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PANEL ON SOCIAL ISSUE DOCS AND
"DARFUR NOW"
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Mr. Thomas-Jensen:
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Ocampo hopefully understood that --
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Cathy Schulman:
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He was the one who negotiated with most redlining . He was an attorney.
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Bonnie Abaunza/Moderator:
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Right over here?
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Female Speaker:
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I have two questions. Ted, how much time in Darfur did you put in determining who you wanted to feature there or were you always shooting and then doing it with the editing?
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Ted Braun:
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That’s a great question. Yeah. I arrived in Darfur, or I arrived in Sudan, on January 6th of this year and had originally intended to spend two weeks traveling in Darfur determining who the subjects were going to be and securing access to places I wanted to film. The government of Sudan which oddly facilitated our filming there suggested when I arrived, that two weeks was not going to be enough, that I should allot at least three. I came first without any crew. When we shot were a really small team. We had a cinematographer, a sound person, a field producer, security consultant and a translator and me that was it. We were five.
But for the first three weeks in Darfur I was without the sound recordist and the cinematographer. Though I had had in my mind the types of characters I was looking for when I went there, I wasn’t able to find any of those exact types. Someone told me this great piece of advice from the famous Czech filmmaker Carole Rice. He says, “In veritae filmmaking you have to want what you get, not get what you want.” And we found that’s true. At the end of those three weeks, I had only one character that I knew for sure I wanted to be in the film. And that’s the humanitarian Pablo Recalde. And I had been looking for a young woman and instead found a middle-aged latino Male. Then I had met Sheikh Ahmed who is the leader of one of the refugee camps, the camps of the internally displaced there, who I was fascinated by but I had not intended to feature that kind of figure. I was interested in a translator. But, you know in discussions with Cathy and Don and Mark afterwards as well as the crew when they arrived, I realized that Ahmed was dealing with many of the same issues as the translator, so I shifted to him.
The third and final character I didn’t find until the second trip. I had decided in the absence of a female humanitarian, I really needed to have at least one other woman in the film and through our contacts with the rebel groups, I was assured that I would be able to find a female rebel. But, I didn’t have her identified until we came back for our second trip and picking her has its own crazy story. I was in the mountains at 6,000 feet, and it was a 108 degrees and pitch black..
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Ted Braun:
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They had told me that they were going to bring a group of female rebels for me to meet but I didn’t actually finally sit down with them until 9:30 at night. It was pitch black. I mean we were in the mountains of Africa. There’s no electricity. There’s no running water. There are no generators. There was no campfire. It was black. So, they bring these four women over and sit down and I have to decide which of these four women is going to be the subject of the film, and I can’t see their faces.
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Janice Kamenir-Reznik:
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Was it a full moon --
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Ted Braun:
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No moon. I couldn’t see their faces. You know it was crazy. And they were telling me their stories in a language I didn’t understand. I’d been listening to it for three months, so I had some idea. But I had to decide right then because the next morning we had to start shooting. I finally got a pretty good idea of the one that I wanted to focus on.
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Cathy Schulman:
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We had so few days to shoot overseas and were under such strict embargo laws, and there were so many many things that might cause this not to work. Not enough money, not enough people, and not enough days, not enough anything - it was just crazy. But in some kind of weird, lucky way it worked out and we kept thinking that’s because there’s a purpose to this. Ted was up against all sorts of obstacles . He was standing on top of an outhouse to make the call on his satellite phone, 6,000 feet up a mountain in the pitch dark and he said I think I met the female rebel…. but I couldn’t see her.
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Female Speaker:
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Why did you end up choosing her?
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Ted Braun:
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The story that she told me, and the way she talked about that story, as well as the sound of her voice. And when you see her in the film and hear her story, you’ll understand. Hedra.
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She’s the person on some of the materials…She’s wearing bright-blue -
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Ted Braun:
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She’s wearing something that says “my lovely Darfur. I will die for Darfur.” Just again to go back to the filmmaking: My veritae colleagues who were in the field with me were a little bit frustrated with me because I was really, really focused on who I was going to train our attention on and what the dramatic story was.. Most veritae crews and most veritae filmmakers are much more wide open and much more responsive. They’re used to getting everything, shooting as much as possible , being responsive to the moment and then coming back and sorting it out. We didn’t have that luxury. When we first started working in the Sudan, I’ll be honest the DP and sound recordist were frustrated. They kept saying, look at this guy over here and look at this woman over here, these are fascinating people. We’ve got to go with them, what are you thinking? I had to listen to them. But, I also had to say this is a different situation. You have to trust me that we’re going to stay on these guys we’ve picked and what I think their dramatic line is. I wasn’t just talking about plot. I was talking about it as you would think about a character in any film story, who they were, what their inner struggles were, what the external obstacles were and sticking to that. Like any documentary film there was stuff we didn’t get. And like always there’s stuff we left on the editing floor, but the basic approach worked for us. We called it “focused veritae.” They really gave me a lot of shit about that, believe me.
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Female Speaker:
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Can you talk a little bit about how social issue filmmaking can operate in both areas….the import of the issue and making it into a movie.
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Ted Braun:
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I’ll respond on the documentary point and then let Cathy can handle it on the narrative point.
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Female Speaker:
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Okay.
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Ted Braun:
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From my point of view, once I made the decision about the subject of this film I ceased to think about it as a social issue and thought about it as exclusively as a cinematic storytelling issue. Like I was saying at the beginning, I worried about whether I could take the audience where I wanted them to go and who are my characters? Why were they interesting to me? Why would they be fascinating to other people? What are the obstacles that they face? And are they going to get what they’re after or not? And I stopped the moment I said this is the way I’m going to go. I stopped thinking about it as a social issue until we got to the end and had to address the issues of outreach. And I think I would give you the same advice. Obviously, you need to learn as much about the social problem as you possible can and be responsive to how it’s changing as you learn more about it. But, you know you have an obligation to your audience --
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Cathy Schulman:
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Yes--
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Ted Braun:
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Never forget that. I mean your job as a filmmaker is, I tell this to my screenwriting students all the time, the great Spanish director, Bunwell said, “You can argue forever about a film’s morality, its aesthetics, its meaning,” he said, “but the crucial imperative is to avoid boredom at all costs.” And it’s true. You have an obligation to keep people in their seats and deliver a satisfying emotional experience. You’re never going to be able to predict what people are going to think about your film, forget it. People will be pissed off. They’ll be angry. They’ll think this. They’ll think that. But you can, and this is something I learned just while I was a graduate student in cinema, you can learn how to anticipate how people will feel. It’s an emotional medium and if you’re skilled, whether you’re a documentarian or a narrative filmmaker, you can shape people’s emotional lives for two hours or 90 minutes, while they’re in the theater or in the living room. And if you concentrate on that, you’ll succeed.
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Cathy Schulman:
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I have the same answer about letting the issue itself fall behind, but I would give you two little tools that I use to analyze narrative film that can work in these mediums. The first one is at the root of every issue is an emotional problem. If you take “Crash” as an example, although we certainly wanted to make a movie about racism in LA, what we really spent the most time analyzing is what’s at the root of it and we ultimately came up with the notion that it was fear. That fear is what makes people use racism as a method of attack. So, first of all we tried to forget about racism and focus on fear, what’s the emotional root, not the issue itself.
I feel really strongly about the second tool, because you don’t want the movie to be didactic or feel like medicine. It’s important that the strands of the film, the various characters, the points of view, the stories, the sub-stories, the b-stories, paint a portrait of the issue. No single character should be a mouthpiece, it’s got to be the collective. It’s this person all the way out here on the right and this one’s on the left, and this one’s in the middle and this one’s confused and this one wishes they’re something they aren’t. When you see it all together and approach it from the emotions, just like Ted was saying, then collectively you can start to look an issue. But, try not to make the movie about the issue itself or let a character be about the issue itself.
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Ted Braun:
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That will get you some incredibly surprising things if you’re open to that. We filmed Don Cheadle visiting Senator Sam Brownback, whose politics are very distant from his. We screened this for a big student audience in DC a week or so ago, and when Brownback first appears you get that sort of tittering of sneering, kind of oh-ho-ho, and they’re anticipating that he’s going to get skewered. And in fact, in fact --
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Cathy Schulman:
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……he doesn’t --
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Ted Braun:
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What I found in that day’s filming, with the editors, surprised me. He astonished me. He was talking about how he was transformed as a human being by what he saw in Africa. And then he said, “it touched my spirit.” He’s a very religious guy, in a fundamentalist Christian way. Just after he said that phrase, the conversation went a different direction.
But we were able to salvage that moment in the editing room. And it was stunning to watch that scene in the theater because this twittering audience that was looking forward to seeing him get skewered hears him saying your soul’s going to be changed. You could have heard a pin drop in the theater. This is great. It’s great for the film but it’s also great for us as human beings because it allows us to discover that this border you thought would keep you separated from somebody you have no respect for at all, suddenly turns into a bridge and - we could do something together. We can find an avenue together. You only find that if you drop away your preconceptions and focus on the humanity of individuals.
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Bonnie Abaunza/Moderator:
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So, our panel time is over.. I would like to thank Women in Film for organizing this very important panel. I would like to thank Colin Thomas-Jensen. Enough’s project is doing remarkable work on the ground on the advocacy side so please log on to Enoughproject.org and support their work. My hero, Janice, who is saving the lives of women every day in those refugee camps, they’ve supplied one entire camp. They’re on their second one now. And of course, to Ted and Cathy who had the artistic integrity and commitment to making this against all odds, Participant is very proud to be associated with this film and you are going to make such a tremendous difference in the world. Thank you everybody.
participant.net
participate.net/darfurnow
enoughproject.org
jewishworldwatch.org
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