At Kohlenquelle, in Prenzlauer Berg, MeinMann and I met the authors of FirstWeTakeBerlin, Thorsten and Daniel. We had followed them on Miro’, their Berlin video-clips mixing reportage and sur-reality. The friendly riot in Kreuzberg on May 1st, the Oberbaumbruecke fight between Kreuzberg and Friedrichshain, the diverse social mix in Moabit, Wedding by night. Together with Phil they are now filming Dougs Deutschland, their first film, in Berlin. We met them on Kopenhagener Strasse during a pause in the tournage.
As Daniel suggested, this round of cappuccinos and Club Mate seemed one episode of the FirstWeTakeBerlin series itself, because it did have a slight surreal twist. We had contacts via e-mail and followed their videos on the web so it was a bit like FirstWeTakeBerlin meets its Italian public or anyway, a good portion of it. It was like when you met your pen-pals, you had seen pictures, exchanged views in writing, but to sit at the same table in a bar seems odd at first.
Our questions were the usual naïve ones of those who go and see movies, and don’t make them. The movie is a movie in the movie, and its matrioska structure was not always easy to grasp because the authors made references to movies we had never seen. Thorsten took us through the intricacies of the plot, which reminded me of Patrick Modiano’s Rue des Boutiques Obscures, where the plans of reality and amnesia are strictly intertwined. We glimpsed a few scenes on Daniel’s phone, we are really curious!
I was curious to understand if creative city Berlin or Europe were helping financially the young cinéastes (a local film commission? Eurimages?). Daniel and Thorsten told us that they are financing the film by themselves, since film commissions want to have too much control on the plot and the whole process.
I had to put my sunglasses on, I was staring to the warm afternoon sun and it started to get visually difficult to sustain a conversation with the guys sitting à contrejour. Producers, financing, sunglasses, bright sun light brought to my mind a movie scene, Sally Potter meeting the producers in LA (“The Tango Lesson”). Her plot was still in the making, the producers chase her, want to force her ideas in a cookie-cutter scheme, her expression remains frozen behind her sunglasses. She would finance the film herself, in order to let her freedom shape the plot. And that was a movie in a movie.
Yesterday night we were asking to MV, a film director living here in Rome, the differences digital vs film photography in movie making. Eventually we ended up talking about Sally Potter once more: her i-phone movie, Rage, is just out now on the Babelgum platform. And about film commissions. The new Tornatore movie, Baaria, apparently cashed-in 4 millions Euro from the Sicily film commission, and is one of the most expensive movies ever produced in Italy.
Rage is out today on the i-phone and on Nokia N96 (among others), I am definitely curious to watch it, also for the techniques used by Sally Potter, as described by Lily Cole: “The unusual shooting set up on RAGE, of just Sally with the camera, the sound recordist, and myself created an extraordinary level of intimacy quickly which allowed Sally and I to experiment and really explore the character. With great sensitivity and intensity, Sally was drawing out emotions in me and then tempering them, always guiding me toward delivering just what was necessary and true to the character.”
I hope my German will improve further in the coming months in order to fully enjoy Dougs Deutschland when it will hit the silver screen. And in the meantime MV intends to leave Rome for Turin in order to realize her movie projects in a truly creative environment, now completely dried out in Rome. As per Baaria, probably as an Italian tax payer I already paid for it, I’ll wait for it to turn up on the TV shores, no hurry.
Photos: Babelgum, Ragethemovie, Brandtundsimon.de
