Having just spent the best part of this year making our documentary 'Cyber Crime' I jumped at the opportunity to visit the much renowned documentary film festival in Sheffield. I was ready to have my eyes opened by the films on show and was ready to welcome the insightful experiences of the film makers themselves.
Working on my own documentary I quickly discovered just how important documentary films can be to a fiction film maker like myself. I'd like to think the real life stories documented in these films can help inform my fiction writing, giving a much needed authenticity to the characters and events I create.
The best example I can think of comes in the form of 'Drill Baby Drill' an interesting documentary about the fracking in Poland and Pennsylvania, USA. The events taking place in America are stranger than fiction, what we see are these rather horrific scenes of public rivers and countryside being poisoned by these energy corporations. In one moment in the film we're introduced to a local guy who shows the film maker a bottle of polluted water that he's just taken from his tap in his own home. He states that this problem is not going away, that this problem is no longer a problem in the eyes of the authorities, that this polluted water is actually rather safe to drink!
It's an absolute horrific situation and the film only highlights a very small percentage of the problem, but what struck me is that these types of films are wells of information that I can tap into, I can take these real life events and turn them into fiction, perhaps to raise awareness of the problem further or to even help develop a back story for a particular character. I understand that this process may appear cynical to some but I genuinely believe that my fiction film making from now on will be a lot better for having been exposed to documentaries.
I also just want to comment on the terrific interview with 'Passion Pictures' producer John Battsek that I was glad to sit in on. During my university year I produced both the documentary and a short drama piece and had my eyes opened to some of the pitfalls of film making in general. It was really pleasing to find out that the problems I encountered in my student films are not going to go away once I take the step into 'professional' film making. It was humorous listening to John explain why he disliked working on fiction and why he much prefers documentary. I think the point he made that I related to most was that in documentary you really do collaborate more with your colleagues than in fiction. In fiction you have to respect this hierarchy that drives him mad (myself included) but in documentary the teams are much smaller and everyone just works on the film the best way they can, it's encouraging to be relating to someone in the industry, it helps evaporate the illusion that the industry is this thing that we're all striving to get into, we're all already part of it I guess.
Just speaking from a fanboy's perspective it was really great to get to see Jarvis Cocker's live music show about Sheffield and I was delighted to see Micheal Palin of 'Monty Python'.
I'll definitely be going again next year, I thoroughly enjoyed the few days I spent in Sheffield and I'll certainly be looking for more film festivals in the future to visit!
