Images of the 21st Century
14-23 March 2014
JUST TALKING 18/3
The “Just Talking” sessions of the 16th Thessaloniki Documentary Festival continued on Tuesday, 18 March 2014, with directors Yael Andre (When I Will be Dictator), Iva Radivojevic (Evaporating Borders), Emily Yannoukou and Alexandros Papanikolaou (Hope on the Line), Nikolaos Ventouras (Palikari: Louis Tikas and the Ludlow Massacre), Eric Phillips-Horst, Adam Pogoff and Bryan Chang (Brasslands) and Thierry Michel (The Irresistible Rise of Moise Katumbi).
The discussion opened with Emily Yannoukou and Alexandros Papanikolaou, whose documentary, Hope on the Line, follows SYRIZA leader Alexis Tsipras on the campaign trail. “We live in Paris and wanted to have a first-hand experience of what was happening during the election race in Greece. We immediately started shooting. We would write and shoot at the same time. We were primarily interested in taking an inside look at the campaign. We often disagreed with each other, we had many debates, we would write and revise over and over again, trying to find the right balance between the scenes and maintaining our neutrality. I think the main part of the script took its final form during editing,” said Yannoukou. Papanikolaou added: “In terms of planning, we had to work fast. We met Alexis Tsipras in Paris on May 31, and two days later we started the shoot in Greece. We decided to wrap things up a year later. After Tsipras lost the elections, we thought it would be unfair to stop filming, so we kept following him in his role as opposition leader.”
Palikari: Louis Tikas and the Ludlow Massacre by Nikolaos Ventouras is also a political documentary, focusing on a landmark event in the history of the US labor movement. The protagonist is Louis Tikas, a Greek immigrant and unionist, who led the struggle of coal miners in Colorado in 1914. “The film tells the story of Tikas, his fellow workers and their legacy. This is what we call a ‘handmade film’, since we kept the budget to a minimum and did everything ourselves: the shooting, the editing, the score. It was a surprise for me that the film was selected for screening at the Festival. It received positive reactions at the premiere, and I hope it proves a good start for my next films,” said the director. Commenting on the material he used for his documentary, he said: “Since the Massacre took place a century ago, there were few visual materials, so we made extensive use of interviews. We had written the script and producer Lamprini Thoma participated in our research about the era, which allowed us to determine the questions and issues we would raise in the interviews. In our film most of the writing was also done during editing, when we had to reduce the amount of the footage.”
The audience is taken on an explosive musical journey with the documentary Brasslands, produced by the Meerkat Media collective. Three members of the collective — Eric Phillips-Horst, Adam Pogoff and Bryan Chang — were present. The film follows three bands — from the USA, Serbia and Romania — as they compete at the music festival of Guca in Serbia. “We come from New York and we are members of the Meerkat Media collective, which consists of ten members, directors and writers. Our film was produced quite unconventionally. Five members of the collective travelled to Serbia, brought back the material, then we all watched it together, decided on the narrative and plot, and then did the editing accordingly. This is not the traditional way to make a film, but it is our way, one we developed in the last couple of years, and it works for us,” said Chang. Phillips-Horst talked about the filmmaking process: “After choosing the American band for its characters who were opening up to us, we followed them for about nine months.” Pogoff added: “We filmed for four or five weeks in Serbia, and we followed a plan. We made contact with the local community and local bands, one of which did well in the competition. We used the small room we were staying in as an editing studio, collecting our material about the characters and debating. We filmed in turns, because this is a 24hour festival. It was an altogether interesting experience. We had to write on the spot, time was short since the Festival had an end date, and the entire process was like a test for us.”
Taking the floor, Iva Radivojevic, talked about her film Evaporating Borders, a poetic portrayal of immigrants seeking asylum in Cyprus. “I live in New York but I am originally from Yugoslavia. My film is a treatise on asylum seekers in Cyprus, a country I have also lived in as an immigrant, so this is a personal take on the issue. I did the shooting and editing myself, since in New York I also work as a film editor. This is a slow moving, untraditional, visually poetic documentary that demands patience from the audience. It premiered at the Rotterdam Festival, and this is the third festival I take part in with this film.” Talking about the filmmaking process, Radivojevic noted: “Thankfully, I love filming and editing. To me, filming is an intuitive process; the images are not literal, but suggestive. I get ‘lost’ in filming and keep notes. Before the editing, I wrote the script in the form of a letter to a friend, adding the interviews.”
Moise Katumbi, an unusual kind of leader, is the protagonist in Thierry Michel’s documentary The Irresistible rise of Moise Katumbi. “I have made many films in various countries on state power in the last twenty years. My documentary about Katumbi is different, because he was elected to office, which is something new in Africa. He is an African businessman, who was elected governor and who also owns a football team. His province is rich in minerals, accounting for 80% of Congo’s national wealth. The film is about the manipulation of the masses and democratic machiavellianism. It is interesting to observe how this new system of government is shaping up in Africa, given that powerful men of this type exist also elsewhere in the world, exploiting their financial power to rise to political offices,” said Michel. The director also talked about the adversities he had to overcome while filming: “My Congolese assistant, a journalist, was placed under UN protection. That was when I had to end shooting and try to complete my film with the footage my associates there had managed to discretely collect. While making another film, I was arrested in Kinshasa and had my visa cancelled. It was really hard for me. The police chief in Congo pressed charges against me and tried to prevent the distribution of my film. The Congolese Foreign Minister warned me against distributing the film and, when I refused, he threatened me he would destroy my career. The odd thing is that they paid the press, not only in Congo, but even in Europe, to write the film reviews.”
Yael Andre described her film When I Will be Dictator as a “science fiction documentary,” noting: “I gathered my material on a super 8 camera and spent ten years filming myself. I wrote a fiction story and tried to add the images to the story. It is hard for me to talk about the film, since it is ten films in one, with each image telling its own story. I call those images ‘wild’, because they were lost and found in an open market. Also, this documentary is in a sense also a love story, since it refers to a friend of mine who has died.” Andre also said that the major obstacles in her film were related to editing, and specifically in placing the right images in the right part of the story.
The directors then discussed the relationship between the documentary genre, fiction and journalism. Radivojevic noted: “As film critic Luciano Barisone has pointed out, there are two ways you can approach the documentary genre: either as a format, in which case it is informational, or as a cinematic expression, in which case you look at it for its emotional potential. The documentary depends on the personal way of expression of each filmmaker.” Michel said on the same issue: “The main thing is to find a good narrative, genuine fiction in reality itself. When I made my first film, my inspiration was Shakespeare. It was like filming a political comedy or political theater and I had to find the balance between that and the tragic nature of my theme. A documentary shows what would otherwise remain hidden. It reveals things people wish to keep secret. It is an anthropological art.” Commenting on the same issue, Chang said: “Labels such as fiction and documentary do have their uses, but if you take a closer look you realize there is no clear dividing line. In all films, you have to reduce original material running for many hours into a final, one or two hour cut. We do follow certain conventions of the doc format, and our hope is to present our story in the best way we can. You need to always ask yourself if you are unwittingly deceiving the audience.” Radivojevic said: “It is always a matter of context and who is the one doing the talking. Documentaries are fictional and fiction is real.” Ventouras clarified on this point: “My experience as a photo journalist has influenced my filmmaking. My effort is to elicit truth from reality in any way I can, without adding extra poetry or art to it. The important thing is to be able to reveal the intrinsic poetry of the story. Everything is subjective, including our perception. But subjectivity is not the opposite of truth.” Michel said: “Every genre has its own traits. In political documentary, you have a great moral obligation. You have to use journalism, but that is not enough, since there are many other aspects: dramaturgy, psychoanalysis, anthropology. I don’t fully agree with the dichotomy between journalism and documentary. Great journalists, like Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre or Victor Hugo used this method to be exact and write on the complexity of reality. Journalists today do not have that luxury of time to develop and investigate their story, which is why journalism often becomes only a caricature. We have to raise questions and depict the complexity of reality. For example, I am very upset with media reports from Ukraine. Journalists should go deeper into the history of the country and this conflict.”
The filmmakers then commented on the issue of the personal relationships developing between the director and his or her protagonists. Phillips-Horst explained: “I set limits that prevent us from becoming friends and me learning about their pasts before I meet them. I also want to be filming during the first time my protagonist tells me a story, because I believe this is always the best take. I try to keep my characters at arm’s length and stay in the background.” Pogoff added: “I personally like the moment when the film is over and you can finally be yourself again with the people you had been filming.” Talking about her experience with a politician, Yannoukou said: “It was a challenge to come close to Alexis Tsipras, because, as a politician, when he wakes up in the morning he wears the clothes of the professional politician. He controls his image. We tried to capture on film more than what we see in the news, and be fair at the same time. We were not enchanted by Tsipras, but the truth is that you can easily get carried away by the way he presents himself, so we had many debates and discussions and we were very careful in the editing.
