Saturday, June 18th, 2005
8:30 - Live music by The SB (details below)
9:00 - On the difficulty of filmmaking
On the roof of The Old American Can Factory
232 Third Street, Gowanus/Park Slope, Brooklyn.
Dress warmly (it's cooler on the roof than in the streets).
In the event of rain the show is indoors at the same location.
Undocumented
If you are a filmmaker, and another director wants to make a documentary about your production, watch out. That other director is like a buzzard, smelling disaster and circling, waiting, recording. They smell a good story, and your production is probably in trouble. From Hearts of Darkness (about Apocalypse Now) to American Movie (about Coven), from Burden of Dreams (about Fitzcarraldo) to The Man of La Mancha (about Don Quixote), there is a long history of movies about troubled productions.
It makes sense. Filmmaking is an extremely complicated and difficult art, and the productions are cinematic in and of themselves -- the lights, the equipment, the large crews moving with great coordination, or with anxious difficulty. Tensions flare, plans are scraped, things break. In two films in this program, swordplay goes horribly wrong. When a writer or a painter fails, there's not much to see. When a film goes down in flames, let's hope someone else is rolling tape.
This program is all about the difficulties of making a movie. But the magical thing about filmmaking is that even when the buzzards are circling, sometimes your film will rise from the flames like a phoenix. These documentaries are made with the utmost love and respect for their subjects. What you see here are all triumphs, testaments to the will, imagination and talent of artists who keep fighting for their films even though, in the words of Gary Barbosa, "The stips are chacked against the little guy."
THE FILMS:
Gary and the Romans (Ted Gesing / Brooklyn, NY, Miami, FL & Nashville, TN / 17:00)
Gary B. was once a podiatrist, became a billboard magnate, and now has a dream to make epic Roman gladiator films. Last fall he used Nashville's fake Parthenon as the backdrop for a movie trailer for his first film, The Charioteer. Lured by free hotel rooms and discount togas, 300 Roman re-enactors agreed to populate his spectacle. About 50 of them showed up. Gary and the Romans follows Gary over the course of year, as he begins production on his $60,000 shoot, through the romance that blossoms with his lead actress, through his efforts to sell the screenplay through "backdoor connections" or even simply complete the trailer. * Rooftop Films' Production Collective donated editing space for the completion of this film. This is a work-in-progress of a feature film.
Made in Italy (Fabio Wuytack / Wachrebeke, Belgium & Carrera, Italy / 30:00)
Young filmmaker Fabio Wuytack discovers an old film which was shot more than 100 years ago in Carrara, Italy, by the
European inventors of cinema, the Lumiere brothers. Wuytack brings this film back to the charming marble-city where
Michelangelo came to make his sculptures. With the help of a cinema-owner, a series of mineworkers, an old priest and
other fascinating local characters, he tries to trace the location where the Lumieres filmed. In doing so, he also
finds out more about his own roots than he could ever have imagined. Winner of the prize for Best Documentary at the
International Short Film Festival Leuven in 2004. Italian with English subtitles.
Video Money (Monika Heilscher & Mattias Heeder / Hamburg, Germany & Lagos, Nigeria / 30:00)
Unbeknownst to most Westerners, Nigeria is now a booming producer of feature films, despite having almost no theaters. Over 1,000 straight-to-video movies are produced every year in a massive independent system in which directors produce and finance their own films, which are then sold in the streets. This documentary follows one hot screenwriter, Egbon Kabat, as he attempts to direct and produce his first feature -- a two hour film shot in five days. The tone for the production is set early, when one actor complains about having to do take after take walking up a muddy, insect-infested river. The director screams at him, "There is no democracy in filmmaking. It's very simple, you do as you are told." Things go downhill from there, until day eight, when Kabat finally gets to utter the climactic words for any Nigerian film production: "Cut. Strike this bull---- down."
Sayeh (Kaveh Nabatian / Montreal, Canada & Paris, France / 37:00)
A small film crew follows Shahram Golchin, a former Iranian movie star who now lives in exile in Montreal, to meet a man who fled Iran but has been stuck in Paris' Charles de Gaulle Airport for over a decade. But instead of conducting an intelligent discussion about homeland and displacement, Golchin's grief and guilt overwhelm him, and the filmmakers are forced to go down with his sinking ship.
THE MUSIC: The SB is an experimental music collective that warps standing waves and complex fields of interference into atmospheric drones.
