FILMMAKER SPOTLIGHT: Olga Delane, Director of SIBERIAN LOVE

What does a woman need to be happy and fulfilled? After 20 years of living in Berlin, director Olga Delane journeys back to her roots in a small Siberian village, where she is confronted with traditional views of relationships, life and love.SFF Selection Committee member Shelley Sackett caught up with Delane ahead of SIBERIAN LOVE's New England premiere at Salem Film Fest.

SS: How did you get into filmmaking?

OD: I'm a fashion designer by profession. I worked as a costume assistant after the education in the theater and that was my last job in the team. I was too self-contained, too free and self-determining. These qualities do not bring anything good (unless you want to work alone!). One day, a friend gave me an inspiration — "you come from such interesting country that we do not even know here, look back where you come from, maybe you can work with it?" And so, half a year later I was back in Russia.By then,

I had already lived in Germany for 16 years and really had no relation to my homeland. In Russia, on my first trip, I made a movie with a friend about Krasnokamensk:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HXewb1bfmIg&lc=UgwGVQZ92eUwNW0GXR94AaABAg

Afterwards, when I learned that the shaft-mining workers got better conditions in the shaft after our visit in this city, I was sure - I continue to make films!

SS: How did you get involved with this project?

OD: After the first trip back to the Motherland, I fell in love with the people, scenery and life there. I really wanted to tell the world what I see and experience. I traveled a lot through the area, met many people and had many conversations. And every time I was asked the same questions: "Why are you still not married? Why do not you still have children?" I found it interesting to develop the theme into a film.

SS: Why did you feel compelled to make this film? What about the story ignited a fire in your belly?

OD: I saw how different we are, my protagonists and me. Two planets, in many views. And both planets open to each other and interested. That was the fire that brought this film to life.

SS: What have been the reactions to the film by audiences?

OD: There are no conflicts in the movie. It honestly tells about honest people. They are pure in their answers, actions. Sometimes, maybe, as pure as the kids. If brother goes to his brother with his fists, then it is also very honest in the film. Most people are grateful after the screening and come to me to say that. But they do not know why they are grateful, and I think that's the purity we see in the film. And, of course, Siberia is exotic. For many people Siberia is a Terra Incognita and many want to experience this country somehow. The film gives this possibility.

SS: What do you hope audiences take away from the film?

OD: Love.

SS: What are you looking forward to having your film screened at SFF?

I'm happy about every opportunity to show the movie. We live in a world full of problems and conflicts, looking for happiness that is already there. If we learn to take life as it comes to us, and say thank you to what we have, then we will feel the happiness in ourselves as well. It's really already there. I learned that from my protagonists. You do not need to have teeth in your mouth and no new iPhone to be able to dancing and to singing and enjoying life.  Maybe the viewer sees it after the screening as well.

SS: Have you screened the film in your village? What was the reaction?

OD: I was there last summer and showed the film at the club. And that was the best screening ever!!! So much more laughter and joy than I experienced with any other viewer of the film. Before, the villagers were the strongest critic for me. And so, I passed the exam!

SS: What is your next project?

OD: In the new project, I return to the topic of ecology, as in my first film. Instead of focusing on the mine workers, I will feature the artists of the place. 

SIBERIAN LOVE screens at CinemaSalem on Wednesday, March 28, 2018 at 6pm

FOCUS ON: THE OTHER SIDE OF EVERYTHING

Documentaries of love are the best kind. They foster critical thought without tearing down their subjects. They are capable of inducing good-humored nose-twitching even as the bickering between family members resumes. They take behemoth abstractions like national identity and show you their blood pulse.

THE OTHER SIDE OF EVERYTHING emerges in slow-motion from a fog. It is gorgeous. It spends considerable time watching the buffing of heirloom silver. It hardly leaves the apartment while setting its sights on a critical moment of globalization and state formation for the people of Serbia, once part of Yugoslavia.

Much like its fog-laden and polished-silver beginning, TOSE’s information amasses slowly over time. Director Mila Turajlic’s storytelling is like a cloud growing in density; watching it is like watching the door handle’s tarnish slowly recede to expose the fresh luster of newly collected details. We hear, through the wall, voices and dish sounds from the neighboring apartment, and thus we infer its layout. Similarly, the viewer is stealing glimpses of a most intimate setting and its people; becoming familiar, but always at a remove.

TOSE is a biopic of Srbijanka Turajlic, the director’s mother, a distinguished professor and central figure of the civic protest group Otpor! that deposed Slobodan Milošević from office in 2000. TOSE shows us that Srbijanka remains active as a public figure, but her catalyzing days, she professes, are mostly behind her. We learn that she believes this task now falls to the present generation of young people, just as it did during the uprising of the 90s.

It takes so much skill, discretion, and awareness to strike the right balance between stylistic allure and storytelling--something the much-lauded TOSE does right from the outset. Director Mila Turajlic beautifully weaves extensive archival footage from the time of the anti-NATO and anti-Milošević protests within and alongside present and past recordings of her mother’s speeches, both public and private. Because of its personal subject matter, the internal-made-external dynamic imbues this patchwork media project with a care particular to intimacy.

Among the most poignant moments is the scene in which Professor Turajlic peers directly into the camera and insists that it is the next generation’s turn to find its voice. This is the axis on which the documentary turns--the exploration of the possibility of a voice, the internal made external. We learn that the partition between the two has always been porous, and that it takes self-discipline of a kind not indexable by a census survey to accept and pursue--with an open mind--the unknowns abiding in front of, let alone behind, the wall.

THE OTHER SIDE OF EVERYTHING screens at CinemaSalem on Tuesday, March 27, 2018 at 5:45pm

FILMMAKER SPOTLIGHT: Mark Hayes, Director of SKID ROW MARATHON

Despite its excursions abroad, SKID ROW MARATHON is rooted to place. It names a neighborhood in its title; this neighborhood becomes a metonymy for rock bottom. There are beautiful aerial shots that follow the gridded street patterns on the runners’ routes. We may leave momentarily or, better yet, for good, but Skid Row remains with us. It’s the site of our low points, but it’s also the substrate of our life recovery.

A formal rectilinearity contrasts well with how the events of addiction play out, particularly how progress is seldom made on a straight vector from point A to point B and beyond. Instead, we are shown the loops, hitches, spasms, and outbursts that go along with addiction. The resolutions of one chapter lead to the hard lessons of the next.

There are many scenes in this documentary dedicated to the act of conferring dignity--on oneself, on a stranger, on a loved one. We learn that different people and situations require different methods of this conductive compassion--some may be more self-inclined, but no one is capable of doing it completely solo. Collaboration becomes a survival strategy.

The New England premiere of SKID ROW MARATHON will take place on Monday, March 26 at 6pm at CinemaSalem.  Mark Hayes responded to some questions ahead of the screening via email with SFF Blog contributor Rebecca DeLucia.

RD: How would you say the experience of directing this documentary changed your notions of dignity and its importance to documentary-making?

MH: We were running with the runners for about six weeks before we started filming; we thought it would be better that they get to know us first. If you’re ever in that situation, it’s not something that you share with ease; you don’t want people invading your privacy. So we tried to be careful to build trust with the runners. First we established that bond, became part of the program.

Now, I became aware of one of the runners’ legal status--that he was on parole and may face time in prison for breaching the conditions of parole, a minor crime he had committed. We’d been running together for a month or so, finally I asked him outright: “Hey, what was your [original] crime?” Honestly, I was expecting him to say robbery, or drug possession, but then he said he was on parole for murder, and I was taken aback, to say the least.

It took me several months to get my head around the fact that this person with whom I had become buddies had committed that crime; taken someone’s life. We still ran together, but I would think of his crime every time we were together. This went on for a while, then about a year later, this guy was arrested in violation of his parole. There was a chance he’d had to serve out his life sentence. And I remember when we found out he was back in jail, I couldn’t sleep. It dawned on me that I cared because I had, over the time it took to make this documentary, started to care about him as a person--and I believed at this point that not only is he better off not going to jail, but that also society would be better off not having to fund the life sentence of this person who had reformed himself. Also that I would be better off because he’s my friend! And I saw that he was doing good things, and he was trying to make amends for what he’d done as a young person. And that’s when I realized I had changed. Over time, I realized the documentary had changed me.

RD: So you’re interested in documentary as catharsis?

MH: Oh, definitely.

RD: Did the group dynamic of this film introduce any formal imperatives or political choices?

MH: [Gabi and I] were thinking there are so many issues… there is a whole confluence of factors that contribute to homelessness in Los Angeles. Working in an area such as Skid Row, you never get used to the reality of these thousands of humans living, sleeping, doing everything in the garbage and on the streets. You never get used to it. It stays with you. And we’re done with the project, but we still go there, to the Midnight Mission, to run and celebrate birthdays. Recently, I went there, needed a shot of a sign, and I had to walk about a block or so by myself with a camera, I was literally stepping over bodies ankle-deep in trash.

The political imperative you’re asking about--it’s that this is clearly out of control, and something must be done. Here is Judge Mitchell, he sees this intractable problem: homelessness in LA. He’s not resolving the entire problem--by the time of this documentary’s release, there were 58,000 people living on the street in Los Angeles--but he sees the same thing that everyone else sees, and he’s doing something unique, constructive, and simple:  starting a running club. And he’s changing the lives of the runners. It’s better to be the small part of the solution to a huge problem, than it is to just sit on your hands. Our hope is that people will watch this documentary and take action in their own communities.

RD: The labor of documentary-making is often emotionally fraught, as you have described, and this is a particularly hard portrait of people coming and going. What are some difficulties of conveying this without being didactic or instructive during points of tension? Did you cry at any point during production?

MH: We did cry a few times, when people relapsed. You thought the person you were running with was doing so much better, and then all of a sudden you wouldn’t see them the next week. When one of the runners disappeared, he was back on the street. We went looking for him. When we found him, he looked completely different. I asked, “What happened?” we had seen him a week before, we had just celebrated his one year of sobriety, and when I asked, he looked right at me, hesitated, and said “I got lonely, and I took a drink.” And I just really felt for him. It is just so simple, why he was throwing it all away. That made me cry. What moved me was the Judge and the connections he made, real connections. And that is part of our message: the difference made can be as simple, and as challenging, as becoming a friend; giving someone a chance, and seeing what they do with it.

Next up on their docket, Mark and Gabi hope to produce a romantic comedy based on their own story: meeting in the GDR, falling in love, and leaving together for the US after the demolition of the Berlin Wall in 1989.

SKID ROW MARATHON screens at CinemaSalem on Monday, March 26 at 6pm

FOCUS ON: THE RELUCTANT RADICAL

 THE RELUCTANT RADICAL posits documentary as an extension of activism. It creates from its opening scene an inexorable trajectory towards its climax: climate activist Ken Ward’s boldest direct action yet, in which he and a coordinated group of environmentalists shut down the TransMountain pipeline in 2016. As a result of this action, activists and documentarians alike are arrested and await trial. 

Ward’s narrative is framed by the sobriety of the case brought to the Skagit County Superior Court of Washington state. Defense attorney Ralph Hurvitz, representing Ward, asks the jury to consider the role of civil disobedience--not as a remote hagiography of founding fathers, but as a transformative force in the US today. That the jury, for the sake of privacy, remains anonymous and off-screen lends the documentary a certain urgency; as a viewer, you join the jury of Ward’s peers. TRR thus sharpens the self-consciousness of its viewership through its mode of address, posing the questions: Where do you stand? How do you do it?

Similarly, director Lindsey Grayzel locates the voices of the environmentalists as they are amplified in a bright sea of touch-screens. Here, the documentary filmmaker’s lens is not alone, but surrounded by auto-documentation meant for instantaneous publication on social media platforms. This is another aspect in which the radical’s action is intrinsically connected to the act’s mediation and portrayal. Such reflexivity prompts a host of questions: Does it create a sense of competition for the director? Or how does a director differentiate the intent of social media documentation from the intent of a feature film-in-progress?

Throughout the film, TRR develops the figure of the caretaker (or in Ward’s case, multiple figures): a figure in the activist’s life who may not participate directly in the protest, but whose role as a support agent is equally significant in activism’s equation. In the depiction of Ward’s persona, the human counterweight of the support figure offsets the classically tragic notion of the radical as a fundamentally individual and dissociative figure, while it also sheds light on the social expenses of direct action. Activists are not simply administrators of self-sacrifice; they tend to rely on a network of support in order to effect their political struggle.

When Ward contests the label of ‘radical’ toward the end of TRR, it is more than a show of sheepish humility. For him, the term seems too freighted for the activism he feels is necessary; here, Ward is calling for an asceticism of personal aesthetic. Here and elsewhere in Grayzel’s documentary, action and representation are not disparate but intricately connected, so much so that the act of mediation itself is a political choice, and the question of activism’s discursive reality remains: What do you think, and what will you make of it?

THE RELUCTANT RADICAL screened on Sunday, March 25, 2018 at 7:20pm

FILMMAKER SPOTLIGHT: Erika Cohn, Director of THE JUDGE

The religious Shari’a courts of Islam ban women from adjudicating domestic and family matters. Kholoud Al-Faqih, a criminal lawyer who has drawn the support of a progressive Sheik, challenges over 1,000 years of tradition with her appointment as the first woman judge to sit on a West Bank Palestinian Shari’a court. THE JUDGE follows Kholoud inside and outside the courtroom as she redefines how Shari’a law treats women despite attempts to marginalize and demote her.

SFF Selection Committee member Shelley Sackett caught up with Erika Cohn (SFF special screening IN FOOTBALL WE TRUST) ahead of the film's New England premiere on Sunday, March 25 at 4:50pm at the Peabody Essex Museum.

SS: How did you get into filmmaking?

EC: I grew up in Salt Lake City, UT and started attending the Sundance Film Festival at a young age, where I fell in love with independent film. I deeply felt the power of cinema and craved the feeling of being transported into different worlds/places/cultures for a couple of hours. I was 15 when I made my first film, mentored by a local youth media program in conjunction with the Sundance Institute. At the time, I was struggling with how to self-identify as a non-Mormon, coming from an interfaith family in a city where faith defines who a person is. Film became a catalyst for me to express my frustrations with socio-cultural-religious alienation and to heal intergenerational wounds. After this experience, I became committed to providing a platform for unheard voices to be heard and untold stories to be told.

It's a great privilege to be a storyteller, which comes with tremendous responsibility - which I do not take lightly, and I'm driven to using cinema to move audiences to a more just world.

SS:How did you get involved with this project?

EC: While I was on a shooting hiatus with my last film, IN FOOTBALL WE TRUST, I received a Rotary Ambassadorial Scholarship in Israel/Palestine. There I taught film, mentored local filmmakers, assisted NGOs launch media advocacy projects, and continued my post-graduate research in Islamic feminism at Hebrew University. One day, a dear friend and colleague invited me to attend a Shari’a law reform meeting in Ramallah.

I was welcomed into a large conference room filled with the images of Arafat throughout the years hanging in old picture frames, and seated at a table surrounded by men in tarbooshes (hats that judges and sheikhs wear). Then Judge Kholoud walked in and everyone stood to great her. I was immediately struck by her presence – her confidence – her command of the room. I wanted to know more. Who was this woman? What was her story?

Judge Kholoud and I were introduced at the end of the meeting and I was moved by her charisma and personal story. After spending her first years as an attorney representing women who were survivors of domestic violence, Kholoud felt she could best catalyze change in the Shari’a courts, where familial cases are adjudicated. She then turned to the Shari’a text to prove that women could be judges and began studying for the judicial exams. I remember asking her how she felt about the mistreatment of women under Shari’a…to which she responded, the problem isn’t with the Shari’a, it is with the interpretation (or rather misinterpretation).

Upon learning I was a filmmaker, Kholoud immediately expressed enthusiasm in making a film about her journey. She hoped that sharing her story would inspire other women and girls throughout the Muslim world to pursue leadership roles in their communities, despite cultural and/or traditional norms. Thus, THE JUDGE was born.

I immediately called mentor and Executive Producer, Geralyn Dreyfous to tell her about this encounter who encouraged me to pursue the project and was an invaluable producing partner throughout the journey.

SS:Why did you feel compelled to make this film? What about the story ignited a fire in your belly?

EC: I have always been fascinated with how law is interpreted – how power, economics and/or status can influence implementation. I am captivated by the intersection and tension between religion, culture and identity. I am drawn to narratives about strong women. Kholoud’s story stuck with me and I felt that her experiences might invoke a more nuanced understanding of Shari’a, challenge rapidly increasing global Islamophobia and highlight positive advancements for women by women in the Middle East, which are often uncovered or ignored by mainstream media.

SS:What have the reactions to the film by audiences?

EC: We screened the film at numerous film festivals around the world, where audiences have been fascinated with Kholoud's journey and inspired by her courage, in addition to being captivated by the verité courtroom scenes in an environment that most audiences viewers would never be privy too.

SS:What do you hope audiences take away from the film?

EC: Judge Kholoud’s resilience and determination greatly impacted our entire team and will encourage others around the world to persevere through adversity – in asserting legal rights, achieving gender justice and challenging cultural and traditional norms. I believe her story reflects a collective struggle for women’s control over their bodies, economic welfare, custodial rights, and marital status. I hope THE JUDGE leaves viewers with a greater insight into Shari’a law and strong imagery of powerful Muslim women, while illuminating some of the universal conflicts in the domestic life of Palestine.

SS: Has there been any reaction in Palestine?

EC: We hope to screen the film in Palestine soon.

SS: What is your next project?

EC: I'm currently in development with my first fiction feature and in production with feature-documentary, BELLY OF THE BEAST, which intimately chronicles the journey of women fighting reproductive injustice in their communities.

SS: Anything you'd like to add?

EC: After SFF, THE JUDGE will open theatrically in numerous cities across the U.S. including NYC, LA, San Francisco, Berkeley, Seattle, DC, Boston, Salt Lake City, Chicago and Detroit among others. Later this fall the film will be broadcast on PBS's "Independent Lens" series.