KARACHI: Film is not just a portrait of someone, it’s something that the rest of the world will see, said Prof Noe Mendelle of the Scottish Documentary Institute while delivering a talk on the art of documentary filmmaking at Studio 154, SZABIST on Tuesday evening.
Prof Mendelle said her interest was in ‘creative documentary’ that was storytelling with real people. She likened it to the way stories were told in fiction. There needed to be a set of ethics and at the same time it was important to tell a story. But that balance was not easy to get, she claimed. She advised students who were present in the hall that they should watch a lot of documentaries to move forward and engage in dialogue to gain confidence and to create their own space. She told them how she got into the film sector in the UK and saw that some people associated with short films whom she worked with went on to become known filmmakers.
Prof Mendelle said the British Council got in touch with her to do one-week courses in countries that were in transition politically or had less filmmaking activities. Recalling her experience, she said people came to her and said they had a story about or of someone to tell, and she would let them know that film was not just a portrait of someone; it’s there for the rest of the world to see. Each one of us carried a philosophy within ourselves, so there should be layers in the story.
After that Prof Mendelle showed seven very short documentaries which came out as a result of the workshops conducted in different countries. The first film was from the Dhaka Stories series called ‘My Dream’. Directed by M. Rezwan Ali Khan it tells the tale of a disabled young beggar who is in love with a girl and has a dream of setting up a grocery store. The director of the film himself is a disabled fellow.
The second film was from the Rabat Stories project titled ‘Hand and Four Fingers’. It’s directed by R. Harbal and is a touching little story of a gravedigger. One line from the film resonated with this writer: “There’s no difference between the living and the dead, except the soul of the dead has flown away.”
The story from Benghazi called ‘The Salesman’, directed by Ibrahim Algouri, is about a clever salesman who has hundreds of cars (abandoned during the war) to sell. He rips off his clients using humour and yet finds no hesitation in praying alongside them.
Prof Mendelled presented two films from the Ramallah series. The first one was ‘iBad’ helmed by a young woman, Lamees Abd Eljalil, and the second ‘Check-Point Boy’, directed by another woman, Shireen Abu Hamda. The former is about how some girls in Palestine, against all odds, manage to exude energy and show entrepreneurial skills using social media, while the latter revolves around a young boy who sells artifacts near checkpoints.
The penultimate film of the evening was ‘The Secret Room’, directed by Ibrahim Shebani, from the Tripoli Stories series. It pivots around an old man who lost two of his sons in the war but had the courage to save the artworks in a history museum in Tripoli. The last documentary was from the same series titled ‘Granny’s Flags’, directed by Naziha Arebi.
The talk and the screening of films was organised by the Media Science Department of SZABIST and the British Council Karachi.
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