We document the exhilarating comings and goings on the ground at London’s second Creative Nonfiction Film Weekend.
The Creative Nonfiction Film Weekend celebrated its second incarnation this year at the Rio Cinema in Dalston, having decamped from the Genesis in Mile End. The 48-hour event is the brainchild of co-directors Orla Smith and Kimia Ipakchi, and it felt like something similar to the landing and departure of a small UFO: lighting fast; exquisitely odd; and trailblazing the skies in quality.
Key to the CNFW’s concept is that you can attend all of the screenings (there were seven this year) if you so desire. Unlike the majority of film festivals, there are no moments where the spectator is forced to decide what screening to attend and what to miss. There is no scribbling in the calendar and no rushing for something to quickly fill the stomach.
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I found the curation of the small programme to be excellent, with a coherence among the films that it is not easy to dissociate them from the context of the ensemble – the whole and its parts. This presents a uniquely strong and impressive effect, a mutual strengthening between the festival and the individual films.
The UK première of Therese Henningsen’s All These Summers, for instance, where the director finds rhyme between her father’s experience of isolation and the sleepless nights of her estate neighbor felt like a moment integral to the CNFW, not just something that happened to take place there; or Chloe Abraham’s The Taste of Mango, about the relationship between the director, her mother and her grandmother, and the raw Q&A that followed between Chloe and fellow filmmaker Saeed Taji Farouky. The care given to these films, their filmmakers and audiences was visible everywhere from the beautiful printed programmes to the closed captions the festival commissioned for the works that did not have them, striving for complete inclusivity and accessibility.
After last year’s inaugural edition, which the CNFW refers to as an introductory sampling of “everything documentary can and should be”, this year’s range was narrowed to focus on something known as “personal documentary”. These are often nonfiction films where the camera is turned onto the filmmaker. Co-director Ipakchi reminds us in the programme that having an exceptional story is not necessarily a requirement for a personal documentary; it’s more that the featured filmmakers have, “moulded the material of their lives into complex and intriguing shapes”. As the festival began with the screening and panel “Chronically Online: A Personal History of the UK Internet”, everyone was invited to learn how accessible and surprising, pure and informal this moulding could be.
This was a masterclass in opening a film festival, an immediate romp, DIY top-to-bottom, filled with oddities and the most fun I’ve had inside a cinema this year. In partnership with the BFI National Archive’s “Our Screen Heritage” project, which has been acquiring specimens of online moving image deemed historically or culturally significant, the hour-and-a-bit featured treasures and relics such as an episode of David Firth’s Salad Fingers, a WhatsApp-viral video of Liverpool teens being chased by a police car, and the 12-second, “Ah fuck, I can’t believe you’ve done this” meme, presented by the actual legend getting punched, Paul Weedon, a cultural journalist these days. The video just turned 18: fellow panelist Kitty Robertson mentioned how we are now about as far away from the beginning of online moving image as we were from moving image itself when the National Archive was founded, which is quite the jarring notion.
You’d be mistaken to think this was an unserious night, a mere warm-up to later, more high-minded pursuits. At a point in the screening, a video called I Quit My London Bus Driver Job to Start a Business [Now I’m Scared] starts playing, and I’m in awe. In it, YouTuber “Mr. Tasar” shows us the business he started in the town of Arnold, Nottingham. The vlog somehow feels like an immediate cult classic, owing to things like his deadpan confidence, the way he keeps plugging his other videos, or the walk with his wife just around the block where he takes the opportunity to announce they’re having a son, ultrasound and all. This story of a guy and his corner coffee shop somehow feels like a Terrence Malick film, someone tells me at a nearby bar over the weekend.
Polish writer Witold Gombrowicz has a diary entry that I think about frequently – one of my favorites in literature. On a Wednesday in 1953, pertaining to a peculiar curiosity he felt developing, Gombrowicz asks: “Around the corner… what will be there? A man? A dog? If it is a dog, what size of dog? What breed? I am sitting at the table and soon from now a soup will appear… but what soup?”. He adds: “This fundamental experience has to this day not been adequately studied by art”. This was, of course, several decades before the CNFW, but it was meaningful for me to recognise, guided by the festival’s programme, just how filming one’s life or endeavour can propose to resolve the phenomenon described by Gombrowicz, that assignment of meaning to the void of possibility.
That’s what happens in the 2004 film Kings & Extras: Digging for a Palestinian Image by Azza El-Hassan who asks in Jordan, in Syria and in Lebanon, “Where is the missing archive?”, referring to the films in the PLO Media Unit that went missing during the Israeli invasion of Beirut in 1982. The material is not present, so the film is built around this negative space.
It’s what happens in MS Slavic 7 by Sofia Bohdanowicz and Deragh Campbell, where we follow Audrey, an amalgam of the two directors, as she investigates the letters between her great-grandmother, Zofia Bohdanowiczowa, and fellow Polish poet Józef Wittlin. Like Gombrowicz, Zofia and Józef were also displaced by WW2. Here the box of letters is present, but the material is impassive and monolithic: the filmmakers attempt to find its meaning.
In Shared Resources, the 1PM Sunday screening, filmmaker Jordan Lord procures meaning in their parents’ domestic life, health and financial debt, the devastation of Hurricane Katrina still a stark piece of the past. The film is brilliant. Lord and their parents narrate, comment and discuss over the footage and after the fact, often describing things so minute as hand or face movements, building something like a painting or diorama of their relationship, every detail recognized and cared for as a family.
Finally, L.A. based filmmaker Julian Castronovo offered a wholly different approach in his fascinating film Debut, or, Objects of the Field of Debris as Currently Catalogued, also a UK Première. It’s a dense, thrilling, slightly terrifying autofiction about a missing filmmaker called Julian Castronovo and his attempt to locate an enigmatic art forger known as Fawn Ma. The film is peppered with meta-commentary, as the protagonist is struggling to find financing for his first feature, and Castronovo has some pretty amazing answers to my questions, claiming that the things he made happen to his character “demanded that a film was made about them”. A clear budding master of the personal film, he equates his method to existence in society; pretending to be a given person has always been a fundamental approach to being that given person.
Things got intensely meta as the festival team themselves appeared to grapple hands-on with these notions, in recursive fashion. At a certain point there was an impromptu showing of personal documentaries that Smith, Ipakchi, and Technical Director Nick Bush filmed about their friendship during the Caveh Zahedi UK Tour they organized this past March, as well as short films made by applicants of the workshop they hosted then. After watching the pieces, a kind of personal-life Q&A slash group therapy session with the co-directors ensued – I remember thinking, can other festivals claim that they have something like this?
We vacate the mysteriously furnished room and the organization resets the placement of things. A single rug lies on the floor. This is the setup for the CNFW’s final surprise: a work-in-progress, brand-new interactive piece by film editor Joe Bini (All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, You Were Never Really Here, and 27 films with Werner Herzog). A tablet is set up on a table, and I pick it up for reading. One-person only, this session. It gets really peaceful. A narrator in the book begins to describe a scene in San Francisco. At a certain point, things move to a TV, as I am seeing on screen the results of what I have been imagining. I faintly hear Howard Shore through the basement walls. It’s David Cronenberg’s The Shrouds playing in the other room: the festival’s stay at the Rio is coming to an end.
Bini’s piece is around 45 minutes long. It’s about the interpolating psychologies of being an author and being a reader. We have tea the following morning at the Bar Italia in Soho: this is not autofiction – it really happened. The weekend is over, and the effects of CNFW’s dedication to its world are beginning to be felt; everyone who came out for the festival is already reaping the rewards of a grassroots programme truly dedicated to its craft and audience. If a voiceover played somewhere at that point it would be about my return, camera in hand and all, coming to document the documenters in whatever plans they had next.
