Author: |Posted: 13:50 on 12/11/08
Category: festivals
How to make a film using Sean McAllister’s tried and perfected method:
1. Head to a hostile environment to report on an important political issue
2. Brutally collide camera lens with your topic head on
3. Realise your subject is a victim sprawled open for examination, like a bug in a petri dish, divorced from the context of its being and devoid of individual detail
4. Become depressed and think you’re losing your way with no human narrative to grasp onto, as you drink and talk your frustrations through at night with a bar fixture
5. Leave, and almost give up on the facade of making a film, until you understand the one who propped you up with their near-immunity to the surrounding scenario is the one you must return to
6. Stake down your claim on this surviving social misfit whose eyes dance above a slouching spine, and attach yourself fast for the next 6 months
7. Question the basics until they laugh and reveal their seams
8. Spot the potential drama of their destiny, and divine it
Again, Sean McAllister has cast the most charismatic of characters, in another free-spirited hero, at odds with his society and expected role. Welcome to Naoki and the class of working poor in Japan. read more
Author: |Posted: 23:18 on 10/11/08
Category: festivals, theatrical documentary
There was a surprising amount of films commissioned directly for television playing at Sheffield Doc/Fest this year, several already broadcast, and many being aired very soon. So, this week, from the comfort of your home, you can play catch-up and watch a selection of the best suggestions.
A quick glance at the Storyville home page shows that tonight on BBC4 at 10pm is Prodigal Sons, which follows an old football hero who is now a post-operative transgendered lesbian woman, home for a school reunion, and was the film my festival comrade James Newton recommended most. In next Monday’s slot is Elizabeth Stopford’s touching film I’m not Dead Yet about an inheritance battle within her family, and apparently there is a twist in the middle that changes your perspective on everything. Strangely the film that played in last Monday’s slot, Operation Iraqi Filmmaker, played at Sheffield a whole year ago, and was picked up as an acquisition there, to be aired much later than its festival outing. read more
Author: |Posted: 11:04 on 14/08/08
Category: theatrical documentary
Never have I known a documentary to aggrivate audiences like Jennifer Fox’s epic 6 part Confessions of a Free Woman (the first 2 installments aired on Storyville last night). Jennifer is an 46 year old American documentary maker, who wanted to push the idea of getting past ‘the performance’ of when people act up for the camera. She spawned a way of filming, which like cinema verite, means she is control of a small camera without a crew. She also “passes the camera” so that the her subjects film her when she is talking, it is more like a circular conversation without a power hierarchy or contrived end point. The way she talks about (I saw her give a talk at this years Birds Eye View) is analogous to the way lesbians make love, which is fitting because the central feminist investigation is into how women see themselves in the world today. It’s also structured around women experience time – fluidly, like a chat over a cup of tea.
Much like Carrie Bradshaw, Jennifer wants to discover what it means to be a woman today, working and living ‘without man and children’. She has affairs and talks freely about sex, like a man, but she isn’t man, cue existential crisis that takes her around the world to ‘pass the camera’ with woman and chat about rape and marriage and masturbation and even FGM in a bid discover why women (but not her) defer to men, and how men stake their claim through cultural rearing practices. This of course give Jennifer ample opportunity to reflect on her own childhood (the only girl with 4 boys), and lifestyle choices. She concludes that only men can be truly free. Except her, presumably. read more
