CINEMA GUILD: NE CHANGE RIEN (2009)—DVD Review by Alex Hansen

Pedro Costa's Ne Change Rien (2009) is a glimpse into the abyss that is process: long hours spent pouring endless energy and concentration into minute details that the majority won't even notice, perfecting an expression, giving it a power to punch the viewer / listener in the stomach, wielding only a silence, a gesture, a cut, a word, an unexpected note.

Jeanne Balibar is presented as the creative driving force behind the music—it's her name on the album just as the films are "by" Costa—but both receive aid and inspiration from their peripheral collaborators. Balibar's music is co-written. She is guided by the musicians who play with her, patiently persisting, playing and replaying until she can find the tempo and get her phrasing right. Costa's films, likewise, are created with the input of those who appear in them. They bring to life onscreen versions of their own life stories, leading Costa and his films to their eventual expression. Both draw inspiration from material that's come before, which they use as a foundation to build on, whether it be a "Superfly" sample or a Jacques Tourneur plot. Even Costa's shooting methods mirror the musical process. Just because a scene's been committed to tape doesn't mean he won't revisit the material and shoot it again weeks later, allowing the atmosphere and "vibe" of the room and/or the day to imbue the performance.

Costa shed the baggage of celluloid after making Ossos (1997), feeling it constrained and imposed on his process too much. One can imagine him reacting similarly to Balibar as she rehearses La Perichole. She isn't in control of her process. She's stopped every other syllable to make adjustments. Her frustration visibly builds as she's forced to bend to another's will and the demands of the medium, much as Costa himself once had to bend to the needs of film (lights, crew, etc.).

Costa's latest work—this and the 2010 short O Nosso Homem, another variation on the footage used in Tarrafal (2007) and The Rabbit Hunters (2007) and included on the Masters of Cinema's must-have Colossal Youth (2006) set—looks towards the past, without a hint of the future. Compare that to a filmmaker with whom he is often compared: Lisandro Alonso, whose Untitled (Letter to Serra, 2011) similarly deals with the filmmaker's past work but dangles a few tantalizing possibilities about what is to come. Will there be another shift in his process? Where does Costa go from here? Where is there to go after In Vanda's Room (2000) and Colossal Youth? Perhaps the answer, or maybe just a hint, can be found in O Nosso Homem, which proves the malleability of images. Just because something's been done or seen before doesn't mean it's potential has been exhausted.

It comes as no surprise that The Cinema Guild's DVD release of Ne Change Rien is top shelf. Image and sound are stellar and the extras are plentiful with a few deleted scenes and a sampling of Balibar's "Tronomettes" (musical sketches featuring accompaniment by a metronome). Cinema Guild continues their habit of including short films when possible (and bless them for it), as their Manoel de Oliveira and Agnes Varda discs, and the inclusion of an early Bela Tarr short on their upcoming Turin Horse release attest. The real gem is Costa's short film The End of a Love Affair, a modest piece whose pleasures are derived from the simple act of viewing, much like how the subject of Costa's short watches the street from the window. The curtains billow in from the edge of the frame. Light dances on the bed sheet and across the chest of the man. The title song joins in after a spell; but, we learn nothing about the man. In the parlance of Billy Brown, we "span time" with him. And in many ways, that's all we should ask of the moving image.

CANNES 2012: AMOUR, LAURENCE ANYWAYS and RUST AND BONE—By Ryan Lattanzio

Thanks to the good people at the San Francisco Film Society, the Consulate General of France in SF, the French American Cultural Society and La Semaine de la Critique, I was sent last week to the 65th Cannes International Film Festival as a critic and jury member. Six days into the festival, and I have managed to see a ton of films both good and bad, and I am living the dream of the magpie cinephile.

To start, the best film I have seen so far in the Main Competition is Michael Haneke's Amour. Who knew that the Austrian provocateur behind such films as The Seventh Continent (1989), The Piano Teacher (2001), Cache (2005) and The White Ribbon (2009 Palme d'Or winner) was capable of feeling anything? Amour is the director's most emotional, tender film to date. It marks a shift in his career that resembles late Ingmar Bergman or Carl Theodor Dreyer: restrained, pensive and deeply felt.

Amour is about love, of course, but it is also two hours of a woman dying. Yet Haneke renders this depressing material redemptive and utterly compelling. It's as good a rumination as any about getting old and getting on in life.

The film is also a tribute to seasoned French actors, starring Jean Louis Trintignant and Emmanuelle Riva as Georges and Anne, an elderly married couple whose amour is put to the greatest test of all when Anne suffers a stroke that paralyzes half of her body. Georges, with the help of his daughter Eva (Isabelle Huppert), must care for Anne in the final months of her life. We know from the outset that she is going to die. The film opens with police breaking into the couple's apartment to find Anne splayed on the bed amid a funereal bouquet. Natch, in Haneke tradition, this image cuts to the title card Amour.

Trintignant is my pick for Best Actor at the festival, which ends on the 27th when the Palme d'Or and other awards are announced. As Georges, he is calm, sensible and devoted to his wife, yet we also see the personal toll Anne's condition takes on him in several unsettling dream sequences which punctuate this lovely, elegiac film.

With the exception of one crucial scene, Amour never leaves the apartment, which looks more like the chateau in Bergman's Cries and Whispers than a bourgeois flat. We are confined to these large rooms with Georges and Anne for two hours, but instead of suffocating, it's riveting. Haneke does not sanitize with cliches or sentimentality, and like all his films, Amour is starkly realized, but this time with more heart than head (something new for Mr. Haneke, otherwise known for his cinema of nihilism and dread). I walked out of the theater completely wrecked. I didn't know Haneke could make me feel such feelings.

Another excellent film, this one from the Un Certain Regard category, is enfant terrible Xavier Dolan's Laurence Anyways. With this glam epic, Dolan has made his most personal film yet. All he had to do was not cast himself in it.

With its huge, episodic structure spanning 10 years in the life of a couple, Laurence—shot with vibrant color in a 1.33:1 aspect ratio that immediately evokes Dolan's cinephilic nostalgia—smacks of '90s era Pedro Almodovar in telling, through broad brush strokes and intimate moments, the story of a man who realizes he was meant to be a woman. The title character, played with sensitivity and bravado by Melvil Poupaud (a regular cast member of Ruiz and Ozon), becomes a transsexual over the course of the movie but his girlfriend Frederique (the effervescent Suzanne Clément whose performance recalls Kate Winslet's as the manic pixie dream girl in Eternal Sunshine) decides to stick with him. She wrestles with this decision for the rest of her life, as Laurence and Fred are constantly on-and-off, hot and cold.

Given that the film clocks in at nearly three hours, and though it feels surprisingly breezy, Laurence, like Dolan's coiffed pompadour, is going to need a pair of scissors if it's ever going to find an audience across the Atlantic. But it's a big, beautiful film, where we really get the sense that these two flawed but endlessly watchable people are crazy in love with each other. Dolan pumps '80s New Wave tunes, sometimes ad nauseum, into the film and its uber-'90s aesthetic (the shoulder pads, my god those shoulder pads). Sometimes his tendency to smear his style all over his substance does a disservice to the characters and the story, but Laurence is leaps beyond Dolan's previous efforts J'ai tue ma mere (2009) and Les amours imaginaires (2010). Though the 23-year-old director is not quite ready to sack his punk sensibilities and aesthetic attitudes, Laurence is a mature film, a near-masterpiece that's been one of my favorites at the festival.

A film I was far less thrilled with but one that is generating a lot of buzz around La Croisette is Jacques Audiard's Rust and Bone, or as it is known in its very chewy French title De rouille et d'os. It is Audiard's follow-up to the 2009 political drama A Prophet. Like that film, Rust and Bone takes its characters and audience on a grand tour of emotional hell. Overwrought melodrama with some seriously good acting make up this otherwise flavorless picture about (you guessed it) two broken souls who come together amid the scraps of their personal tragedies.

As Stephanie, an orca trainer turned paraplegic after a random accident on the job, Marion Cotillard throws herself headlong into her stripped down, untreated performance. The role churns the actress through the wringer and finds her doing some brutal gymnastics of grief and otherwise. Cotillard, along with Matthias Schoenaerts (Bullhead) as Ali, a single dad, amateur boxer and antihero par excellence, could potentially nab the Best Actress prize. In one scene in a hospital—as much as I hate screaming scenes in hospitals—she articulates her emotions with rare fluency. I refuse to dispel the nature of her accident, as forthcoming American trailers no doubt will, but the way she cries out mes jambes, mes jambes is some of the most gut-wrenching, heart-crushing stuff I've witnessed at the festival.

With its contrived incident-driven plot, which is overly determinant of the characters' lives, the film stinks of Alejandro González Iñárritu gone out of control. But there is also, undoubtedly, a reckoning with cinema Americana, like that of Darren Aronofsky, with the film's trembling camera and gritty lens filter. But at the beating bloody heart of the film is the love story of Stephanie and Ali, who meet at a club where Ali is a bouncer. Beneath all the film's ramblings about working class malaise, and a narrative momentum that's frozen in melo-molasses, there is something so moving about the film that I cannot shake. Plus, it uses Katy Perry's pop ballad "Firework" in such an unexpectedly tender way, I couldn't help but feel my heart strings pulse and pull a little bit. Rust and Bone will be nominated for Academy Awards, mark my words, and it's really going to work with American audiences.

BLOODSWORTH: AN INNOCENT MAN—The Evening Class Interview With Gregory Bayne

Quite possibly, Gregory Bayne might know more about alternate funding strategies for independent film—including crowd funding—than most Idaho filmmakers. This "faithful pragmatist" has funded four successful Kickstarter campaigns for three separate films (A Person of Interest, Jens Pulver / Driven, and Bloodsworth: An Innocent Man), negotiated a hefty distribution deal through video on demand and streaming aggregates, has written columns for Filmmaker magazine, and has been cherry-picked as an expert panelist to discuss funding for independent film at this weekend's Idaho Cineposium Film Conference (May 18-19, 2012).

Keen to the association between crowd funding and audience building, Bayne follows-up his successful Kickstarter campaign for documentary-in-progress Bloodsworth: An Innocent Man with an evening with Kirk Bloodsworth at Boise's Egyptian Theater on Thursday, May 17.

As part of a suite of research interviews conducted for an overview piece for Fusion magazine on Idaho film production, Bayne and I sat down to discuss Bloodsworth late last month.

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Michael Guillén: Gregory, you started with a feature and have now shifted to documentaries. Does that mean that documentary filmmaking has become more your medium or are these simply the stories you want to tell right now?

Gregory Bayne: Well, you can easily get pigeonholed. For me it was more like, "What's the most reasonable thing for me to do after Driven? What will people be waiting for? Likely a documentary." I like documentaries. I like the stories that I can tell through them that maybe I can't tell through narrative features. It took me a long time to even say, "I'm a filmmaker", but that's what I do for a living and that's how I spend my time. But I guess I want it to be more encompassing? I want to be format-agnostic and genre-agnostic, y'know?

Basically, filmmaking is just storytelling for me. For example, my next project is Bloodsworth because Kirk's story really intrigued me. It's a great story to tell. Somebody had been looking into making his story into a feature; but, I liked him, I liked him as a person and I thought that the best way to tell his story was to do a documentary and let him be the star of it. Stylistically, it will be different to a degree than Driven; but, they're the same in that they're both stories centered on their subjects. I feel that the State of Maryland has told their version of the story several times at court, people have read it in the news, but what does it feel like to be a guy ripped off the face of the earth and thrown into prison for something he didn't do? What's that story? I can tell that story better as a documentary through somebody's true experience rather than trying to dramatize it.

Guillén: Clearly, finding the story is essential to building an audience. And a story of direct human experience has a better chance of having an audience relate to that direct experience through a shared humanity. But your decision to tell that story through documentary involves many choices along the way that intrigue me. For example, with Driven—and, I anticipate, with Bloodsworth—I respect that the story is told through the voice of its subject. You don't have a lot of talking heads in Driven, for example, to tell Pulver's story. Jens Pulver tells his own story. And it sounds like you're taking a similar approach with Bloodsworth? In some ways, it might be considered a no-no to give one face so much screen time; but, in the case of Jens Pulver, it revealed an emotional authenticity that engaged the audience. You can run with emotional authenticity for hours, I think.

Bayne: I totally agree. To be perfectly honest, I mostly watch narrative films and mostly just wanted to direct narrative features. That was my initial impulse. But then I fell into editing documentaries and began to like that approach to storytelling. I felt documentaries gave me a greater sense of how to tell stories than all the years of writing and watching dramatized narratives. One of my major inspirations are the Maysles Brothers, especially their film Salesman (1969). I love that movie. It's so interesting and heartbreaking and real and raw. One thing that documentaries have over narrative features—unless they're genuine classics—is this level of timelessness. So the Maysles Brothers inspired me and, more recently, Errol Morris's films, and one Chris Smith did called Collapse (2009), which I watched before making Driven and thought, "Oh wow!" Have you seen Collapse?

Guillén: I haven't.

Bayne: It's about this guy that supposedly predicted the financial collapse. He's something of a conspiracy theorist and Collapse is basically a movie that's just him in a room being interviewed through several different camera angles. It's just him for 80 minutes and I thought, "Holy shit! This is incredibly interesting." The guy was totally engaging and I knew from meeting Jens and having talked with him that there would be no problem with him carrying a movie too. There was a certain amount of the trifecta going on: a great back story, a totally engaging personality, and he had something happening. It's the same with Kirk Bloodsworth. The intensity level turns up to 11 from Driven in terms of what he experienced: being wrongfully convicted, sentenced to death, having to go through that, and then being the first death row inmate in the U.S. to be exonerated through DNA evidence.

My whole point is that—through watching films like Errol Morris' The Fog of War (2003)—if you see these engaging personalities and you allow them to speak and know you have the editor's touch in the end, you can in an authentic way shape what they're saying and tell it to the audience who is watching.

Guillén: Let's talk a bit about where you are with Bloodsworth. You're doing a benefit at the Egyptian Theater on Thursday, May 17, 2012 with Kirk Bloodworth in attendance to Q&A with the audience? My understanding is that part of that event is to film audience reaction? How much longer will you need after that to finish up the film?

Bayne: I also like the process to be as simple as possible. I'm working on two tracks with the Bloodsworth story. Along with my own documentary, we're doing a short piece for PBS for some new program they're developing. I filmed him throughout February back East but I'm not sure that footage will actually be part of the film. The concept I have for Bloodsworth encompasses four elements. First is his speaking in front of people and telling his story from beginning to end. It's compelling and he's a great storyteller. He's shaped his story really well and it resonates because—even though it's second nature and a little bit rehearsed at this point—it's still very emotional and authentic. It comes back to that. So, having him in front of an audience telling his story is just engaging. I look forward to being able to shoot that.

My favorite quote about documentaries is from Errol Morris who said that the best thing and the worst thing about documentaries is that they can be about anything. I love that and it's one of the things that draws me to documentary filmmaking over narrative filmmaking. That principle could be inherent in narrative filmmaking as well, but there's still formulaic storytelling tropes that one way or the other you have to fit in. With documentaries you're bound to a degree with the tenets of storytelling but the way in which you present the story is wide open.

So, the first element is filming him in front of an audience. Then there's the second element of interviewing him, much like I described the Collapse interview, with several cameras. I'm going to sit down with him for four solid days, which is what I did with Jens, and go through the whole story, hoping through that process to get beyond the technical aspects and go deeper. The third element is archival footage from day one of the murder, all the coverage around it, his arrest, his conviction, his appeal, prison.

Guillén: That sounds like a costly element of the film?

Bayne: Yeah. I don't know how costly it's going to be yet. It depends on how much of the archival footage I'll actually use. First, I have to pay a fee to get the footage to look at and then—once I actually use it—I'll have to pay money.

Guillén: You have earned a reputation as being something of a master of crowd funding. How successful were your Kickstarter campaigns for Bloodsworth? Could you use a Kickstarter campaign to offset the costs of securing archival footage?

Bayne: The original Kickstarter campaign for Bloodsworth was fully funded. The way it works in the documentary world—which I'm sure you're fully familiar with—is that you can't get any money from any agencies or granting organizations unless you're already way deep into the process. I raised the original money to get through the initial production process to come up with 20-25 minutes of good footage that tells a story, gives the scope of what I'm making, and present it to people at Sundance, at the Ford Foundation, to people at PBS, etc.

I didn't want to do the Kickstarter campaign because it was already my fourth, all of which have been successful. That's nice, but, I do perceive a burnout. So I was really nervous about the Kickstarter campaign for Bloodsworth. I had tried other ways to raise the money. The initial seed money I was supposed to get fell through but I knew there were a lot of things I needed to do that would require money, because the budget for Bloodsworth would probably be larger than it was for Driven. So I went ahead and did the Kickstarter campaign and I did it for various reasons. First, a lot of people just think about the money-making aspect of Kickstarter; but, if you treat crowd funding right, if you respect the process, and follow through with what you say you're going to do, Kickstarter can be a pretty amazing audience-building tool.

I had a nice track record already. For Person of Interest, we did what we said we were going to do with that movie and it got out. With Driven, there were two campaigns and, again, when the movie was done and it was released, everyone got what they were promised. So with the Kickstarter campaign for Bloodsworth, it was nervewracking and yet it worked. It also gave me the opportunity to create another level of audience for this new project that I didn't have prior. It's always good to do that. It gets the conversation rolling.

The campaign kind of sucked because it had the Thanksgiving holiday right in the middle of it and I thought it was going to be very hard to make the funds happen. But the story got picked up all over the place—there was a tidbit in The Washington Post and coverage in all the major online magazines—and the reason the Kickstarter campaign for Bloodsworth got picked up all over the place was because the Idaho State Tourism Board sent out a press release for me. I called them and I said, "Hey, remember that time you said that you really liked what I was doing and to call on you if you could ever be of help?" And they said, "Yes!" I was a little nervous towards the end of the campaign but then one day this writer who I've never met threw in $5,000 and that was the last little chip that needed to fall and then it was done.

The nice thing about this experience was this it was my quickest Kickstarter campaign. Ordinarily, to get a campaign 10% funded early on is the best strategy possible. If you can make it there, oddly enough you can get it funded the rest of the way. Within 24 hours, the Bloodsworth campaign went past 10% funded and then the work really began. Still, again, it went the fastest of all my campaigns in achieving the 10% but, again, I think that had to do with all this work I'd done prior, had delivered on my promises, and people were beginning to trust that I wasn't an asshole.

Guillén: So any sense of when the film will be ready to be released?

Bayne: Well, I'll have the bulk of the footage I'll need by the end of May, but then the animation aspect is a new element for me that I've never worked with before and I'm assuming that's going to take more time than I imagine it will. Half of the film will be animated by Matthew Wade.

Guillén: How did you decide to film this story? Had you read some news coverage and that's what lured you into the project? How did you then contact Kirk Bloodsworth?

Bayne: A friend of mine in Boise was friends with Bloodsworth and she had read Tim Junkin's book Bloodsworth: The True Story of One Man's Triumph over Injustice. She contacted me about the possibility of making a film about him, gave me the book and I started reading it, and I thought, "This is a great story." Then Bloodsworth and his people all watched Driven and thought I was pretty good at what I was doing so I sat down with Kirk and decided we would make a documentary about his story. That's how the process began. It was very simple.

Guillén: When you approach a prospective subject, what do you offer them? What do they get out of your telling their story?

Bayne: With Jens Pulver / Driven, because it's a first person movie, Jens owns half the movie. I think that's totally fair. I put in most of the equity, I made the movie and all that, so I should get something; but, then, Jens put in his life story. If Driven is making money right now and Jens isn't getting some of that, I would be a total asshole. So that's how I approach it. It's not like making a movie about Japanese whaling ships. When you're making a movie that's so specified and it's so definitively about one person and their story and they're investing their time to be with you and to tell their story and to allow you the creative freedom to make and own the movie, it nonetheless at the end of the day has to be shared. If there's a financial benefit, it's a shared financial benefit. I don't really see any other way to do it. You can litigate a project to the end of time, but there's a right and a wrong. If you're going to tell a story about a specific person and they're on camera for 90% of the movie, you both share the money, period.

PANAMÁ IFF—HORA MENOS (HOUR LESS)

Hora menos / Hour Less, dir. Frank Spano (Spain / Venezuela, 2011)—In terms of camera style, Hour Less is 180° away from the calm compositions of Route of the Moon, and—though less a road movie in its usual sense—is every bit as much of a transformative journey. The film begins with archival helicopter footage of the 1999 mudslide that devastated La Guaira, considered one of the worst catastrophes in Venezuelan history. 15,000 victims succumbed to a torrent of muddy water, which is shown sweeping away houses and cars. It is every bit as horrific as the archival footage that begins The Tsunami and the Butterfly (2012) where the documentary evidence of disaster unites humanity in a shared, tragic experience. My heart literally leapt to my throat to see how quickly lives could be destroyed by water. And yet Hour Less seeks to suggest that the water that destroys families also creates them at the same time.

From its opening archival perspective, Spano and his cinematographer Gabriel Guerra shift to a frenetic hand-held approach to best approximate the emotional frenzy and psychic turmoil directly following the Vargas disaster. Isabel, a 49-year-old nurse (Rosana Pastor), hunts desperately among makeshift encampments littered with drowned corpses until she locates her dead husband. Yudeixi, a 16-year-old woman-child of the barrios (Erika de Santiago), has to have her dead baby wrested from her arms. The two women, having lost those they love, turn desperately if reluctantly to each other to survive, especially after being repatriated to Canarias, Spain, where an overtaxed bureaucracy abandons them to fare for themselves.

In effect, the camera’s POV becomes the audience’s, a third character who accompanies Isabel and Yudeixi in the journey they must take in order to come to terms with what they’ve lost and the new family they’re destined to create. Trouble trails after tragedy as they meet and fall under the manipulations of Alfredo (Alfredo L. Fernández) who seeks to involve them in his illegal immigration trade. This feminist narrative is all the more remarkable for having been written by Spano, who spent four years getting to know his two female characters. Embodied by his lead actresses, Isabel and Yudeixi emerge as two remarkable women brought into relationship despite their disparate backgrounds and classes. Through an intriguing, if sometimes confusing, flashback structure that reveals secret motivations, the narrative complicates and enrichens, as its central theme of families destroyed and created by water plays out.

The film's title derives from Yudeixi’s gradual awareness of time zones and how Venezuela is time zones behind Canarias, and Canarias is an hour behind the rest of Spain. She becomes determined never to let her life be an hour behind, or an hour less, than anyone else’s anywhere in the world.  It also comments upon one of Spano's flashback sequences that takes the viewer back an hour before the disaster to indicate how Isabel and Yudeixi's paths are destined to cross.

Hour Less is the opera prima of Panamanian / Venezuelan actor and director Frank Spano, and was twice awarded at Madrid Imagen in 2011. Spano deftly skirts the limitations of melodrama to elicit an emotionally authentic drama of survival. The film has important musical assets like the Venezuelan Aquiles Baez, guitar player and composer, and the Panamanian Roberto Blades, who sings the original track of the film. Spano admitted to me that he is especially proud of the soundtrack and mentioned that his father—a well-known musician in Tito Puente’s band—offered him music to use in his film, which he only later discovered was a tune his father had written to court his mother. A perfect fit for a movie about mothers who give birth to new lives.  By film's end Spano's camera has calmed down and we, as witnesses, feel hope that Isabel and Yudeixi will find new lives tempered by the strength of love. IMDb. Facebook.

PANAMÁ IFF—RUTA DE LA LUNA (ROUTE OF THE MOON)

Ruta de la luna / Route of the Moon, dir. Juan Sebastian Jacome (Panama / Ecuador, 2012)—Tito, an introverted bowling champion must, suddenly and against his will, travel from his native Panama to San José in Costa Rica to take care of Cesar, his father who has fallen ill. They have a disaffected relationship. Cesar and Tito barely know each other. Tito's only wish is to go back to Panama as soon as possible to be able to participate in a Bowling Tournament, but Cesar has different plans for him. Official site. IMDb. Facebook.

The waxing phases of the moon (i.e., the “route” of the moon) provide a visibly-insured transformation in Juan Sebastián Jácome’s La Ruta de la Luna, which is having its world premiere at IFF Panamá on Sunday evening at the historic Teatro Nacional in Casco Viejo. Less assured is whether the contentious relationship between an overbearing Cesar (Luis Antonio Gotti) and his hectored son Tito (Yimmy David Suárez) will achieve resolution, desite their having to spend three days together driving back to Panamá from San José, Costa Rica.

Lost in his glory years as a “boxing trainer of champions”, Cesar is suffering from a heart condition and only his albino son Tito is available to look after him, albeit against his will. Tito would much rather be bowling. In self-denial about the seriousness of his condition, Cesar defies his doctor’s orders and exasperates Tito by doing everything he shouldn’t: jogging for exercise, insisting on a marathon drive of 13 hours, and picking up a stray young woman (Victoria Greco) and her filthy dog along the way.

Yimmy David Suárez excels as the put-upon, petulant and irritable Tito who sleeps as much as he can to get away from facing the forced company of his judgmental father who, it’s assumed, has given Tito ample cause to be resentful. A philandering husband, Cesar was never around to help raise Tito. Embarrassed by his son’s albinoism, and traditionally machismo, Cesar mocks Tito’s masculinity, calls bowling “gay” and insists it’s not really a sport. But illness has made him experience momentary pangs of guilt for not being more supportive of Tito while he was growing up and so he latches on to Tito’s chance to compete at a bowling tournament as if prepping him for a boxing match. Tito, however, approaches bowling not as a competitive sport but more as a stress reliever. He prefers to play alone when the lanes are being polished, compensating for his bad eyesight by mastering technique and form. Cesar insensitively claims that Tito is not willing to compete because he’s “afraid to show his white face.”

Enter Yadia, a penniless young woman trying to get home to her family in Panamá. She quickly senses the tension between the two men and tries to defuse it through Panamanian superstition by making an offering of a pumpkin and a plucked hair from Tito’s head. The pumpkin, she explains, is to be left on the road so that it will be smashed by a car, releasing the tension. She tries valiantly to negotiate the pent-up animosities smoldering between father and son but ends up putting them into further competition for her attention and affection. It’s an unexpected near disaster that make father and son come to terms with each other, though by film’s end those terms remain irresolute and tentative, adding a poignant touch of reality to the narrative.

Juan Sebastián Jácome has a no-nonsense shooting style. His camera rarely moves and is, instead, meticulously placed to stress framing and planimetric compositions. Little movement occurs within the frames, which is curious for a film that is admittedly a road movie in which Cesar’s blue car becomes as important a character as himself, his son, Yadia, and the street cur. Towards the end of the film there is a sudden shift as the camera appears to be moving on curving roads, weaving through a rainy fog, which comes across as dream-like compared to the deliberate compositions up until then. Music by Xavier Muller greatly enhances the journey.

ALREADY GONE (2012)—The Evening Class Interview With Peter Katz

I first met producer-innovator Peter Katz in 2008 when he and his brother Evan L. Katz brought Adam Wingard's Pop Skull to San Francisco's IndieFest. We met in a grungy Tenderloin noodle shop to have a conversation. Subsequently, Peter kept in touch and we talked some when he was exploring the application of neuroscience to cinema (i.e., neurocinema), as detailed in Curtis Silver's write-up for Wired and Steven Kotler's for Popular Science. Katz was exploring if neurocinema could help genre filmmakers craft scarier films, as explained in his segment for CNN's The Screening Room.

Ever attentive to marketing trends, Peter recently contacted me to tell me about his 3-minute teaser reel for a proposed project Already Gone (2012) [Facebook], directed by Ross Ching, based on a feature script by Bill Balas, produced by Katz and Don Le, and starring Shawn Ashmore (Iceman from the first three X-men movies) and Harry Shum, Jr. (Glee).

Compact, visceral and atmospheric, the Already Gone promotional short advances the "teaser first, movie later" marketing strategy centered on the concept that—as Hugh Hart states it for Wired—"one moving picture can be worth several thousand words when it comes to sounding out the sizzle of a fantastical tale." As Hart details, "The trailer-first, movie-later phenomenon works both ways. Would-be directors get a chance to show off their chops by creating DIY clips made with inexpensive video software. On the other side of the equation, busy studio types get a quick and easy-to-digest peek at what a project might look like on the silver screen, without committing to a big budget." Numerous success stories with this strategy abound: Tron: Legacy, Panic Attack, Iron Sky, Goon, several pitched as YouTube demonstrations of what these projects might look and feel like.

My thanks to Peter for being willing to hop on the phone to discuss his involvement with this 3-minute short.

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Michael Guillén: Talk to me about this short sizzler you've produced to pitch Already Gone.

Peter Katz: I definitely want to make sure to establish that Ross Ching has done this kind of work in the past. He has this forte as a director to do short form content. He has a load of experience with doing commercials and has developed his own style. He comes from the position: "How can I create an interesting experience?" That doesn't mean he doesn't value his actors or what the project might become, but he wants to provide a cool experience from the kernel of an idea, from the tip of an iceberg. If an interested party were reading the full feature screenplay, it would have the dramatic story elements; but, in his short films he wants to encapsulate it all in a visualized experience.

Guillén: As one of the producers of this short film, did you approach Ching with this idea or did he approach you?

Katz: Well, Ross is a friend of mine and I hang out with him and with Don Le, another producer on the project, and since we're buddies Ross said, "Hey, I've been doing short form content and I'm looking for a feature screen play to do what I did with 3 Minutes (2011)." 3 Minutes had no screenplay; it was a short idea that turned out really well and he enjoyed doing it.

Ross said, "Let's mix it up a little bit. Let's film a script. Find me a script that's really action-packed and hyperkinetic." So I went onto this screenwriting site called Fresh Voices. They have really good taste and there's cool stuff on there. The guys who run that site really know their stuff. They sent me a lot of really good scripts. What caught my attention was a high concept idea of a criminal who robs other criminals, kind of how Dexter is a serial killer who kills other killers. That idea alone had a hook.

Guillén: I'm presuming your short was shot digitally as a cost-effective pitch to find financial backing for a full feature?

Katz: Yes, it was shot on The Red. What's going on is this: Don Le and I are producers on this and there's also an executive producer Joel Mendoza [Attraction Entertainment], so we all have relationships; but, the thing is, even if you're a friend of mine, if I send you a screenplay you're probably not going to read it. It's just a fact. People will read scripts if they really have to, but the key is how to present something that's accessible so you can pull people in? A short can capture the experience. When we first presented the short, we were covered by Wired [in a piece by Curtis Silver]. A short makes it easy for your idea to be communicated. How can you easily communicate a screenplay? You can't! Rather than have a producer interpret a screenplay, a director on a short film can show in a few minutes the kind of choices he will make with regard to, let's say, the action in a shot. Through that, anyone who wants to finance the film or any actors that might want to get involved, they can make a decision based upon this sampling of the director's vision.

Guillén: Exactly. Now, is this something unusual to approach a pitch this way? Are you one of the first to be doing this or is it part of a trend?

Katz: It's been done for a while. One of the first examples I'm familiar with was Saw, which started off as a short film. They sent in a VHS tape, back when people had VHS, and they said, "Hey, this is a project. This is the sense of it. Check it out." So it's been going for a while. More than anything, screenplays aren't easy to read. It's not like they're a graphic novel or a book. Someone can write a really beautiful script but it doesn't lend itself to being consumed easily. It takes more words because it has to be denser and detailed, but it's not laid out so the reader can lay back and relax. It usually takes more work to process it. So anything you can do to make it easier for me to process is better. The reason people want short films over a script is simply because it's easier to process and you can spread the idea around faster. If you're a financier and you have five other people you need to share an idea with, if you get a short film it's easier to do.

Guillén: It all sounds straightforward in concept, but looking at the credits for this short film, I'm amazed how large a crew was involved in putting this together. Did you finance it? How did you find the money to do the short?

Katz: I can't put the number out but it was actually a very low budget. A few of the guys have all put a little bit of money in; but, there is definitely a lot of work that went into it. On Facebook, there's a picture of everyone involved in the project and it's a huge friggin' army of people who all volunteered. It was serious. There are stunt men involved and everything. But the thing is that it's a good inbetween. You know that as talent you're always doing something so if someone says, "Hey, we're going to film this in a day" it's a lot better than holding someone up for three or four weeks. When it takes only a day, then it's a fun thing you can do. It's not like a serious feature where your whole life is put on hold. After a day's work, you get to call it a day.

Guillén: Well, it's—as you said—a visceral way to experience an idea and to promote the sense of the atmosphere of a film and the visual style of the filmmaker, so I applaud you in the effort, hope you keep me abreast of developments, and certainly wish you luck with advancing to the feature.

PANAMÁ IFF: JUAN OF THE DEAD—The Evening Class Interview With Alejandro Brugués

Alejandro Brugués' Juan de los muertos / Juan of the Dead (Cuba / Spain, 2011) [official site] is not your papi's zombie flick! Sure, it has hordes of the walking dead who swarm upon the island of Cuba on the anniversary of the Revolution, and it has loads of guts and gore to make you squirm and squeal, but Brugues inflects his Havana-set homage to predecessors Dawn of the Dead (1978) and Shaun of the Dead (2004) with regional affects that make it a welcome and culturally distinct addition to an already ubiquitous genre. What sets it apart is its wry sociopolitical tone and an everyday acceptance of Death that is uniquely Latino.

As synopsized by Panamá IFF: "A mysterious plague unleashes on the streets of Havana, with zombies starting to be seen and multiplying exponentially by the minute. The authorities blame imperialistic maneuvers from the North on the vicious takeover, and are soon overwhelmed by the mounting chaos. The apocalypse seems irreversible. But before all hope is lost an unlikely team is formed that can possibly defeat the odds: Juan, a middle-aged man of unspecific occupation and his pal Lázaro are luckily on a fishing excursion at the beginning of the outbreak. The two men quickly realize there is a business opportunity if they stay alive, and start offering their zombie extermination and removal service to the living that can afford it. 'Juan of the Dead, we kill your loved ones' is their slogan."

At Twitch, Josh Hurtado writes: "The film is filled with clever dialogue, plenty of solid gore, the blackest of black humor, and geek humor for miles. There are very inventive zombie kills, including one in particular that involves a truck, a wire, and about three hundred of the undead that is really the piece de resistance of Juan of the Dead." Quiet Earth declares "how much fun it is to see the zombie apocalypse in yet another new locale, and the Havana alleyways, rooftops, tenement buildings, and beachfronts are consistently lush and brim with detail and character." And Latin Horror reports: "Brugués and his partners created their production company 5a Avenida and secured a whopping $2.3 million for special effects via financing from Spain's La Zanfoña Producciones."

Screenwriter and director Alejandro Brugués was born in Buenos Aires. He graduated from Cuba's International Film and Television School of San Antonio de los Baños. He co-owns and writes for 5a Avenida Productions. His first feature Personal Belongings (2007) secured worldwide distribution. Anticipating its popular appeal, Panamá IFF has booked his sophomore feature Juan of the Dead for one of its late-night en plein air screenings. My thanks to Blanca Granados and the Toronto International Film Festival—where Juan of the Dead had its world premiere—for providing the opportunity to sit down with Brugués to discuss his film.  [This conversation is not for the spoiler-wary!!]

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Michael Guillén: Straight off, Alejandro, I want to say that I found Juan of the Dead to be an accomplished genre piece in its humor, sterling special effects, and wry but lighthanded sociopolitical commentary.

Alejandro Brugués: Thank you very much.

Guillén: Tell me about your background. This is your second film, no?

Brugués: This is my second film as a director but my sixth film as a screenwriter. I just wanted to be a writer when I got into filmmaking so I studied screenwriting and my career began as a screenwriter. Then I started to not like the films that directors were making out of my scripts. Of course, when you're a writer and you're on the set, the director's role looks easy—he just tells the actors what he doesn't like and what he wants them to do—so I thought, "I can do that. If someone's going to screw up my screenplays, it might as well be me." So I started directing. I made my first feature film Personal Belongings—which is a completely different film from Juan of the Dead; it's a social drama—and then, when we were doing the post-production on Personal Belongings, I had the idea for Juan of the Dead. I began writing. When I talked to my producer for the first time, he told me, "This is going to be big." Then when he read the script, he said, "This is much bigger than I originally thought." So it became a matter of figuring out how to raise the money.

Guillén: Which you did. You raised $2.3 million through Spain's La Zanfoña Producciones.

Brugués: Yes, when I finished making Personal Belongings, I met Javier Iglesias from La Zanfoña who was helping us to finish the film. I told him my idea about Juan of the Dead: a zombie comedy set in Havana, which he thought sounded like it would be fun to do so he jumped in. From there it was just a matter of finding the right people. We were very lucky because all the people we talked to shared our enthusiasm for the idea.

Guillén: It's a great idea that works on many different levels. Not only is there a lineage of films about zombies associated with tropical islands, but zombies in themselves can be used to embody almost any kind of social commentary. You used your zombie outbreak to comment upon U.S. imperialism and capitalism, but—more importantly—the survival of the Cuban people in the face of consistent aggression.

Brugués: When I started in on this project, I wanted to talk about how Cubans react when faced with problems. I knew it was going to be fun because I was taking things I'd seen happen in real life but adding zombies to the mix. You wouldn't believe how much truth is actually in the film. When things get bad, Cubans usually keep on living as if nothing has happened. They either capitalize on what is happening or try to leave the island for someplace else. Those are equally wrong approaches. If you really like something, you have to fight for it. That's something I wanted to say in the film.

Guillén: Which is exactly what Juan expresses in the final sequence when he decides to stay and fight?

Brugués: Juan in many ways is a parable about living through the past 50+ years of revolution in Cuba. Cubans see Havana deteriorating but they just keep on living. So many people leave but I've always said, "Why would you leave? If you really like it, stay and fight for it."

Guillén: I like how Diana Sanchez wrote it up for the program capsule. She wrote that Juan of the Dead "depicts Havana as a place where elevators rarely function and medicines are usually out of date; things are falling apart, yet people know how to have a good time." You cleverly make sure that your protagonists find rum first, and then food. And because I am dealing with my own little viejita of a mother, the scenario that most spoke to me as real but hilarious was when Juan is being attacked by a zombie while his mother is gossiping on the phone. I howled at that.

Brugués: Thank you. I think anyone can take something away from the film that has a basis in their real lives. What comes to mind, for example, is when Juan is teaching the neighbors how to defend themselves by using a ninja star. I took that from a real-life self-defense class. I was taught that—in case we're invaded by the Americans—we had to be able to defend ourselves with anything. I was taught that you can cut ninja stars from the lid of a can. At the time I thought, "Is this guy for real? C'mon. If the Americans invade us, this is what we're going to do?" But the truth is, yeah, the Americans better be prepared, because we will.

Guillén: You described your first film as a social drama, what inspired you to turn towards genre?

Brugués: I love genre. I would like most of my career to be spent making genre films; but, at that time, I had two scripts: one was genre and the other was this love story social drama about a guy who wants to leave the country and a girl who wants to stay; a take on Romeo and Juliet but very Cuban. I did that film because it was easier to fund and also because at that time the Cuban attitude was, "We don't do genre films." Most Cuban films were comedies or dramas so it was easier to get Personal Belongings done. But Juan is more the kind of film I want to do.

Guillén: I'm intrigued that you talk about a Cuban cinema and distinguish it from your own ventures into genre. In fact, I've been told now and again that some filmmakers specifically use genre to move past the concept of a national cinema to reach an international audience. When you first imagined Juan of the Dead, did you see your audience as an international one?

Brugués: Of course! That was the case even with my first film. Films have to be international so that audiences can understand them no matter where the film is from. The point was to make a film that had international appeal but at the same time one about how we are in Cuba and make it interesting. In the case of Juan, I also had to make sure it was a good zombie film. I'm a big fan of zombie films. So I had to please the zombie film crowd at the same time that I offered social commentary about what I observe as an artist.

Guillén: Has there not been a genre film like Juan out of Cuba before?

Brugués: There was one in the '80s, Vampires in Havana (1985). It's very good but it was a cartoon. I also have to talk about one filmmaker, Jorge Molina. He actually plays Juan's sidekick Lázaro in my film, though he's not really an actor; he's a genre film director. He's a cult filmmaker. He loves to do very gory horror stuff with lots of naked women and all that. He's awesome and he was great in my film.

Guillén: You qualified earlier that you felt under pressure to make a good zombie film. The quality of your special effects have helped you achieve that. Your practical blood effects are great and the scenes of Havana falling apart, the buildings on fire and smoking and collapsing, are really well-done. Who did you work with to achieve those effects?

Brugués: First of all, there's a lot of Havana that's actually falling apart. [Laughs.] That's one of the things I wanted to show. Sometimes there are locations in the film that you might think we've retouched or that have had some art direction; but, no, those places exist like that. Also, we had a Cuban team for the practical effects. Three Spanish companies were in charge of the CGI and a Mexican team for the make-up. Since Cuba doesn't do a lot of genre films, there was a lot of stuff that was being done for the first time there that Cubans didn't know how to do, so we had to bring in specialists from other places.

Guillén: Will Juan kickstart a wave of Cuban genre filmmaking? How big is the filmmaking community of independent filmmakers in Cuba?

Brugués: It's not that big. There's only one production company in Cuba and it's run by the State. Most Cuban films are funded by them; but, ours wasn't. I think a lot of Cuban filmmakers are trying to make more independent films, though I'm not sure they will be genre films. Cubans tend to talk about their problems in straightforward ways. I just thought it would be a lot of fun using zombies. Even though I don't think there will be many genre films coming out, I hope Cuban filmmakers will continue to make independent films. You can feel the change in the filmmakers who have grown up in my generation who have had different influences. I can tell you for sure that I will keep making genre films.

Guillén: Talk to me about your La China, your gay character who—though effeminate—kicks ass. His performance carried political subtext.

Brugués: The actor Jazz Vilá who played La China was in my first film, where he was amazing. The character of La China was different in the original script; but, I met with Jazz in Spain where he's living now and we had so much fun together that I told myself, "I have to write a new character for him because I really want to work with him again." So I created the character of La China and I knew how I wanted him to look and all that; but, I let Jazz improvise most of his dialogue because he's a genius. He's brilliant. It's lovely to work with him. So most of La China's dialogue is his own invention. It's interesting that you think his performance was political because my sole intention was simply to work with him again.

Guillén: That's fair. But, as a character, La China adds a lot to your ensemble of characters. Let's talk about that ensemble and your casting. You've already mentioned that Juan's sidekick Lázaro is actually a genre film director. How did you develop the rest of your cast of characters?

Brugués: I wrote the script with the two main characters for Alexis Díaz de Villegas to play Juan and Jorge Molina to play Lázaro because—when I first thought about this film—I had this image of Juan standing with his oar ready to fight. I wanted these two guys to be like Don Quixote and Sancho Panza and I wanted them to be 40-something because that is a generation that has gone through a lot in Cuba. They were born right after the Revolution and they have seen the best of that time and then—with the fall of the Soviet Union—there was their disenchantment. They saw everything change into bad times. Their's is a generation that has a lot of sadness to it. What I told them was, "What you have felt in all these 40 years, I want you to recreate it in the moments that take place in the film. I want to see in Juan's eyes the sadness and the worry that life around him is falling apart." Lázaro I just wanted to be funny.

Then I added the character of Lázaro's son Vladi California, played by Andros Perugorría. I wanted him to represent the new generation, which is a generation that doesn't care about anything. Things happen to people within the country and they just don't care. I believe that's sad. It looks funny in the film but when you think about it, it's sad to be living like that. Juan's daughter Camila, played by the Spanish actress Andrea Duro, is part of the Cuban society who has left. If you're Cuban you probably have someone you love who has left Cuba. La China's sidekick is the big black guy El Primo.

Guillén: The fainter! You used the gag of him fainting at the sight of blood repeatedly and it worked every time.

Brugués: But you know what? We discovered that while we were rehearsing with the actors. They added so much to the script. Eliecer Ramírez who played El Primo is a bodybuilder; he's not an actor. I found him on the street. One day I was driving with my producer Claudia Calviño and we saw him. I stopped the car and said, "That's the guy!" He was lovely and—when we were reading the script and adding stuff—we came up with the idea of a big muscular guy who faints.

Guillén: Can you speak to that process of adjusting your script to accommodate the improvisations of your actors? Do the improvisations get set in rehearsal or do you just turn the camera on and let them go?

Brugués: Each actor is different. Each actor has their own world. For example, Juan (Alexis Díaz de Villegas) is a very mental actor. With Jazz Vilá (La China), it's all about improvisation. Jorge Molina, being a film director too, knows how to steal a scene. He's a fucker! [Laughs.] Sometimes we would be shooting and we'd be thinking, "What the fuck's he doing?" And then you can't cut it when you're editing the film because it's brilliant. He knows where to stand. He knows how to get the light. I usually tell my actors that—except for specific lines I want them to say—the script is just a starting point. I can tell when we're rehearsing which actors are going to improvise and which are not.

Once when we were beginning to shoot the film, I was wearing my headphones and the actors didn't know their mics were on and I overheard them talking about what it would be like if Juan and Lázaro were in a TV series like CSI? It was fun listening to them because they knew what they were doing. I relaxed when I heard them because I knew they were into their characters and—once I knew that—I could change the scene and have them remain in character.

Guillén: In the opening scene of your film when Juan and Lázaro are fishing on the raft, they encounter the first zombie, kill it, and then decide, "Let's keep this a secret between us." What was that about? Why wouldn't they want to go back to the mainland and warn everyone they'd just seen a zombie?

Brugués: When I grew up it was difficult to see zombie films. I had to go to a lot of trouble to see all the zombie films I wanted to see. Since shooting Juan, and because it was such a big production and got so much attention, there's now more awareness about zombie films; but, initially, Cubans didn't really know what zombies are. That's what I was playing with in that scene. And because Cubans don't really know what zombies are, that's why I could play with letting the television announcers talk about "dissidents." The authorities could blame the United States for the zombie outbreak.

Guillén: In other words, it would be more trouble than it's worth to try to explain it to anybody?

Brugués: You probably didn't notice that the zombie in the water was wearing a Guantanamo Bay t-shirt?

Guillén: I didn't notice that and, undoubtedly, I need to watch the film again to catch these little details. But now I understand how you're playing. In the later scene where Juan and Lázaro are saved by the American and he says, "Kick ass for the Lord", that's a quotation from Peter Jackson's film, isn't it?

Brugués: Yeah.

Guillén: Since you're clearly citing other films, what earlier zombie films influenced Juan? Other than the obvious references to Dawn and Shaun?

Brugués: I knew from the beginning I was doing something special for which there really wasn't a reference. I'm aware that there are some people who come to my movie and think they're just going to see a Shaun of the Dead rip-off; but, that's not it at all. That's not the point. And that's not even the reason why "Juan" is in the title. The character of Juan is based on my brother Juan, who is pretty much like that character—except for the killing people part—but there are a lot of stories about my brother in the film. For example, the raft. Or the guy jumping to the neighbor's balcony. That's my brother Juan. But I won't deny that I'm paying homage to zombie films. In this case, obviously Peter Jackson, Shaun (as suggested in the title), and The Evil Dead, which—even though it's not exactly a zombie film—felt like one when I was a little kid. The social commentary is obviously taken from Romero. I managed to make a zombie film with a lot of social commentary. I also wanted to have some fun with the ongoing argument about "fast" zombies vs. "slow" zombies. I wanted to have both in my movie. Why not? But most of them were slow because I like slow zombies.

Guillén: A choice that allowed humor. Some funny bits danced around the slow zombies. One thing that lifted my eyebrow, however, was the killing of innocent people, along with the killing of the zombies.

Brugués: That is mainly in Lázaro's character. I wanted him to be the biggest fuck-up. I'm not sure how many ended up in the actual film, but I think his body count of innocent people is seven. I should do a film just about Lázaro because he's such a mess.