Festival coverage sponsored by IndiePix.
Come the new year, we will sit down for the second time to compose our summaries of the best festivals for documentary (here's the first), and when we do, this may well be the text of my thoughts on BritDoc, which on Friday wrapped its third edition in Oxford:
BritDoc is not for you. And by you, we mean Americans.
After two years of including us Yanks in an International Competition and showcase, they have shown us the door, focusing instead on their first priority, connecting British filmmakers with funders, festival programmers and networking opportunities. Their Facebook profile might as well have been changed to read: "Looking for: Friendship, Networking, Whatever I Can Get (Brits preferred)."
Further cementing the focus on the home team, the 2008 edition was stripped of its international competition and replaced by a "Best of Fests" sidebar, featuring films from a handful of world class film festivals: Sundance, Toronto, IDFA, SXSW & Berlin. So, keep it moving, nothing to see here. No need for you to go to BritDoc.
And yet....
What if we said that despite the fact that there's not really a place for the Americans at BritDoc, that there's no room for you (the fest might have reached full capacity in '08), that there's no hue and cry for you to show, that you should think of going anyway.
And by saying you should think of going, we absolutely mean that you should stay home, because we like it just as it is, actually, and more Americans trying to upset the apple cart might just make the whole thing a little less, dare we say, awesome.
Yes, BritDoc is the True/False of the UK, and saying that is both a compliment as well as selling both True/False and BritDoc a wee bit short. While it shares True/False's sense of college town collegiality, it lacks T/F's manic and enthusiastic crowds (most of the screenings at BritDoc are well attended but it's rare to find a sell out), but it bares a few things that T/F does not, mainly an enviable list of industry types in a heretofore uncluttered setting. The pitches (as we wrote about previously) are the best of their kind and Oxford is small enough that you can actually get some face time with people who may have the power to greenlight (or contribute toward your new project).
However, and this is big - and perhaps necessary before someone is allowed to set foot on the grounds of Keble College, BritDoc's HQ for the week - it would be a good idea if attendees were given a few more rules re: the approaching of commissioners and others. Cringe-worthy it was to view one-on-one pitch meetings, whether in formal or informal settings (and it's hard to think of a meeting space more lovely than the main lawn at Keble - well there is a certain social club in east London, but that is besides the point), interrupted by overzealous filmmakers.
Word to the unwise filmmaker: you're a rude bastard, you are. Not only are you making a terrible first impression with the commissioner or producer, but you're betraying a fellow filmmaker who already figured out how to do it the right way. So do one and all a favor: observe, make small entreaties - potentially through someone else (a festival representative? another filmmaker?), be patient. If you're really in it for the long haul, there's no good reason to to lead with your worst foot forward.
But I digress...
I was fortunate enough to be invited to BritDoc last year with ABOUT A SON (when they still had that international competition - I didn't win, by the way, but neither did eventual Oscar winner TAXI TO THE DARK SIDE or Cinema Eye winners MONASTERY or BILLY THE KID) and even more fortunate to be asked back to serve on this year's British Feature Jury with Sheffield Doc/Fest director Heather Croall and filmmaker Pawel Pawlikowski.
I've been honored to serve on a number of juries during the past year (I seem to be on the "year after tour", invited back one year after screening my film - which one hopes reflects well on my behaviour in 2007). While the jury selected James Marsh's MAN ON WIRE as the competition winner (my initial thoughts on the film from Sundance are here), there were a number of films that screened in Oxford that are worth looking out for.
We awarded an Honourable Mention to John Dower for his film THRILLER IN MANILLA, a re-examination of the classic boxing match between Muhammad Ali and Smokin' Joe Frazier, that dared to up-end our current hero worship of Ali (fomented in no small part by the Oscar winning WHEN WE WERE KINGS and the decision by Sports Illustrated to name Ali the top sportsman of the 20th century (not to mention the Michael Mann/Will Smith vehicle). By focusing on Frazier's story, rather than Ali's, Dower successfully cracks at Ali's veneer of perfection and reveals how its possible that one superstar athlete is accorded fame and adulation while another scrapes by.
While THRILLER is presented in a straightforward manner (and, in my opinion, should lose the distracting "British TV" narration in such a classic American story - at times you'd think they were examining the lost tribes), it's fast-paced, incredibly suspenseful and could have a theatrical life in the US. In any case, HBO should grab the film (if they haven't already).
Another film that caught our attention was Richard Parry's BLOOD TRAIL, the examination of a young, unfocused man who travels to war-torn Sarajevo in the early 1990s in hopes of becoming a war photographer. Following the man's story over more than a decade, Parry constructs a film that succeeds on a number of levels, not least as it deals with memory, war and the passage of time. Parry, who also served as a journalist during the war in Yugoslavia, lingers throughout with his own camera, somehow always observing without invading. The images are so stunningly rendered that it's often difficult to believe that some of the footage was actually shot more than 15 years ago.
Jerry Rothwell, who co-directed last year's DEEP WATER, returned to BritDoc with HEAVY LOAD, a film that he pitched at the first BritDoc two years ago (where IFC's Evan Shapiro came aboard with financing). The film received a rapturous response from BritDoc audiences (it was not a surprise it took the Audience Award) and it's easy to see why. Rothwell uses the conventions of the music doc - meet band, band has troubles, band perseveres, band triumphs, close credits - to great affect in a film that has an unusual subtext - 3 of the members of Heavy Load have learning disabilities.
While there were mixed feelings about Rothwell's presence in the film (it opens and closes on him, with the ostensible rationalization that Rothwell is discovering something about finding one's bliss as he spends time with the band), HEAVY LOAD works ultimately because Rothwell is able to get the band to be honest about their hopes, fears and ultimately their frustrations. It's on that last point - as the band begins to launch a campaign to allow the developmentally disabled to stay out later than 9 PM - that the film transcends the conventions of a typical music doc.
While I was favorably inclined toward all of the films that I saw (including the popular US hit YOUNG@HEART), I want to briefly note two other titles - Nicola Collins' THE END, a stylish (it was not a surprise that she acted in Guy Ritchie's SNATCH, since the film sometimes feels like a compilation of excerpts from that film's cutting room floor) and concise look at East End gangsters in sunset years, and Jerermy Gilley's THE DAY AFTER PEACE, a sequel to his earlier PEACE ONE DAY, which chronicled his attempt to launch an International Peace Day. Now that the U.N. has officially adapted IPD, the new installment looks at Gilley's efforts to get nations around the world to commit to recognizing the day with cease fires or other humanitarian endeavours. The film is very British (it has that unquantifiable mix of social justice, reality television and, oh look, it's Jude Law!), but it's effectively structured and polished. While the audience may initially be wary toward Gilley (who directs and serves as lead crusading character), he throws enough skepticism toward his efforts to pay off in the end. But, man, a little Jude Law sure goes a long way.
By Friday night, the films and panels and pitches and keynotes (see Matt Dentler's notes on Larry Charles unveiling of RELIGULOUS clips here and his summary for indieWIRE here) and eyeliner (again see Dentler -- and, frankly, for the Brits as well as the Americans, if you have to ask, you apparently didn't get the memo) began to cluster around the participants as they boarded trains and coaches back to London. Conventional wisdom was that despite tweaks and changes (and the loss of the beloved punk rock karaoke), BritDoc 3.0 was an unqualified success.
Keep that in mind when we inform that BritDoc '09 is not for you.
Thing is, unlike a certain other UK documentary festival I could mention (cough cough), Britdoc's remit is totally to be a British documentary industry-focussed festival not an international one, so it couldn't/shouldn't/wouldn't get more Yankified without upsetting the apple cart that keeps it bespokely focussed and funded. It has its niche and it lives in it wonderfully, and in a small land like the UK, that's essential. You're the anomaly that sneaks in under the radar, AJ, and the event is all the better for it that you and other non-Brits/Europeans in small numbers are there.
But in that sense, the comparison with True/False is for me a bit forced - T/F is a full-fat public film festival (not that I've been so tell me if I'm wrong) whereas Britdoc is a brilliant semi-private documentary conference, meeting-place and marketplace. I think TF and Britdoc do different things and position themselves to very different audiences.
Posted by: charlie | July 31, 2008 at 02:35 AM