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Very pleased to announce a special
screening hosted by London's Science Museum
(one of the film's funders in its early stages)!
Wed. 23rd January 2013, 7-9pm (film followed by
discussion)
Free, but booking advised - more info here
A good day for Somewhere yesterday ... our wonderful hard working collaborators on the Floating Cinema, UP projects just managed to reach the target for the fundraising campaign - so a big congratulations to them and THANKS to those who pledged support.
In the evening I went along to the very enjoyable celebration for Capital Growth and all that the team there have achieved. Even better Abbey Gardens won the award for the most inspiring food garden ... which is quite something. I was humbled to realise we'd beaten Food from the Sky - a really impressive project.
bravissimo!
On Sunday afternoon there we were, all standing at the tiny Graz airport luggage carousel, the airport billboard advertising that the local ski season is being opened by Swedish House Mafia. It's got a certain kind of cool, Europe, hasn't it? Though people do still style their hair in mullets a lot, it must be said.
A disparate group of film people bundle into our large taxi and make our way through that efficient-looking industrial farmland they seem to have around European cities (what have they got against hedges?) on our way to what is a rather nice hotel in Graz city centre. They've even organised bikes for us to zip between hotel and course venue (at this early stage we don't realise that this is probably the only journey we'll have time to make this week). No cycle helmets - this is Europe remember, and they do things differently here.
We're swiftly grouped into one of three, two groups are fiction to our one documentary team, led by Argentinian-born writer Gualberto Ferrari. We familiarise ourselves with the Theatre am Lend, our home for the next 7 days. It's comfortable and supplies the endless stream of coffee, snacks, lunches and sometimes dinners required to keep the show on the road - sitting in a room all day appears to make everyone very, very hungry and I quickly learn to appreciate the pumpkin - the hallowed food of the region. The all-women Sources2 office has decamped from their base in Berlin to here and runs the operation with just the right style of warm efficiency. We're all very impressed at how easy they make it look, though we all know how hard they must need to work to pull these Herculean events off.
First thing on Monday, Gualberto maps out the format he'll take with our group of projects - Nina Pope (my co-producer and DoP) and I are joined by Stefan Lechner, Lieven Corthouts (& later, fresh from IDFA, his producer Emmy Oost), Madhureeta Anand & Johannes Rosenberger, Walo Deuber & Rose-Marie Schneider and Ruslana Berndl. The project subjects range from Chernobyl to nuns to refugees to my parents. Africa comes up quite a few times...
Our workshop will discuss each project in detail in rotation across the week, each project getting typically a 2 hr discussion every few days. We've all read each others' treatments in advance (these vary to a rather interesting degree though all are presented in English - most are much longer than is typical in the UK), so know the bones of what is ahead. Clearly Gualberto has both read and watched a lot of our material in advance. (He continues to work on our material at night at the hotel, though when he tells me about simultaneously enjoying old Rod Stewart videos on the telly, I wonder if this is homework entirely helpful).
My film is much further ahead than most in my group (i.e. in production rather than development) and this concerns me a little at first. It makes you feel a lot more vulnerable to show raw rushes than a paper treatment that can be re-edited or even erased on the spot. However, as we all know, having a hard drive of rushes is very far from having a film and I was here to approach the film afresh, so having a room full of trustworthy, talented strangers is just what I needed.
Each project is dissected and interrogated by the group and Gualberto, clips and tasters are viewed, and often what the director energetically tells us about their subject turns out to to be even better than what's been written: I've found this happens in pitching workshops I've done before, but as Sources2 is not focusing on the showy performance of pitching an idea in public, we are mercifully at liberty to get down to the minutiae if we want to - it's a delight, if a knackering one, and leads us into some astonishing personal revelations that remind me why documentary film-making is where the most awake people I've ever met are.
Nina and I are the only native English speakers here and more than lucky to be working in our mother tongue - if I find the course intensity tiring think how much more it is for everyone else - I'm amazed they can summon anything beyond jibberish after lunch. The dynamic of a collective effort on each and every project is followed and Gualberto is extremely focused - to the point that he needs to be reminded to allow us the coffee-breaks we exoect if we are to devour all the excellent pastries they keep leaving around outside our room.
In between sessions and over lunch we have all-too quick chats
with some of the fiction writers and directors from the other
groups. They come from all over the globe and I can genuinely say
I've never had a more stimulating week of conversation - ranging
from the sexual politics of modern Turkey, to the influx of Russian
dancers into the Bollywood scene, to how well Norway deals with
snow (not as well as is always reported here in the UK, it seems),
to the cuisine of Uganda, to internal politics of the Swiss
Protestant church and mountain biking in Belgium.
I also enjoyed dropping listeners' jaws with my 'No, really, this
is the true story of my family, and I'm making a film of it', and
it was endlessly helpful to hear the many insights of a truly
international and culturally-unbiased lunchtime table.
Back in the room, Gualberto rigourously emphasised the importance of building a structure in all feature documentaries - taking each project to task on probable starts and ends, even those whose directors were still in the starting blocks. However hypothetical these discussions were, they remained helpful to all of us as we drew parallels in our own projects and recounted experiences we'd had that could prove helpful to each other. Characters were discussed, sometimes watched in clips, and honest feedback offered. My father (on film) did not have to open his mouth to evoke appreciative laughter from the group - something he could perhaps develop for comic effect in real life....Directorial approaches - investigative, playful, strategic - were all shared - after all, how many of us indie doc directors ever get to watch another at work and see fresh techniques in action? At one point I remember recommending all-female crews as the antidote to macho film subjects, and there were enjoyable digressions into how to engage with Somalian refugees (as a postman as well as as a director) and with Lisbon's fado music scene (as a guitarist and portrait photographer, as well as a director).
Sources2 kindly programme the odd trip out (the thrill of the Arnold Schwarzenegger Museum cannot be done justice to here) and some guest speakers to give our weary heads a rest: I caught Barbara Albert speaking about her new film The Dead and the Living and Manuela Buono of Taskovski Films talking about something you hear a lot about in doc circles now - 'cross-platform'. As an unofficial godmother of the UK net art scene (I learnt how to write raw HTML back in the the heady days of 1994) I come to such talks with a lot of scepticism, so much being touted as groundbreaking online now was old hat even by the late nineties. It's just that most audiences were not online in those days, so it was all niche.
It's never easy to exactly wow an audience who have to watch your cursor click and the wifi buffer, but Manuela offered a nice tour of the kind of N American and European online plus TV projects that big broadcast players like Arte have been funding. I had to admit I knew of almost none of them - One Millionth Tower and Empire Me (which might have travelled if it had had a better English title!) being a few tackling the kind of big global subjects that - for better or for worse - the WWW as a medium attempts to describe. Towards the end of Manuela's talk someone from my group whispered to me 'What's the difference between this and a 'film with a web site'?'. If we'd had more energy left that evening this might have been a good question to throw open to the room but truthfully we were all by then looking forward to throwing open the door to the bar.
After what felt like much more than a week's work, I left travelling with our tutor Gualberto - we listlessly browsed the airport shop with its pumpkin-seed based local confections and talked about what was next for us, once we'd left our immersive Sources2 bubble. Our group meets again in March 2013 in Vienna and we all have an action list to complete by then - one thing's for sure, we'll not be idle in the interim.
Many thanks to the Scottish Documentary Institute for supporting my attendence at Sources2.
This week Somewhere is in lovely Graz in Austria, workshopping with Sources 2 , a brilliant professional development organisation for film-makers.
More as soon as there's brain space for creating a blog entry....
Up Projects are fronting a bold new crowdfunding campaign for next year's returning Floating Cinema!
You can watch a lovely short film telling you all about it here starring nice man with a nice accent off the TV (pictured) Michael Smith, with whom we produced his directorial debut 'Drift Street' for the 2011 Floating Cinema.
There are some great perks for happy bidders, some of them even involve our illustrious company :-)
You are all very invited to this cosy weekend event at
Abbey Gardens, the East London space we designed a
few years ago (aka
What Will the Harvest Be?). It's free and as ever there will be
splendid food and fun.
Sat. November 24th from 4-6pm - Abbey Gardens,
Bakers Row, London E15 3NF
Over the last year (or is that the last 40?!) I've been working on an as-yet-untitled film about my incredible family story (no yawning at the back - when I say incredible I really mean it :-)) , and last week Nina and I travelled at rather short notice to Ethiopia's capital city Addis Ababa to shoot for 6 days. It was an unforgettable experience, and very special to meet family there after all these years.
Our Ethiopian fixer and crew (see pic) came via Addis-based Gem TV - here we all are in action.
Recently we heard of the sad death of one of the central characters of our second feature documentary film, Living With the Tudors, Tissy or Shirley or Mrs Starkey Bence, depending on whether you met her in 1557, 2007 or 1941 persona.
Tissy was universally appreciated as one of the stalwarts of the UK re-enactment scene, having anchored the fun and games at Kentwell Hall's events for many years, camping there when 'in residence' in her cosy caravan where she welcomed visitors with a glass of wine. When tired of playing 'gentry' in public (stiff corsets and a lot of smiling and waving), Tissy had a 'peasant' costume she could retire into of an evening to take a back seat, but most of us will remember her in her glamourous gowns, sailing by in a stately fashion. Before our time at Kentwell, she had, I believe, greatly enjoyed working in the Tudor kitchen and she was extremely knowledgeable about Tudor life, but never ever boring about it.
It wasn't easy to gain the trust of the re-enactment scene,
although we had participated in Kentwell events for three years
before beginning to film. But Tissy 'got' us instantly and at times
was an incredibly valuable bridge between our project and the
re-enactors who worried we were only there to send them up.
Of course, in our film we meet a deeper and more complex Tissy than
the character-actor, and we are forever indebted to her for
offering an intimate insight into her life story (she was a single
parent to her son at a time when it was extremely difficult to be
so) and to what in re-enactment fed her sense of fantasy,
creativity and fun. A visit from her son to Kentwell remains one of
our favourite scenes with her - as they tease each other gently
about her multiple identities there is a vulnerability evident in
both of them that is very touching. Tissy's sense of irony (not a
quality that every re-enactor can share it has to be said...!) and
humour is also in evidence in a great scene with Tamsin Lewis (another Kentwell
stalwart) and us (all in our Tudor characters) where we discuss a
filming matter in coded Tudor-ese (the language of Kentwell) - in
the film this conversation is subtitled into English and rarely
fails to raise a laugh in audiences.
So it's a fond farewell to Shirley from us at Somewhere.
I had a really 'good garden' day yesterday. It began with a beautiful sunny morning at Abbey Gardens with a visit from Capital Growth who were judging the garden for a competition - fingers crossed, as Karen would say - 'we're in it to win it.'
I then headed over to Frieze to see some of our produce on the 'mega-stall' there by Grizedale arts ... And finally to the garden museum for the launch of a new book on London Gardens - also featuring Abbey Gardens!
I met lots of other garden folk and heard some really nice comments about the project. It seems after 4 years and much hard work Abbey Gardens really is thriving - it's a very good feeling to have about a much loved project.
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