DAILY TIGER
NEDERLANDSE EDITIE Z.O.Z
39TH INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL ROTTERDAM #5 MONDAY 1 FEBRUARy 2010
photo: Ruud Jonkers
Tsai Ming-liang
Mirror man IFFR veteran Tsai Ming-liang recently converted to Buddhism; this had a profound effect on the making of his new film Visage, he tells Alain Devraux
Taiwanese auteur Tsai Ming-liang is generally known for his minimalist style. So the 141-minute Visage, commissioned by the Louvre, is something of an epic for him. The textured and colourful film tells the story of a filmmaker trying to film a version of Salome in the Paris museum. Filmic references, musical scenes, exuberance and melodrama abound in what Rotterdam programmers describe as a “wonderful mass of film pleasure exploding with excitement and ideas.” Window on the West
The scale of the work didn’t phase Tsai, he says. “There was a difficult period around the halfway mark, when we were trying to get the finances organised. It was a complex set-up tied in with dis-
tribution issues. That got complicated, but the producers dealt with it. The scale of the production was fine for me. In fact, the Louvre gave me all the freedom I needed – I had never had that much freedom on a film before.” Tsai says he did face an artistic challenge. The commission mandated that the film had to be shot in and around the Louvre, and he was a taken aback by the vastness of the cultural information held inside. “It houses such a huge collection of Western art,” says Tsai. “Even though I spent three years getting to know the Louvre, it still remained an unknown territory to me. I wasn’t sure how to approach the subject, as I didn’t feel comfortable commenting on Western art. But during the making of the film, I found an angle to make it work. I decided to start from my own experiences of watching Western films. Watching films – mainly French New Wave movies – gave me a window on the West. Movie references suddenly came to my aid and gave me a way to deal with the subject of the Louvre.”
HEAD ON
The narrative is pegged to a filmmaker’s attempt to shoot a version of the Biblical myth of Salome. Tsai decided to adapt the story to his own Eastern viewpoint. “I took an individual approach. It’s more of a Buddhist iteration of the Salome myth. It’s my own personal retelling of the myth that takes it away from Western Biblical portrayals of her.” Salome arrived in the film by chance, says Tsai: “I discovered a gallery which had many paintings of John the Baptist. I became interested in him. Then I found a gallery with a picture of Salome holding up his severed head. I found her a fascinating and intriguing woman. That is how she entered the film.” Tsai continues: “Over the last few years I have become more interested in Buddhism and have become a Buddhist. I think it connects with my life in all sorts of ways. I thought it would be interesting to approach John the Baptist’s character in a Buddhist way. There is a Buddhist saying that goes,
‘flowers in the mirror, the moon on water.’ This saying means that everything you have seen is not real. It’s a reflection of something. It’s an illusion. It would be really great if audiences who watch the film get a similar feeling from the experience.” A FOREST
Tsai says that he has built this philosophy into the mechanics of the film: “I use a lot of mirrors to give a sense of illusion. That’s especially true of the scene near the start, set in the garden. We used fifty mirrors for that. the Louvre garden doesn’t really have that many trees. But the way we positioned the mirrors made it look like a forest. That gives the scene a kind of fake look. I wanted that fake quality – I wanted the audience to be aware that they were watching a film, an illusion, not a reality.” Visage – Tsai Ming-liang Sat 6-2 12:30 CI4
Pavement artist Tiger competitor Levan Koguashvili’s poignant drugs drama Street Days depicts the plight of a ‘lost generation’ of his fellow Georgians. By Edward Lawrenson
There is a strong and vivid sense of place to Street Days, Georgian director Koguashvili’s touching drama set among middle-aged heroin addicts in modern-day Tbilisi. “I feel I’m best making films about things I know well,” says Kougashvili, explaining why he was drawn to the drifters and junkies whose lives he depicts with such affecting compassion. These Georgian men, he says, “belong to a lost generation. Like me, they grew up under the Soviet system and got used to a very ideal life. Materially it was OK, but the prosperity wasn’t built on labour or true values, so lots of young people were spoilt by this ideal life. So when the tough times came, in the 1990s, many of them got lost; since they had to use their energy somewhere, they turned to drugs or alcohol. For me it’s painful, I’ve seen too many people like this. It’s a very personal story, the story of my generation.” Ironically, it was in New York, at film school, that Levan Koguashvili decided to focus on Georgian subject matter. “I made a four-minute film there,”
Street Days
he says, “and the subject was a robbery in the street, but I didn’t understand why I was doing it: it was a human story, but I didn’t have enough connection to the characters. But the next project I did was about Georgian immigrants to New York, and I had an instant emotional connection: even when I was looking through the viewfinder, I knew how
to frame it emotionally – I knew the backgrounds of the people just by their faces. In order to make a strong movie you have to feel the texture of your characters’ lives and environments very well.” Koguashvili spoke to and befriended many of Tbilisi’s addicts while preparing Street Days: a research process that reveals his background in documenta-
ry. There’s a strong documentary impulse behind his decision to cast some of these real-life addicts in the film. “Many of them had problems remembering lines because they were thinking too much about drugs so I told them, forget about the lines, improvise. They got used to this style of working. It’s an additional headache in editing, but it works.” “The process was very nice,” he says of working with non-professionals. “They enjoyed the experience. The most important quality of direction – which is something I learned from documentaries – is you have to love the character you’re making the film about. And once you love them, they feel it,and they respond.” So what did they think of the film? “The general response was very good. Dealing with this subject matter, we have to be very careful. Some films about drugs glorify them. Even if you make a masterpiece, if one person gets an idea to experiment with drugs it’s not worth it – it’s such a foolish waste of time. So the biggest compliment was that these people, who had experience of drugs, felt that my film was against drugs.” VPRO Tiger Awards Competition Street Days – Levan Koguashvili Mon 01 19:00 PA4, Wed 03 13:00 PA1, Fri 05 10:15 PA4, Sat 06 19:00 PA4
One hump or two Harmony Korine has enjoyed success at IFFR in the past, winning the KNF award for Gummo in 1998 and presenting julien donkey-boy here two years later. But it’s the social side of Rotterdam that made the biggest impression, he tells Ben Walters
“I met this one girl when I was walking back to the hotel late at night,” he recalls. “She was like six months pregnant and drinking a beer and standing under a tree, and she had pulled her skirt up above her knees and she was sticking a fork in her anus. I asked what she was doing and she said her ass was very itchy. That’s one of the reasons I love coming to Rotterdam.” It’s a vignette somewhat in keeping with the tone of Korine’s latest film, Trash Humpers, a lo-fi ode to creative destruction, shot on VHS and edited on a couple of VCRs, in which Korine and various cronies in oldage make-up hang out, smash thing up, dance around and – yes – hump trash. “I was a child of the ‘80s and the first camera I had was a VHS camera,” Korine recalls. “I remember what it was like re-using the same cassette tapes, the way the image would degrade. This specific movie was supposed to mimic a found artefact, something found buried in a ditch or floating in a Ziploc bag
with blood on it, and I thought it would be nice to see it on VHS. I thought if we were doing it correctly it needed to be filled with glitches and mistakes, so that’s what we did, me and an editor sitting in a living room in our boxer shorts in summer.” As affectionate towards analogue technology as Korine is, even that came second to the joys of mayhem – as the numerous shots of old TV sets being bashed around attest. “The movie was mostly an ode to vandalism and destruction as a creative force,” Korine says. “The idea that blowing shit up is a beautiful thing. These guys transcend violence and become artists of mayhem. Part of it goes back to being a kid and remembering how good it felt to smash things.” Korine’s friend Cameron Jamie is also at IFFR with Massage the History, a short about an unconventional dance group in Alabama whose work partly inspired the dancing and humping in Korine’s film. “We thought they’d make a really good double bill,” he says. “The kind of thing that would make people jump out of windows and start humping trees.” Trash Humpers – Harmony Korine Mon 01 20:00 DJZ, Tue 02 20:15 CI4 Massage the History – Cameron Jamie
Harmony Korine
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photo: Corinne de Korver
Go with the flow Paz Fábrega talks to Ben Walters about her Tiger contender Agua fría de mar
Childhood and nature – two subjects often presented with sentimentality on film – receive more ambivalent treatment in Costa Rican director Paz Fábrega’s Tiger contender Agua fría de mar (Cold Water of the Sea). Mostly set around the country’s Pacific coast, the film – which benefited from Hubert Bals Fund backing – explores the peculiar relationship that develops between a young Costa Rican on holiday with her fiancé and a seven-year-old runaway girl she meets near the water. Favouring low light and wide compositions and paying attention to children’s capacity for irresponsibility and nature’s potential for danger – the film’s title refers to a treatment for water snake venom – it’s an unusual, even unsettling work, rooted in small mo-
ments. “I’m a little bit against cuteness and empty beauty,” says Fábrega. “I was interested in those things in kids that are a bit threatening to adults. Sometimes nature can be a bit scary too.” Although much of this atmosphere was deliberate, other aspects evolved contingently. “The strange subjects like the snakes, the strange location, strange children’s games – that was intentional,” says Fábrega. “But the general atmosphere is a bit more distanced than I expected. We had a complicated shoot. I work with non-professional actors and I think they need a very intimate atmosphere to do what I like them to do. But we had more of a traditional shoot. A professional crew expects actors to perform on cue, so lots of things were shot wider than planned because we didn’t have much time.” Fábrega was also interested in offering something other than clichéd notions of Costa Rica. “I wanted to
show something that felt more like my impression of those places,” she says. “There are people in the country! When you see the tourist shots, it’s all nature and
Agua fría de mar
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animals. You never see the beaches full of kids enjoying themselves.” The country’s relatively undeveloped filmmaking infrastructure brought both frustrations and opportunities. “We don’t have film labs or a lot of equipment or crews with a lot of feature experience,” Fábrega says. “It would be silly to try to make films in a very traditional way in Costa Rica. The results would be mediocre. But it’s easy to shoot there – not too much paperwork, not too many permits – and the films I’d like to make are in between fiction and documentary. It could be great as long as you use the things that are there rather than going against them.” VPRO Tiger Awards Competition Agua fría de mar – Paz Fábrega Mon 01 21:30 PA4 , Tue 02 21:45 PA1, Wed 03 12:15 DJZ (Press & Industry) , Thu 04 13:30 PA3, Sat 06 13:00 PA1
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Pitching Africa Representatives of the Durban Film Office and the Durban International Film Festival are in Rotterdam to promote the inaugural Durban FilmMart, to take place in July 2010. Nick Cunningham reports
The event will follow closely the Rotterdam market model and Durban staff are hopeful that it will act as a project feeder for CineMarts of the future. On a not unrelated side-note, Rotterdam and Durban share twinned status. “We at the Durban Film Festival [DIFF] really want to promote African cinema – that’s one of the most important things we can do, ”says DIFF manager Nashen Moodley. “But we have found over the years that it’s increasingly difficult to promote African cinema, because there is so little African cinema. And Africa gets too little attention, which is why Rotterdam is making such a big effort this year to bring our cinema to the forefront. At the same time, you have to realise that you cannot hang around waiting for great African films to land in your lap. So, as a festival, we think it is very important to play a more proactive role in attracting and getting these African films made.”
Nashen Moodley, Peter Rorvik and Toni Monty
Continental cooperation
Durban Film Office (DFO) CEO Toni Monty confirmed she is looking to secure between ten and twenty outstanding projects for the event’s closed Finance Forum pitching event, and a further twenty
photo: Tobias Davidson
to thirty for the Producers’ Forum, which will entail a pitching and packaging workshop and conference programme. Immediately following IFFR, DFO and DIFF personnel will spread the word in Berlin and Discop Africa (Dakar), with the aim of luring
Chair dances
Going underground
Cameron Jamie’s Massage the History marks a cinematic step forward for the experimental filmmaker and artist, he tells Richard James Havis
Kate Taylor of Electric Sheep magazine and Abandon Normal Devices festival considers IFFR’s hip credentials
Seriously Rotterdam, have you discovered oil? What is with the never-ending excavation round the Centraal Station? Returning for my third year, it seems like the construction work consists of creating a maze leading – eventually – to De Doelen. Gripe over, and onto today’s burning question – is IFFR still cool? I don’t mean this in the form of a prescribed aesthetic that would be scorned by the silver haired festerati (and indeed an early highlight has been the elaborate hipster death scenes in Red, White and Blue), but rather the foxy charm of imagining cinema from a multitude of angles. While many fests stagnate in red carpet atrophy, the velocity of ideas here is what turns a cinephile’s head. Alongside the shark-like movement from one screening to another, I’m seeking moments of wonder. And if these are often found in surprising places, their context always feels deeply considered. So far such pleasures have ranged from the odd – David Kame Tsai introducing Kanibal Seijin with a rubber bag over his head – to the pastoral – Alistair Roberts’ folk singing with Luke Fowler’s 16mm accompaniment at the Break Even Store. The store itself is a fine example of institutional critique more familiar in contemporary art discourse. And if I trust anyone to pioneer the cultural and political future of film exhibition, it is the impassioned rabble at the Kino Climates summit. The heat generated by IFFR’s constant invention was a huge inspiration when starting the Abandon Normal Devices festival in Liverpool last year. It amply compensates for the occasional disappointing film and offers plenty of reason to take a risk on the fringes. In conclusion: Still cool. Meanwhile, I’ve got a theory on the roadworks. Inspired by the (literally) underground cinemas found in the Paris catacombs in 2004, IFFR is secretly digging a brand new venue for next year’s festival.
top-level industry executives to the event. Monty confirmed that her immediate priority is to have between twenty and thirty key financiers from the global industry in place before Durban doors open for business in July. “Durban is a very African city,” she commented. “This is a wonderful opportunity to create a platform for African filmmakers to access, and hopefully get some product out into, the global market.” DIFF director Peter Rorvik commented before the 2010 IFFR: “By providing a funding and co-production forum, the Durban FilmMart aims to redress the paucity of film production on this continent and make a vital contribution to film financing and industry development in a time where stability and growth is sadly sporadic. The FilmMart aims to be a place for film financiers to locate fundable African projects and encourage project collaboration between African filmmakers from different African countries. The enthusiasm and support of the DFO and the city of Durban for this partnership initiative is an encouraging acknowledgment of the potential this project offers in terms of international and continental cooperation in the development of the film industry.”
David Dusa
photo: Nadine Maas
CineMart ProDusa Producer David Dusa has a hectic schedule of CineMart meetings, each demanding a different pitch, he tells Nick Cunningham
“It’s quite strange to pitch a project that’s already been shot,” pointed out producer David Dusa yesterday as he raced from his hotel to prepare for the first of his fifty-five scheduled CineMart meetings. Dusa’s complex and highly contemporary project Fleurs du Mal (Flowers of Evil), dubbed “a 21st-century love story steeped in the internet and tangled up in history”, was written in July 2009 when Dusa had – he claims – a spare bit of budget to use. “I wrote the script around the constraints of the budget I had in place,” he comments. “I wanted to do it. I get tired of waiting.” In Dusa’s film, a young woman from the Tehran bourgeoisie is sent into Parisian exile as protection against the political violence in Iran. Through the internet and social-networking sites, she remains in
Script to screen Tomorrow, veteran recipient of Hubert Bals Fund support Malaysian filmmaker Woo Ming Jin will field questions from hopeful HBF applicants during a case study at the Sales & Industry Club (10am). HBF coordinator Janneke Langelaan will host this inaugural assessment – entitled ‘In Conversation’ with HBF – of how best to work with
close touch with the continually worsening situation and – together with a man with whom she falls in love – is forced to take a momentous decision. A Binger alumnus with a background that underpins his co-pro credentials – he was born in Budapest, grew up in Sweden and South Africa and studied in both Gothenburg and Paris – Dusa pitched his project France at the Rotterdam co-production market in 2008. “At CineMart, you’re normally pitching a story that can take hours and hours to explain, but this year with Fleurs du Mal I can just show a picture and say ‘it looks like this’,” Dusa stresses. “But being in a big room with all these meetings going on around you doesn’t always seem like the right time and place to show your footage. So now I’m on my way to the first meeting and I’m thinking about the most efficient way to do all this. Fifty-five meetings – that’s 27 hours. But people you meet have different interests in your film, so I always try to vary my pitch. If you don’t, you go crazy.”
the Fund, from initial application through to festival screening. Woo’s Woman on Fire Looks for Water, screening today in Spectrum, benefited from a €20,000 HBF Digital Production Support grant, given to projects budgeted up to €100,000. In 2007, Woo’s The Elephant and the Sea benefited from script development and post-production support valued at €10,000 and €30,000 respectively. “We want to use this opportunity to allow
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Cameron Jamie’s work delves behind the closed doors of suburban life to discover strange rituals. BB documented the lives of backyard teenage wrestlers, while Spook House depicted some unusual Halloween rituals. Cameron’s latest, the 10-minute Massage the History, features some male dancers who perform exotic and erotic dances in their living room in Alabama. Sometimes they upload the dances to the internet, sometimes they don’t. Jamie came across the dancers by accident, he says: “I was researching gangs, as I was interested in how gangs document themselves on YouTube. These guys had the ‘gang’ tag associated with their videos. I was suddenly faced with these incredible performances. I went to Alabama and shot them dancing. They film themselves dancing and post the results on the internet because they are bored. It’s kind of Merce Cunningham pushed to another level – a kind of urban ballet.” The dancing is not connected to any urban Black dance forms, such as breakdance. “It’s a weird form of personal expression that they came up with because they were bored and because they didn’t have a woman there,” he says. “It’s an expression of fantasy. It goes beyond sex … I can’t look at chairs the same way anymore after making this film. I got sent an IKEA catalogue at home, and I thought it was pornography.” Jamie feels that the aesthetics of the film mark it as a step forward for his work: “It’s my most cinematic film. I made this differently from my other films. I planned it out to be a cinematic experience. I think it’s a big step forward for my filmmaking.” Massage The History – Cameron Jamie
Mon 1-2 11:45 LA1
informal questions about all aspects of Hubert Bals funding, including how the money can be spent,” commented Langelaan. “Ming Jin is the perfect example for filmmakers considering applications, as he has applied successfully for support at all levels.” NC ‘In Conversation’ with HBF, Sales & Industry Club
4th Floor, De Doelen, 10am.
5
Awaiting the tail The long tail hasn’t yet arrived, Teun Hilte of Content Republic – in Rotterdam today to give a talk on Digital Distribution at the Rotterdam Lab – tells Geoffrey Macnab
The independent film community has embraced long-tail theory with enthusiasm. Applied to the movie business, this is the idea that niche movies selling in small quantities can still generate significant profits via new digital distribution initiatives. “The long tail is definitely possible in the future. I don’t think the theory is a write-off,” the Content Republic boss comments. “But considering the amount of resources and time that go into digitising and distributing films digitally, it is prohibitive for a lot of films, because the revenues aren’t there.” Content Republic licences films on internet platforms. It acts as an intermediary between independent distributors and major internet platforms like iTunes, Netflix, Amazon, YouTube and Lovefilm. Hilte describes the company, founded in 2006, as a digital equivalent to a wholesaler supplying product to major retailers. Digitisation
Hilte will be telling young producers in Rotterdam to take digital releasing more seriously. This means providing adequate promotional materials and trailers in decent formats. “It’s agonising how often we are chasing materials that are somehow quite elusive and that we need to complete the package and deliver it to our partners,” Hilte notes. “There is a direct correlation between the success of a film and the amount of materials that are available to promote it online.” The main platforms remain very selective about which movies they will make available on their platforms. If the materials are not of a good enough quality, the
Teun Hilte
photo: Nadine Maas
platforms are likely to reject the movies. Hilte says that a feature film of an average length costs a distributor around £300 to digitise through Content Republic. There is also a charge of £150 each time the film has to be delivered. Content Republic also works on a revenue share model. In this case, the distributor does not pay anything at all. Content Republic will take care of the online marketing, digitisation and storage in exchange for a share of revenue. “In a lot of cases, smaller distributors have opted for that. They’re unsure what revenues are going to come back, and they would rather that we share their risk with them,” Hilte says. “We are prepared to do that but not on all films… I don’t mind telling you that some films we have worked on have barely made enough for lunch.”
Vive l’auteur! Unifrance has announced a new online French film festival. Geoffrey Macnab reports
Régine Hatchondo, director general of Unifrance, has revealed details of the French promotional film agency’s plans to set up a new “online French film festival.” The first edition is likely to take place in December of this year, and feature a short film competition and a competition for features. Various awards will be on offer, including an audience award and a foreign press award. The films will be screened with English and Spanish subtitles. “We will have a majority of films directed by Régine Hatchondo
photo: Corinne de Korver
young talents, first or second-time directors, because generally they have difficulty in finding foreign markets,” Hatchondo says of the online festival’s emphasis on tyro auteurs. Audiences from all around the world will be able to watch the films for a likely charge of €2 for streaming each title. Hatchondo was speaking in Rotterdam this weekend, where she was accompanying a sizeable French contingent to the Festival, led by directors such as François Ozon, Luc Moullet and Eugène Green. Unifrance is also planning initiatives to boost the visibility of French cinema in various new territories. Hatchondo revealed that, in 2010/2011, Unifrance will be organising “French film festival” events in Vietnam, Kazakhstan and various countries of the Mahgreb (including Tunisia and Algeria), and possibly Poland. Unifrance will take filmmakers, actors and industry figures to these events. Unifrance has an annual budget of around €9 million. “For the moment, the budget is more or less the same as last year, but we know we have to try to find more private partners,” says Hatchondo. However, she acknowledged that Unifrance may need to make savings in the face of tough economic times. Hatchondo, erstwhile cultural adviser to Paris Mayor Bertrand Delanoe and former general manager of Cannes’ Quinzaine, took up her new position at Unifrance last year. Asked about her observations of Rotterdam, Hatchondo commented that she admired the auteur-driven approach of the festival. Rotterdam doesn’t place great emphasis on stars or red carpet events. That, Hatchondo suggests, is a “good policy.” “It’s very important to show young talents, young directors and real auteur films,” she states. “I think that Rotterdam is completely right in its policy in the type of films it wants to show and defend.”
Multi-platform releasing
This isn’t necessarily a reflection on the films. It is more a sign of how “immature” the movie download market remains. In the UK or Holland, Hilte
suggests, “if you asked anybody in the street, you would be hard pressed to find anybody who is familiar with downloading films and paying for them and who does so on a regular basis.” However, Hilte believes this will eventually change. Content Republic recently struck a deal with UK production outfit Warp to handle Shane Meadows’ Le Donk & Scor-zay-zee. “We know he has a big following in the UK and we know we can target that online… we can find his fan base.” The Content Republic co-founder is also confident that mutli-platform releasing will become more and more commonplace. “Most of the distributors and exhibitors in the theatrical space or even on DVD are increasingly accepting that, whether you like it or not, films are going to be available online from day one. It’s pointless to say that you are going to artificially enforce windows when actually those windows are already annihilated by the fact that the film is available.” Hilte argues that a multi-platform release has “a big upside” for distributors, enabling them to collapse marketing budgets and cross-promote films. Here in Rotterdam, Hilte’s message for producers is upbeat. “Ultimately, it’s about the product. We love to hear from filmmakers directly and will gladly look at their films… a good film will always find distribution.”
Living on a volcano Lebanese director Dima El-Horr tells Geoffrey Macnab about the paradoxical position of filmmakers in her home country
Lebanese director Dima El-Horr is in Rotterdam this week presenting Chaque jour est une fête (Every Day is a Holiday). The film (screening in Bright Future) is about three women who are on their way by bus to a prison far from the city, going to visit their men-folk. The film isn’t set in a specific period. However, El-Horr’s screenplay is steeped in her memories of the Civil War in Lebanon and of the 2006 war, when the country was invaded by Israel. “My memories became like a dream. This is how my film is – it juggles between dream and reality, nightmares and reality. These three women are very strong. They refuse the stagnation that the country offers them. You feel that people walk, walk, but all they do is go back to the starting point,” the writer-director reflects. “You even feel that the earth these women walk on smells of death.” El-Horr doesn’t foreground the atrocity and violence that have marred recent Lebanese history, but viewers are always aware of it. “The war is always present in my films, but it’s always in the background. You don’t see it but you feel it,” she says. “We live in a country where, even though the war has ended, it is still there. We always feel
Dima El-Horr
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it. It’s part of our daily lives. We feel like we are on a volcano and that at any moment it can erupt.” As El-Horr’s experiences attest, these are paradoxical times for filmmakers in Lebanon. On the one hand, there are many talented directors who’ve been feted on the international festival circuit: Nadine Labaki, Zlad Doueiri, Danielle Arbid, Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige and Philippe Aractingi among them. On the other hand, the Lebanese government isn’t supportive of its own filmmaking talent. “In Lebanon, we don’t have a structured industry… the government is not interested at all in cinema. They feel that, for people who are making cinema, it is a hobby. We are all obliged to leave the country to look for foreign production.” Chaque jour est une fête, which has just opened in France, was put together as a French/German/ Lebanese co-production. In the end, Lebanese involvement was minimal. El-Horr spent five years getting the production off the ground. She is now working on a screenplay for a new feature, again about three women. This time, the setting will be her home city, Beirut. “I have lived all my life in Beirut. It’s an extremely complex city,” the writerdirector states. “It’s very important for me to work there.” – Dima El-Horr Mon 01 09:30 CI1, Sat 06 12:15 CI3
Chaque jour est une fête
photo: Corinne de Korver
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Light And LIFE New York filmmaker Jim Jennings’ 16mm shorts are inspired by light and city life, he tells Richard James Havis
New York filmmaker Jim Jennings may document his city, but that doesn’t stop his work having a strong abstract quality. Short films such as Wall Street and Fashion Avenue have New York districts as their subjects, but Jennings’ focus is on form, line and – most importantly – light. “My work is a combination of abstract and documentary filmmaking,” explains Jennings. “The subject matter is central to the film. It’s not purely formal abstract images I’m working with, so there is a humanistic quality. I’m interested in the working class of New York, and how people are surviving. But abstraction interests me, too. My films look at the interplay between these two worlds.” Helpful
Jennings works as a plumber, and he has integrated his filmmaking with his work. “My job means that I’m moving around a lot. I spend a lot of time alone in a van or walking. I carry a camera with me and if the light is how I want it to be, I shoot. I like to work in direct sunlight, because of the shadows that are cast. I’ve worked in the rain and in cloudy conditions, but essentially I am interested in light and shadow. Light inspires me. Sometimes I can’t concentrate on my work because the light is so dramatic and inspiring it’s difficult not to think about filming.” The anonymity of the New York streets allows Jennings to film without hassle, he says. But he has also found the city’s inhabitants unexpectedly helpful: “Wall Street was shot from a city bus. I would shoot on the bus at lunch hour, because the shadows would fall vertically up the Avenue at that particular time in the autumn. I needed to get the last seat on the left so that I could open that window and shoot down on to the sidewalk. Sometimes people would be sitting in that seat and I’d give them a couple of dollars to move. They would usually do it. People are helpful in New York if they see you are trying to do something.”
Jim Jennings
temporal
Jennings doesn’t let his camera linger; his shots are short and his editing very fast. The film is composed in the camera, not in the editing room, he says: “I tend to cut in the camera. Filming is temporal, like music. It’s not a still art form. I think of filming as similar to playing a piano; the essence rests in the act of filming in the same way that it rests in the act of playing. It would be impossible for me to make these films in the editing room. I do cut the film – I usually cut about
photo: Ramon Mangold
1,000 feet down to 400 feet – but the essence of the work has already set during the actual filming.” Ephemeral
The ephemeral quality of light makes it a difficult master, Jennings says: “I’ve had bad days. I sometimes get out there to film a sunny day and a huge grey cloud suddenly covers the sky. I know that the light that inspired me will not be there the next day. That makes me very unhappy and my wife has to deal with a lot of
emotional grief. I have to tell myself that there will be other sunny days to film. But the next sunny day won’t be exactly the same as the one I missed.” A collection of Jennings’ shorts screens this afternoon, accompanied by audio recordings made in Rotterdam by Dutch musician and artist Rutger Zuydervelt. Jim Jennings – NYC & Field Recordings
Jim Jennings & Rutger Zuydervelt Mon 01 14:15 LA2