Category: Festivals & public screenings

Hot Docs: ‘Position among the Stars’

I wasn’t at the Hot Docs festival in Toronto this year, because I’m in production. But my colleague Tobi Elliott, the writer and filmmaker who helps me with this blog was there, and picked this film to write about. Over to Tobi:

You won’t find a stronger documentary that so beautifully brings out Indonesia’s churning social and religious questions than Position among the Stars (Stand van de Sterren), which screened recently at Toronto’s Hot Docs festival. Earlier this year the film took home the Best Feature-length Documentary at IDFA and a World Cinema Special Jury Prize at the Sundance festival.

Directed and shot by Dutch filmmaker Leonard Retel Helmrich, it’s the concluding film in a trilogy following a poor family living through modern-day Indonesia’s tumultuous decade of change. (His first two films The Eye of the Day and Shape of the Moon won the Joris Ivens Award IDFA – 2004, and the World Cinema Documentary Grand Jury Prize at Sundance – 2005.)

Position among the Stars continues Helmrich’s 12-year documentation of Rumidjah, an elderly Christian grandmother living in the world’s largest Muslim community, and her family. Rumidjah struggles to keep her non-observant Muslim sons on track, and to provide for her granddaughter’s uncertain future in an increasingly globalized economy. Through the microcosm of a single family, we see all the issues Indonesia is struggling to come to grips with today.

Helmrich’s cinematography style is astonishingly intimate. Using his unique “Single-shot Cinema” method – his excellent website where he describes his trademark style is here – and an array of relatively cheap consumer cameras, he brings the audience into startling moments of truth in the family’s life.

After a screening he answered some questions about his film:

Describe your filming technique and how you got such intimate scenes with this family.

I didn’t want to be just an observer, and standing, shooting scenes from the outside. I wanted to be a participant, among them. As I filmed, I was just being with them, together.

There is a drama going on always, and when you get to know people you can predict what will happen, and I just make sure that I get the right angle from the right place. I call it single-shot cinema. At a scene, I shoot in a single shot and only in the editing it gets cut.

I also used five different cameras, normally I have just consumer cameras, but they are all specialized in certain things. I use them like a painter would use a brush. So I can say that in this situation, “this camera would be best.”

In the scene of the boy running (ED NOTE: a long scene with multiple shots of a young boy running through Jakarta’s alleys after he’d stolen some clothes) I just ran after him, and he ran away… but I knew where he would go, I knew his labyrinth by then. So when I had a number of my shots and I thought “if I want to make my story round I should do something extra – I should do with the camera what he wanted to do himself.” The boy wanted to fly. So I took the little camera and put it on a bamboo stick and lifted it up to get a kind of a crane shot.

How much time did you spend with the family, and how did you meet them?

I was there about 14 months, almost every day, actually living their life for that time. This is the third part of a trilogy, the first I shot almost 12 years ago, so they know me quite a lot.

In 1990 was the first time I went to the village where my mother was born, and it was there I met them. Rumidjah’s husband was still alive, he was about twenty years older than her and he still could speak a little Dutch. Because of the old colonial tie. So it was a great bond between us and we became friends. It was just before the fall of Suharto (May 1998.)

And then I hired Bakti (Rumidjah’s son) as a driver and I was seeing what was happening with the family. And it was historical, this change in the country because the Suharto family was a dictator and he had to step down, and there were huge protests, and it was similar to what is happening now in Arab countries. And I saw that what was happening in their life was a microcosm of what was happening in greater Indonesia so I thought, I’d better focus on them.

Can you talk a bit about the themes you pulled out?

The main reason I decided to focus on religion, economy and politics is because it’s the three things that are very much changing and making this turmoil in Indonesia. If you look at every newspaper they are really the three main things. The economy is booming, but there is a also a kind of reaction from the religious part. And politics of course, you have to cope with these events.

Helmrich said he doesn’t plan to film a fourth installment, but if something were to happen in the family that was important with respect to Indonesia, then “I’m ready.”

Winds of Heaven

Emily Carrs painting Cathedral Grove
“Kispiox Village.” Painting by Emily Carr, 1929.

Montreal’s International Festival of Films on Art has a huge following. Most screening are full, great to see. The festival mostly programs films for the subject matter as opposed to the filmic qualities, but every year there are some really excellent films.

Of the films I saw this year I liked The Owl in Daylight by David Kleijwegt about Philip K. Dick for the way it used metaphorical images. (The sci-fi writer PKD’s stories have formed the basis for many fiction films, including Bladerunner, which came out just after he died, at an early age. Not to be confused with the Hollywood biopic with the same name starring Paul Giamatti as Dick!) And also my friend Jennifer Alleyn‘s excellent film about a German artist I really admire: Otto Dix. (Named Dix fois Dix, it’s made up of ten tableaus from different moments in Dix’s life.)

Another beautiful and insightful film at the festival was Winds of Heaven about Emily Carr, directed by Michael Ostroff, co-produced by Peter Raymont at White Pine Pictures and filmed by John Walker – who won the CSC award for best documentary cinematography for his work on the film. The most interesting thing about the film for me was the way it took a close look at Carr’s struggle to be recognized as an artist at a time when not many women were, and the ambivalent and not always ‘politically correct’ (especially with today’s standards) relationship with and views of the aboriginal peoples whose culture figured so prominently in her art.

Michael Ostroff explained to me how he constructed the story line:

Carr’s writings form the narrative basis of the film but I had to look at them from that of the perspective of an old sickly woman recalling her earlier times solely from memory. There were no notes or diaries that she relied on, at least so’s that anyone is aware of. So memory of events formed the basis of much of her writings which she began sometime after her first stroke in 1937. This is especially true of her stories about her travel among the First Nations peoples of NW BC. She declared herself to be a friend of the Indians but, as Marcia Crosby says in the film, her writings reflected not so much as friendship but a conceit, and a sense of the racism of her day.

John Walker and Michael Ostrof
Carr was not political – and we cannot judge her by the standards of our times. Her writings are problematic and to Marcia pose a real concern, because schools are still reading/teaching Carr’s stories.

However – the paintings show a great deal of respect. Carr went up the coast and brought back images of communities – active, working, living. This was at a time when the slogan “the only good indian is a dead indian” was often heard and approved of in white society. First nations people were seen by most whites as either barbaric savages or sad vestiges of the noble savage. Most of the the images created by whites portrayed one or the other of these two polarities (think about Curtis.) The solution presented by government was assimilation when it wasn’t outright extermination. Carr’s images however were respectful – and shocking to white society. (In addition to the fauve colours.)

Her diary entries of the 1930’s though suggest a more complex and troubled present. The sacrifices she had to make to remain true to herself as an artist were very hard.

The Harris quote I think should be on every artist’s wall. “… despair is part of every creative individual. It can’t be conquered. One rises out of it. I suppose we are only content when all our sails are up and full of the winds of heaven. I hope all your sails are up and full of the winds of heaven. There is only one way. Keep on.”

Much of the Carr industry is dedicated to the didactic exploration. WOH is not. Entertainment and visual flow were the guiding principles of my direction. And from that the film evolved. The logging sequences for example, became a metaphor for the first nations people. When first seen in the film’s prelude – there is barely enough room for the trees to fall. Each time we return to logging, the forest has been reduced until the very last exquisite camera pan of 25 seconds across the landscape of a 1925 clearcut. They are almost wiped out. Only a stick or two remains. So when we see – at the end – “Scorned as Timber” – a much loved Carr work – it can be a metaphor for Carr’s persistence and individuality, and it can be a metaphor for the First Nations people. “Yes – we’ve been beaten, but we are still here – reaching for the sky.” Striving. Living. I couldn’t feel comfortable ever writing – “they were almost exterminated/assimilated” – so I let the visuals say it.

Thanks to Tobi Elliott for the help with this blog post.

The Yes Men bring the house down

This week I went to a sensational Cinema Politica screening at Concordia University here in Montreal.

Cinema Politica is now, according to programmer Ezra Winton, the biggest community- and campus-based documentary screening network in the world! And Concordia, its home base and launching pad, continues to be the scene of weekly screenings often attended by more than 500 people – quite an achievement!

This time, after several years of efforts, Winton and CP Director Svetla Turnin had succeeded in bringing the Yes-Men to Montreal. Do you know who they are? They are surely the world’s leading impostors of the serious-humorous kind. They have pulled off some incredible hoaxes, and always at the expense of governments and corporations who should have reasons to be ashamed of their doings.

The Yes-Men modus operandi is to create false websites which lead people to invite them to conferences as representatives of the ‘bad guys.’ Once there, they push the envelope, taking corporate and government strategies to absurd levels, announcing outrageous schemes. The most incredible thing about their stunts is that people usually take them seriously, even when they propose, for example, human remains as a new energy source or human waste as a protein source for the poor.

On behalf of Dow chemicals, they apologized for the Union Carbide disaster in Bhopal and promised compensation for the victims. They got terrific coverage on BBC news around the globe, forcing DOW (the new owner of the UC assets) to strenuously deny that they had done something good! The Concordia crowd saw these feats in the film The Yes Men Fix the World, produced by Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonnano themselves, as a follow-up to the 2003 film The Yes Men.

I found the film a little uneven but full of brilliant ideas. For example, some arch-conservative U.S. climate-change deniers and free-market apostles are shot against a blue screen and are asked what they would like to see as a background for themselves. They then take the interviewees’ suggestions to heart, in their own humorous fashion, and use the backdrops as an ironic backdrop to their comments. Talk about giving people the rope to hang themselves. And most of all, the footage of the Yes Men’s stunts is priceless.

The Yes Men

In the discussion afterward, Andy and Mike (actually Jacques Servin and Igor Vamos) explained that they are anti-capitalist, that they take advantage of opportunities to expose fraud and ill-doing, that they haven’t generally had problems with lawsuits, and that they encourage people everywhere to follow their example.

In response to the many activists who inevitably wanted to know if they had done something on their pet issue, they gave the sound advice: why don’t you do it yourselves!

Congrats to Cinema Politica for an exceptional last-screening-of-the-year!

Cinema Politica crowd at Concordia

With thanks to Tobi Elliott for her help with this blog. Photo credit: Thanh Pham

Kim Longinotto and the Pink Saris

Pink Saris film by Kim Longinotto

Last week, at the Rencontres Internationales du Documentaire de Montréal, I had a chance to see the latest film by one of the world’s best documentarians, Kim Longinotto. In Pink Saris, she tells the story of the ‘Pink Gang’ of women in Uttar Pradesh, one of India’s poorest states. Led by a tough lady named Sampat Dal Devi, these “untouchables” (lowest caste) women take on violent or abusive husbands and corrupt officials.

The film has all the characteristics of a Longinotto documentary: it has amazing access to intimate situations, it deals with the rights of women, it’s tough and uncompromising, and doesn’t stay away from contradictions and difficulties. In this case, the main character is admirable, but Longinotto doesn’t idealize her, and at one point the film clearly shows her making a selfish and morally questionable choice which has serious consequences for a young woman who she has taken under her wing. The film is beautifully shot by the director herself.

Kim Longinotto @ Hot Docs
Photo: Paul Galipeau

I went to hear Longinotto speak at a workshop at Hot Docs last spring. I was very impressed by her modest and unassuming presentation. What struck me the most was her combination of caring for her subjects but her incredible tough-mindedness. She is so close to the characters that they will, it seems, let her film just about anything, no matter how hard it is.

And she does – even when the scenes are almost unbearable to watch, as in a famous scene from a female genital mutilation in Africa. Life is often unbelievably hard for women in ‘Third world’ countries, and Longinotto is determined to show it – but always from the perspective of people who are working to change the situation. It’s an attitude which seems to be rooted in her own harsh childhood experience as a homeless orphan, and her feeling that filmmaking “saved her life.”

Here is a list of some of Longinotto’s films:

Rough Aunties (2008)

Hold Me Tight, Let Me Go (2007)

Sisters in Law (2005)

The Day I Will Never Forget (2002)

Runaway (2001)

Gaea Girls (2000)

Divorce Iranian Style (1998)

Shinjuku Boys (1995)

Dream Girls (1994)

The Good Wife of Tokyo (1992)

Eat the Kimono (1989)

Underage (1982)

Thanks to Tobi Elliott for her help with this blog.

“You Don’t Like The Truth”

Interrogation Number 4
CSIS interrogation of Omar Khadr

The director of programming of the Festival du Nouveau Cinéma, Claude Chamberlan, had a question for the programmers of the Toronto and Vancouver film festivals: “Why did they turn down the amazing and crucial film You Don’t Like the Truth – Four Days Inside Guantanamo ?”

“I know them well,” he said, “and I wouldn’t have cared if they had shown the film first. I just want them to give me an answer.” He then introduced the directors of the opening film of this year’s Focus Québec-Canada section, my friends Patricio Henriquez and Luc Côté.

Omar Khadr at age
Omar Khadr at age 21.
Omar Khadr at age 15 (above) and 21.

The film is about the shocking case of the young Omar Khadr, the 24-year old accused of terrorism and killing an American soldier, who has been imprisoned for seven years, most of that time in Guantanamo. I will not summarize the case and describe this moving and incisive film in any detail, because I would not do as good a job as Cinema Politica’s Ezra Winton – read his article on the Art Threat blog.

Suffice it to say that the film is a deconstruction and analysis of the surveillance camera video of the seven-hour, truly revolting –Orwellian more than Kafkaesque– interrogation of Khadr by representatives of CSIS, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service.

Ezra is right in pointing out that we all have a share of responsibility for what the Canadian government is doing to this young man, a child soldier at the time of the events. You can only leave this film with a sense that something has to be done, even though Khadr’s lawyer explained at the launch that he is stuck between the devil and the deep blue sea.

Indeed, it seems – in the bargaining going on right now – that he will have to choose between pleading guilty to a crime he didn’t commit and continue serving time in prison, or rot in his cell in Guantanamo (the facility Obama promised to close!) forever. Amnesty petition here.

The film will screen at the Royal Cinema in Toronto and at the Cinema Parallèle in Montreal starting Oct. 29th.

Since the film premiered, Patricio and Luc have been caught up in a whirlwind of activities, including a repeat screening of the film at the 700-seat Imperial Cinema where it premiered, and an upcoming screening on Parliament Hill in Ottawa. They nonetheless took the time to answer a couple of questions:

When we watch the film, the concept comes across so clearly and the structure seems so simple, so obvious. But during your process of creation…?

PATRICIO: The chronology in the shooting of a documentary doesn’t always provide an interesting dramatic structure. Often in the editing room you need to betray this chronology to give meaning to the images. Of course, in this case, we weren’t the ones who filmed the interrogation of Omar Khadr at Guantanamo by the Canadian secret police. Nevertheless, the seven hours of video recorded over four days in February 2003 (accessible to the public thanks to a decision by the Supreme Court of Canada in 2008) had a progression that we kept in our film.

Luc, our editor, Andrea and I, we watched these seven hours – of very poor technical quality – several times. We quickly discovered that each day had its own specific, separate nature. So we decided to identify each day as a journey: Day 1: Hope. Day 2: Fallout. Day 3: Blackmail, Day 4: Failure. Also, we understood we would need some context for these four days. So we directed our research toward eyewitnesses, people who had seen Omar, experts (scientific and legal), objective observers such as the Toronto Star reporter Michelle Shephard, and politicians. All these people had to help us better understand what played out during this four-day interrogation.

Andrea first edited together the interrogation in this order, and then we showed all the participants the passages they could appropriately illuminate for us in interviews. Then, we inserted these new elements into the structure of the interrogation. And voila, it wasn’t a very complex creative device.

Patricio Henriquez
Patricio Henriquez

Having followed this story for several years, how do you evaluate the media’s coverage of Khadr’s case?

PATRICIO: In Quebec, the coverage was particularly lacking. To my knowledge, the first print media to send a journalist to Guantanamo was Rue Frontenac, the website of the locked-out journalists of the Journal de Montreal. That’s totally to their credit.

Elsewhere, they trafficked in misinformation. One example: in a report aired Nov. 13, 2009, a Téléjournal correspondent in Washington said this of Omar Khadr: “He has already spent over seven years in Guantanamo, waiting for his trial for the murder of an American MILITARY DOCTOR.”

There are two grave errors in this communication. The 1st Class Sergeant Christopher Speer, in whose death Omar Khadr is allegedly implicated, had never been a military doctor. At the start of the proceedings against Khadr, the Pentagon stated (perhaps not innocently) that the victim had been a medic (‘un infirmier’ or ‘un brancardier’ in French.) The Radio-Canada reporter translated badly, calling him a “doctor.”

But even worse: Omar Khadr’s lawyers have proven since 2004 that the Pentagon has held back the fact that, in reality, Sergeant Speer was in Afghanistan as a member of the special forces known as Delta Force. And although he had been trained at one point as a medic, his primary role in Afghanistan was not to heal, but to kill.

This difference is doubly loaded with consequences for Khadr, because, according to the laws of war, killing a duly identified nurse or medic is a war crime. Therefore, probably more by negligence than in bad faith, Téléjournal reinforced all the same this idea that Omar had committed a war crime in killing a medical doctor. It’s not a shock then that public opinion, having fallen victim to similar misinformation, is still largely indifferent to the fate of Omar Khadr.

Then, we realized that practically every media in Quebec and in Canada has been content to merely reproduce the most emotional part of these seven hours of recorded video, the moment where, yielding to the psychological pressure of the Canadian secret agents, Omar cracks and falls into a depressed state, crying uncontrollably. No one seems to have taken pains to listen to the tapes in their entirety.

omar distressed

We do understand that journalists, working constantly under pressure, haven’t had the time to decode the material. This is where, sometimes, the documentary can be useful in supplementing, more calmly and later on, the picture of a certain reality.

How did you manage to finance the film?

Luc Cote
Luc Cote

LUC: Financing this film hasn’t been very easy. After being refused by broadcasters and public institutions, we went to Jean-Pierre Laurendeau and Sylvie de Bellefeuille at Canal D. Without hesitation they agreed to give us a license. With this license, we had access to tax credits. But there still remained an immense hole in the budget of 50 per cent. One of my best friends, Kevin Kraus, who closely follows our work, offered to lend us money. So we went ahead by investing our salaries, our equipment, etc. For lack of resources, all of the filming – camera, sound and interviews – was done by Patricio and myself alone.

Thanks to Tobi Elliott for her help with this blog.

Super-Grannies – and two shorts

Les super mémés at Cinema du parc

The normal progression for a budding filmmaker has generally been from student films and shorty shorts towards longer shorts, and then medium-length films and finally feature length ones. Working on the short films, he or she would learn the ropes, learn how to use equipment and tell a story. Later on, with more resources, would come a bigger crew and competent technicians or co-creators.

Not so in my case. When I started making audiovisual stories for television, I already had many years of storytelling behind me as a radio producer. And as a television ‘producer’ (meaning actually director) at CBC and Radio-Canada television, I didn’t have the right to touch the equipment. I remember the editors saying to me, “You can screen the cut again while I’m on my break, but close the door and don’t tell anyone.” It was a co-conspiracy by the bosses and the union.

Things have changed a lot since then! Now, in the digital world, many television journalists and directors do their own shooting and editing.

And for my part, I am looking after the beginnings I never had as a filmmaker. Over the last couple of years, I have made my first short films. And they will be screening at the Park Cinema in Montreal, before my film Super-Grannies (subtitled version of ‘Les Super-Mémés’) from Oct. 18th to 22nd.

Here is a brief description of the three films – with apologies for the PR language!

Béthièle & Magnus

Letter to Béthièle. (8 min. 2010) In French with English sub-titles.

In a touching visual letter to his adoptive daughter Béthièle on her 10th birthday, Montreal filmmaker Magnus Isacsson reflects on her roots in Haiti and his own in Sweden, drawing some surprising conclusions.

Sonny Joe & the Casino

Sonny Joe & the casino. (22 min. 2004)

Sonny Joe Cross collects used clothes from the residents of the Mohawk territory of Kahnawake. He sells some in his store and gives the rest to the homeless and poor in nearby Montreal. A former hard-drinking gambler, Sonny Joe leads a suspense-filled campaign against a casino promoted by the band council.

Les super-mémés. (45 min. 2010.)

Decked out in gaudy shawls and outrageous hats brimming with a cacophony of colours, «Raging Grannies» defy the invisibility so often experienced by older women. They are a colourful presence at most demonstrations and grassroots meetings promoting peace, social justice and environment.

On the surface, they are amusing, even hilarious. But underneath that humorous veneer, they are deadly serious. The film does more than portray of the movement and its members. It raises universal issues very seldom addressed by the current media, such as the role of senior citizens in our society. “With this documentary film, I wanted to accomplish myself what these exceptional women do so well: entertain while forcing us to reflection,” says the filmmaker.

Production: Island Filmworks

Distribution: Vidéo Femmes

Thanks to Tobi Elliott for her help with the blog.

The Experimental Eskimos broadcast premiere

The Experimental Eskimos 1

Barry Greenwald‘s terrific documentary The Experimental Eskimos reveals an extraordinary attempt at social engineering. The film follows three Inuit, Peter Ittinuar, Zebedee Nungak and Eric Tagoona, who, as 12-year-old boys, were shipped South in the early 1960s from their homes in the Canadian Arctic to attend white public schools in Ottawa. The consequences for their identity and culture were brushed aside.

In their twenties, they became a thorn in the government’s side and were instrumental in the establishment of aboriginal rights that led to the creation of the territory of Nunavut. The film is the untold story of how an experiment in assimilation not only changed the future of their people but the actual geo-political configuration of Canada.

My friend Barry’s previous documentaries include Taxi!, Who Gets In?, Between Two Worlds, The Negotiator, and High Risk Offender. Barry, Ali Kazimi and I share a website, and Barry’s complete bio can be found here.

The film will have its World Broadcast Premiere on Wednesday October 13 at 9 pm ET/MT on the Aboriginal Peoples Television Network‘s (APTN) Reel Insights strand across Canada.

Now, if I praised this film you might find that suspect, as Barry is a close friend of mine. So let me quote filmmaker Martin Duckworth – he copied me on a message to Barry after seeing the film:

What a brilliant and beautiful film, Barry. Such a great story, and so cleverly told. Relating personal tragedy and political triumph. Allowing the story to unfold at its own pace, with each chapter appearing as a surprise and a revelation. The film is a work of ingenuity and dedication. Chiseled to perfection. You have reached a pinnacle. It leaves one wondering, “What is there left for this guy to do?” My god, I must look at it again.

Eskimos received the “Allan King Award for Excellence in Documentary” at the recent Directors Guild of Canada Awards (Editor Nick Hector, Sound Editor Michael Bonini, Director Barry). The film has also received honours at the Winnipeg Aboriginal Film Festival (Best Feature Documentary) and the Yorkton Film Festival (NFB Kathleen Shannon Award).

Have a look at the trailer here.

Thanks to Tobi Elliott for her help with this blog.

Anaïs: turning the tables

Trio politique
Three children from Anaïs' film Se Souvenir des Cendres: Regard sur Incendies

French would be the logical language for this post, but I’d like to share this content with people outside Quebec.

This past week was Anaïs Barbeau-Lavalette week. This extremely talented, 31-year-old Montreal director launched a novel, held a vernissage for a photo exhibition, and signed a terrific documentary broadcast on Radio-Canada Sunday night at 10.30.

The film, Se Souvenir des Cendres (“Remembering the Ashes”), is the ‘making of’ Denis Villeneuve‘s film Incendies, a fiction film based on Wajdi Moawad’s stage play of the same name. Produced by Micro-Scope for Radio-Canada, Se Souvenir follows the shooting of Villeneuve’s film in Jordan. Villeneuve and his crew worked with actual survivors of the conflicts as extras, from notably Iraq, Lebanon and Palestine, and these people become the mainstay of Anaïs’s making of film: they compare what they see on set to what they lived through in real life, and the effect is striking.

Also, Anaïs – who does her own camerawork – has a real eye for the children. There are many moving moments with children remembering war and expertly discussing arms, survival strategies, fears and hopes.

Anaïs Barbeau-Lavalette
Anaïs - Photo Credit: André Turpin

Children are also at the heart of Anaïs’s first novel Je voudrais qu’on m’efface (“I Would Like to be Erased”), based on the lives of children in the Montreal East End Hochelaga-Maisonneuve neighborhood where she shot some of her previous films.

The launch took place at the Usine C performance space, simultaneous with the première of a photo exhibition by cinematographer André Turpin, featuring very creative pictures of children growing up in a context marked by poverty, absent parents and various forms of addiction. All proceeds from the sale of large prints of the photos go to Dr. Gilles Julien, who is internationally renowned for his work with children, mainly in Hochelaga-Maisonneuve.

Anaïs tells me that she used to see me as an inspiration. Well, the tables have been turned, now it’s the other way around. Chapeau Anaïs!

(Anaïs is the daughter of director Manon Barbeau and cinematographer Philippe Lavalette.)

NOTE: Se Souvenir des Cendres: Regard sur Incendies will be re-broadcast on ARTV Tuesday, Sept 21 at 4 pm, and again on Sunday at 2:30 pm and 7 pm. The film will also be presented at the Festival du Nouveau Cinéma in October.

Thanks to Tobi Elliott for her help with this blog.

La crise économique ad marem usque ad marem: PIB

PIB/GDP: 'Famille à la casse'
Copyright: ONF/NFB

Cette semaine à Sunny Side of the Doc à La Rochelle, l’ONF et ARTE France ont annoncé une collaboration pour la production de documentaires pour le web. Ils produiront un documentaire par année, avec un budget de 100.000 $ Can. Les deux ont déjà une expérience considérable avec les webdocs.

Depuis presque un an déjà, l’ONF a mis en ligne un projet majeur, PIB – L’indice humain de la crise économique Canadienne. La Directrice du programme français, Monique Simard, une ancienne dirigeante syndicale et politicienne dont les préoccupations sociales sont bien connues, a pris l’initiative de cette expérience.

Son intuition de départ: la crise économique ne serait pas passagère, et elle serait assez profonde pour changer le cours de la vie de beaucoup de gens. Le projet PIB a permis à beaucoup de cinéastes et photographes à travers le pays de suivre des personnes affectées par la crise. Je n’ai pas regardé tout, évidemment, mais voici quelques impressions.

D’abord, l’architecture du site est impressionnante, le design aussi. On a accès aux histoires racontées dans les deux langues officielles, avec sous-titres au besoin. On peut voir des épisodes multiples dans l’ordre qu’on choisit. On peut commenter, partager, utiliser les médias sociaux pour en parler.

Pour le contenu, je l’ai trouvé très inégal. Il y a d’excellentes histoires, comme ‘Famille à la Casse’, l’histoire d’un couple formé d’un travailleur et une travailleuse de l’automobile, Brian et Cassandra, qui perdent leurs emplois et doivent se battre pour survivre. C’est très dans la tradition du documentaire, sans la structure dramatique mais en échange l’avantage du suivi de l’histoire à travers les épisodes.

La même chose vaut pour un reportage sur une famille immigrée qui tient un motel en Colombie Britannique – on rentre dans leur univers, on comprend les défis qu’il doivent relever et leurs émotions. Parfois une série commence bien, comme cette histoire d’un groupe de jeunes femmes dans l’Ouest qui tentent de sortir de leur endettement – mais à un moment donné il ne se passe plus grand chose, on tourne en rond et on fait du remplissage. Et puis, il y a malheureusement des histoires qui ne donnent pas grande chose, ni côté humain ni côté production.

Daniel Poulin / St-George de Beauce
Copyright: ONF / Photo : Renaud Philippe

Une des plus belles surprises de ce projet est la qualité des reportages photo, réalisés notamment par Renaud Philippe à Québec, Brian Howell à Vancouver, Goh Irotomo et Craig Chivers à Toronto. La photo ci-haut est tirée justemment d’un reportage de Renaud Philippe intitulé ‘Le vouloir c’est le pouvoir’.

La semaine prochaine: une conversation avec Hélène Choquette, la réalisatrice qui coordonne PIB/GDP.

Merci à Tobi Elliott pour son aide avec ce blog.