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Director’s Notebook

25 Years of Hot Docs: New Directions in Documentary with 306 HOLLYWOOD

To celebrate 25 years, Hot Docs Jots explores the legacy of former Hot Docs Forum projects.

Doc-making brother and sister team Jonathan and Elan Bogarín reflect on the role family plays in personal politics, the winding path of being a career artist, and the community of documentary in their debut doc feature 306 Hollywood, screening at the 2018 Hot Docs Festival.

Hot Docs: What is it like to pitch at the Hot Docs Forum?

Jonathan Bogarín: Never before in my life have I had an experience where one moment things were one way, and a few minutes later things were another way. At the Forum, there was a literal a 15-minute shift and everything had changed; everybody who previously didn’t understand our project, didn’t see why it was relevant, fun, interesting, entertaining or engaging, now wanted to be on board. Writing about the film wasn’t really the best way, at least for us, to pitch. When we can speak about the project, show people the images and how the narrative feels, it gets much closer to the style, ethos, and philosophy of the film. The Forum truly allowed us to give a voice, and shape, to how we were actually trying to make and tell our story,  rather than simply flattening it down to a logline or a call to action.

Elan Bogarín: I don’t think in our lifetimes you could possibly have a single better professional development experience. We went from being a very unknown team with a slightly odd project to something that would be finished and could go out into the world. I explain it to people as "Shark Tank" for filmmakers, where you go into a room surrounded 360 degrees by every documentary decision maker you’ve ever heard of (producers, broadcasters, distributors) and you have seven minutes to make the case for your project and change the direction of your career.

HD: What happened after the Forum?

JB: Chicago Media Project came on board, led by Paula Froehle, Steve Cohen and Ken Pelletier. Laurie David was also a key instrumental player right from the day of the Forum. We clicked immediately, and they’ve been tremendous resources and collaborators.

EB:  People who wouldn’t meet with us before the pitch wanted to meet us afterwards. The pitch allowed us to show that you could make a film that had humour and levity to it amidst sadness. That you could ask serious questions in unconventional ways.

JB: We had made a very great deal of the film before we got funding. In terms of timing, 90% of the film happened before funding and 10% happened after funding; but a tremendous amount of filmmaking happened in that 10%. Hot Docs Forum happened in May 2017 and we finished the film January 2018. It was a crucial financing period and we could’ve never finished, or gotten the film into the world in the way we wanted, without everyone’s help; but it was a long journey to get there before we had help.

HD: What about making a personal film relevant to everybody?

 

JB: I’ve thought a lot about this question of personal, because obviously it’s our grandmother, we’re siblings—there is a personal connection to the story. But when you watch a fiction film, there’s usually one character and their ideas that you really care about, and their emotions anyone can feel and their issues anyone can engage with. One person can stand for so much. I like the idea that the personal can be political, that the personal can go far beyond one individual.

EB: With our film, people can reflect on their families, on the role of the individual in the larger society, on how the role of the household and the family defines our societies, and how it defines your memory and your identity. Our goal was always to have it spark other people’s memories, to bring out their own stories. That’s the success of the film.

HD: You start with 10 years of archive, years of interview footage of your grandmother in the kitchen surrounded by piles of newspaper. What was it like revisiting that footage? At what point did you know you were going to make a film?

EB: Neither of us had watched the tapes since we had filmed her, so they felt like new discoveries to us. If you have a conversation with anyone from ten years ago, do you really remember the details? Time had passed just as much for us as it had for her. And after 10 years between the person you were and are now, you ask: “What is it that she was telling us? What is she teaching us?”

JB: And we had another element—the house and everything left in it. We had 70 years worth of stuff, which actually spanned a 100 years worth of time. Between the stuff and the tapes, we kept on going back again and again: what our grandmother was telling us, what she wasn’t telling us, what she was revealing, what we were discovering. As we are getting older, she was telling us different things and we were understanding them in different ways. Our lives were passing and it was like a real-time experience of rediscovering someone who you already knew.

EB:  You also recognize that we’re all going to go through exactly the same experiences. You start seeing that she’s telling you stories that you’re living at that moment in time. You start to see that you’re actually inhabiting almost the same structure of the life she’s talking about, and we’re all effectively living the same timeline.

JB: We had planned to make a magical realism documentary before we even started this film. We wanted to find a way to make ordinary people’s lived experience extraordinary—we wanted to transform and elevate life to the level of myth and fairy tale. We had been working on projects to try to figure out this language, and when we decided to keep our grandmother’s house and everything in it, that became the vehicle by which we could use this mythic reality, and we used this language to talk about her life. If you think about the ways that human beings have always spoken about big life transitions, whether it be birth or death or coming of age, they always use myth, including fairy tale, religion or magic. Those are the languages that we have come up with to describe things that are very difficult to describe. We also wanted to elevate our grandmother to the level of philosopher and authority because she’s a little old lady who is used to being overlooked. A 93-year-old Jewish lady is not what people are thinking of as the person who can tell you about life. She’s an ordinary person who lived an ordinary life, she doesn’t need to have achieved something enormous. What she did was figure out how to live, and she had a way of transmitting that to other generations.

HD: It makes one person’s individual experience so weighty, giving reverence to mundanity in a really lovely way.

JB: We spoke to a funeral director who told us that the soul stays near the home for 11 months after death, but we also spoke to an archaeologist, a physicist, an archivist. With each of the people we interviewed, we wanted to give credence to their idea of how we remember and how people remain after death. They all offer different ways of thinking about the same mystery.

EB: It’s an exploration of how we deal with death. In our culture, death and dying is taboo. There is no sense of how grieve, no real tradition of how to get through this process. Jonathan and I did this by meeting and talking to different people with different philosophies, to look for different metaphors to make sense of what is happening, and how to re-learn the world without this person. What does it mean to take what you learn and let it guide you to find something new.

HD: What did making the film teach you about the legacy you leave when you die? How has it informed the way you deal with grief?

EB: When someone is gone and you decide to allow yourself to look beyond reason, you are exposed to something completely new and it sort of gives you an opportunity to relearn the world; to see it in a way that you don’t generally let yourself see, where you can believe in a bit more mystery, and a bit more wonder. You allow yourself to live in the surreal to make sense of something that doesn’t make sense.

JB: It makes the life you’re living feel more intense, more vibrant, more real. In the course of making the film, I had a daughter and it was powerful for me to think about how my grandmother communicated with me, and how I want to communicate to my daughter what my cultural and philosophical values are. I started thinking a lot more about the values that I had and that I wanted to share.

HD: What myths, if any, did you adopt as your own philosophy after this?

EB: We are makers. I would say that the biggest thing we adopted is the practice of making something in response to what’s occurred and what we have learned. I don’t know if I adopted anything in particular so much as I had the chance, and the time, to learn what other people might say, in the same way the audience has the chance to see what makes sense to them.

JB: Joseph Campbell talks a lot about the archetypal, mythical characters, and in almost every myth there is a character who sets off on a journey to learn something, and they are grappling with the big mysteries of life: love or death. These are the things that people try to grapple with because they’re immaterial. You set off on a journey, go through difficulties and obstacles, discoveries and revelations, and you come out the other side a different person, a person who has a different sense of the world. Through my grandmother’s house, being able to make the film was the opportunity to live through that mythical journey and then hopefully share it in a way that other people can do the same in their lives.

 

HD: You’re both visual artists. How was your art informed by making the film?

JB: The film is an encyclopaedia of about thirty years of our nerdy, artistic interests. There are different filmmaking influences, but the film gave us the space to have total liberty to go through this encyclopaedia of things that we love, whether it be ancient Roman art influences, Catholic churches, contemporary installation art, doc filmmaking,  or fiction from Busby Berkeley to horror films. Because we had been engaging with the arts for so long, and it’s such a normal part of our lives, it became part of the way we went through our grandmother’s stuff, her life, through her stories and how we made sense of them. We wanted to create something that has political and a social component, but also has ethics and imagination.  There are many different strands that we’re trying to bring together to achieve that.

We developed some of this idea of magical realism when we were working in Venezuela, and Venezuela’s a place, like many places, where dreams and myths and culture exist as reality, as part of the way that people interact day in, day out. 

HD: Who do you hope comes to watch the film at Hot Docs? Who do you want to have discover this film?

JB: My first answer would be anyone with a grandmother. My next answer would be elderly people and young people. My third answer, and this is maybe because of the particular political situation we find ourselves in the United States, people who might think that immigrants or people who are from different cultures shouldn’t be in the same culture as them. The goal that we had with this film was to make something that was generous and something in which one could see themself because everyone’s going to die, everyone’s going to lose someone. We wanted to create a language that can be inclusive, and in which people can see one another as equals and as people who are sharing in experiences, rather than finding ways to be divided.

EB: One of the things that physicist Alan Lightman says in the film is, “A house is a universe,” and I think what defines our society are our homes. Families and interpersonal relationships define our identity, our past, our memory, our politics, all these pieces are the building blocks of our society. All of us are coming from these small environments magnified outwards, and if we can acknowledge those spaces are actually what build our politics, that is where we can find commonality.

JB: I think another way to think about the question of immigration, xenophobia, racism, misogyny and patriarchy, is that what we present in our film is an ordinary woman who has something to share and she is valuable. We should think of her in a systemic, a structural, way as one of the valuable members of our society that is building something and toward something. Hopefully the inclusiveness, the openness and the generosity of spirit that we used to make the film would make people think about the other voices who are not being represented in media and in our institutions.

HD: Your grandmother was a collector and a maker. She made dresses for wealthy women in Manhattan, dresses which you feature in the film in different and creative ways.

EB: People watching the film respond strongly to the objects left behind: the things we acquire and the things we make. They are traces of our existence. They acknowledge our day-to-day life, the decisions. They are the traces that define our realities. There’s a reason archaeology and museums exist. Having these objects mark our time and the values that we have. We use objects to tell stories and prove that the past existed. We look for ways to synthesize what our realities are and hold onto the things, be it people or time.

HD: Were there any objects that revealed something about your grandmother you didn’t know?

EB: The house was a time portal, and every single object from another era. You want to ask yourself why isn’t it 1970 again? If every single thing surrounding me tells me it’s 1970, why isn’t it 1970? The objects, if you allow them to reveal themselves, are made of a different material, they have different typography, it’s a totally different moment in time, and it becomes a tool to transport yourself.

JB: One of the most surprising things for me is that paper clips or random plastic containers or wallpaper can actually really say something. My second surprise was when we found audiotapes of our family from the early ‘70s. Our grandmother was in her fifties, and we got to hear her perspectives from when she was in the middle of her life, not when she was at the end. When we interviewed her years later she was always looking back, never looking forward. So to hear her perspective then, what her concerns were, was actually kind of a revelation. She was in a totally different time and place.

HD: I imagine she reveals things you already knew the outcomes of, a generation in the future.

EB: She talks about what’s going to become of this family. She’s literally asking if anything’s going to remain of this family, and then our mother responds instantaneously, "Nothing will become of this family." It’s quite funny to realize that she’s actually effectively asking the same question that we were asking. She’s cooking food, cavalierly asking this really gigantic life question in the most ridiculous way possible, and then we come along and spend six years doing the same thing.

HD: Hot Docs is celebrating our 25th anniversary this year. Where were you in 1993? And what advice do you have for other artists finding their path as you have done?

JB: I was out graffiti-ing, going to museums, reading books and cutting school. I pretty much figured that I would be an artist from forever. I think if there were one thing that has continually been true as an artist that I could share it is: you should prepare yourself for an unknown ride and be adaptable. Being a filmmaker is the third iteration of me being an artist. Each iteration has taken seven and 10 years, because you have your creative interests, your social and political interests, your financial realities, what the world will allow you to do and won’t allow you to do, or the opportunities that do and do not appear. You are entering into a profession in which there’s no clear path.  You have to figure out amongst all the information that is coming to you, both positive and negative, and I think realizing that’s what you’re really getting into. I wouldn’t tell someone not to do it, but I would say: Think about what it means on a more holistic, broader scope, because you’re signing up for a certain kind of life.

EB: In 1993, I was eleven and I was sewing a lot. I wanted to be a fashion designer and I was working in a shop called Sew Fast, Sew Easy, and I was teaching adults how to make clothes. The woman who ran the shop was an ex-fashion designer. She took me under her wing and she let me work the cash register and teach classes. It was amazing.

JB: We did a fashion dance number in the film. That’s one other thing in terms of advice: the experiences you have all throughout your life, they come back in in weird ways. You don’t really lose anything, they just kind of transform. And you don’t really become another person, you just transform.

EB: In terms of advice: you aren’t given a plan for how to learn something in this field, let alone the values you should hold or the structure of beliefs you need to embody. Whereas, if you work in other industries, a lot of those come along with the culture of that work. In which case, then, keep at it, but only do this if you really feel like you have to. Otherwise, pick an easier path.

HD: Is this path burdensome but necessary to you?

EB: Yeah, I am not really competitive, but I have a driving force to be successful. I always hid behind another profession just in case this didn’t work. I couldn’t ever admit that I had to do this so completely. But I would’ve given up if I didn’t have to do this. So if you won’t give it up, and you won’t walk away to something that is tremendously easier, then I guess it means that you’re destined to follow this path.

You ask yourself a lot when you’re making a film, or a project that takes a long time, whether it’s worth it or if you’ve made a terrible decision. The only thing I can say is that it is worth it, because I couldn’t have moved on in my life without finishing this film. I think another thing is that I had never understood that getting a film out into the world is actually, truly part of the process. You have pre-production, production, and post-production. There is, in fact, the fourth category, the fourth stage: getting it out in the world, which changes how you see being a filmmaker. This will shape how I make films, knowing that the fourth piece of the puzzle exists.

JB: Having the collaborators that we do has really proven to be essential in helping us to position and market the film, to think creatively about how we can get it out to audiences. It goes beyond just the funding itself. It's about partnerships as well.

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