After five days of scouting in and around the mountain resort of Vama, Aristoteles Workshop’s four film crews have settled on the subjects for their documentary shorts.
Camera settings are being checked and batteries are charging as this year’s four film crews get ready for the third and most challenging stage of their training – production. Two weeks into Aristoteles Workhop 2011, the four teams were asked to conclude their 12 hour a day scouting efforts and settle on a single subject. Yet making this decision proved harder than any of the students could have expected, even though from the very beginning, tutors Rafi Pitts, Nino Kirtadze and Simon Brook gave the four film crews freedom to choose any subject whatsoever, be it a person or a whole community, a place or an event. Students were given only one criteria, in the form of a question that kept repeating itself over and over in their minds - “What are you going to show?”
It might seem like a simple question, but it’s one that differentiates documentarists from reporters, as any of the three acclaimed filmmakers are keen to point out. Throughout the workshop, each tutor has insisted upon the need to convey emotion plus a point of view, rather than cold, objective facts. And keeping in mind the need for a visual narrative, each film crew developed a new understanding of what makes a subject “documentary-worthy”.
The visual narrative requirement proved to be an excellent filter when sorting through a rich list of fascinating stories and intriguing characters – this year’s 16 participants scouted over 5000 square kms in less than four days, interacting with exorcist priests, Buddhist policemen, village mayors, wood thieves, mushroom pickers, madmen and 3 1/2 cows. They wandered through abandoned mineshafts, deserted factories, derelict synagogues and centuries old cemeteries, got lost in the woods, got lost in the mountains, got lost in a city, got lost some more and got arrested.
Wherever they went, the film crews tried to blend in to their surroundings and become invisible, not always successfully as one Greek producer got himself escorted to a police station simply because the locals found his singing and dancing on the hills of their quiet village to be somehow “peculiar”.
All said and done, the four crews settled on some very promising and ambitious subjects for this year’s documentary shorts: a lonely 90 year old woman living in the past; an unusual eccentric who enjoys living in a reality of his own making; a granddaughter being pushed to embrace the path of etnofolk stardom, and a century old steam train whose passengers make up a constellation of human characters.
“We want to make an intimate portrait of this extraordinary woman and her peculiar life philosophy” said director Mara Trifu of the 90 years old woman whose main activity is donating her books to those she finds worthy, one at a time. “We are trying to understand why she has chosen to suddenly confide in us her view on life, death and everything else.”
At the opposite end of the age spectrum, the story being developed by Ozana Nicolau and her team follows the tribulations of a 13 year old girl destined for stardom by her grandmother, and who rehearses etnofolk songs in front of a laptop, surrounded by farm animals. “We felt instant empathy with this girl’s situation”, says Ozana, “and wanted to find out just how much she’s living her dream and how much she’s living her grandmother’s unfulfilled fantasy.”
One of the main challenges that each team faces during the production stage at Aristoteles Workshop is that of figuring out the boundaries of intimacy that exist between them and their subjects. Gaining one’s trust is a continuous and exhausting process that takes place both ‘on’ and ‘off’ camera, as Ivana’s team discovered when they met a “local artist”. Time after time, producer Mirona Radu had to reassure him that none of the four crew members were government agents and that their laptop and camera weren’t monitoring devices.
If some teams stuck to a single character or two, Veronika Janeckova and her team charged head first into a trainload of captivating characters. Veronika spent a couple of days riding on and alongside a turn of the century steam engine connecting some of the oldest mountain monasteries in Romania. The crew found that a 12 hour journey by train can reveal the true spectacle of life: happy couples and solitary figures, children and grandparents, drunkards and public figures, all of them guided by two quirky mechanics and a chunky old locomotive belching black smoke. Says producer Eliza Zdru: “We want to look at this train as a symbol of passage through life – each station representing a stage in life and the passengers being the people you meet along the way. And although you might not always see who drives the train, you know that in the end you’ll arrive at your destination.
Filming on all four documentary shorts begins August 12 and is scheduled to last approximately one week. Each team will be given 6 days to assemble a rough edit, under the careful supervision of trainers Rafi Pitts, Simon Brook and Nino Kirtadze.
