bosnia

Award-winning filmmaker James Lees guest-blogs from the Sarajevo Film Festival.

Attending Sarajevo Film Festival was a bit of a last minute decision for me. I have always thought it would be a great festival to check out but there are so many out there. As it was, a filmmaker I know, Chris Bates was already over there filming some footage for a documentary he was working on. Chris and I had actually discussed his documentary on numerous occasions since he had come to speak to me after a Screen WM film event I was talking at. He had some great ideas for films set in Bosnia but needed some help pinning down the best story to tell and finding funding. Chris asked me to come out and help him shoot some footage and meet his contacts at the film festival - how could I say no?

My own film The Apology Line was actually being screened at the festival as part of the European Film Academy Prix UIP Award Winners Programme and the EFA asked me if I would give a Q&A after the screening. I have been working with the EFA since the film won the Prix UIP Best European Short at Cork International Film Festival (a great festival to attend by the way and coming up again October 12 to 19th) which meant it was also nominated in the Short Film Category of the European Film Awards, this year being held in Copenhagen.

I landed in Sarajevo and Chris picked me up and drove me to his family’s place in town. I was immediately struck with the contrast between the shiny, glossy modern architectural experiments in office design and the bullet and grenade-pocked walls of concrete communist block apartment blocks. Here was a city clearly in transition, but a long way from shaking off its dark and violent history.

After a quick tour I got straight to the festival and settled myself down in front of a few films. First up was My Winnipeg, and the second was Divorce Albanian Style, a film about three Albanian couples pulled apart by the strict regime of Enver Hoxha, two films that couldn’t be more different in tone. My Winnipeg was truly original and charming which can rarely be said but it did feel like Guy Maddin could have taken the ideas and approach further. Divorce Albanian Style was very formulaic and straight in its approach but with such a devastating human story to tell this was perhaps unavoidable.

Next up: the post-screening Q&A - the director’s perspective.

Film-maker Chris Bates blogs about his second day at Britdoc festival, pitching his film to commissioners.

A big day today. My first time pitching face-to-face to an actual commissioner.

Current TV is a great platform for first time filmmakers, and if I can get a few pieces on their channel, then that could provide some serious opportunities further on down the line. We met at 10, and informal as it may have been – sat on the grass outside the café – I was nervous. Had I prepared enough for this? It was a simple idea, but had I fully thought it through?

My fears were confirmed when I ran out of things to say. Current TV liked the concept – it was modern, linked to youth culture and urban social conflict – but it needed more development. Obviously being a documentary we do not know exactly what will happen during filming, but it is essential to have some knowledge of the film’s structure beyond the original concept, and this was my stumbling point. ‘Go away, think about it and come up with some structural ideas, then get back to us.’ Ok, let’s chalk that one down to experience.

So I had lost my pitching cherry, and it was all over rather quickly. But hey, it’s never that good first time round anyway, right?

Before arriving at Britdoc, I had arranged through the online delegate messaging system to meet with Brian Woods – 3-time BAFTA and 7-time Emmy award-winning documentary director and producer. He had been involved with films in Eastern Europe before, and if I could get his interest with my Bosnia project, then possibly he would act as my mentor, maybe even come in as executive producer.

Brian was fantastically helpful, but unfortunately here was more of the same: my story needed more character-based development: conversations, arguments, convincing, desperation to achieve the goal; and specific knowledge of how this was to be filmed.

Brian also said that the reason the pitch and proposal are so important to get right (which seemed obvious once he’d explained it), was that these things were all the commissioners had to make the decision whether to fund the film or not. If some details of the pitch end up different in the film, or even if the main character changes for example, that is generally fine, but you need the pitch to be good enough for the funders to agree in the first place, otherwise there’s no film.

I watched several screenings after this, all excellent documentaries. But for the most part I was distracted, thinking about what my next steps were for my Bosnia project. New pitch, proposal and trailer; character struggle, secondary narratives, arguments, build-up to a final event… I really have my work cut out.