Eva Weber: The Solitary Life of Cranes
Sometimes it is easy to express your opinion. Like in this case where I found a text from the film critic at The Guardian, Nick Bradshaw (November 28), that precisely and in much better English than I can perform – praises a beautiful film by Eva Weber, a big talent in British documentary. He saw it at Sheffield Doc/Fest, I saw it on a computer from the dvd that Eva gave me:
”A film that got it all beautifully right was Eva Weber’s 27-minute The Solitary Life of Cranes, which I’d missed at BritDoc, where it won the Best Short Film award. As previously noted, all successful documentaries (Man on Wire, Touching the Void, Fahrenheit 9/11) take us up death-defying heights (the World Trade towers, Siula Grande, the lies of the Bush regime).
Weber’s film is structured as 24 hours in the cabins of construction cranes overseeing London: it’s a city symphony with a bird’s eye view and poet’s soul. Against a delicate soundtrack of machine noises and almost hyper-realistic observed sounds, twenty or so crane drivers discuss what they see and feel from their eerie vantage points: the ebb and flow of the crowds on the streets, the itineraries of office workers and flat dwellers through their windows, the inspiration to ruminate afforded by these silent watch posts. Very simply, the film did what art should do: it opened your eyes.”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/filmblog/2008/nov/28/sheffield-doc-fest
