As an intern here at Arts Engine, I had a chance last week to catch a brief glimpse of the IFP market, a veritable bazaar of screenings, panels, meetings and frenetic networking!

I began the day with a screening of Unfinished Spaces: Cuba’s Architecture of Revolution. The film examines the fate of Cuba’s National Art Schools, a group of buildings commissioned with revolutionary zest by Che Guevara and Fidel Castro in 1961, only for construction to be abandoned two years later. The buildings that were never completed today stand empty and overgrown, poignant monuments to a Cuba free from Soviet influence, which shifted focus away from long-term cultural endeavors towards the demands for pre-fabricated social housing. Facing discrimination and professional stagnation, two of the three young architects involved in the project left the country to pursue their careers abroad; only one remained, and in the subsequent forty years has designed nothing but the interior of a pizzeria.

Still a work in process, the film’s narrative so far is woven around beautifully shot images of the decaying buildings, archival footage of their construction and interviews with the architects. With a renovation project set to start next year, the filmmakers plan to follow the architects’ reunion in Cuba, continuing the film’s subtle and focused examination of the country’s political journey.

My next stop was the keynote panel with Diane Weyermann, from Participant Productions, responsible for the documentary giant An Inconvenient Truth. She’s currently working on a number of projects, including Errol Morris’ exposé of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal and Brett Morgen’s new film Chicago 10, which I was going to be hearing more about later.  The discussion centered around how to get your film noticed, with advice about soundtracks, marketing budgets, token celebrities and distribution dates –- particularly in regards to the new rules for Academy Awards submission, which has led to a totally over-saturated market in the fall. One juicy topic that came up was product placement in documentaries, a practice Weyermann vehemently denied even after an audience member claimed that Apple not only featured prominently throughout An Inconvenient Truth, but also appeared in the credits…

Hybrid “docudrama” was the topic for the next panel, with Brett Morgen center stage in the discussion. He came up with some great sound bites, most memorably, “Verité is bull****!â€? His argument was that since the introduction of a camera in any situation will inevitably alter the subject’s behavior, scenarios presented as a reality in documentaries are really only versions of the truth – and not necessarily any truer than a staged re-enactment. Perhaps, but I felt the conversation was focusing far too much on authentic footage v. re-staging, rather than dealing with whether or not the claims being made by the film are accurate. If, to quote Morgen again, performances can be “sculpted in the edit room,” then even the most genuine footage can be deceitful.

Which brings us on to the topic of the last two panels of the day—documentary ethics. The first, chaired by our very own Katy Chevigny, focused on the filmmaker’s relationship to the subject and the significantly unequal power balance between the two.  St. Clair Bourne described his films as tools through which the characters could tell their stories themselves – alleging that many other documentarians are dangerously patronizing, adopting an almost imperialist attitude to their often poorer, less empowered subjects. Jennifer Venditti discussed the way she asserted her directorial authority over the boy in her latest film Billy the Kid, who had a very strong sense of how he wanted to be portrayed and Macky Alston described his unease with the deception of interviewing a group of teenagers who were going to unwittingly reveal their racism. Whether or not to explain the film’s real intention to interviewees, pay them for their contributions and how to help the subject recognize that their lives won’t necessarily change or follow the life of the film were all energetically thrashed out!

The final panel, as the moderator Nancy Abraham pointed out, looked less at the filmmaker’s responsibility to the subject and more at his or her duties to the audience—how to determine guidelines when using explicit or painful footage. Steven Okazaki’s experiences filming a drug addict for Black Tar Heroin highlighted the struggle between the human urge to intervene and the filmmaker’s desire to get a “great shot.” Jon Alpert described his recognition during the editing of Baghdad ER that footage of one amputated arm could stand for the many others he had witnessed in his first two days in the hospital. One interesting tendency that came up was audiences’ intense empathy for animals (often disproportionate to their concern for humans), exemplified there and then by our responses to a graphic clip from a film by Matthew Galkin.  The choice to show this fragment, and extracts from the other contributors’ films, was I think slightly misguided; removed from the original context, the footage was reduced to voyeuristic, shock-value clips—a perfect example of the ‘unethical’ decisions the panel was trying to discuss.

So, apologies for ending on that slightly morose note, but I think it’s time to wrap up this entry! All that was left for the day was to have a few much needed drinks courtesy of HBO…

—Clem