In addition to the geographical and thematic width shown on a documentary-only film Festival as true/fake in Columbia, Missouri, viewers can also find different formal approaches to Story without fiction All over the program. The eclectic sampling of distinct visions reiterates that what is said is as important as it is presented.
One of the World Premieres at This Year’s True/False, The Visually Sumptuse and Philosophical Stimulating “How Deep Is Your Love,” From British Film Makers Eleanor Mortimer, Makes Aste Use of Time and Space in order to examination uncharted territory that is the deep sea.
After spending time with a group of researchers focused on taxonomy (naming and classification of plants and animals), Mortimer is urged to sail with them on an expedition to gather information on deep -sea organisms called for by imminent mining operations.
“We discover things about ourselves through the deep sea, but there is also this paradox to only discover something because the industry is interested in it,” she said.
Most of the doctor consists of what Mortimer shot observes their daily activities at sea. For the close-up images of the animals, researcher operated the Deep-Sea cameras after discussing with the filmmaker what does a convincing shot. Their usual intention when capturing photographic evidence of previous invisible creatures is data collection.
“It was a really interesting collaboration: the collected pictures for data purposes, and I thought about them in a different way for stories,” she said.
Instead of presenting these images as they were presented to her, Mortimer manipulates the images that create time markings to show that while the impatient human eye can seem inert and lifeless, they are really at their own pace.
“Depth sea is on a completely different timecape, things move incredibly slowly, things live for a really long time, nothing really changes,” Mortimer said. “Then I realized that only when I rushed through them that I could see that these animals were actually moving. But you couldn’t see it if you looked at it in human time. ”
Mortimer goes a step further in its exploration of the relationship between people and these creatures by creating frames where they later appear as if they roamed our urbanized world. Brilliant and sometimes amorphic creatures float around a city street or inside a museum. In the imaginary of Mortimer’s movie, they can visit us while they are still alive.
“I felt frustrated because I was like,” I have these human characters and then I have the characters of these deep -sea, but they cannot exist in the same frame unless one of them is dead, “she reminded.” I thought, “Why not make the movie a space where it becomes possible? And what would it do for how we understand the story?”
From documenting how many time that researchers invest in a single species, Mortimer taught a new type of patience. “The closer you look at something, the more there is to look at, the more there is to understand,” she said. “It is a really good lesson for a filmmaker because it is not about observing everything, it can only be about observing one thing really good. Demanding something so much attention is a act of love.”
Deadly underwater sounds are crucial to the Mexican director’s expressiveness Manuel Acuña’s enlightened debut “The Silence of My Hands”, which crowns the romantic band between two deaf: pink, a team student in Guadalajara, and SAI, a transgender man based on California. The use of non-traditional sound as an engrossing, sensory element derived from the tactile way in which both his subjects relate to it as deaf individuals.
“Rosa makes music, but not because she can hear it, but because she feels the vibrations in her stomach,” he explained. “SAI loves to dance because of the vibrations that his feet feel. We started with the questions: ‘How can we hear their silence? And how can we represent it in the movie? “
One way Acuña answered this formal question was through a unique view of Voice over. There are parts of the story where we see pink and Sai interacts in a certain space, but do not sign. The focus is not their hands, and yet there is text on the screen that makes us interested in a conversation that happened off the screen. In the background, the sound is of the hands that touch.
“It was a risk, but also a way of proving that this sensory quality that I was looking for in the film could also be material,” he said. “What happens when you really listen? The sound is so present that even the smallest is raised. You know they talk even if you don’t see them and just see the text. It is expressed in a cinematic language. “
Acuña had to learn sign language while making the film, but initially, when he began to shoot his daily lives, he would catch their exchanges without knowing what they said to each other. It was only later when he looked at the material and hired the help of an interpreter that he became aware of the whole context for their discussions about the conflicts that test their long -distance relationship.
The fact that SAI uses American Sign Language (ASL) and Rosa Mexican Sign Language (LSM) not only how they communicate with each other, but Acuña’s interpretation because the couple has also created signs that they only understand.
“It was very difficult to translate all that material when they spoke, because neither the interpreters, not even the mother tongue for American sign language, understood everything, he said. “In the end, this also reflected the unique construction of their relationship.”
For the Pakistani photojournalist and filmmaker Danial Shah, the source of inspiration for his first feature “Make it look” was an often rejected practice that first made him photography as a child. He grew in Quetta, a city in Pakistan near the border with Afghanistan and was familiar with local photo studios that would shoot their customers against Outland backgrounds or use physical props to pretend that they lived another, “better” life.
Today, the exercise holds, but now these pictures are designed with digital cameras and Photoshop. Protectors choose a selection of backgrounds with luxury cars, beautiful women or even young men who serve as their fake friends. Men often want to show up with a Kalashnikov to resemble the members of the Taliban. The amazing end product looks random and far from realistic, but acts as a manifestation of their unattainable desires – which includes bleaching their skin and erases all facial containers.
“It is a very suppressed society. They want to project their desires in a material way, ”explained Shah. “People, especially who come from the working class, they can hardly buy a car, have cleaner clothes, interact with a woman, has a man as a friend. They want to look beautiful. That’s all their wishes they want, and then they can do it in a photograph. “
Sakhi, one of many photo studio owners in a market, became Shah’s main subject, but when their friendship develops, Shah also appears in front of the camera as the interview object.
Over several cups of tea, Sakhi, which brews their own rather than buying sugar -containing tea sellers infusions, and Shah engages in conversations that denote their distinct socio -economic circumstances even though they are from the same city and around the same age. Sakhi is curious about Shah’s life in Belgium, about his professional equipment and the money he makes from taking pictures shown in international publications. For Sakhi, to make enough money to stay afloat, it’s all strange, and he is curious about Shah’s more fulfilled lives.
While most filmmakers explicitly recognize the difference in the privilege between the subjects and themselves, Shah makes this conversation central to his film. For starters, Shah’s intention was to make an observation film about all the market photographers, without getting into it, but soon he realized the obvious gap between them and him.
“I come from the same city, but I have education, they do not have education. I work as a photographer, so I make more money than them. Their pictures are considered pictures of the working class and they are always seen down, “SHAH said. “I questioned a lot about my practice of photography. Why is it that my pictures are more acceptable in the world compared to their aesthetics? I thought it was better to put myself in it. “
In the end, although he could not get direct answers from Sakhi or customers about why they like these photographs, the filmmaker believes that these expressions for their longing get something truthful through their exaggerated, kitschy configuration.
“The idea of photography in the West is that it must look realistic, especially in photojournalism and documentary,” SHAH said. “But these pictures break this idea and I am really interested in photography as something that can go beyond realism or fakeness.”
