“WAR DON DON” AT STRANGER THAN FICTION

By Mary Anderson Casavant

While introducing War Don Don at last night’s Stranger Than Fiction, SXSW programmer Janet Pierson said that while many great documentaries were submitted to last year’s festival, there were few with the “clarity” of Rebecca Richman Cohen’s directorial debut. It was a sentiment later echoed by Raphaela Neihausen, the executive director of Stranger than Fiction who praised Richman Cohen for her ability to “break down a complex issue” but still keep the “nuance.”

Three years in the making, War Don Don follows the UN Special trial of Issa Sesay, one of the leaders of the RUF, an incredibly violent rebel group in Sierra Leone. Although we know that Sesay will be convicted from the very beginning, Richman-Cohen finds an incredible amount of drama by questioning whether or not that conviction was fair. Structured like a trial, War Don Don follows both the zealous prosecutor who sees no grey and the sympathetic defense attorney (with movie star good looks) who sees nothing but. As the two sides construct their competing versions of Sesay’s story, we realize that the truth about Sesay is probably forever beyond our grasp. One of the most viscerally compelling documentaries of the year, it will leave you haunted.

I spoke to Richman-Cohen before the screening.

Filmmaker: I noticed in your biography that you have an unusual background for a filmmaker – you went to law school, not film school. When did you decide you wanted to make documentaries?

Richman-Cohen: In law school, I worked at the court where the trial takes place. During that time, I came to know people who were involved in the trial, and I thought they were fascinating. Having worked there, I thought I might have some great access…Also, I felt that the subject of international criminal justice, these trials and the complexities of how they operate, had been largely ignored. The story wasn’t going to get told unless I told it.

Filmmaker: As a first time filmmaker, how did you get started?

Richman-Cohen: It wasn’t that I had no filmmaking background. I had worked as an assistant editor on Fahrenheit 911… Read the rest

25 NEW FACES – PART 2

By Filmmaker Staff

Jason Byrne

When we caught up with filmmaker Jason Byrne to include him in this year’s “25,” it was via e-mail from Tanzania. At the sa me time Byrne’s hypnotic experimental documentary Scrap Vessel winds its way along the festival circuit, he is working as an audio/visual archivist for the United Nations Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. “Living in East Africa for the last two years has been a deeply rich experience, and this job has been fascinating but psychologically difficult at times, especially when listening to the many graphically explained testimonies from witnesses to the genocide,” he writes.

Byrne has worked previously as an archivist in Los Angeles, and he also graduated from the Film/Video Masters program at CalArts, where he “received a lot of help in understanding space and time from filmmakers Betzy Bromberg and James Benning.” His understanding of the relationship between film practice and historical memory informed Scrap Vessel, which was his thesis project at CalArts. The film takes place on the final voyage of a former Chinese-owned freighter ship on its way to the breaking yards of Chittagong, Bangladesh. As he explains, “I shot this film in the frame of mind of being alienated from the rest of the crew and of trying to capture my initial understanding of the new environment. Maybe the film is the reverse of an anthropological study. Once I began editing, I realized I also wanted the film to reflect the memories I had aboard the ship, which I created by manipulating shots to give them a dreamlike image. By manipulation, I was able to capture a stronger state of sublime (technically by building heavy contrast by rephotographing the print over and over again), along with sound of Albert Ortega’s haunted-like score, to capture the traces of memory that leave me continuously with the surreal vision of being aboard the vessel. Also, I was interested in creating a similar haunted feeling with the use of the dusty archival material left over from the former mainland Chinese crew, which is interspersed throughout the film, that includes 16mm motion pictures of 1970s/’80s … Read the rest

25 NEW FACES

By Filmmaker Staff

The 25 new faces of independent film.