could only be possible in the world of animation--let's hope), Roof Sex by PES, The Making of Gladiator by Duncan Beedie, Cosmic Honeymoon by Ondrej Rudavsky and, the above-mentioned How To Make Love to a Woman by Plympton. 

Interview: Director and Cinematographer, Kirsten Johnson

Kirsten Johnson has traversed the globe as a film director, and as one of the most acclaimed and sought-after cinematographers working in nonfiction filmmaking today.  She just shared the 2010 Sundance Documentary Competition Cinematography Award with Laura Poitras for The Oath, and shot the 2008 Tribeca Film Festival Best Documentary winner, Pray the Devil Back to Hell, directed by Gini Reticker and produced by Abigail Disney, two women she is currently, once again, collaborating with for an extended project in Congo.  She also shot Ted Braun's Darfur Now (2007), and has collaborated with directors such as Raoul Peck, Barbara Kopple, Michael Moore and Kirby Dick.  A chapter on her work as a cinematographer is featured in Megan Cunningham's The Art of the Documentary: Ten Conversations with Leading Directors, Cinematographers, Editors and Producers.  She has also directed the cinematography on films such as Throw Down Your Heart, Lioness, Motherland, Election Day, This Film Is Not Yet Rated, Farenheit 9/11, Derrida, The Two Towns of Jasper, My Generation, and many others.

Her feature script, My Habibi, was selected for the 2006 Sundance Writers' and Directors' Labs and is the recipient of an Annenberg Grant.  Her film, Deadline, co-directed with Katy Chevigny, premiered at Sundance in 2004, had its national broadcast on the NBC television network, and received the Thurgood Marshall Award. 

As is the case with most people I talk with who have been devoted to making independent films for a long time, Johnson's career trajectory was far from a traditional one.  The beginning of her film career was spent living in Dakar, Senegal, and then seven years were spent in Paris, France, where she attended La Fémis, the French national film school, receiving a degree from the Cinematography Department.  Her work has taken her to close to fifty countries, and she is fluent in French, Portuguese and Wolof.

Just a week before departing for Colombia to shoot part of Reticker's long-form new project, Johnson and I spent an afternoon chatting together at a café near her home in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn.  Here's our conversation:

 

Still in Motion (SIM):  So you’re off soon on another adventure and working again with Gini Reticker and Abigail Disney.  I’m assuming they want to work with you on every single thing they do for the rest of their lives, or something like that?

Kirsten Johnson (KJ):  Well, Gini and I have a collaboration that dates all the way back to Asylum [shot in Ghana, 2001, nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Short], a film we did with [director] Sandy McLeod.  That was the first time we had worked together.  Gini had strong story ideas but she wasn’t confident about her visual ideas at that time.  Now, of course, she’s a very visual director.  It was one of those things where we got on that shoot and it just was kind of remarkable how we were all seeing and wanting to shoot the same things.  We call it the “stop the car” shoot where all three of us, simultaneously, would shout, “Stop the car!  There’s something we want to film!”  I think that that collaboration was one of those things where we found a way to talk about ideas together that has continued throughout the years.  We’ve done two Wide Angle shoots together, one in Rwanda and one in Morocco, and then Pray the Devil Back to Hell.  When Abby came on board, we all realized, too, that we could play Speed Scrabble together [laughs].

Right now, they’re doing this very ambitious thing, a four-hour series, done in co-production with WNET.  But it’s a Fork Films production, which is Abby and Gini’s company.  There will be a broadcast of the whole thing, accompanied by a broadcast of Pray the Devil as a part of the series.

SIM:  I hope you’ll take this next question in the right spirit because some people we know and love sort of balk at this subject matter, but you’re a white woman, or a group of white women, and you tend to shoot in locales where, as a female and as a white person, and one with a camera, you distinctly don’t blend in.  You’ve been doing this for decades now, so I’m assuming you’ve come up with ways to negotiate that.  Both you and Gini, I know for sure, are incredibly open people and it wouldn’t appear as if it’s that difficult for people to trust and open themselves to you.  But do you encounter suspicion or mistrust, wariness?  And when you do, how do you counteract that?

KJ:  I think that’s a great question and it’s an important one.  For anyone who knows me, they know that thinking about race has been a part of my life, actually, since my childhood.  I grew up going to a Seventh Day Adventist school that was incredibly racially diverse but there was a lot of 70s confusion about race and a lot of racism.  I really picked up on that as a kid and I was very concerned and very confused and wanted to understand it.  So I would say that I’ve been thinking about race since the early 70s.

I always think “whiteness” matters, being an American matters and it’s really important to understand that you represent something to other people and that those affiliations have an impact when you go somewhere.  The question is always, how can you be aware of that and yet deal with people where they are? I was just talking about this with the sound person we’re with on this trip, Wellington Bowler; he’s African American.  He’s one of my steady collaborative partners.  I also work a lot with Judy Karp, who is a tiny white woman--as opposed to me, a giant white woman.  I think all of us are really aware of what our presences mean in a certain place.  What does it mean to have a man in a maternity ward, etc.?  I think all of these factors go into my presence.

SIM:  Is race thought of in the same way in those places?

KJ:  It’s always different wherever you go.  Wellington, sometimes, will be seen as a white person because he’s American.

SIM:  Wow, that’s interesting, and kind of weird.

KJ:  Right?  Or we will be seen as urban people in rural places.  There’s no question:  I’m 6’2”; I am white; I am someone, in these situations, who can be very communicative, comfortable.  I try and engage with a lot of humor.  I have a presence; it’s a big presence in certain ways.  There’s no missing me in these contexts.  But it’s also how you behave, what level on which you give people the respect they deserve.  One of the things I found early in my life through traveling in African countries is, because of this history of colonialism, as a white person you have unexpected privileges, and whether or not you use those privileges, how you use them would be the better thing to say, dictates how things go.  Rather than being shut out, you’re actually given access to things that are almost inappropriate for you to be given access to.  I’m constantly reminded of the kind of privilege you experience as a white person.  It comes back to you, how meaningful that is.  I clearly remember being in Mali and there was a group of people gathered in the central square of this village, all sitting under a tree waiting to meet with us.  They had brought out chairs for us and there were a lot of older men and women sitting on the ground.  I just gestured to them and gave up my chair.  An older man took the chair and I sat on the ground.  It wasn’t what they expected me to do at all.  Who knows really how appropriate it was?  I saw a hierarchy I respected and that was the hierarchy of age.

Being attentive to those cues is what makes it possible for any documentary filmmaker, no matter what their skin color or what country they’re working in, to gauge things.  To gain a little respect from the people that are working or living where you’re shooting is really important.  But you have to earn the respect they, in turn, give you by allowing you to be there, a white person in a brown world.  There’s a lot of bad history under the bridge.

SIM:  Current things being done by filmmakers, however, in the guise of being “sensitive,” kind of concern me sometimes. It’s tricky.  People don’t realize all the nuance involved, particularly filming people’s stories.  The respect definitely comes from the person behind the camera, the person telling the story.  It’s an innate quality, perhaps—in the true sense of that word, they just know how to do it.  

KJ:  There is an innate thing going on.  Sometimes, you’re in a sophisticated city, like Kampala, where everybody’s making music videos, for example.  Or you’re in a village where they’ve never seen a camera before.  That’s one thing people might forget: how technologically fluent the world is now.  Cell phones, video cameras, all these things exist in the developing world.  Respect for other human beings is just something you keep learning your whole lifetime.

Being the cameraperson really does put you in particular quandaries where your idea of what’s respectful is often challenged.  It’s not so much the apparatus, the camera, that is perceived to be this intermediary between me and the subject; that quickly falls away. For me, it’s always, “Who’s holding the camera?  How do they move?”  I feel like I’ve done the same kind of work with a ridiculously huge camera and a teeny, tiny one I can hold in the palm of my hand.  But you often find yourself in these moments of total ethical confusion. 

Gini and I were shooting in Rwanda on a project that was to talk about a lack of infrastructure in the country.  We were driving and we saw a group of people carrying a screaming woman on a litter.  We could see them and hear them from down the hill.  Gini quickly realizes that this scene completely conveys our theme and decides also that we are going to help them. There was a silence and I said, "Are we going to film them, too?"  [laughing]  It was like this little moment.  Obviously, if we had stopped the car next to them and said, “May we film you?,” they would have put the litter down, the woman would have been in pain.  We would have had to put her in the car immediately.  So we decided that we would pass them, go up the hill.  I was going to get out, be with the camera, and film them walking up the hill towards us.  I know I’m not there as an aid worker; I’m not there as a doctor.  I’m there as a filmmaker.  But this thing of having to ask people’s permission—they’re in an urgent situation, etc.  This stuff is just going through your head as you’re standing at the top of the hill while people are walking up to you.  The woman was in labor and had been for seven hours.  We put her in the car and it was another hour and a half to the clinic.  She ended up naming the baby after our driver!  But there was that moment that wasn’t quite right.  But I got the shot and that wouldn’t have happened if we hadn’t done that.  That dimension is constantly with you.  Those are split-second decisions.  As a cameraperson, I feel that you are certainly a collaborator with the director.  But, you are also responsible for maintaining your own ethical boundaries.

SIM:  It does seem like you’re working with filmmakers, for the most part, that have strong ethical boundaries, as well.  But there can easily be a sense of confusion when your crew is in the thick of something and you just roll.

KJ:  It can be confusing.  There’s always this moment of, “This world makes no sense!” when I’m filming beside workers that make a dollar a day hauling huge sacks of rice with a camera that costs more than they make in several years.

SIM:  You trained at La Fémis, the French national film school in Paris.  Why did you decide to take yourself there?  What were you going to get there?

KJ:  I had kind of a peculiar career trajectory.  It wasn’t about going to France.  I went to West Africa and that’s where I started, in Senegal.  I was really interested in African filmmakers.  It was purely the discovery of filmmaking and I thought, I might want to write about film or be a critic.  I really didn’t know.

SIM:  What was it about the filmmaking tradition there that was so enticing for you?

KJ:  I think it was the pace of it and the world that was being described in it.  I had seen some of Ousmane Sèmbene’s films, a couple of Cissé's films.  I saw that there was just a whole other thing going on. I was really curious about it, probably stemming from my focus on race.  I had this elaborate plan my senior year of college [Brown University, Providence, RI].  There was a possibility of getting something called a Watson Fellowship that would grant someone $20,000 for the year and you could go anywhere in the world and do anything you wanted.  I wanted to go to West Africa and be on set with filmmakers there—and to Brazil and to Paris and to London.  And think about blackness in all these different places.  I made it to the finals but didn’t get it.  I didn’t have any back-up plan.  At all.  I sent some letters to various people, bought a one-way ticket, and went and knocked on Sèmbene’s door.

SIM:  Right out of college?

KJ:  Yeah.  I got there and I lived there and just loved it.  I got to work on a film and discovered I really liked production.  I worked as an intern on a film directed by Clarence Delgado based on a Sèmbene novel, Niiwam.  He was Sèmbene’s assistant director.  There was this whole crew of Senegalese filmmakers from a very particular era.  Despite the sometimes crazy difficulties of shooting there, I loved being on set.  I had this Senegalese boyfriend who was a photographer.  I was realizing that I really needed to learn something about how filmmaking worked.  He asked me why I didn’t go to the film school in France—it was free.  So that was how I ended up there.  But in talking to people, I was told that there was no way they were going to let me into the directing department, not being French.  No American had been accepted into that program.  I was told to try for a technical department and by default, I went for camera because I didn’t know how to do anything, but I’d taken some photographs before and that’s how I got into cinematography and fell in love with the camera.

I can give a lot of credit to the French and the way in which they train people for the way I work.  The films I saw during my time there and some of the people we got to work with were extraordinary—people like Raoul Coutard and Michel Fano, who’s an unbelievable sound guru who taught everybody how to do documentary sound.  Sound, in many ways, is the missing piece in so many people’s documentary filmmaking.  The level of sophistication and intent was displayed in some of the films I saw and what we strove for in our own work.  A strong contextual base is really, I think, where I come from and that has a lot to do with sound.  That’s why I work with people like Judy and Wellington.  When I first started shooting, I didn’t hear at all; I was so concerned with composition.  Little by little, I’ve become more and more quiet; I listen more and I realize how much more of the story is in the ear than through the eye.  That’s been an evolution for me.

Initially, my instincts certainly weren’t bad.  Especially in relation to people, they were pretty decent.  But for a long time, I was moving too fast.  I wasn’t thinking about how to recognize a scene in the middle of a moment.  All those things I’ve learned through the back and forth of working and watching other people’s films, and those films that are made with the footage I shoot.  It’s surprising sometimes [laughs].

Right now, I’m working with this German-Swiss director named Mirjam von Arx. She and I are working on a film about the father/daughter Purity Ball in Colorado Springs.  The ball is an event staged to celebrate the father's role in the daughter's commitment to sexual abstinence and virginity until marriage.  It’s in lieu of a prom since most of these kids are home-schooled.  We’re shooting in one family’s home for one year, from ball to ball.  Mirjam is coming from a European sensibility; you hold a shot a really long time and look.  I was trained in France; I have that sensibility, and yet it’s still a whole other level.  I would shoot for about three minutes and start to move away and she'd lean over and say, “No, no, stay.”  And it actually felt really wonderful to have permission to do that. 

I felt that way working on Laura's film, too [The Oath].  She's a director that says, “Yes, we have the time.  Yes, take the time.”  Knowing that that kind of care and attention was going to be put into the film was exhilarating. There’s a lot of expediency we’re dealing with in camerawork a lot of the time.  If you do end up working on things that are going to be made into television programs, it’s about getting the coverage and you may only have one day in a place with a subject.  [Poitras and Johnson accepting their cinematography award, Sundance Film Festival, 2010.]

SIM:  This is distinctly not in the American tradition of how films get edited and pieced together.  If the time was taken on the shoot, we can’t really ever tell since we’re given such a rapid series of cuts to take in at any given moment.  We aren’t usually given this luxurious sense of spending long, extended moments with a subject or character.  Scenes clip along so rapidly.

KJ:  There are enough moments where there is action—and by action, I might mean just emotional action happening between people. You can see it all in a wide shot and have a chance to sit and look at what’s going on.  A lot of times, you’re in a space that’s so small and you’ve got one character on one side of the room and one on the other.  The camera operator has to make the choice.  If we’re going to see two people in this shot, I have to move, I have to change positions when I’m cutting from one person to the next.  Thank goodness we’ve got the continuous sound to make us feel like it’s all cohesive.  But you’re still making these choices.  The mind space that I’m in is going to decide when I choose to move and on whom to put my focus.  I try to develop those things with the director in conversations where we’re discussing what we want.  What do we really care about seeing?  

SIM:  Was that the first time you worked together with Laura?

KJ:  Yes.

SIM:  She usually has done all the shooting on her films.  What was different about this project, about this situation, where she decided to bring on a DP? Making this film was difficult on many levels.

KJ:  Almost in every way.

SIM:  In My Country, My Country, her naivéte and inexperience shooting in a place like Iraq stood her in good stead, one might say.  Meaning, I don’t think she really fully realized what she was stepping into and needed to just go by herself to figure it out.  This was before she met Dr. Riyadh, this was when she was preparing to embark on that trip not really knowing what story she’d find there.  

The way The Oath is put together, working closely with you and Jonathan [Oppenheim, co-producer and editor], the level of craft is so deliberate and fine, with uncompromising intention, as in her other work.  We move moment by moment through this film and we see and hear exactly what’s intended for us to see and hear.  But we’re never told how to feel.  The collaboration involved really speaks to that, I think.  We see the outside world of the city of Yemen; we’re out in the streets.  And we’re in incredibly intimate spaces, as well.  When you first discussed this project with her, what were her concerns, especially as they pertained to shooting Abu Jandal, Guantánamo, and the possibility, at least at the beginning, of getting footage of Salim Hamdan, Jandal’s brother-in-law?

KJ:  I actually saw the film for the very first time at its premiere at Sundance in January.  I could not be more honored that I was a part of making this film.  I think it’s extraordinary.  I think that Laura and Jonathan did a mighty work in the edit room.  I will say that I think that Laura had the vision in the beginning.  From the moment she met Abu Jandal, I think she understood what a complex person he was.  She knew she would have to calibrate the film with that kind of razor-sharp attention and elegance.  She also knew she needed these counterpoints.  Her initial impetus for making this film was to do a story about a detainee returning from Guantánamo.  Her interest in Guantánamo was there; it’s a place she feels very strongly about politically.  She wanted to represent it in a way that translated the energy of the place.  [Pictured, Abu Jandal driving his taxi in The Oath.]

We did everything we were supposed to do in relation to the military’s restrictions. We asked, every day, if we could film the prison but were never given permission.  We kept asking and kept asking.  We were allowed access, as most of the journalists are, to very specific things.  And yet, we were also given access to all the public places of the base.  The places that you can go, you go with a military escort.  The prison, itself, is off in another place.  I just filmed everything I was allowed to film and I filmed it with the energy borne by sitting in the courtroom everyday.  That’s what’s so extraordinary about Laura as a director and producer.  She couldn’t be in Guantánamo because she was filming in Yemen.  She said to me and Jonathan that she wanted us in the courtroom as much as we could be there [during the trial of Salim Hamdan].  Now, mind you, we couldn’t film in the courtroom.  It’s an eight-hour day, time she’s paying for us to be there.  And listen.  And take in the story.  We were there a total of five weeks.

SIM:  That’s really incredible.  I didn’t know that.

KJ:  Yes, amazing.  So, basically, when I was shooting the exchanges between the journalists and the lawyers, I knew, from being in the courtroom that day, what the key moments were.

SIM:  You had profound contextualization, in other words.

KJ:  Yes, and very few people would feel confident enough, in both their collaborators and the subject matter, to say the important part of your shooting is for you to sit in a courtroom and listen.  That speaks volumes about Laura.  It was absolutely engrossing to be a part of that event, the first military commission trial of its type.

SIM: Did you experience a good amount of frustration that you couldn’t film?

KJ:  Not being able to shoot in the courtroom?  It killed me!  I feel like I have this personal vision of Hamdan.  I was sitting very close to him watching his emotional reactions to all kinds of things.  He would say these incredibly cinematic things.  At one point, he was describing becoming slightly delusional after being in solitary confinement for so long and he said that he felt like he had eyes all over his body because he was constantly being watched by the guards.  What I would have given to have him say that on film, you know?

What’s so interesting, and I think is often true with documentaries, is that your constraints are part of the story.  The more you have to find a way to embody them filmically, the better off you are.  It’s a great thing in the case of The Oath that you don’t ever see Hamdan except in that footage at the very beginning.

SIM:  It is very powerful.  You’ve just articulated what we can do creatively with nonfiction storytelling.  I did not know about the situation you just described when I watched that film and I’ve seen it twice now.  But in thinking about those scenes with the journalists and the lawyers doing their post-mortem sessions, there was something ineffable and palpable in the way in which those interactions were filmed and interpreted.  You can feel the import of it from all sides, this vital line of communication.  There’s almost a secret language being spoken but, as a viewer, you really get a very nuanced understanding of what’s happening—it’s subtle, instinctual, anchoring.  As opposed to the scenes where Jandal is holding forth and talking incessantly, rapidly, about so much.  In juxtaposition to the post-courtroom footage, it’s quite disorienting, the wall of sound coming from this man who is providing a boatload of exposition.  I always felt so off-center and that’s one of the things I love about this film.

KJ:  I’m so thrilled that you picked up on that secret language going on between the lawyers and the journalists.  I felt like that was something on which I had to quickly get up to speed.  There is this roomful of amazing investigative journalists, people like Carol Rosenberg and William Glaberson, who’ve been following Guantánamo from the beginning.  They understand all the legal intricacies.  Then you’re there, listening to all of these lawyers, many working pro bono, some of the very top attorneys in the country and all of these military experts.  You’re really dealing with three or four languages that are unfamiliar to you.  It was stimulating and absolutely gripping.  I would come down to the debriefing room after a day in the courtroom, anxious to hear about how a lawyer would address what had happened.

I mean there were moments when you, literally, could see the judge trying to decide, “Do I say this court is invalid?”  It was the first trial of these military commissions [on Guantánamo] and there was no precedent for any of it. There were at least four times where the judge was faced with an ethical decision, more about his role than anything else.  “Am I the judge that goes down in history as the person who recognizes this as something legitimate, or do I take a stand and say it’s not?”  Those were stunning moments.

The journalists would ask questions of the prosecution and watch the prosecutor set his jaw and insist that it was all working fine.  To paraphrase one of the military prosecutors, he said something like, “We want the public to relate to these trials like they do to the Space Shuttle.  Shuttles are constantly going up into space and people know that they are, but they aren't really paying attention."  That was his hope--that these kinds of trials should become so commonplace.  And yes, I would be shooting in my head and visualizing all these powerful shots of these people making these moment-by-moment decisions.  But it’s nice to know that is all getting through on some level.  You do put in all that time of understanding the context of what’s going on—it’s really important, understanding the deeper narrative.  And then you do your best on the fly to tap into that.  That’s what’s so amazing about filming real things; it’s all there, all the complexity, the power balances.  Can you let the viewer see them?

SIM:  What falls flat so many times about capturing vérité?  A lot of times it really has very little dimension.  The fanciest cutting and other production values are not going to hide the fact that one has captured less than compelling footage.

KJ:  It’s an incredibly challenging job to be tuned into what matters and to find the way to film it.  It’s exhausting.  Often, you’re in for eight, ten, twelve hours in a day.  You can get in a mode of shooting too much, obviously.  But staying on point and staying focused on what really matters in the story takes a huge amount of concentration, a physical flexibility in space.  It’s a thing that a director gives you.  They give you what you need.  I need twelve bottles of water a day [laughs].  They give you what you need in order to stay in that zone, able to film.  If a director gives you the support and allows you to stay in the zone, then sometimes, you can actually start watching the film while it’s being made.  It doesn’t happen very often but when it does, it’s extraordinary.

SIM:  And when a director is, distinctly, not giving you what you need, or any of the other crew for that matter?  You also take on the role of director and have a whole body of work you’ve directed.  How does that inform the way you handle yourself on set?

KJ:  That’s something I bring to a shoot, my experience as a director, my thinking as a director.  I do think about what happens in the editing room.  I’m a really active partner in the whole collaboration.  I almost never would say to a director, in the moment, that things aren’t okay, that they aren’t working.  There’s too much going on.  But every night, I’ll come back with my input, letting him or her know that we needed more support in this regard; something was great in the way it was executed; we’re not giving this character enough time, etc.  Sometimes, I really will push directors in terms of blind spots I feel they have.  We all have them.  I expect to be pushed on mine.  Once in a while, I will encounter someone who’s not interested in the elephant in the room and for whatever reasons, it’s scary territory for them and they start putting up all these subconscious obstacles to actually getting at it.  I’m definitely not a silent partner at the end of the day.  I will do what I can do in the course of a filming day and won’t call into question any of the director’s choices.  But at night, over dinner, I will talk about missed opportunities and want to know why.  A lot of directors don’t really realize what you might be going through unless you speak up.  People forget about the physicality of holding the camera, shooting.  It’s the obligation of the crew to tell the director what they need and how and when they need it.

I like to talk about themes with the director so I can watch more for those elements that speak to those themes.  That way when we’re filming something relatively interesting but I see something going on that really is the embodiment of what we’re trying to capture, I can just say it and be able to turn and start shooting what should be shot.  They get what I’m doing because we’ve discussed it.  That’s the art of catching things on the fly.  There should be a good amount of preparation so you can do that.  You have to know what you’re looking for and you have to have the freedom to get it.  Not communicating well about these things can be disastrous, both for the film and the relationship.  Hopefully, it becomes an unspoken thing after a while.  That’s how you become really alive and light on your feet.

SIM:  With your background, your training and these locales that keep drawing you—can you talk about light and texture in the way you see things?  There’s a luminous quality to your work that’s very particular.  In those places you shoot, in Africa, for instance, there’s a particular light that doesn’t exist anywhere else.  Is that part of what draws you subconsciously, perhaps?  This is more a curious question more than anything since I’m obsessed with light and reflection and how those things can cause emotional resonance just on their own, doesn’t matter really what the image is.  Is that something you think about?

KJ:  Yes, it’s something I’m absolutely interested in.  It’s hard to tease it out in some ways.  Senegal was the place I went as a young person.  It was the first place I was truly free, in many different ways.  I have a strong, nostalgic engagement in that particular environment and it speaks to why I love West Africa so much.  Absolutely I’m turned on by the madness of color there and the quality of light on the equator. 

Admittedly, though I’ve been slow in my developmental relationship to what light can do.  I understood composition much more.  Again, my teachers were extraordinary—I had an opportunity to learn from Raoul Peck on a documentary that he did here in New York.  It was a transcendent experience.  It was an essay film called Profit and Nothing But [2001] set in Paris, Haiti and New York.  He had planned to go to many different places in New York to express these different ideas.  We’d go somewhere and nothing would be happening with the light and he’d say, “We’re out of here.”  I’d never experienced that before from a documentary filmmaker.  He had been a taxi driver and he took over from the AP who was driving slowly through New York traffic and he drove us up and down the city chasing the light.  He went where the light was.  Something changed in me from that experience.  He also has an incredible compositional eye.  We had a lot of locked-off shots and he’d have me set something up, come and look at it and he would just move the lens incrementally, just a smidge and that would be it, so much better.  It became my quest to set up as many shots as possible to please his aesthetic, shots Raoul would keep.  Certain things really matter to me from that experience; I was so inspired by him.

SIM:  Was there another seminal filming experience that inspired you in that same way—to notice something you never paid much attention to, yet, somehow, now it’s a signature way in which you shoot?

KJ:  You mentioned reflection, too.  I was shooting a film, Derrida [2002], for Amy Kofman and Kirby Dick.  Initially, we had all these great conceptual discussions about how we were going to film things.  One of the ideas was that we were only going to film Derrida in reflection.  Which proved to be impossible, among many things, although it’s great to try and push yourself.  I always love having to stay too long because once you stay too long, you get through all of the “stock” shots, the obvious things to do.  You get to a place of slight boredom because you think you’ve seen every possible angle from which to shoot.  Then, suddenly, you’re finding things.  That was my experience in the courtroom in Deadline [co-directed with Katy Chevigny, 2003].  I started shooting reflections in the table, filmed the clock seven times, people’s hands in a moment of grief or agitation.  You start to see differently because your eye gets tired of seeing the same thing.  You start to search.  You learn that there are always more shots.

SIM:  This is when you realize there are two directorial minds—that of the director and that of the cinematographer.  It’s a distinct advantage, especially in documentary.

KJ:  In my experience, everyone I work with in documentary, including the sound people, thinks like a director.  Your whole team has to be thinking that way, respecting the director as the primary person.  When you don’t have that in documentary, stuff just falls off the edge.  That’s what it demands.  It demands this team of people totally engaged in making the same film.

SIM:  Have you ever lone-wolfed it—did your own directing, shooting, sound, with no one else crewing?

KJ:  I did that this past summer in Afghanistan and I have to say I kind of loved it.  It’s something I hadn’t done in years.  This was more of a scout situation and it was in a place where there’s a lot of danger so it wasn’t wise to bring too many people.  There was a clinic opening and a lot of people were making speeches.  If I’d have been there with a director, I might have felt obligated to “cover” the scene, the crowd watching, the people speaking.  I was perfectly disinterested in that but what was amazing was that every person there was completely stressed, everyone was worrying their prayer beads, all in a state of deep agitation.  I felt a lot of that in Afghanistan, people are worried, stuff is churning.  I spent the entire opening of this clinic just filming people’s hands.  It’s gorgeous footage; I have no idea what I’ll do with it. But, to me, it said a lot about the emotional state of these people.  Instead of that being a cut-away in a sequence in a scene of the opening of that clinic, because I was by myself, I filmed what I wanted to.

But I do feel like I have relationships with directors where I can say to them that I know which shots are going to give us what we need in terms of capturing the emotional temperature of a situation.  I ask them to allow me to do my thing.  I am comfortable taking the initiative if I see something like that.  But to not even have to discuss it was really fun.  One thing I did find difficult working by myself was not having a producer.  Having to decide where to stay, where to find food, all the logistical stuff you take for granted when a good producer is just taking care of all that—I missed that very much [laughs].  Half the time I’m shooting, I’m completely disoriented, since I’m so present in the action around me.

SIM:  What kinds of stories haven’t you had an opportunity to explore, thus far?

KJ:  I’m really interested in having the time and space to tell really complex stories.

SIM:  Complex in what way?  The stories you’ve told have a complexity to them.

KJ:  I feel like something like The Oath has the kind of complexity I mean.  I feel like we’re in a time where a lot of “issue” documentaries are supported and expected.  I’m supportive of that kind of work, certainly, but they trap you in certain ways.  They might allow you to go into structural complexity, but not necessarily human complexity.  It’s sometimes too much to get in, somehow.  Where I’m headed right now is that I’m feeling like I have a couple of ideas and a couple of places I want to be where I can tell those complex stories.  One of the things that I admire about The Oath is that it manages to function on a complex level both in a human way and in a political way, addressing something that’s really important to us all.  You have to take the time to make the choices you’re making.  To do most things well it takes years of commitment, to not get sidetracked by things that are less critical.  There are a lot of critical things to think and talk about right now.  Finding the way at them is important.

One of the things that interested me about my time in Afghanistan—and I don’t quite know what to do with this yet—was my interest in photography and filming in Afghanistan.  There are all kinds of restrictions on who can be filmed and who cannot.  There’s an amazing group of female videographers who film weddings.  The wedding parties are all single-sex and women dress completely differently than they dress out in the street.  It becomes illicit material that everyone wants to look at and it can be dangerous, as well, if the video images of women dancing get outside the family and passed from cell phone to cell phone, for instance.  Women can get into trouble.  That’s fascinating to me, what can be photographed, what can’t be; there’s a lot to explore there.  This entire history of imagery is hidden or purposely destroyed.  I saw a lot of interesting stuff there and there would be something interesting to make there, although right now, I don’t know how or what it would be.  I can get very conceptual like that and realize, that’s not a movie!

SIM:  Or it could be.  It’s always captivating to discover narratives hidden in these types of “archaeological finds.”  I like it when people make up stories on evidence left behind where not much is explained anyway.  There’s an archive, but of what we don’t know.  The baseline of the story is rooted in reality.  I think you’ve earned your creative stripes to try on something like that if you feel like it.

KJ:  Well, I’m glad to hear you think I’m entitled to that [laughter].  I’m definitely interested in doing work that’s formally sophisticated and emotionally true and is complex.  I’m trying to find ways in which I can do that with other people or on my own.  I realize now that takes time and strong choices about subject matter and intense commitment.  Again, I think of the work Laura does and her commitment to the material on a number of levels.

SIM:  Well, there also needs to be a willingness, I guess, to be in that tortuous phase where you’re really lost.  Where you do say, I don’t have a movie.

KJ:  If you don’t feel that way, you’re probably not making a movie, especially a nonfiction one.  It’s in those moments, I think, where the work of discovery is being done.  It certainly creates anxiety for me as a director, but as a cameraperson, I really like being in that place where I’m searching.  There’s always something interesting going on, you just have to find out where it is.

SIM:  Who’s making work these days that really excites you?

KJ:  You know what film I think about a lot is [Jean-Pierre Duret and Andrea Santana’s] Because We Were Born (Puisque nous sommes nés).  I want to show that film to everyone.  I mean, come on!

SIM:  It’s gorgeous.  They really reached a creative pinnacle with this film.  It took them many years to get there.  It’s filled with so many incredible moments.

KJ:  There’s so much happening on so many levels—it’s visually stunning and they tap right into the dreams of those boys.

I can watch that movie with Gini or Judy or Wellington and we all know what it takes.  You see that film and respect it for what it represents which is the complexity of that relationship between those subjects and the filmmakers.  They were living with them for months and negotiating their involvement with them day by day.  That’s a high emotional risk, such difficult terrain to journey through.  Being in those kinds of situations for a long period of time is a big deal.  And in seeing Duret’s film, I knew how many levels on which those filmmakers were operating.  It’s such an exciting thing to see.  You don’t look at a film like that and just take it in as something stylistic.  No.  It is an approach, it’s time spent, it’s understanding how a camera works, understanding how a story works.  The choice of filming two little boys who can talk to one another—all those things speak to a lot of experience.  You see it all there.  That’s the kind of thing to which I’m aspiring.

SIM:  I’m always embarrassed to say this out loud, but I call it love.  It sounds kind of dopey to say that, but that’s what you feel when you watch a film like that.  It doesn’t speak well of my critical chops but that’s what it is and I twist myself around trying to find a more academic word for it.  It’s the energy created from the people behind the camera and the people in front of it that supersedes circumstance; all have a hand in creating something utterly unique and singular and I don’t understand how that cannot be a thrill.  You feel it in your bones.

KJ:  Absolutely.  Listen, some of the situations that these people are in, the subjects of our films, are egregiously horrible.  And they’re still human beings who are funny, who have hope, who are open. Truly, we have to honor them.  Filmmaking becomes a form of honoring people, honoring the tradition of filmmaking, as well, stretching that far, and further.  It’s a mutual gift documenting the truth that happens between director and subject.  Laura did that with Abu Jandal.  She surprised him.

SIM:  It’s not such a bad thing to sometimes be underestimated.  Low expectations give you a lot of leeway, a distinct advantage [laughter].

KJ:  Yes, but sometimes you need to own up, too, and show right away that you’re a high-level player.  A really great example for that, to me, was St. Claire Bourne, someone I miss terribly.  Saint did not let anyone, I mean anyone, sleep on the fact that he didn’t have a sharper question, was searching for a better answer.  He was always on, always bringing up the level of expectation for everyone.  He wouldn't let an interview subject off the hook.  That’s especially important in interviews.

SIM:  Sure, especially when you have agendas which are in opposition to one another.  It is the filmmaker’s responsibility to weigh that, not the interviewee’s.

KJ:  Yes, if you let someone sleepwalk through an interview, they will.  It’s our job to get at it.  I know I’ve said this a couple of times in the course of this conversation, but sound people are so underestimated in the documentary world.  I have these incredible conversations with the sound people I work with.  They are the people listening the most.  It doesn’t happen very often, though, that the director is turning to them for input into what’s happening.  One of the things I try to ask of a director with whom I’m working, if he or she is okay with it, is to give both me and the sound person an opportunity to ask a question at the end of an interview.  The director is caught up in the interview and we’re there the entire time watching and listening.  It can be tricky because sometimes it is inappropriate to ask and the crew needs to stay out.  But most of the time when this is allowed to happen and the director is willing to give it a shot, there will come Wellington or Judy, or whoever has been recording, with a question that sends it out of the ballpark, the question that nails the interview.  I like to set up a dynamic where that kind of thing is possible, reminding everyone in the room that we’re all filmmakers together.  [Soundman, Wellington Bowler, pictured.]

SIM:  Can you recall a particularly profound moment while filming that shifted your molecules around, made you look at the world a bit more openly, perhaps, than you had before?

KJ:  I can say I’ve had many, many of those moments.  I can think of a lot of extremely emotional experiences, particularly interviews, as we were talking about.  The experience that always comes to mind, however, is that of shooting Derrida (1930 - 2004).  Basically, he was very ambivalent about us filming him.  He’d constantly cancel shoots.  One day, he’d kind of had it and was in the mood to call everything off.  He said he just couldn’t have all of the distraction going on; he needed to get things done.  He just needed to be there in his house.  He told us that if it was just me who stayed and I didn’t say a word all day, we could stay there with the camera.

I was incredibly intimidated, very respectful of who he was.  He made you feel as if your speech was so superfluous; he thought people talked too much, like so many of my words were superfluous because he used words so carefully.  He was so precise and rigorous.  So I was left in Derrida’s house and I vowed not to talk all day and went into this place where I just moved around and filmed him doing what he was doing.  I opened the door, went out into the backyard, filmed him from outside when I got too much of being around him [laughs].  I just kept moving around and doing my thing in complete silence.  It was quite liberating.  I’m obviously quite a talker!

I wanted to prove to him that I was smart.  That mattered to me, you know, that Derrida should know that the cameraperson wasn’t dumb.  To have him tell me what he needed from me, which was utter silence and for my presence to allow everything to happen for him, was revelatory.  

I’m currently working with a filmmaker named Kathy Leichter on a personal documentary about her mother’s suicide [Motherland].  We’ve been working on it for a long time and it’s usually just her and me in the room.  She’s let me know that, filming with me, she feels like she can display any type of emotion—even intense anger—and it’s okay.  I feel like I learned I had that ability that day with Derrida.  Kathy says she can feel it, that she can feel from me that it’s okay.  People always have the right, after the fact, to request that something not be used in a film.  But if there is trust established, it allows the subject emotional freedom.  Kathy says she's actually willingly gone to very dark and difficult places because she feels like she's safe to do that with me.  I’m not sure I’d know how to let myself emotionally go to certain points with someone standing by.  It was thrilling to me to see someone allow herself to do that.

Can I ask you a question?  Do you feel, in general, excited about what’s happening formally in documentaries right now?

SIM:  For the most part, I do.  It’s a way of telling stories I’ve been fascinated by for a long time, even before I became a maker or started celebrating in rapturous prose all the incredible work I see.  I want to concentrate on people pushing the form in exciting ways, not the horror stories of elusive funding and how hard it is to make films and how we can monetize all this in some way. I’m bored by all that. I see too many instances where people make their films on their own terms using money they scraped together somewhere and made a beautiful, personal piece of work.

It’s interesting that in this particular form—in most creative endeavors, but particularly this one where you are investing years and years of your precious life and it’s hard to keep the mechanism going, and there’s so much mystery involved!—well, the most extraordinary people are drawn to do this.  Documentary filmmakers are the most fascinating people to be around, they just are, mostly because the best ones tend not to be filmmakers.  They're coming at cinema from another vantage point; they've been out in the world and lived a bit, traveled, learned languages.  So yes, I have hope that the work of making nonfiction cinema is just going to get better and better and better if my reading of the pulse and vigor of this particular community here in New York is anything to go by.  The aesthetic imperatives are becoming something important to acknowledge and that’s a big leap, I think, and an important one.  

KJ:  Where we can take hope, on a certain level, is that there are many films that do exist where the craft is so strong, it cannot be denied.  I think we just have to keep speaking publicly, indulging in active discourse and honing our unique sensibilities.  But that aesthetic imperative should be more of a baseline.  I care about social justice as much as the next person; I’ve spent my entire adult life filming stories that push that agenda, right?  But we have to be careful about these alliances we make that can, if we’re not careful, create literalism, reduce craft.  I’ve seen it happen.  A lot more of the funding is there for that than it is for other kinds of films. 

I try to save certain periods or opportunities where I can work for free or for very little money and have blocks of time where I earn some money so I can take on these kinds of projects that I know are never going to get funded.  I worked on Kathy’s film for years because I knew it wouldn’t be getting into any funding loop.  Or something like Lisa Collins’ film about the Oscar Micheaux festival in South Dakota [Festival of the Unconquered, 2004, currently in post-production].  She can’t take that project to the Good Pitch, or whatever.  And it’s the most complex film about race there is. It’s about this crazy town in South Dakota where they hold a festival and celebration of Oscar Micheaux because he lived there for a short period of time.  There are Indians coming from the reservation, old ladies talking about race problems in Denver—it’s a wild film, the funniest and most complex discussion about race you’ll see.  That doesn’t fit a category; there’s no NGO for that.  And did I mention it’s funny?

SIM:  There definitely need to be more comedic docs.

KJ:  I need to make more of them, too.  The important thing is to allow for the surprises that happen in a story.  A story isn’t necessarily “character-driven” if its main protagonist is chosen because he or she fits in a slot that serves the explication of the issue.  And we don’t let people talk and tell their own story outside of the context of illustrating a problem, especially if they’re “problematic” people like criminals or terrorists.  It’s always got to be in this context of explaining the political issues involved when, in fact, it could just be the weirdness of a certain person [laughs] and how they got to this obsessive place.  That’s fascinating.  There should be a space for films like that to be supported.  Those kinds of things are very hard to predict in terms of outcomes.

SIM:  Well, we all live for the going-down-the-rabbit-hole episodes of our lives and that’s always what it is.

KJ:  It's so important that we be surprised by what we find. 

The DeVilles

This was pretty much the best thing I saw at SXSW.  I say "best" in the sense that almost every moment of watching this piece was an enjoyable one--meaning, I was glad my butt was parked in a seat in a theater watching it.  I'm a fidgety girl, so when something holds me completely rapt, it's a big deal, 'cause not much does these days.

The DeVilles, directed by first-time feature director, Nicole Nielsen Horanyi, clocks in at a cool 56 minutes.  And yes, she's a Dane and if you've noticed by now, I love, love, love the nonfiction cinema that comes out of Denmark.  If I were ever to bother going to film school, the only place I would be interested in enrolling would be at the National Film School there. The film was programmed with an excellent 25-minute short called Control from Norwegian director, Hanne Myren; playing the two films together was a great programming call by SXSW's own Jim Kolmar.

The DeVilles tells the story of the 25-year relationship of married couple, Teri Lee and Shawn Geary, who live in a charming, but well-worn, house in the Silverlake section of Los Angeles.  Teri Lee's stage name is Kitten DeVille, and she's a big deal in the world of burlesque; she's been a headline performer for decades and still puts on a scintillating show.  (She also teaches fat housewives how to striptease in her home studio.)  Her husband, Shawn, is a rockabilly singer, who physically channels Joe Strummer, circa 1980.  He and his band still rage like young punks, rehearsing at full throttle during the day in the garage, driving all the dogs in the neighborhood crazy.

The couple, with their three daughters, lives in a nostalgic world of their own making and we soon find out that the long-standing love between Teri Lee and Shawn has fissures and cracks that erupt into full-blown crises once in a while.  While completely devoted to one another and their family, both have indulged in various infidelities over the years, and during a party one evening, Teri Lee has a major drama-queen moment in front of their guests revealing for all to see her private distress and heartache.  She's got one of those wide-mouthed glamorous smiles, that if you look closely enough, reveals a lot of pain.

The film is shot and told as a riveting narrative, the subjects never directly addressing the camera/audience, but acting out the passion play of their family drama.  There are several moments of self-consciousness even though most, if not all, of the scenes are staged explicitly for the camera.  We are always aware that we are watching real people, but neither do we ever lose sight of the fact that they are all performers (including the youngest daughter who appears to be about eleven years old and has a stunning, powerful singing voice of her own).  At the beginning of the film, I was a bit disoriented as to where I was geographically, but this is a tableau that could really only exist in Los Angeles, the city which resides under the relentless shadow of Hollywood dreams that never say die.

Teri Lee and Shawn are fascinating to watch when they're on their own, but together there is definitely "movie magic," the charisma and sexual energy between them quite powerful.  One, literally, cannot exist without the other.  The film, in turn, romanticizes this long-term love affair in all its glory, Laust Trier Mørk's cinematography shot in 16:9 HD-CAM, luscious and fulgent.  The film ends with our hero driving off into the sunset towards Vegas in his pink Cadillac DeVille to rescue and re-kindle the passion of his only true love. 

The DeVilles has no release date yet in Denmark (or anywhere else, at the moment), but is distributed worldwide by First Hand Films.

Filmmakers to Watch from SXSW

[Note: There have been some corrections made for the NY Export section since this was first posted, per the producers.  I sourced incorrect information from a published article in FILMMAKER Magazine.  Apologies.]

For my SXSW wrap-up, a bit anemic as it is, I'd like to mention a few more films/filmmakers that impressed me, and the outstanding doc shorts program presented at the fest. 

I may write almost exclusively on nonfiction filmmaking (although that's changing more and more as I see work that's throwing any sort of idea of "genre" filmmaking out the window--more of this, please), but, no matter what, I still want to be thrilled when I sit and watch a film, transported, told a great yarn, be emotionally engaged and moved, etc.  I'm tired of seeing films not ready for exhibition, hurriedly "completed" to meet a festival premiere, sloppily finished, or what have you.  There's no room for that anymore, if there ever was.

Whether it's a film in the guise of what some are calling "social issue," an intimate portrait, a first-person account, or an historical treatise on a seminal event of the recent past (or some combination, thereof) the focus, intention (and the tenacious hold on that intention) of the maker's vision should be felt viscerally at every moment.

In the case of Jody Lee Lipes, Henry Joost and Matt Porterfield--these are filmmakers we celebrate at Hammer to Nail over and over again.  Why?  Because these are filmmakers who have such intense imperatives in the way they create cinema, such devotion to their craft, such expertise in the way in which they storytell.  Lipes and Joost have collaborated as co-directors on NY Export: Opus Jazz which had its début at SXSW last week.  (Lipes also shot Lena Dunham's SXSW narrative jury prize-winner, Tiny Furniture.)  The film won an audience award in the Emerging Visions category.

This re-creation of Jerome Robbins' 1958 tour-de-force dance story (written for the screen by Lipes) was shot on location in New York City and stars an ensemble of New York City Ballet dancers--all young, lithe, explosively energetic presences.  The film was conceived, created and produced by Ellen Bar and Sean Suozzi, soloists in the ballet company, and it took them several years to finance the finished film after getting the rights to the piece from the Robbins Trust.  They shot a 5-minute sequence with funds raised by the producers from private donors to use for further fundraising efforts, and committed to shooting the film in anamorphic 35mm to make it as gorgeous as possible.  You can see a preview here.  Over a year later, PBS came on board and took the film on as a pre-acquisition for its Great Performances dance series.  Remaining steadfast in their vision, the first-time producers had much more fundraising ahead of them, and the finished product shows, to glorious effect, the uncompromising way in which it got made.  Aaron Hillis, writing for IFC.com News, says, it is a "jaw-droppingly gorgeous marriage of choreography and cinematography."  The 45-minute narrative, accompanied by an excellent fifteen-minute "making of" documentary directed by Anna Farrell and Matt Wolf will have its broadcast premiere on PBS' Great Performances as part of the Dance in America series this Wednesday, March 24.  Watch it on as big a screen as you possibly can.

SXSW exhibited a very strong documentary shorts program.  As I've expressed before, shorts programs (watching several short films back to back) is not my fave due to the unevenness, most times, in the quality of films shown together.  While there might be a couple of standouts, one usually has to sit through several that are rather weak, or even worse, pointless.  But the half dozen I saw in this program were all fantastic and I hope they all make many appearances on the circuit in the next couple of years, and beyond. 

Amy Grappell's 20-minute Quadrangle (which premiered at Sundance) took the jury prize, and Travis Senger's White Lines and The Fever: The Death of DJ Junebug (26 minutes) received a runner-up nod for his world premiere.  Quadrangle is a fascinating piece, a video art installation more than it is a traditional narrative film.  The physical manifestation of the storytelling resonates so strongly because of the subject matter, that of a family collapsing and tearing itself apart due to a well-intentioned "social experiment" that goes awry.  The reveals come tantalizingly slowly and subtly and we don't know for sure how these people are related to the filmmaker, but we know that they are.  I especially like the way she reveals and implicates herself into the piece, again very deliberately and slowly until she is fully folded into this story that has impacted her life in so many ways.  We never actually see her, but we do hear her and, at one point, see her shadow outlined on the cement as she films.  Intelligent, potent, and artfully conceived and crafted.  She is working on a feature narrative script of the story.

The other film I'll give special mention to is called 6.  Also a world premiere at the fest, this film is just a staggeringly beautiful piece of work.  In its 22 minutes (I would have been more than happy to sit through something feature-length), it shows us a complete and full universe with such intimacy and love.  6 is a portrait of a teeny, tiny town in Texas, extrapolated through its rabid devotion to its high-school football team which consists of only six players; the place is so small it cannot populate a full 11-man team.  Its maker, Jeff Bednarz, has exquisite instincts and finds storytelling soulmates in his editor, Jack Waldrip, his cinematographer, Mark Thomas (stunning work) and, in particular, his subjects, who open up to him in ways in which only an incredibly empathic artist can get subjects to reveal their hearts and souls.  I cannot wait to see more from this team of filmmakers.

The other films in the program were: The deeply personal and beautifully shot Seltzer Works by Jessica Edwards; David Wilson's Big Birding Day with breathtakingly magnificent cinematography by Wilson and Nathan Truesdell; and, Bradley Beesley's hilarious Mr. Hypnotism about the notorious Ron Dante.

War Don Don

There were eight entries in the documentary competition at SXSW with Jeff Malmberg's Marwencol taking the top jury prize.  (Jury members were Nelson George, Thom Powers, and Karina Longworth).  Rebecca Richman Cohen's War Don Don was given a special jury nod.  You can read rhapsodic reviews for Marwencol here, here and here.  Since I've yet to see it, I'll talk about the outstanding film I did see and that's Cohen's feature début. 

I first knew about this project, and heard the director speak, at Full Frame two years ago when she was one of the recipients of the Garrett Scott Documentary Development Grant.  (That same year, Mai Iskander, director of Garbage Dreams, was also a grantee.)  Cohen, a law school graduate and human rights activist, is a young, slight-framed, pretty woman with a powerful booming voice and a confident demeanor to match--a person of conviction.  Partnering with Academy and Emmy Award-nominated filmmaker, Francisco Bello, her producer and editor, and directors of photography, Nadia Hallgren and William Charles Moss, ensured a high-level of proficiency in the way in which this piece was put together, a cinematic dream team, if you will.  I also don't want to neglect to mention the thrilling music supplied by Bajah + the Dry Eye Crew. 

The film supplies incredible visual power, is rhythmically precise in its pace and timbre, and presents the hard-won access these filmmakers had to its very best advantage for the viewer to weigh, ponder, listen and learn.  Never outright didactic, and, thankfully not narrated by the filmmaker or anyone else, it has a lot of nuanced and, downright contradictory, information to impart.  War Don Don ("the war is over" in Krio) is one of the most intelligent, balanced, thoughtful films I've seen in a while.  It is a superb piece of work on every level. 

In Freetown, Sierra Leone, an auspicious "special court" convenes, there to try a man named Issa Sesay, accused war criminal, brought to trial by the prosecution for crimes against humanity during the country's devastating civil war.  The population was decimated, many survivors left without limbs due to rampant amputation by the young soldiers.  Sesay's defense team deems him a good soldier (in fact, a coerced one), who protected civilians and was one of the leaders who helped to bring a hard-won peace to the nation.  This was the world's first international war crimes "hybrid tribunal," created jointly by the UN and the government of Sierra Leone.  The spine of the film is the trial itself which offers quite complex questions as to how this man's life and actions are to be interpreted. 

As Cohen states, "From my seat in the gallery of the RUF-accused trial, I first observed Issay Sesay, a former rebel leader accused of crimes against humanity and a key player in the peace negotiations--and I was fascinated by the range of roles that one man could assume amidst the intensity of such a brutal conflict."  What the filmmakers also do is move from this rarefied place into the streets and small villages of Sierra Leone where the trial can be seen by any private citizen that wants to watch it, with an on-the-ground team on hand to explain the proceedings, i.e., what it all means for the people who have lost so much.  As well, all of the participants--prosecution, defense, the citizens--get to weigh in on how effective the legal system that is trying this one man "for the crimes of many" happens to be--or not to be.  Hundreds of millions of dollars were spent to stage such a trial, perhaps at the expense of people who are still lacking basic necessities, clean water, enough food, a solid roof over their heads, good medical care, still living in a place where the basic infrastructure is in more of a shambles than ever.  This is highly-nuanced, thought-provoking filmmaking, providing profound sustenance for both the mind, the conscience and the heart. 

The film plays next at the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival London, then moves to the Amnesty International Movies That Matter Festival at The Hague, Netherlands.  And, then, the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival in Durham, North Carolina--coming full circle to the place where Cohen first presented it two years ago.

Next up: NY Export: Opus Jazz, the The DeVilles, and my favorite doc shorts from SXSW.