RIIFF in China at the Guangzhou Documentary Film Festival: Day Five

By Nicholas Carr

Our final day here was a perfect split between Guangzhou sightseeing and festival programming.  This morning, I ventured into Guangzhou proper to catch up on my tourist duties, including Shamian Island (about the size of a football field, and for centuries, the only place in China where Europeans were allowed to settle), The Temple of the Six Banyans, along with many other gems of the municipality.

Guangzhou is increasingly revealing itself to be an eminently lovely city (it didn’t hurt that today was the first day of sunshine all week), and the perambulations, while taxing, were superbly educational and enjoyable.

When I finally returned to the festival grounds, there was a series of delightful talks already in progress.  The focus of these talk were “docu-animation & docu-drama,” which appropriately discussed the applications of both animation and re-enactment in documentary.  As with any other fundamental debate in documentary, there were proponents for and against.  However, the discourse was designed to provoke thought in the film-maker, and in that, was a resounding success.

Finally, a tour of local industrial developments led seamlessly into the closing night festivities at a nearby golf club (my personal favorite of the night was the midnight screening of experimental short “Loop Loop” on the big screen. A perfect cherry on top of the rich sundae that was GZDOC09). [Editor's Note: "Loop Loop" premiere at RIIFF in August 2009 and was part of a package of films that the Festival provided to GZDOC for screening.]

Tomorrow, we depart China at 5:00 p.m., and arrive in New York thirty-five minutes later.  [Editor's Note: this is based on different time zones, not actual travel time.] Thank you so much for tuning in, and congratulations to both RIIFF and GZDOC in another successful season of fruitful cooperation.

About the Author:

Nicholas Carr is a writer, musician and artist. He has been arts reporter, contributor and editor for The Ithaca Times, Popcorn Youth, and SFMagazine respectively. He is a former intern of the Rhode Island International Film Festival and maintains a close affiliation. He holds a Bachelors degree in Speech Communication from Ithaca College, where he has spent the last several years curating and producing visual, musical, and video-arts installations.

Adam Ross on “Cash Crop”

Ross directed the film, his second, on the booming marijuana business in California.

Adam Ross, director of “Cash Crop” from DocumentaryTech on Vimeo.

“Cash Crop”: deep access, quick shooting, and “whether you’re paranoid enough”

When Adam Ross decided to document the not-insignificant marijuana-growing industry in California, he was aware that the key to the project was getting access. He wanted to be neutral, but go deeply into a world that is largely unseen. With his film “Cash Crop,” a documentary that premiered at the Maui Film Festival and screened at the Rhode Island International Film Festival in August, he has brought forth the fruits of two years out in the weeds.
“Ross, long a musician, was a so-called “gun-for-hire guitar player” who got into film by that route. In 2003, he was asked to score his first film , a feature length doc, David C. Kneiss Jr.’s “Khe Sanh: A Walk in the Clouds.”

I loved it. Years ago I had studied film at NYU, before studying at the Berklee College of Music in Boston. At that time it was too much “Hurry Up and Wait,” the film thing; I stuck to guitar. But now with the digital world of filmmaking and the whole change in distribution, and what you can, it inspired me.

Ross’s first film premiered in 2005. “Between The Bridges,” about the art colony in the shadows of the bridges into Brooklyn, won best documentary feature at Malibu Film festival over “Mad Hot Ballroom.” That success spurred him to launch on two new film projects, one of which is “Cash Crop.”

This is not an advocacy piece. It’s just showing people what’s there. I conceived of it and designed it as a road movie. From Tijuana to the Oregon border, it goes deeper into what’s referred to as “The Emerald Triangle,” where it all comes from. But I discovered the heart of the American Dream there, and a lot of core American values and issues.

Ross says he brought the film east with the notion that it contrasts with what’s happening with Madoff and the subprime lending crisis with what’s America’s biggest cash crop, which goes back for generations. It started as a modest project.

I was going to do a small film – I knew people who were growers – but a buddy of mine from Northern California who said, “No, let’s do the big picture,” and he became my partner in Sierra Films. He had hookups with growers and other people up north, and I had some hookups with people in Southern California.

Getting access to growers and DEA agents and Mexican mafia was both “thrilling and exhilarating, but also exhausting. I was simultaneously filming an inner-city documentary at Erasmus High School in Brooklyn.” He said he approached film knowing that he wanted to convince the growers that he was telling their story fairly, and also see them at work in their element.

My films are about access. They’re not Ken Burnsian, researched looks back. They deal with the present but they’re not Michael Moore-ish polemics. It was intense when I think back. From day to day, I wouldn’t tell my crew where we were filming – it was on a need-to-know basis. I had two or three guys who couldn’t handle that. You’d go into these areas, and as they say up there “It’s not whether or not you’re paranoid, it’s whether or not you’re paranoid enough.” So we’d get up to these areas, and if a cameraman got a little twitchy, well, you have to be able to hang with people. They’re inviting you into their lives, and a lot of people are on camera, sometimes masked, but they believe in what they’re doing. And I mean all sides: Cops, growers, people who might be considered commercial growers. We were meeting guys packing guns and doing a million dollars in business, saying, “Well, you’re cool, because if you weren’t cool you wouldn’t be standing here…”

The risk was there on all sides, and Ross says it cost him at times.

I was in on a bust, meaning I showed up to film and eight minutes later six cop cars showed up, and everybody hightailed it. There was a price on my head then because everybody thought I was DEA, and it blew a lot of work I had done up to then, and I shoveled my way out of a lot of that.

He also came up with a simple approach to making a good documentary.

I developed a manual, which I think is great for all filmmakers. I have two rules. The first rule is “Don’t F— Up.” Be professional, whether you’re the camera guy or the sound guy or whatever. You might be tweaking out; somebody might have slipped you a brownie, whatever… just don’t F— Up. Rule Number Two is just be cool with everyone. If you follow those two rules, you’ve pretty much nailed it.

“The way I filmed,” he says, “you could say this was an indie filmed in true guerilla style. My only framework for a film crew is an indie-rock band. That means it’s sort of backwards to the typical or traditional style of filmmaking. I didn’t bring on producers until much later on. I didn’t need people sitting around handing me Post-It notes, I needed to get out and start shooting. And while a lot of documentaries are shot in a really scripted way – find a story, go out and set up all these interviews, then go find background footage and put in the B-roll. We scouted and shot at the same time, because if we went and met somebody, then next week that person could have been arrested, or the cops could have come in and cut all the distributor cables and filled the gas tanks with milk. Or sometimes everybody was just gone.

“I’m dead against the whole talking-head kind of thing. You do something, even cooking dinner, and you realize after a while you have an individual style of doing things. For me, as a musician, the peak experience is when the music is going through you. I’m against any kind of voice-over narration. I don’t even like titles, where it kicks in a left-brain experience for the viewer where they have to read and remember who this person is. I try to humanize things. I didn’t want to do any voyeuristic, meth-lab kind of shooting; I wanted it to look bucolic.” He used what he calls “the poor man’s crane,” shooting over the California landscape from a Ferris Wheel.

We had to be super-streamlined. I rely a lot on friends who were still photographers. For them, it’s exciting to go and shoot video, and for a lot of traditional “cameramen,” there’s this kind of Teamster mentality of, “It’s time to throw down the camera and go have a cigarette.” To find someone who’s visually inspired with light, is what it’s all about.

“The beauty of it is what you can do now with the technology, whether you go with a Sony or Canon or whatever. I insisted on dropping the money on technology whether I had to sleep on a floor somewhere. We shot a lot with Varicam, which goes toward proprietary tape, Fujinon prime lenses and whatever it took to make it look like a super high-end movie. We mostly rented that stuff, because it’s so expensive. It’s either at the back end, where you have to digitize the tapes, having a guy up doing digital transfers until three in the morning, or on the front end, where you have to be ready to shoot at seven in the morning.

“We found that Canons, Sonys and Panasonics each have different looks, and we chose to use the Panasonic HVX200, because it’s small and its look meshes well with the Varicam which is basically a Panasonic (ed. Note: Think of it as Lexus to a Toyota…). When we were getting into some of those situations we didn’t have time for adjusting, we just had to fly by the seats of our pants.

“The other big thing was audio. People are forgiving what they see on the screen, but if you have lousy audio… I spent a lot of money cleaning up the audio and making it pristine.

“I put money into having good microphones. Lavs were great, but you need to have someone with headphones on making sure you’re not getting extraneous noise.

“For music, we initially tried to go after a lot of licensing, but I ended up doing all the music myself.”

Now the task is to get the film out to viewers, and the film festival circuit is the beginning.

“We’ve got the means of production now, but what we need to find is the means of distribution. That’s the issue that everybody’s wrestling with in the film industry. The film industry is having their Napster moment right now. That’s our next challenge.”

Sarah Klein’s “The Good Mother” uses simple but innovative approaches

In the opening moments of Sarah Klein’s The Good Mother, we see a woman applying her makeup as she stares directly into the lens of the camera, talking all the while. Then we see another, followed by snippets of a variety of women fluffing their hair, checking their lipstick and otherwise primping as they talk about the upcoming Mother Of The Year competition, the binding event of Klein’s 70-minute film that explores the notion of motherhood as it is now.

It also breaks the standard subject-talking-to-interviewer interaction so embedded in documentary films. Instead, each subject seems taken up in the task of cosmetics, speaking to someone – maybe even someone behind her, or maybe simply to herself.

The way Klein gets that effect is remarkably simple, and it’s reminiscent of another film in that the low-tech solution can be the best one. I read how in Julian Schnabel’s The Diving Bell and The Butterfly, the director shot the paralyzed Jean-Dominique Bauby’s point of view (and its blurred-edged perspective of a man in a hospital bed) by shooting at a 45-degree angle off a mirror (cinematographer Janusz Kaminski also used a bellows lens to play with focus and depth). Klein, to get her arresting effect, shot through a silvered glass, the two-way mirror in which the subject sees only herself while the camera records her actions.

We set up this mirror in our hotel room. We set up lights and we had the camera hidden behind the mirror. We invited a handful of the women to come up and put their makeup on for us. They knew the camera was there, but they couldn’t see it. I didn’t know if this was going to look artificial; I didn’t know if these women were going to relax into it. But the minute they got in front of the mirror, they were in it.

It’s simple but effective, and a way that signals to the viewer that the view on this trip will be a bit different. Klein will eventually let the action unfold at the competition itself, but the buildup to that includes an interview with the Nebraska mother as she sits in a booth in a convenience store/cafe. Klein used the comings and goings of customers and the beeping of the cash register as effects in the woman’s prosaic life, a contrast to the honor the competition seeks to endow.

Indeed, each the featured women is shot in portrait in front of her house. In the background, the husband and child or children are on either side, a kind of triangulation of home, spouse and offspring. Klein did not shoot these herself, but rather hired crews in those locales to shoot them.

I sent five crews out with a production manual. I asked specifically for this shot. I wanted it center-framed, I wanted it right in front of their houses. It didn’t always work out that way because sometimes the shooter thought something else looked better. But the neat thing is that each night after different crews had finished that shot, we got each crew to send emails (with the shot) to the other crews, so each got to see what the other DPs had done. Some people said, “I didn’t get it right; I’m going to do it again, because clearly I see what you guys really want.

Part of that uniformity also came through using similar format, with the primary camera being a Panasonic HVX200, and the look Klein achieved in the film speaks to that camera’s capabilities. Primary colors seem to fit the lives of these mothers.

While the film Klein judiciously avoided making any judgments, Klein had to be mindful that a documentary focusing on a competition can smack of reality-show material if handled poorly. But she wasn’t looking for big moments of conflict, buth rather smaller ones of circumspection and perspective.

These are people who are struggling, who are working hard, who are trying to raise families, and you have to approach it with an open mind and hear what they’re trying to say. I think you can hear it in the interviews.

The film played at the MountainFilm festival in May, and at The Rhode Island International Film Festival in August. Funding for the film, which had a budget of “about $400,000, or maybe the high 300s.” She said she went into the project hoping to raise double that amount.

I think you should always shoot higher. You should go into it believing it’s a big film – that it’s a great topic, that it should get money – “BBC, you should be on board; HBO, you should be on board…” Get that going early. Don’t say, “Oh, I’m going to make it for $150,000 and starve for two years.” I have a camera package and an edit suite, and if I got people together who worked for free, and shot in a more local setting, you can make films for almost nothing. I have some other projects where there are festivals I really like, where I might be doing a short I won’t make money on, just to be part of that.

The financing came from a French company, Compagnie des Phares et Balises.

In the beginning, the interest was “Oh, these crazy American mothers. ” But at the end of the day, I think it’s a portrait of America, and that’s what the commissioning editors saw once they viewed the footage. We’ve actually sold this film in France and Germany and Finland and Belgium and Israel and Greece. It’s crazy. But I haven’t sold it in the U.S.