As I’m now a media student and an aspiring filmmaker I figured that it was time to start attending some film festival events – with MIFF happening right now there was no better time to start. This week I attended 2 screenings; ‘Finders Keepers’ and ‘Raiders!’ – both were feature length documentaries and both told really interesting stories. I’m a big fan of documentaries, but I especially like ones that explore and follow interesting/intriguing/crazy stories – for example ‘Searching for Sugarman’ and ‘Exit Through the Gift Shop’.
However, it wasn’t purely this appreciation for documentaries that drew me to the 2 films I watched this week. While I was browsing the list of MIFF films, I decided that catching a few documentary films would probably be very useful in regards to the Film3 studio content. As we are spending time investigating the ways in which we can use documentary filmmaking techniques in drama production and vice versa, I wanted to broaden my knowledge of the documentary genre and experience a few recently released documentaries to see what current filmmakers are doing within the genre.
I’d really love to be able to produce some documentary products sometime in the future and while drama filmmaking is currently what I’d like to pursue, I think it’s important to explore a range of film genres and ideas when first starting out. Also, it’s become apparent to me that a lot of stories found in documentaries are more fantastical and amazing than those found in many dramatic films. Creating a documentary film would likely provide a lot of creative writing inspiration.
In both ‘Finders Keepers’ and ‘Raiders!’ there were certainly aspects of drama filmmaking present and I noted many of these down while watching the films. Both films told somewhat spectacular stories and I think that in capturing a lot of the footage for the films, the filmmakers would have tried to find ways to give the film a more cinematic and dramatised look (while still keeping true to the story). This could be seen in the cinematography of both films, but the compositions and cinematography of ‘Finders Keepers’ were often especially cinematic. There were many shots where I was left thinking “that’d look cool in a fictional film” or “hey, that shot reminds me the shot from the _______ film”. I think the use of more cinematic and dramatic compositions is becoming more of a ‘thing’ in the documentary genre and even many of the short online documentaries I have watched recently seem to have had similarly spectacular cinematography and visual aesthetics.
While watching ‘Raiders!’ I realised how good (or bad) luck can have a BIG effect on the pacing and ‘impact-fulness’ of a documentary film – especially when the subject/event that the film is documenting is being filmed as it happens in real time. There is 1 really surprising and impactful moment that occurs towards the end of ‘Raiders!’ and in reality it happened purely by chance. After the film was over I was left wondering whether the film’s concluding segments would have been as dynamic and engaging if that moment hadn’t happened. I think it’s entirely possible that the film’s ending wouldn’t have been nearly as great without the drama that unfolded as a result of this event. Obviously the filmmakers had a lot of creative decisions to make in the post-production process regarding how they would conclude the film, but it just struck me how lucky the filmmakers were that the events unfolded in the way that they did.
Anyways, that’s all I’ve got to say about the 2 documentaries I watched this week. Below is the trailer for ‘Raiders’ and a short clip from ‘Finders Keepers’. Check them out if you’re interested.