Lady Svit in Buenos Aires

Voila, here we are. I came the day before yesterday in the morning after the 13 hours flight. Together with Sabina I spent the afternoon and evening putting the equipment together. Yesterday at 11 o'clock we met with other two crew members Lorena and Pedro for equipment checking and around 2 p.m. we finally started shooting. I brought with me from Paris the text (I got it from Brina's publisher) of Brina's new book designed as it will be for print. This is a moment when the book is finished but there are still minor details to correct so I wanted to capture the moment when Brina gets it in her hands. And it was quite ok, I guess I got some emotions from the scene. In the afternoon we shot Brina and Sergio having a private tango lesson in the middle of the parc. Here is the picture.

After the dinnner we went to the same parc to document some more moments. Brina took part in milonga as she does every day. We shot some moments and that was that for the first day. Today we will walk with Brina around Buenos Aires and try to get just some moment of her and the city. As for the evening, of course, another milonga.

J.J.B.

Bueno Buenos Aires

Things are slowly coming together in Buenos Aires. I'm leaving Paris on Wednesday and hopefully I will be there on Thursday morning. Brina has been there already for two weeks. At the moment our Slovenian contact in Buenos Aires Sabina Dogic is renting the equipment and putting together the crew. We will be shooting on HDV but today I checked super 8 camera (thanks a lot Alex) because throughout the shoot I want to capture small moments also on super 8. Anyhow, just for a taste, here is a short moment shot by Sabina with Brina in one of the dance halls in Buenos Aires .


J.J.B.

Busy Days

This blog was a bit abandoned in the last week but I have so many things to do before I leave to Buenos Aires to shoot a documentary. Work at school takes me a lot of time, meetings with students, different drafts of the scripts, different versions of films in editing... But ca va. I'm at the moment also involved in a lot of coordination with Gustavfilm about the screening of paris.love on 10th of June in Kinodvor in Ljubljana. Btw, here are the posters.

J.J.B.

Devil In Disguise

I've got inspired to write about optical illusions from this Slovenian blog. Of course, the premise is that the cinema itself is one big illusion. So, let's go back to beginings. English doctor John Ayrton Paris in 1826 created a first device for optical illusion - thaumatrop.

On one side of the encircled paper is a drawing of a bird, and on the other side there is a cage. With a very quick rolling around the horizontal axis one gets impression that the bird is in the cage. I used to create this kind of toys when I was a kid and yesterday, inpired by the elections for president in France, I did one again.

This optical illusion synthesizes two static pictures into a new one on a characteristic of human eye, which is called a retinal persistency (in english I found it under the persistence of a vision). The fact is that the retina in human eye retains the picture for a brief moment. So, in the case of our thaumatrop, the bird stayes on the retina long enough that when we "catch" the next one, is already replaced by the cage. This effect is used in cinema theaters, where the film is projected 24 (or 25) pictures per second and after each picture it comes a moment of black (shutter effect). TV uses the same effect in a bit different way, instead of one picture having two half pictures. The fact that the cinema (even the most realistic stories) is a big illusion, can't be more true.
J.J.B.

Brave New World

There are some really great films at cinema MK2 Beaubourg at the moment. And it's obviously a time for documentaries. Last week I watched We Feed the World, which is a great film. I look on the shelfs in the shops and the food I see it's just disgusting. The mass production of the food have stolen it's taste, not to mention that it's destroying local economies all around the world. The strongest line is anyhow the one from Jean Ziegler, UN Special Reporter on the Right to Food: "Given the current state of agriculture in the world, it could feed 12 billion people with no problem. Or to put it another way: any child who dies of starvation today is in fact murdered." It makes you think.
Yesterday I saw Jesus Camp and it scares you from the other side. The film follows group of children in their summer camp, where they play, dance and do all the other things that kids do. But what is a specialty of this one: it’s Evangelical Christians gathering and they teach the kids some amazing things: that the school theory of evolution is wrong and that they should believe in creationism, islam is of course equal to the terrorism, support of American troops in Irak is not a question and George W. Bush is the best guy in the world. They teach the kids (even that young as 6 years old) how to be Christian soldiers in God’s army. And the church leaders, without any bad conscience, speak about the fact that what you teach the child in the age between 7 and 10 years it stays in his mind for the rest of his life!! They approach to the youngsters as a key generation that will change the face of America. Of course, the key generation, indoctrinated kids who will grow up in crusaders fighting all around the world with a sword and a torch for the one and only existing god (interesting article you can read here). The filmmakers presented in the movie also the only voice of intellect, the guy who has a radio talk show in which he is opening the raising questions about that subject. Followed with his voice coming from different radios, we travel through America. As an editing structure, those parts reminded me a lot of M.A.S.H. which uses the speakers to connect smaller scenes through the story line. My favorite moment in film is when pastor uses the water to purify the kids from their sins. It’s a Nestle bottle of water. And in We Feed the World there is an interview with a Nestle executive director, in which he says that point of view of NGO’s that the water should be free for everyone is horrible and that we should attach a value to the water.
Obviously, great time is coming. Very soon they will probably start charging us for the air we are breathing and then we are really fucked. Even if global warming doesn’t exist.

Voila, here is one more time the picture that I took in New Mexico.


J.J.B.