In addition to the geographical and thematic breadth on display at a documentary-only film festival like True/False in Columbia, Missouri, viewers can also find diverse formal approaches to non-fiction storytelling across the program. The eclectic sampling of distinct visions reiterates that what’s being told is just as significant as how it’s being presented.
One of the World Premieres at this year’s True/False, the visually sumptuous and philosophically stimulating “How Deep is Your Love,” from British filmmaker Eleanor Mortimer, makes astute use of time and space in order to examine the relationship between humans and the creatures that inhabit the still uncharted territory that is the deep sea.
After spending time with a group of scientists focused on taxonomy (naming and classifying plants and animals), Mortimer is invited to sail out with them on an expedition to gather information on deep-sea organisms prompted by impending mining activities.
“We are discovering things about ourselves through the deep sea, but there’s also this paradox of only discovering something because industry is interested in it,” she said.
Most of the doc consists of what Mortimer shot observing their daily activities at sea. For the close-up images of the animals, the scientist operated the deep-sea cameras after discussing with the filmmaker what makes for a compelling shot. Their usual intent when capturing photographic evidence of previously unseen creatures is data collection.
“That was a really interesting collaboration: them collecting images for data purposes, and me thinking about them in a different way for storytelling,” she said.
Rather than presenting these images as they were presented to her, Mortimer manipulates the footage creating timelapses in order to show that while to the impatient human eye these living forms might seem inert and lifeless, they indeed exist at their own pace.
“The deep sea exists on an entirely different time scape, things move incredibly slowly, things live a really long time, nothing really changes,” Mortimer said. “Then I realized that only when I sped through them that I could see these animals were actually moving. But you couldn’t see that if you were looking at it in human time.”
Mortimer goes a step further in her exploration of the relationship between humans and these creatures by crafting frames where the latter appear as if they were roaming our urbanized world. Luminous and sometimes amorphous beings float around a city street or inside a museum. In the imaginary of Mortimer’s film, they can visit us while still alive.
“I felt frustrated because I was like, ‘I’ve got these human characters and then I’ve got these deep-sea characters, but they can’t exist in the same frame unless one of them is dead,’” she recalled. “I thought, ‘Why not make the film a space where that becomes possible? And what would that do to how we understand the story?’”
From documenting the amount of time scientists invest cataloguing a single species, Mortimer learned a new type of patience. “The closer you look at something, the more there is to look at, the more there is to understand,” she said. “That’s a really good lesson for a filmmaker because it’s not about observing everything, it could just be about observing one thing really well. Paying something that much attention is an act of love.”
Muffled underwater sounds are crucial to the expressiveness of Mexican director Manuel Acuña’s illuminating debut “The Silence of My Hands,” which chronicles the romantic bond between two deaf people: Rosa, a law student in Guadalajara, and Sai, a transgender man based in California. The use of non-traditional sound as an immersive, sensorial element derived from the tactile manner in which both of his subjects relate to it as deaf individuals.
“Rosa makes music, but not because she can hear it, but because she feels the vibrations in her stomach,” he explained. “Sai loves dancing because of the vibrations his feet feel. We started with the questions, ‘How can we hear their silence? And how can we represent it in the film?’”
One way Acuña answered this formal query was via a unique take on voice over. There are segments of the narrative where we see Rosa and Sai interacting in a particular space, but not signing. The focus isn’t their hands, and yet there is text on screen making us privy to a conversation that happened off-screen. In the background is the sounds of hands touching.
“It was a risk, but also a way of proving that this sensorial quality that I was looking for in the film could also become material,” he said. “What happens when you really listen? The sound is so present that even the smallest thing is exalted. You know that they are talking even if you don’t see them and only see the text. It’s expressed in a cinematic language.”
Acuña had to learn sign language while making the film, but initially, as he started shooting his subjects’ daily lives, he would capture their exchanges not knowing what they were saying to each other. It was only later when watching the material and enlisting the help of an interpreter that he became aware of the full context of their discussions about the conflicts that are testing their long-distance relationship.
The fact that Sai uses American Sign Language (ASL) and Rosa Mexican Sign Language (LSM) complicated not only how they communicate with each other, but Acuña’s interpretation because the couple has also created signs that only they understand.
“It was very difficult to translate all that material when they spoke, because neither the interpreters, not even the native speakers of American Sign Language, understood everything, he said. “In the end this also reflected the unique construction of their relationship.”
For Pakistani photojournalist and filmmaker Danial Shah, the source of inspiration for his first feature “Make it Look Real” was an often-dismissed practice that first turned him on to photography as a child. Growing in Quetta, a city in Pakistan near the border with Afghanistan, he was familiar with local photo studios that would shoot their clients against outlandish backdrops or using physical props to pretend they lived a different, “better” life.
Today, the practice endures, but now these images are crafted using digital cameras and Photoshop. Patrons choose from a selection of backgrounds featuring luxury cars, beautiful women, or even young men to serve as their fake friends. Men often want to appear holding a Kalashnikov in order to resemble members of the Taliban. The fantastical final product looks haphazard and far from realistic, but serves as a manifestation of their unattainable desires — which includes whitening their skin and erasing all facial blemishes.
“It’s a very suppressed society. They want to project their desires in a material way,” Shah explained. “People, especially coming from the working class, they hardly get to buy a car, have cleaner clothes, interact with a woman, have a man as a friend. They want to look beautiful. It’s all their desires that they want, and then they can do that in a photograph.”
Sakhi, one of many photo studio owners in a market, became Shah’s main subject, but as their friendship develops, Shah also appears in front of the camera as the interviewee.
Over multiple cups of tea, Sakhi, who brews his own rather than buying sugary infusions from tea sellers, and Shah engage in conversations that denote their distinct socioeconomic circumstances despite being from the same town and around the same age. Sakhi is curious about Shah’s life in Belgium, about his professional equipment, and the money he makes from taking photos that appear in international publications. For Sakhi, making just enough money to stay afloat, that’s all foreign, and he’s curious about Shah’s more fulfilled life.
While most filmmakers don’t explicitly acknowledge the disparity in privilege between the subjects and themselves, Shah makes this conversation central to his film. At first, Shah’s intention was to make an observational film about all the market’s photographers, without inserting himself in it , but soon he realized the obvious gap between them and him.
“I’m from the same city, but I have education, they don’t have education. I work as a photographer, so I make more money than them. Their images are considered images of the working class and they are always looked down upon,” said Shah. “I questioned myself a lot about my practice of photography. Why is it that my pictures are more acceptable in the world as compared to their aesthetics? I thought it was better to put myself in it.”
Ultimately, though he was unable to glean direct answers from Sakhi or the costumers about why they enjoy these photographs, the filmmaker believes that these expressions of their yearnings get at something truthful through their over-the-top, kitschy configuration.
“The idea of photography in the West is that it has to look realistic, especially in photojournalism and documentary,” Shah said. “But these images break this idea and I’m really interested in photography as something that can go beyond realism or fakeness.”
