Collected Data
It's an honour to be nominated...
David Paperny and I have been nominated for a 2018 Canadian Screen Award for Best Writing, Documentary. for Mohamed Fahmy Half Free.
Not mentioned in this nomination are two people who also deserve recognition - story editor Samantha Beck and editor Dom Basi. The film would have suffered without their substantial contribution. Thank you both. And thank you to David for asking me to be involved in the project.
"It is an outlandish, compelling tale, mainly because it is a series of circles within circles."
At the heart of the story is a man trapped in circles of hell, inside a circumstance not of his own making. Freedom is within his grasp and then disappears because of the actions of others. (Canada's then-minister of foreign affairs, John Baird, made a grave error in the Fahmy case.) Fahmy's frustration mounted and, today, living in Vancouver, it still seethes. That's why he's "half-free." His energy now is directed at helping the families of the wrongfully imprisoned and ceaselessly talking about the number of journalists who are in jail around the world for doing their jobs.
Mohamed Fahmy’s story – trapped in several circles of hell
Watch “Mohamed Fahmy: Half Free” at 9pm on Sunday Oct 01 on CBC.
"How do you tell the story of press freedom when only 13 per cent of the world population enjoys a free press?"
When Paperny met with me and expressed interest in telling my story I knew I had fallen into the hands of a humanist, a storyteller who uses his camera to zone in on the “why?” and “what next?” It’s not easy trusting someone with the message you want to portray to the world through your own complicated political story of injustice.
I was freed but too many others are still wrongfully imprisoned: Fahmy
Watch: "Unsound Preview"
The internet has transformed the world, but there are unintended consequences. Now that people expect everything on the internet to be free, what are the consequences? As the music industry collapses from the consequences of FREE, so too has journalism. What are the impacts on society when all culture becomes free? Find out who really is benefitting from the so-called free internet.
"Maybe it’s a matter of ditching the noun for an adjective. Of conceding that while certain films aren’t categorically propaganda, they’re propagandistic in part."
When attempting to identify a film as propaganda, we often resort to the same set of historical antecedents. There’s Eisenstein and Vertov fronting for the communist contingent. There’s Riefenstahl repping the fascists. Over here’s Capra standing up for Why We Fight. All of it is rather comfortably contextualized in an extreme era that necessitated an extreme methodology that, when it’s been evoked during the 70 years since, implies crass hysteria—which is also how it’s applied to North Korea, effectively a holdout from that earlier era, making it all the more hysterical and crass for enduring in this supposedly more enlightened era.
Thus a perfectly descriptive, non-qualitative word damns and is damned by dint of its historical associations. Officially, propaganda casts a wide net, encompassing, per Webster’s, “ideas, facts, or allegations spread deliberately to further one’s cause or to damage an opposing cause,” whereas in popular discourse it’s become a blunt, zero-sum pejorative for art with an agenda. Which leaves us without a valuable tool for identifying what certain films are doing and why, and forces some of the savvier modern propagandistic practitioners into a defensive crouch.
Make It Real: Dramatic License
"If much of the general public isn't aware of our constructions, and become disillusioned with documentary when they discover the creative choices we make, do we filmmakers need to rethink our narrative strategies and citation practices? Or are we obliged to raise public awareness of how constructed documentaries really are?"
most nonfiction filmmakers I know—wrestle conscientiously while filming and editing over how to represent the truths we perceive. Of course, that's the key: The truths we perceive. Most doc filmmakers and scholars agree that documentaries are subjective. I started to wonder to what extent general audiences understand that what distinguishes documentary from journalism is that docs are interpretive; they have a point of view, rather than being straight reporting or documentation. Today, when doc filmmakers exuberantly employ elements from the narrative toolkit—re-enactments, animation, stylized staging—to create powerful nonfiction cinematic experiences, has a credibility gap emerged between the general public and the film community? Are our narrative strategies becoming obstacles to audiences trusting our films?
Bridging the Credibility Gap - Drawing the Line on Manipulation in Documentary
"If technology has made it easier for sources to critique how they’re presented on -screen, it has also provided an opportunity for filmmakers to head them off at the pass"
Over the past few decades, documentary-makers have taken enormous aesthetic leaps away from the static, talking-head educational films they grew up with, embracing reenactment, animation, stylized staging and other fiction-film techniques to bring energy and urgency to their narratives. In most cases, they have striven to hide the artistic liberties they take — the better to keep the audience fully immersed in the tale they’re spinning. But such coyness is beginning to feel hopelessly dated at a time when audience expectations have changed: Today, transparency has become the new standard. Perhaps it’s time to bring that same creativity to full disclosure, whether in the form of brief explanations during opening or end credits, or more artfully within the body of the film.
Documentary filmmakers need to be accountable to their sources and viewers
"Unlike the fictional-feature-film industry, where job titles tend to be more distinct, nonfiction credits are more fluid."
For many documentarians their opinion on the credit issue hinges upon audience perception: how puzzling it is for viewers to see the credit. Mr. Berlinger ranks it as “incredibly” so, while Mr. Curry said it may be a little confusing. The concern is that when audience members notice a writing credit, they may think that the dialogue spoken by subjects has been scripted and is therefore not genuine. If a documentary has been written, it suggests that the film could be more artifice than fact based.
You Say True Life, I Say Scripted
R.I.P. Colin Low 1926-2016
“The National Film Board of Canada feels a profound sense of loss today. The NFB as a centre of excellence and innovation would not have existed as we know it without the enormous contributions of Colin Low. He was a great and committed public servant―and would speak of the pride he felt in creating cinema that served Canadians. He was tireless, visionary, generous in spirit, a true gentleman―a great Canadian and Albertan. Canada will not see his like again and we are forever in his debt,” said Claude Joli-Coeur, Government Film Commissioner and NFB Chairperson.
Colin Low (1926-2016) | The NFB and Canada Lose a True Pioneer of Cinema
"As we work towards journalism’s and documentary’s next iterations, the one thing that is clear is that they have more in common now than at any other point in their histories."
Documentary’s relative freedom from institutional constraint has enabled its makers to experiment in ways that are difficult for traditional journalists. Moreover, as journalism becomes more of a curator of information and shaper of conversations, documentary’s demonstrated ability to contextualize and explain through well-chosen instances has proven newly relevant. The interactive documentaries produced to date offer a compendium of approaches, interfaces, user experiences, tools and even strategies for working with crowd-sourced and co-created content all of which journalists can assess, draw from and transform.
So I guess I would say that by finding themselves in the same boat, both journalists and documentarians have discovered commonalities of purpose and technique. Interactive documentary is fast developing a repertoire of techniques that work well in today’s ‘digital first’ and increasingly participatory environment and digital journalism still commands considerable reputation and audience reach.
Charting Documentary’s Futures: An Interview with MIT’s William Uricchio (Part One)
Charting Documentary’s Futures: An Interview with MIT’s William Uricchio (Part Two)
Charting Documentary’s Futures: An Interview with MIT’s William Uricchio (Part Three)
Charting Documentary’s Futures: An Interview with MIT’s William Uricchio (Part Four)
Updated 16-02-09. Added link to Part Four.
"We’re not tape recorders. You know, we’re sort of like meat in a can, observing the world."
However you want to describe it: the whodunit; the mystery of what really happened; the mystery of personality; of who people really, really are is powerfully represented when you have a crime standing in back of all of it. It’s a way of dramatizing really significant issues: How we know what we know? How have we come to the belief that we have? Is justice served by the various mechanisms in our society? Is the law just? And on and on and on and on and on.
What Errol Morris Thinks of Making a Murderer
"Top 10: Errol Morris"
Errol Morris, the reverred documentary filmmaker, has revealed his top 10 programme for this year’s International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (Nov 18-29).
Each year, the festival invites an important figure in the world of documentary to compile a list of ten important works of factual film, all of which will be screened as part of the programme.
Top 10: Errol Morris
Here’s Errol Morris’ list;
• Bright Leaves (USA, 2002) dir. Ross McElwee
• Fata Morgana (Germany, 1971) dir. Werner Herzog
• It Felt Like a Kiss (UK, 2009) dir. Adam Curtis
• Land Without Bread (Spain, 1932) dir. Luis Buñuel
• Let There Be Light (USA, 1946) dir. John Huston
• Man With A Movie Camera (USSR, 1929) dir. Dziga Vertov
• One Day in the Life of Andrei Arsenevitch (France, 1999) dir. Chris Marker
• Tales of the Grim Sleeper (USA/UK, 2014) by Nick Broomfield
• The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On (Japan, 1987) dir. Kazuo Hara
• Welfare (USA, 1975) dir. Frederick Wiseman
They are also screening a retrospective of his work, including one of my all time favourite films, Fast, Cheap and Out of Control.
An animal trainer, a gardener specialised in converting yew hedges into animal figures, an expert in the field of mole rats and a robot technician are the protagonists of Errol Morris’ playful philosophical exercise about the relationship between man and animal, culture and nature.
Watch: "Everything is a Remix Remastered"
Kirby Ferguson;
In the five years since the series launched, Everything is a Remix has been viewed over two million times and produced a popular TED Talk. Amazingly, Remix continues to change the way people think about creativity, originality, and copyright.
Watch" Do Not Track" by Brett Gaylor
Do Not Track Press Kit;
Do Not Track is a personalized documentary series about privacy and the web economy. If you share data with us, we’ll show you what the web knows about you.
This documentary series will explore how information about you is collected and used. Every two weeks, we will release a personalized episode that explores a different aspect of how the modern web is increasingly a space where our movements, our speech and our identities are recorded and tracked.
We want to explore what this means to you, your family and your friends. From our mobile phones to social networks, personalized advertising to big data, each episode will have a different focus, a different voice and a different look.
Do Not Track
"Lipsett’s filmmaking opened new directions and possibilities"
A Trip Down Memory Lane by Arthur Lipsett, National Film Board of Canada
Brett Kashmere;
When Lipsett, fresh out of Montreal art school, was hired to work in the Unit B’s animation department in 1958, an independent avant-garde cinema did not exist in Canada. In the absence of tradition, Lipsett blazed a new trail. His pioneering collage films imparted exciting possibilities for handcrafted, personal, cameraless, and found footage filmmaking, both in his time and in the present day.
Inventing a Tradition: Arthur Lipsett and the NFB’s “Studio X”
Arthur Lipsett was a genius.
"Agnès Varda Will Be Awarded Honorary Palme d’Or: Cannes"
Gleaners and I (2000. Dir. Agnes Varda)
Kinsey Lowe for Deadline;
Agnès Varda will be honored for the body of her work at the closing ceremony of this year’s Cannes Film Festival. She’s the first woman selected for this distinction. Only three other directors — Woody Allen, Clint Eastwood and Bernardo Bertolucci — have been recognized in this way for the global impact of their body of work.
From her first film, La Pointe Courte in 1954, Varda’s style reflected elements of what would become the French New Wave although because she preceded that movement her work is more Left Bank in style. Her next feature, Cleo From 5 To 7, was a documentary style look at a singer awaiting results of a biopsy, which foreshadowed Varda’s fascination with human mortality.
Agnès Varda Will Be Awarded Honorary Palme d’Or: Cannes
"It’s been almost ten years since Laura Poitras’ name has been on the NSA Watch List."
After a few hours of tense huis clos in the hotel room, Greenwald publishes his first article on the basis of evidence from the former NSA employee. The clock is now running before the NSA and its minions, or the triads, get to them. Laura films Snowden’s confession. He faces the camera and gives testimony: family name, first name, age, profession, motivation. And evidence of the some of most shocking revelations in the history of the American Intelligence Agencies. The Washington Post, the only media company to have commissioned Poitras, releases the video on its homepage on June 6th. The video, a full frontal assault on the NSA, goes viral around the world and is screened in Times Square.
The Woman Who Hacked Hollywood
Watch: "Squarepusher Discusses his Ufabulum Live Show"
Squarepushers Damogen Furies is out today.
Surprisingly, Pitchfork didn’t hate it, but did give it a generic review.
Watch: "Errol Morris Week"
Six new short Errol Morris films.
Also, a great interview…
The Grantland Q&A: Errol Morris
R.I.P. Albert Maysles 1926-2015
In 1960, Maysles co-directed the iconic vérité entry Primary, about the Democratic primary election campaigns of Kennedy and Humphrey, and later the documentary Salesman (1968), a portrait of four Boston door-to-door Bible salesmen. Maysles was made a Guggenheim Fellow in 1965 and went on to make such films as Rolling Stones doc Gimme Shelter (1970) and Grey Gardens (1976), a portrait of a mother and daughter living in a dilapidated East Hampton mansion. Maysles Films – the director’s production company – has produced many films on art and artists, with Grey Gardens cited by many doc-makers as a huge influence.
Master documentarian Albert Maysles passes away
Watch: "Sätta Ljus - On the lighting of The Sacrifice/Offret"
via Cinephilia and Beyond.
Sven Nykvist;
A personal motto of mine is “It is never too late.” Many, as they reach the age of sixty start to feel as if they are at the end of themselves, the official retirement age is fast approaching. Thanks and goodbye. But, those of us who are freelance and rather independent often do not think along those lines. Creativity surely doesn’t cease at a certain age. Many artists, composers, authors, and filmmakers are still active will into their eighties—not to mention actors and actresses. The fact is that I received some of my most exciting assignments, and did some of my best movies, at an age usually associated with retirement. It began with Andrej Tarkovski’s The Sacrifice
Watch: "Reunion of Giants" Trailer
Watch: "The Beast of Turin" Trailer
“This word, ‘documentarian’? I am here today to declare that word dead. That word is never to be used again."
The director spent the latter half of his keynote outlining a 13-point manifesto for filmmakers:
1) Don’t make a doc, make a movie. “The art is more important than the politics,” said Moore. “Because if I make a [crappy] movie, my politics won’t get through to anybody. The art has to come first.”
2) Don’t tell me anything I already know. “Give people something new they haven’t seen before,” said Moore. “With Roger & Me I said there shouldn’t be one shot of an unemployment line. People are numb to those images.”
3) Don’t let your documentary resemble a college lecture. “We have to invent a different kind of model than the college lecture model,” said Moore.
4) Too many of your documentaries feel like medicine. “Don’t show a doc that’s going to kill [an audience's] evening,” said Moore.
5) The Left is boring. “It’s why we have a hard time convincing people to think about some of the things we’re concerned about,” said Moore. “The Left has lost its sense of humor and we need to be less worried.”
6) Why don’t we name names? “Why don’t we go after the corporations and name them by name?” asked Moore. “You will be sued. People will be mad at you. But so what?”
7) Make your films personal. “People want to hear your voice,” said Moore. “It’s what most docs stay away from, and most don’t like narration. But who’s saying this film?”
8) Point your camera at the cameras. Moore advised doc makers to challenge the mainstream media and film its coverage of various events.
9) Follow the examples of non-fiction books and television. “People love to watch [Jon] Stewart and [Stephen] Colbert,” he said. “Why don’t you try to make films that come from the same spirit? People just want the truth and they want to be entertained.”
10) Film only the people who disagree with you. The director said that while filming Roger & Me he tried to stay away from interviewing union workers to tell the story, since they were basically friends. Interviews with those who held contradictory opinions are harder to secure, but more interesting to audiences, said Moore.
11) Make sure you’re getting emotional when filming. “Are you getting mad when filming a scene? Are you crying?” asked Moore. “That’s evidence that the audience will respond that way, too… [You] are a stand-in for the audience.”
12) Less is more. “Edit, and make it shorter,” Moore advised, saying it’s okay to let audiences fill in the gaps. “People love that you trust they have a brain.”
13) Sound is more important than picture. “Sound carries the story,” said Moore. “Don’t cheat on the sound, and don’t be cheap with the sound.”
TIFF ’14: Michael Moore presents 13-point doc manifesto
I love a good Manifesto.
"The VIFF Film and Television Forum has a new name, VIFF Industry"
This year’s forum will see more industry guests and speakers from LA., and will expand its focus from film and television to broad-based screen entertainment, in recognition of Vancouver’s growing visual effects, animation and gaming industries.VIFF Industry also wants to promote Vancouver as a production and post-production centre, by participating in trade missions, for example, and helping to facilitate international co-productions, in particular with India and China.
Vancouver film festival revamps its focus
This is unfortunate. While I’ve been very critical of VIFF’s programming for the past 10 years or so, turning into an “industry” promotional tool is not the way to make things better.
Watch: "November 22, 1963" by Errol Morris
In a short film, Josiah “Tink” Thompson, who has been investigating the Kennedy assassination for nearly 50 years, looks to the photographic evidence. Will we ever know the truth?
‘November 22, 1963’
Errol Morris is brilliant.
RIP Robert L. Drew
Drew's films pioneered a strict journalistic code that allowed no directing of subjects, no set-up shots, no on-camera narrator. The candid footage was edited into a dramatic narrative that gave the feeling of what it was like to be there as events occurred. His technique became known as cinéma vérité or direct cinema, though he liked to call it reality filmmaking.
R.I.P. Robert L. Drew, the Father of American Cinéma Vérité
Watch a clip about Drew from the excellent documentary Cinema Verite: Defining the Moment.
"Following Lindsay Lohan or craft brewers doesn't have the same impact as exonerating wrongly convicted murderers or probing years of alleged FBI bribery"
On the other side of the coin, the reality show — documentary's younger sibling — is thriving both financially and production-wise, with nascent cable channels scooping up endless series about pawnbrokers and extreme truckers. Channels like Oprah's OWN try to give a serious examination of celebrity, following in the footsteps of E! and Bravo, which have been “documenting” the lives of the pseudo-famous for years.
Is This the Death of the Big Screen Documentary?
Reality TV is not Documentary.
"Media producers are transforming the documentary experience through interactive docs and buzzy transmedia elements."
While broadcasters are using transmedia to reach previously inaccessible audiences, filmmakers are using these devices to create dialogues with viewers ahead of completing projects.
Making transmedia work for documentaries
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