Blog Post
Opening Weekend: Highlights from the 2017 Cinetopia Film Festival
by christopherporter
The first weekend of Cinetopia is over and I saw eight films in total. Sure, that’s more than the average person sees in a weekend but far fewer than the 400 seen by the programming team to select the 68 that make up the festival. Deciding what to see was difficult, and with so many intriguing options I often just chose on a whim. While I found something to admire in all that I saw, I really want to tell you about two of my favorites.
Blog Post
Full STEAM Ahead: Intermitten highlights the intersection of art and tech
by christopherporter
A lot of folks blame the influx of tech companies in Ann Arbor as a prime reason for the rising rents that have gradually pushed portions of the creative community out of downtown. The Intermitten conference returns June 8 and 9 to remind us that artistic adventure and modern business success don't need to be mutually exclusive or adversarial (even if there's no immediate solution to the rent situation).
Now in its second year, Intermitten brings together speakers to discuss how "how creativity in both art and technology helps us add value to our home, work, and global communities," as stated on intermitten.org. "We're technology people with creative prowess and artistic people powered by tech, and we unite to discover the many ways in which working together and thinking creatively can help us accomplish our goals."
Trevor Scott Mays, co-founder of Intermitten and director of support operations for Duo Security, walked us through the event's brief history, current focus, and bright future.
Q: Who are the principals behind Intermitten and how did you end up banding together to do the conference?
A: The core organizer group of Intermitten is comprised of four individuals from local Ann Arbor startups Duo Security and FarmLogs. We were all involved in the Ann Arbor Customer Experience Meetup, and following one of those events, were at a local coffee shop brainstorming how so many tech conferences were bad and all the same. As so many of us had diverse creative backgrounds -- dance, poetry, podcasting, DJing, etc. -- we were determined to showcase how Ann Arbor is one of the KEY places where those two lifestyles mesh so well.
We spent a lot of time trying to figure out the correlation between the creative and tech communities, only to realize that we were mistaken in trying to correlate them when they are so often the exact same kind of people. So many of our coworkers in tech were involved in passion projects writing books and designing new products, and so many of our friends and colleagues in the arts were adapting and including the latest technologies into their creative process.
After seeing so much friction between the creative and tech communities in places like San Francisco, we really wanted to showcase a community like Ann Arbor where that relationship is more harmonious and collaborative. As a result, the community tends to prosper and benefit from the output, both fiscally with new business, and culturally, with invigorated energy driven by the art scene.
Q: What are the biggest changes from last year to this year and why?
A: We surveyed our attendees last year, and some of the biggest changes include more time for attendees to ask questions of our speakers, as well as bring in speakers from a wider array of backgrounds. This year, we have authors, designers, hackers, CEOs, poets, inspirational speakers, comedians, artists, founders, producers, editors, and even an elementary school principal! I think some of our learning lessons from last year were to slow things down a little bit and allow some breathing room for the event to just happen. Working at tech startups in Ann Arbor, there can be a tendency to go, go, go. We took a lot of feedback in and are ensuring that attendees this year get a really good chance to absorb and engage, rather than get bombarded with knowledge!
Q: Why do you think people, in general, are paying more attention to the intersection of arts and technology?
A: I wholeheartedly believe people are looking beyond the norms and rules that have traditionally dictated their lines of work. People want something to differentiate the work they do, and there is so much out there that can not only enhance one's work but also accelerate it beyond a natural cadence. I can attest that many of the individuals working in tech substantiate their frantic work life with hobbies and interests that round them out. Others are holding down their jobs in tech until they can sustain themselves professionally with their craft. Sustainability is a big deal to us, and I think that artists and techies alike benefit from the symbiotic relationship that courses between the two archetypes.
Q: What can you tell us about some of the free events and art installations at the Ann Arbor Art Center and the Mayor's Green Fair?
A: The Ann Arbor Art Center will be featuring a special music performance by Coffee Cup Sessions, which in my opinion is perfect music to peruse and take in an art gallery. We're also working with the Art Center and ICON Interactive to set up a special exhibit which lives right at the heart of high-tech and creativity. Intermitten speakers Christina York and Marty Shea will be showing off their projects -- SpellBound and CollabFeature, respectively -- at the event, which should be a really cool way for attendees to see tangible output from our speakers this year.
At the Mayor's Green Fair, we're bringing in a bicycle-powered DJ soundstage where local DJ Roman Martinez will be spinning hot fire. Of course, we'll need volunteers to be spinning the pedals to keep the music going! We're bringing some special art projects as well that locals may recognize from other annual events like FestiFools. You'll have to go to find out!
Q: What do you hope people do with the information they gather at the conference? Are you aware of anyone taking what they learned last year and applying it to projects?
A: One of my core goals with Intermitten has, and will always be, to help attendees integrate and give back to their own respective communities. Our speakers' collective knowledge alone should be enough to inspire and motivate our attendees, but we've seen it go a step further in the past and watched collaborative projects blossom from attendees who met at the conference. A great example of this was the collaborative work between Ghostly International DJ Shigeto and startup ICON Interactive. They put together a VR exhibit where Shigeto's music altered the world within the VR headset. Since the event, the collaboration has continued and I know Zach (Saginaw, aka Shigeto) is still working with VR actively on several projects to date.
We've seen attendees from the event placed at new jobs in Ann Arbor, particularly in the startup scene. Attendees from our event have also sought out volunteer opportunities with organizations who presented or sponsored. As our conference progresses into year two, we anticipate a whole lot more collaboration and connectivity within our community, as we continue to drive our initiatives forward and expose individuals to all that makes Ann Arbor unique.
Christopher Porter is a library technician and the editor of Pulp.
Intermitten 2017 runs all day Thursday, June 8, and Friday, June 9 at The Ark; the full schedule is here. Tickets are $70 to $120 from eventbright.com. The free pop-in event at Ann Arbor Art Center runs 6-9 pm on June 8. Finally, the Intermitten crew of musicians and artists will participate in the 17th annual Mayor's Green Fair on June 9; the free event runs 6-9 pm on Main Street in Ann Arbor. Related: Read our wrap-up of Intermitten 2016 here.
Blog Post
A guide to the 2017 Cinetopia Film Festival
by christopherporter
Though most of us don’t sense a strong link between the auto and film industries, Michigan Theater executive director and CEO Russ Collins pointed out that the two essentially grew up together.
“In 1922, when Hollywood was deciding whether it would be based in New York or California, Ford Motor Company became one of the largest distributors of movies of anywhere in the world,” said Collins, at a recent press conference for the sixth annual Cinetopia Film Festival, which happens June 1-11 in various Ann Arbor and Detroit locales.
“Ford distributed so many educational films and newsreels that Detroit was second only to Hollywood in terms of the amount of film shot and processed. So it’s an art form that Detroit has long held dear," Collins said, "and it’s deeply built into this community, which is why we’re so happy to bring the world’s cinema passion back here to Detroit.”
Indeed, the guiding principle of Cinetopia -- which Collins founded at the Michigan Theater in 2012, showing more than 40 films that year -- involves gathering together some of the best new films being screened at the world’s most prestigious film festivals. So whether you’re looking for cutting-edge comedy, drama, suspense, or documentaries, or selections from the 12th annual Arab American Film Festival (now part of Cinetopia), you’re likely to “find your film” during the 10-day fest. There’s also a competition program of Michigan-made short films, called Detroit Voices, and this year’s U-M screen arts symposium is focused on producer/distributor Ira Deutchman, so Cinetopia will show Hoop Dreams and Sex, Lies, & Videotape.
This year’s Cinetopia features more than 100 screenings of 60 films, at venues that now include -- in addition to the Michigan Theater and the Detroit Film Theatre at the DIA -- the Henry Ford Museum, the Arab American National Museum, Cinema Detroit, the Maple Theater, Wright Museum of African American History, College of Creative Studies, and one screening of the documentary Look & See: A Portrait of Wendell Berry at Cornman Farms. Several films will have their Michigan premiere at Cinetopia, while one film, car-racer doc McLaren, will have its U.S. premiere.
It's a tremendous undertaking and it takes many partners and sponsors to make Cinetopia come alive. “It takes a whole metropolitan area to put something this ambitious together. This ain’t no damn village," Collins joked.
“The first year of the festival, we had about five thousand visitors. This year, we’re aiming for something in the 30,000 range," Collins said. "But we couldn’t do this without the passion of our team of programmers.”
Those programmers also decide if Cinetopia's film selections have a unifying motif. “Every year, we try to think about the theme, and what we want to say with the films we’re selecting," said programmer Brian Hunter. "Last year, we tried and tried and tried to come up with a theme, but in the end, it really is just about what’s happening out there in the zeitgeist. This year, when we realized that it was the 50th anniversary of the Detroit uprising, that seemed really important, and like something we could build around.”
The film 12th and Clairmount, which features home movie footage, focuses specifically on the 1967 Detroit riot/rebellion, while other films build on the topic of resistance and rebellion, including: Check It, about LGBTQIA gangs in D.C.; an excerpt from The Vietnam War, Ken Burns’ new 18-hour series; Clash, filmed in the back of a police truck in Cairo shortly after the overthrow of President Morsi; Whose Streets? about the Ferguson uprising; Destined, a new feature by Detroit native son Qasim Basir; In Between, in which three Palestinian women walk a tightrope between traditional and modern cultures; Quest, which follows a family in Philadelphia over the course of eight years; and Step, a documentary about step dance team members at the Baltimore Leadership School for Young Women.
Here are additional Cinetopia movie recommendations from the judges and programmers:
Tribal Justice, a documentary about two judges in the tribal court system, which seeks to rehabilitate and heal instead of harm. Local judge Tim Connors said, “They have three goals, which are simple and noble: first, to keep their people out of prison as much as possible; second, to prevent so many children from being taken from their community; and third, to not let them be fodder for the school-to-prison pipeline. It sounds to me like we have a lot to learn from that.”
Patti Cake$, a feature about an unlikely up-and-coming rapper who’s stuck working at a bar in New Jersey while paying her grandmother’s medical bills and dealing with her mother’s alcoholism. The film was a hit at Sundance, and programmer Barbara Twist praised it for being one of a handful of woman-positive films, in which the directors allow “these women to hold their own, without subjecting them to traditional Hollywood notions of femininity.”
I Dream in Another Language, a Sundance Audience Award (World Cinema-Dramatic) winning feature about a university philologist who’s searching for the dying indigenous language of Zikril, only to uncover a bitter feud that may work to silence the language forever. “It’s an important film, a beautiful film,” said programming director Brian Hunter. “If you can only see one movie, that’s the one to see. I was floored.”
Rat Film, a documentary that marketing director Sarah Erlewine cited as “experimental and uncomfortable, and by far the most fascinating film I’ve seen in years.”
Dina, the Sundance Film Festival Grand Jury Prize winner, tells the story of a woman on the autism spectrum who gets engaged to a Walmart greeter with Asperger Syndrome. “All I want is for Dina to have never-ending happiness, all right?” wrote programming manager Makenzie Peecock.
The Wailing was comically listed repeatedly in programmer Christine Tremblay’s “Top Five Recommendations” list. “This Korean supernatural whodunnit will keep you on the edge of your seat clutching the armrests, or the person next to you, as the mysterious nightmare unfolds on screen,” she wrote.
Band Aid is an offbeat feature comedy about a married couple who decide to start turning their tired arguments into songs, and thus form a band with drummer neighbor Fred Armisen. “Band Aid sucks you in with the fun plot and A-list comedy cast, but it's surprisingly deep and darker under the light-hearted surface,” wrote programming intern Mikki Dick.
Jenn McKee is a former staff arts reporter for The Ann Arbor News, where she primarily covered theater and film events, and also wrote general features and occasional articles on books and music.
For a complete schedule and information about ticket and pass prices, visit http://www.cinetopiafestival.org
Blog Post
Motion Lights: UMMA's "Moving Image: Performance"
by amy
The art of motion is currently on display in the University of Michigan Museum of Art’s spirited Moving Images: Performance.
The second of UMMA's three presentations drawn from Istanbul, Turkey's Borusan Contemporary museum, Moving Images: Performance illustrates the subtle (and sometimes not-so-subtle) relationship of performance and moving-image media that’s been fostered by the advent of the portable video camera.
The exhibit complements the concurrent UMMA installation Rafael Lozano-Hemmer: Wavefunction, Subsculpture 9, which is a subject we’ll get to in a forthcoming review. But for the time being, the four short videos in this exhibit stand as prime examples of experimental filmmaking.
Typically classified cinematically as short subjects, these sorts of films have a long history going back to the origin of motion pictures. Indeed, these kinds of works -- experimental independent films with nontraditional narratives -- make up a significant chunk of the Ann Arbor Film Festival.
The four films in the exhibit are Kalliope Lemos’ At the Centre of the World; Elena Kovylina’s Equality; Roman Signer’s 56 Kleine Helikopter; and the Universal Everything group’s Presence 4. Each film features a different aspect of performance-based moving-image media.
Kalliope Lemos’ 2015 16mm black and white film with sound At the Centre of the World (running eight minutes, 29 seconds) is perhaps the most challenging short subject to watch in this exhibit's cinematic tetralogy.
A mixed-media and mixed-medium artwork, At the Centre of the World features a woman who is trapped within a body-sized iron-sphere sculpture crafted by Lemos. The video is that simple -- and it’s that complicated as we watch the woman roll about her studio, increasingly frustrated in her attempt to maneuver around the room.
Presumably a visual metaphor for being trapped in one’s world, the video does a good job of unsettling the viewer with its relentlessly swaying hand-held camerawork, which is as disconcerting as the model’s increasingly frantic and unsuccessful attempts to balance herself in the studio that serves as the center of her world.
The moving image of Elena Kovylina’s Equality is easily the most heroic -- as well as politically pungent -- in this exhibit. A 2014 single-channel video with a running time of seven minutes, 59 seconds, Equality follows a procession of participants, each holding a stool before him or her, walking in a single row and standing in solidarity at Palace Square in St. Petersburg, Russia.
We like to think this activity would be something like an art prank in our country. But in Russia, where democratic institutions and traditions are under severe stress, participating in such an installation could have legal and political consequences. Yet Kovylina’s performance art is so deceptively passive and so formally nonviolent, it’s up to the viewer to determine its meaning.
Our only clues are that the footstools have been cut at such a height that the many participants standing on them are superficially equal. Despite their obvious differences in gender, age, ethnicity, and occupational standing, the people stand hand-in-hand looking forward, ostensibly symbolizing the social equality that democracy fosters. Kovylina’s video (like her performance art) questions what is real and what is only apparent in contemporary Russian society.
Sometimes art is seemingly really no more than it appears to be. Swiss artist Roman Signer’s 56 kleine Helikopter, a 2008 high-definition color video that runs three minutes, 14 seconds, is just as its title says: 56 small helicopters let loose to riot and buzz around in an enclosed studio space.
It's possible the video illustrates the futility of range and motion in our current state of social and political affairs. But it looks to me like it’s more of a really cool idea to crash and burn a bunch of drones. Admittedly, it’s fun to watch these little copters repetitively slam into each other in a sort of miniature death race, with only a small number of them surviving the aerial mayhem.
Finally, Sheffield, England-based design consortium Universal Everything’s 2013 stereo, two-channel digital video Presence 4 (two minutes running time) turns a dancer's movement into colorful digital abstraction. The undulating curvilinear image of Presence 4 flows seamlessly in and out of an abstract whip and tide, with the dancing figure coming in and out of focus.
There’s not much commercial potential in this sort of filmmaking, but Presence 4 displays the ongoing value of experimental cinema in our postmodern era. As this short blissfully shows us through dance, adventurous video will thrive despite market restrictions -- and the art of filmmaking is so much better for it.
John Carlos Cantú has written on our community's visual arts in a number of different periodicals.
“Moving Images: Performance” runs through July 24 at the University of Michigan Museum of Art, 525 S. State St. The museum is open Tuesday-Saturday, 11 am-5 pm, and Sunday, 12-5 pm. For information, call 734-764-0395 or visit umma.umich.edu.
Blog Post
A journey through the 2017 Ann Arbor Jewish Film Festival
by christopherporter
The 16th annual Ann Arbor Jewish Film Festival opens Sunday, May 7, and runs through Thursday, May 11. Sponsored by the Jewish Community Center of Greater Ann Arbor, planning for the five-day festival began in November 2016.
“We have a committee of 23 individuals who help decide on the films,” said Karen Freedland, the JCC’s cultural arts director and festival coordinator. “We start with a list of over 95 titles and whittle it down to 40 films we think look the strongest. From there we try to get from the distributors as many of those 40 films to screen, and we narrow it down to the 13 we have chosen.”
Save for one, the films in this year’s festival are very recent, most from 2016. "We try to get the most current releases available and that sets us apart from some other festivals who will show films that we had shown the year before," Freedland said. "We are lucky that we work with Brian Hunter from the Michigan Theater. He helps us source out some of the latest films that are geared for a Jewish film festival.”
Freedland said one of the festival's goals is to present a wide variety of film styles -- “We try very hard to have a balanced selection of dramas, documentaries, and comedies” -- and about a third of this year’s offerings have themes related to the Holocaust, which “is typical for a Jewish Film Festival,” she said. “There are new films coming out regularly with Holocaust themes or stories that continue to keep the topic relevant, which is so important.”
Nearly a thousand people attend the festival every year, and while “it is definitely a stronger Jewish attendance,” Freedland said, “we always try to reach out to the entire Ann Arbor community to attend. With these films, there are universal themes that connect with everyone, and you do not have to be Jewish to appreciate or relate to any of them.”
Freedland said she has no favorites among this year’s offerings but pointed out, “What is different this year is we have a shorts program on Thursday, May 11, at 5 pm. There are five short films and each one is unique and powerful. Shorts can really bring home a message or story very quickly. The committee enjoyed selecting that program very much.”
Freedland arranged for me to preview two of this year’s festival films, Mamele and Fanny’s Journey.
Mamele is a digitally restored edition of the classic Yiddish-language film with English subtitles starring Molly Picon, one of the most illustrious names in Yiddish theater. Picon made her stage debut in 1912 and was so famous and beloved among Yiddish theater and movie fans that her name on a marquee or a movie poster all but guaranteed success. When Yiddish theater faded in the late '40s, Picon made the transition to English movies and TV shows, again achieving renown but this time with a mainstream audience. She appeared alongside Frank Sinatra in Neil Simon’s Come Blow Your Horn in 1963 and in the 1971 film adaptation of Fiddler on the Roof where she played -- nu, what else -- Yente the matchmaker.
Mamele (Little Mother), made in Poland in 1938, followed one of Picon's best-known Yiddish films, Yidl Mitn Fidl (Yiddle With His Fiddle), also made in Poland two years earlier. Mamele’s predictable plot and weak supporting cast are more than compensated for by Picon’s brilliant acting, singing, and comedic abilities. The film is set in Łódź and was the last Jewish film made in Poland before the Nazis invaded in September 1939. It is simultaneously an entertaining movie featuring a major talent and a precious artifact preserving a place, a vibrant culture, and a people just before they were destroyed forever.
Fanny’s Journey is a 2016 French drama with English subtitles based on the true story of Fanny Ben-Ami, a 12-year-old girl who took care of her two younger sisters and, eventually, a handful of other children who were separated from their families during the Nazi occupation of France. It’s not giving away too much to disclose that this small band of children, after a number of harrowing trials, thrilling escapes, and a few heartwarming incidents, eventually make their way to safety in Switzerland.
Every Holocaust story is unique, yet each one often also shares common elements with all others. Fanny’s Journey is like that. The children’s one-of-a-kind adventures, close calls, and strokes of luck are distinctive and matchless, but their suffering, courage, and creativity, as well as the cruelty of their tormentors and the humanity of some of the people they encounter, are themes found in many Holocaust tales. They are woven together artfully in Fanny’s Journey and fill every frame of this unforgettable film.
Sandor Slomovits is an Ann Arbor-based writer and musician known for his work in Gemini and San & Emily.
The two showings of “Fanny’s Journey” on Sunday, May 7, the first day of the festival, will take place at the Rackham Amphitheater on the 4th floor of U-M’s Rackham School of Graduate Studies. The rest of the festival films will be shown at the Michigan Theater. For the full schedule and further info, visit film.jccannarbor.org or call 734-971-0990.
Blog Post
Rave On: FoolMoon 2017 in moving pictures
by christopherporter
Downloads:
➥ 720p video, 480p video or 240p video
It's hard to believe FoolMoon 2017 took place a few weeks ago; we're still glowing from the April 7 event and it has nothing to do with the neon paint we still can't get off our bodies.
To keep the FoolMoon vibes illuminated a bit longer, our talented photographer and videographer Tom Smith combined some images from the event with the techno track "bland western charm" from the album chromedecay tracks pt. 2: 2001-2005 by Bill Van Loo. (The Ypsilanti-based Van Loo also did one of our Tools Crew Live performances; check out the videos here.)
As the FoolMoon afterglow begins to fade, keep this page bookmarked for emergency illumination.
Christopher Porter is a library technician and the editor of Pulp.
Blog Post
Terence Davies' film "A Quiet Passion" covers the life of poet Emily Dickinson
by christopherporter
At first listen, Terence Davies' voice seemingly betrays his 71 years. Even with his charming British accent, the Englishman sounds gravelly, like he can't get as much air into his lungs as he might like. But then it takes about 30 seconds of hearing his words to understand age might not explain this condition as well as a literally breathless enthusiasm for whatever topic he's discussing.
I spoke with Davies about his latest film, A Quiet Passion, a biopic about Emily Dickinson that details her complicated family relationships, her unconventional religious beliefs, and her own self-esteem issues in order to celebrate a unique life and illuminate her poetry. The film opens at the Michigan Theater on Friday, April 21.
Q: How did you decide on Emily Dickinson as a muse?
A: I discovered her when I was about 18 from this little program on television, a program with Claire Bloom reading the poetry. I went out and bought a little anthology. I was 18 then. It was only 12 or 15 years ago that I began to reread her. Then I read a biography and thought this was the most extraordinary life, that she carried on even though she had less than a dozen poems published in her lifetime and she died completely unknown really. But that makes it all the more powerful, and I love the poetry, and I love her spiritual quest because I went through that myself. I was a devout Catholic and between 15 and 22 I had a great deal of doubt and fought it and fought it until I realized that it really was a lie and I'm now an atheist. But she never became an atheist. She constantly oscillates between, "Is there a god, is there not a God," but knows she's got something called a soul, and there's always an implied hope in all the poems that there might be something beyond this. So those were really the reasons why I wanted to do it.
Q: How difficult was it for you to write the screenplay compared to other things you've written? Did you find it more of a challenge because you wanted to capture this other artist's life?
A: Not really, no. Every script is difficult because you're trying to get the best out of that subject. So that's always difficult, but that's always the challenge and impetus to it as well. It gave me a great deal of pleasure writing it I must say. It's the only one of my films where absolutely nothing went wrong at all anywhere. It was bliss from beginning to end so I can't complain. When you love something and you want to write about it that's a joy in itself.
Q: I hope the casting process was also a joy. Cynthia Nixon was a wonderful choice; how did you end up seeing and casting her?
A: I met her over six years previously for a film that I couldn't raise any money for and never forgotten her. There's only one extant photograph of Emily at 17. One of my producers who used to be a sales photographer superimposed Cynthia's face on Emily's and they looked very, very similar. Also, she knew about Emily Dickinson's work because she grew up hearing Julie Harris' records of them and knows the verse herself and she can read poetry. A lot of people can't and she can. She said, "Well, you won't get a film off the ground if I'm starring in it." and I said, "We will. We will." And she stuck with it for four and a half years. She was so loyal. So loyal and such a wonderful, wonderful actress; really, really gifted.
Q: You've had such a long and prolific career I'm curious how your approach to filmmaking has changed over time.
A: It's not so much that that's changed. For 10 years I didn't work at all. No one would give me any work at all and something happened to me. I still can't figure out what it is that happened, but those 10 years changed me. I think you've got to be passionate about what you do but you have to put it in perspective. It's very easy to think that this is the be all and end all of everything. I care about making films and everybody who has worked with me cares about film. Everybody who makes films cares about them, but it's not mining coal. It's not a cure for cancer. You've got to keep it in perspective. I feel a sense of freedom really, but I can't explain it more than that. It really is that vague.
Q: You have so effectively mined your own life story for your art. How did you approach getting yourself into Emily Dickinson?
A: There are certain things that I feel very strongly with her -- the nature of spirituality is one, a very important one. The nature of time, which I've always been interested in regardless of A Quiet Passion, that's another. But also I know what that struggle was like. I really do empathize with her. I think she didn't so much withdraw from the world as to her family because she thought that was a kind of safe haven. And obviously, for a while, it was. But when your family starts to change and that safe haven becomes a prison I know what that feeling is like. I wanted my family never to change and I was the youngest of 10. I just didn't want anyone to change but it does and you can't stop that. So those things I felt very close to her. In fact, my manager said he thinks it's the most autobiographical film I've made.
Q: How much research ended up on the page and in the film?
A: Because I was limited to a two-hour film I did not have time to read any of the letters, it was just impossible. Doing it from her point of view, that limits what you can have in. If you're doing it from one character's point of view the only thing that can be in the film are those things to which she's privy, or part of, or hears about, so that cuts it down. Now I read six biographies and I got to the point where I thought I can't read anymore, I've got to concentrate on those three areas that I just said and anything else really has to be disregarded. You can't have everything, you can't. Obviously, I took certain liberties. Aunt Elizabeth is actually an amalgam of the maternal aunt and the paternal aunt. She was actually Edward's sister, was only 26; she didn't like being an Aunt at all and was very tetchy about it. But I thought if she was that young somehow it would not be really convincing, so I thought I'll put the older one and the younger one together.
Q: What is your favorite Emily Dickinson poem that you could not work into the finished film?
A: I got my favorite in. "Because I could not stop for death," I got that in. That was the first one I heard so I was determined to get it in.
Q: What projects are you working on currently?
A: I've got two projects. One is based on a lovely book by an American called Richard McCann; it's called Mother of Sorrows. The final script has been done for that. Paul Dano is attached to it, we're casting and raising the money now. I'm in the process of writing a film about Siegfried Sassoon.
Q: Your last three films have been very female-centric. I'm curious if that's purposeful or if those are just the stories that spoke to you?
A: I'm first and foremost drawn to the stories. They happen to be about women. I was brought up with my sisters, although obviously, I love my brothers and my sisters and mother, but like a lot of gay men, I think we get on well with women because there's no ulterior motive, so that just happened that way. These next two films are about three men.
Perry Seibert is a movie lover, freelance writer, and founding member of the Detroit Film Critics Society. Follow him on Twitter @Perrylovesfilm.
"A Quiet Passion" opens at the Michigan Theater on April 21. Visit michtheater.org for tickets and showtimes.
Blog Post
Michigan native and "Narcos" co-creator Doug Miro talks about the art of screenwriting
by christopherporter
When I talked to him on the phone recently, Michigan native Doug Miro was driving around Bogotá, Colombia, looking for a good coffee shop. He was shooting a few episodes for season three of the Netflix show Narcos, which he and collaborator Carlo Bernard created along with their partner and showrunner Eric Newman. Miro and Bernard, along with a team of writers, pen the scripts, and the two take turns filming episodes in Colombia and California.
Miro and Bernard have worked together for years now, writing screenplays for Steven Spielberg, Harvey Weinstein, and Jerry Bruckheimer, scripting films such as Prince of Persia (which starred Jake Gyllenhaal), The Wall (starring Matt Damon), Tintin, The Uninvited, and the television series Narcos, which Miro describes as more of a “20-hour movie."
Miro will give a free talk at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (MOCAD) on Wednesday, April 19, at 7 pm. The event is co-presented by the MOCAD and the University of Michigan's Penny Stamps Distinguished Speaker Series.
Q: What will you talk about at MOCAD here in Detroit?
A: I'm focusing on the process of how Narcos first came about and what the process is like, episode to episode. A little bit behind the scenes of the scripting, producing, and editing process. Hopefully I can give people an insight -- a little glimpse behind the curtain.
With Narcos, back when we started, had the director, José Padilha, not insisted that it be made in Colombia, I don't think there would be a third season. The director is Brazilian, and he insisted it all be shot in Colombia for authenticity, and he was absolutely right. That's one of a thousand decisions that we made, but it was essential.
We also get a lot of Latin American directors, and I think it's better for them to be in Colombia. The crew is from here -- some from Mexico and Brazil -- and all that gives it authenticity. There's a lot of people who know the story, who live the story. Those things all help.
Q: You've written a variety of things, like action, horror, and a video game adaptation. Can you describe the approaches that you took to writing those and the complex storyline that you're writing for Narcos?
A: Usually the big distinction with television is that it's not closed-ended -- it's this endless, ongoing story. What allowed us to do Narcos is we pitched it as a 20-hour movie. We always approach a season of Narcos as one long movie.
In a film, there's such a relentless need for building tension. You have a captive audience that's there for two hours; you don't want them looking at their watches or wanting to leave. And that's a totally different structure than an audience that's choosing to pick up the remote, pick Narcos, and watch it. That's more of a novel versus a short story, almost.
We feel like we can approach any character-driven genre based on making sure that it feels like a fulfilling and tense ride for the main characters. It's just about putting characters in a predicament --
whether it's a horror, crime, or western predicament -- they’re all stories about a character in a predicament.
Q: You seem attached to stories, not to genre. What inspires you about them?
A: I think why I'm so open to stories is because it's a real journey for me. I’m attracted to the types of stories that take me somewhere, on an adventure to a place where I haven't been before. It might not be very far from where I’ve been. For instance, the first script that Carlo and I wrote was about Detroit in the 1950s, and I think that what inspired me was that I'd heard my parents talk a lot about the city in the '50s and what a dynamic place it was. I wanted to imagine that.
I did a lot of research -- I really wanted to be in that city when it was different from what I grew up in. So it wasn’t far, but it was still different.
I’m a lover of classic, mythic storytelling. Stories that move me in big ways. You can easily fall into the conventions of that approach to storytelling. Sometimes those stories can feel broad because they’re big and ambitious. They’re standing on the shoulders of what preceded them. There’s pressure to be better than those movies. People are so inundated with material and stories, you have to be fresh in some way, or bring some new assault to their senses, or else they're just not going to be interested. They'll go off and do something else, where they're in charge of it and can control the ending.
I never thought it would feel old-fashioned to sit in a movie theater for two hours. It always felt like such a precious and exciting experience to me. But I think for some people it does, and that's kind of frightening for those of us who love that experience and want to make sure that it's great. It puts a lot of pressure on movies to be special and different every time someone goes in the theater.
What we're trying to do, especially in a feature film, is keep an audience captive for two hours. I think about the exercise of that. I mean, everyone has a certain willingness when they go in the theater, right? They're happy to be there, and they want to be taken away for two hours. To do that, you have to be conscious about the audience, keeping their attention, their interest, and their emotions engaged. It's very much about that basic form of entertainment.
When we were working for Jerry Bruckheimer -- he’s a Detroiter and comes across that way, a real Midwesterner, not pretentious -- he would just say, “You know, I go to movies because I just want to sit back, eat my popcorn, and be taken away. I think that's why everyone goes to movies, and that's why I make movies.”
Maybe that seems overly simplistic, or not ambitious, but when you try and make one of these movies at that size and scale, just nailing the basic things is so hard. To me, it's a great challenge and really fulfilling to be able to do that.
Q: Where or how did you learn to write? You attended the University of Southern California, but I wonder if part of your training was trial by fire, good mentors, the collaborative aspect, or something else.
A: I'm always still trying to learn from mentors, and from my fellow writers, and by reading. But I think if I had to break it down, you learn by mimicking what you like. If you can do that, you can then start to learn your own voice and find your own voice.
I think I started out doing two things: One was trying to learn the structure of how to tell a great story, which is essential to screenwriting because it's such a craft. It's more rigid -- not rule-bound, but there are certain parameters to it that I think are less true of writing a novel. People have certain conventions and expectations. There's a certain chair-building quality to writing a screenplay -- a part of it that's making furniture. You need to be able to sit in it, it needs to be functional, it needs to work. So those rudimentary, practical things I learned at USC.
A huge part of what screenwriters do is solve problems. It's an unseen part of our craft. A team is trying to make something, and they say, “We can't make this. How would you fix it? This doesn't make sense. How would you change it?” And you sit in a room in a meeting or on set, and you have to be able to solve that problem right away. That's not a typical writer's skill -- that's more of a specific screenwriter's skill.
And then, trying to elevate my writing and get it to where it’s at a level with professional screenwriters, I learned by reading and imitating those writers. I went and worked for Michael Mann in development, and I read every screenwriter I could find. I spent a lot of time with Carlo just saying, “Could we do what that guy does here?” We tried to pick and choose the best of them and see if we could get those skills. That process is ongoing.
I think there are straightforward things, too. Is your script good enough to get made? Is it practical? Does it have a character in it that's going to appeal to a big actor, which will get people to spend money on it? Even established screenwriters live paycheck to paycheck, or are paid based on a script rewrite. There's very little profit-sharing for us, as opposed to how actors and directors are paid -- they just have much more leverage. It's very much a service business, more than you'd expect it to be as a creator. My dad is a lawyer, and I saw what it was like for him in the service business. We share a lot in common, surprisingly.
I think the blank page and sitting in a room is a challenge for some writers. For me, it's not. I love sitting with my imagination. My favorite part is sitting alone in a room, just challenging myself, and doing the best work I can.
I love it. I thank my lucky stars every day that I get to do it. There certainly are compromises you make. You may end up writing some material that you didn't imagine you would write. But I would be pretty bad at anything else. I don’t have any other talents, really, besides my imagination.
Q: Is there any question that you don't get asked enough, that you're dying to answer?
A: It's funny: Writers don't get asked a lot of questions. We're kind of in the background. But I'm always eager to both demystify that process a little for people and help them to understand how essential the writer is. I feel that what’s put forward in the media is how important and essential directors and actors are. I think writers are in the unfortunate spot of being in the background.
And I think something that comes up a lot is people asking why Hollywood makes so many bad movies. Trust me: A movie would not have gotten made if the script wasn't great. Enough smart people have read it, and no one would have taken the risk.
But in executing that script, a sort of alchemy occurs after everyone agrees that the script is great. It could go one of 20 ways at that point, and that's why Hollywood doesn't always make great movies. The more people you throw into an equation -- with all their foibles, their ambitions, their flaws -- the more luck plays a role. All it takes is one thing to unravel it.
It's luck, management, talent. But not just one person's luck, and ability to manage, and talent. Everyone feels very lucky when it does come together. I think there's a camaraderie in that in Hollywood, of everyone knowing that we're all just trying to make good stories and hoping they work. If you're not living it, it's hard to get that -- all you see is the finished product.
Elizabeth Wason is a science writer with the University of Michigan's College of Literature, Science, and the Arts.
Doug Miro will give a free talk at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (MOCAD) on Wednesday, April 19, at 7 pm. The event is co-presented by the MOCAD and the University of Michigan's Penny Stamps Distinguished Speaker Series.
Blog Post
The Great Eight: Banff Mountain Film Festival at the Michigan Theater
by christopherporter
It’s been over 20 years since the Banff Mountain Film Festival launched its “world tour,” bringing various films from the competition to over 40 countries and hundreds of cities around the world. Ann Arbor has been lucky enough to be a stop on the tour for more than a decade.
The film festival, which takes place at Banff National Park in Alberta, Canada each fall, features short films and documentaries about outdoor recreation of all sorts. Eight of the best films from the festival were shown at the Michigan Theater this past Tuesday evening.
This year’s selections offered a refreshing dose of unusual sports and unique humor. The festival opened with Metronomic, a 5-minute film from France about a team of “flying musicians.” The stuntmen swing off of tight-ropes and parachute off of cliffs, all while playing their respective instruments. Most amazing was the drummer, Freddy Montigny, who flew with his entire drum set.
Next was a film about canine sports, Dog Power, that covered much more than dog sledding. Focusing on the lasting relationships that form between athletes and their dogs in dog-powered sports, the film showed canicross (running with dogs), bikjoring (biking with dogs), skijoring (skiing behind a team of dogs), and various distances and team sizes of sled-dog racing. It was fascinating to learn about the breeding and care that goes into making dogs into athletes. One racer emphasized that the dogs are just as important a part of the team as the human. Banff Film Festival’s films often focus on skiing and snowboarding, climbing or mountain biking, so it was exciting and heartwarming to see a film like Dog Power.
Another feel-good film from the show was Four Mums in a Boat, the amazing story of four middle-aged British mothers who decide to compete in a race rowing a boat across the Atlantic Ocean. They all met one another while dropping their kids off at school, and took up rowing on the local river. After learning about the 3,000-mile race across the Atlantic, one of the mothers convinced the other three to sign up for it with her. The film showcases the trials and tribulations that the women undergo as they spend almost 70 days (20 more than planned) rowing across the ocean. From a loss of power (meaning they had to spend 10 hours a day hand-pumping ocean water through a filter to make it potable) and a broken rudder to rowing into Hurricane Alex, the women demonstrate admirable strength, endurance, and determination, and a great deal of humor.
Young Guns is a 30-minute film about two young rock climbers, was also a crowd-favorite. Kai Lightner was 15 years old when the film was made and Ashima Shiraishi was just 14. The two are gaining worldwide notoriety as the film opens, winning national championships and beating climbers much older than them. Friends both at the climbing gym and outside of it, they spend their spring break traveling together with their families to Norway, where extra challenging rocks put their skills to the test. Their quiet maturity and amazing climbing skills had the audience gasping with delight, especially when Shiraishi becomes both the youngest person ever and the first woman to climb a V15 boulder in Japan at the film’s conclusion.
Other films shown on Tuesday were Being Hear, a brief film about the importance of listening to nature, The Perfect Flight, a five-minute film about falconry, The Super Salmon, about the fight by many Alaskans to protect the Susitna River from being dammed, and Danny MacAskill’s Wee Day Out, a charming, amusing film about one man’s day mountain biking through rural Ireland. Banff Mountain Film Festival, which is locally sponsored by U-M’s Recreational Sports association, Moosejaw, and Bivouac, is a special treat each year. The films offer viewers the chance to see aspects of outdoor sports and life that often aren’t captured at the Olympics or other major televised sporting events, and the unique perspective that each filmmaker brings to his or her work casts each movie in a different emotional light. This year’s distinctiveness, with its focus on sports like falconry, rowing, and canicross, made for an extra special experience. Luckily for anyone who missed the festival -- or for anyone who is excited to see more outdoor films -- Banff Mountain Film Festival will be back in 2018.
Elizabeth Pearce is a Library Technician at the Ann Arbor District Library.
The Banff Mountain Film Festival world tour stops in Ann Arbor at the Michigan Theater every April.
Blog Post
All the Way In: Diving into the Ann Arbor Film Festival for the first time
by christopherporter
hashtag by Sherlonya Turner
Confession: Despite living in the greater Ann Arbor area for nearly 20 years, I have never attended any part of the Ann Arbor Film Festival.
The poster caught my attention. I’m a sucker for bright colors.
Seduced by the orange, pink, and yellow in this year's AAFF poster, I thought, "Wouldn’t it be funny if I watched as many episodes of Dallas as I can before the film festival and then went to the screening of Hotel Dallas?," which documents Romania's strange fascination with the TV show that ran from 1978 to 1991.
An experience was born, but instead of diving into Dallas, I decided to steep myself in the Ann Arbor Film Festival experience.
First, I had to learn about the thing, so I did some light research on the festival’s founder, George Manupelli. I stumbled upon a memorial blog for him and read the whole thing click-after-click on my phone. Suddenly, I wanted nothing more than to create for myself the experience that this man would have appreciated.
I like to imagine that he’d approve of my plan to jump right in.
In preparation for the experience, I watched a DVD of short movies from an earlier Ann Arbor Film Festival. The viewing made me feel as if remixed scenes from my life were flashing before me. It also made my son take off his headphones, leave the table where he was doing homework, look at me with serious concern and emphatically ask, “What ARE you watching?”
Days before the official AAFF kickoff, I visited associated exhibits at the Ann Arbor Art Center, which hosted three works. The one that haunted me was Indication by Yuan Goang-Ming. Here, I entered a curtain to find a mostly black screen punctuated by a line of people walking toward the viewer. As the video continued, the people continued to approach until suddenly they were all pointing directly forward. Could I read this as a demand to actively participate in one’s experiences? Should I?
On Tuesday, the official first day of the film festival, I lined up outside of a North Quad room with just over a dozen people who seemed excited to kick off their film festival experience. I wandered into "Pop Up Projection Pavilion (PU_PP)" by Peter Sparling. His piece consisted of several screens that worked together to create a film experience. As I watched an on-screen dancer, I almost ignored the strange sensation of watching a film inside a room of rooms, darkness created by window shades and a black partitioning curtain. I barely registered the just audible milling about that was happening in the other part of the room. As I pondered what I viewed, the dancer’s exquisite control of his instrument shone, and his silver-haired chest reminded me that art and creation require time, discipline, and practice.
Confession: I am highly distracted and fascinated by other people’s behavior.
Overheard: “It’s a miracle that we got this far. Not a miracle. Just our own steam.”
I moved on to the rest of the room where I noticed a group of students viewing the exhibit Lasting Synergies. Their instructor encouraged them to eat the Jerusalem Garden spread from a nearby table. The students had, as a part of Terri Sarris’ "Screen Arts" class, used ephemera from the Ann Arbor Film Festival’s archival materials to create the exhibition. The work they had created provided a taste of history for this AAFF newcomer.
I looked around and had the distinct feeling I was not among my people, lacking the context to understand the customs and rituals that were playing nearby among the veteran film-festers. I certainly didn’t understand it when a man stood directly behind me as I read one of the posters and grunted over the back of my head. I moved to my right, where there was plenty of space, and read the poster from there.
Overheard: “With the hosting, I get a free pass all week!”
Confession: I was mesmerized by some of the outfits.
At the opening night screening, "Films in Competition 1," there was a lot to take in with the crowd alone. There was pattern mixing. There was a blue fur stole? A capelet? There was hair of many colors. There were floral pants. There were cable-knit tights as pants.
I found a seat and studied the AAFF booklet, which I knew to look for from a conversation I had with a regular attendee. Thumbing through it helped me understand the magnitude of what was offered, the impossibility of covering it all. I realized I needed to take a buffet approach and have a little taste of a lot of things. Had I paid closer attention to the booklet, I would have realized earlier that the tent in the lobby was actually a part of the festival, too.
Overheard: “I love to drink. I’m not an alcoholic. I enjoy it.”
As the organist began to play, I noticed a woman wearing blue lipstick and a smartly dressed sir with a man bun.
Executive Director Leslie Raymond and Assistant Director of Programs Katie McGowan soon took the stage, spoke, and sparkled. They literally sparkled: one wore a sequined skirt, the other a floor-length metallic gold one.
Like I said, the evening's outfits mesmerized me.
That evening, the standout movies were a pair of love stories. Victor & Isolina showed us an old couple that reflected on the ups and downs of their relationship. Luis & I told us about the story between a clown and the young secretary who fell in love with him.
Confession: There is a very thin line between what I’m calling "overheard" and purposeful, directed eavesdropping.
The next day, I attended the "16mm Etching and Digital Manipulation Workshop." I am no filmmaker, so I was a little nervous walking into this experience. We were all given a length of 16mm film and encouraged to make markings directly onto it in order to create a short, abstract movie.
I worked at scratching my piece of film but found that I had a more delicate touch than I had imagined, which meant I needed to repeat what I had done to leave my marks. The next day, I returned for the second part of this workshop where everyone’s short film was digitized. I called mine hashtag. (It's up there at the top of this post.)
Overheard: "The bottom line is, how does it upset you because it’s more about you …."
I became curious about The River by Ya-Ting Hsu after sitting behind the filmmaker the day before and listening to her make small talk with a few people. I learned the film is about a difficult pregnancy, but when I showed up to see it as part of "Films in Competition 3," I wasn’t expecting to watch a baby’s head pass from his mother’s body.
In fact, Wednesday’s films bombarded me with surprises. Camping With Ada boldly displayed vulnerability on screen. Here, a young woman yearned for a life that was better than the one she had, but she couldn’t escape her reality of working as a prostitute. A Love Story was a moving tale of the life cycle of a relationship between two yarn creatures. Something about that one reminded me of Pinwheel-era Nickelodeon. Voyage of the Galactic Space Dangler was exactly the type of strange I expected it to be. Yet I did not expect to witness my personal nightmare: someone taking milky toilet water to the face and getting some in his mouth.
Overheard: “I wish I could extend my arms to go shopping for rocks.”
I ended Wednesday evening with a feature-length film, Jim Trainor’s The Pink Egg. In it, human beings in simple costumes acted out the life cycles of seven insect species. It was strange to watch people dressed in form-fitting unitards play insects. It was also strange that Trainor was successfully able to show how these different insects interacted with each other using no words at all. It was like taking a Discovery Channel documentary and crossbreeding it with the performance of colorfully dressed mimes.
“Charles Darwin was my hero.” --Jim Trainor.
Thursday, I hustled to make it to "New Negress Film Society: I Am a Negress of Noteworthy Talent" talk and presentation. I was particularly intrigued because this title borrows from artist Kara Walker’s work. In preparation for these films, I both revisited some of Walker’s work and watched a few videos on the New Negress Film Society's YouTube page. I was quite surprised to enjoy Jo’Tavia Gary’s Cakes Da Killa: No Homo. I had tracked down some of Cakes Da Killa’s music, which was just not for me. It was a genre thing, not a content thing, and it was the first time in my immersive AAFF experience that I wished I hadn’t first done my homework.
I followed the New Negress Film Society event with "Films in Competition 4: Out Night." While I thoroughly enjoyed each of these films, Walk for Me by Elegance Bratton, a coming-out film set in the ball scene, left me wanting more and with Paris Is Burning on my “to see” list. Rodney Evans’ Persistence of Vision made me want to learn more about the blind photographer John Dugdale and his experience making art as someone who lost his sight.
Friday evening, I could only squeeze in "A Prerequisite for Rebellion," a collection of films curated by Ingrid LaFleur. All That Is Left Unsaid, while only three minutes long, packed a punch. Everything Audre Lorde tried to say in the film gets truncated. It symbolized her life, which was cut short by cancer, and also the filmmaker’s mother who also battled then succumbed to the disease. I also found Siboney to be quite powerful. Here we watched a woman produce a tropical-themed mural on a very large wall. Once it was complete, she doused herself in water and then destroyed the painting using her body to smear/ruin it. The film unapologetically and beautifully explored what it means to have power and control of one’s own body and one’s own choices.
On the fifth day of the Ann Arbor Film Festival, I rested.
I appreciate a story that has a distinct beginning and a distinct end. With that in mind, I decided Hotel Dallas would be the back cover to my Ann Arbor Film Festival experience. I don’t even remember what I was expecting when I went into the theater, but several moments in, that was all blown off of the table. Also, it made me glad that I hadn’t watched more episodes of Dallas in an attempt to properly ground myself for taking in this movie, which I'll just let the AAFF describe:
The primetime soap opera Dallas becomes a big hit in 1980s Romania, providing a rare window to the West for viewers living under a brutal communist regime. Among those watching are Ilie and his daughter Livia. He's a small-time criminal and aspiring capitalist; she's in love with Dallas hunk Patrick Duffy. After communism falls, Ilie builds the Hotel Dallas, a life-size copy of the show's iconic mansion. Livia becomes a filmmaker and recruits Duffy to star in a bizarre Romanian version of Dallas, haunted by the ghosts of the country's past. Weaving together documentary, fantasy, and a surreal film within a film (within a TV show), Hotel Dallas creates innovative cinema from personal and cultural history.
Hotel Dallas is about a moment in time, but also about how history repeats itself. It was about how major events anchor us in time ... sometimes.
Overheard: “So weird,” said Person A. “But kind of interesting,” said Person B.
Confession: That’s right.
Sherlonya Turner is the manager of the Youth & Adult : Services & Collections Department at the Ann Arbor District Library. She can be found diving head-first into all sorts of projects.
Check out the rest of our 2017 Ann Arbor Film Fest coverage here. View a list of the 55th festival's award-winning films here.