IDFA 2010: Greasing the wheels for change
We live in a fu*ked up world. Just go to a documentary film festival near you (or not so near you) and have a look at the program guide. Conflict minerals. Child labour. War. Rape. Murder. Oppression. Slavery. Afghanistan. The Congo. Palestine. Chechnya. Themes abundantly present in the documentaries we consume every day. Consume. Consumer. You and I. The people who our broadcasters are listening to. The stuff they program because it’s what we want to see. That’s a very big part of what this IDFA festival and market is about: selling your film to distributors and broadcasters who will then release it in your local theatre or schedule it on their television station. And you and I will go to watch it.
Last year I heard a producer get excited about a film project because the subject matter ‘sells’ well – the subject matter was homelessness. My stomach turned at the idea that homelessness would be exploited for profit – I was right out of school and eager to make films that make a difference, and this early encounter with the industry was my first reality check about the world of filmmaking. That is, it’s no different from the rest of the world – the world of economics – where money talks. That, like it or not, is the world that we live in. So unless you’re willing to move to the woods and live off the grid, you are a part of this world and you and I all depend on it to eat and put roofs over our heads. How I rationalize this proft motive is by telling myself that I am giving underrepresented people a louder voice with my films, that they might provoke thought among the audience, and that maybe one or two people might eventually put that thought into action for positive change.
What sells though, or what is popular is often dependent upon the flavour of the month, which are usually related to current events. So mediocre films about current events (I saw one tonight) beat out better films about ‘less relevant’ topics, when it comes to the market festivals like IDFA. There are a lot ‘important’ films at these festivals that, to watch, are frustrating or boring or both. If your cause isn’t popular, you better suck it up and live with it, or change your cause. Am I criticizing this reality? No. I’m just articulating a sobering realization I had tonight.
Some thoughts about Blood in the Mobile. (By the way, the other film I saw was the mediocre one – this one was better). Blood in the Mobile is a decent, entertaining film (but from an advocacy standpoint squanders its potential – more in a sec) where the Danish filmmaker Frank Poulsen goes on a well-intentioned mission to find out if the raw materials in his (and everyone else’s) mobile phone are coming from violently exploited inhumane sources in the Congo. They are, and then he continues his mission to get his mobile handset manufacturer, Nokia, to stop using products from these sources. Although there is no practical way to prove that there are ‘blood minerals’ in their phones, the evidence indicating the blood minerals are there is convincing.
The film is strong and dramatic right up to the gut wrenching scenes from inside the mines in question in the Congo. After that it remains entertaining, but I felt disturbed as his approach to holding Nokia to account are well intentioned but, in my opinion, juvenile and self-serving. You can’t just walk into reception at the headquarters of the largest handset maker in the world, with your camera rolling, and expect to get a meeting with the CEO and then expect (still rolling camera) a complete confession and a commitment to begin using only fair trade minerals from the Congo (if there were actually a way to determine this). This would only happen if the company were on the eve of announcing they had found a way to eliminate blood minerals from their products and by the filmmaker’s dumb luck he walked in that morning for his interview. But while Nokia is the largest handset maker in the world, I’d wager their usage of the blood minerals is only a small fraction of the total world consumption in all of the (nearly disposable) electronic devices. To me, he almost made Nokia look the victim of an over zealous filmmaker who was under pressure to hit his broadcast windows. In fact he admitted in the Q&A after the screening tonight that he had promised his broadcasters he would get Nokia to commit. That tells me he may have gotten more caught up in the completion of an entertaining film and his own personal ambitions rather than finding the best way to actually make the change happen. I do agree that Nokia has the power to lead the move away from blood minerals but he took it upon himself, as one person, to spark that change. Perhaps he should have used his findings to rally support, and filmed that.
It is a conundrum for advocacy filmmakers I think… when faced with a choice between doing what’s best for the cause or doing what’s best for the film (whether the story or a deadline or whatever), what do you do? I think Mr. Poulsen did what he thought was best the film (and convinced himself it was also the best thing for the cause). It could be argued I’m guilty of the same thing in Surviving In The Cracks… In Mr. Poulsen’s case, and in mine, the films have the potential to be used as tools for advocates. This is where my earlier rationalization of giving underrepresented people a louder voice comes up again. I think Mr. Poulsen tried to do both though – be the filmmaker and the advocate, and in the end he lived up to his responsibility to complete an entertaining film that will be used by others to continue the cause.
Yes, many filmmakers really do want to change the world. An Inconvenient Truth. Darwin’s Nightmare. Armadillo. Blood in Your Mobile. David Suzuki’s Test Tube. The Devil Operation. But do movies spur us into action? I don’t think so.
Let’s consider what had a greater effect on the Big 3 Automakers beginning to make more fuel efficient cars, and bring back the electric car. Was it the Oscar-winning An Inconvenient Truth? Or was it the sudden increase in the price of oil (compounded by the economic crash) a few years ago? The movie certainly didn’t push us over the edge and convince us to stop buying gas guzzling Hummers. But it increased our awareness just a bit, perhaps, and made us think twice. It changed attitudes and thought patterns when it came to the climate. When the double whammy of gas prices and a poor economy hit our pocketbooks though, things changed overnight. The movie may have greased the wheels for change. I think that’s the best that any 1-off movie can hope for, even an Oscar winner.
I’ve heard people say Armadillo is changing public opinion and policies with regards to the Afghanistan war and could be credited with certain governments deciding to pull out. But what I saw in that movie was just an entertaining, graphic articulation/confirmation of what we’ve all known all along. This movie definitely greases the wheels a bit more.
IDFA 2010: Day 4 – Some thoughts on IDFAcademy and other stuff
The street that leads to De Brakke Grond - home of IDFAcademy 2010
Hmmm… I have €20€17, $20, and £10 let in my wallet. Will that enough to get me through my sightseeing tomorrow? This morning I was preparing myself to leave and learned that I was off by a day. Sometime in the last 5 days I lost track of the date… here I was thinking I would be returning to Vancouver yesterday and when I went to check out learned that in fact, I had another day scheduled. It was Nov 22nd, not the 23rd. I leave on the 24th, so that means I have an extra day here (not really extra, I just lost track of time and burned my cash too fast.
Two days ago I tried to get an advance ticket to a prsentation tonight at 10pm: DocLab Live: A Showcase by Zach Wise (Zach Wise the award-winning multimedia producer of the New York Times will host a live screeing of his favorite online documentaries and multimedia projects). Sounds cool right? It was sold out, two days ago. I tried to get in again tonight in a last minute rush and was #18 on a waitlist of 37. Numbers 1-5 got in. Popular, and a great follow up to last night’s DocLab: 3 Stories of Time and Place, a show of three new NFB interactive documentaries: High Rise/Out My Window (Katerina Cizek), The Test Tube With David Suzuki (you have to watch this), and Welcome to Pine Point (Paul Shoebridge & Mike Simmons) which has not yet been released to the public. Unfortunately not nearly as well attended – about 60% full by my estimate.
So here I am, another night blogging at the bar at Durty Nellie’s Irish Pub & Hostel – my home. Hmmm…and now there’s a girl up on the bar, no three, doing a strip tease for the patrons. The bartender cranks the music and the hooting and hollering is ear piercing. I shield my laptop as she advances down the bar towards me…
The very broad collection of students here at IDFAcademy (25 countries, from those still in school, to a 6-year producer taking a side trip from a shoot in London to attend) raised a couple of burning questions for me two days ago: 1. How many people were accepted into IDFAcademy anyhow? And 2. How many people applied? I learned the answers today: 160 and 180. Gasp – that means my four-year old nephew could have gotten in if he had €185. This of course killed any sense of importance I may have had about my application being accepted, and that was, in that moment, a disappointment considering the investment I made to be here. I suppose I was expecting it to be similar to Doc U (Hot Docs) where my ego was fully inflated by and all-expenses paid, exclusive TDF scholarship. Measured by size IDFA is, after all, the #1 Documentary Market/Festival in the world, Hot Docs is #2. Ego and vanity aside though, in most respects IDFA’s classes have been superior to Doc U’s and IDFA had the very important international perspective, whereas Doc U’s was exclusively, and perhaps moreso – asphyxiatingly – Canadian. Although, had I known that 89% of applications were accepted for IDFAcademy, I don’t know if my decision to come would have been different – maybe. I did get a few very good pieces of information, definitely a whole lot of new perspective on doc film and market tastes, met a few cool people, and perhaps got a lead or two on some sources of funding I didn’t know about before. Tangibly, my ROI is deeply in the red. Intangibly, it is probably about breakeven. If I get some funding, it will sharply rise towards the black. And if I get that travel grant, well then I would get up on the bar at Durty Nellie’s and do the Dance of Joy (Anyone remember Perfect Strangers?). Hope. Hope. The benefits have been many. And I got to see Amsterdam. And I got to live in an Irish Pub in he Red Light District for a week – that part – never again.
Final Note: I HEARD, if you want the ultimate ego-inflating (and presumably best) festival film school on your CV, see if you can get accepted to the 6-day Berlinale Talent Campus (Berlin Film Festival): 4000 applications. 300 accepted. Check the prerequisites…I don’t even think I’m eligible to apply. It’s too late for the Feb 2011 class anyways. Apply by Oct 2011 for the 2012 class.
IDFA 2010: Day 3 – The Wild West
This morning we talked about distribution with two panel members Esther van Messel of First Hand Films and Andrew Mer of Snag Films with our very own Rudy Buttignol moderating. It was nice to hear the contrast between the more traditional distributor, First Hand Films, with that of Snag Films, an internet distributor. Nothing earth shattering came from this session thought – and I certainly won’t be rushing to submit and of my current films to either of them, but nonetheless they provided some important stuff and had a interesting and valid discussion over the state of film distribution today: ‘It’s the Wild West’.
{An aside: Rudy Buttignol and Murray Battle are here from Knowledge, our public broadcaster in BC. They are a couple of familiar names for anyone who attended Vancouver’s Storyville, or anyone who is in film & TV in BC. On this trip I’m realizing what great work Rudy has done to bring Storyville to VIFF in Vancouver. It’s the real thing, although a little smaller than the big, established pitch forums like the TDF (now the Hot Docs Forum) at Hot Docs Toronto and the Forum at IDFA in Amsterdam (VIFF Storyville is only 2 years old). Rudy has been and continues to be instrumental to the IDFA Forum and has a major presence in IDFAcademy and (I think also) in the Hot Docs Forum. Murray is the commissioning editor for Knowledge and is representing us well. During our IDFAcademy Meet The Professionals sessions yesterday, I overheard some students who attended his table speaking quite highly of their meeting with him.}
Snag Films distributes films over the internet, for free with advertising as its sole revenue stream. Unless you negotiate a special agreement, the terms are 50% of advertising revenue, which doesn’t get higher than the low three figures unless your film is being streamed tens of thousands of times per month. They don’t pick up just any film, but short formats and odd lengths are welcome. They represent films like Morgan Spurlock’s Supersize Me, and if you live in the right region, you could stream it for free through Snag Films. Canada is not the right region. A lot of good that does me…
First Hand Films on the other hand is a traditional distributor, and add only 10-20 titles, of at least 60 minutes long, to their catalog each year out of thousands of submissions. They like to get involved at a rough cut so they have some say in the final polish applied to your film. Otherwise, acquisitions are also normal. They represent films such as Oscar Nominee Burma VJ and Winnebago Man. Expect them to take about a 35% commission.
Infobit #1:
While traditional television (and other traditional media) are on their way out, subscription TV (and other media) is up. The New York Times and Hulu are both moving from their current models (NYTimes being free content with advertising) to subscription models. The Wall Street Journal has been very successful with subscription.
Infobit #2:
Traditional distributors like First Hand are likely to want all rights, all remaining territories in perpetuity, and the exclusive deals will make you the most money. Non-exclusive deals will do a good job marketing your film, they are less likey going to make much money. (Isn’t ‘much’ a relative term?)
Next todaywas a Master Class with Pirjo Honkasalo, a famous director/cinematographer (in Europe at least) from Finland. If you read my comments about her two films I saw this week: Ito: Diary of an Urban Priest and The 3 Rooms of Melancholia, this Master Class was an experience much like those screenings: slow, sleep inducing, that which causes several people to leave before the film has finished, but with gems of content that make the length and pace worth the effort. Gems: she shoots and edits everything herself on 35mm film. Her shooting ratio is 1:2.2 (whaaa?), pretty precise number, and pretty darned efficient! She is this way because she came from a time and place where film was scarce and deciding when to roll camera was a commitment. Habits are hard to break.
She looks for the little things, not the drama. She will ignore drama to let the little things reveal themselves, and they do. She wants to “show the silence of man”.
Her technique is evolving… today she is less fond of camera movements than she used to be, although she saw a few very beautiful, well timed pans in her films.
While she does not consider herself a storyteller, i.e. her films do not follow a story structure, everything nonetheless has structure. The lack of story in her films is intentional, and she has become a well-respected pioneer of film in Europe. This no-story approach was hard to swallow for a few students I spoke with afterwards. We as emerging filmmakers are being hammered with “What’s your story, what’s your story” time and again from the industry – this frustrated my new colleagues. I find Pirjo’s approach liberating in a way. While I actually prefer films with a strong story I tend to prefer a hybrid of the art of film that seems to been more prevalent in Europe over the heavy-handed storytelling you often see in North American docs.
A few films that she mentioned, and are now on my watch list: Catfish, War Photographer.
The trailer for Catfish, recommended by Pirjo Honkasalo during her IDFA Master Class. Watch it - if you dare. Muahahah!
A note about Catfish…. this was an American film that Pirjo said she intially scoffed at (as she was speaking about story) but then she watched, and liked enough to recommend it during her Master Class at IDFA.
IDFA 2010: Day 2 – An Armadillo and a Pig
Saturday, November 20, 9:30pm. Sitting in the audience for the nightly ‘surprise screening’ in the Escape Club, a large bar/club that serves many purposes during the festival…
Today was a great day at IDFAcademy. Although i really like the effort to build a community at Doc U … (my inherent social awkwardness sometimes requires a push from someone else for me to make new friends) the content of this mornings session was frankly unbeatable. What I’m talking about is the phenomenon of Janus Metz’ war documentary Armadillo. It won the Gran Prix at Cannes (I think – I can’t find anything official to confirm this, but if it did, it would be the first for ANY documentary, ever. In any case he had 3 assistants, 7-8 interviews per day for 10 days, in other words, stardom). Interestingly it did not make the short list for the Oscars, the whispering being it was politics within the Academy that kept it out. Considering the attention it’s been getting (compared to others I’ve seen that are supposedly Oscar contender) Armadillo has every reason to be on the Oscar shortlist.
The trailer for Armadillo. Sorry, no English version of the trailer is available but you'll get the idea of the impact this film has anyways.
So I actually saw Armadillo last month at the Vancouver International Film Festival after hearing by word of mouth that it was a must see and would be a top contender for the best-doc Oscar. We learned the whispering actually began over year ago, just before the project was pitch at the 2009 IDFA Forum. The film began as part of 6x30min series of docs for Danish TV, each epispde to be directed by a new filmmaker. One filmmaker, Janus Metz, was to be embedded with a unit on the front lines of Afghanistan. After 4 trips to the front lines (4 weeks, 7 weeks, 5 weeks, and 2 weeks over the period of a year) he was afraid of letting anyone see the demo for fear that he would be imprisoned by the Danish government for revealing any military secrets of the mission in Afghanistan. This for me was the most unbelievable thing about this film – the access! How on earth would a government permit a filmmaker to keep the footage he has in the film? Footage that could potentially portray your soldiers as murderers..? And then how did he continue to get access after the incident? Oops I’ve given it away. But everyone already knows this and this, along with the beautiful cinematography and character development are what make this a great film, deserving of all the whispering, and now the accolades, it’s received. And if you’re interested to know, which you might be, Janus Metz is not in jail, he has a good lawyer, and the utmost respect of the world film community (save Oscar). The subjects, the soldiers initially felt betrayed by Janus, but as they realize the importance of the film is larger than themselves they are coming to terms with it and beginning to reconcile with him.
The trailer for Divine Pig, tonight's IDFA 'surprise screening' at the Escape Club.
9:31pm. Title of the surprise screening has been revealed: Divine Pig. Touching, tragic, graphic, horrific (horrific not meaning the film is bad, but rather shocking – you’re unlikely to see this on North American primetime TV). The relationship a butcher has with his pig, from birth to taking him for walks, to laying on the beach, playing with kids… and to slaughter or not to slaughter. Apparently this film went through some workshopping with IDFA over the last year, so it may give you a bit of an idea of what they’re teaching here in Amsterdam.
Today was a great day. Good night.
IDFA 2010: Day 1 – Traveling on a budget
My Hostel in Amsterdam - Durty Nellie's - great chicken curry!
This must be the noisiest hostel I’ve been in… good reason: it’s a pub around the corner from the red light district with some dorm rooms above it. If you’re in Amsterdam to party and want to hang out around the bar with a bunch of dudes (about a 10:1 ratio of men to women) before heading out to a café or the red light district, this could be your place… otherwise it’s a little tough to get anything done – and at the moment I am struggling with their wifi (fixed now) and I refuse to give my phone co. any roaming charges on top of the already hefty monthly toll they collect from me – leaving. Such it is when traveling on a budget (and booking hostels over the internet – It got good ratings on hostelworld.com despite the name: Durty Nellie’s).
Okay so here I am on my first day in A’Dam. I thought I’d get some touristy things out of the way before going to pick up my pass… so I arrived early at the Anne Frank Huis (the actual secret annexe where Anne Frank and her family hid from the Nazis during WW2). It was surreal to duck through the opening behind the bookshelf that hid the entrance to their hideaway, and then to stand in the room where she slept and wrote much of her diary. Highly recommended – a tough act to follow, IDFA.
A tough act indeed… I walked down to Rembrandtplein to the Guest Services area and picked up my stuff… a catalog of films, an industry guide with hundreds of industry bios and contacts… very useful stuff but I don’t really know where to begin with all of this information… and rather than fret over it I remind myself I’m here for IDFAcademy, which doesn’t actually start until tomorrow. So I can’t decide whether to grab a couple of films for the afternoon or to spend the rest of the day seeing the sights – a canal tour perhaps…> I figure I can do the tourist stuff on Monday so I go to grab a coupe of tickets… sold out, sold out, hmm this pass isn’t doing me much good so far. I pick a couple of flics that might be a little more obscure, and they are. But interesting.
First up: My Avatar and Me. Director Mikkel Stolt, Danish “documentary” about the director’s real love affair in the virtual world of Second Life. Sure there are reenactments in documentary but this film blurs the lines between documentary and “based on a true story” narrative. I think many documentarians would place this one in the latter category. The whole thing was reenacted by the filmmaker by all of the people it affected in the real thing – there is not a single interview or verite moment in the film that I can tell. It’s a little awkward at times when you just KNOW that the camera guy did not actually shoot the filmmaker’s sexual advance on his real GF getting denied (after getting it on, quite graphically, with his Second Life GF, unbeknownst to his real GF). Yep, reenacted, him and his real GF, in bed. But overall it kept me quite interested and entertained. I love it for pushing the boundaries of documentary, even if it didn’t quite pull it off for me.
Second: I counted 5 people who walked out on this next film, and almost everyone in the theatre was sitting behind me so I don’t know if there were (a lot) more. I almost walked out myself, but was happy I didn’t. Ito, Diary of an Urban Priest is a 2008 Finnish/Japanese doc portrait, part of Pirjo Honkasalo’s Restrospective Series – for this I was expecting it to be a special film… and that it was. About a likable young boxer-turned Buddhist priest, this is a very introspective, very intimate, very personal doc. The interviews at times were excruciatingly long – and were usually in the form of a conversation with another subject (his estranged mother – who abandoned him and his sister and became a Buddhist priest herself, his boxing coach, a woman who met him staggeringly drunk – he owns and operates a small bar in Tokyo). I love it for its spirituality, intimacy, and honesty. Shot on 35mm film, a rare format in documentary, it’s also very pretty to look at. I hate it for its ridiculous length (111 minutes). Definitely not mainstream, not much of a story… appreciate it for what it is… (art, I guess?) or you will be disappointed.
IDFA 2010: IDFAcademy 3-Day Film School Preamble
I guess I just couldn’t get enough fun during Doc U/TDF at Hot Docs last spring and then during Storyville at VIFF this fall. So what was the next big documentary film industry event that I could go to? IDFAcademy at IDFA perhaps…
Unlike Doc U, which I had been planning to apply to nearly 6 months in advance, I found out about IDFAcademy by chance while I was creeping (eww) on Facebook one day… IDFAcademy is the three day documentary film school held annually during IDFA, the International Documentary Film Festival of Amsterdam, the largest documentary film market/festival in the world, Hot Docs being the second (as I understand). So I applied, and not knowing what the chances of being accepted were, I gave it an honest shot and was accepted… the big difference this time around however is that this is not a scholarship like Doc U was – my expenses nor my pass are covered, meaning that that Canada Council travel grant I applied for will be the most wonderful Christmas present I could get this year (hope hope). But before committing to this rather big trip, I asked around during Storyville too see if it would be worth the investment… not everyone was fully on board with it… but one rather experienced producer’s worth every penny comment, along with my affinity for the European docs I saw at Hot Docs and the fact that I’ve never been to Amsterdam, sold me.
So tomorrow off I go on British Airways to Amsterdam via London and while there, time and internet connection permitting, I will be making my best attempts to blog, as I did from Hot Docs this spring, about the experience of being at IDFAcademy, for the benefit of other “emerging” filmmakers, students, teachers, colleagues or whoever just likes to read my self-indulgent blabberings.
