Documentary director Mike Hannon recently attended the Sheffield Doc/Fest (8 - 12 June) where his short observational documentary ‘Rats Island’ was screening. One of the largest documentary film festivals with 120 films and 300 speakers at the event, the Sheffield Doc/Fest has been running since 1994 and, with Heather Croall at the helm for the past six years, is regarded among the leading documentary film festivals in the world. Here the Irish filmmaker gives us his festival diary and shares his reactions to some of the documentary films that were screened.
The Sheffield Doc/Fest has moved to a summer slot, which didn't deter the rain that streaked across the porthole as my flight began its approach to Manchester Airport. I was attending the festival as director of ‘Rats Island’ one of two programmed Irish shorts, the other being Colm Quinn's excellent ‘Needle Exchange’. And although the festival's impressive series of markets, sessions and masterclasses ensure its significance for various important industry types, I was more attracted by the prospect of a slew of great documentaries, interrupted only by the occasional and judicious sampling of a Sheffield real ale.
It was my first time attending a festival for documentary film alone. And although I am a documentary film maker of sorts, when presented with the opportunity to watch a factual feature I usually greet it with an air of apprehension. I must confess that my passion for engaging with the real world through the medium of the moving image does little to corrode my childish conviction that the films made by others will be preachy, boring and, worse, educational. As we all know, however, in reality a good documentary film is twice as gripping, hilarious or terrifying as the best narrative can hope to be. And I was lucky to catch quite a few that fell into this category at Sheffield. In fact, after a day or two's viewing I was kind of an emotional wreck, ready to tear up at the slightest intimation of poignancy. I wept openly during the TV biopic ‘Queen: Days of Our Lives’. Hopelessly against the odds and flying in the face of historic inevitability I plaintively begged Freddie not to die and wished that a travel size packet of tissues had been included as part of the otherwise comprehensive delegate pack.
All films were programmed according to various strands, designated by geography or content. Those based on content were quite helpful for making inroads into the dense structure of the five days of screenings: the general strands of music, arts, bent, and protest were complemented my more specific programmes dedicated to the films of Richard Leacock and of Albert Maysles (who received the festival's inaugural lifetime achievement award). Free outdoor screenings on the town green provided an opportunity for the general public to enjoy parts of the programme, and a convenient means for me to continue my exciting personal research into the qualities and effects of real ale. Between imbibings, I was able to scribble some notes on what were, for me, the most noteworthy of the films I saw.
There were a number of documentaries at Sheffield Doc/Fest that dealt with the transformational nature of community arts programmes. ‘We Are Poets’, winner of the Sheffield Youth Jury Award, followed the multi-ethnic teenagers of Leeds Young Authors as they partake in the most prestigious poetry slam contest in the States. And ‘At Night I Fly’ showed how the discontinued Arts in Correction programme helped ex-gang members get in touch with their humanity at California's New Folsom Prison. It's fairly clear that documentaries of this type like to claim a rehabilitative role for the arts in the lives of their protagonists. And while the problems of the privileged Sydney school girls of ‘Mrs. Carey's Concert’ may pale in comparison to those of the Leeds youths, and shrivel and disappear in the face of the hard lives of the New Folsom inmates, that documentary was no less dramatic and tense as a result. Perhaps it was even more so.
Bob Connolly's and Sophie Raymond's film is humorous, tender and proof that you don't need a hard-hitting subject to make a great documentary. In this compassionate and precisely observed study of teenagedom, the camera rarely strays far from the rehearsal room or staff offices. Nevertheless, through the strictly controlled regimen of rehearsals and meetings we glimpse a dropped head, flushed cheek or raised eyebrow. These small moments draw back the curtain on the girls' inner lives, and we hear the cacophony of thought, feeling and mischievous intent that is anathema to Mrs Carey's carefully orchestrated vision. Great drama lies in the struggle between the chaotic waywardness of pubescent individuality and the purportedly transcendent and socialising influence of the music programme. Mercifully enough, on this issue the documentary seems to be pleasantly ambiguous in its ultimate proclamation.
Two Irish feature documentaries screened at Sheffield: Paul Rowley's and Maya Derrington's ‘Build Something Modern’ and Ian Palmer's ‘Knuckle’.
‘Knuckle’ follows a number of families of Irish travellers over a twelve year period, documenting a selection of their bare knuckle boxing matches. Fair fighting, as the travellers call it, functions as a way of simultaneously settling and perpetuating long-running family feuds in a way that is regulated. A champion from each family meets the other at an agreed location and fights in a match arbitrated by two independent referees, until one contestant capitulates or is knocked out. Fair play is adhered to in the main; the fights seem to approximate the Marquis of Queensbury rules, except that the boxers wear no gloves. Fights last anywhere between ten minutes and two hours.
Intriguingly, the arranging of a fight is often facilitated by a process whereby home videos are sent from one family to another. In these, individuals from a given family complain of past transgressions against them, boast of their prowess and do their utmost to belittle and rile the opposing clan. This format will be familiar to anyone who has spent a Saturday afternoon enjoying the sanitised entertainments offered by World Wrestling Entertainment, Inc., with the important distinction being that here the fights are real and people are hurt.
It was very difficult to watch the first fight in the film. I felt like covering my eyes with my hand as one combatant beat his rival into submission. However, as the film progressed I gradually became desensitised to the depictions of violence. By the time the last fight was presented I was able to enjoy it on its own terms, and could firmly root for one contestant.
In his Q&A session the director, Ian Palmer, stated that after a number of years he realised he was no longer as interested in making a documentary as he was in the excitement attendant upon filming the fights. And as a viewer, I was interested to find that my initial squeamishness at the spectacle of two men beating each other bloody soon gave way to acceptance and, dare I say it, exhilaration.
‘Knuckle’ treats an explosive topic in a straightforward but not unproblematic manner. The subject matter is contentious and unavoidably gives rise to a plethora o fquestions. Upon its release it is sure to garner plenty of critical attention, and will stimulate fierce debate on its content and approach. Not least because Rise Films is developing ‘Knuckle’ as a drama series with Rough House Pictures and HBO.
Incidentally, the film also gave rise to the best tweet from Sheffield Doc/Fest:
@sheffdocfestwatching Knuckle. Person behind keeps bashing my seat. I turn tocomplain...it's the bare knuckle fighter from the film :-0
Sheffield Doc/Fest doesn't have a dedicated screening of shorts, but does programme the min the traditional manner before many of the features, to which they usually have some thematic link. Minka screened before Still Films' ‘Build Something Modern’. Here the connection is apparently architecture, but Davina Pardo's short gradually reveals itself as something else: a lyrical evocation of the shared life of two men from different cultures. It's told from the point of view of Yohshihiro Takishita, now an architect, who reflects on his life with John Roderick, an American journalist, in a traditional Japanese farmhouse that they bought together. Mr. Takishita became Roderick's adopted son, and they lived there together for many years.
Stylistically, the film is entirely conventional. Interview footage with the architect is interspersed with personal photographs and carefully composed static shots of the farmhouse today. However, this material is delicately and masterfully handled. We sense that we are being shown the part of Mr. Takishita's humanity that is the well from which his life has flowed. It's possible to make a greatand affecting documentary without innovative technique or a sensational logline. It's a beautiful, gentle film on love and loss and I was reaching for the tissues once again...
Of the films that I saw at the festival ‘Bombay Beach’ was undoubtedly the most ingenious and most wonderful. Alma Har'el is a music video director who brings innovation and flair to this, her debut documentary feature. While scouting locations for a music video shoot, she was introduced to Bombay Beach, a town that lies on the Salton Sea in Southern California. It is a dilapidated and isolated place; a former resort which has suffered the effects of flooding and pollution. Here, we meet Har'el's three main characters: Benny, a young, heavily diagnosed and medicated boy from a family with a hidden past; Ceejay, a black teen escaping from gang warfare who has high hopes for his career as a footballer and for his love life; and Red, an old man on the cusp of life and death, but very much raging against the dying of the light.
The film, given an honourary mention by the panel of the Special Jury Award, is lyrical, expressionistic and unprecedentedly stylish. Indeed it is reminiscent of a music video. Har'el shot the film on her own, recording pictures and sound with minimal equipment that let her get close to her subjects. More importantly this allowed her a freedom of mobility and of expression that we don't normally associate with documentary film. One gets the sense that the director was less interested in exploring a particular agenda than engaging her subjects in an extended collaborative process where the people in front of and behind the camera make the film together. This has always been implicit to documentary. Here it is explicit. And no more so than when everybody starts dancing!
In ‘Bombay Beach’ Alma Har'el makes a virtue of a notorious vice. The film sees her documentary subjects engaged in carefully choreographed dance sequences that dramatise aspects of their lives. This innovative technique functions as a kind of cathartic play where the director and her subjects co-create the documentary. Benny, CeeJay and Red perform as versions of themselves as the boundaries between fact, fantasy and fiction are dissolved. Her subjects are afforded the greatest possible dignity, being placed by Har'el at the juncture of their past, present and future selves in a space where nightmares blossom into the sweetest of dreams. This is no mere stylistic device, however. Her methodology implicitly acknowledges the presence of the camera, and poeticises the collusion between film maker and subject, thus deftly sidestepping what are usually thought of as the main epistemological pitfalls of the documentary form.
- Mike Hannon's 'Rats Island’ will next be screened at the Galway Film Fleadh on Sunday 10th Jul
