AN INTERVIEW WITH D.P. MARTINA RADWAN

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

CANNES DIRECTORS DIRECTING 2010 |
By Livia Bloom

Each year, before the movies and parties and deals go down at the Cannes Film Festival, thousands of international participants go through the same steps. They complete their registration, receive the color-coded badge that designates their place in a screening hierarchy as rigid as that of a fascistl state, and pick up a mid-sized, branded satchel that holds, among reams of leaflets and ads, the official festival program. This is a slim, beautifully produced book—the 2010 edition is midnight blue—where each film in the Official Competition is given a full double-page spread. There is a portrait of the auteur behind each production in the upper right corner of each page; the directors are often posed behind cameras, or look broodingly into the distance as headphones cover their ears or encircle their necks. But this year, the mini-flipbook of directors’ photos illustrated something else: Of the 19 films in competition, four of them French, not one female director had been included.

It was an omission that clung like a burr to criticism of the competition films. With works like Catherine Breillat’s Bluebeard, Lucretia Martel’s The Headless Woman, and Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker among the most acclaimed films of 2009, and the top award at this year’s Sundance won a few short months ago by Debra Granik for Winter’s Bone, where were the women directors of Cannes 2010?

Outside of the main Competition slate, the problem persisted. Among the 19 films playing in the most prestigious non-Competition section, Certain Regard (Un Certain Régard), the only one was directed by a woman was Agnès Kocsis’s Adrienn Pál. Among the 22 films playing in the Cannes Classics section, the only one directed by a woman was Isabelle Partiot-Pieri’s Toscan (1954). Among the nine films playing outdoors for the public in the Cinéma de la Plage beach screenings (including JR’s Women are Heroes, 1983), a woman did not direct a single one.

One’s inner backseat driver (or backseat film curator) may find it tempting to point to the least successful of the selected festival films in frustration. It is simply … Read the rest