The Women of Below Her Mouth

This Friday, February 10th BELOW HER MOUTH opens in Canadian theatres. I’ve got to take this opportunity to thank my crew for their skill, hard work and sensitivity on set, as well as for their endlessly positive spirits.

I don’t take nearly enough pictures on set and I wish I had photos of you doing your thing to share here because it is very impressive to see, but the memory of each of you lives on in my heart and I hope we’ll meet again soon. Congrats & love to you all:

Cheryl Sileikis, First Assistant Camera, A Camera
Sue Johnson, B Camera Operator & Second Assistant Camera
Augustina Saygnavong, Daily First Assistant Camera, B Camera
Clara Chan, Camera Trainee
Karissa Cashion, Daily Second Assistant Camera, A Camera
Camila Tamburini, Daily Second Assistant Camera
Ruzanna “Rooster” Sukiasyan, Daily Camera Trainee
Heather McDowell, Data Management Technician
Anya Shor, Gaffer
Simona Analte, Best Boy Electric
Sydney Cowper, Electric
Cait Lusk, Key Grip
Heather Weigel, Best Boy Grip & Daily Key Grip
Sabrina Spilotro, Grip
Andrea Hernandez, Grip
Brianna Blades, Grip
Bee Bertrand, Grip Intern

WORKIN’ MOMS Premieres on CBC

VERY EXCITED to announce tomorrow night’s premiere of Catherine Reitman’s new series WORKIN’ MOMS on CBC. It was a dream to be able to DP all 13 episodes of Season 1 this past summer/fall in Toronto, showcasing this city while shooting only on location with incredible IATSE and NABET camera, lighting & grip crews. I’ll always be grateful for the friendship and artistry they brought with them to set every day. It also just so happened to be our camera union’s first ever all-female A camera team so that was a wonderful bonus. Many thanks to you all for your eyes and support. Thanks also to SIM Digital for the Alexa camera packages and Cooke lenses, PS Production Services for the lighting and grip, and to my longtime home-away-from-set REDLAB Digital and colourist Walt Biljan for doing such beautiful and thorough work on post these past couple of months.

Workin’ Moms will air Tuesdays at 9:30pm on CBC.

There are so many great interviews with Catherine circulating already… here are two of my favourites so far:

Toronto Star, “Society expects us to hit a brick wall. A whole lot of honesty, and a whole lot of my own experiences, went into this. But there is humour in the dark places.”

TV Junkies , Catherine Reitman on Creating a Judgement-Free Zone

WEXFORD PLAZA @ Slamdance

WEXFORD PLAZA will have its North American premiere at Slamdance in Park City next month – so happy to be celebrating with the 11 other feature filmmakers in competition that the festival programmed this year! Also so happy that we were able to immortalize The Plaza itself before the gentrifiers took hold of it last week:

WEXFORD PLAZA in Italy

So proud of my dear old friend Joyce Wong and our producing team Matt Greyson and Harry Cherniak for bringing our feature film WEXFORD PLAZA to Turin, Italy this week. We shot the film, which is Joyce’s first feature, in August 2015 in the suburbs of Toronto.

WEXFORD PLAZA follows Betty, a young woman with a new job as a strip mall security guard, as she navigates the plaza by night searching for solutions to her boredom. She meets Danny, a charming bartender who works at the bar on the strip. His own feelings of financial and emotional inertia have got him eager to make a change. The two become acquainted in the nebulous waters of flirtation and enterprising ambition as they try to better their situations.

Inspired by our youth loitering in pre-gentrified Scarborough, Ontario, Joyce and I had a ton of common ground and personal experiences to draw from when we were conceiving of the film’s style. Joyce wanted to highlight the strange serenity of a place in economic stasis using static compositions and minimal coverage. We carefully storyboarded every shot, 300 of them or so, which is a relatively tiny amount for a feature film. Stylistically, we drew from Ulrich Seidl’s Paradise trilogy  and our own documentary backgrounds to emphasize how the landscapes of the characters’ realities – their homes, their places of work, their unregulated shift schedules, their vehicles – generate both the energy and the apathy that shape this moment in their lives.

We shot the film with a small crew over the course of three weeks. Matt called it “family-style filmmaking” from the start, and that’s exactly what it felt like. Thank you and congratulations to my filmmaking family for this project.

The film will be coming to the U.S. soon – more on that later.

Shooting the Invisible

The New York Times reviewed THE PRISON IN TWELVE LANDSCAPES the other day in advance of the film’s week-long run at Anthology Film Archives in New York City (Nov 4 -10). It just so happens the article highlights several concepts I’ve been trying to articulate in a draft here the past few days but for which I’ve had trouble finding the proper context.

Every now and then new filmmakers contact me and would like to know how to continue pursuing a life in cinematography. It’s difficult to give this type of advice since every path is very different. But I do firmly believe in one consistent truth: that the projects we choose to shoot directly shape the trajectories our lives will take as cinematographers. They will inform what we continue to shoot, where in the world we go, the creative soulmates we might encounter – broadly speaking, we further cement and refine what we align with through the work that we do, and in this way we can shape the life we give ourselves. More importantly though is the stuff we’re actually outputting. If consistently chosen with the heart, one’s body of work grows to eventually indicate a worldview and an overarching philosophy, as well as a collection of frustrations about and hopes for the world. If you are choosing your projects by identifying fiercely with them, you’re contributing something of yourself in sometimes enormous ways just by putting your energy there instead of some other place.

The Village Voice also did a piece on The Prison in Twelve Landscapes. It opens with the statement, “It’s rare that a film this outraged is also this calm.” This intersection of urgency and patience is what I’m getting at here. In my very first meeting with a director, it’s this sense of urgency that I’m looking for before anything else. Once that’s made clear we move on to the next step, which is figuring out whether or not we can contribute something to the world that we can both agree is essential and, in a small or sometimes massive way, shift a paradigm that needs shifting. Reverse a gaze. Inform hearts and minds by begging an audience to consider what it looks like from the other side of a situation, the side of the Other, or in some cases from a place less dichotomous than that – perhaps from an even tinier, quieted, underrepresented nook shoved elsewhere outside of society’s narrow sightlines. This is really important to me because I believe that well-told stories teach us about ourselves by virtue of their specificity. The more specific they are, the more universal their effects will be. We ask audiences to project themselves and their experiences onto the images we give them, and a hyperspecific story asks the viewer to offer back their own specifics and fill in their own blanks. This process makes a film personal to the viewer and, ideally, timeless. It asks them to investigate the minutiae/details/circumstances of their own existence. A feedback loop is created. A story is successful if it can do that. In terms of representation, the more we ask an audience to identify with a traditionally unfamiliar archetype, the more audiences might find comfort in relating to unlikely heroes on a regular basis. This is the third level. And if, through art, we might create a more compassionate world by engaging with these specific but often unseen realities, why not at least attempt to not tell the same tales ad nauseam in order to fill seats? Urgency, reconsidering the paradigm, compassion. If there is an ounce of strategy in me it is this, and strategically-speaking this seems a simple enough model to follow.

When Jeanette Catsoulis for the NYT writes that Brett’s film “attempts to make the invisible visible”, it speaks to this urgent call for widespread compassion. And there is no reason why these stories should remain in the hands of documentary filmmakers alone. I’m lucky enough to also be working in fiction filmmaking and television that also strives to put veiled, often ignored people on the screen. To infiltrate the mainstream with these stories is to demand that they belong in plain sight – out of the fringes and onto larger platforms. This is the power we have when we decide where and to whom we give our tireless efforts and hard-earned skills. Until we as a culture reach a place where we can coexist, co-produce, cohabit (these are holistic concepts and you’ve gotta really live it) and co-create with real equality and respect for the experiences lived by all people and have those realities represented on screen, we are cheating ourselves out of a fuller, more nuanced picture and keeping ourselves deprived of a deeper relationship with empathy.  If we don’t at least make the attempt, we will always be fighting the battle for more diversity and we will always be going to extremes to be seen and heard in a climate oversaturated with the same stories told by the same people.

Extremes, though, are how some of the best art is made, so for now I’m grateful for the pushback. This is how we can achieve artistic and professional integrity of an elevated level. This is how we can achieve better art for more people.

If you’re interested in seeing THE PRISON IN TWELVE LANDSCAPES in New York City, it’s playing now until November 10th at Anthology Film Archives. Director Brett Story will be in attendance – to hear her speak about the film is life-changing.

I HEAR THEM CALLING – Music Video

This week Exclaim! launched Rae Spoon’s latest video, directed by Chelsea McMullan & shot by me in an all-genders washroom provided by the lovely folks at Buddies in Bad Times Theatre in Toronto:

For the video, Rae got a group of 23 LGBTQ and ally youth together to make costumes and party hard in protest of archaic bathroom bills.

Very special thanks to amazing gaffer/grip combo whiz Cait Lusk and to Craig Milne at SIM in Toronto for the Amira package that we shot the party with.

 

THE RAINBOW KID in CSC Mag

Thank you to Fanen Chiahemen at CSC Magazine for running this article on my work for The Rainbow Kid. We had a chat before the film’s TIFF premiere and she did a nice job of detailing the ways in which Kire Paputts and I made our homespun cinematic dream come to be.

 

 

The Prison in Twelve Landscapes

Very happy to announce that Brett Story’s feature documentary THE PRISON IN TWELVE LANDSCAPES will screen in New York as part of the Art of the Real showcase at the Lincoln Center on April 17th. Here are some of the reviews the film has gotten so far, following its world premiere at the True/False festival in Missouri last week – click the links for the full articles:

“The Prison in Twelve Landscapes has a consistent formal beauty that sets it apart… With only seven-and-a-half minutes, on average, to make an impression, Story and her d.p., Maya Bankovic, make concise statements through carefully composed and often dreamily stylized images.”

– Scott Tobias for VARIETY

“…it’s an artfully made work, lyrically filmed (by Maya Bankovic) and scored (Olivier Alary), with Simon Gervais’ ambient sound design as crucial an element as Avril Jacobson’s elegant editing.”

– Sheri Linden for THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER

 

The Weather Station – Floodplain

Stereogum launched my new video for The Weather Station yesterday – it’s made up up of Tamara Lindeman’s own footage from her travels intercut with a portrait video I shot of her against winter in Canada. Nadia Tan edited the video, interspersing Tamara’s footage into nostalgic fragments that flash across the screen like random access memory moments. The track, FLOODPLAIN, is off of The Weather Station‘s latest album Loyalty.

Enjoy!

From Stereogum:  The accompanying video is a tribute to remembrance and the changing seasons. Lindeman stands in a wintery light as her memory flashes back to a companion, maybe a lover, swimming in the summertime. It’s an eerie, nostalgic piece. 

Rae Spoon – New Video

SILENT SHOUT premiered the new Rae Spoon video this week – check it out! Rae and I co-directed the video and shot it in their 1907 home in Victoria, BC, lighting it as a 1970’s horror scene. Why? The song and video are about haunting.

In Rae’s words:

“Written Across The Sky” is about my own desire for legal recognition of my agender identity––right now, for example, I am still required to have my assigned sex on my identification. It is about my hunger for rights for trans people, especially those most vulnerable to systemic oppression, including sex workers, indigenous peoples and undocumented folks.”

The music video for Rae Spoon’s song “Written Across The Sky” from their new album Armour is an ode to 1970s’ horror film lighting and all things haunted. Spoon co-directed the video with Maya Bankovic, an award winning cinematographer whose work has screened at TIFF, Sundance, VIFF and many other festivals. The two previously worked together on the NFB documentary-musical My Prairie Home, a five-year project. Shot in Spoon’s 1907 Victoria home, the new video shows the ease of their working relationship through the intimacy of the close-up shots and moving portraits.

http://www.raespoon.com
http://www.coaxrecords.com

HIT HD!

SPECIAL THANKS to Nadia Tan for those lightning fingers, and to Kendra Marks for helping us make the video happen.

True/False

Really happy to announce that both Chelsea McMullan’s MICHAEL SHANNON MICHAEL SHANNON JOHN and Brett Story’s THE PRISON IN TWELVE LANDSCAPES will be having their US premieres at True/False in Columbia, Missouri in early March.

Kentucky 2014, for THE PRISON IN TWELVE LANDSCAPES:

Thailand and the Philippines, 2014 for MICHAEL SHANNON MICHAEL SHANNON JOHN:

THE PRISON IN TWELVE LANDSCAPES is a cinematic journey through regions across the USA where prisons, unseen in the film, affect the trajectories of lives and local economies existing in the shadow of the prison industrial complex.

MICHAEL SHANNON MICHAEL SHANNON JOHN tells the story of a murdered police officer-turned-bike gang one percenter who left a family in Ontario – including two young children named Michael and Shannon – and began a new family in Thailand, having two more children – naming them Michael and Shannon. Now adults, the siblings meet for this first time and try to decipher the patchwork mythology surrounding their father’s life and death.

World Famous Gopher Hole Museum @ CSA

Congratulations to directors Chelsea McMullan and Doug Nayler on the Canadian Screen Award nomination for the film WORLD FAMOUS GOPHER HOLE MUSEUM. The museum for which the film gets its name sits in a trailer not unlike a high school portable, but inside the atmosphere is cavernous, like a temple, or a crypt. Or a loving monument. Inside dozens of glowing dioramas sit elaborate tableaux of taxidermied gophers, all carefully dressed and arranged in ornate, handcrafted scenes paying homage to a way of life in rural Torrington, Alberta, a town of less than 200 people. Most of the dioramas represent specific community members and events, forever immortalizing an increasingly forgotten region that has been changing due to the economy and the encroaching exurbs of Calgary.

We began shooting the project in the fall of 2012 and wrapped in early 2015, making six or seven trips over the years to catch up with the town and with museum director and co-founder, Dianne. Some trips were entirely devoted to hours spent capturing each of the dioramas in macro detail, shooting everything from the brushstrokes of the backdrops to the caption bubbles and miniature outfits and objects in each scene. We saw Torrington through all of its seasons, and watched as young commuter families moved in while lifelong residents moved away. We also went square dancing.

“Finding a deeply human soul in its even more deeply quirky subject matter, all of it presented flawlessly in a quietly understated yet deeply evocative style, World Famous Gopher Hole Museum evokes the very best work of Errol Morris while marking McMullan and Nayler as significant young talents to watch.” – Todd Brown, Twitch Film 

“This documentary is a piece of pure, unadulterated Canadiana as carefully woven as the crochet and knitted items sold in the Gopher Museum gift shop.” – Geek vs. Goth

“Invoking the Pyramids of Egypt, the film questions the human desire for legacy in the face of mortality. This struggle is visually represented through the Gopher Hole Museum, as the gophers are destroyed, taxodermied, and recast into an idealized version of the country town of Torrington.” [Official press release]

 

The shared moment

Susan Sontag once wrote this thing, “All photographs are memento mori“. She said that to take a photograph is to acknowledge “time’s relentless melt.” Relentless – what dread, what urgency, what resentment oozes from that word. So I can’t help but consider the opposite: That capturing an image of a person is not merely an acknowledgement of their inevitable death, but rather a commemoration of their having lived – and inspired you – right then and there. It’s a tribute to their existence. And we’re selective about to whom we pay tribute, aren’t we. Do we take pictures of every person we come across, even though we easily could more than ever before? No, we actually don’t. We choose when and who and why. Sontag says that taking a photograph is an act of aggression. I think it’s an act of reverence.

This is what happens when I look back on pictures of the dead: I, of course, consider their deadness for a second, but mostly I consider their pulse beating in that moment, or that they held their breath to smile for me. Or, if caught off-guard, I consider their gesture captured mid-action, their body, once moving, now frozen in time. That they were living beings then, and so forever will be, in this image. If it’s a moving image, the kind I normally shoot, then that’s all the better: They had a voice, this was their kind of body language, this is how their brains worked, and this is how much I wanted to capture all of that.

Why write this? Because when I’m at my luckiest I get to see people come to life for the camera, and these moments of transformation should not be taken lightly by those of us who do it. In these moments I know that the person feels they are being looked upon with love and respect, because that’s when they give it back. That’s when you get an incredible performance, a moment of honesty, or humour, or whatever surprising and authentic turn you couldn’t have even thought up in your wildest designs. Sometimes I tend to brush that feeling off as simply “a shoot gone well”, professionally speaking. But truthfully, and especially in the documentary realm, this is a really special switch to witness in somebody. And this is also when the exchange takes place: You gave this moment to me and, hopefully, I can give this feeling to you. You’re enough. And what you do is all that I need you to do. Nothing more.

My friend Chris once took a walk around Queen’s Park in Toronto with the film director Wim Wenders, who told him that when you capture somebody on camera you are bound to that person for life. Oftentimes that connection isn’t entirely up to us, of course, because we are just one half of the exchange. We can’t control what happens next. But does that moment, no matter how brief (1/1000 of a second in some cases), does it indeed create a current that permanently connects us, as Wenders says? Yeah, I’d like to think it does, so long as we care enough, and so long as our memory holds out.

And if our memories eventually fail us? Well, that’s what the images were for in the first place. You may only see one of us in the shots, but we were both there.

 

Post on The Prison in Twelve Landscapes

Big thanks to Redlab Digital for their work on Brett Story’s documentary THE PRISON IN TWELVE LANDSCAPES, seen here projected upon picture editor Avrïl Jacobson and Brett herself at last night’s final colour session: We shot the film over the past 18 months in various parts of the US, where Brett explored the ways in which the prison industrial complex permeates ordinary daily life in American communities in both massive and subtle ways. The message is delivered impressionistically, with details of each community being explored visually and the connections to prisons themselves being left intentionally vague: These are stories that happen around the prison, that happen because of the prison, but never inside of it.

You can also check out some of my pictures from our trip to Kentucky in 2014 here and here and here.

 

 

THE RAINBOW KID @ TIFF 2015

Come see it! Tickets here! Our world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival will be Saturday, September 12, 2015 at the Scotiabank Theatre.

PORCH STORIES – At TIFF LIGHTBOX until June 25!

Don’t miss it – the theatrical run of Sarah Goodman’s debut narrative feature PORCH STORIES is still on at Lightbox in Toronto

Shot in 2013 in our own neighbourhood of Trinity Bellwoods in Toronto, the film weaves multiple narratives that reflect the changing landscape of Toronto’s west end in the macro while zeroing in on the small moments, love stories and personal struggles in the micro.

The film is screening nightly at TIFF Bell Lightbox until June 25. 

It’s a cold one

Artist Louise Noguchi, yesterday.

Life After Death From Above 1979

Director Eva Michon made a feature-length documentary film about Death from Above 1979. It’s comprised of many years’ worth of footage and I got to swoop in towards the end of production and do a bunch of shooting with her last summer in New York and Toronto. Featured in the film are members of Sloan, The Strokes, Fucked Up and of course DFA 1979 themselves. It’s currently up on Vimeo On Demand and Eva is touring the film theatrically throughout Canada and the US right now. So check it out!

Click the image to see the trailer

The Rainbow Kid

On to week 4 of feature film The Rainbow Kid

Special thanks to Redlab, PS Production Services and SIM Digital for helping us make this film happen.

Joel McHale for Purity

Screengrabs from a recent spot I did with director Ari Costa featuring Joel McHale testing a bulletproof suit in Toronto – now circulating on the worldwide web:

Special thanks to my gaffer Jeff Hanley, key grip Justin Yaroski, AC Rafi Mishan and to Greg Biskup for shooting second camera.

The Rainbow Kid

Scouting begins on the feature film The Rainbow Kid with director Kire Paputts.

Shooting in SE Kentucky

BRY WEBB “Prove Me Wrong”

 

The AV CLUB and CBC MUSIC premiered Colin Medley‘s new video for Bry Webb today. For Prove Me Wrong, Colin asked me to shoot the donkeys and Bry at 120fps at the Donkey Sanctuary of Canada. He then cut the piece into something both melancholy and mesmerizing. Please enjoy:

 

LA: My Prairie Home screens in July

“Like its subject, Sundance Film Festival favorite “My Prairie Home” defies labels. It is beautiful and deeply personal cinematic poetry. It is part documentary and part avant-garde music video. It is at times deeply emotional and at times almost hypnotic.”

– Charles Purdy, LA TIMES reviewing My Prairie Home in anticipation of OUTFEST Los Angeles

MPH will screen as the festival’s Documentary Centerpiece presentation on July 13. From the festival’s programmers:

“Together with filmmaker Chelsea McMullan, Rae’s songs transport audiences from small, confining nightclubs into dreamy, beautifully photographed landscapes of music and memory. MY PRAIRIE HOME disposes of traditional documentary filmmaking, opting instead to explore Rae’s discovery of love outside their evangelical home with haunting visuals and a hypnotic score that go hand-in-hand with Rae’s highly personal melodies.”

On a related note, Rae Spoon’s album of the same name (and soundtrack to the film) was recently longlisted for the Polaris Music Prize. Nice.

THE HUM

NEW VIDEO: Dan Griffin, THE HUM.

Today

 

Shooting Bry Webb with Colin Medley

TRU LOVE @ InsideOut

Congratulations to the team behind TRU LOVE for its upcoming Gala Presentation at Toronto’s Inside Out LGBT Film Festival. Saturday, May 24th will mark the film’s Canadian premiere, having already screened to sold-out festival audiences at BFI-Flare London and while there acquiring Canadian, US, UK and German distribution. This will bring the film to festivals, cinemas and DVD all over the world in the coming months so keep your eyes out for it: Boston, Miami and San Diego are next in the US, and dates in England, Italy, Switzerland, New Zealand and Mumbai are on the horizon… 

 

[above: Shauna MacDonald and Kate Trotter getting buzzed in TRU LOVE]

CSC Magazine

Thank you to Fanen Chiahemen at CSC Magazine for doing a feature on my work for MY PRAIRIE HOME – click here to read the piece, featured in the April 2014 edition of Canadian Cinematographer

Megan Bonnell – STARS

Special thanks to Olga Barsky and Dustin Redshaw for designing the heck out of that cape.

MSMSJ

Scouting with Chelsea in the Thai jungle the other day for the documentary film Michael Shannon Michael Shannon John.