Tag Archives: Channel 4

First Word: A Look Back at Sheffield DocFest World Premieres

festival, , , , , , , ,

It’s time for Sheffield DocFest 2022. Although I won’t be attending in person this year, it’s sprung to life across all of my socials, reminding me what a wonderful festival it is, and how instrumental it has been to my professional life.

From 2002 to 2019 I wrote film descriptions for the festival, a job that I loved. In the early days I’d be sent a huge box of VHS tapes, then later DVDs, and most recently streaming links. As I watched the films with my notebook in hand I built up an enormous documentary database in my head. It serves me in good stead juggling a number of doc teaching gigs.

One of my biggest pleasures was being the first to write about a film for its world premiere. Many of these were television films, showing at Sheffield before their broadcast. Some of them were so new I’d travel down to the edit suite to watch them. 

Here’s a selection of my write-ups from some of these world premieres. With Channel 4 and the BBC both under threat, I think revisiting them can remind us that public service broadcasting can indeed be a fertile environment for quality documentary storytelling:

Battle Hospital (Olly Lambert, 2003)

Nobody wants to be at the Battle Hospital. The giant tented camp close to the Iraqi border is run by the British Territorial Army to provide crucial trauma care to coalition soldiers. But more often doctors find themselves treating injured Iraqi children on fly-ridden operating tables. The hospital’s 650 staff, most of whom have abandoned their civilian practices, try to escape their surroundings through brass bands and discos, but it’s an uphill struggle. And now the increasingly frustrated Iraqi fathers and children in ward 2 are threatening to go on hunger strike in a bid to persuade the army to take them home. Embedded filmmaker Olly Lambert’s exclusive access provides a rare and sobering glimpse of modern war field hospitals, first made famous in M*A*S*H. In stunning cinematography – shot on DV – Lambert contrasts the graphic horrors of the operating theatre with the dreamlike state invoked by living in a desert limbo. 

Battle Hospital

The Liberace of Baghdad (Sean McAllister, 2004)

Life is a little complicated for Samir Peter. Once the most famous pianist in Iraq, he now plays to half empty lounges, sleeping in a hotel basement, afraid to cross Baghdad to his seven-bedroomed mansion. Samir’s string of Western girlfriends over the years led to his wife and two of his kids leaving for the States. Now he too has a visa to move to America, but he is having second thoughts. Samir is happy to introduce director Sean McAllister to his world, but as the months progress and violence escalates around them, he grows understandably nervous about filming. And indeed it seems that nowhere is safe – Samir’s next door neighbour’s body is discovered by his son: she had been shot three times. As conditions deteriorate, the pianist and the filmmaker together try to survive the ‘peace’ of post-war Iraq. 

The Lost World of Tibet (Emma Hindley, 2006)

A recently restored treasure-trove of colour films from the 1940s and 1950s provides the core of this astonishing film, which allows us to see what Tibet was like before its brutal occupation by China. As members of the aristocracy and the Tibetan government in exile recall, the Tibetans’ world revolved around a series of colourful religious festivals, taking up 68 days of the year. In the great Prayer Festival, monks took over from the government for a few days and, whilst ceremoniously whipping their subjects, imposed fines for such offences as singing in public or having a dirty house. The film includes a revealing interview with the Dalai Lama, who reminisces about how much he missed his mother and his envy of his brother who got to play with all his toys. The Dalai Lama found himself studying for his rigorous final monastic exams – which included public debates with his elders – at the same time that the Chinese were preparing to take over the country. “We were just so engrossed in our little pond,” recalls one interviewee. “We knew nothing, what was happening in the world, what could happen. And so we lost our country.”

The English Surgeon (Geoffrey Smith, 2007)

When brain surgeon Henry Marsh first visited a Ukraine hospital in 1992, he found the medical conditions absolutely appalling. Since then he has worked with his Ukrainian protege, Igor Petrovich, to help create a viable clinic using discarded NHS equipment, and to bring hope to people where there was none. In Geoffrey Smith’s moving, beautifully shot documentary, we follow Henry on his latest trip, to yet another corridor filled with patients for whom he is their last chance. Marion is among them, determined to do something about the enormous brain tumour threatening his life, even if it means undergoing an operation he must stay awake throughout. As Henry tackles increasingly risky procedures, he is haunted by the memory of an operation which went catastrophically wrong. 

The Fighting Spirit (George Aponsah, 2007)

There aren’t a lot of ways to leave Bukom. A pooer village in Ghana, its main industry is fishing, with a paltry annual salary of three hundred dollars. So its young people are fighting their way out – literally. Thanks to tenacious coaches who turn rough street fighters into money-churning professional boxers, the village has produced several champions and is looking for its next big winner. Twenty-two year-old George is excited to box overseas for the first time, but has girlfriend troubles back home. Known as the first lady of boxing, Yarkor is using the memory of her cheating ex-boyfriend to fuel her fire, but is struggling to win her first big fight. Having already achieved international success, Joshua is training for the world featherweight title, with the help of dodgy manager Vinnie Scolpino. A spirited look at Ghana through the eyes of those fighting for their dreams.

Just Do It (Emily James, 2011)

“I put my body in the way and I don’t mind being arrested.” Marina Pepper is a domestic extremist, renowned for making tea for police officers and bailiffs while they are in the middle of evicting her. Marina is one of a growing number of modern-day outlaws – people who care about what is happening to our planet and are prepared to take action to stop it. Previously a secretive world, filmmaker Emily James was granted unprecedented access to follow a community of UK environmental activists. It’s an action-packed time, with activists scaling the chimney of Didcot Power Station, locking themselves to the Royal Bank of Scotland and tangling with gung ho policemen at the Copenhagen Summit. Articulate, funny and engaging, the ensemble cast care passionately about the environment on a global level, but work locally, with courage, determination and manners to take a stand.

Terry Pratchett: Choosing to Die (Charlie Russell, 2011)

It’s a plotline he can’t rewrite: Sir Terry Pratchett has Alzheimer’s. In his early 60s and faced with a failing brain, he is terrified that he will no longer be able to write novels – he has 37 under his belt. He can try, however, to control the ending and sets out to investigate the option of assisted dying. His query is a simple one: “is it possible for someone like me, or like you, to arrange for themselves the death that they want?”. He meets two British men with degenerative illnesses who have booked appointments at the Suissse assisted death clinic Dignitas in the same week. Thirty years apart in age, both are engaging, articulare, stoic, and accompanied by equally stoic loved ones. And both men are utterly determined to die, long before their illnesses have run their course. In powerfully heart wrenching scenes, Pratchett and his horrified assistant observe their final hours. 

The Man Whose Mind Exploded (Toby Amies, 2013)

Draco Zarhazar lives in the here and now. He doesn’t have much choice: his anterograde amnesia means he can’t create new memories. He’s certainly had his share of life’s woes – he’s quick to tell you he has survived two comas, two nervous breakdowns and two suicide attempts. Despite past angst, the Drako of the present is cheerful and extroverted, and more than happy to let Toby Amies film him, in all his tattooed, frequently naked glory. His heaving Brighton flat is a phallic-themed art installation, with many mementoes of Drako’s colourful past. It’s also increasingly a health hazard. Over the months, Toby becomes more than documentarian, filling in as both carer and friend. He struggles to keep Drako safe and under the radar from social services in this tender and nuanced portrait of an outsider. 

The Road to Fame (Hao Wu, 2013)

Beijing, China. At the Central Academy of Drama, anticipation is running high. The prestigious school’s graduation production of Fame will be the first official collaboration between China and Broadway. As musical director Jasper arrives from America to run auditions, the students find the pressure intense. It’s something they are used to: as only children born of China’s one child policy, they carry the hopes and dreams of the older generations on their shoulders. From wildly disparate backgrounds, some families have sacrificed everything to send their children to the Academy. Most of the students hope to compete on sheer talent – but know that connections in China, like in America, are all important. With 300,000 actors already in Beijing, there is everything to lose. Director Hao Wu weaves an intricate portrait of modern China through the stories of these students and their families. 

Attacking the Devil: Harold Evans and the Last Nazi War Crime (Jacqui and David Morris, 2014)

As editor of the Sunday Times for fourteen years, Sir Harold Evans proved to be the right man in the right place at the right time. In an investigative climate all too rare by today’s standards, Evans had the freedom and resources to allow teams of journalists to work on long term projects, including the exposure of Kim Philby as a Soviet spy. As Evans himself details in this stylish documentary, his longest and most hard fought campaign was for the victims of Thalidomide. Originally developed by the Germans in World War II to counter effect sarin gas, post war the drug was blithely prescribed by British doctors as an antidote to morning sickness, leading to tens of thousands of children being born with serious defects. The Sunday Times’ fight to win compensation for their struggling families would take more than a decade, as Evans tenaciously pursued the drug companies through the English courts and beyond. 

Addicted to Sheep (Magali Pettier, 2015)

In the North Pennines, tenant farmers Tom and Kay spend their days looking after their flock of prized sheep, and hoping that this will be the year they breed the perfect one. Director Magali Pettier, herself a farmer’s daughter, follows a year in their lives, capturing both the stark, stunning beauty of the landscape, and the brutally hard graft it takes just to survive. Their three children are growing up close to the land, attending a school entirely comprised of farmers’ children, thoroughly immersed in their remote rural world. As the seasons change the couple help birth, groom, nurture and sell their sheep even when the odds often seem stacked against them. A treat for the senses, Addicted to Sheep allows us to experience life on a hill farm without having to get mucked in ourselves.

The Divide (Katharine Round, 2015)

Alden is an ambitious Wall Street psychologist, while Rochelle struggles as a carer on a zero hours contract and Keith tries to make sense of his life behind bars, as a result of Clinton’s “three strikes and you’re out” policy. Through their stories, and four others, Katharine Round humanises the bleak fact that growing inequality is driving a terrible wedge through modern society. Jumping back and forth in time, and between characters and experts, this is an engrossing, cinematic, thought-provoking essay which flags up some root causes of today’s societal woes – and raises disturbing questions about the future. Inspired by the bestselling book The Spirit Level, The Divide demonstrates the terrible impact that decades of misguided economic decisions is having on modern lives – and the truth behind the adage that money can’t buy happiness.

Sheffield DocFest runs from 23 – 28 June.

Paddy Wivell on the Making of Prison, Series 2

Interview, previews, , , , , ,

The last time I interviewed Paddy Wivell, he was just putting the finishing touches on the first series of Prison. The three part series, filmed in Durham Prison, was a revelatory look at a system in crisis. It took a themed approach, with an episode each focused on mental health, drugs and violence. It won both the Grierson and Royal Television Society awards for Best Documentary Series.

Now Paddy has turned his attention to women prisoners, filming for months in HMP Foston Hall in Derbyshire. I caught up with him over the telephone to find out more about Prison: Series 2. 

Carol Nahra: Can you tell me about the approach to this series? 

Paddy Wivell: It felt like a natural progression after the Durham series to then look at the women’s estate. There are 80,000 male prisoners (in England and Wales) and something like 4,000 female. So I knew I would be encountering something quite different. I wanted to take a sort of present tense approach – looking at the culture within the environment. But actually what I did find was the women’s backgrounds became seemingly more relevant as I started to pick up on some of the main themes. You just couldn’t look away from the effects of trauma played out in the lives of the women in terms of sexual and domestic abuse.  It felt really important to then spend some of the time with the women looking back at what brought them into prison.

Each film again has a theme. The first film is really looking at short sentences. Something like 75% of women in prison spend less than 12 months in prison. And within that to be able to look at issues like drugs, relationships, trauma within a setting where women are coming in and out routinely. And ultimately sort of questioning the validity of a system that doesn’t seem to rehabilitate or help women with the kind of difficulties that they come into prison with. Because the prison has a very short window, you’re not doing anything to rectify or help with the problems. So that’s one of the films. 

Paddy Wivell, holding his Grierson, and a beer

Another of the films looks at the issues of family.  Something like 95% of children when the mother goes to prison has to leave the family home. So I was really interested in how do you continue to parent from within the prison and what sort of dilemmas does that bring up? How important is it that family ties are maintained in order to help with reoffending?

And then another film looks at the issue of trauma in more detail through a prisoner led therapeutic course called Healing Trauma. So that’s a map of the three films. Although the approach was similar to the first series, the content feels very very different.

CN: So much of the series is dependent on your interactions with your contributors. I’m wondering if your interactions were different than with the men and how you were received?

PW: To be honest with you it was much more gratifying. Women handle incarceration very differently to men and the fact is that they do it through relationships with each other. So in terms of filmmaking in many ways it was far richer than the first series. Because women want to communicate.

That’s not to say that it wasn’t quite difficult at first just gaining the trust of the prison as a whole. Obviously a lot of women in there have had very difficult experiences with men. So when somebody like me comes in it takes a long time to build a sense of trust, and a feeling that they’re going to be safe with us wandering around. So that took some time. But once I found the contributors who could speak to these wider themes it was immensely gratifying because the conversations were richer and more detailed. So I think what it might lack in the sense of a system in crisis it absolutely points to a sort of richness of humanity.

CN: Did you get a sense that there was a way that the men could be learning from the women?

PW: Definitely. I think there is a certain sort of narrative that is applied to women in prison that isn’t necessarily applied around men. There is a public recognition that for most of the women in prison that they’ve had worse crimes visited upon them than they have actually perpetrated. And trauma has a huge effect and there is a sense that a lot of women are going to prison and being punished when they’ve already been punished throughout their lives. Because these narratives aren’t as prevalent with a male population it doesn’t mean to say that it doesn’t exist. I would say obviously huge numbers of men have had the same issues. 

But one of the other really shocking things is what happens when women are released. There are only six hostels nationally with 100 places a huge amount of women are being released homeless. So there is a real problem in sending people back outside without proper accommodation or support. There is a big push that hasn’t really materialised as much as it should do where women carry out their sentences in the community instead. And get support for issues that are common to them, like substance misuse debt or homelessness

CN: I know that it was tricky in the first series getting your third episode to broadcast because of people getting caught up in the legal system. Have you had any issues with this series?

PW: Anybody that’s released can pick up a charge at any time so it’s always quite anxiety inducing. We have to do a check a week before the TX, and the first program can go out. We will keep our fingers crossed for the next two!

The first episode of the second series of Prison goes out on Channel 4, 9pm Monday, 17 February.

Prison Director Paddy Wivell: “I didn’t think I’d spend so much time talking about anal cavities”

Interview, previews, , , , ,

In fifteen years of directing documentaries, Paddy Wivell has made a name for himself for the seemingly effortless way he connects with his subjects, from African tribes, to Orthodox Jews, to psychiatric inpatients. His warmth and curiosity elicits often astonishing intimacy from his subjects – a skill on ready display in his new Channel 4 series, Prison. The three parter uses a 360 degree approach to take us deep inside Durham Prison where a constantly revolving population of nearly 1000 men do daily battle with a skeletal staff long on patience but short on resources. It’s a layered, sometimes shocking peek into a world most of us know little about other than crisis-screaming headlines.

 

I sat down with Paddy as he was finishing up in post, to find out the making of it. This interview has been edited for length and clarity:

CN: Can you talk me through the access?

PW: In England and Wales I think it’s been about five years since a documentary team have been allowed in to a prison – they’ve had such terrible negative headlines for such a long time. But Spring Films managed to locate a particular individual called Ian Blakeman who was then an executive governor of the Northeast Prisons. He could see the value of allowing a documentary team in. He introduced me to one prison that didn’t feel right – they didn’t feel confident or open enough. And then he suggested I go to Durham Prison. And as soon as I went there I knew that it was a great environment. The governor, Tim Allen, said “we’re getting such bad press, I don’t know why we don’t just open our doors and you can see what we’re doing in the face of extraordinary challenges”. He had complete faith in his staff.  He’d been governor there ten years and felt confident and robust. And we got on really well.

Screen Shot 2017-12-08 at 21.26.42
Paddy Wivell on location

CN: How did you approach making the series?  

PW: I knew that I had to make a series that was specific to the prison that I was in, but that also spoke to the national crisis. And so as I started to get access around the prison, doing my research, it started to form in my mind that it would be good to do something based around different themes – so that each week the audience would feel like they were coming back to something different. And if you look at the indices of the crisis, you would find that mental health, drugs, incidents of violence are the themes people talk about: the trouble preventing drugs getting into the system, the prevalence of spice in prisons all across the country; the incredibly alarming rates of self harm which have tripled in five years; incidents of violence of prisoners on other prisoners but also on officers. So there was a ready made map of the series for me. I then just needed to find prisoners and staff who could start colouring in those sketches.

CN: How did the consent work? Do you gain it from each prisoner before you start filming? Sometimes it seemed like you would go up to a cell and film from the get go.

Paddy: Everybody who is on it consents. But sometimes I do just film from the get go and see how they go with it and then build consent off that first meeting. I had an amazing assistant producer, Josh Allott, who would be around all the wings with us as we were filming, getting consent from every prisoner. And he was just extraordinary. Because it was a big concern that we would end up having to blur everyone. And every prisoner you end up getting their consent but also you have to be across the legal proceedings – you have to avoid sub judice. If they are charged and not sentenced you can’t put them on the television. They have to be sentenced. So we’ve done a lot of work in post with the courts and prison service to make sure we’re completely across everyone that features. So in the background shots there are only a relatively few number of people blurred. If you look at other prison documentaries it’s a blurfest – the whole thing’s a nightmare!

3. MENTAL HEALTH FUTERS 08
Prisoner Futers

 

CN: You came across as a bit of an anthropologist in there – did you feel like one?

PW: I was just really excited because I really felt like there were unchartered territories in prison documentaries. Always the space that excites me is the space I wanted to go but hadn’t had the opportunity to know. I always felt that a lot of the prison documentaries I’ve seen, the emphasis is so weighted on the shoulders of the staff members that you don’t really get the POV from the prisoners themselves. And I wanted a series that had equal weight among prisoners and staff. They both kind of cohabit the same space and they both have views on the crisis but from very different perspectives. So what might be a crisis to the officers might actually be seen by some of the prisoners as an opportunity. And I wanted that to be impressed somehow….Every day I l hear all these headlines and listen to the Today programme about the crisis in prisons but it’s from such a particular perspective. And it felt like there is a whole class of people who are not being spoken to or heard. It’s fresh territory.

1. DRUGS MR MATTHEWS 03
Prison Officer Matthews

CN: What was your responsibility when prisoners confided in you about all of their shenanigans? Obviously it’s going to come out on telly if the staff don’t know it already.

PW: They sort of know it already. But there’s a difference between knowing something and being able to prevent it. They know they stuff all these things up their bums to come in – they know the techniques. But they have six staff to two hundred prisoners. The prisoners have 24 hours a day to dream of ways to bring drugs into prisons or to hide contraband. It’s a never ending battle with the staff. What I wanted to avoid going in there was setting out too many rules to make my life more difficult. I didn’t ask the question “what do I do if someone”…I didn’t want them to tell me “you have to tell us”. But I did have my own sort of system. So if I felt that someone was in danger, of if I saw weapons, there were times I needed to tell staff. But the prisoners needed to feel confident that I wasn’t running with all the information to members of staff. There was this time when the prisoners showed me all their contraband and then they had their cells searched a week later by the intelligence unit. And then the word got out that we were a grass. So that was quite an awkward position – but I also quite like it when the lines get a little bit blurred. You can sort of incorporate that into the film.

CN: There are a lot of quite funny scenes.

There is a lot of humour. A lot of times in these institutions you think it is totally bleak. But inherently when you’ve got a lot of rule-breaking people in a rule-based environment trying to transgress the rules it provides quite a lot of humour and levity. And there’s a sort of David and Goliath dynamic going on which is quite pleasing.

1. DRUGS SCOTTY STOREY 01
Prisoner Scotty Storey

CN: It’s relatively rare to see a series filmed in Durham. What was it like filming up there?

PW: Love it. It’s so refreshing. The Northeast has such warmth. And in a way there’s something quite nostalgic about the Northeast because they don’t have the same problems that southern prisons do – or almost any other region. The gang issues don’t affect the Northeast in quite the same way. So I think I benefited. The prisoners were pretty friendly. It wasn’t quite the same edge I don’t think.

CN: What was the biggest surprise for you making the series?

PW: I didn’t think I’d spend so much time talking about anal cavities!

The first episode of Prison airs 9pm Thursday, 19 July on Channel 4.

It’s Grierson Time!

commentary, , , , , , , , ,

It’s a sign of the times that two of the winning docs from this year’s Grierson Awards, which I attended on Monday night, came from the heart of the migrant crisis. As it shows no sign of abating, filmmakers and broadcasters alike are struggling with how to tell the narratives emerging from the crisis in fresh ways. In the BBC’s Goodbye Aleppo which won Best Current Affairs Documentary, four citizen journalists film themselves under siege as the East Aleppo in December 2016. Against some stiff competition, the Best Documentary Series went to Keo Films’ Exodus: Our Journey to Europe, which tells a range of astonishing stories, tracking refugees from the shores of Turkey, through harrowing sea crossings, to their unstable lives in Europe. Coupling refugees’ own escape footage with interviews, it makes for very powerful frontline testimony. To get a taste of it, check out this BBC extract from Exodus, which tells Hassan’s story:

 

Another notable award on the night was the Best Constructed Documentary, which went to Love Productions’ Muslims Like Us, for Channel 4. The two part series placed ten Muslim men and women in a house together for ten days, including a convicted extremist.  The program not surprisingly generated a lot of debate about what Islam means to modern Muslims.

 

Although it’s a strange category to win – Best Entertaining Documentary – I was delighted to see the Channel 4 series 999: What’s Your Emergency? win a Grierson. Made by Blast! Films, it’s always a superb watch, taking viewers into the heart of the emergency response system, and tracking calls from origin through treatment, often via some compelling ambulance cab footage.

999: What’s Your Emergency? is one of a plethora of top quality public services series on British TV this year. They cumulatively demonstrate both the utter professionalism and quality of the National Health System and emergency services while at the same time showing how ever dwindling resources and escalating demand have left both at breaking point. Other outstanding series include Label One’s BBC series Hospital, which in its second series found itself at the epicentre of a response to a terrorism attack. Check out this astonishing clip:

 

And this one, as two of the victims – French school friends – reunite in hospital:

 

Some months ago I was taking notes on a student film about the impact of a high speed motorway on a community in the British countryside. A woman appeared briefly in it, telling how her husband had killed himself, leaving her raising seven children, most of whom were on the autistic spectrum. I made a note that she clearly needed a documentary all of her own. Fast forward to the closing night of the BFI London Film Festival last month, and the winner of the Grierson Award for Best Documentary goes to Kingdom of Us – taking us deep into the lives of this very same family. Shot over three years by director Lucy Cohen, the feature film focuses not so much on the children’s autism but on the ongoing impact of the suicide of their father some years ago. It’s a very moving gem of a story, with luminous filming, abundant family archive and creative editing – no wonder it was snapped up during production by Netflix, where it can now be found.

 

Finally, I much enjoyed helping shape the Best Student Documentary list this year. The winning film, the National Film and Television School’s Acta Non Verba is really remarkable, as director Yvann Yagchi undertakes a creative personal journey investigating his father’s infidelity and suicide. You can request access from the NFTS to see the film.

See here for a full list of Grierson Winners. And to listen to another story from the frontline of the refugee crisis, check out this newly released episode I produced: Rajwana’s Diary, in SE15 Productions’ A New Normal podcast.

On the Frontline in MOSUL: A Conversation with Olivier Sarbil and James Jones

Interview, previews, , , , , , , , ,

For a good portion of the nine month fight to defeat ISIS in Mosul, veteran French cameraman Olivier Sarbil was embedded with a small elite team of Iraqi Special Forces. Airing this week on PBS’ Frontline (and on Britain’s Channel 4 in November), Sarbil’s film MOSUL combines beautifully shot actuality footage with direct interviews with the soldiers in their home. The often uncomfortably close up scenes take us directly into the fight against ISIS, focusing on four young soldiers. Having screened to packed, rapturous houses at European screenings, it has been entered for an Academy Award nomination in the short film category.  I spoke with Olivier and his co-director and producer James Jones in London to find out how they made such a powerful film with minimal crew and little knowledge of Arabic. 

(Edited for length and clarity)       

Carol Nahra: This is your first time working together, isn’t it? How did that come about?

James Jones: Basically, Olivier had been a freelance cameraman in news, shooting this extraordinarily beautiful stuff that didn’t become anything bigger, so it was kind of wasted. So he was kind of known in that world for shooting really beautifully but hadn’t done that longer form stuff. So he went out to Mosul for Channel 4 News to doa long news piece. And then PBS had a film fall through and needed to fill half a slot and Dan Edge, the senior producer called me and said ‘We’ve got this amazing footage, we’ve got two weeks until broadcast, can you come and like help.’ And I had just finishedUnarmed Black Male so thought why not. The film (Hunting Isis) was very good but it was lots of commentary. But I think all of us came away from it thinking this could be so much bigger. He shoots so beautifully, he’s got this amazing access, where no one else on earth is filming, and the guys seem to trust him. So we were all like let’s send Olivier back and I will come on as a producer (Olivier shot the frontline scenes solo while James and a fixer joined him for the interviews). 

IMG_3866
Olivier Sarbil and James Jones in London

Carol: How did you approach this shoot and gain the trust of the soldiers?

Olivier Sarbil: Somehow we started to build a trust between me and the commander….For me it was important that I wasn’t going to do a news report – I was going to tell their story, the story of the battalion. And I don’t speak Arabic so it’s all about how I smile, the body language. I’m covered in scars, it helps, from shooting the war in Libya. I myself am a former Marine – maybe it helps me, cause they understand I know how those guys work in the field. And it was a very long process, for weeks eating beans and rice with them every day, shooting almost nothing. I didn’t want them to feel frightened by the camera. I really wanted them to feel Olivier is there but he’s almost invisible.

James: He doesn’t speak Arabic, he didn’t have a fixer or translator with him….He’s so unobtrusive, they know he can’t understand what they’re saying, so they’re completely uninhibited. It’s like a documentary experiment. It’s like totally fly on the wall – if they’re calling their girlfriend or roughing up a prisoner, they just do it.

A009C628_170226W4_CANON.new.01 Nucoda FF

Carol: It was translated when you got back, correct? So there must have been moments where you thought ‘Oh my god I’m glad I didn’t know what they were saying!’

Olivier: That was one of the most amazing moments. When I was going back and I had all that footage, and finally I could understand what they were talking about.

Carol: What was the most shocking thing that you realised much later what they were saying?

Olivier: I would not say shocking because I had an idea, but for example, there is a scene in a school where they are talking with a kid. I didn’t know they were threatening him.  I had no idea…. You really have to trust your instinct and your gut. The thing that is really interesting is if I had a fixer or a translator, it would have killed the connection between me and them. I think I would have missed some key scene because my fixer might have said ‘ they are just talking rubbish, don’t worry about it’ and maybe I would have been tempted to turn away the camera. Because I didn’t know, it’s like I’m being deaf, so you have to develop other senses. It’s a very interesting process.

IMG_4399

Carol:  How did you conduct the interviews?

James: When they’d more or less declared victory in Mosul. Even then they were still on rotation. There was a week window – we didn’t know when that would be. As it happens it came in the middle of Ramadan, in the middle of summer; it was really hot. Half of them were wounded; half weren’t picking up their phone. It was just like a nightmare. It was actually a miracle that we got it. They were scattered all over Iraq. We didn’t want to think about what the film would be if we hadn’t got everybody. Each of them told crucial bits of the story – losing any one of them would have made it really hard. We probably would have had to use commentary.

11

Carol: What has been the reaction to the film at screenings?

James: It has been amazing. But the one criticism we’ve heard is some people have said “Is it too beautiful?  It’s about the horrors of war, but does it look too beautiful?!”

Olivier: It’s an argument that unfortunately I’ve heard a few times. Some people are saying that because it’s war you don’t have to be worrying about the aesthetic of the shot. Which I find disturbing to a degree. Because it’s something that you don’t have in photojournalism. All the best photojournalists are painting with their pictures the misery, the death, the suffering with beautiful pictures. And no one told them ‘Why are your pictures so nice?’ But in fact I think the reality that you see for example in a news story that is not actually the reality. The way they build a news story with a shaky shot, it’s not reality.

James: It’s a cheap trick. To tell audiences it is dangerous, it has to feel wobbly. And actually there are a lot of tricks. Where this, it is well composed and it’s beautiful, and it looks sometimes like fiction. But I don’t think that that means it doesn’t seem visceral, or tense.

1

Carol: It’s beautifully shot and reminded me of Cartel Land. I’m amazed how you did it – because there is a fair amount of turmoil going on and you did the sound and everything too.

Olivier: I’m not a war junkie. The only reason I went to that battle is there was a story to be told. I said to Dan and James, we had to tell it in a way that was not just another bang bang. And there is bang bang – this is a war story – but I wanted to get more into the mind of those guys, to be more human, more intimate.

James: It’s a film about shades of grey – the horror of war. These kinds of guys going through really extreme things. What we were keen to do was to treat the soldiers with the same respect that we treat British or American soldiers. We wanted to go home with them, interview them, see their lives… It’s interesting, at a time when Trump is banning Muslims for all being terrorists, these men are fighting against ISIS. They are fighting our battle. We left Iraq to them. They are sacrificing themselves to fight ISIS. There’s this kind of irony that all Muslims are seen as enemies but these guys are doing great work.

———————————————–

MOSUL airs 18 October on Frontline, and on Channel 4 in the UK 7 November (title The Fight for Mosul). Location photos © Olivier Sarbil – Mosul

ARMED AND UNARMED IN AMERICA

Interview, previews, , , , , , , , , ,

by Carol Nahra

Two British documentaries airing this week provide nuanced and balanced glimpses of a frightened American psyche. In Unarmed Black Male, screening on BBC Two’s This World strand on Wednesday, James Jones takes a 360° approach to telling the story of the trial of Stephen Rankin, a policeman accused of murdering a black teenager. The following night Channel 4’s Cutting Edge strand airs The Gun Shop, where director John Douglas brings a mini fixed rig to an American gun store. (The films are part of a noticeable uptick in British television programmes examining all things American in the run up to the November 9 election, which continues to grip and horrify Europe). I spoke to both directors as they were putting the finishing touches on their films.

For Jones, his focus on the Portsmouth Virginia shooting stemmed from his interest in the growth of police shootings in America documented by citizens. He was thinking of approaching it in a similar way to films he made in both North Korea and Saudi Arabia, where he employed an abundance of both curated and collected footage by ordinary people caught up in extraordinary situations. “I wanted to make a film about how technology is changing awareness of American police shootings,” he says.“In the past the police statement has been taken as gospel truth. So there was the idea that people being able to film it on mobile phones was transforming our perception of this issue.” Whilst scouting such stories, Jones came across details of William Chapman’s murder via the Guardian’s acclaimed interactive journalism project The Counted. In a brief early morning encounter outside a Walmart store in Virginia, police officer Rankin had shot and killed Chapman at close range. Extraordinarily enough in the US, Rankin was actually going on trial in the summer for first degree murder. Like many American trials, it would be filmed. Jones had his story.

rankin
Stephen Rankin

In a documentary that never drags in the course of 90 minutes, Jones secures an enormous range of interviews from those caught up in in the highly emotionally charged events — including Rankin’s only interview to date. The interview came about through dogged persistence, by befriending both Rankin’s wife Dawn, who features prominently in the film, and then Rankin himself. Jones found that both were really wanting to tell their side of the story: “They felt very beaten up by the local media and it felt like she was almost like waiting for the call,” he says.  

The Rankin interview succeeds in instilling viewer empathy for a man on trial for his freedom after seemingly just doing his job (Rankin argued he fired in self defense after Chapman dislodged Rankin’s Taser). But soon the film offers up two astonishing interviews providing a very different perspective. First Rankin’s ex-wife describes his obsession with guns, including continuously discussing scenarios where he would discharge against an unarmed suspect. Then Rankin’s former boss, Ken King, a highly distinguished officer, is interviewed saying: “(Rankin)  was one of these guys who could cause a riot at a church social. He could go to any event and it would just escalate out of control.”  It’s jaw dropping, powerful testimony which is impossible to dismiss.

Jones said that neither Dawn nor Rankin were aware of these damning testimonials when he interviewed them, but he has since talked Dawn through it. “She’s going to hate some of it, she really will,” he admits. “But I think the thing is, on their own terms they come across as sympathetic. The film is much more fair and balanced for having them in it. And you get a sense that there are two families’ lives destroyed by this, whatever the details of the shooting.”

The film goes on to show the ripples of misery stemming from the Walmart shooting, following the quest of Chapman’s family for justice, as well as a mother from Kazakhstan whose inebriated unarmed son also was killed by Rankin, who was never charged.  To round out this story, Jones and his team managed the impressive feat of tracking down two of the anonymous jurors, one black and one white, who describe in detail some of the thoughts behind their deliberations, to which they each clearly brought their own personal experience to bear. “The white juror that we interviewed certainly had had experiences in her life that she told us about that shaped her worldview and her view of someone like William Chapman,” says Jones. “So that was key to the jury’s deliberations. And that’s quite scary that that would be the case.”

william-and-baby-gaby
Victim William Chapman

Indeed, like so many films about the US, Unarmed Black Male offers up a vision of dysfunctional race relations. What did Jones himself make of racial tensions?  “The divide felt very stark. As an English person who lives in London where you are surrounded by people from all over the world and there are very few ghettoised neighbourhoods, it’s all a kind of melting pot, going to the south of America was a culture shock. You’d go into neighbourhoods and you’re the only white person there. And you’re viewed with great suspicion at first because white people usually spell trouble in that neighbourhood. So I was shocked that the legacy of segregation was so visible.”

Coming as a stranger into a volatile story, Jones is delighted by just how many people agreed to take part. “We were really happy with the way the film turned out. I don’t know if it’s America, or the South, but everyone was willing to talk to us. And that just never happens. Usually you’ve got like a one in three chance of people agreeing, but for one reason or another they really did want to tell their story.”

In the end, the type of mobile phone footage that was the seed for this film instead becomes a grim drumbeat of misery. In between scenes from the Rankin storyline, Jones uses such video to catalogue the many police shootings of black victims which took place, even in the relatively short time span of the film. 

Made using very different techniques, The Gun Shop nonetheless sheds light on similar terrain, notably the current climate of fear in the US which contributes to a gun death rate at least ten times higher than the rest of the developed world.  Director John Douglas says that he and the development team at Rogan Productions were very keen to find a shop whichb flew in the face of British perceptions: “It felt like we should try and move away from very stereotypical views of gun shops and gun owners. So finding somewhere where the shop was based in a community but was diverse, had young and old, and wasn’t just the community you’d normally expect.”

gunshop-publicity-still-5a
Joel Fulton, the gun shop’s co-owner

The shop they settled on, in Battle Creek, Michigan has a shooting range and runs educational classes, in addition to a constant stream of varied customers. I wondered what the owners of the gun shop made of the fixed rig style of programming they were proposing – using mounted cameras operated remotely – which is unknown in the US?  “Yeah it is unknown,” Douglas agreed. “The sort of reactions we would get would be people would think it was like a reality show or Big Brother.  It took a while. We showed them some 24 Hours in A&E and some other things I’d worked on which were not rigged but not sensationalising and treated people with respect. So I think that helped.”

johndouglas
Director John Douglas in the edit

For the six day rig shoot they kitted out the shop with 12 cameras (three would shoot at any one time); Douglas directing from a backroom gallery. Assistant Producer Rebecca Coxon manned the shop floor, seeking consent and fitting customers with radio mics. In a week of follow up filming they delved more into some of the stories, which together paint a rich tapestry of reasons underlying why so many Americans are arming themselves.

Back in London, working with experienced fixed rig editor Sam Santana (see this Docs on Screens interview), Douglas was painstakingly working to make a film which took a nonjudgmental tone. “It would be really easy to make an anti gun film. Really easy,” says Douglas. “But the way that I’ve hoped we approached it in this documentary — and to some degree all documentaries — is always to be able to put yourself in other people’s shoes a bit. Because clearly whether anti gun or pro gun there’s not all that anger and rhetoric because they’re bad people and they only want to hate one another and they want to ruin everyone else’s life. They’re doing it because they feel really passionate about the issue.”

Unarmed Black Male airs Wednesday, November 2nd at 9pm on BBC Two. The Gun Shop airs Thursday, November 3rd at 9pm on Channel 4.

Fixed Rig Focus: The Editor

Interview, , , , , , ,

Factual editor Sam Santana has worked on an enormous range of British factual television in a career spanning 17 years, including the award-winning Katie: My Beautiful Face and The Murder Workers. The last five years his work has been dominated by a genre which itself has come to dominate the British TV landscape – the fixed rig. Taking the technology from the Big Brother House and applying it to the wider world, viewers have immersed themselves in the worlds of hospitals (One Born Ever Minute, 24 Hours in A&E), deep-sea fishing trawlers, police stations, model agencies, secondary schools and even an African tribe. Santana has worked on many of them, and been instrumental in helping train a new generation of editors through a training scheme run by The Garden Productions.

sam 4
Sam Santana

 

Santana’s latest programme, Inside Birmingham Children’s Hospital, is currently running on Channel 4. The series, made by fixed rig experts Dragonfly TV,  uses a wide range of filming techniques to supplement a 80 plus camera hospital rig, including mobile phone footage, still photography, single camera crews, as well as patient car footage using GoPros. The viewer feels like a privileged observer to the difficult and very inspirational journeys that families undergo when facing health crises, and I can’t recommend it enough as an example of riveting public service television. I spoke on the telephone to Sam about how his working life has changed with the advent of the fixed rig:

In a nut shell, what is the difference between editing from the rig and traditional factual editing?

Anything in fixed rig is completely different from anything in traditional factual editing. The main difference is there is no producer. You don’t produce your actuality because there is no producer or director filming – it’s a fixed camera. From a technical point of view, with traditional factual when a director brings you his or her rushes you can immediately look at them. You cannot do that with a rig. There’s quite a lot of groundwork you have to do before you can start looking at the material – organising the material, pulling the right microphones, syncing the cameras up. So from a technical point of view that is a big difference. Also, when you’re editing something that has been shot traditionally with a director on a single camera, you have an expectation at the beginning of editing a particular scene that you know how that scene is going to turn out, because the director has shot it with an idea. When you edit a scene that is shot on the rig, you have no idea how it is going to end, you don’t know if it’s going to deliver, and so really it’s in the lap of the editor to try to make it work in one way or another.

download
Jack and parents from Ep 4 of Inside Birmingham Children’s Hospital

What do you enjoy most about editing from the rig?

Really what I enjoy most about it is how really organic is. How pure it is. Because of the fact that you have to go through all those hours and hours of material, not knowing how anything is going to turn out, not having any control over what people are going to say. Because people will forget the cameras are there. I’ve done probably over 40 episodes of 24 Hours in A & E, and Children’s Hospital, and more, and all the time people forget the camera. They may be quite self-aware at the beginning but they forget it. And I think that’s what makes it so pure, so different. And on top of that you have so many camera choices and so many angles. At times it feels that, although you are cutting real life, you feel you’re cutting drama.

What are the biggest challenges?

One of the biggest cons of rig documentary editing is the sheer volume of material and the fact that actually you need the luck of the draw. Because as I was saying before, when the director goes to film, he or she has met a family, a set of contributors. And that’s why they’ve decided to follow a story -because of the research they’ve done before. With most rigs, that research doesn’t happen. So you meet somebody there and then and you just embark on that mini journey with them. And you don’t know how things are going to end. And sometimes you have less choice of who you are going to feature in your programme and therefore that makes things more complicated. So a story that on paper may feel great because it looks big that happened on the rig, it may not then have the dramatic storytelling that you would like it to have.

For 24 Hours in A&E, you get all of your 24 hours of footage, and then, once you’ve looked through it,  producers have to go out and do those follow-up interviews and dig out those background stories, correct?

Yes, for example there’s a particular story in 24 Hours in A&E, one of the last ones I worked on, where you had this tiny story of a young lad who had broken his leg. The doctor thought he was faking it, he was like three or four years of age. So medically it had nothing, you know? It was just a tiny thing. But then because we thought he was funny and quirky on the rig, we then went and interviewed the grandmother who brought him, and she gave an incredible interview that explained to you so many different things and the unconditional love which she had. It transformed the rig material. And a story that was only seven minutes in terms of screen time completely kidnapped the film I think. 

How much do you think your fixed rig experience is informing jobs you do that aren’t fixed rig?

I think whenever you go back to traditional observational documentary making there are things that you have to untrain yourself about. Because the rig provides you with an amazing amount of multicamera footage to cut to. It’s easier to create dramatic pauses on a rig than on single camera. And so you have to sort of make sure that when you go back to single camera observational documentary making that you forget the rig quickly. Because if you don’t you won’t get it done.

Where is the fixed rig genre heading?

I’m hoping that the rig will provide us a way in the future to blend itself to the old techniques. You know that if someone is talking to you, you can use their voice to take you to the rig and use the rig as an example of what that person is saying. At the moment the rig is used as a bed of shots and actuality, which is unadulterated by anyone else’s voices apart from the interview. It will be interesting to see where the rig takes us in the future.

Catch up with Inside Birmingham Children’s Hospital on All Four. For more on this topic see Fixed Rig Focus: The Exec

 

 

From Grierson to Gogglebox: Teaching the Factual Spectrum

commentary, , , , , , , , , ,

I’m just coming up for air after a bout of intensive lecturing. I teach a few different classes for American university students in London, but my favourite, semester after semester, is my documentaries class. It is here, in a deliberately darkened classroom near Holborn, that I share the highlights of twenty years immersed in the world of British documentary. We cover the whole factual spectrum, from independent feature documentaries to heavily formatted reality, and everything in between.

Usually, my students arrive having been exposed to roughly two kinds of factual fare: worthy subject based documentaries, like Ken Burns’ marathon series that their parents watch, or the far-from-real world of the Real Housewives or Kardashians. If I’m lucky these days, and frequently I am thanks to Netflix, they will have streamed a few American documentary features like Blackfish or Girl Model. They know Sherlock, and Doctor Who but have never heard of Louis Theroux or the term “fixed rig“. They are a blank slate when it comes to British factual, and I have fifteen weeks to make my mark.

I have to begin by introducing them to something else they have never heard of: Public Service Broadcasting. For while the BBC is in a perilous state at the moment, with no reprieve in sight, the PSB tradition it stems from is crucial to understanding just how the Brits got so great at making documentaries. I wrote my entire MA thesis on the topic. It’s important.

grierson
John Grierson

In class, after we look at the notion of public service broadcasting, and how it was extended with the creation of Channel 4 in the 80s (also, sadly, under threat), we turn to John Grierson, who coined the term documentary, defining it as the “creative of treatment of actuality”. We have a look at Grierson’s most famous sequence in his seminal film Night Mail, which shows the postal train rhythmically chugging north to Scotland, to words by W.H. Auden and music by Benjamin Britten:

We learn just how Grierson came to make propaganda films for the British government, by dipping into Britain Through A Lens: The Documentary Film Mob, made by the excellent Lambent Productions. It includes a clip from Grierson’s box office hit Drifters (1929), about the British herring trade. While I recognize I need to tread softly and not show Drifters in its entire, silent, black and white glory, my students were gratifyingly engrossed when I showed a modern take on deep sea fishing, Channel 4’s recent The Catch, a fixed rig series which was mesmerizing from start to finish.

After our crash course in PSB and Grierson, we look more in depth at contemporary examples of Grierson’s creative treatment of actuality, in its many guises. We explore the topic with the help of a specially curated Flipboard Magazine; I often ask students to use articles in it as a starting point for further research. We also hear from a number of leading filmmakers – Kim Longinotto, Brian Hill and Christopher Hird have all been recent guest lecturers.

As students gear up to make their own three minute film for a final project, it’s critical for them to see how a simple construct can make a powerful film. Marc Isaac’s beautifully made first film Lift – shot entirely in the elevator of a tower block in East London – is a great example.

the lift
Lift

While it would be a joy to spend our entire time looking at the work of talented British independent documentary makers, my charges are about to enter the real world and many are hoping for a career in television. So a large chunk of our time is spent looking at the world of formats, with the occasional help of the always entertaining Gogglebox and Charlie Brooker. My students are surprised to learn just how many of the American shows they watch are British formats made by British production companies. But our focus is not so much on this crossover as on those reality formats in the UK that traditionally haven’t had a hope in hell of appearing on mainstream US television. In the hopes of fostering transatlantic fertilisation, I spend a lot of time exploring the intersection of public service and reality, looking at how some UK production companies are doing both, in really interesting ways. For more on that, stay tuned…

Watch Now: Channel 4 Documentary Jewels

commentary, , ,

So I’ve heard from a fair number of people that they’d like more blogs about films they can actually watch *now* rather than new docs which could take an eternity to come to a small screen near your sofa. So, obligingly, here’s a few films that you can watch now (if you’re in the UK, that is…will follow up soon with a US Netlix post).

Channel 4’s factual archive hosts more than a few outstanding documentaries and is altogether more satisfying in its scope and range than the BBC online archive, including films from a number of the UK’s leading documentary makers. Here are a couple of my favorites:

The Day I Will Never Forget (Kim Longinotto, 2002)

thedayiwillneverforget

A classic from Kim Longinotto, this is a great introduction to her work. Here’ s my write-up on it for Sheffield Doc/Fest 2002:

Nine year old Fouzia stands in her finest white dress to recite her poem called “The Day I Will Never Forget.” But instead of a tale of a cherished holiday memory, she talks about her forced circumcision at her mother’s insistence. Kim Longinotto’s latest film demystifies the practice of female genital mutilation through engrossing stories of Kenyan women. As young girls like Fouzia cope with the painful aftermath of their trauma – and in the film’s most difficult scene we witness it firsthand – older women demonstrate how entrenched cultural beliefs can override the maternal instinct to protect. But times are changing. Nurse Fardhosa teaches hygiene to circumcisers in Nairobi, while quietly encouraging them to stop. And a group of runaway girls are seeking court action against their parents…Gripping devastating, but ultimately hopeful.

Here’s an interview I did with Kim when the film came out.

The Leader, His Driver and the Driver’s Wife (Nick Broofield, 1991)

the leader

Nick Broomfield’s dogged following of the South African white supremicist leader Eugene Terre’Blanche comes to a climax in one the most famous scenes from Broomfield’s impressive body of work. Deliberately showing up late for a long-requested interview, the tongue lashing Broomfield receives sheds more insight on Terre’Blanche than a tradtitional interview ever could. Funny and riveting in turns, this is Broomfield at his best.

Finally, be sure to check out From Russia with Cash (top picture above), which will be available on Channel 4 for a couple more weeks. Director Dan Reed sheds a long overdue light on just how easy it is to launder money through London’s property market. Secretly filming throughout, Reed sends actors posing as Russian government minister “Boris” and his trophy girlfriend to five top end properties, where estate agents eager to earn their hefty commissions prove all too willing to provide advice on how Boris can buy the property with what he clearly states is dodgy money. In the aftermath of the film’s broadcast last week, two investigations have been launched, as well as parliamentary questions. Reed is one of the most talented documentary makers working today – you can see several of his films on the Channel 4 archive including the multi award-winning The Paedophile Hunter and Terror in Moscow.

Docs on Screens is taking a summer hiatus – and a lengthy trip to the US. See you in the autumn, and thanks for reading if you have got this far!

Fixed Rig Focus: The Exec

Interview, , , ,

24 Hours in Police Custody
24 Hours in Police Custody

I know way more about the Luton police station than I ever thought I would. I know that sometimes Detective Sergeants have to have impassioned telephone debates with the Crown Prosecution Service (which are always, in a very British way, extremely polite, but nonetheless called a “huge fight” afterwards). I know that if they succeed in getting the charge they are arguing for, such as a GBH upped to Attempted Murder, that they are quite likely to follow up the phone call with a silly dance and quiet gloating to every colleague they come across for the next ten minutes. I know that desks are often a mess, that who makes the tea has little to do with rank, and that no one really wants the responsibility of fetching abandoned hamsters from a house where carnage has occurred. I know all this because I never miss an episode of the utterly outstanding 24 Hours in Police Custody. The Channel 4 series is the latest in a rapidly growing crop of “fixed rig” television programs, which have, quite simply, transformed my television viewing in the last few years. They have taken me behind the doors of real life British communities, placing me front and centre of dramatic, transformative moments – and all of the even more compelling quiet moments in between.

Simply put, the fixed rig takes the technology of the Big Brother house – multiple cameras operated remotely – and transplants it to the real world. In the experienced hands of some of the most talented factual film-makers in the world, magic then occurs. What is most compelling about every fixed rig series I have seen, is watching human interactions occurring in as natural a setting as possible – that is, without the intrusive presence of a camera crew. Yes, those being observed know that cameras are there, but filmed 24 hours a day for weeks on end, they very quickly cease to play up to the camera. “Fly on the wall” is an overused, much criticised term, but it is perhaps most appropriate here. An enormous amount of behind the scenes labour goes into bringing about the quietest of scenes.

The original real world fixed rig series was The Family, which I wrote about after it debuted in 2008. Over a mackerel lunch at a Shoreditch Vietnamese restaurant with independent producers Magnus Temple and Nick Curwin, then Channel 4 Commissioning Editor for Documentaries Simon Dickson hatched the plan for the Family. He commissioned Temple and Curwin, then of Firefly Productions, to make an eight hour series on a single family. Twenty one cameras filmed them for four months, audiences were hooked, and a new genre was launched.

Five years on, and hundreds of hours of fixed rig programming later, I feel the time has come to look at how this way of filming has infiltrated British broadcasting – and is having an effect globally. I recently interviewed Nick Curwin, who has spent much of the last half decade overseeing a raft of award winning series, from The Family to One Born Every Minute. In 2010 he founded The Garden Productions with Magnus Temple, where they have make 24 Hours in A & E, which has sold to more than 100 territories around the world, and 24 Hours in Police Custody, which first aired in September.

Nick Curwin
Nick Curwin

Did you ever think you would be here, just a few years later, seeing such a change in British television?

NC: I don’t know how many rig shows are in production today – there seems a lot – so that seemed unimaginable. On the one hand, I think the main people who were having that conversation at the time really felt, right from the get go that we were on to something. There was a fantastic belief that this was going to be amazing. We were very very excited. It’s brilliant that it has become a prolific idea but I don’t think we would have anticipated it at the time.
When I first started making factual television, I thought if you could somehow or other instead of revisiting things that had happened in the past, if you could throw a net over actuality circumstances and show them actually happening wouldn’t that be a fantastic thing? So the rig in a way is a way of doing that. It was all about, wouldn’t it be wonderful to be able to film these things as they actually happened. But you’d need this vast array of cameras to do it and you’d need to be in the right place. So that’s where we ended up with the Family because it was Simon’s suggestion to say why don’t we use that in a family home.

What are the biggest difficulties in making a fixed rig series?
NC: Now it is difficult for different reasons. If we’re doing 24 Hours in Police Custody, to find a police force which allows you to put 70 odd cameras on the walls of their police station is very difficult. Likewise 24 Hours in A & E you say to a hospital what you want to do and they say ‘you’ve got to be kidding!’. So that’s very difficult and it’s very hard to win that access. Although we now have that track record – if they can talk to people we’ve worked before that helps us. With The Family we didn’t have that track record, we didn’t really know what it was going to be like, so it was hard to articulate that. And of course it’s an incredibly difficult private situation, a family home, so they’d have to in a way be very brave to let us do it.

But in a way one of the hardest things from our point of view was not just persuading a family to let us do it but finding the right family. Because in a way we always thought we were sort of making a drama rather than a documentary, but the people in it were also the writers. We didn’t tell them what to do so they were the writers, the producers and the stars. So they were the providers of the content in every possible way. So you had to think really cleverly about what sort of person would be able to provide the best possible content.

The editing is key to all these programs, isn’t it?
NC: Of course. We have been blessed with fantastic editors. But that’s very difficult as well — it’s another challenge we face. Because we’re making thirty episodes of 24 hours in A & E at the moment and 20 hours of Police Custody. That’s 50 hours and the editing is key. So trying to get fantastic editors to do that is very difficult. But we have this magic bullet for that which is an editor training scheme. We have brilliant editors in charge and then we hire inexperienced young editors and we use is as a training opportunity and train them in the edit.

24 Hours in Police Custody has some amazing scenes. What have been the particular challenges?

NC: Finding Luton was a huge challenge. It took something in the order of a year to get accesss to a police station to make that so quite obviously an extended period of development. I suppose the other challenge we face with that production is it’s not purely a rigged show – it’s a hybrid. It’s quite a big rig – it’s not as big as 24 Hours in A & E but it’s more than three times the rig for The Family and nearly double the rig for One Born Every Minute. But we also have three or four roving camera crews who are filming in a more traditional way, out and about. We were nervous about putting together rig and non rig material. It’s worked fine in the edit but we didn’t know it would at the time. And our previous experience with trying to do that hasn’t worked very well. In the first series of The Family we filmed loads and loads of them out and about and didn’t use a frame of it because it felt really odd to put the two things together. So that was a challenge, seeing whether that would work. But with 24 Hours in Police Custody, because the two things dovetail so perfectly together – when we have a cop interviewing a suspect in the police station and at the same time other cops are searching that suspect’s house, and they come back with something that is useful to the interrogation – then it just has to go together. So that really helps us I think.

24 Hours in A&E
24 Hours in A&E

What is it about the rig that yields such compelling material?

NC: One of the thing that you get from the rig that you probably can’t replicate unless you are using a rig is the fact that you are cutting around multiple cameras. And the effect that that gives you is something that is a bit more like drama. So you are much more connected emotionally with what is going on and you are observing it much more closely. And you can’t do that with a factual program in a scene of actuality unless you either have more than one camera or ask people to do it again and film as you do with actors. But you can’t ask people to do it again in a factual program because obviously it is not real anymore and you’ve got no authenticity. So you have to have lots of cameras.

The rig partly gives you the ability to be everywhere – so we’re in multiple places in a police station at once, likewise in a hospital. And that enables you in turn to, for example, make a show out of just one 24 hour period where if you had one camera you couldn’t. But it also dramatically affects the quality of the scene so in the interview rooms in 24 Hours in Police Custody, we have four cameras in there and also they are remotely controlled, so we are getting different kinds of shots. And so a scene edited from that footage is always going to be much more engrossing than a scene from one camera.