TORONTO PHOTOS AND NOTES, #2

For several people I talked to, my favorite film at Cannes became their favorite film at Toronto. Oslo, August 31 is Joachim Trier’s follow-up to his inspiring hit film, Reprise. That movie, a tale of youth and best friends and literature and longing and rock and roll, was smart, sophisticated and with an emotional arc like a great mix tape. It was also somewhat dazzling in its montage, using split-screen, freeze frames and a European post-punk soundtrack to make its story of young Norwegian literati one that felt like young adulthood everywhere. After several years working on a larger-scale American picture that Trier hopes will go next year, the director decided to quickly make another feature. Oslo August 31 is a melancholic and deeply empathetic portrait of a recovering heroin addict on his first weekend away from his half-way house and amidst regular society. Based on a 1931 novel by Pierre Drieu La Rochelle (also adapted by Louis Malle in The Fire Within) film stars physician and sometime-actor Anders Danielson Lie — he also appeared in Reprise — who delivers a heartbreakingly stoic performance. As befitting this more somber subject matter, Trier’s editorial pyrotechnics are dialed down this time. Nonetheless, the film’s opening minutes are a beautiful, elegiac city symphony for the film’s eponymous locale. I interviewed Trier and we talked about how movies with sad subjects, like this one, don’t have to make you blue. Like a melancholy song, they can move you and leave you with a feeling that heightens your sensitivity to everyday life. Watch for this interview here soon.

The IFP had a rooftop party at the Thompson Hotel with sponsors Calvin Klein and RBC. Celebrating women in film, the party honored a number of the fest’s female directors and stars, including Lynn Ramsay, Dee Rees, Selma Blair, Lynn Shelton and Susan Youssef. Spinning was The Ellen Show‘s DJ Tony — better known to Filmmaker readers as Tony Okungbowa, an actor and executive producer of Andrew Dosunmu’s Sundance and IFP Narrative Lab selection, Restless City.

Speaking of IFP parties and films, here’s … Read the rest

TORONTO 2011: “WAVELENGTHS” PART I

For fans of experimental film, 2011 has been a year of heavy losses. Yet even as we mourn the deaths of pioneer filmmakers including Jordan Belson, George Kuchar, George Landow (aka Owen Land), and Adolphas Mekas, the 2011 Wavelengths programs at the Toronto International Film Festival indicated that experimental film is alive and well… and living in Canada.

Aberration of Light: Dark Chamber Disclosure is a site-specific live projection performance that was a highlight of this year’s festival. In the projection booth, Brooklyn-based artists Sandra Gibson and Luis Recoder distilled a found 35mm commercial film print into rich, gorgeous beams of light that danced on the screen, the auditorium walls, and the faces of the rapt, dreamy spectators who filled the theatere at the Ontario Gallery of Art. (The movie that was the basis for the work was never identified to the audience, and the artists have never watched it in its entirety.) The introductory movement of the piece is a marvel: tiny lines of white light that were movie credits in a past life shimmer onscreen like sunlight filtering through deep water. Occasionally a half-glimpsed face from the original film surfaces deep within the piece like a mirage in the desert; other moments resemble flashlights dancing through fog.

The audio to the piece, created and mixed live in the theater by the Dallas-born contemporary composer Olivia Block, is at once organic and otherworldly. In addition to sounds produced digitally and musically, Block works with sounds she has collected from the world around her. Occasionally, these feel familiar: is that the sound of rushing water? Peeper frogs chirping on a summer night? The plaintive bleat of an alarm? The whir of an airplane about to take off? The pop of distant fireworks? Together, the visual and aural components of Aberration of Light are a symphony of lights and darks, quiets and louds, that are greater in concert then the sum of their parts.

Empire, as tiny and wondrous as Aberration of Light is long and wondrous, is the gem of a trailer for the 2010 Viennale made by Apitchatpong Weersethakul. Happily, it … Read the rest

TIFF 2011: THE YEAR OF THE DOC?

The buzz word at this year’s TIFF is “doc.” For the first time in its 35-year history, the Toronto International Film Festival opened with a documentary: Davis Guggenheim‘s From The Sky Down, which profiles the world’s most popular rock band, U2. Filmgoers and critics are also buzzing over Crazy Horse, by verite legend Frederick Wiseman;  Samsara (by Baraka‘s Ron Fricke); Tony Krawitz‘s The Tall Man,; and Girl Model by Ashley Sabin and David Redmon.

The doc vibe was in the air on Monday morning at a breakfast launch for Focus Foward. Sponsored by Cinelan and GE, Focus Forward invites big-name documentarians such as Morgan Spurlock (Comic-Con: Episode IV: A Fan’s Hope), Nick Broomfield (Sarah Palin: You Betcha) and Jessica Yu (Last Call at the Oasis) to make three-minute socially conscious docs that A-list festivals like Sundance, IDFA and Tribeca will screen. It was a rare bit of good news in an otherwise tough documentary business climate.

A lot of the talk that followed at Doc Conf, TIFF’s annual doc pow-wow of panels and keynotes, focused on raising money, finding distribution and getting eyeballs in front of screens. Idealism vs. cold, hard cash. A weak economy and broadcasters slimming their funding envelopes have forced documentarians on both sides of the border to launch crowdfunding campaigns on platforms like Kickstarter.com and find new ways of knocking on doors. Or rather, find new doors to knock on.

At the Focus Foward breakfast, Spurlock remained undeterred, but realistic: ”There will always be people who’ll give you money. You got to find them. When I made the Greatest Movie [Ever Told] I called 650 companies and we got 15 to say yes. It was ten months of just cold-calling, meetings, more cold-calling and meetings…. There’s a private financier for every idea, but you gotta find that guy who’ll say, “Oh my God! This is the greatest idea I ever heard! Where have you been all my life?”

For the sake of disclosure, my co-director and I last year raised Kickstarter seed money for our own African amputee … Read the rest

TORONTO PHOTOS AND NOTES, #1

The IFP organized a screening series at TIFF this year for RBC, the Royal Bank of Canada, at the Thompson Hotel. The event turned into a four-night run of Ryan O’Nan’s festival selection, The Brooklyn Brothers Beat the Best, which knocked out the crowd each night. As I moderated the Q&A’s, I can attest: this film plays.

The movie was selected for the IFP’s Narrative Lab just this past summer, and it happily surprised all of us by finishing so quickly and making it to Toronto. The Brooklyn Brothers is a totally winning tale of a makeshift band on a haphazard cross-country tour. It speaks to both a DIY-youth generation as well as to boomers mulling their own life choices and vicariously living out through the movie their own “what if…?” scenarios. Above are pictured, from left to right, producer Kwesi Collisson, writer/director/star O’Nan, and producer Jason Berman. At the Q&A’s, I learned that the film has already picked up a soundtrack deal from Warner/Rhino Records, and that the movie’s fictional band is now a real one, with records to follow.

One of my favorite films in Toronto was David Redmon and Ashley Sabin’s disturbing documentary, Girl Model. In following a thirteen-year-old Siberian girl traveling to Japan for modeling work, it turns into an eerie critique of a post-modern global image trade. I was haunted by the scenes of young Nadya in the middle of giant Japanese magazine stands hunting for her portrait amidst a sea of fashion magazines. Read my interview with Sabin and Redmon here. Above, they are pictured with Rachel Blais, another young model who appears in the film.

After living in various cities around the world, writer/director Alison Murray has moved to Argentina, where she is making movies… and teaching tango. Dance has featured in all of Murray’s films so far, and she is also a competition-level tango dancer. At TIFF she premiered her Caprichosos, which is a documentary about the murga — what she calls “tango’s bastard cousin.” Here is Murray at the IFP/Cinereach party. Read our interview with her … Read the rest

FIVE QUESTIONS FOR “UNION SQUARE” DIRECTOR NANCY SAVOCA

Nancy Savoca’s True Love was an early high-water mark in the modern independent film movement. In fact, its storyline, newcomer casting and loose style is now the template for much current indie drama. So, it’s great to report that over 20 years later Savoca is back with another intimate drama realized on a low budget and entirely outside the industry. With a stellar cast (Mira Sorvino, Tammy Blanchard and Patti Lupone), Savoca explores sister dynamics through the lens of a Canon 5D. The film, Union Square, premieres today at the Toronto International Film Festival.

Filmmaker: What were the origins of Union Square, and were the relationship dynamics of the film’s two lead sisters inspired by any in your own life?

Savoca: I was sitting in a coffee shop with (producer) Neda Armian and (screenwriter) Mary Tobler. We were venting our frustration that we couldn’t raise money for any of our projects and Neda said, “Let’s just shoot something. Anything! Shoot in my apartment. It’s yours!”

Little did she know that I’d take her up on it.

We had to finance this ourselves and needless to say, our resources were limited. My biggest fear was that, because of our low budget and short schedule, we’d be forced to shoot some boring, half-baked ‘two-people-in-a-room’ scenario. (Neda’s apartment is actually just one room).

So, I entered the project feeling a bit shaky but, luckily, Mary was fearless. Over the summer, she and I batted the script back and forth. It was great fun to get the emails with her latest draft- like opening a lovely gift every time!

I also enlisted the help of my favorite movie couples: Roberto Rossellini/Anna Magnani and John Cassavetes/Gena Rowlands. “The Human Voice” (part of the feature, Amore) and Woman Under the Influence, were an inspiration for telling an emotionally powerful story within a small canvas.

Like both films, I wanted to bring our audience in close with some difficult women. Maybe it’s a reaction to so-called “reality tv” which makes us see people as either crazy, stupid, uptight or bitchy. It plays on our … Read the rest

FIVE QUESTIONS FOR “CAPRICHOSOS” DIRECTOR ALISON MURRAY

Several years ago director Alison Murray moved to Buenos Aires, where she danced tango competitively, married her tango partner, had two daughters and, now, has completed her fourth feature. Not surprisingly given these life changes, the film, Caprichosos, deals with dance. But instead of tango, Murray has focused on the murga — what she dubs “tango’s poor cousin.” Performed by groups of costumed dancers who rehearse their theatrical presentations for months before premiering them at Carnival, the dance is a local tradition suffused with beauty, drama, and a slight undertone of menace. Writes Murray in a director’s statement, “Unlike its cultural cousin the tango, murga is not taught in any institution; it’s a tradition of social protest and commentary that has remained hidden in the arrabals, the slums of Buenos Aires. With this film we are infiltrating the world of the murgeros, and meet some of the characters that make this dance of empowerment a community-building, life-saving socio-political activity.”

Dance, and more broadly, movement, have featured in all of Murray’s previous films — documentaries Train on the Brain and Carny, and narrative Mouth to Mouth. These films are united too by their empathetic portrayals of cultural outsiders and keen understanding of the relationship dynamics of small groups. Caprichosos has these traits as well, eschewing the overused tropes of many performance films by exploring the history of the dance and the lives of its dancers before showing us the performance itself. It’s a winning, layered film with indelible characters, and a window into vibrant dance world unknown to most of us. We asked Murray five questions about murga, tango and filmmaking in Buenos Aires.

Filmmaker: Which came first — the desire to make a film about the murga dance or to tell the individual stories of the Caprichosos? Or was the movie inspired by the fusion of the two?

Murray: At first I wanted to do something more extensive in terms of researching the roots of the dance in actual dance traditions in Africa, but I ended up focusing more on the indivdual characters in the group and … Read the rest

FIVE QUESTIONS FOR “THE PATRON SAINTS” DIRECTORS BRIAN M. CASSIDY AND MELANIE SHATZKY

Photographers-documentarians Brian M. Cassidy and Melanie Shatzky use dark humor and unconventional storytelling techniques to look at patients living in a nursing home for their debut feature, The Patron Saints. Known for their Hurricane Katrina short God Provides and their photography highlighted on their site, piegonprojects.com (two reasons why we selected them for our 25 New Faces of Independent Film in 2007), Cassidy and Shatzky’s unique eye of making the ordinary look extraordinary has us excited in seeing this premiere at TIFF.

Filmmaker: Tell us a little about what your film is about?

Cassidy/Shatzky: The Patron Saints is a hyperrealistic glimpse into life at a nursing home.

Filmmaker: What motivated you to tell a story about life in a nursing home?

Cassidy/Shatzky: A feeling that we might be able to depict an aspect of life that is rarely, if ever seen on film. A lot of people have a tendency to deny that this stage of life exists, because it’s frightening or sad. As a result, residents often live in even greater solitude because their existence is too difficult for us to accept. As artists/filmmakers, we attempt to reveal or make visible these unseen areas of life. Early on in this process we both saw the potential for making a portrait or a kind of dirge that could deal with the subject matter in ways that could be at times very intense, but also tender and even humorous.

Filmmaker: Were there any inspirations (directors or films) behind the style of your film?

Cassidy/Shatzky: Mostly, we were trying to connect to our own intuitions, the rhythms of the place and the people who lived there, the mood or whatever else was going on. We both have a background as photographers and tend to favor work that on first glance might be difficult to deal with head-on but which also has a tenderness or a strange beauty. Photographers like Diane Arbus, Roger Ballen, Nan Goldin and Richard Billingham come to mind. Also the writer J.M Coetzee.

Filmmaker: What was the biggest challenge in making the film?

Cassidy/Shatzky: From the outset, we … Read the rest

FIVE QUESTIONS FOR “HABIBI” DIRECTOR SUSAN YOUSSEF

When we chose Susan Youssef for our “25 New Faces” list in 2009, the Brooklyn born filmmaker of Lebanese and Syrian parents was in post-production on her feature Habibi, which she had been working on since 2002. “I’ve been working on the film for eight years, continuously,” she said. “I’ve never fought for something so hard before — I’ve defined my whole existence around this film.” Fortunately for Youssef, her work has paid off. Habibi premiered last month to strong response at the Venice Film Festival and now plays Toronto before heading to Dubai.

Based on an ancient Sufi parable, Habibi tells the tragic story of two young lovers in the Gaza Strip, Qays and Layla, who struggle to be together and express themselves through art in a restrictive culture. We asked Youssef about her long journey, how she finished her film, and her next project.

Filmmaker: When we last spoke to you, it was 2010 in our “25 New Faces” profile, and you had been working on the film for eight years. What’s happened in this last year, and what was involved in this final push to finish the film?

Youssef: Well, first off, I have to say the ’25 New Faces’ profile was an incredible push for HABIBI, that brought the film to the attention of a lot of people that have now become our allies, and have introduced us to other who befriended the film.

The ’25 New Faces’ profile, in part, led me to a brea through on my working process on this film. For a long time, I worked devotedly on the project, believing that I only had to make an amazing product to succeed. I was improving the edit, writing the best grant applications I could, reaching out to other artists, such as the composer, who could really enhance the film with me. But within this year, I watched my colleagues who were having their breakthroughs with their film–getting the financing, premiering, getting the sales agent–and I realized that while of course the quality of their work was good, their friends and backers … Read the rest

“GIRL MODEL” DIRECTORS ASHLEY SABIN AND DAVID REDMON

In both narrative and documentary film, the character of the fashion model has long been a symbol of not only glamor but also a kind of post-modern alienation. Depicting a Russian teen model casting and one young girl’s travel to Japan for modeling work, Girl Model, David Redmon and Ashley Sabin’s absolutely riveting new documentary, is set in a morally adrift culture in which the image of childhood is a globally traded commodity. Nadya is an innocent-looking, blonde 13-year-old for whom modeling work is both a dream and way out of the poverty she’s grown up with in Siberia. But the modeling contract she signs is full of loopholes and onerous clauses (if she gains a centimeter around her waist, it’s void, for example), and, with her parents remaining in Russia, she has no real protectors in Japan.

As a character, Nadya is both heartbreaking but also something of a heroine, refusing to be beaten down by the world she’s found herself in. Fascinating for different reasons is the film’s other main character, Ashley. A former model in the 1990s, Ashley is the scout who organizes the casting, selects Nadya, and brings her to Japan. Intelligent and beautiful but also conflicted and mysterious, Ashley comes off as both predator and victim, a woman smart enough to understand the moral dilemmas of her world while being unable to stop working within it. In Girl Model Redmon and Sabin illuminate both these characters while using their stories to create a hauntingly lonely film that in its poetic reach is about much more than one corner of the modeling world.

I spoke to Sabin via Skype while Redmon worked in the background and joined in to answer a couple of my questions.

Filmmaker: Let me start by asking you what came first with this movie — was it the idea of following girl models in general, or was it one of the subjects?

Sabin: What came first was the main scout, Ashley. She approached us after watching two of our films at MoMA. She was interested in us making a film about … Read the rest

FIVE QUESTIONS FOR “CRAZY HORSE” DIRECTOR FREDERICK WISEMAN

Legendary documentary filmmaker Frederick Wiseman heads to the Toronto International Film Festival with his latest film on dance, Crazy Horse. Highlighting the famous cabaret in Paris, Wiseman uses his patented verite style to give an unprecedented look inside the work and lives of the women who makes the Crazy Horse legendary.

Filmmaker: Tell us a little about what your film is about?

Weisman: I Followed the day to day activities involved in the rehearsing and staging of a new show at the crazy horse, a parisian cabaret famous for its beautiful dancers and erotic dances.

Filmmaker: Why a verite look at Paris’ cabaret club, The Crazy Horse?

Weisman: I am very interested in dance. This is the third film on dance I have made following ballet (The American Ballet Theatre) and La Danse-The Paris Opera Ballet. A documentary can try to convey the ephemeral beauty of the vareity of patterns the human body is capable of creating.

Filmmaker: What’s the most fascinating thing you learned about the girls who work there?

Weisman: How nice, normal and talented they are.

Filmmaker: You’ve been making films since the 1960s, what still drives you to make movies?

Weisman: It is better than working for a living.

Filmmaker: Do you watch a lot of documentaries?

Weisman: No. I do not watch a lot of movies. I like to work, read and ski.

… Read the rest