Documentary Longinotto Style

Ross Whitaker took a trip to Guth Gafa film festival to talk to an extraordinary documentary maker, Kim Longinotto. The director tells us about her unique approach and the difficult decisions she’s made whilst making her films.

Guth Gafa is fast becoming one of Ireland’s most enjoyable festivals. Locked away in the north west corner of the country, it is delightfully small yet perfectly formed and screens some of the world’s most exciting documentary films, always with the filmmaker in attendance.

One of this year’s undoubted highlights was two screenings and a masterclass with Kim Longinotto, whose marvellous films have been gracing festivals around the world for over thirty years…

Kim Longinotto refuses to be unequivocal. She has done these masterclasses before and as she begins to speak to the group, she is just a little careful about what she says. ‘I promised myself I’d never do one of these things again,’ she says with a smile.

But everyone here is glad she didn’t stick to that promise.

Longinotto has a way that she likes to make films and it has served her well. For many years her films have been greeted by critical and audience acclaim and she was given an Outstanding Achievement Award at this year’s Hot Docs. Major awards at festivals like Cannes and Sundance and a European Film Award prove the world likes the way she makes films too.

Generally speaking, Longinotto doesn’t use interviews in her films, uses little music and rarely uses any kind of voiceover. She never wants to ask her subjects to repeat anything or act in any particular way and she doesn’t shoot cutaways. But she doesn’t want people to think that she is against these things, she just doesn’t want them in her films. She is at pains not to generalise about how films should be made.

‘What we all do is make films that reflect who we are,’ she says. ‘What you make shows so much of what kind of person you are and how you see the world and you just have to go with it really.’
Longinotto’s personality seems reflected in the films that she makes. She seems unassuming, quiet but confident and very open. You can see how the subjects of her films might warm to her.
In her films, she doesn’t tell the audience what to think but instead creates a narrative with complex, human characters. She does all her own cinematography but she is not a fly on the wall, rather she’s another person in the room. The audience becomes a witness in the world she portrays rather than a passive observer.

‘It’s a different kind of information that you’re getting. I remember sitting through documentaries that were on before a fiction film and everyone used to talk through them because documentaries were the boring bit where you were told something and it was supposed to be good for you somehow. What I’m trying to do is make a story where you’re being drawn into a world and you’re watching a story unfold and you stop thinking about what type of film it is and just follow the narrative.’
The full article is printed in Film Ireland 133

100 Mornings - COMING SOON!

Conor Horgan is a man in a hurry. He squeezes me in for a chat in a Dublin café the day before he is due to fly to the Slamdance festival in Park City, Utah where his debut feature - One Hundred Mornings - will have its World Premiere.

For his first film to be chosen for Slamdance is a creditable achievement in itself but over the coming days the film makes a substantial impression at the festival, where it receives a Special Jury Mention and is described by Filmmaker Magazine as, "Achingly humane and stringently observed".

One Hundred Mornings was one of three films green-lit by the Catalyst Project to go into production with a €250k budget. The other films were the festival favourite Eamon and the as-yet unreleased Redux but the scheme was also responsible for incubating other fine films like His & Hers and Savage, that weren’t funded by the project itself but were developed to the point that production was almost inevitable, and was ultimately successful.

What comes across so strongly in conversation with Horgan is just how much he enjoyed making this intense, moving film. His eyes light up when he thinks back to the process, holed up in a Wicklow location for four weeks.

“The film is quite bleak, you could say, but the set was the happiest set I’ve ever been on. Perhaps that was a reaction to the material. We were a group of people doing something that we believed in and believing it was something we could do well. There was a strong feeling amongst the cast and crew that we had the potential to make a good film.”

The film imagines a world where society has broken down and the population is struggling to survive with no energy and limited resources. At the centre of the film, two couples form an uneasy alliance, hiding out in a remote lakeside cabin and hoping things will somehow improve.

Time passes. With precious little information from the outside world and an increasing amount of external threats to their survival, tensions rise between the characters, leaving the audience gripped by the action.

To make the film, it was vital that Horgan find a location cut off from the external world, both from the point of view of isolating his characters and also creating a quiet world away from the sounds of daily life.

“Writing the film, I thought I was being very clever because we only needed one location but when I actually broke it down I realised that the location had to provide a very long and specific list of requirements. It took us an awful long time to find it. We were at the top of a hill looking down at Lough Dan and we saw this place. I remember walking down the hill and looking in the windows and thinking, ‘this is it!’”

“It was just in the middle of nowhere but because of the film it needed to be in the middle of nowhere. It needed to have no lights, no noise, not even a road nearby or even livestock. And it had to big enough so that we could shoot four people in it and make it visually interesting.”

The film is definitely that. At times watching it, I was reminded that Horgan has a background in photography; so many of the frames could have been stunning photographs in themselves.

This visual strength allied to the bleak but beautiful location makes this film the best looking of the recent lower budget Irish films, in my opinion at least, and Horgan explains that he had a strong collaborative bond with cinematographer, Suzie Lavelle.

“Suzie was just a really great ally to make the film with. We spent two weeks on the set before filming, looking at everything and storyboarding. She has a document somewhere with photographs for every scene from the film but when it came to filming we just put that in the back pocket and were open to what would happen in front of us. There was a spontaneity and an energy about how things happened on set that gave the film life.”

Horgan has achieved a taut, compelling drama that sucks you in and won’t let go. Central to achieving this outcome is his choice of bravely long takes held in wider shots that drag the viewer into the centre of the unfolding human drama.

“I didn’t want to make a cutty film,” he says. “I started off in commercials where you cut so often. Where possible, I wanted to make the scene work in one take. I wanted to block the scenes and set the frame and create something that held the attention and held the drama without needing to cut to another angle. It just makes the film feel more real.”

Test screenings confirmed that the intensity of film could emotionally engage viewers. Horgan sat delighted amongst the punters while post-screening debates about the film unfolded. People were engaged and passionate about it. The film’s domestic premiere at Galway continued the trend and success at Slamdance suggests it has a bright future.

“It isn’t a film that’s everyone’s cup of tea but then it wasn’t intended to be. I think the people that get it, really get it. I certainly hope that it’s thought-provoking and, so far, it seems to be.”

JAPANESE CINEMA GEMS CURRENTLY @ IFI

Departures - until Jan 7thWinner of the Oscar for Best Foreign Film, director Yojiro Takita’s drama conjures an arresting story from unlikely subject matter: the travails of a cash-strapped cellist who takes on a new job preparing corpses for Japanese funeral rites.This fundamentally warm-hearted film finds a balance of humour and sobriety in its touching exploration of both the pain and the catharsis involved in saying our farewells.

YASUJIRO OZU SEASON - until Jan 29thRegarded by many critics as the greatest of Japanese directors, Yasujiro Ozu (1903-1963) is celebrated in this short season built around the re-release of digitally restored versions of Tokyo Story (1953) and Late Autumn (1960).

SCREENINGS:An Autumn Afternoon (Sanma No Aji) until Jan 7th Tokyo Story (Tokyo Monogatari) until Jan 14th Floating Weeds (Ukigusa) Jan 16th & 18th The End of Summer (Kohayagawa-Ke No Aki) Jan 17th & 19th Late Autumn (Akibiyori) from Jan 29th.

Coming soon

Still Walking - Jan 15th - 28thHirokazu Kore-eda’s previous work (After Life, Nobody Knows) has been impressive, but this family drama is so wise and true that it affirms his position at the forefront of Japanese cinema. It revolves around a single family gathering, in which elderly parents host their grown-up son and daughter, their respective partners and children. Ozu is a reference point, obviously, but you might as well say Jean Renoir or Chekhov. It’s that good.

SPOTLIGHT ON COLONY

NOT JUST ANOTHER BEE MOVIE

Ross McDonnell - co-director of Colony – meets me in Dublin fresh from the Toronto International Film Festival, where the buzz around his debut feature was great.

"Colony may be one of the most aesthetically beautiful documentaries of the season, as well as one of the more urgent and intelligent,” wrote Variety.

“The movie constitutes a satisfying addition to the blooming, buzzing field of social issue documentary,” wrote the New York Times.

In addition to the compliments of the newspapers at Toronto, McDonnell has recently heard that his debut film will also play at IDFA, one of the world’s most important documentary festivals. But, despite these successes, his biggest concern at present is that he is smashed broke - welcome to the world of documentary filmmaking.

One hopes, though, that the financial challenges of making documentaries won’t discourage McDonnell and his co-director, Carter Gunn, from pursuing future projects in the medium. This is a mature, intelligent, informed piece of work from two young filmmakers who clearly have more to give.

Colony is one of a number of bee movies that are emerging at present. These documentaries are prompted by the clear and present danger facing bees as Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) leaves landscapes of empty beehives across America and beyond.

Now, those of you who spent your primary school education getting stung by bees and falling asleep in biology class might be surprised to hear that honeybees are actually quite important. Because they pollinate our plant-life, these noble, industrious creatures are central to our own survival on Earth. Einstein reputedly said that if the honeybee became extinct then man would only have four years left to live.

“It was actually falsely attributed to him,” McDonnell tells me. “It turns out that a bunch of disgruntled French beekeepers made it up and credited to him. Anyway, I read that and it’s a pretty powerful statement and I read all the statistics about the American beekeepers who ship bees back and forward across the US to pollinate every third bite you eat and I thought it was interesting material for a film.”

While the film interviews numerous beekeepers, it concentrates mostly on veteran beekeeper, David Mendes, and Lance and Victor Seppi, two young broth­ers starting out as beekeepers in tough economic times. As Mendes campaigns on behalf of all beekeepers, the Seppi’s try to keep their own business afloat.

The Seppi family is very much the emotional epicentre of this film. The observational footage of the family’s struggles is enthralling and one of the strongest aspects of the documentary. The story of their collapsing business, affected both by the struggles of the bees and the world economy allows the filmmakers to subtly get across the message that perhaps we have more in common with bees than we realise.

“When we met the Seppis they had seven children, they’re a home-school family and they’re actually really natural environmentalists - they live in the middle of the country, they grow their own food and they eat an almost entirely raw vegan diet. We started to think that they were a colony in their own right. We went with the thought that they were a colony, the United States was a colony and that the bees were a colony and we then looked at ways of interweaving these stories.”

One of the strengths of the film is its openness to all sides of the story. While CCD could have catastrophic effects on nature and society, nobody is fully sure what has caused the problem. Rather than standing back and pointing the finger at pesticide manufacturers, the filmmakers patiently pursued access to the corporation and let them put forward their side of the story. It turns out they might not be to blame.

Perhaps we are all to blame. One is left with the feeling that bees are more important than we realise, that our cavalier attitude towards them might lead to their demise and that our tendency to undervalue their importance might lead to a reduction in the beekeepers that look after them.

Colony is a tribute to what can be done with time, talent and a little money. Gunn and McDonnell spent the guts of two years immersed in the project, with McDonnell on camera and Gunn taking care of the edit. The film is stunningly shot and the two-man team clearly made the effort to develop the relationships and access necessary to tell the story well.

“If I can draw a parallel with feature filmmaking, what we wanted was to see the change come from within our characters. We were very lucky that we were given the time and the support to be able to see the change over time in our subjects and in the story. We were fortunate that the Irish Film Board and our producers at Fastnet Films gave us the support to do that. They never said, ‘where are you going with this.’ They were with us the whole way along.”

They all should be proud of this clever, powerful film.

AWARDS NEWS

IFB Funded Shorts Win at Irish Film Festivals Over the Weekend

IFB funded short films have had a successful weekend picking up a total of seven awards and honorable mentions at the Cork and Kerry film festivals.

The 54th Corona Cork Film Festival saw wins for Bye Bye Now and Moore Street Masala and two honorable mentions for A Film From My Parish - 6 Farms, a short which also won at the Kerry Film Festival along with The Man Inside and The Wednesdays.

The Reality Bites BYE BYE NOW directed by Ross Whitaker and Aideen O'Sullivan picked up the Audience Award for Best Irish Short Film at the Corona Cork Film Festival after its premiere in the Opera House on Saturday. The short documentary looks at how the phone box has gone from the centre of Irish life to the verge of extinction through the stories of those who remember it fondly.

David O'Sullivan's MOORE STREET MASALA picked up the Audience Award for Best International Short Film. The musical love story was filmed in Dublin earlier this year and mixes the colour of Bollywood with the diversity of modern Irish culture. The film was produced as part of the Short Shorts scheme which premiered at the Galway Film Fleadh in July.

The Framework short A FILM FROM MY PARISH - 6 FARMS directed by Tony Donoghue received two Honorable Mentions at the Cork Film Festival in the Best Irish Short Film and Best International Short Film categories for its imaginative and emphatic look at a rapidly disappearing rural world. The film also picked up the Best Documentary Short award at the Kerry Film Festival.

Meanwhile Rory Bresnihan's Signature short film THE MAN INSIDE was awarded the Best Film title in Kerry. The short film has had a successful year having been named Best European Dramatic Short at the European Independent Film Festival in Paris in March and winning the Best Live Action Short Under 15 Minutes Award, 2nd place at the renowned Palm Springs International Film Festival.

The short comedy THE WEDNESDAYS directed by Conor Ferguson picked up the Best Irish Short Film award at the festival. The film has already won acclaim and awards at prestigious festivals such as Clermont Ferrand and the Aspen Shortfest in the US.

BYE BYE NOW PLAYS CORK FF

Bye Bye Now! is an amusing, poignant documentary about the fate of the Irish phone box which has gone from the centre of society to the verge of extinction.

We Irish are known for the having the gift of the gab. As a nation we love to talk, But until the 1980s most houses in Ireland were without telephones. Until this time, the humble phone box was our chosen method of instant communication. It was at the heart of our lives.

Now, however, the phone box is on the way out. First came the house phones, then the e-mails, then cell phones and texts - evolving technology which led the way for the demise of the phone box.

This short documentary intertwines wonderful anecdotes with the warmest of characters as they recount their memories of the small concrete structure that was so important in rural Ireland.

Bye Bye Now! is a bitter sweet tribute to the phone box, a historical document and a barometer of how much we've changed with the times. Light-hearted, sensitive, engaging and entertaining, each character tells a different story.

SPOTLIGHT ON SWANSONG

An article I did for Film Ireland on the new film Swansong.

Swansong, Story of Occi Byrne director Conor McDermottroe’s debut feature, premiered at the Galway Film Fleadh earlier this year to great acclaim and the runner-up prize in the best feature category.

Screening Swansong in Galway was the satisfying completion of a journey full circle for McDermottroe - he had performed the same narrative himself as a one man play almost exactly five years before in the same Town Hall venue.

I speak to McDermottroe on the phone from London, where he is based. It was there that the play was originally written as a monologue in just seven weeks back in 2003. Also called Swansong, the one man show was acclaimed from the start and the audience reaction to it prompted McDermottroe to see the possibilities for the story beyond the stage

“The lead character, Occi Byrne, was really touching people,” he tells me. “People loved the character. In the play he was an older character, feeding the swans and telling his life story. People told me that the play was very picturesque, very cinematic, so I decided to write a screenplay of the story.”

Around that time, McDermottroe was working as an actor on a TV series and he invited the German producer of the series to come along to see the play.

“It was an achievement in itself to get a TV producer to come to a play,” he says with a chuckle. “Sometimes those worlds just don’t mix but Herman Florin came and watched the show and really loved it. He asked me afterwards if I’d considered making a film on the same subject. I reached into my bag and took out the screenplay.”

Before Swansong, McDermottroe had made three successful short films and he appears to have moved smoothly and confidently on to the longer form. The film is atmospheric and very moving with fine performances from the cast and it is easy to imagine the film finding an audience internationally.

The film was made as a German/Irish co-production, funded by the Irish Film Board, ARTE, RTE, Eurimages and Kinowelt, with The Little Film Company taking care of sales. It was filmed on the unusual format of 16mm Cinemascope in Sligo for six weeks with a cast of 47 actors and over 50 crew and the locals were delighted with the economic boost the film brought and how the area was captured on film.

Swansong is the story of Occi Byrne, a boy born to a single mother in an uncompromising garrison town in the 1970s. His fatherless beginning is the worst start possible in this conservative landscape and Byrne travels a road of misfortune from a young age.

In a world where any difference is ruthlessly exploited, Occi is mercilessly bullied by schoolmates, culminating in him being rolled down a sand dune in a barrel and sustaining minor brain damage that makes him prone to violent outbursts when angered.

McDermottroe’s script draws from his memories of growing up in Sligo where he observed how children in his school without both parents were immediately treated differently and ultimately marginalized. Later, when McDermottroe lived in London, he came across one such child, now grown-up.

“I was working on a Frank McGuinness play in the Royal National Theatre and I was walking to the theatre along Bayswater road when I saw someone wrapped in blanket on the side of the street. We both froze for a second and I realized that each of us recognized the other. He used to sit beside me in school. It was he that turned away, I’m sure out of shame. I walked on and I thought about it for the day. Later, I went back to the street and he was gone.”

Having lived with his lead character for so long, it is no surprise that Occi is so well achieved in the way he is written and directed by McDermottroe. Martin McCann is thoroughly convincing as Occi, truly inhabiting the role and capturing skillfully the vulnerability and violence of the young man.

“Doing the one man play first was a luxury as a writer because I got to know the character so well. I had a deep, three-dimensional treatment in my head and I knew how the character would react to each situation. I could ask myself, ‘What would Occi say here? What would his attitude here be?’ All of that information was readily available to me, which was great.”

“Martin brings his own energy to it, his own performance and persona. It’s miles away from the actors that played Occi on the stage. He brought amazing qualities to it and his instincts are bang on. We went on the journey together and he trusted me and I think that shows in the end result. He and the camera signed some deal with the devil. He’s an instinctual actor. He really feels what Occi feels. It was inspiring for me and I learned from it.”

McDermottroe hopes to use the lessons learned in making Swansong as soon as possible and is moving on to his next film. He is one of a seemingly endless line of burgeoning Irish talents that has directed one or two films and he hopes to direct many more. He is frustrated, however, by the current threats to indigenous film funding.

McDermottroe was forced to leave Ireland for Australia in the early 1980s when funding was cut to the theatre company he was working with and he lived and worked there for over ten years. Considering the benefits of Swansong, Story of Occi Byrne – in terms of culture, economics and the physical depiction of the west of Ireland – one hopes he, and others, won’t be cast adrift again.