Whirlygig Cinema's Spotlights: Docs - The Q&A

After an evening of showcasing exciting new documentary ideas at Hackney Attic – the trio of female documentarians were grilled on their views of the genre, on the creation of their projects and on what we can expect from them in the future.

whirlygigcinema.com

Jackie Nunns: http://lookingatyouproductions.com/  @jacnunns

Victoria Fiore: http://victoriafiore.com/  @victoria_fiore

Asmita Shrish: http://www.anahatavisionsandfilms.com/

Why did you choose documentary as a genre for your projects?

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Jackie: We started our own documentary obviously, we decided to make a film about children coz we work with kids and we thought that’d be easy. But of course, it wasn’t. And it was the young man who is a film-maker who helped us make the film who said, it would be much more interesting if you made a fly on the wall documentary about making this film. So, we fell into it and it was such a good experience in the sense of getting a good product at the end of it, that we stuck with it. So we’ve done 7 now and our next film is not going to be a documentary.

We’re building up to a feature which is based on a true story, so it’s not quite a documentary but it’s a true story, and we found that we needed to learn how to work with actors before you actually do the feature, otherwise it wasn’t going to work.

H: But your first film was still a documentary though, so you must have decided at one point to go that way?

Jackie: Yeh I mean, the one we’re doing at the moment is a scripted piece which is complete fantasy and that’s only so that we can practice those skills. But the features that are coming up are actually based on true events, which you can’t document in the way you’d want to in a documentary because people don’t want to be filmed, they’ve got a great story. The first feature that we’re doing is about our son’s wedding and he’s married a Turkish Muslim girl, whose family completely did not understand our relationship. So, you know, that’s very funny, it was very difficult and very funny but they were never going to be in the film, you know, they just wouldn’t. So we have to script it…so it is documentary but not quite.

Victoria: I don’t know, I just kind of fell into it coz I just want to explore. I don’t know, I prefer to explore other people’s situations than pretend that I already know what’s going on and write a script about it because I just know I’m never gonna know as much about a situation as much as someone else, and entering people’s lives, or forcing myself into people’s lives. But also, I hate writing so yeh. Probably another reason I couldn’t have the dedication to sit down and write a script. To come up with ideas and stalk people, I’m better at so that’s why I went to documentary.

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Asmita: Actually I was very introvert and very shy and film-making is kind of journey for me to understand myself and it’s a kind of good way for me to get exposed to people and get connected to people. I find it very healthy for me myself, to know myself, how I can get to know humans. So that’s why I choose documentary as my first choice but I do like others as well. I do write scripts.

I am still a visual artist but I think it took me about 6 years to get into the films so, now I know I want to make films, and that’s what I want to do for the rest of life. So, it’s kind of a big journey for me.

What are the biggest challenges you found working in the genre?

Jackie: For us it’s that we have very big jobs, we’re full time and some, trying to find the time to do the job properly and outside of that it’s very hard. I think that’s the biggest challenge. Money is difficult to come by.

Host: Did you find the skills relatively easy then?

Jackie: we are project managers in our job so, it’s another project that we’ve had to learn different skills and we’ve had to acquire them quickly. But you know, there’s so much available on YouTube and books and the filmmaking community have been immensely supportive. We’re lucky to work with people who are very famous right now and helping us do our next things.

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Victoria: I think for me, my biggest challenge is access because I’m incredibly stubborn and if I want to make a story about something, I have to make the story about THAT thing because I need, I have an urge, a deep inner urge to explore that thing but usually that takes a long time to build up trust or I don’t know. The case of the Roma family took 8 months of convincing. Now I’m making another film in Russia, trying to convince the ex-KGB to let me into this closed city or I’m doing another film now on Mauritanian slavery and all of a sudden, everyone said yes they want to appear or no they don’t want to appear so, there’s a lot of access issues but to be honest, being quite a perfectionist, stubborn Neapolitan, I kind of enjoy that challenge of forcing people to let me into their lives. It is definitely a challenge, where you have to morph and be these different people. I was always myself but you have to be different people in different circumstances and learning how to do that for me, was a challenge. But a nice challenge.

Asmita: I’m still trying to learn films so that’s my whole challenge, understanding films.

(To Victoria) How much did you direct and how much did you step back? Who made decisions over costume etc? 

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Victoria: So the deal was that Dudek would direct this and the deal was that Dudek would choose everything that went in but I’d guide him along which scenes I’d like to have. So, I definitely wanted a scene where they were all singing together, definitely wanted a scene where – he explained certain types of transactions and I knew there was a horse on the campsite – so the scene about buying a horse. Certain scenes I knew that I wanted. What, we had building tents, sleeping in them at night but we didn’t use them right.

He decided what they would wear, what they would eat and how they would eat it and all of those kinds of things. And then he’d direct his family, I wouldn’t say anything. I set up the device, I set up the campsite and told them that we would just observe them and that’s as much as I did. But he chose a lot of the things. He wouldn’t have wanted to have in the film the bits where he’s observed because he didn’t realise he was being like that but then we finally got over that. Yeh he knew he was being observed and he largely directed the scenes.

I mean, it was mean to recreate old Roma gypsy lifestyle. They all had the costumes, they perform in those costumes because they’re musicians so, they choose those, I didn’t ask them to wear that.

There were a lot of public in the films, do you always get release forms from all of them?

b3media.net (Asmita at TalentLab 2014 - 3rd from left)

Asmita: Yes I do. For all the characters you mean, I did a sign from the English class, the organization that is organizing the whole class so, I had a release form from each of them that appears in the film.

Victoria: I did everywhere apart from Mexico City. But hopefully they won’t find out

Jackie: We got all of the releases except for 17secs of a song. And that took us a lot of time and it turns out that the people that wrote the song normally write for choirs, churches and schools. And they just ignored our request of permission for the 17secs so we decided to just do it anyway. We have 17secs of other music ready in case anyone ever criticizes that and we can slip it in yeh.

Asmita I wanted to ask you, how did the people particularly in the English class, show did they react to being filmed? Were they aware of the camera?

anahatsvisionsandfilms.com

Asmita: They didn’t even care that I was there. They just see me as a little girl who was just filming. I’ve been shooting that for a year now so, when I am in England I regularly go there. Now they are just cringing their faces when I show them and they don’t really care that I’m there anymore so, it’s fine.

I’ve been there for ten classes now, I’m still going, I’m still going there. It was meant to be an installation documentary actually, so there was no dialogue, just expressions and how they’re trying to communicate with each other or just trying their struggle. I really tried to tell the story, the history, the past and the present and the future through the class only and through their expression but we’ll have to see, it’s still in the edit suite.

What do you hope to do with your films, or what do you hope they will say, or change?

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Victoria: I do hope that, well, my aim is to screen them as much as possible right, and in that way manage to change people’s minds, especially in the most recent films. , the ones about more social issues like the Roma gypsies where there’s not a lot of things about Roma, or at least that aren’t as, subtle. I feel that I want to tell their stories more and just to get people used to it. I don’t know if I want to say something with it but just get people thinking about representation is what I’m interested in anyway. With that and other films about social issues. And just like, get the audience to have a good time and have fun. I think that’s my aim, I want it to be fun. I think that’s it really.

Jackie: Well we wanted to go to film festivals, and we got there. Yes, we’ve been all over the world. These two films in fact got into frameline, which is the number 1 LGBT film festival in the world. And we went and had this Hollywood experience which we couldn’t’ quite believe and still can’t quite believe and met all these people. There’s an international community on our Facebook now and they come to London and stay with us and one day we’ll go back to San Francisco and stay with them. It’s just been an incredibly shallow experience really.

But now that we’ve thought about it a bit more, we can see very much so, that the LGBT history month and all those sorts of things. I mean we’re very committed to that community. We’re not very interested in other things although we love to see them, but actually there’s so many stories in our community that that’s where we’d like to stay.

Mark was just saying that somebody we were about to film as part of his journey died recently, because so many of those activists are of an age where their health is precarious, their understanding of what’s going on might not be quite so good. We’re quite committed to recording that, those histories.

Asmita: I think maybe to give them something to think about, for the audience. If it touches them emotionally. That’s my aim. And also I do festivals.

How do you make your subjects comfortable in front of the camera?

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Jackie: I’d like to start by saying, we’ve never cracked that. The children wouldn’t talk remember. Well we went from children to Mark who is a performer so he was fine. Our most recent short is women’s arm-wrestling and that was very interesting because we filmed it at a gay club and it’s a women’s arm-wrestling night and there were people in the queue who wouldn’t be filmed. Being out is still a problem. I had this one woman who said ‘I can’t be filmed because my parents don’t know’ and all this stuff, ‘so only film me from the back’. So we had this arm-wrestling woman like this imitates awkward camera angle). Then I saw another one in the queue outside and she said ‘oh no, no, no you can’t film me, my parents don’t know’. I said ‘oh aren’t you out’ and she said ‘no, they don’t know I smoke’. So, it’s different for everybody, we’ve just got to find out what it is.

Victoria: For me, there’s a lot of negotiation involved but also I’ve made films where they don’t want to appear on camera at all and I’m just going to have to find a way out of it. But then again, I find that as really fun, and challenge how do we use film to tell their story without seeing their faces, through various techniques.

But yeh it does take a lot of negotiation. I mean I was with the Roma family for 8 months trying to convince them coz they wouldn’t appear in the film, they were really nervous about that. S that was through an agreement almost. It depends on every person you meet, everyone’s so different.

So yeh, I guess, I made them feel comfortable by spending so much time with them, drinking vodka and eating steak tartar which was great and attempting to play the violin.

[Anesthesia] in that case I couldn’t recreate the moment he was telling me anyway coz I only had this rubbish recorded, recording his voice. I recently did one about Romanian migration to the UK and none of the people on the bus wanted to be filmed. Which was, well I wanted to film the people on the bus. But, that didn’t matter because I took all their interviews and filmed scenes from the bus and then gave it to an actor who then took all of the interviews and acted them out, with projections of the bus ride. So, I mean I go around those kinds of problems trying to find solutions, which will sometimes work, sometimes.

Asmita: I think, just be honest, that’s it. I try to be honest with my characters and so, just try to be good friends with them, don’t lie to them or anything, just be honest and they’ll understand. Even after they watch the film, I mean with aunty, she’s more than happy to show it to others, with her crying. We are quite close actually.

Host: You didn’t plan for her to open up like that, that must have been hard to film…

Asmita: No, Yeh I was crying myself. It was very hard for me, very difficult for me but yeh I try to be honest, just be yourself in the situation.

How do you feel that documentary as a genre could evolve any further?

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Victoria: It’s so exciting right now. I find the documentary genre, so exciting, and they’ve just opened a documentary cinema at the Curzon Bloomsbury. So yeh, oh my god. Documentary is becoming so exciting right now, especially with hybrid documentary. More documentaries are being put in the cinemas now than a couple of years ago. I think it’s a super exciting place to be where the genre is being bent and people are thinking of going to the cinema to watch a documentary. That’s really cool so, I think we’re in the right moment to.

One of my things is to create a boundary between fiction and documentary. I like to play with that and there’s a lot more to play with in longer form. I don’t know there’s so much to do right now.

What would you classify as a documentary?

Victoria: I don’t know. I think, whatever you think it is then that’s enough. I mean there’s films that I think are documentaries that are mine and people are like actually what, so you’ve scripted that and that’s an actor, why’s it a documentary? But its real life represented through something. Yeh so I guess documentary is really, based on real life. But then you have a drama documentary. It’s a constant question isn’t it, what is a documentary? I just think there’s a lot more to be done and it’s really exciting.

Asmita: I think documentary exist when there is a camera and there is a character, and the character is aware there is a camera. So I don’t know if that’s documentary or fiction or... there has to be confusion of whether it’s a fiction or a documentary. But in terms of hybrid documentary, I’m not really, I don’t know about hybrid documentary but I do, do installations and projections so, that could be. There are lots of possibilities. You can work with reality, whatever, however you like.

Jackie: I cannot understand why people need to make stuff up because real life is so crazy. You just document stuff that interests you and as you both said, you get access to people who are amazing and their stories are amazing and you just film that and that’s fantastic… why do you make stuff up?

Victoria: I agree.

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Mark Bunyon: There is a difference, watching footage about children taking three hours to go to school… if you see that on the 7 o’clock news it’s just news footage and there’s a split second where you go that’s amazing and awful, and then you forget it. When you come to the cinema and actually watch something, because I’ve been watching documentary programmes in film festivals and I’ve been made to watch films that I wouldn’t have actually chosen to watch. And then I’ve been really, very moved by it. I mean, the idea of taking three hours to go to school , and three hours to come back, is something that would just pass you by on television but when you’re stuck, in a seat, watching a documentary film, it has much more weight.

I’m curious because you do a lot of different styles, how do you constantly switch styles and to different audiences? How do you cater to audience?

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Victoria: I consider myself to be, first and foremost, a traveler. Right, traveler through genres, traveler through people’s lives. I’m not an expert on anything but I simply travel subtly through genres, styles, techniques and people. So, my curiosity in diverse things, drives me.  My curiosity in diverse techniques or in diverse stories and ways of telling stories, topics, that’s what drives me, I can’t help it. All of my stories are just absolutely crazily different. I don’t have a style per say, just because I’m too interested in everything and you can’t do everything all at once so, that’s really annoying but yeh, to just travel through these things. I do think about audiences as well but first and foremost it’s my curiosity that drives me. 

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Jackie: We’re very committed because we’re at the other end of our lives, you’ve got so much more to come and we’ve got, what we feel, quite a short time to get a lot done if we’re going to do this. So, we’re very very focused on what we want, which is LGBT stories, and older people. We’re appealing to ourselves and those people that we know who reflect our own interests. Women film-makers are a great minority at festivals, 3% of film-makers are women, so that in itself is a challenge. Then to be focused on the queer community is a challenge. I mean we wouldn’t want to do anything simple. So, we’re doing it for ourselves and other people like us really but there’s not enough time as Victoria said, there’s not enough time to do everything.

Almost leading on from that, I don’t want to make it a focal point but I don’t think that we can ignore the fact that you’re all women sitting here tonight:

Audience: YAYYYYYY

Most of the submission that we had, a lot of documentary makers were women. I just wondered if you’d found that.

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Jackie: No, nowhere. I don’t know why. We’re constantly having to resist men… in the film-making sense. Not in a bad way, it’s not that we don’t want to work with men or anything it’s just that certainly when our first film was made, our young man who was the film-maker, he made it and completely missed some of the female and gay stuff, because it wasn’t his community and we then decided that we wanted to work with lesbians predominantly, to make sure that our understanding of our lives is reflected in our films. Because we didn’t want to fight somebody’s, it’s not ignorance exactly, aesthetic thank you.

So it’s for that reason really. I think we feel that we have to be very niche, very targeted.

Victoria: I know a lot of women documentary directors and at documentary festivals I tend to see a lot more women, than at mixed shorts festivals where there are a lot of men. But obviously in departments like, camera, sound… I mean all tech stuff. And also I work as an editor mostly, and definitely in that field, there’s a lot more men than women. I realise it more in the directors I mean, I don’t know, my experience recently I’m meeting a whole load of female directors but less in the more technical aspects.

There’s still more work to be done right, there’s loads more work to be done.

Tell us more about what you’re doing now and what you’re working on…

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Asmita: I wrote a script for a small ten minutes film, so it got selected for [VERSAILLE??] international film festival. So I’m going back to my country again, to Nepal and shoot the film for ten minutes. It’s going to be premiered there which is a great opportunity for me so I’m exploring film-making more into the fiction now. And also I’m sticking also to non-fiction, and researching now climate change in the Himalayas and how it’s effecting the local communities there and yeh, that’s it. For now I’m trying to do more fiction and non-fiction and also experiment. I done two fictions before and this will be my third.

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 Victoria: Well yes, one of my projects is trying to get into this closed city which they (KGB) don’t seem to be happy about letting me into. They will, one day. They won’t have a choice. Besides hat, I split my time between hybrid documentary films or which I’m working on about 3 or 4 right now, and also, another project that I’m really interested in is bringing classical music to the forefront  in the perversion of classical music videos . So yeh reinterpreting contemporary classical musicians, and giving that a view because I think there’s too much other kind of music and that doesn’t have enough prominence. So these next few months are being hopefully travelling working quite a lot on strange hybrid docs in different places which is really exciting. And a commission as well which is great, that’s the dream.

whirlygigcinema.com (Angie)

Jackie: Yeh, we’re working on two features actually. They just burst out of us and we bump into people at other film festivals and you know, you start swapping stories and you say ‘I’ll do this’ and before you know it, they’re on the phone saying ‘I couldn’t get the story out of my head, let’s do it together’ and all this stuff. So, we’re working with somebody in Canada who is in the number 1 hit lesbian film in the world, one true love, and we met her at the London LGBT festival so we’re collaborating with her and another chap in Spain so, that’s pretty exciting.

Are you in development?

I don’t know what that means still, but we’re first draft, 2^nd pass of our script, whatever that means.  We’re simultaneously working on the funding and scenes and actors and so on.  I just want to say, that I’m having lunch with Lorraine Chase tomorrow, which we’re dead impressed about. The next star in our next short!