Combative Filmmakers and Breakdances as Sheffield DocFest winds up
Sheffield Documentary Film Festival wound up on Sunday, with a brief interlude before the Scottish Documentary Film Institute hosts the Edinburgh Pitch on Tuesday and prior to the Edinburgh Film Festival officially kicking off on Wednesday. Filmtastic week. As was probably part of the rational to shift Sheffield to June (which it has wanted to do for almost 4 years), many of the commissioners who’ve come from abroad will also make their way to Edinburgh in the week. How well this plays out over the next fortnight, for ‘decision makers’ and film-makers, we’ll find out once Edinburgh gets under way.
But back to the closing weekend at Sheffield, which hosted a masterclass with Nick Broomfield, and a UK premiere of Hell and Back Again by Danfung Dennis - the movie everyone headed for on Saturday night. It struck me that at both events’ Q and A sessions, the curiosity - when not technical - revolves around the film-maker’s personality: what are the relationships with protagonists; how do they get the access; what are the moral implications at times for a film-maker’s politics?
Dennis’s film is an exquisitely shot work focused on a batallion posted 18 kilometres inside ‘enemy’ lines in Afghanistan, and more specifically on Sergeant Nathan Harris, badly wounded and recuperating back in North Carolina. This is Dennis’s first film; his background is as a war photographer, which results in a filmic aesthetic more often found in grand cinema than an on-the-hoof documentary. Careful composition, stunning resolution and a shallow depth of field combine to take us a long way from the rather garish grain of the low-budget video look. The result is extraordinary considering that Dennis was a solo operator and his rig was a Canon 5D stills camera with a boom and radio mic combined and balanced on a monopod. As a man of slight build and quiet personality projection, that he was inches from where bullets and incendiary devices landed made one aware of the physicality of such film-making. But it also explained the film’s visceral impact: immediacy ensures the powerful imagery because the decision-making and shot-taking are simultaneously in his hands. Broomfield, in commenting on footage caught for Soldier Girls, pointed out that capturing extraordinary moments is about trust between collaborators – there often just isn’t time for discussions with crew when drama kicks off. He cites an example of a crew member being practically assaulted by Sarah Palin security when they were ejected from a meeting: Broomfields’s camera people were so freaked that they couldn’t shoot. For him, what happens on the way to filming is where the story is, so you need to know that the cameras will keep rolling, whatever happens. And as Dennis illustrated, at times with very graphic footage, backing off is not what he does at any point.
And this brings us to the issue of politics. Dennis side-steps them - the story is very much from the soldiers’ viewpoint. This does leave the Afghanistan sequences rather untethered, notwithstanding an instance of jaw-dropping irony delivered by an officer during one of many contretemps with Afghan villagers. He expressed the hope, in the course of a hearts and minds talk, that the villagers - whose homes and fields they’re trampling through or squatting in - will come in time to consider him a village leader. But US imperialism aside, there’s also the politics of editorialising, and Dennis included a scene of a horrifically wounded man (from a 100 hours of footage shot), which he said was necessary in order to represent the brutal reality of war. But this was an Afghan member of the platoon, and as this was a battalion who had lost 13 men in total, the sub-text of the question asked of Dennis was; would he have shown a US soldier in similar circumstances? The death of an American early in the film was respectfully unintruded upon.
Broomfield was dealing with politics of a different kind in The Leader, His Driver and His Wife – the latter two characters apartheid supporters, even if not of the venality of Eugene Terre’Blanche, ‘The Leader’ in this case. Broomfield maintained that it’s the place and time of a person’s birth which determines their politics – so there but for the grace of God go all of us. Broomfield’s intolerance is of dishonesty, or a subject window dressing their own representation on camera; generally his moral compass points to non-judgement. In relation to access, Dennis needed to clear a mountain of bureaucracy to get access to the platoon – Broomfield, one sensed, would get it with sheer force of will. I wouldn’t like to be up against Broomfield in a war of anything: I know who would win. But Broomfield is engaging and fun, and I imagine that the bug-eyed innocent face he deploys when in trouble with either his producer or Heidi Fleiss oils many a cranky cog in the production process.
After scant rehabilitation – the reality of US health insurance - Mark builds a miniature Belgian town, ‘Marwencol’, which becomes the site of a WW2 fantasy-scape populated by Action Men and Barbies. He creates and photographs endless scenarios, including SS sieges and Barbie cat-fights in the local bar (called Hogencamp’s of course). The dolls here represent Mark and the people in his life, including his attorney and the married neighbour he has a crush on, Colleen, whose name he utters in sighs. Meanwhile, his mother is a James Bond Pussy Galore doll, and it is this suspension of reality and its simultaneous connection to the narrative of Mark’s new life that makes his story a fabulous balance of creativity as therapy and the sublimely cockeyed. This Action Man- scaled world isn’t surreal and it isn’t ironic; instead we’re witnessing play as a life-affirming force. And it is the compassion the film brings, with humour and a deep respect for Mark, resurfacing into the ‘real’ world disabled and managing PTSD, that tilts Marwencol into the realm of the rather special.
Rather than extraordinary lives, it is the very ordinary that director Kevin Macdonald is seeking for his Life in a Day project, inspired by the 1930s Mass Observation social research organisation. However, this time it’s the entire planet, not just Britain he’s hoping to get on board. As a crowd-sourced movie it confounded expectations around user-generated content on a couple of levels. A million dollars isn’t exactly budget documentary, but it was all needed. With footage from 197 countries, it turned out to be the Byzantine admin and huge translation costs which were the main budget-munchers.
If you want to meet documentary filmmakers from around the globe, Sheffield Documentary Film Festival is the place to be. The 17th year of the event kicked off on Wednesday evening with the UK premier of Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work. Interviewed yesterday by the chair of the Festival, Steve Hewlett, Ms Rivers replied to the loaded question - ‘why did she make the film?’ – with the pithy, ‘because they asked me to’. La Rivers acknowledged herself she will grasp the opportunities for exposure whatever their form, and, as the subject of a documentary film, sanctioned the all-access footage of her life now available for an audience.
Making this case most clearly was Bruno Barreto's exceptional 
A surprisingly fun and un-indulgent film was ‘Smoking I Wait', in which director Adriana L. Dutra uses her personal attempt to quit smoking as a base from which to explore the history and current state of the tobacco industry. Well made and engaging, it did suffer from a problem evident in all the documentaries screened at the festival - an overestimation of its own playing time.
Let me take you, a director is saying to me, let me clutch your soul in
my fingers for a while as I fly it across the rooftops of Edinburgh.
Let me lift you out of your broken shell and drift, briefly into the
shape of a fairer form than yours - say, Jamie Bell - as I show you
enough that you recognise of yourself to believe that this is you, and
enough that is alien to make you not sure what will happen next. And
maybe, just maybe, if this is a good film, when you are thrown back to
your all too human form at the end, you will feel better armed to
tackle those woes and foes that have so broken you, and left you before
this massive light show of make believe. Or at least leave you with the
perspective that problems, like all good films, have beginnings,
middles, and most importantly, ends.
