Amiel Courtin-Wilson

Well, it’s not every day you get to meet a director whose work has been shown and won awards at film festivals including Sydney Film Festival, Venice Film Festival, MIFF and even Sundance, but it happened to me on Tuesday. Kim had asked documentary, feature and short film creator Amiel Courtin-Wilson to come in to speak to us. Courtin-Wilson is one of those people you’ve never heard of but really should have. His films include Bastardy, about Uncle Jack Charles, Catch My Disease, about Ben Lee, and Hail, a feature in which a former prison inmate plays himself in a fictionalised version of his life.

In case that wasn’t daunting enough, Courtin-Wilson is much like an Olympian, in the sense that he makes you reflect on just how little you’ve achieved compared to when he was your age. By the time he was as old as I am now, Courtin-Wilson had had his first documentary Chasing Buddha featured at Sundance. But of course, his extensive achievements meant he had great advice about how establish yourself in the film world.

Unsurprisingly, his first piece of advice was to just go for it – make the most of every opportunity and get as much material produced as you can. He made the quite important point as well (I think) that often it’s the projects you’re not as invested in at first that become your masterpieces, so you should really put time and effort into everything. For example, he spoke about how Chasing Buddha was originally written as a speculative exercise for university, and that it was only after writing the script that he decided to actually make it.

He spoke about the importance of building and maintaining relationships, and interestingly not just with people already in the industry but with classmates and friends. As he pointed out, although they can’t offer you a job now, if your classmates end up in the industry in 20 years time and remember you, that might give you the edge. Courtin-Wilson has worked with the same DOP for all of his projects since Chasing Buddha, a guy who was a buddy from high school.

And it’s no wonder he’s stuck with the same guy as his films are visually beautiful. We watched scenes and trailers from Hail, Ruin, Bastardy, Cicada and others, and each one was aesthetically wonderful. It’s again quite daunting, because while I’m sure Courtin-Wilson has spent many years learning his craft, there is a part of me that thinks that kind of artistic vision must come from raw talent that you’re born with (according to his Wiki page, his parents are both artists, which doesn’t surprise me a bit!).

Dan saw a similarity between his subjects and that of one of Courtin-Wilson’s films, and so asked a question regarding documentary ethics and the line between expose and exploitation. Courtin-Wilson, softly spoken and eloquent, struck me as a very genuine person who would be highly invested in his subjects and treat them very well, and he spoke about befriending Jack Charles rather than just being his profiler. His advice was to give the subjects a voice through the editing stages, to ensure that they were comfortable with the final project.

Courtin-Wilson ended his talk by suggesting that he was always on the lookout for interns – music to our student ears! I’ve just taken on an internship, and the more experimental route he seems to be taking with his new work is far too visionary for my unimaginative mind, but I really hope someone in our class takes him up on the offer as it would be just fantastic to learn from someone who has clearly mastered the craft of documentary-making.

Open Channel Conference 2016

If there’s one thing I’ve learned this week, it’s that telling people you’ve just attended a conference makes them think you’re a lot more professional than you are.

Open Channel’s Generation Next conferences run annually, and provide opportunities for young people to hear from and connect with screen creators who are already established in the industry.

This year’s conference was called Your future, what next?, and as a previous attendee of the Generation Next conferences I was lucky enough to get a discounted ticket. Held at the Docklands Studios, the conference featured a great range of speakers from Robyn Butler and Wayne Hope to Jocelyn Moorhouse and Benjamin Law. It was fantastic to be able to hear from such a wide range of media practitioners, and to be able to learn from them, but it was also quite daunting; a theme of the conference seemed to be ‘you’ve got at least ten more years before you can expect to have a decent job’ . . . eek!

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Nonetheless, I enjoyed going, and it was perfect timing during the mid-semester break as it gave me something to do my blog post on! There was more of a focus on fictional content, but there were a few sessions featuring and even dedicated to documentary as well. For example, we heard from Jacob Hickey, a former BBC journalist who’d worked on Immigration Nation and Inside the Firestorm. Another speaker on the same panel was Susie Jones, the factual entertainment development executive at Matchbox Productions.

But in terms of Go Out Into The World And Do Good Things, probably the most interesting speaker was Anna Grieve. Anna is the creator of Big Stories, Small Towns, described on its website as “a unique model of community engagement and participation.” The website is highly interactive, with video material categorised in several different ways (by town, by theme, etc), encouraging the audience to explore the films at their own pace.

It’s a really interesting project for me because this idea of audience participation (as opposed to just subject participation) is something I want to explore with my own project. I’ve been leaning towards having a physical space in which audiences can explore the various elements of my work but it’s interesting to see how it can be done by digital means as well.

Other documentarians at the conference included Nicole Ma (Dances With Ecstasy, Putuparri) and Chris Kamen (Small is Beautiful, and one of my favourite docos, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea). While not all of the documentary filmmakers at the conference had the same explicit focus on interactive documentary as Anna Grieve, of course the relationship between the filmmaker and the subject is always important so it was interesting to hear all their thoughts.

 

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