WATCH, Evaporating Borders Excerpt ::: https://vimeo.com/65610353

It’s an exciting time. My whole summer is dedicated to the post production of my first feature length documentary and definitely the most ambitious of all my work thus far.

It has been an interesting journey and it continues to be.

Over the years I’ve developed quite an obsession with the Essay Film in the vane of Chris Marker, Agnes Varda, Alain Resnais, Allan Sekula, Harun Farocki. The process allows for exploration and search, it’s an investigation that doesn’t necessarily resolve. And it happens to be the most effective way I can express myself in film. I’m exciting about exploring and pushing those possibilites with this Evaporating Borders.

I was intrigued by some of the thoughts in Timothy Corrigan’s book  ”The Essay Film : From Montaigne, After Marker” (enjoy this excerpt).

Two films that I found inspiring recently, both over 30 years old are Alain Resnais “Hiroshima Mon Amour” and Sergej Paradjanov’s “Color of Pomegranates”. Very different films, but both adventurous, daring, explorative, visually compelling and reflective. Reflecting on memory, tradition, culture and identity.

Enjoy.

WATCH ::: https://vimeo.com/58313887

While working on my new film, a long form documentary that addresses displacement, tolerance, refugees and people migration and mainly takes place in Cyprus…I took a little trip to Israel and Palestine. Most asylum seekers in Cyprus are Palestinian, some have never even been to Palestine.
I was curious to find out more about the land… conscious of the privilege I have to explore my curiosity, 
while they will never be allowed to come near their homeland.

During my brief visit to Palestine, I met Avram, also known as John…He chatted for a few hours. Here are his thoughts.

Over the winter holidays, I also took a short detour to Morocco…an intense and beautiful country also polluted by the remnants of colonialism. More visuals and thoughts from there in the next post.

On a filmic note, Sundance just wrapped and published a list of winning films, perhaps some to look out for.

In the meantime, I finally saw  Women On A Verge Of a Nervous Breakdown, Pedro Almodovar’s brilliant imagination at its best. Besides the super intelligent narrative dramaturgy, there are various levels of cinematic gems, from colors, compositions, camera movement to symbolic use of objects and devices. Delight!

And one more delightful gem is Tsai Ming-liang’s short film Walker  that won at Cannes last year, you can watch it in its entirety online. Patience is the word. We’re working to break and challenge the 30 second attention span.

If you’re looking for more stimulation, IDFA has a list of short films available for online watching, all of which took part at the festival.

Enjoy.

WATCH HERE ::: http://vimeo.com/50014012

This August, 

I ventured off to Pozega, a beautiful small town in Serbia where summer nights are cold and people are warm. While there for a 10 day film workshop InterDOC, we stayed at Hotel Pozega. Each meal was heavy but brilliantly flavored by Milena’s colorful presence. We caught her just before she took off on her Greek vacation. My partners in crime here and new fantastic friends Isabella Rinaldi and Ana Lucia Ordonez lend their skillful hands. Otherwise the workshop with Zelimir Zilnik and Dragan Elcic were brilliantly insightful.

Otherwise, most of my time was spent in Cyprus and working on my feature-length documentary, working title : Five Star Country. The blog updates are not as frequent because of it but will be done monthly while I orchestrate this beast of a project. In the meantime, some inspiring films…oldies, yes…

Andrei Tarkovsky’s The Mirror is a beautiful abstraction of past and present, reflecting on time, memory, spaces between reality.

It’s also cinematic ecstasy.

On the same principle, of time, space, memory, life and death is Gaspar Noe’s Enter The Void.

This one kind of disturbs you from the inside. But ultimately, the creativity inspires and you remember why you love making films. 

More for September coming soon.

Enjoy.

June’s Steel Drum Orchestras ::: http://vimeo.com/45010190

This is very quick and dirty.
Last summer my partner in crime Sarah Hagey and I made a short film on Despers USA,
a full steel drum orchestra from Trinidad. Throughout the summer, various bands gather
throughout brooklyn to practice and prepare for the annual competition in September.
Last year’s winners were Adlib, this is a small excerpt of their performance that Sarah and I
had a pleasure of checking out. The Despers put on a night that featured the best of the best
and asked us to film the event. We haven’t yet had a chance to edit the entire thing.
But here’s a little taste, I was elevated by Adlib and perhaps you will be too.

Our short film, Despers USA is screening at Rooftop films on June 29th, and the
Despers are performing!

Be sure to check it out - they transport you into a trance!

Otherwise, I’m currently in Cyprus working on my first feature films and so the posts are less
frequent but are nevertheless coming…I will be posting some interesting stuff over the summer.

In the meantime,
One of my new all time favorite films 5 Broken Cameras.
Absolutely ingenius, done jointly by a Palestinian and an Israeli director.
It’s conveys the problems as you have never seen it before, cleverly and emotionally structured.
Brilliant editing too.

Find it!

Over Christmas ::: http://vimeo.com/39613317

I took a little road trip to Vermont, to my friend Tennessee Watson and her father Bill.
Their beautiful house on the creek, a “hotbed for radical feminism” was once owned by Aunt Lou,
a jailbird Suffragette, who fought for women’s right to vote in Vermont. Here’s her-story.

I’ve been quite busy developing my next project, feature documentary which I am shooting this summer in Cyprus…loosely based on an interview i did with Simon Khan. In thinking about the structure of the film, I’m exploring non traditional documentary forms, others ways of expressing and telling a story and so I have been researching such works.

I picked out a few highlights from experimental filmmaker Trinh T. Minh-ha’s book Woman, Native, Other - to stay on the topic of feminism. Her writing is abstract, involved and provoking, as are her films, here are some of her thoughts :

“In this unwonted spectacle made of reality and fiction, where redoubled images form and reform, neither I nor you come first. No primary core of irradiation can be caught hold of, no hierarchical first, second, or third exists except as mere illusion. All is empty when one is plural. Yet how difficult is it to keep our mirrors clean…Theory oppresses, when it wills or perpetuates existing power relations, when it presents itself as a means to exert authority - the Voice of Knowledge…And theory as a tool of survival needs to be rethought in relation to gender in discursive practice… He who represents his own discourse on myths as a myth is acutely aware of the illusion of all reference to a subject as absolute center. The packaging of myths must somehow bear the form of that which it attempts to enclose, if it wishes to come closest to its subject. One cannot seize without smothering,for the will to freeze (capture) brings about a frozen (emptied) object.”

I also recently read an interesting interview with Armenian filmmaker Artavazd Peleshian in which he talks about his “distance montage” method which “creates a magnetic field around the film…it allows you to defeat time…when you reach the end, you’re also back at the beginning…And the effect is that the film revolves; it is “revolution” in a new sense…Orbits are created. Sound and image cross each other, intersect each other, switch, change territories. The sound enters the territory of the picture and the image enters the territory of the sound. You start to see the sound, and you hear the picture”.

He closes his the interview with a thought that deeply resonates with me personally when talking about film and ones work:
“I’ve tried to simplify things to get ideas across. But my films are precisely not about language, about verbal communications. The difficulty is that one cannot express with words what one finds in my films. If it were possible to say it with words, the films would be useless. Words cannot express it. One should not talk about films, one should watch them. This is why I have always been against interviews.”

In terms of films to watch, I also checked out a screening of Yugoslavian Experimental Films this past week at Anthology Archives.

Two that stuck out the most are Zelimir Zilnik’s Inventory and Ivica Matic’s Classifieds. They are probably hard to find, but worth noting.

Enjoy.

My wonderful teammates (Laura Hadden , Alex Mallis and Tennessee Watson) won the International Documentary Challenge at HotDocs in Toronto. The way it works is, you receive a theme and genre on a Thursday morning and have 5 days to find a topic, characters, produce and deliver a 4-7min documentary film. It’s fun for many reasons but also because you never know where you will find yourself over the course of the next few days.

So this year, we went back for more and welcomed the brilliant Jay Sterrenberg to our team and found ourselves on a 70 year old oil tanker…We can’t release the film just yet but the still image is a teaser. I love this challenge!

On the film front, I watched a couple of interesting docs that were in a way similar.

The first gives a larger scale portrait of modern day society spanning over 10 countries and the other concentrates on small town Middlefart in Denmark.

Abendland from Austrian filmmaker Nikolaus Geyrhalter, though described as a demonstration of “the empowering, unifying, and alienating nature of technology” to me acts more as a brilliant overview of the European society in 2010s…African immigrants are denied residence, Big brother watches on massive camera arrays in London, annual anti-nuclear activist gathering, Spanish boarder patrol watches for illegal activity, thousands of ravers dance in a techno-liscious stadium…

all very very beautiful filmed.

The other film was The Average of the Average by Dutch filmmaker Michael Madsen (not the actor!). He attempts to define the town through 13 chapters of “average” events, approaching the subject matter as if it was to be exhibited in a museum. And it also happens to be Denmark’s first 3D film.

And to end with here’s what Filmmaker Mag’s Scott Macauley is looking forward to at SXSW.

Enjoy.

On Martin Luther King’s Day, a special treat… http://vimeo.com/35467813

With the elections at hand…and many people dreading the Republican wrath, I was reminded of Angela Davis’ talk at OWS last year (it’s already last year!). Here’s a little something on the Third Party System and OWS.

I’ll also include here a quote I enjoyed from the”Pedagogy Of The Oppressed”:

“The oppressed, having internalized the image of the oppressor and adopted his guidelines, are fearful of freedom. Freedom would require them to eject this image and replace it with autonomy and responsibility. Freedom is acquired by conquest, not by gift. It must be pursued constantly and responsibly. Freedom is not an ideal located outside of man; nor is it an idea which becomes myth. It is rather the indispensable condition for the quest for human completion.”
- Paulo Freire

On the film from, I just recently watched “I Am Cuba/Soy Cuba” a 1964 film by Mikhail Kalatozov… a brilliant resistance film but also visually the most compelling camera work and the increadible tracking shots, check out this funeral scene. It’s a beauty.

A few months ago, Scott Macaulay of Filmmaker Magazine recommended another must see, Gary Tarn’s “Black Sun”. A brilliantly crafted documentary that’s a little reminiscent of Sans Soleil, not only is it artfully executed, Hugues de Montalembert (the storyteller) takes us into realms we forget to explore.