Tag Archives: independent production

Sue Bourne on The Age of Loneliness

January 5, 2016Interview, previewsaccess, BBC, documentary, independent production, sue bournecarolnahra

The single documentary The Age of Loneliness looks at the “epidemic” of loneliness in Britain, telling the stories of 14 very different contributors. It’s a profoundly moving exploration of an often taboo subject – and one that resonates with most of us, whether we’re currently lonely, have been in the past, or worry about the future when we might be. Docs on Screens spoke to veteran director Sue Bourne about the film, which airs 7 January on BBC One.

Carol Nahra: You were very careful to get a good range of people. How did you go about finding your contributors?

Sue Bourne: Four months research. It just took us forever (laughs). I said ‘I’m not doing a film just about lonely old people – that’s boring and it’s obvious and that isn’t the problem. It’s an epidemic, and it’s about all ages and there’s something happening’. It was very much for me about a societal change and what was going on. But then I’m not doing a Panorama so I just wanted to give a voice to all those different people. So I said I want a voice from every decade, from every age group. So I drew up my list and then we just hit it for four months. We were in touch with 500 odd people to narrow it down to the 14 who appeared. Charities, blogs, internet, just everything. The thing about lonely people is they’re not out there shouting about it from the rooftop. And so that’s hard. And a lot of the people we met were just too vulnerable to go on telly.

Programme Name: The Age of Loneliness - TX: 07/01/2016 - Episode: The Age of Loneliness (No. n/a) - Picture Shows: Isabel, 19 – Lonely at university - (C) Daniel Dewsbury - Photographer: Daniel Dewsbury — Isabel, 19 (C) Daniel Dewsbury

CN: The ones featured are also vulnerable. You have very emotional scenes where it seems to me they are often articulating their loneliness for the first time, which I found quite painful. How did you find interviewing them?

SB: Well, basically I think they were wonderful, all of them. I think they were brave. Because no one wants to admit to being lonely because in the back of your mind you’re thinking ‘well, why am I lonely? Is it because I am horrible? Why am I Johnny no mates? What’s happened?’ Some of them they have lost their partner so it was obvious why they were lonely. But other people were lonely and wondering if it was their fault, are they to blame. There was certainly one person I thought would be very good for the part because they epitomised a very large group. And I phoned them up and said ‘I want you to be in the film but you have to be honest. And I think your default position is to put on a brave face. And frankly you’re going to have to take that off. And bare your soul. Because if you put the brave face on you’re not telling the truth and the one thing I want this film to be is truthful’. So I was asking a lot….but I think it’s one of the most moving interviews in the film.

CN: Which interview was it?

SB: It was Jaye, the single girl. Because she wants to be a jolly person. But I thought the interview she gave was so honest. It was extraordinary She was really brave to be so honest. But I knew what her default position was – she was battling through life being jolly saying ‘I can cope with it. I can cope with it’. But inside it was tough.

CN: Are you a lonely person?

SB: No. I think I’m alone. My daughter’s dad, my ex partner, is dead. All my parents are dead. I have no brothers and sisters and really no family to talk to. So really it’s just me and my kid and she’s in her twenties and I don’t want to be a needy mother. So I’m acutely aware of the life ahead of me. That it will involve aloneness. So I better get used to it. So I try to train myself to be a bit more positive about it (laughs).

CN: Is that what brought you to the topic?

SB: I think so…In Fashionistas (which profiled six extraordinary older women) I wanted to find role models for the next 30 odd years, who were going to be upbeat and enjoying life and squeezing the pips out of it. Because that’s what I wanted to do. And then again a lot of them were on their own, so what I got from that is you need a particular spirit if you can find it to carry you through life because it ain’t easy and you might well be on your own.

age of loneliness sue bourne — Sue Bourne

CN: Did you ever think of matching people up? Cause it seems like there’s some people who would benefit from each other’s company in The Age of Loneliness.

SB: Well in a way sometimes you look at these films that we do and it’s like – I feel like a social worker. Because what I’m doing is I’m opening them out. I’m giving them a voice. Then I want other people to talk. I want people to look and think ‘why is nothing being done to help them?’. I now want to do Contact the Elderly tea parties because I think that it’s just wonderful. It transforms their lives for one afternoon a month and that’s all it takes…We have to be kinder. That is the wettest things a filmmaker can say – “I just want people to be kinder” – but I do!

CN: I can imagine that a doc about loneliness might not make for like the most filmic pitch.

SB: It took a bit of time and eventually I got in front of Charlotte (Moore) and said ‘Please, just give me this commission’. And she said ‘Okay, it’s yours, go.’

CN: It’s beautifully shot. It looks lovely.

SB: I had (producer) Daniel (Dewsbury) at my side from February. We did all the research together; we talked constantly about what we were trying to achieve, four months of that. And then I decided not to use a cameraman but to use him, and gave him a beautiful camera, nice lenses, and three months to shoot it. And we were this tiny little team. And it paid off. And then we got the drones (used for aerial shots throughout the film). I don’t like gimmicks. I always thought I only want to shoot it if it’s relevant to loneliness. But for me the drones were critical because I wanted to say “It’s everywhere in Britain – anywhere you look you’re going to find loneliness”.

The Age of Loneliness is on BBC One at 10.35 pm, Thursday, 7 January.

Sheffield Doc/Fest 2015: Kim Longinotto’s Dreamcatcher

June 2, 2015UncategorizedBritish, documentaries, dogwoof, independent production, Longinotto, sheffield doc/fest, Sundancecarolnahra

Twenty minutes into Kim Longinotto’s latest film, Dreamcatcher, which is screening at Sheffield Doc/Fest, a chilling scene takes place. The setting is an after-school club at a Chicago high school, where at-risk teenage girls are being counseled on how to say “No” to boys. As the teenagers munch through copious amounts of junk food, a girl confesses that she was raped at the age of 11 at a friend’s house. Another girl interrupts to tell a story of long-term abuse by a family friend, then another story of abuse follows, each more harrowing than the one before it. It’s astonishing to hear the details of these unreported crimes, and as they quickly pile up, to realize how endemic it is to these girls’ worlds. It’s the sort of scene that stays with you for a very long time.

For anyone familiar with London-based Longinotto’s extraordinary body of work, however, such moments are to be expected. Her subjects often take advantage of the presence of the camera to make their marginalized voices heard. While she is considered an “observational” filmmaker, and avoids interfering in the action while filming, she is well aware that by being there, she very much changes what is taking place. “It’s something that has happened a lot with making films,” she says. “People grab the opportunity to have a witness. It’s not ‘fly-on-the-wall’— a term I hate. You’re going in as someone who is going to make something with them. They feel part of it.”

Having seen most of Longinotto’s films, I point out to the filmmaker that my strongest memory of such a moment was the 8-year-old girl Fouzia in The Day I Will Never Forget (2002), who uses the camera to recite the titular poem, protesting the practice of female genital mutilation.

“Yes, The Day Will Never Forget poem is exactly like that scene; they grab their chance,” Longinotto exclaims. “Students at film school often say, ‘Being a documentary maker, I feel bad that we’re going in and we’re taking advantage of people.’ And I always say, ‘Well, why do you think that? Is it because you’ve been watching reality TV? That’s not the only way of doing it.’ If you are using that analogy, Fouzia completely used me: She told me where to stand, she bullied me into going into her house, and she wanted me there because she knew her mum would listen. So she used me, but I loved being used. We used each other. You wouldn’t even use the word ‘use.’ We were working together.”

Indeed, when Longinotto first met the Chicago teenagers, she encouraged them to take control. “I said to them, ‘Look, this is your film and I really want you to feel good about the film and be part of it. And you will have the film when it’s finished. And we’re doing it together; I’m relying on you. I’m not going to interview any of you. This is your film, so you do whatever you want.'”

Longinotto also showed the girls excerpts from two of her films that feature strong women working to fight abuse: Rough Aunties (2008) and Sisters-in-Law (2005). “They all went very quiet and went off and didn’t say anything, but we all had a bit of a hug because it was quite emotional,” says Longinotto. When it came to filming the girls in the after-school club, Longinotto felt that they had built up a trust that allowed for intimacy: “I knew in that scene, I could go really close and film them. I was half a meter away from them; you can see how closely it was filmed. And there was this real level of trust.”

The in-class confessions came as a surprise to the girls’ mentor, Brenda, who had been running the group for two years and was trying to prevent the girls from being abused, not fully realizing the extent to which they already had been. Brenda is the “dreamcatcher” of the title—a mesmerizing woman who has overcome a horrific life on the streets to devote herself to encouraging girls to do the same. Articulate, impassioned, non-judgemental and utterly focused, Brenda exuded a strength in character that convinced producer Lisa Stevens that hers was a story well worth telling.

Stevens met Brenda through her coworker Stephanie, when producing the feature-length doc Crackhouse USA (2010); Stephanie’s son is currently serving 42 years in prison. Recognizing the strength of both the characters and the story, Stevens nurtured the relationship for several years, ultimately bringing the idea to Teddy Leifer of Rise Films, with whom Longinotto made Rough Aunties (2008). A trailer that Stevens shot of Brenda was integral to convincing Longinotto to come aboard the project. “If I’m being totally honest about it, I thought, ‘A film about prostitutes? Do I really want to do this?'” the filmmaker recalls. “I find films dispiriting, if there’s nothing to hope for or fight for. But when I saw the trailer, and saw her feisty and full of energy and joy—Brenda and Stephanie both are—and that they are actually doing things, they are changing lives, I thought, ‘I really want to do this.'”

Longinotto, Stevens and a sound recordist traveled to Chicago for a ten-week shoot. Dreamcatcher was a far cry from the other US-focused film Longinotto had directed—Rock Wives (1996), which looked at the privileged lives of wives and girlfriends of rock stars. Indeed, she found Chicago to have much in common with Durban, South Africa, the location for Rough Aunties: “The neighborhoods where we were living, the largely white neighborhoods, everything worked, the pavements were nice, the roads were nice, there was lighting,” she recalls. “And then you’d go into the black neighborhoods and a lot of the houses were boarded up. There were actually plants growing out of the middle of the road…It’s surprising because America is the richest country in the world, supposedly. And Chicago is where Obama lives. It takes your breath away.”

Dreamcatcher was edited by Ollie Huddleston, with whom Longinotto has made eight films. When I visited them halfway through the ten-week edit, it was clear, as Longinotto is quick to point out, that they are equal partners in the post-production process. They were working their way through a second viewing of the rushes—an impressively restrained 30 hours. “That’s what’s fantastic for me, because she really shoots very little,” Huddleston says. “And she knows why she shot it and she shot it with a beginning, middle and end-ish in mind—or some idea that you need one.” Longinotto frequently sits back while Huddleston brings his considerable story-making skills to each sequence, their discussion focused on what each scene contributes to the story. They often finish each other’s thoughts, in a shorthand that speaks to the many months they have passed together in close proximity. “I think editing is the bomb. It’s the most important thing,” says Longinotto. “I can’t imagine doing it with anyone else.”

Dreamcatcher follows Brenda in her day job, counseling incarcerated prostitutes, and at night on the streets, as she speaks to women in a roving van, an all-night cafe, or anywhere that can provide a brief respite from the ever watchful pimps. Brenda’s ever-changing array of wigs are testimony to the many facets of her character, as she shifts between champion, motivational speaker, sympathetic ear and confessor. There is nothing that her girls can tell her that she hasn’t seen before, or witnessed herself firsthand, nor seemingly any subject that is off limits. The film is full of revelations.

Like many of Longinotto’s films, Dreamcatcher is a story where many men do not come out well; the Chicago of the film is a world of baby daddies and violent pimps. Homer, the film’s major male character, is a reformed pimp who now works with Brenda as a public speaker, but, rather creepily, says he has few regrets about his past.

Dreamcatcher is an important contribution to Longinotto’s life work documenting the attempts of girls and women to recast themselves in a world dominated by men. It’s a compelling, harrowing and utterly uplifting story of redemption that should have a long life as a resource for those working to help those with lives mired in prostitution and substance abuse.

Longinotto’s hope is that the film, above all, will bring awareness to the inherent hopelessness of criminalizing prostitutes. “I want the film to decriminalize the women—that’s what I want,” she maintains. “And help them when they’re in jail. I don’t feel comfortable with using a film to criminalize anyone. I think films have to be seen in a wider way. It’s about changing a mindset and opening windows and getting people to think more humanely and differently.”

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This article first ran in Documentary Magazine and on my blog in the run up to its Sundance World premiere in January…

Amir Amirani: How I Made ‘We Are Many’

May 12, 2015UncategorizedBertha DocHouse, Curzon Cinemas, documentary, independent production, sheffield doc/fest, We Are Manycarolnahra

February, 2003. Filmmaker Amir Amirani is participating in the Berlinale Talents summit. As the days progress he becomes aware of the momentum building up for a demonstration against the looming war in Iraq. Vehemently opposed to the war, he has a hard time deciding whether to stay in Berlin or return to London to take part in what would be his first political act. In the end, he stays in Berlin, and marches with half a million others. But when he returns to London, and hears about the three million strong London march – the biggest in the city’s history – he is filled with regret for missing that moment in London’s history. Over the next two years, that regret niggles away at him. Eventually the niggle turns into a full blown itch, and he starts reading up on the demonstration, and how many people mobilized around the world to protest. One day, whilst recording a radio programme for the BBC, Amirani has a moment of clarity and realizes what he needed to do is make a film about it.

A decade later, and with the participation of a huge range of subjects including Damon Albarn, John Le Carre, Brian Eno, Danny Glover, Richard Branson, Noam Chomsky, Ken Loach, and Hans Blix, We Are Many is about to get a UK cinema release. It’s a masterfully told, moving story – the film received extended standing ovations when it had its world premiere at Sheffield Doc/Fest. Below Amirani tells me about the long journey he’s been on to make this film.

Amir Amirani: In 2005 I had one of those lightbulb moments, and thought ‘hang on a minute’. The demonstration happened in London; it happened in Berlin; it happened in a few other places. This was a coordinated global day. This must have been the biggest demonstration in history. That is a story.

NEW YORK - FEBRUARY 15: Protesters carry an inflatable globe during an anti-war demonstration February 15, 2003 in New York City. Tens of thousands attended the rally which coincided with peace demonstrations around the world. (Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images) — Preparations for demonstration in NYC: Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images

Carol Nahra: And what were the biggest challenges in the making of it?

AA: The first challenge was piecing the story together because no one had done it before. So I had to track down the activists and meet them here. But it was global – it happened in 72 countries; thirty million people took part. How do I find my characters? How do I piece together the background of how this day happened? That took nearly four years… I ended up filming in seven countries. The challenges were finding the people, piecing the stories together, hearing whose idea was it, how did the idea spread, who were the protagonists in each of those countries. Then doing lots and lots of research, going and meeting those people, writing treatment and so on. But also I had no money at this stage.

CN: That’s what I was wondering.

AA: Between 2006 and 2011, I wasn’t working full time on the project. So over those four or five years I basically had to supplement my living to pay my bills. I had to remortgage three times. In 2010, I pitched it around a few places. It was Best International Project showcased at Sunnyside of the Doc. Lots of interest, no money. From 2011 I thought I’d do Kickstarter campaign. The money came through in the beginning of 2012.

CN: How much did you make?

AA: $92,000. At the time it didn’t exist here – it was only in America. I had to get a fiscal sponsor over there. It ended up being £52,000…Also, Stephen Fry tweeted the Kickstarter campaign. And then (comedian) Omid Djalili matched what I raised on Kickstarter.

CN: What did you spend the money on?

AA: I paid myself a smidge from that to just start living. With the Kickstarter we had to buy the Avid kit. I knew immediately we wouldn’t be able to hire an edit suite or Avid equipment. So we bought the kit. I had to make the £50,000 on Kickstarter stretch as far as it possibly could, until Omid’s money came through. That has been the pattern ever since: money would come through, we’d spend it, it would run out, until another investor came along. The budget has ended up being a little over £500,000. With the true value probably over a million.

2014 Sheffield Documentary Festival DocFest — Executive Producer Omid Djalili at world premiere at Sheffield Doc/Fest

CN: You were aiming for the 10 year anniversary of the demonstration. I saw you when you had missed that and you were quite low.

AA: That was a key moment. When we didn’t make the anniversary we had completely run out of money at that time. And we had missed the deadline. And on top of that, we didn’t know where to turn next. For two months I couldn’t do anything. Then one of the investors came through with a bit more money and we were able to finish it.

CN: What are you most proud of in this whole journey you’ve been on?

AA: That I didn’t give up – because of the number of times I was close to throwing in the towel. Because financially it was a disaster. It’s taken many years of my life. But I’m very proud of the film. I’m very proud that I didn’t give up and I was able to tell the story.

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On May 21 We Are Many screens at 100 cinemas throughout the UK. Post screening there will be a satellite event broadcast from Curzon Mayfair, London with Jon Snow in discussion with Amirani, Djalili, convenor of the Stop The War Coalition Lindsey German, professor of international law at UCL Philippe Sands and actor Greg Wise. The film will then have a limited UK release.

Fixed Rig Focus: The Exec

January 12, 2015InterviewBritish, Channel 4, documentary, fixed rig, independent productioncarolnahra

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.

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.

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.