Still in Motion

Interview: Alma Har'el, Director BOMBAY BEACH

 

Thinking of a series of dreams

Where the time and the tempo fly

And there's no exit in any direction

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

Wasn't makng any great connection

Wasn't falling for any intricate scheme

Nothing that would pass inspection

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

 

This interview originally appeared on the Hammer to Nail site.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

All photos courtesy Alma Har'el.

 

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!

Docs Under Duress (Redux)

For the Spring 2010 issue of DOX Magazine, to which I contribute, I wrote an article based on a panel I did last fall with filmmakers Laura Poitras, Ross Kauffman, Andrew Berends and Eric Daniel Metzgar called "Docs Under Duress" (a title we all had some fun with).  There is an audio recording of the panel on this blog here (thank you pinch-hit soundperson, Ingrid Kopp).  Here is the article reprinted from the magazine (and, by the way, you should all subscribe):

This past autumn in New York, I moderated a panel discussion with four award-winning documentarians as part of a festival called The Royal Flush Fest which takes place in Manhattan’s East Village. We sat together in front of an attentive audience to discuss the topic of how nonfiction filmmakers grapple with the personal and ethical dilemmas of making films in war-torn regions:

It was Christmas-time of 2003 and filmmaker, Andrew Berends (The Blood of My Brother, When Adnan Comes Home, Delta Boys) remembers being at Pottery Barn, a high-end housewares store. It was nine months after the US had invaded the country of Iraq. The store was warm, cozy and well lit and he remembers looking at a $4000 leather chair and thinking, "Is this what a country looks like when it’s at war?"

Last year, Eric Daniel Metzgar (The Chances of the World Changing, Life. Support. Music., Reporter) overcame his visceral fear of traveling to Africa to have dinner with a warlord. At the behest of producer, Mikaela Beardsley, he accompanied New York Times’ journalist, Nicholas Kristoff, to the dark heart of the DR Congo.

Everything post-9/11 struck Laura Poitras (Flag Wars, My Country, My Country, The Oath) with the same sense of disbelief as she watched people in smart clothes walk busily down the streets of Manhattan with their lattés and expensive mobile phones stuck to one ear.

Ross Kauffman (Born Into Brothels, Wait For Me, Project Kashmir, In a Dream) took himself and a camera to the red light district of Calcutta after merely seeing some compelling footage of children of prostitutes which he had received from a woman doing a project there called Kids With Cameras. This woman, Zana Briski, turned out to be his co-director for Born Into Brothels.

All of these documentarians are award-winning, highly regarded filmmakers in their field, winners and nominees of Academy Awards, Peabodys, Emmys, International Documentary Association Courage Under Fire Awards, Independent Spirit Awards, etc. – recognized by their peers, and the film-going community at large, as some of the top artists working in nonfiction cinema today. The panel was meant to highlight filmmakers who had "risked life and limb to tell important stories of people in war-torn and impoverished places around the world." Berends, Poitras, Kauffman and Metzgar certainly fit the bill as risk-takers and consummate storytellers. However, each and every one of them was slightly horrified at the notion of being touted as brave souls cavalierly going into war zones to shoot stories. It is a bit more complicated than that, number one. And number two, that is not really the "duress" part, necessarily.  The duress, as any independent filmmaker knows, is getting a feature-length movie made, completed, distributed and seen. A brave and foolhardy feat, indeed.

Andrew Berends, the winner of the aforesaid Courage Under Fire Award for his work in Iraq making his two moving and compelling films, experienced personal upset about what was happening – as a human being, not as a "journalist" or "documentarian" hot on the heels of a good story. He felt a personal connection to the men fighting there, most much younger than he, and contrasting that to the comfortable life at home with no sign of war in sight was a very unsettling feeling for him. This is also why he ended up going to the Niger Delta last year, to try to understand the young Nigerian rebel army that blows up pipelines and kidnaps white people. He wanted to understand something much deeper about the people portrayed as villains in the media. Berends, along with his interpreter, found himself arrested and detained by the Nigerian government there, after following the story for six months. His agenda of showing a human portrayal of these rebels trying to save their land was derailed by an entity that had no interest in looking bad on the world’s stage.  (Berends, pictured with Aaron Soffin, the friend who helped him get out of Nigeria, courtesy of Andrea Mohin of The New York Times.)

Ross Kauffman, director of Born Into Brothels, which won the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature in 2005, did not have an agenda at all. He was simply captivated by the kids and the footage he saw. He says the biggest lesson he learned in making that piece was that no matter where one is or what one is doing, to change one’s life is up to the individual. In other words, there was nothing that he, as a filmmaker, telling these kids’ stories could have done to change the course of their lives – that conceit is something made up by some PR machine. "I realized that to understand and respect an individual’s life is the most important thing. And as another individual [coming from a different world], one has to step back and let go – you can only do so much for someone." Unlike a lot of journalists and reporters, a long-form filmmaker’s priority is relationship-building with his or her subject and egos and larger agendas are usually quickly checked at the door.  (Kauffman lecturing at one of the IDA's Doc U sessions in Los Angeles last year.)

But that is not to say that a filmic story does not have an authorial stamp, a personal ethos in how the filmmaker sees the world he or she is privileged to penetrate. These filmmakers grapple constantly with the privilege of the first-world artist going in to document a third-world subject. It has inherent moral and ethical problems and creates a huge philosophical question that looms over every decision they make in the field and in the edit room. Laura Poitras acknowledges the ambivalence of doing this kind of work: "It’s a hugely problematic tradition in photojournalism and filmmaking in war zones, that people from the first world take images from the third world and bring them back to be consumed. It lets audiences off the hook. My intention is to create a less comfortable ride for the audience by really looking at how our power and privilege are used and exercised on foreign soil. It’s important to make people feel accountable, to show Iraqi civilians beyond the statistics and front-page news. It’s about reflecting the power back to the audience. There’s culpability; you’re being asked to take responsibility." She admits that she has internal conflicts about this all the time. By being invited into an Iraqi home, as she was by her main subject in My Country, My Country, she felt protected. She was immediately set apart from "the pack mentality of journalists" who all gather in the same places when an incident occurs, vying for sound bites and the perfect pull quote to tell a very complicated story. She understood the value of the access she was given and, in turn, people were more open with her. Her American passport enabled her to do the work she did there.  (Poitras, pictured on the red carpet at the Academy Awards with film editor, Joe Bini [Grizzly Man], courtesy of All These Wonderful Things.)

Unlike most "objective" news reporting on various crises going on around the world, a filmmaker’s voice (whether heard on the soundtrack or not) is "another color to play with," as Eric Daniel Metzgar puts it. There is always the danger of way too much context getting lost in presenting a dry, strictly vérité account of lives in peril. Yet, too much context "can make a piece saggy and heavy. I’m distinctly not an activist journalist, but an artist," says Metzgar. And it is the artist’s prerogative to control how much context he or she thinks should be provided. There is also the duress of just that kind of subjectivity in terms of the commitment to the subject(s), the emotional investment. Kauffman talks about this huge emotional investment but in the context of what follows – selling these stories in the marketplace. "It’s tough to sell the notion of these kinds of films that are humanistic and heartfelt and come from a deep emotional well, especially when it’s your first film. You have to do it all on your own and prove that you have a complete film that’s marketable." All these filmmakers do their own camera and sound work, for the most part, and say that one can launch a project like this – even in a difficult geographical locale – fairly easily. It allows them to get a project started without needing too many resources and gives them a certain amount of flexibility. It’s what is needed on the back end in finishing funds and exhibition and release that is the tricky part.  (Metzgar directing and shooting in Congo.)

Referencing his experience in Nigeria, Berends acknowledges that the risk-taking is in investing the time and one’s own money. But, unlike a journalist for hire, the risk of losing your access before finishing your project,– as he did when he was arrested – was his own risk too. And, in turn, there is the risk the subjects are taking, the pact that filmmaker and subject make together to create a singular piece of work. Poitras always wonders, "They participate; they consent. But, do they really realize what it means?"

At the end of the day, "docs under duress" does not represent so much the dangerous places these filmmakers traverse, but rather the task of surviving as a filmmaker and expressing work from a particular point of view, and in turn, having that personal point of view transcend to a universal story. This label of "activist filmmaker" made everyone on the panel squirm a bit. And the "fear factor" is not what one would expect – all four of these filmmakers, in different ways, express the ambivalence, the conflict, of filming real people’s stories in such an intimate way. Berends: "One of the scariest experiences for me was going into people’s living rooms, filming mothers and children." This by a man that spent years dodging bullets and explosives in a war zone! Kauffman admitted that he sometimes feels that asking people to re-live and talk about painful experiences and memories is asking too much, that it is a particular kind of invasion that makes him extremely uncomfortable: "I’ve just got to believe and know that it’s going to have a positive effect somehow." Poitras agrees: "There’s a great deal of dilemma in realizing the goal of figuring out how to document these events and how to make an audience really care. As an artist, you want to express something that has emotional heft. If I can’t do that, and you didn’t connect, then as an artist I’ve failed in terms of what I want to express. . . . The goal is not to convey the experience of that place, but to get people to think about the world a bit differently."

Metzgar, another singular visionary in how he crafts his films says, "Actually, I don’t think about the audience. When I’m cutting a film, it’s a very selfish and insular experience. I’m completely overwhelmed when I realize that people are actually going to watch it. The whole notion that what I’m creating is ‘an issue film’ makes me feel like an imposter. That’s not my fuel at all. I want the work to transcend and move people. That can’t be explained in words. It’s its own art form."

Festival Express: Can the Fest Circuit Empower Your Film's Distribution Stategy?

The Spring 2010 issue of Documentary magazine, the publication of the International Documentary Association, focuses on festivals and film distribution--two things of which I know a thing or two. 

But only a thing or two.  Now on newsstands, the issue also features articles by associate editor, Tamara Krinsky, producer, David Becker, filmmaker, Adrian Belic, and curator, Kathy Brew.  Documentary.org has kindly reprinted my article that leads the section called "Rethinking the Film Festival" where I talk to many of the top programmers about the current fest landscape.

So having just returned from True/False (coverage on Hammer to Nail in a bit, as soon as my jet lag abates--from Europe still, I think!) and heading to SXSW next week, and also working on distribution strategies and theatrical runs for a few more films this season, it's something with which I occupy a great deal of my time.  Why we don't know; but I like it.  So enjoy--here's the link.  Unfortunately, the web version doesn't include all the pretty pictures, but happy reading, anyway.

New Hammer to Nail Film Series

Just flew over the pond today and am chilling (literally) in Helsinki, Finland where I'll be for the next month or so, guest-lecturing at the documentary program at the TaiK and working at the DocPoint festival, which takes place the 26th through the 31st of this month with concurrent festivities in Tallinn, Estonia. 

I have a cozy, lovely studio adjacent to a sex toy shop and a café called Las Vegas and couldn't be happier.  After a massively delinquent but ultra-pleasurable couple of weeks, promises of much more regular blogging to come and all that but, first, some cool news from home: 

Michael Tully, our ace editor-in-chief at HTN is kicking off the new Hammer to Nail-hosted series, Misunderstood Gems at the 92YTribeca this Thursday night, January 14th at 8:00 p.m.  With a desire to curate films that are fun communal viewing experiences, Tully is starting off the series with Jackass Number Two.  Click here for more info and to purchase advance tickets to the show.

More soon from northern climes and my adventures in Wonderland.

Tribeca Presents "Docs on the Shortlist" Screenings

On January 8th and 9th, 2010, Tribeca will present a weekend screening series of six films shortlisted for the 82nd edition of the Oscars.  The series is hosted by Tribeca Film Institute's Gucci Tribeca Documentary Fund at the Tribeca Cinemas.  Curated by the film festival's programming team, the series will enable New Yorkers to see a selection of the documentary contenders shortlisted for the Best Feature Documentary prize.  Tickets go on sale today; you can call the cinemas for more info at 212 941 2001, or click here. 

On Friday, Rebecca Cammisa's Which Way Home, which world premiered at Tribeca, will screen at 6:30 p.m. and Cammisa will be there for a post-screening Q&A.  At 9:00 p.m., Robert Kenner's Food, Inc. will screen.  The film had its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival in September.

Saturday at 1:00 p.m., Mark Hopkins' Living in Emergency will play (world premiered at the Venice Film Festival).  At 3:30 p.m., Bill Guttentag and Dan Sturman's Soundtrack for a Revolution (still from film, pictured) will screen.  This film also had its world premiere at Tribeca.  At 6:00 p.m., Louis Psihoyos' The Cove will play with Psihoyos in the house for a discussion with the audience afterward; The Cove world premiered at Sundance.  Lastly, Andy Abrahams Wilson's Under Our Skin plays at 8:30 p.m., another Tribeca world premiere.

Don't miss this chance to see these films before the big night.

First Run Features Releases Six New Documentaries in Theaters

New York-based distributor, First Run Features, is set to theatrically début six new American-made documentaries this winter. 

Opening Friday, January 8 at the Cinema Village is Waiting for Armageddon, directed by award-winning filmmakers, Kate Davis, David Heilbroner and Franco Sacchi.  This 2009 release, which premiered at the New York Film Festival, is about America's 50-million strong Evangelical community.  This population, which spans most of the country, is convinced that the world's future is foretold in Biblical prophecy.  The filmmakers explore, among other things, the politically powerful alliance between Evangelical Christians and the State of Israel and how Armageddon theology has had profound consequences both politically, and between various faiths, in the US and Israel.  Armageddon, the film, is handled with a determinedly, non-judgmental approach; there is no narration, nor do the filmmakers seek to demonize anyone, allowing the subjects to speak for themselves.  This is an extremely important document for dialogue and, in fact, the night before the film premieres at Cinema Village, an interfaith roundtable will be presented, in conjunction with New York University, at the Puck Building on the 7th of January.  There will be influential community leaders, religious leaders and other interfaith-based organizations coming together for discussion.  Clips from the film will be used as a catalyst for conversation.  (Keep checking this site and the film's Facebook page for upcoming info.)  The event will be open and free to the public; seating is limited to 120, including press.  Filmmakers and other special guests will also be on hand at most theater screenings in New York throughout the week.  The film will then head to Boston and Providence, RI, later in January.  Also, co-director, David Heilbroner has a first-person guest blog post on the Huffington Post today about the film.  Check it out here.  Thus far, there are over 200 comments attached to that post!  The film is supported, in part, by the Foundation for Jewish Culture, with outreach support from the Fledgling Fund.

On January 29th, Nicole Opper's Off and Running will premiere at the IFC Center, with special guest hosts almost every night and the filmmaker present at the theater for Q&As.  Set in Brooklyn, Opper's feature début is a collaboration with her main subject, Avery Klein-Cloud (pictured above); the partnership garnered them the Writers Guild of America Documentary Screenplay Award at this year's SILVERDOCS and the film also received jury prizes for Outstanding Doc at Outfest and Philadelphia's Q Fest.  The film premiered at the '09 Tribeca Film Festival (where it was a top-ten audience fave) and will have its national broadcast début on PBS' P.O.V. 2010 series, airing next November.  There is already quite a groundswell of excitement and support for this film in many different communities throughout the nation, particularly here in New York City, and many of independent film's most prestigious and important organizations have been behind it from the start--Tribeca All Access, ITVS, P.O.V., the IFP, DocuClub and New York Women in Film and Television, among others.  Opper was also named one of FILMMAKER Magazine's 25 New Faces of Independent Film this year.  Off and Running tells the story of the Klein-Cloud family, a white female couple who are raising three children in a loving Jewish household.  Before meeting, they had each adopted a child, Tova adopting Rafi, a mixed-race boy, Travis adopting Avery, an African-American girl; after many years together, they also adopted, Zay-Zay, a Korean boy.  As Avery nears the end of her high school career and is getting ready for college, she starts to have an urgent need to contact her birth mother, curious about the African-American roots she's never explored.  This begins somewhat of a rocky journey, one familiar to us all, as she searches for her true north and tries to gather together all the disparate elements of her identity--African American, Jew, transracial adoptee, athlete, sister, daughter.  Click here to see the trailer and read more.  Also check back on this site for other up-and-coming extracurricular activities associated with the film.  Also coming soon, an extended interview with Opper to add to my arsenal of chats with kick-ass female directors.  (There is a book coming, I promise.)

Opening across the country beginning February 5 is Judith Erlich and Rick Goldsmith's The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers.  This doc is the co-winner of this year's Freedom of Expression Award from the National Board of Review and was one of their picks for five best docs of the year.  It also won a special jury prize at the IDFA and is a contender for this year's best doc Oscar prize.  Daniel Ellsberg, a high-level Pentagon official and Vietnam War strategist leaked 7,000 pages of top secret documents to the New York Times in 1971 when he concluded that the war was based on decades of lies and falsehoods perpetrated by the US government.  This was a watershed moment in history that led directly to the Watergate scandal, Nixon's resignation from the presidency, and the end of the Vietnam War.  It was then-Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, who called Ellsberg "the most dangerous man in America."

Opening in New York on February 26 at the Cinema Village and then in San Francisco, Berkeley, Seattle, Washington, DC, Boston, Philadelphia, Denver and Atlanta beginning on March 5, Prodigal Sons will launch its nationwide theatrical run.  This film, since its festival opening in Telluride in September 08, has had a really magical festival run, and the film's director, Kimberly Reed, has had a chance to see first-hand how audiences respond to her riveting and open-hearted personal documentary story.  The film breaks fresh ground in almost every way.  Like Opper's family story, this one is so distinct and individual, dealing with issues most of us might feel we're very far away from, but in fact, transcends its boundaries of circumstance to leave us feeling like we've met another family we can admire and love, a family closer to our own than we would have first thought.  Journalists and juries and audiences have adored this film from all corners of the globe.  There's a full press archive on the site here if you want to link and read some items (or all of them).  Reed, a transgender woman, returns to the small town in Montana where she grew up.  She initially took a camera in tow with DP and co-producer, John Keitel, because the trip home was to go to her high school reunion--the first time her classmates would meet her as Kim, instead of the young Paul McKerrow who graduated with them, star athlete, honor student and all-around stud.  But the story goes to the heart of the matter very quickly when she comes back together with her estranged brother, Marc, a man who's gone through many changes in as many profound ways as Kim has, and whom she hasn't seen in almost 10 years.  Look for Reed and the film to be featured in an article in the February issue of Details Magazine with an essay written by Rick Moody.  There will be several press and media events surrounding this film leading up to its run with social engagement and outreach partners, including a Film Talk interview with Reed in mid-February.  (Carol McKerrow, Marc McKerrow, Kimberly Reed, pictured.)

Opening in New York on March 12 will be Tales from the Script, Peter Hanson's from-the-horse's-mouth ode to screenwriting, with encounters and anecdotes from Shane Black (Lethal Weapon), John Carpenter (Halloween), Frank Darabont (The Shawshank Redemption), William Goldman (Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid), Paul Schrader (Taxi Driver), and others.  Sharing never-before-told behind the scenes stories, the writers describe their collaborations (or lack thereof) with the likes of Harrison Ford, Morgan Freeman, Stanley Kubrick, Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg.  There will be a companion book published by IT Books, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers, that will be in stores in late January.

Lastly, opening on the 26th of March in New York and, then, nationwide in April is Dancing Across Borders, a new feature doc which chronicles the story of Sokvannara Sar, a dancer discovered by arts patron, Anne Bass, on a trip to Angkor Wat, Cambodia in 2000 and brought to the ballet stage here in America.  The film explores Sy's relationship with his new milieu, the world of American ballet, and his new culture.  The film was directed by Bass and was photographed by Bob Elstrom, Anthony Forma and Tom Hurwitz.

Wunnerful, wunnerful that all these independent docs are getting a crack at getting their name on a movie marquee.  Good start to the new year.

Union Docs Rocks This Weekend: Deborah Stratman, Mamadou Niang, and More

This weekend, UnionDocs in W'burg, Brooklyn, will present two great programs.  On Saturday the 17th, guest curator, Rachael Rakes of Doctruck, will bring three wonderful pieces on contemporary China: the marginalized Turkic-Muslim community of Ughyurs in Deborah Stratman's Kings of the Sky from 2004, Sam Green's haunting short film, Utopia: Part 3, The World's Largest Shopping Mall (2009), and Yin-Ju Chen and James T. Hong's 11-minute, Dogs of Straw (still from film, pictured), a profile of the streets of Taiwan right before the 2008 elections.  Great filmmakers, great films!  Special guests will be on hand; the screening will begin at 7:30 p.m. 

On Sunday the 18th also at 7:30, UnionDocs is partnering with the African Film Festival New York to bring in documentary filmmaker, Mamadou Niang to present a short work-in-progress cut of his new piece on Ousmane Sembene, the father of African cinema.  Following this, the multiple award-winning Pray the Devil Back to Hell will play.  Devil presents the story of the powerful struggle of a group of Liberian women who band together to end a violent and long-standing civil war in their country.  Their methods of peacemaking are a sight to behold.  After the screening, I will moderate a conversation with the film's producer, Johanna Hamilton, and its cinematographer, Kirsten Johnson. 

It's supposed to rain for the next several days, so it's the perfect weekend to get your ass to a movie.  Come join us!

Call for Submissions: 2010 Gucci Tribeca Documentary Fund

You have until January 11, but since holiday season is fast upon us (yikes!), and the deadline is just after the new year, a reminder that the Gucci Tribeca Documentary Fund is seeking feature-length documentaries that are in production or post-production with the intention of a premiere exhibition in 2010.

Eligible films should concentrate on people and populations who are ignored, ostracized, or otherwise marginalized and people fighting for social or political change.  They are looking for films that also highlight broad social movements.  Film works should focus on stories that challenge the status quo while pushing the form of nonfiction storytelling--in other words, a theatrical-ready movie.  Click here to take a look at the '08 and '09 list of films the GTDF has funded, more info on rules and regs and the application form.  Submissions should be postmarked no later than 01/11/10.

Tribeca Film Institute Announces Gucci Tribeca '09 Grant Recipients

Just one year old, the Gucci Tribeca Documentary Fund Grants will be given to a second round of promising directors with films in production or post-production.  Filmmaker, Ian Olds, pictured, received grant money last year for The Fixer: The Taking of Ajmal Naqshbandi.  He went on to win the award for Best New Documentary Filmmaker at this year's Tribeca Film Festival and the film will broadcast on HBO next month.

This year, seven international projects that promote social change and "illuminate issues in need of deeper coverage currently missing from mainstream media," will receive finishing finances.  These projects were chosen from 350 submissions from 41 countries.  The total amount of the fund to be shared amongst the seven projects is $100,000.

The projects are: Elinyisia Mosha's Anatomy of Power; Jairo Eduardo Carrillo's Born Under Fire; Rob Lemkin and S. Thet's Enemies of the People; Jyllian Gunther's Growing Small; Rebecca Haimowitz and Vaishali Sinha's Made in India; Gemma Atwal's Marathon Boy; and Beth Murphy's The Promise of Freedom.  To read more about the grant cycle and this year's recipients, click here. 

Tribeca Film Festival Launches in Doha, Qatar

Tribeca Enterprises has just announced the official dates for the inaugural Doha Tribeca Film Festival as October 29th through November 1st, 2009.  The fest is a collaboration between TFF and the Qatar Museums Authority and will showcase "the best of the local Qatari community, as well as the broader Arab culture."  This cultural partnership was formed by Her Excellency Sheikha Al Mayassa bint Hamad bin Khalifa Al-Thani.  The first edition will be hosted at the Museum of Islamic Art.

And for those who read from right to left:

     مهرجان الدوحة-ترايبكا للأفلام 
                        يقام من 29 أكتوبر إلى 1 نوفمبر 2009
 

أعلن مهرجان الدوحة-ترايبكا للأفلام عن انطلاق دورته الأولى في الدوحة-قطر من  29اكتوبر إلى 1 نوفمبر من العام الجاري 2009 . وبالتعاون ما بين مهرجان ترايبكا للأفلام و إدارة متاحف قطر ,فإن مهرجان الدوحة-ترايبيكا للأفلام سيطرح أفضل ما في المجتمع القطري والثقافة العربية بشكل أوسع. المهرجان سيرحب بضيوفه من المجتمع القطري, وبالمشاركين من فضاءات صناعة السينما العالمية و سيواكب مختلف النشاطات الراقية و البرامج الأسرية التي تساعد في بناء، إلهام، وتحفيز صناع و منتجي الأفلام على التركيز على المبادرات السينمائية التربوية الرائدة في دولة قطر.

على المدى البعيد, فإن مهرجان الدوحة-ترايبيكا للأفلام سيوفر المناخ الملائم و الدعم اللازم و التحفيز المستمر لصناع السينما المبتدئين, كما أنه سيمهد لتوفير منبراً تعليمياً وتوجيهياً على مدار السنة للنشاط السينمائي.

مهرجان الدوحة-ترايبيكا للأفلام تأسس من خلال التعاون الثقافي بين سمو الشيخة المياسة بنت حمد بن خليفة آل ثاني، رئيس مجلس أمناء هيئة متاحف قطر ورئيس اللجنة المنظمة للمهرجان وبين مؤسسي مهرجان ترايبكا نيويورك , جان روزنثال,كريغ هاتكوف, و روبيرت دي نيرو. وقد تم الإعلان عن المهرجان في نوفمبر من العام الماضي 2008 , وسيستضيف متحف الفنون الأسلامية في الدوحة- قطر الدورة الأولى لفعالياته.

تفاصيل برنامج المهرجان سيتم الأعلان عنها خلال صيف/خريف عام 2009.

من؟ مهرجان دوحة - ترايبكا

ماذا؟ مهرجان سينمائي عالمي

متى؟ 29 أكتوبر- 1 نوفمبر 2009

أين؟ الدوحة - قطر

Smörgåsbord

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Two Stars Rising

When it rains, it pours.  Congratulations to filmmakers Gabriel Noble and Marjan Tehrani for their two fabulous co-productions whose debuts are happening (almost) simultaneously.  They brought their first child into the world just the other day, an Aries so she's bound to kick ass, of course.  Every father should greet his daughter in such millinery splendor!

As for their other co-production: next week their latest feature documentary, P-Star Rising, will debut at the Tribeca Film Festival which starts on Tuesday.  I've been impressed with Gabe's directing chops and intense dedication to his projects ever since seeing Autumn's Eyes, a hugely underrated nonfiction gem, co-directed with Paola Mendoza (who is debuting her latest feature narrative, Entre Nos, at the fest as well with co-director, Gloria LaMorte).  You can watch Autumn's Eyes now on Snag. 

An interview with Noble about the film is featured in today's edition of indieWIRE, and he will also be appearing at the Apple Store Soho on Monday, April 27 at 6:30 as part of the chat series there during TFF.

Acting as producer for P-Star, Tehrani is no slouch in the directing department.  I first got to know her after seeing an extract of her film, Arusi Persian Wedding, as part of a composing workshop at True/False hosted by T. Griffin and Michael Furjanic.  Furjanic furnished the sound design for Tehrani's film and I promptly invited them both to come to Dubai to show it there.  You can read my conversation with Marjan about the making of Arusi here.

Come out and see P-Star.  There are several screenings at the fest (although just received news that opening night is already sold out), as well as a free outdoor screening in Battery Park on the 25th.