Tantric Tourists peers into the world of 'spiritual bling' and the 'mystic bourgeoise'

One of the gala premieres at the East End Film Festival in London, is Alexander Snelling's first feature, Tantric Tourists (Friday 19th, Genesis cinema, 7.30). Shot on location in India for £10,000, the film cost as much to produce as Snelling's 35mm short Denial seven years ago (which we thought was really cheap at the time) and which also premiered at the Genesis. Looking back in Netribution's archives, our interview with Alexander - republished below - is as relevant today as then, and reveals a filmmaker whose skills of ingenuity and perseverence ensures his films gets made, whatever the budget or problems.

And the film looks fascinating - and potentially very funny - dabbling in the waters of other micro-budget British features such as The Truth to peer into the world of 'spiritual bling' and the 'mystic bourgeoise '.

NB - Tantric Tourists should not be confused with the acclaimed short film/doc/biopic of the same name on Current TV 

From James MacGregor's interview with Alexander in the Netribution archive :

What's your own background as a filmmaker Alexander? From where did Denial spring?
I started as an online editor in London, eleven [18 now -ed] years ago and moved onto specialising in Henry/ Editbox in 1995. I have been working freelance in this capacity ever since. Henry is a non-linear editing and compositing tool used mainly for effects work with a lot of painting, colour-grading and graphics work involved. I have also directed and produced various TV projects over the years as well as working in theatre many years ago.

I have always wanted to make films and feel slightly sheepish to have taken this long to get my first off the ground - but, better late than never.

In 1999, my resolve changed and I realised that standing around in bars talking about making films and slagging off other people’s efforts was not going to get me anywhere, apart from further entrenched in my own bitterness. At this time, with many half-finished script ideas in my bottom-drawer, the story of Denial popped up and I realised this was the one to make. Two years later, I am in a position that I can actually be proud of.

The distribution deal was done with Revolver but they wanted some minor cuts to the film, which I was unhappy about... They went ahead with it without ever discussing it with me directly."

Director Menhaj Huda is best known for his hit feature film Kidulthood (2006) which became a cult flick amongst teenagers across the UK and went on to win The Douglas Hickox Award at the British Independent Film Awards in 2006. As part of a series of articles on Netribution from Film and Festivals Magazine, Menhaj meets Editor Vicki Psarias and explains how he got to shoot Kidulthood on 35mm for under a million, what went on behind the scenes, and why he feels let down by the British film industry.

You're known best as the director for Kidulthood, but how did you start your career?

I never set out to be a director - I always wanted to be an editor and after university, that's where I started. I was working with music videos and I pitched an idea for a dance music show called Hypnosis to Channel 4, which they made into a series that I directed. I'd never been to film school so that was an education in itself. From that, I spent the following five years directing music videos, music shows and youth programmes.

What did you study at university? 

Engineering. I have a very technical mind so I love everything equipment wise and mechanical. Most crews are quite surprised by how much I know and understand about the technical side of filmmaking. Ultimately, they're all machines whether it's a camera or an edit suite and if you understand how machines work, you can cut corners and do things most people don't learn how to do. I've always been very confident about computers and once you have that knowledge, you can extend it and be very creative.

You work a lot with eminent cinematographer Brian Tufano, who shot Kidulthood. If you're very technical, does that ever cross into his area? 

It actually saves a lot of time as I can be very specific and say to Brian, ‘I want this particular lens' or ‘I want that shutter speed'. Other directors, however, come from different, more theatrical backgrounds or are speaking more artistically about what they want, and it's the DP's job to translate that into visuals. I know exactly what I want and how that can be done.

Extraordinary Rendition, which first caught Netribution's attention ahead of its premiere at last year's Edinburgh festival, is due to be released on DVD on 28th April, and broadcast on the BBC in the same week.

Suchandrika Chakrabarti met up with director Jim Threapleton and producer Andy Noble, childhood friends turned filmmaking collaborators, to get an update on the improvised film's editing and innovative distribution, as well as to discover what "the opposite of documentary" means... 

How did it feel to be nominated for a British Independent Film Award last October? 

Andy: We were humbled to be in such exalted company really, the great and good of the British film industry. It was great to be recognised in that way.

Jim: The evening had the appropriate independent spirit, as opposed to the more formal Bafta enterprise.

Andy: I was quite relieved when we didn’t have to go up and collect anything – absolved me of the need to go up and say something coherent!

Jim: We were nominated for Best Achievement in Production, and it was a real achievement under the circumstances we did it.

"There was a great bit in Eastenders when Ricky said, "we were goin' at it 'ammer 'n tongs!" so we pinched that and put it at the beginning of our showreel! "

I remember Tom Fogg coming back from the interview with Hammer and Tongs, a music video trio (then unknown to us) in 2000. He was both bitter and excited for they seemed just like us, except they'd focussed only on making films and had made 50. And what's more they had two features in the pipeline, a big 'space movie' they couldn't talk about, and a film set in the 80s with a bunch of kids interested in Vietnam films, a film, Tom was told, they wanted to make so they could get where Michel Gondry was. Sweet ironies.

Tell us about the movie.
N. - Well it will open with "A Hammer & Tongs Production", perhaps said by James Earl Jones but he's really expensive.

Well he did The Simpsons for free.
G. - Well everyone does them for free, they are under their agent's orders! (laughter)

N. - W are working on a couple of films at the moment and Garth is directing both of them. The first is a really big, exciting film set in Space in the near future and, as crap as it sounds, that's all we can say about it. We are developing it ourselves from a draft that we are pretty happy with but that's been going on for about three years. We went to America and our agent over there set us up with 6 meetings, really exciting but when we came home we just decided to carry on doing it our selves for the time being. After a while we were having lunch below our office and Garth has this incredible idea for a film, he pitched it to me and I thought, "Brilliant! Let's go to someone now and pitch it, do a development deal, stop doing videos and someone can pay us to focus on it." That's always been the problem, you've got to survive. We then pitched it to Jim Wilson and Paul Webster at Film Four, Jim's always been interested in music video directors, they both loved it and agreed to do a deal on the spot.

G. - We smiled for a solid week after that! (laughter)

N. - We are about to finish the fourth draft and it just needs tweaking. Its based on a group of 13 year old kids in the 1980's who discover the big Vietnam films and decide to make their own one. It's really exciting.

Has it got a working title yet and is it a comedy? Give me a scoop!
N. - We've got the wrong title so I can't tell you, because it's the wrong title! (laughter) It's a coming of age action adventure! (more laughter) From our videos, we tend to make quite accessible films and we want this to work on a few different levels, kids can go and watch it and enjoy it. We can't wait. Spike Jonze did, Being John Malkovich, which I loved and Michel Gondry is doing his Human Nature which is being edited now and is being produced by Jonze.

Who's work do you prefer?
N. - Both!

G. - On a technical level - Gondry; but for making us laugh, like, Sabotage, it would be Jonze's stuff. They are both great.

N. - I want to be where they are by making this film. We were at an awards ceremony where Garth won best director and Michel won best video for The Chemical Brothers which was the last award after Garth's. He went up on stage and said that he thought Hammer & Tongs work is really good. We met with Michel and Spike afterwards and talked and it was really, really nice.

G. - The nicest aspect of the work is that you get to meet your heroes, its not that they are particularly famous but for us it’s a real privilege.

Korean director of classics Oldboy and Sympathy for Lady Vengence, returns in fantastic and upbeat style with I'm A Cyborg, and That's OK. The film was - for me and friends I saw it with - the highlight of the 2007 Edinburgh Film Festival, a One Flew over The Cuckoos Nest in Teletubbie Land. There are far too few films looking at the effects and treatment of mental illness with anything other than despair, save (off the top of my head) the excellent Icelandic Fridrik Thór Fridriksson’s Angels of the Universe, and the 1990 Dudley Moore starer, Crazy People.

Chan Wook ventures into deep and difficult waters, armed with only hallucinogenic metaphors, candy floss visuals, and a deep, resounding sense that being different and unusual is not just OK, but rather fun. From fingertips that become machine guns to socks that make you fly, it's the imaginative explosion that Ken 'Cuckoo's Nest' Kesey would have created had he been able to join the dots between the US mental health system, where he worked, and his life as a Merry Prankster touring America with the electric kool-aid acid test. If you've ever walked a little on the wild side, or want to - go see this film, out in the UK from April 4th.

27-year-old director, writer and magazine editor Vicki Psarias has been making films since she was 11 years old. With her TV-experienced dad, George Psarias , on hand as cameraman, she directed a film about litter on the streets of Leeds, where she grew up. As she says, "I was actually directing, which is quite freaky, because I was 10, 11, and I was saying to my dad, get a shot of that over there, quick! Look at this!" 

Vicki studied film at Goldsmiths, University of London, and her graduation film, 'Rifts', about two warring kebab shop owners, won a number of awards at film festivals, including Best Screenplay at the Portobello Film Festival. Her second short, Broken, was based on the story of her mother and grandmother, who are of Greek Cypriot background, and their experiences of moving to the UK in the 1960s. Vicki is also the editor of Film & Festivals Magazine .

Fresh from winning a 4Talent award for Best Filmmaker in late 2007, Vicki directed and shot trailer footage for the English National Opera . She is currently working on two scripts and a project for the Sci-Fi London 48-Hour Film Challenge. She found some time in her packed schedule to grab some caffeine at the ICA bar with Suchandrika Chakrabarti. 

Digital film studio Warp X want to address a specific problem: why don't many women direct horror? Suchandrika Chakrabarti finds out how DarkLight aims to encourage female directors to reinvent the horror genre for the 21st century.

Leeds filmmaker faced kidnap, torture and attacks to shoot debut feature in Iraq - now on cinema release in the UK 

There are tales of filmmakers acting like war heroes, battling against the odds to complete their film true to their vision. There's Francis Ford Copolla in Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmakers Apocalypse clinging onto a helicopter as it took off to go fight in Cambodia, the whole journey of production on that film a kind of brute heroism. Tales of crew dying on Werner Herzog's Fitzcaraldo suggest that powerful cinema was a battle against the forces of nature, while Kubricks long time obsession with Napoleon, seem to be a reflection of the film director as war general, invading one reality, and imposing another on top.In the beginning they were calling me 'Mohammed the crazy' because if you want to make a film in the war zone it is not acceptable. People are scared, they want to protect themselves, how can you go in the middle of the street, making films?

But none of these people come close, in terms of gung ho guerilla filmmaking guts, to Mohammed Al Daradji, whos Ahlaam is currently on release in the UK. Not content to shoot a film about Iraq while the war still waged, Al Daradji returned to the country to shoot it there. He dressed extras up as Saddam's Bathist thugs and rehung photos of Saddam to create flashback scenes. He recreated battles on the streets of Iraq with soldiers and burning cars (see right), while real battles raged streets away. And in doing so he shot the country's first feature in over a decade, using a largely untrained local cast and crew, some of whom had been imprisoned under the Saddam regime. The team were shot at and threatened so many times that Daradji took to holding a machine gun in one arm and his camera in the other. His sound recordist was shot in both legs, and he and the crew were kidnapped first by the insurgents, accusing them of making a pro-USA film, and then the Americans, accusing them of making a pro-Al Qaeda film.

I've heard many stories of filmmaking against the odds - but none like this, while there are arguably few films right now as important as this one: a tale of Iraq during the conflict, shot during the conflict, with local actors and crew, filmed by a national, against all the odds. It doesn't take sides or try to prove a point. It just presents the human side of the story.

It's like the girl in the red dress in Schindlers List: in the midst of the death tolls, chaos and photos of sandy devastation, it reminds us that the people at the centre of this mess are really just like us; with broken hearts, hopes for the future and unwanted hair loss. Do anything you can to see this film, and show it to as many people as possible. For me it is the reason why cinema is great - in a heart of darkness it shows the light of the human.

Background

For me it was like 'to be or not to be'. During the two or three years of making Ahlaam, it was like for myself, what are you doing, who you are, what can you do?"The idea came from the BBC on the 10 O'Clock news. It was the beginnning of May, a couple of weeks after the fall of the Sadham regime. It was a reportage about a mental institution. And I saw Ahlaam, the main character, she was wearing a white dress, and she was speaking a nonsense language, and this image of the lady speaking a nonsense language wearing a white dress in an empty room, this stayed in my mind. And when I went to bed, I dreamt about Ahlaam. She was on the streets of Baghdad in the scene that you see at the end of the film. That's what I saw in my dream in 2003.

"I woke up and wrote down the idea, and then two weeks later when I finished my degree I went back to Iraq and I was looking for mental institutions. I visited an institution by accident becuse I told my friend I would help some of the mentally ill people who were on the street. It was chaos, there was no government or anything. When I helped one of them back to the instituion, I asked what had happened to them and he told me their story. And so I based the foundation of the story, 50% on what had happened with these people. And so 50% is a true story, 50% fiction. "

Full in-depth interview follows...