Back in Mexico City after a week of great films and impossibly blue oceans.
“The Man Who Lived in a Shoe”, our feature-length doc was in competition.
Had a ball, and a very fun screening–full house and a moving Q&A that lasted almost an hour.
This, here, is an article in Mexican press that recounts that night in Playa del Carmen.
TRUE / VISIONS:
EL DOCUMENTAL CREATIVO
UN TALLER DE ROSS MCDONNELL PARA TÓXICO LAB
14 – 17 de febrero / 11.30 am – 6pm
Ross McDonnell. Cineasta y fotógrafo irlandés cuyo trabajo atraviesa los mundos del documental, el reportaje y la ficción. Ha ganado varios importantes premios, incluyendo el First appearance Award del IDFA por su pelÃcula Colony, dos nominaciones del Irish Academy Award (IFTA) y varias becas del Irish Arts Council, the Jerome Fountation y el San Francisco Film Society. Como cinefotógrafo Ross ha collaborado con reconocidos directores de cine independiente, incluyendo Alex Gibney (ganador del Óscar), Kirsten Sheriden y John Carney. Sus fotografÃas han sido publicadas en The New York Times, Time Magazine, Art in America, Washington Post, Observer y Esquire, entre otros, y ha sido exhibido en museos y galerÃas internacionalmente. Recientemente Thom Powers—“Mr. Documentaryâ€, programador del TIFF– nombró a Colony como uno de los mejores 20 documentales de los últimos cinco años.
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En este taller de cuatro dÃas se explorarán las formas y posibilidades del documental creativo. Ross hablará acerca de técnicas narrativas y sobre diversas formas de acercarse a eso que llamamos realidad. El sonido y la imagen jugarán un papel muy importante–asà como la mirada subjetiva–ya que su forma de trabajar, como fotógrafo y también como director, está caracterizada por poner en tensión constante a hechos reales con una hiperactiva sensibilidad estética.
Además Ross hablará a fondo de cómo lograr resultados exponenciales con bajos presupuestos y micro-equipos: “Colonyâ€, su primer largometraje, fue hecho por un equipo de sólo dos personas de principio a fin; sin embargo, después de estrenarse en el Festival Internacional de Cine de Toronto, fue aclamado como uno de los documentales mejor realizados de ese año.
Dados sus comienzos como fotógrafo y el hecho de que la mayorÃa de sus documentales los ha realizado con una Canon 5D, este taller se recomienda tanto para cineastas como para fotógrafos y artistas visuales interesados en ahondar en las posibilidades de la estética documental y su potencial creativo.
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“Colony is the most aesthetically beautiful documentary of the season, as well as one of the most urgent and intelligent†-John Anderson, Variety
“We admire some documentaries for their artistry and others for their urgency. Rarely do we see a film that combines both those qualities as impressively as this debut by directors Ross McDonnell and Carter Gunn. Their unlikely topic is the world of honeybee keepers during the on-going crisis of “colony collapse disorder.” Beautifully photographed by McDonnell and skillfully edited by Gunn, their film “Colony†follows several American beekeepers over the course of eighteen months as the country’s economy spirals downward.”
-Thom Powers, TIFF Programmer
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El costo del taller es de $2,250 pesos.
Selección por portafolio.
Cupo limitado.
Interesados favor de mandar una breve bio y links a trabajo a
info@toxicocultura.com.
Les recomendamos escribir lo antes posible porque los talleres de Tóxico se llenan muy rápido.
Gabriella Gómez-Mont
0445521719574
(Y gracias a Taxidermie y a The Lift por el apoyo)
Yes. News just out. We are soon off to the Guadalajara Film Festival–considered one of the most important showcases for Latin American Films–with our Man and his shoe.
After the break you will find the complete list of selected films.
(I am specially eager to see the new films by Juan Carlos Rulfo and Everardo Gonzalez;Â two of Mexico’s best doc filmmakers, who are also in competition.)
Yep. Bernard is in town once again. But this time he is not only descending for tacos, but actually back in Mexico for good, after many years of living in NYC.
Which makes me very happy indeed. So as part of my own personal celebration, I am reposting a blog entry I wrote in Feb 2010 about a VBS.tv episode that Bernardo and I did together.
Enjoy.
(Y bienvenido señor!)
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Some months ago, I got a call from Bernardo Loyola–senior editor at VBS, (plus DP, occasional producer, also director and now a dear friend who brings gifts in the form of chocolates with truffle oil and sea salt when he comes to visit Mexico City).
He had just read an article of mine that was published in Vice Magazine, which started off describing a certain amusement park in a certain indigenous town:
(“There is a certain amusement park in Alberto Town, in the Mexican state of Hidalgo. It is run by hñahñu Indians. There, instead of the usual merry-go-round or what not, amusement takes a different turn: one can pretend for a couple of hours to be an illegal immigrant trying to get across the border. You will be chased for 18 kilometers; there will be shots, barbed-wire fences, cactuses, sirens, shouting, running for cover and even a theatrical death or two: all for 25 bucks a head. It is a simulacrum of the “torturous travails of a ‘mojado’ crossing the border, with educational objectivesâ€, the organizers have explained several times. Non withstanding its educational and entertainment value “for the whole family, sometimes people even bring babies, like in real lifeâ€, the amusement park has been criticized by some as so-called training grounds for people who are truly planning to get across the border; by others for treating lightly the terrifying ordeal that real immigrants go through, in search for something a lot more basic than the American dream: just plain old food on the table and a roof over their families heads.
The idea for the theme park—even if it is in central Mexico, far from the real border– was not gratuitous. The town’s number of inhabitants dwindled to a little over two hundred (compared to an average of two thousand in former years) because their population started immigrating to the USA. So a council was formed and they decided upon a strategy: to gather stories of people who have been there and done that, all while reviving an ecological park and guaranteeing steady income for their townsmen so they would no longer feel the need to cross the border; only pretend to everyday. Almost 80 towns-people work there, don their police uniforms or become masked coyotes for the tourists as soon as the sun comes down, so they can imagine what the real thing is like.”)
So, yes, Bernardo had read this, and was calling from New York with a proposal: that we travel together to Alberto and do a 30 minute documentary for VBS.
And so we did. We ran in the dark for a few hours, huddled beneath the bushes,  hopped on ‘Border Patrol’ trucks with wailing sirens, heard stories of real crossings, and all the time our feelings verged madly between enjoying the surreality of it all and quietly pondering the complex social scenario at our northern border–so palpably visible in this small town–, mulling over questions with no easy answers. Bernardo, Rodrigo Teie (who assisted us with an additional camera) and I where in a thoughtful mood on our drive back to Mexico City.
No easy answers, no. But creative ones in Alberto: that, for sure.
Click, click click to see the short VBS documentary.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e5b_59mls4M[/youtube]
“The city multiplies man’s power to think, to remember, to educate, to communicate, and so to make possible associations which bridge and bypass nations, cultures. This mixture, this cosmopolitanism, is the chief source of the city’s vitality. And we must enlarge and enrich it as we move towards a new urban form.â€
In 1963, the National Film Board of Canada produced six 27-minute documentaries for a series entitled ‘Mumford On The City’. In this rare surviving footage of the series’ closing titles, Mumford articulates the ideology of urbanism long before it reached its contemporary tipping point and presages essential issues we grapple with today as we try to understand and optimize our cities, from transportation to communication to violent protest.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HNUifH5htTc&feature=player_embedded[/youtube]
Extended trailer for “The Mayor” a documentary film in progress by Carlos Rossini, Emiliano Altuna and Diego Osorno–and all too relevant to the times at hand in Mexico.
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(Emiliano and Carlos were part of the Tóxico Master-Class by Christopher Doyle.)
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“I’ll summarise this. It’s very simple: I think, and I hope that you’ll agree with me, that Mizoguchi, Ozu, Griffith and Chaplin are the greatest documentary directors, and thus the greatest directors of life, of reality. They are the directors who hide things, who close the doors, and you can open them, sometimes. Yet, to open the doors of such films is difficult, dangerous – it’s work. Sometimes when we think that we’re going to show everything, that we make a documentary to show everything, in fact we don’t show anything, we don’t see anything, we’re just scattered…
So, the real directors don’t distinguish between documentary and fiction. Never in my life have I thought: am I making a documentary, am I making a fiction, and what are the ways to make one or the other? They don’t exist. We film life, and the more I close the doors, the more I hinder the spectator from taking pleasure in seeing himself on the screen – because I don’t want that – the more I close the doors, the more I’m going to have the spectator against me, perhaps against the film, but at least he will be, I hope, uncomfortable and at war. That is, he will be in the uneasy situation of the world.”
-Pedro Costa-
(Gracias BenjamÃn Z.)
This here is like an ultrasound: a lil fetus film.
We have two weeks of editing to go. And then we shall see what we shall see…
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sMJ4thppCkk[/youtube]
A fragment of a lesser-known short documentary by Werner Herzog:
take a deep breath before pressing play.
I have been looking for this Frederick Wiseman film for some time now.
This documentary was shot at the Bridgewater State Hospital for the criminally insane, in Massachusetts; it shows inmates inside the asylum, living a harsh reality behind the bars of their own–and the system’s–unreason.
“The movie was both a landmark piece of journalism and a landmark work of art. It made the Massachusetts Correctional Institution at Bridgewater one of the most infamous madhouses in the country, and it is now one of the most celebrated documentaries of the ’60s. It is also notable for two reasons that have nothing to do with its merits. It was the first picture to be directed by Frederick Wiseman, a former law professor who at age 37 was beginning a long series of rich and challenging films. And it is the only movie in U.S. history to be banned for reasons other than obscenity or national security.”
Read an interview with Wiseman here.
And see the movie here or here.
(Gracias Jannike)
Images by Mexican photographer Vida Yovanovich, from the series Soledades Sonoras.
Vida has spent many years traveling around Mexico, photographing women in jail. Her main topics–both in this series and in former work–are abandonment, marginalisation, injustice, courage, vitality and survival.
More here.
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(Vida took the Martin Parr Tóxico Master Class, as well as the one with Christopher Doyle.)
Alarma! es un documental sobre los fotógrafos de nota roja del turno nocturno de la Ciudad de méxico. Bernardo Loyola y representantes del rotativo amarillista estarán presentando el documental el viernes 20 de febrero en Cinemex Insurgentes a las 17hrs.
Es un documental modesto de 50 minutos, con buena música y algo de sangre. Basicamente todo lo hicimos entre dos personas, en 6 dÃas de grabación y con super bajo presupuesto. Inicialmente fue una serie de videos cortos producido para VBS.TV el canal de televisión por internet para el que trabajo, pero decidimos convertirlo en algo que pudieramos proyectar como pelÃcula en algún lado.
La pelÃcula también se proyectara en los siguientes horarios:
Viernes 20 de Febrero CINEMEX Insurgentes 5:00pm
Domingo 22 de Febrero CINEMEX Real 1:00pm
Martes 24 de Febrero CINEMEX Altavista 7:30pm
Sábado 28 de Febrero CINEMEX WTC 9:30pm
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(Tóxico ha hecho un par de proyectos con Bernardo, Vice y VBS.tv. De hecho, pronto noticias sobre un proyecto que hicimos corriendo por la noche entre fronteras imaginarias.)
Robert Crumb es uno de los caricaturistas más reconocidos de nuestro tiempo. Su trabajo se ha vuelto una referencia para el mundo dentro y fuera de la la literatura gráfica.
[googlevideo]http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6091176121929802750[/googlevideo]
Paul Mawhinney nació en Pittsburgh. Durante los últimos años ha logrado acumular lo que se ha convertido en la colección más grande de discos en el mundo. Por razones de salud y dificultades en el mercado de los discos, Paul ahora necesita vender su colección
(Click en la imagen para ver un documental de 8 minutos sobre Paul y sus discos. En inglés.)
(Excerpts of text that follow from Design Observer blog. Post by Michael Beirut.)
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Man on Wire, a new documentary directed by James Marsh, tells the story of Philippe Petit’s 1974 high wire walk between the two towers of the World Trade Center. Petit was a teenager in Paris browsing magazines in a dentist’s office when he saw a rendering of the then-unbuilt World Trade Center. He was electrified. He was already an obsessed magician, juggler, and high wire artist. To an aspiring tightrope walker, the idea of two 110-story towers, side by side, suggested only one thing. Petit drew a line between the image of the two towers. All that remained now was the execution.
Man on Wire’s biggest, most satisfying surprise is seeing what Petit actually did when the moment of truth finally arrived and he stepped out into the void. I have to admit, I’d always assumed that he simply edged his way inch by inch across the expanse between the towers, teeth gritted and knuckles white, finally making it with relief to the other side. Was this is what I expected from past exposure to “death defying” circus acts, where the danger is always exaggerated while the crowd holds its collective breath? Or, more likely, was I simply projecting how I — and, admit it, you — would have attacked the challenge?
“There is no why, ” he said. “When I see three oranges, I juggle; when I see two towers, I walk.
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Take a look at the trailer here.
