‘Writer’s documentary’ wins jury prize at Sundance for film shot on HDV

First-time but well-known documentarian Sebastian Junger, along with photojournalist Tim Hetherington, won the jury award for Best U.S, Documentary for “Restrepo,” besting a lineup that included Academy Award winners Davis Guggenheim and Alex Gibney (although Guggenheim’s film, “Waiting for Superman,” won the audience award). Junger is well-known as a writer, most prominently for “The Perfect Storm.”

Sebastian Junger and Tim Hetherington

The film, about a military unit fighting in Iraq, was done very simply in the face of some more-heavily funded competition. In an interview with Movieline.com, Junger described it this way:

Tim obviously is a still photographer, I’m a writer, and we decided to make a documentary, so we both had a video camera that we used continually. Some trips I was there by myself, some trips Tim was.

In other words, about as simple as it gets. While documentarians keep ranting about the RED and other pricey equipment, these guys shot in HDV, according to Junger:

It was a Sony V1, Tim shot on a Z1. For the most part, I held it at chest-level, autofocus, auto everything. One of the great things Tim told me was, “Hold the camera for ten seconds on everything.” Because we’d get into firefights, and the camera would go everywhere my head did. The footage was totally useless.

Tape! And for good reason – it remains a storage medium that is well suited to long stretches without a chance to get to a workstation for transfers from solid-state memory. A dozen tapes in a bag (and a bunch of batteries) provides lots of opportunity to record.

Sony V1u HDV camcorder

The news on “Restrepo” should be very encouraging to documentary filmmakers for this reason: Because a writer who had to be told how to use the camcorder has won Sundance, based on the ability to tell what is said to be a haunting story about men at war, something far beyond what TV-news people ever seem to get. One of the great books out of the Vietnam War was Michael Herr’s dispatches, a collection of deeply psychedelic pieces he wrote for Rolling Stone; we’ve thought of “Gunner Palace” as that representation of the war in Iraq. Many may want to add this one to that list. Storytelling, not expensive technology, is the key ingredient of good documentary filmmaking.

It’s also an interesting story of working in multimedia. Junger will publish a book out of this project, and Hetherington already won an important still-photo prize. The World Press Photo of the Year Award, for this work. In the interview, he said he used a separate camera for the stills.

I had two D-Rings, and on one I had the stills camera and on one I had the video camera. Sometimes it was a crazy kind of Western where I’m shooting like this. [He draws both hands.]