Tutoring at CoPro and Storydoc
Below, in the previous posting, you get text and links to discover what is CoPro, Ramallah.doc and Storydoc. This posting is more a kind of mix of info and gonzo/gossip. First about the CoPro training in Tel Aviv, where a tutor slot was 40 minutes. To get an impression of the Israeli filmmakers who you meet and with whom you discuss their written exposés and eventual visual material, which can be a trailer/teaser or edited scenes or rough footage. Of course it is limited how deep you can go with that time, but as there were three tutors doing the job, the filmmakers hopefully got a lot of input to take home for the next phase, which is the preparation for the real pitch at the CoPro at the end of May.
Editor and director Erez Laufer, who also runs the Archidoc in Paris as main tutor, Iikka Vehkalahti, visiting professor at Tampere University for almost a year (he goes back to YLE in August) and I were the ones to comment on the projects. Vehkalahti was next door to me at the Goethe Institute in Tel Aviv, and told me that – true or not, it is a good story – he started his session by asking the filmmakers, which animal they were, and which animal they would like to be!!! My response when they came to my session was often, ”ah, you have already been to the Zoo”. The days in Tel Aviv were organised perfectly by CoPro founder and manager, Orna Yarmut, assisted by Mia Webb
The same Vehkalahti came up with a great idea in the workshop in Ramallah: Why not make a festival of films shot in Ramallah, starting from 60’es? The population living here has not yet seen these films, and they should of course! The idea is now in development through Storydoc President Kostas Spiropoulos in collaboration with local filmmakers.
Thursday afternoon in the streets of Ramallah. A man who looks totally like Arafat stops EDN’s Mikael Opstrup: Hello, you look like Jimmy Carter. For documentation a photo is taken by filmmaker and professor Emma Davie from Scotland, with whom I had the pleasure to tutor group sessions in Ramallah. The programme in Ramallah lasted three days, including most of the time group work on the film projects presented and on presentation. The opening day including a lecture by Mikael Jimmy Carter Opstrup on Pitching, a presentation of arte by Elisabeth Hultén from arte France, and an intervention by Vehkalahti on what it means to be a commissioning editor. All held together by Palestinian filmmaker George Khleifi.
Photo will come documenting the moment of Jimmy Carter and Arafat meeting each other in a street in Ramallah.
