documentary
Tuesday, February 7th, 2012
While at the Toronto Film Festival this year I interviewed Maldives President Mohamed Nasheed and director Jon Shenk about their climate change doc, The Island President. The film is focused entirely on Nasheed’s efforts combating climate change and greenhouse emissions, showing how his stewardship of the environmentally fragile island state can be a model for others looking to enact more progressive policies.
One question I had while watching the doc was how well his environmental activism played at home. The domestic policies of the Maldives are largely absent from the doc.
Today, reports the BBC, Nasheed has resigned amidst widespread unrest in the country. According to the news service he is under house arrest, with some claiming his ouster the result of a military coup. His environmental policies appear to have had little to do with today’s events. From the BBC:
A one-time political prisoner, Mr Nasheed became a vocal figure in office on issues relating to the environment and climate change.
But he has faced constant opposition – from those loyal to former President Gayoom and from religious conservatives who accuse him of being anti-Islamic, says the BBC’s South Asia analyst Jill McGivering.
That pressure has intensified with the prospect of fresh presidential elections, scheduled for next year. Opposition parties are jockeying for power as they try to extend their influence.
I’m planning to run my complete interview timed to the release of the film. For now, here’s an excerpt in which Nasheed discusses his collaboration with Shenk.
… Read the rest
Monday, February 6th, 2012
I started working with DP Martina Radwan about a year ago on the feature documentary, Mentor (addressing bullying and teen suicide in Mentor, Ohio) I further had the pleasure of working with her on a recent music video for the band Shearwater. It is a gift, as a director, to find a DP who you can quickly fall into a shorthand with, creating your own visual language, and trusting in the collaborative process. Radwan and I found this with each other.
Her narrative work includes Flannel Pajamas, by Jeff Lipsky; Singapore Dreaming, one of the first Singaporean feature productions and the winner of several international awards; Rain, the first indigenous film of the Bahamas, produced and directed by Maria Govan; The Killing Floor, a thriller produced by Doug Liman & Avi Arad and the horror film Train, a Millennium Films production, both directed by Gideon Raff.
Her most recently-released documentaries include William Kunstler: Disturbing the Universe by Emily & Sarah Kunstler, and Beautiful Darling, by James Rasin. I sat down with her recently to discuss her beginnings as a cinematographer, women as directors and cinematographers, and Saving Face, the Oscar-nominated short doc she shot this past year.
FILMMAKER: How did you first get interested in cinematography?
RADWAN: I was always interested in images because to me the visual language leaves more room for interpretation then the spoken word. You can allow the audience to add their own emotions and impressions to the story. Images are a universal language, as we know from silent movies. Growing up in Germany, I watched many American movies, and if the visual language was strong enough, I could understand the film, without understanding the spoken language. I was a school drop out which prevented me form going to college, so I worked my way up from PA to Assistant Camera, and I started shooting after I moved to the US.
FILMMAKER: What was your first production assistant job?
RADWAN: It was an American German co-production starring Martin Sheen and Sean Penn — I think Sean Penn’s father was directing … Read the rest
Friday, January 27th, 2012
The Year of the Dragon calls for boldness, passion and power. What better way for Sundance to usher in the new year than a dragon dance up and down the aisles of the Yarrow Theatre? Cavorting to drums and cymbals, the dragons were introducing the world premiere of the documentary, China Heavyweight.
China Heavyweight is the second feature-length doc from Montreal’s Yung Chang, who helmed the award-winning Up The Yangtze. Chang follows coach Qi Moxiang and his two boxers, Zongli He and Yunfei Miao, in southwestern China as they train for the championships. The area they come from is poor, isolated and a breeding ground for kids looking for a way out. One way is boxing. These kids dream of being world stars like Mike Tyson, amazing given the fact that during his reign Chairman Mao Tse-tung banned pugilism for being violent and decadent.
Like Up The Yangtze, China Heavyweight is an observational doc in the style of Frederick Wiseman. It is beautifully shot and edited, preferring to eavesdrop on intimate conversations between anxious parents who want only the best for their sons, and the boys themselves who train 24/7. Some will be disappointed that Chang doesn’t hype the Big Bout that climaxes the film, but his sympathy for his subjects is palpable. In one touching moment, a tearful mother weeps in a corner of the house, because she fears the beating her son will take in the ring.
Though Chang’s family hails from China, it was actually co-producer and sinophile Peter Wintonick who pitched the idea to him. At the premiere, Wintonik and the other producers at EyeSteelFilm, also known for the superb Last Train Home, watched as the normally cool and relaxed Chang choked up during the Q&A when he introduced the coach as his “brother.” Several in the audience awarded Qi a standing ovation. Chang later reported that Qi was “in tears throughout that screening.”
Audience reaction was warm to Heavyweight though some inevitably compared it to Up The Yangtze, though the subject matter is miles apart. Yangtze is about surviving colassal change in modern China … Read the rest
Monday, January 23rd, 2012
More and more often different mediums and genres of filmmaking are being meshed together and Bart Layton’s newest documentary The Imposter is no different. The film’s official synopsis declares, “Documentary meets Film Noir in this astonishing true story which has all the twists and turns of a great thriller.” But this is not just a hoax to get people into the theatre. Based on an extremely bizarre story of a young man who infiltrates a family by posing as their missing son, the film follows an intricate plot of testimonies that aim to recreate the story’s noir-ish tone. Just as the adventure of making the film and uncovering the facts led Layton and his producer on an unbelievable trip, The Imposter aims to leave audiences in a similar state of bewilderment.
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Filmmaker: How did you get involved with this story? What encouraged you to make this documentary?
Layton: In 2009 I happened upon an article in a Spanish magazine about Frédéric Bourdin, AKA Le Chaméléon – a Frenchman who had traveled the length and breadth of Europe passing himself off as an abandoned child. A quick Internet trawl threw up dozens of similar articles about him including a long piece from the New Yorker that described his time in Texas. The story was incredibly hard to believe – a twenty-three year-old French-Algerian man successfully steals the identity of a missing Texan child and begins a new life within the family posing as their son? I knew that this would make an incredible film but wondered if perhaps the imposter himself wasn’t the whole story but was perhaps a way into a more interesting film about deception and, in particular, self-deception.
Filmmaker: What techniques did you use to avoid making the re-enactments in your film feel hokey, cheesy, or like a crime show episode?
Layton: Re-enactment is a pretty dirty word in TV let alone in film so it was vital to find a visual style that didn’t feel like ‘re-enactment’, that felt cinematic and also fitting to a story as unusual as this one. My idea was to play with notions of memory and subjectivity … Read the rest
Wednesday, December 21st, 2011
German filmmaker Wim Wenders started taking photographs at the age of seven. Over the years he has turned his attentions to medicine, philosophy, painting, and engraving, but it is his four decades directing that has most often caught the publics’ attention. I first saw and loved his films with Wings of Desire; later I could be found carrying around a copy of his book Once religiously.
His new film Pina, is a loving tribute to his 20-year friendship with, and admiration of, the dancer and choreographer Pina Bausch. It is a documentary that uses new 3D technology to exquisite effect. As he relates below, Wenders first approached Bausch about making a film together after being moved to tears by her dance performance, Café Müller. She agreed, but it then took him those two decades, and the advances in 3D technology, before he felt he could do justice on film to her work. The resulting film is a beautiful film/dance journey that explores love, life, and loss – and without words, represents the friendship of two great artists.
Wenders: Where are you calling me from?
Filmmaker: New York City. Where are you?
Wenders: I’m in Hamburg Germany. I hope your weather is not as bad as it is out here. It’s so nasty here, I’m sneezing, I’ve been shooting all week with my students in the freezing rain. We were looking for a week of sunshine and instead we had a week of hail and snow and rain. I think we got some good stuff but I am just looking forward to being indoors again.
Filmmaker: Are you sick of talking to people yet about Pina?
Wenders: No, no no – it’s nice to speak about Pina. I have not done any talking for the last few days in that context. I look at interviews the way I look at filmmaking and try to follow the advice that I give my actors: do it like it’s the first time. I think the only way to do an interview is to forget that you ever answered the question before. … Read the rest
Sunday, December 11th, 2011
“In 1972, Ricky put a Super 8 synch-sound camera in my hand and said, ‘If you want to become a filmmaker, you have to shoot,’” writes filmmaker Jane Weiner on the Kickstarter page for her project, Ricky on Leacock. “Turning my lens on him, I was suddenly transported into another universe: What began as a filmic conversation developed into a filmic adventure that traces the roots of Leacock’s cinematic quest and his role in documentary-making over the last century.”
Four decades later, and less than a year after Leacock passed away, Weiner is finishing her documentary on the legendary filmmaker Richard Leacock. As she tells in her Kickstarter video, Leacock agreed to the documentary so many years ago on two conditions: it had to be shot on Super 8 synch sound, and there could be no interviews. More from Weiner:
Mixing my own footage with film clips and never-before-seen images from Ricky’s personal film archives, this film pays homage to my friend and mentor and, most importantly, allows him to tell his story in his own words.
Presented as an intimate, on-going cinematic conversation with me and other filmmakers, Leacock recounts the periods of his career spent with Robert Flaherty, Robert Drew, DA Pennebaker and others, during which he discusses the roots of his lifelong quest to capture “the feeling of being there.”
Ricky Leacock helped lay the foundation not only for today’s filmmakers, but for amateur filmmakers all over the world who use portable equipment and new technologies. His pioneering role in the development of hand-held, observational documentary films can be traced through several important eras in film history to the explosion of the small-format ‘being there’ filmmaking of our YouTube generation.
Weiner has compiled a raft of awards, including many DVDs of docs by her students, and is releasing updates in the form of video clips from the project. There is also a Facebook page with regular news as well.
Check out the video below and consider supporting what I’m sure will be an essential documentary on one of the great pioneers of independent film.
… Read the rest
Friday, December 9th, 2011
Boundary-busting filmmaker Cam Archer — one of Filmmaker‘s 25 New Faces and director of, most recently, Shit Year — is making his first doc, Criminal Thoughts. He talks about it and his career in an unguarded video for Kickstarter.
In the video, Archer is up-front about the exploratory nature of his project, which appeals to me. As more and more Kickstarter campaigns seem like pre-buys for existing products/projects, Cam’s appeal to us to assist him during his creative process is striking. From the page:
CRIMINAL THOUGHTS, my first feature length documentary, will be an exciting, creative departure for me. in the past, my work has been almost exclusively narrative. though i still consider all of that work to be of me, the fictional element, as far as i am concerned, builds a wall, or a mask, which keeps us from getting to know one another. i’d like to remove the mask and be as direct as possible. does this sound okay?
FIVE REAL CRIMES call to me each night… they’re tangled in my mind, actually. with your help, through my lens, i can begin to explore, investigate and re-imagine each of these crimes, their horrors. each investigation will take me some place new, places like: WASHINGTON STATE, INDIANA, OHIO, VIRGINIA, FLORIDA, CALIFORNIA and VIETNAM. yes, crime is everywhere. why?
the film will have one principal narrator, an actor, who will speak in the first person (as me), presenting new facts and old truths, as they are collected and exposed. additional narrators, or characters, will be presented throughout the film, as each new story or incident is introduced. inevitably, with actors lending their voices to real people, some of which are dead, there will be an unavoidable narrative element in the final film.
though this film will be, at its core, about crime, it will, inadvertently, also be a film about me, touching on my own personal obsessions and dark thoughts. projects like this are often labeled ‘personal documentaries,’ but i’d like to think that this project, at this point in time, is too new and undeveloped to be
… Read the rest
Sunday, December 4th, 2011
The vast wilderness of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) is a world away from the urban centers of China. Yet it is there that greater numbers of Chinese engineers are doing business. In the documentary Empire of Dust, featured in the “Panorama” section of this year’s International Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA), director Bram Van Paesschen explores the fraught relationship between the Congolese and the Chinese, as shown through their efforts to build a road between two major cities in the DRC.
In 2007, China and Congo signed a massive resources-for-infrastructure deal with projected revenues of $40-$120 billion. China endeavors to take on a wide range of development projects (including roads, hospitals, schools and airports) to be paid for by Congo’s immense copper and cobalt reserves. Though a promising deal for the Congolese– the majority of whom live on less than $1.25 a day– the deal’s lack of transparency has made it the subject of scrutiny for human rights organizations. Empire of Dust examines the human aspect of this exchange.
Director Bram Van Paesschen zeroes in on two employees of the China Railway Engineering Company (CREC): Lao Yang, the company’s Head of Logistics; and Eddy, his Congolese translator. The two visit construction sites around the country, overseeing a project marred by cultural misunderstandings. To make matters more interesting, Van Paesschen hails from Belgium, who under King Leopold II subjected Congo to one of the most brutal colonizations in history. Empire of Dust is a day-by-day account of globalization at work, wryly observed with humorous interstitials from a Congolese radio DJ invented by Van Paesschen himself.
Filmmaker sat down with Bram Van Paesschen in Amsterdam to talk about the inspiration for Empire of Dust, the implications of the China-Congo deal, and the future of the DRC moving forward.
Filmmaker: Was it your country’s history in the Congo that sparked your fascination with the subject?
Van Paesschen: It was kind of an accident. I never had this interest in Africa in general. I was working for television, and after I made a successful documentary for … Read the rest
Friday, December 2nd, 2011
Gregory Bayne, who has contributed some of the best, most rabble-rousing recent posts to this site — including the analytics-busting “When Should You Call Bulls@&T” — is in the final hours of a Kickstarter campaign for his documentary Bloodsworth, An Innocent Man. With less than 72 hours to go, he’s about 15K shy of his 25K goal. Tough numbers, but I’ve seen other campaigns pull it out. Bayne is a tough and passionate filmmaker who has the goods, as you’ll see from this demo video. Please check it out and if it interests you, consider helping by supporting his campaign. (And check out his near-manifesto from today’s Microbudget Conversation: “The Journeymen.”)
… Read the rest
Friday, November 18th, 2011
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Documentary Branch Screening Committee has announced the 15 film shortlist for the Best Documentary Oscar. The selections were culled from a list of 124 eligible titles.
Some Filmmaker favorites, including films by 25 New Face Directors Danfung Dennis (Hell and Back Again) and Marshall Curry (If a Tree Falls: A Story of the Earth Liberation Front) are in the mix, as are Wim Wender’s Pina, Suki Hawley and Michael Galinsky’s Battle for Brooklyn, and Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky’s Paradise Lost 3. I was sad to see more experimental docs like Bombay Beach and The Arbor left off the list and surprised by the omissions of The Interruptors and Senna.
The 15 films are listed below in alphabetical order by title, with their production company in parentheses and links to our coverage
Battle for Brooklyn (RUMER Inc.)
Bill Cunningham New York (First Thought Films)
Buck (Cedar Creek Productions)
Hell and Back Again (Roast Beef Productions Limited)
If a Tree Falls: A Story of the Earth Liberation Front (Marshall Curry Productions, LLC)
Jane’s Journey (NEOS Film GmbH & Co. KG)
The Loving Story (Augusta Films)
Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory (@radical.media)
Pina (Neue Road Movies GmbH)
Project Nim (Red Box Films)
Semper Fi: Always Faithful (Tied to the Tracks Films, Inc.)
Sing Your Song (S2BN Belafonte Productions, LLC)
Undefeated (Spitfire Pictures)
Under Fire: Journalists in Combat (JUF Pictures, Inc.)
We Were Here (Weissman Projects, LLC).… Read the rest
