Silvia Constantinescu:On that Friday at Astra Film Festival

On that Friday at Astra Film Festival about Documentary…

Here we are in Sibiu, at Astra Film Festival, in a high ceiling, wooden floor, blue ceramic stove room with a big projection screen. Together for the workshop. In the air, like a haze, floats some last night’s booze perfume that meets this morning coffee smell.
We are filling the air of the room with air from our lungs, air that kept trapped inside the culture we were born in. Some of us are living in different countries than we were born. But even better, carrying two different cultures makes your lung air richer!
We were shaping the present of the room that became us, filmmakers. We were there Erasmus students, teachers and Tue Steen Müller. On Documentary.

Tue starts to introduce himself, we introduce ourselves. We start to connect. He speaks out his vulnerabilities and so we are relaxed about ours. Then we start our journey: What is documentary?! Each of us writes down three words, we join them on the screen. It’s basically us on the big screen: is this the documentary?!

life (x12), discovery (x2), observation (x2), drama (x2), authenticity (x2), real (x2), story (x2), unknown (x2), perspective, color, archiving, creative, live, laugh, love, culture, impact, passion, feelings, unexpected, subjective, slice, document, events, perspectives, understanding), honesty, emotions, portrait, challenge, truthful, focus, association, fragment, truth, lies, aesthetics, human, attention, truthiness, testimony, subject,, perspective, reality, sentiment, opportunity, ability, hope, fear, learn, experience, challenges, non-fiction, unfiltered, honest, alchemy, reality, emotion, poetry, subtexts, living life, unnoticed, details, emotion, essence, unintentional, raw

There is always to be felt a tension between strong concepts like real versus perception, between truth and subjective, hope and fear, perspectives and raw. There will always be emotion, poetry, love, feelings, story, drama. And all made with focus, presence, alchemy. On top will be color, aesthetics, laugh, culture, challenges. To be archived.

It’s all about Life. Twelve of us wrote Life. Maybe because the Documentary as a whole is build on Life itself. Co-dependent on Life. Depicting Life. Life as a daily routine or life as it’s greatest and sometimes unbelievable grandeur.

Observation, Drama, Real, Story, Unknown. In a way, all debates lead to the same question: is Documentary a real observer? Can we be truthful in telling a story? How can one succeed in transferring The Real into Drama? Or the drama refers to the storytelling and then, the Story that takes shape by filming and editing is the Documentary. What we know is the Unknown that lives in each and every process of documenting, storytelling and making a Documentary.

Back to our workshop, on the big screen there were some moments from Sergey Dvortsevoy’s Paradise/Happiness. As we were watching it in the darkness, we started to relate and at a point we all laughed when we saw on the screen the kid eating and falling asleep. And it all seemed clear! This is it then! Hearts united, cultures meet, minds are melting into hearts. This perfect moment of unity in front of another human being that existed in a certain time and place. We were in the search for the documentary and the documentary was searching in us.

I am facing two editorial options: to write my own opinion on documentary in this essay or to try and be the voice of what resulted in the class room today from our interaction. So I started to write choosing the second position. But something keeps trying to get out of me: through my ears, my nostrils: my own ideas. What do i think on documentary actually. My self, my voice, my identity. Me. Then I choose to write my own ideas.

This is also my train of thoughts in the editing room too, when I am facing minutes and hours of documentary material. Do I tell the story as I found it? Or the story created in my head before the filming process? Or the story that I lived during the filming?

In my working space i have a quote written in big letters, that has been there on top of my mind since i have started to work on documentaries: „The Only Film is in the Dailies” (Michael Rabiger). No matter what i have experienced during the process, no matter what my projections were about the subject and her story there will always be the dailies (and the new me in the edit room) that will create the story. Piece by piece.

The subjects have to tell the world something about them. All do. I do. So I start editing with this in mind, to respect the subject’s points of view. But then I cut, i put together and I remix and there is me, sewed in between and underneath my subject’s story. Her story. my story. hopefully as many people’s story. Does this make it less of a documentary or is this the core of it? Actually, I was there with the camera. does this make the documentary less of a slice of life? It was life then, on that moment. Presence.

I come from fiction. I grew up, literally, on set and everything fiction. Editing fiction is vast. But first time I felt a massive amount of possibilities was in the editing room with a documentary material. I felt like I was picking sand from a pile. By just raising my hands, I was separating an amount of sand from the rest: it has a certain shape, weight, meaning. Then I put this precise amount of sand, this scene, back in the pile of sand and I can’t see it anymore. It’s again all possibilities. And I pick again, with same hands, another scene but there is another shape, another weight. From same sand. I dare to say it’s infinite.

My guts choose for me. I pick up sand and put it back until my emotions take over, my mind melts into my heart and my heart says: this is it. And then it’s my truth. Authenticity, this is for me, when the mind and heart are in perfect sync. Then I feel authentic and everything I do is like so. And it’s ok if it’s not your truth. I only hope it get’s to your heart. And then we all win: my character, myself and you. Because we connect. and for a moment we all are in the moment as one.

In her essay Against Interpretation, Susan Sontag wrote: „Transparence is the highest, most liberating value in art – and in criticism (…) Transparence means experiencing the luminousness of the thing in itself, of things being what they are.“

So how about live a little. How about stop putting form again and again in front of the content. Of course form exist, of course structure keeps the house from falling. But come and sit and start watching the next documentary with your heart, not your mind. Leave the mind to rest a bit and let yourself connect to other worlds, to other Selfs!

life, discovery, observation, drama, authenticity, real, story, unknown, perspective, colour, archiving, creative, live, laugh, love, culture, impact, passion, feelings, unexpected, subjective, slice, document, events, perspectives, understanding), honesty, emotions, portrait, challenge, truthful,, focus, fascination, fragment, truth, lies, aesthetics, human, attention, truthiness, testimony, subject,, perspective, reality, sentiment, opportunity, ability, hope, fear, learn, experience, challenges, non-fiction, unfiltered, honest, alchemy, reality,emotion, poetry, subtexts, living life, unnoticed, details, emotion, essence, unintentional, raw.