One week from today the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival will start! I’m excited! The festival will run from Thursday, April 4th, to Sunday, April 7th, in downtown Durham, N.C. Check out the list of 2013 Full Frame Speakeasy Conversations and make plans to attend them.
One of my favorite parts of the fest are the Speakeasy Conversations. They’re amazing. They’re also free and open to the public. Bonus: the 2012 Speakeasy conversations have also been recorded and put online for your viewing pleasure. How great is that?
At the 2012 Full Frame festival, I heard Alan Berliner talk about what it’s like to make a documentary film. It was as if he spoke only to me in that very moment, as he described so many of the emotions I’d felt while making Abandoned Allies. What he said has stuck with me throughout the year.
Alan Berliner via alanberliner.com
So I listened to the entire A&E IndieFilms Speakeasy panel discussion to hear Alan Berliner again. I wanted to hear this in his words, not just what I remembered or jotted down in a sleep-deprived state at the festival. I listened to him say it again and transcribed it for you. Enjoy!
When I teach students I say, you should want to do the hardest thing that you could possibly do. And you have to turn that fear into fuel. You know, if it’s easy you’re in the wrong place.
The other thing is, when you start a film, it should always have this capacity–which is also frightening–that you shouldn’t know where you’re going to end up. You know, you should be open to the idea that you think you’re making a film that’s a portrait of your … grandfather but, low and behold, you end up learning the history of World War II, everything you could possibly imagine about Japanese culture, what family secrets do, how films about the dead are really about the living, and on and on and on. Meaning, you know, every film–family film, I mean, every film truly is, but family film especially–when I sometimes think that they’re Trojan horses. You think they’re one thing. They come in as one thing. They get described as one thing. And they turn out to be all these other things packed inside. You know, most of which you can’t control.
— Aalan Berliner, filmmaker
To hear Alan Berliner say those words himself, watch the A&E IndieFilms Speakeasy panel discussion recorded at the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival in 2012 (below) or on their Vimeo page here.