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.

Chris Rogers found his latest role through a website. He signed up to Bethemoviestar.com , which he was sure was "a hoax, an absolute hoax." Luckily for him, it wasn't. A 30-second clip of his acting was all that was needed to bag him a role in a series of mobysodes called GSOH. It's also led to his first feature film role, in Rapture.

Suchandrika Chakrabarti met up with Chris in the BFI cafe to find out how he got from pantomime dame roles to feature films, while playing the odd Nazi along the way...  

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. 

Interview by Geoffrey McNab. Illustration by Eric Dubois 

You issued a “Statement Of Revitality” earlier this year in which you said you planned to reschedule your professional activities in order to rediscover your original enthusiasm for film. Having made The Boss Of It All, are you now revitalised?

Von Trier: I just turned 50, you know. At that age you think of the things you dislike about your situation and you try to do something about it. I had this idea that I would have a longer time to prepare and to shoot my films. The idea was that I wouldn’t be forced to produce all the time, just because the company (Zentropa) needs the production, but in the end, The Boss Of It All was shot in five weeks. So you can scream  all you want and it won’t really help. But, you know, I like problems.  Rules are challenging. They are there to create problems for you. . I just read “The Statement Of Revitality” again and it seems it will be very difficult to change anything.

You say in your narration at the beginning of The Boss Of It All that this is a harmless comedy. Can a Lars Von Trier film ever be harmless?

Well, I felt like saying that. I had been criticised for being too political and maybe I criticized myself for that...for being too politicaly correct, actually. This is a film that was made very fast. This film is not political and I had fun doing it, but of course the good comedies are not harmless.

Did it feel good to be working in Danish again?

It was very liberating and it felt so good. I am better in Danish. I am not saying I will only make films in Danish in future, but it was wonderful to make a small film with a small crew. I was relaxing a lot.

You are opening the film at the Copenhagen Film festival. Did you miss being in Cannes?

It was a choice we made, not to apply for Cannes, and I was happy about it. I
have been very happy for my other films to be there in the past and Gilles Jacob
(at Cannes) has done a lot for me, but it’s so nice not to have to do a lot of
things you don’t like – like the journey, the pressure on you at the festival. I am
staying here in Denmark which is very nice, especially in May when I have my
vegetables to look after.

When did you come up with the idea of making a comedy?

I had the idea for a film about a company director who doesn’t really exist a
long, long time ago, but I thought at first I would give it to someone else. It’s an
old idea but it was written just before we filmed it.

What is the secret of making a successful comedy?

The only thing you can do is something you yourself find funny and that entertains you.

How would you define the Danish sense of humour?

It is quite characteristic that Danes love to hear that they are stupid. Maybe it’s that this is
a small country and the people are quite masochistic. They loved it in The Kingdom when people talked about the stupid Danes. Here, when the Icelandic people scream at them and say all these nasty things, they really love it.

In the film, there is a clear tension between the Danish company and the Icelandic company that wants to buy it. What is going on right now between Denmark and Iceland?

The fact is that we have a lot of Icelandic people who are buying most of Copenhagen
right now. For 400 years, Iceland was under the Danish Crown. All the Icelandic people
hate the Danes in that sense. They have freaked themselves out about the Danes. There is this scar from these 400 years that is rightfully there.

You’re the founder of Zentropa and you’re a filmmaker. Do you see yourself as the boss of it all?

Well, the good cop/bad cop idea is a very efficient way of solving problems. We have a good cop and a bad cop here with me and Peter Aalbaek Jensen (at Zentropa). If it is to do with actors and crew, then I’m the good cop, but there are some situations where I am the bad cop and Peter will be the good cop. It is very un-Danish to be a bad cop. Everyone in Denmark wants to be a good cop, but the bad cop is someone who is needed. As soon as you go to the UK or US, the bad cops are there because they are needed, but the Danish people are very, very afraid of conflict.

Can the film be read as an allegory about Zentropa?

That is what the actors said, but I hadn’t thought about it. With Zentropa, my idea was only that we could produce and control the things I directed. Peter Aalbaek Jensen and I are a little strange. We like to have a good time and do strange things. I think it can be entertaining to work at Zentropa. It is not just another production company. There is not a clear idea behind it. It is more intuitive. We are not brought up to say that the money coming in is the most important thing.

The film is very dialogue-based. Did you deliberately avoid visual gags?

When I was a kid, I saw a lot of screwball comedies. I used to like comedies
like Bringing Up Baby and The Odd Couple, with a lot of talking heads.

I love Philadelphia Story and The Shop Around The Corner. That was what I
tried to do, something like that. These screwball comedies need to have this
idea that some people know something that others don’t. On top of that, I
put a moral story about how someone could use this fictional company director
to treat his workers really poorly. That became another level.

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.

If you can't raise finance for your feature, and cinema chains don't want to touch your film, what can you do? Until recently that could have meant the end of the project, but the web offers some interesting ways of changing this.

"This was not like putting a blog post up and all of a sudden everybody comes and knocks our door down. We'd carefully cultivated an audience and put a lot of effort into the technology to pull them all together so that we could email them all at the same time."

Jim Gilliam, producer of Brave New Films, was unable to raise funding for Robert Greenwald's latest project. So he sent few emails to everyone who had previously bought a DVD from the company. Within 10 days, they had raised $220,000. And when it came to distribution, a network of activists and documentary fans have been mobilised around the Brave New Theaters website to organise their own mini and local screenings. The site, now open for any filmmaker looking to (or needing to) bypass traditional exhibition and connect with fans, allows people to communicate without any distribution or exhibition chain at all.

Iraq for Sale: The War Profiteers, directed by Robert Greenwald, is the most prominent feature film yet to successfully 'crowd-source' the finance of film, in a piece which explores the area of private contractors and mercenaries in Iraq. Gilliam has been working with Greenwald ever since - after 9/11 - he rethought his life and left a high-paid executive career on the web to work on stuff he believed in.

Through documentaries such as Outfoxed, Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism, Uncovered, Wall Mart and Iraq for Sale - Greenwald, with Gilliam as producer - has kept the spotlight on modern America. Through Brave New Theaters, and the groudnbreaking financing of Iraq for Sale, Gilliam is rewriting the rules of the industry, breaking down the traditional barriers between filmmaker and audience.

When I interviewed him last winter, Jim was awaiting a lung transplant and - despite being bed-ridden and struggling to speak clearly - showed remarkable energy, drive and optimism. The transplant took place earlier this year, and thankfully was a complete success. Like speaking with Mohammed Al Daradji, who risked personal safety  to get his Iraq film Ahlaam completed, I was left humbled and inspired after the interview - and I hope you do too.

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...

Last night saw director Paul Greengrass receive The Variety UK Achievement in Film Award at an event held in conjunction with the London Film Festival. He was then interviewed by Variety magazine's Europe and Middle East correspondent, Ali Jaafar. The discussion ranged from Greengrass's interest in Northern Ireland to the process of making The Murder of Stephen Lawrence. Suchandrika Chakrabarti reports 

Last night saw Naomi Watts interviewed for a Screentalk at the London Film Festival.

The discussion took in Mulholland Drive, Funny Games and Eastern Promises, as well as Naomi's background and her experiences of producing. Suchandrika Chakrabarti reports

“We were being chased to the airport by a bunch of chimeres, and people were being shot on the streets. Just at the airport, in front of the terminal, a guy got shot right when we arrived.”

I don't know if Denmark’s Asger Leth has ever actually said he would die for his art. Actions speak louder than words, though, and while making the controversial documentary Ghosts of Cite Soleil, Leth often wondered if he and his co-director/ cinematographer, Milos Loncarevic, would live long enough to finish the project. To get film in the can they risked going home in a box.

Extraordinary Rendition, which gets its British Gala showing at the Edinburgh film festival tonight (21st August) tells the story of one innocent man who is caught up in the Orwellian nightmare of being 'rendered'. He is abducted and detained, then subjected to constant questioning. After that comes the torture. No reasons are given, nor the right to answer any charges. The film was shot for £20,000 and stars Andy 'Gollum / Kong' Serkis.

Suchandrika Chakrabarti speaks with writer/director Jim Threapleton, lead actor Omar Berdouni and producer Andy Noble on the film's inspiration, their on-set experiences and how they hope to add to the current debate on anti-terrorist strategies.

There are few poster-stars of the web-led film evolution quite like Susan Buice and Arin Crumley. The NY duo - who James MacGregor sourced for a Shooting People interview, and then for an interview for the new funding book (republished here) - have just seen their credit-card funded Four Eyed Monsters became the first feature film to be made available on YouTube (films are normally capped at 10 mins). 

There's lots of things you can say about Arin and Susan - how the couple met online and agreed to communicate initialy without speaking, and then went on to turn their art into an expose of their relationship as feature film, how they built up a huge online audience with an ongoing series of video podcasts, and self-distributed their feature film in US cinemas (with DRM-free distribution on the small-screen), who use the latest software, tech, social networks and web services as ways to talk about their feelings. At times I wonder if they were dreamt up by a marketing executive at Apploogletubesoftabox, so brilliantly do they use potentially soulless tools to create something something at once both very personal and universal.

It's this, perhaps, that's their greatest achievement - they've laid their life and love bare, shaping it into a form a world of reality-tv-junkies can gorge on, but in a form altogether more tender, honest, delicate and just plain nakedly human than anything a big media machine could ever create.

The first time I watched the Four Eyed Monsters video-casts I collapsed on my bedroom floor in tears. I have not cried like that in a long time. In fact I wasn't sure I could get up, the films had managed to kick me right back to the most terrifying moments of a broken heart, and the (handwritten) creative explosions around that. It was only a bird, peering in at my window and chirping which made me get up and go for a recovering walk by the river. But it was the honesty of the video-casts which sent me there, and judging by their huge and growing fanbase - I"m not alone.