Louise-Édith Hébert and Marguerite Bilodeau, photo Marie-Pierre Savard
Over the past two weeks, we launched my French-language film on the Raging Grannies and Mémés Déchaînées, Les super-mémés. It premiered on the 20th of March as closing film for the Human rights film festival in Montreal, at the Park Cinema, and we had another launch screening in Quebec City at the Musée de la Civilisation. The film was produced by Isabelle Couture at Films de l’Isle and is distributed by Vidéo-femmes, based in Quebec City. We were able to make the film thanks to the support of Canal Vie, and more precisely Line Richard, now at the French production branch at the NFB. For several years, Line was the only person in the television world who supported this project while it was turned down by numerous English-language broadcasters. It is very heartwarming, after all the difficulties we had finding the funding, to see that the film is very well received both by journalists and audiences. Radio Host Paul Houde at FM 98,5 said: ‘This is a super film which makes you feel like being more of a delinquent as you grow old.’
Guinea pig detectives cover page. Illustration by Pierre Durand.
Together with my friend and colleague Patricia Bergeron I spent last week in intensive consultations about cross-platform documentaries – meaning documentaries which aren’t just a film or a TV program but also play themselves out on the web, including in the social networks. ( Cross-platform or transmedia is different from multi-platform in that the content actually varies from one platform to the other, making for complementary parts of a greater whole.) With our project Guineapig Detectives – about citizen investigations of new forms of advertising – Patricia and I were finalists in the Reboot competition organized by DOC Canada. I will tell you more about our project at a later date but the graphics will give you some hints. As finalists we had the privilege of several sessions with pioneers of multi-platform production and even ARG‘s – alternate reality games. Among the mentors were moderator and Reboot organizer Brett Gaylor ( the director of Rip! A Remix Manifesto), Evan Jones of Stich media, Katarina Cizek who made a Filmmaker-in-Residence at the National Film Board and Lance Wieler, a partner in Seize the Media. You can actually see presentations by these people on the DOC web site, along with the keynote by digital distribution pioneer Robert Greenwald. Since Patricia is herself a new media expert ( lots of good material on her blog about the subject !), I am sure I learned more than anyone else during this week which ended very well indeed, because Patricia and I actually won the coast-to-coast competition ! Thanks Jessica Berglund and Franck Le Coroller for research help with the project.
A documentary filmmaker in Canada today might be forgiven for being discouraged. The combined impact of the crisis of television, the more general economic crisis, and the Conservative government’s policies are having a devastating impact on our traditional sources of funding. There is definitely a ‘paradigm shift’ underway. New models of production and financing will surely emerge, but the transition is in many ways painful and the future uncertain. One way or the other I strongly believe there will still be a place and a role for documenting what goes on in society, and for making films which will contribute to public debate. And I would say, observing my own decision-making process so to speak, that I am in the process of finding new directions. In addition to one more traditional film project, I am beginning to explore multi-platform production ( more on that another day) and filmmaking for the web. In this process, I am learning a lot from my younger colleagues and not the least my interns.
I meant to participate in the short film competition about public service, organized by the CSN – deadline a few days ago. But my plans fell through due to the absolutely exceptional circumstance of no substantial snow fall in Montreal for almost a month. ( Last year we had four meters of snow !) Nonetheless, I extend my heartfelt thanks to the Société de Transport de Montréal and their employees who generously helped me prepare for a shoot which had to be put off to another year. On the other hand i will participate in the short film competition Roots, organized by RCI. This is a terrific idea, an initiative which will allow Canadian citizens from different background to tell their stories – or the stories of others, as you can already see on their web site. My contribution will be a video-letter to my daughter Béthièle who was born in Haiti and whose tenth birthday pretty much coincides with the competition deadline.
Ebbe the movie by Jane Magnusson and Karin af Klintberg
The nominations for the Swedish Guldbagge, the equivalent of Quebec’s Jutras were very interesting. In the documentary category Ebbe the movie by Jane Magnusson and Karin af Klintberg is a fascinating film about Publisher Ebbe Carlson, a larger-than life character whose social climbing and political manipulations during several were so complex that it’s impossible to distinguish fact from fiction. Wisely, the filmmakers don’t try doing that, opting instead for an exploration of ambiguities and contradictions. And they got the award. Videocracy by Eric Gandini ( who also made Surplus and Sacrificio) takes us behind the scenes of Berlusconi’s media & political power grabs and corrupt schemes in Italy. The Queen and I, which I personally liked less, tells the story of Swedish-Iranian filmmaker Nahid Persson-Sarvestani’s relationship to the former Queen of Iran Farah Diba and the recent history of that country.
It’s interesting to see that two of these films were made by swedes born outside of Sweden. And overall in this years Swedish Jutras, the women had the majority of the important nominations. Not only among the documentarians ( 2 out of three for best documentary), but also in fiction: 2 out or 3 of the directors ( Lisa Siwe got the nod) and 2 out of 3 script writers. According to a film industry agreement, signed in 2006, the women “should” receive at least 40% of the subventions for script, directing and production. So far the goals haven’t been reached (it’s still between 20 to 30%) and the Swedish organization WIFT demands a change into making the 40% obligatory.
For more information, contact: info@wift.se
We are all of course terribly sad about the tragedy in Haiti – our family not the least since we have a daughter who lived her first years in Port au Prince. I of course encourage everyone to contribute money to the relief and reconstruction efforts.
Among the many film crews now in Port au Prince there is one which has a particularly interesting documentary mandate: Inside Disaster. Conceptually planned and negotiated well ahead of the Haiti earthquake, it will allow for both complexity and follow-up.
“The website that is up now is Phase 1 of the overall web plan for the film – we’re developing a much larger version that will launch alongside the doc at the end of this year. It’s intended to be a community and educational resource for people interested in the world of humanitarian aid – we’ll have debates, data visualization materials and a glossary, all illustrated with photos and video from this website and of course, the film. To encourage redistribution, we’re taking the creative commons, “open” approach to all the current content on the site and using tools like Flickr and YouTube for distribution. Our site is currently funded by TVO, Bell Fund (Development funding), and the CTF Digital Fund.”
Some people have raised questions about the impact of numerous camera crews using precious resources in Haiti presently.
On the DOC Canada discussion forum, Katie had this to say:
“the bigger picture problem is that the huge influx of international media creates an artificially inflated market for everyday supplies – gasoline, fixers, cars, bottled water, etc. The “internationals” will pay whatever it takes, and that pushes prices for essentials out of the reach of everyday people. Yesterday’s NYT is reporting that a bottle of water in the downtown markets is now going for $6 – prices like that force people to be dependent on aid, even if they have the resources to be self-sufficient in a “normal” Haitian economy.
So, that is definitely a legit criticism that can apply to our team and the rest of the media down there.
The flipside, of course, is that the huge media presence is driving a record amount of donations into aid organizations; these donations matter, and their numbers are directly tied to media coverage. Our team is going to be there until February 16th, long after most of the international media has gone home.
They’re also going back in six months to film a follow-up on the recovery. And then when the film is released early next year – likely one year after the event – it will bring Haiti and its reconstruction back into the spotlight in Canada, and hopefully internationally.
So: we’re primarily storytellers, not fundraisers, but we’re glad when the two get tied together (which is why we have a IFRC donation button on our site).”
I just saw the filmThe Informant! labeled a dark comedy, directed by Steven Soderbergh, starring Matt Damon, based on the 2000 non-fiction book by the same name by journalist Kurt Eichenwald. It tells the story of a bumbling whistleblower who takes on the management of the giant agribusiness corporation he works for, but who is too naive and too compromised by his own complicity in the corporate game to succeed. Indeed, at the end of the movie he ends up in jail.
I often find fiction films more inspiring than documentaries when it comes to structure, style and texture, and this is one example. ( Another fairly recent one, which I loved for the style of shooting and editing, was Enemy of the State.) You can learn an awful lot from watching The Informant! about the amount of complexity a film can handle, about character development and ‘narrative economy’ and about a creative and entertaining way to convey the thoughts of the main character.
In addition, I have a long-standing interest in the role and fate of whistleblowers who play a key role in the fight for accountability and democracy. I sometimes discuss these issues with the Executive director of FAIR ( The Federal Accountability Initiative for Reform) David Hutton.
David has this to say about The Informant! :
“Yes I did see the movie, and it was very entertaining. However, although Mark Whitacre helps expose a massive corporate fraud, he turns out to be a delusional fraudster trying to cover his own tracks with layer upon layer of untruths. This makes him completely unlike any whistleblower that I know.
The common characteristic that I have found among whistleblowers is personal integrity. They are ordinary people whose personal values simply would not allow them to collude in wrongdoing that would harm others. So they feel compelled to speak out even though this puts their own careers at risk. Even when their careers have been ruined, they often express no regrets, saying that they felt they had no choice but to do what they did. So in my mind the word ‘whistleblower’ is synonymous with ‘truth-teller’. Thank goodness that there are so many of them: they typically pay dearly for their courage, but the world would be a poorer and more dangerous place without them.”
The personal crises typical of the whistleblower experience are well rendered in another Soderbergh film, Erin Brockowich, one whose strength lies more in the writing and in the performances than in the visual treatment. Brockovich, as played by Julia Roberts, gets so caught up in her inquiry into corporate wrongdoing that she starts neglecting her children and her lover. When she receives a threatening phone call, it leads to increased stress and separation. The personal crisis theme is even more developed in The Insider, where Jeff Wigand (played by Russell Crowe) is subjected to all manner of blackmail,threats, intimidation and violence, with disastrous consequences for his family life. Again, the story line of The Insider stayed very close to the real life story, as told in the Vanity Fair article on which the film was based.
Thanks to Jessica Berglund and David Hutton for help with this post.
A couple of days ago, I had the opportunity to once again see Burma VJ, one of the most remarkable documentaries from last year. The film documents the use of small digital cameras by courageous Video Journalists – VJ’s – to reveal what goes on inside the Burmese dictatorship.With digital cameras and satellite uploads it is possible to distribute images worldwide within hours. Working with the Democratic Voice of Burma, a non-profit media organization based in Norway where it gets some of its funding, these courageous video activists do just this. Their work made all the difference during the 2007 uprising led by buddhist monks across the country. Although international news crews were banned and the Internet shut down, images of both the protests and the repression were quickly communicated to the outside world. This striking footage made the newscasts on major networks including the BBC and CNN. This was in stark contrast to the successful information blackout during the student revolt twenty years ago, in 1988. So, as we have seen with the use of digital images and Twitter messages in Iran recently, courage and technology can be a powerful force for social and political change.
Burma VJ by Danish filmmaker Anders Ostergaard, produced by Magic Hour Films, combines VJ footage with some recreations of their ‘tactical leader’ Joshua directing operations over the phone. As the threat of life imprisonment and even death becomes very tangible for the VJ activists, the tension in the film is almost unbearable.
Burma VJ was shown last fall at the Rencontres Internationales du Documentaire de Montréal in the presence of Khin Maung Win who is one of the leaders of The Democratic Voice of Burma. My assistant Alexander and I took advantage of the opportunity to ask him about the use of small video cameras.
Burma VJ has won some 30 International awards, the latest being the Grierson Best Documentary Award in Britain. The film is now on a short-list for best documentary at the Academy Awards. The finalists will be announced on February 2nd. I’m hoping that Burma VJ will be among them, because not only is this a cause that deserves all the attention it can get, but because it is also truly a great film.
Thanks for the help with this blog post to Alexander Carson and Jessica Berglund.
This is about a film which was nominated in three categories at the recent Rencontres internatinales du documentaire de Montreal, and which I saw at Cinema Parallèle the other day. Very much à propos, as the Copenhagen climate change conference enters the real negotiating stage. The film, H2Oil by Shannon Walsh (Loaded Pictures), is about the incredibly wasteful and polluting oil sands industry in Northern Alberta and its impact on both people and the environment. It struck me how similar this film is to my own first films, somewhere midway between a journalistic ‘dossier noir’ and a dramatically structured film. The footage of the tar sands is depressingly impressive, and some of the characters are excellent, including a doctor who shows real civil courage and some very touching aboriginal people from the most affected community, Fort Chipewayan.
I asked Shannon a couple of questions.
Shannon Walsh, the director of H2Oil.
·This is a huge subject which one would think would attract a lot of television journalists and filmmakers – have there been other films?
I was really shocked that there weren’t really any feature length films on the subject. There had been a doc aired on CBC called “Tar Sands: The Selling of Alberta” while we were still filming, and there were a couple of pro-industry pieces that had been done, but there really wasn’t much. I felt a lot of responsibility to try to tell the story in as complete a way as I could without losing the human dimension because so many people I met had no idea what was happening in the tar sands.
·And how did you get the funding to do yours in what I presume to be a competitive context?
I think we were in the first wave of projects coming through on the subject looking for funds, but to be honest it is such a complex and difficult subject to tackle. With the help of some supportive initial private funding we made our first trips out to Alberta and put together a short demo that I think reflected the film we wanted to make. That demo I think was a big part of how we set ourselves apart and were able to show that we could handle the subject matter with a sensitive approach.
·Excellent animation, how did you work on that?
I really wanted to find a way to get across some of the tough informative details in a fun and engaging way. I loved the work James Braithwaite had done on “I Met the Walrus” and I thought it would work for H2Oil, so we got in touch with him to see if he was interested. James brought in the excellent animators Dale Hayward and Sylvie Trouve, and we brainstormed together around the content I wanted to put in each of the three animations. I had basic points of what I felt needed to be put together in the animations then I set about writing the scripts. James did the initial drawings and Dale and Sylvie brought them to life. We met several times to tighten and revise the sequences, as the initial drafts became more formal drawings, and were finally. It was amazing working with such talented, smart creative people who really understood what I wanted to do.
·Which were your biggest challenges?
There were a lot of challenges: Getting access to the government and industry. Trying to tell a rounded story that still got to the heart of the issues. Weaving all these very complex technical details, and making an argument without being didactic and losing the human story….END.
RCI, the International arm of the CBC, has announced a competition called Roots, calling for videos under 8 minutes. Sounds like a good challenge ! Rest here: http://roots.rcinet.ca/
During the Rencontres Internationales du documentaire de Montréal which just ended, I saw a number of really excellent documentaries. Over the next few weeks I’ll tell you about a couple of them, not just because of their qualities as films but because they are making a difference, having a real impact. To start with, here is a Swedish film which I already saw in Stockholm a few months ago, Bananas!*, by Fredrik Gertten.
It tells the outrageous story of the banana plantation workers in Nicaragua and Honduras who have been made sterile by exposure to the pesticide DBCP (which goes under several brand names including Nemagon) and the flamboyant L.A. lawuer Juan ‘Accidentes’ Dominguez who takes their defense. He does so without any funding, at his own expense, choosing a group of only 12 workers as a test case. The film has real suspense, following the ups and downs of the legal case. I was at the edge of my seat, dying to see how the law suit was going to end. Well shot, well edited, and with judicious use of archives and court room footage, this is a really important film.
The film has its suspense, and so did the release of the film. Dole, the company running the plantations, put enormous pressure on the filmmakers and the L.A. film festival where the film premiered last June. The company managed to have the film removed from competition, but didn’t manage to have the screenings canceled. It then sued the filmmakers, surely a grave public relations mistake. There was an uproar among documentary filmmakers, and the producers filed an anti-SLAPP motion in the U.S. (A SLAPP is a ‘strategic lawsuit against public participation’ intended not to right a wrong but to force the defendants to spend more time and money than they can afford….) What also made a difference was the reaction in Sweden, where the main medical journal (Läkartidningen) examined the health impacts of DBCP, the federation of Journalists and the Swedish Film Institute condemned the law suit as a threat to freedom of expression, the hamburger chain MAX and major supermarket chains like ICA put their relationship with Dole into question. All this pressure led to Dole withdrawing the law suit on Oct. I5th.
You can read a detailed chronology of all these developments on the Bananas!* web site, complete with the director’s twitter messages.
Normally I would write this in French, but many francophones who read this blog will already know about this film, and it deserves to be widely distributed. So here goes…
Les Petits Géants ( The Small Giants) is a documentary about children from low-income neighborhoods who take on the challenge of performing Verdi’s operaThe Masked Ball. ( the expression ‘on the other side of the track’ applies nicely here, as this is across the tracks from upscale Westmount)The film was directed and shot by Anaïs Barbeau-Lavalette and Émile Proulx-Cloutier, two young Quebec filmmakers – Anaïs is far from unknown though, having successfully directed both documentaries and fiction – and was the closing film at the annual Rendez-vous du cinéma Québecois last winter. The film follows five boys, 10-12 years old, through the rehearsals to the final performance, but also spends a lot of time with them in their families. The strength of the film lies here, in the terrific closeness to the characters and the seemingly complete access to their domestic environments. Having seen their family contexts which feature all manner of cultural handicaps, poverty and emotional deprivation, we completely understand that the discipline and self-confidence required to perform operatic roles in front of an audience don’t come easy. There are some very moving and sometimes funny moments when the youngsters express their insecurities, their dreams and aspirations.
Émile and Anaïs
I saw the film at the theatrical debut at the Cinéma Parallèle in Montreal, where it’s still playing.
In the discussion afterwards the filmmakers answered questions. Someone asked about the extreme close-up framing often used in the interviews with the guys. They explained that their whole objective was to see the experience from the point of view of the kids, or at least very close to them – which is also why the camera often stays on their faces while we hear adults giving instructions or opinions off-camera. I asked them why they followed five boys and no girls, something I found surprising given that there were some very interesting-looking girls in some of the rehearsal shots. Anaïs and Émile explained that they had discovered that in this particular age group, 10-12 years, girls are a lot more self-conscious and controlled than the boys. They found it much easier to have access to the boys’ emotions, and didn’t want any political correctness concerns come in the way of finding the five best characters for the film.
![Tar sands.27[1]](http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2670/4184804629_677c21e34c.jpg)
