Antarctica: A Year on Ice.
Plenty of directors of documentaries in this year's festival went to the ends of the Earth to make their films. Peter Calder talks to one of them
It's a long way, geographically and culturally, from the bustling Bangladeshi enclave of Brick Lane in London's East End to the tiny village of Niaqornat in western Greenland. But that's where film-maker Sarah Gavron, who directed the 2009 film version of Monica Ali's novel Brick Lane, made her first documentary.
The idea for the film, called The Village at the End of the World, came from her Danish-born husband, David Katznelson, who shot it, she explains by phone from their London home.
"He grew up in Copenhagen near the statue of Knud Rasmussen (the Greenland-born Dane, a famous explorer and pioneer of Inuit anthropology), and he always dreamed of being an explorer."
The couple went to Greenland, without cameras, but with a film in mind, and ended up in Niaqornat, latitude 70 degrees north, where the population of 59 is easily outnumbered by dogs and the only motorised land vehicle is a forklift. They stayed for three weeks and conceived the idea of making a portrait of the community, which they compiled during six visits over the succeeding 18 months.
The resulting film, narratively intimate and visually epic, is equal parts ethnography and real-life drama: whether showing whale butchery on the stony beach (the kids pick off raw morsels), the arrival of a shipload of gawking Danish tourists or a meeting to try to re-open a fish processing plant, it depicts a village clinging to life.
Commendably, it maintains an entirely observational approach. There is no mediating commentary or outside expert "talking heads", and the film-makers' presence is barely detectable.
Being accepted into the tiny community (the couple had their two children, aged 8 months and 4, with them, so they swelled the population by 8 per cent) was not as difficult as they expected. The first person they met was the local sewage collector, Ilannguaq (the best documentary character I've seen in years), whom they mistook for the mayor.
"He had that air about him," Gavron says, "and he spoke both Danish and English very well, so he became our way in and our friend. He was our interpreter as well, and we even ended up leaving a camera with him - there are a couple of sequences in there that he shot - so he was very instrumental on a number of levels."
The film-makers' linguistic isolation presented its challenges: they would commonly shoot sequences in which they had no idea what was going on until they had the footage translated later. But it also made it easier to maintain the outsider status that ensured a strictly observational approach.
"Because they couldn't interact with us in a normal way because we didn't speak Greenlandic, that kept us at a distance. They wouldn't say asides to us. They did what they did and we were always catching up."
Gavron says she found the transition from fiction to non-fiction film-making a challenging contrast.
"In a feature film you have a script and you know exactly what you are doing and everybody's very much in control of it. Here you are relinquishing control, actually, going with the flow and seeing what happens. You have to corral it into shape in the edit and find the narrative.
"That's why the editing of documentaries, especially observational documentaries, goes on for years - because that's really the scriptwriting process; that's where we were finding who the characters were that we should focus on when we went back, and working out how it should evolve."
Niaqornat's survival remains precarious. If the population falls below 50 it faces the prospect of closure, enforced by the cancelling of subsidies and supply ships. The documentary screened on Greenlandic television the night before the national elections in which Karl, the local Mayor and top hunter, was elected with a 200-vote majority - something of a landslide in the least populated country on Earth.
"Now he's in Parliament," says Gavron, "which may mean he has to leave the village, unfortunately, but he and the main party are both very supportive of village life."
The other end of the planet is the setting for another must-see documentary in the festival: Anthony Powell's Antarctica: A Year On Ice, which has its world premiere on Sunday, is a visually gobsmacking portrait of the great southern continent that includes ethereally beautiful footage of the aurora australis - great curtains of green in the dark sky - and minute observations of daily life during wintering-over at Scott Base. It's hard to think of a more appropriate of effective use of time-lapse photography, which Powell deploys only sparingly.
Of the other documentaries I managed to preview, the most formally adventurous must surely be Joshua Oppenheimer's The Act of Killing, which remembers the carnage meted out by the anti-communist death squads in Indonesia in the mid-1960s by asking some of their surviving members to re-enact their hideous crimes for the camera.
This is performed bloodlessly, needless to say, yet the recreations are the more chilling for their offhanded banality or bizarre stylisation. More unsettling still is the surrealistic absence of remorse or even self-awareness of the swaggering murderers, whose victims numbered more than a million. Several times it is observed that the Indonesian word for gangster (which most of these men were), means "free man". "We'd do anything for money to buy nice clothes," one well-dressed veteran says.
Less disturbing, but no less sobering, is Gideon's Army, which gets up close to a handful of the 125,000 public defenders who represent those on bottom rungs of the justice ladder in the American South. The film's charge that the system punishes you for the failure to comply with it by pleading guilty is levelled with a quiet anger and the bizarre sentencing regimes - a man faces life in prison for the knifepoint robbery of $96 - inevitably recall the problematic "three strikes" policy here.
Notable local documentaries include a full-length version of Annie Goldson's He Toki Huna: New Zealand in Afghanistan, whose central figure is journalist Jon Stephenson, currently suing the Defence Force.
Who: Sarah Gavron, director
What: Village at the End of the World
When and where: SkyCity Theatre, Saturday, July 20, 10.45am and Tuesday, July 23, 11.45am; Civic, Thursday, August 1, 2.30pm
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- TimeOut
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