Tom Burstyn and Barbara Sumner are on their way home from Berlin, bearing the Jury prize for their section in the Berlinale. As they departed, Barbara posted this on the This Way of Life blog:

At the Berlin festival one thing became obvious – we’re a little old to be embarking on what is a new career for us both. Young people should be making low-budget documentaries. Passion and obsession should be the preserve of those with energy to spare. We’re grandparents and we like to sleep, while we really don’t do well in the two-star accommodation kindly provided by the festival.

And yet we found ourselves repeatedly in conversations about our increasingly technical world – which is clearly the preserve of the young – and the loss of storytelling. At dinner one producer wondered if in fact we were in the grip of a cultural autism. As she saw it, the more technology (and thus budget) a film requires the more it appeals to and tunes the left-brain. And that’s perhaps what I hated most about Avatar – all that film wizardry in service of itself, instead of story.

The trick of course is to harness the fantastic benefits of the digital world to the needs of the heart to make intense, emotionally connected films. That’s certainly our goal. And one of the benefits of going to Berlin with This Way of Life was the solidifying of that purpose. Vive l’obsession!

Well said! Tom’s philosophy (and forthcoming book about) Frugal Filmmaking expresses exactly that wisdom. It’s the approach we shared on The Insatiable Moon – look out for the March issue of Onfilm magazine where you can find a blow by blow description of it. It’s a trifle premature to talk about a gathering revolution in filmmaking, but at least the signs of resistance are there. While recently the NZ Film Commission has been championing low-budget productions through its Elevator programme, one wonders if a bureaucracy can do anything but hinder a natural movement. In their latest newsletter, they laud the success of This Way of Life at Berlin, despite having given minimal support to the film. And in their list of films in post-production in New Zealand, The Insatiable Moon has strangely fallen off the list.

It’s a strange kind of honour and endorsement to be flying under the radar. If the definition of independent film is that which is made outside the auspices of the studios, then the only true independent films in NZ may be those which are made without the support of NZFC. While the good people at the Commission do a great job of trying to assist film with limited resources, the very system unwittingly hampers originality and passion. All arts funding bodies create distrust and dependency, in my experience. There’s a huge amount of freedom from riding bareback.

Posted in news