Blogging IFP: Let's Talk About It

Kouross Esmaeli, Muthana Mohmed & Nina Davenport from "Operation Filmmaker," a film at one of the filmmaker conferences at IFP.

A crowd of filmmakers and other members of the film industry gathered outside the Haft Auditorium at the Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT) at various times today, as they did every day this week, waiting to get into the Independent Filmmaker Conferences, in which filmmakers, producers, distributors, agents, and buyers discussed a variety of issues pertaining to independent filmmaking.

In the panel discussion entitled “Subjective: Working With Documentary Subjects,” which took place at 1:00 p.m. today, four documentary directors engaged in a surprising and thought-provoking conversation with moderator Sky Sitney, the Director of Programming at SILVERDOCS, about the various political, ethical, and social questions that inevitably arise when one sets out to document other people’s lives.

Nina Davenport, the director of Operation Filmmaker, discussed the inescapable power struggle between herself and her young Iraqi subject, describing it as “a microcosm of what was going on in Iraq.”

While making her film, Freehold, about a female police officer dying of cancer and fighting for the right to pass her pension on to her female life partner, Cynthia Wade basically lived with her subjects for the last six months of their life together. She says she wanted to involve the couple in the filmmaking process as much as possible, so she gave them a camera, and interviewed them frequently about what making the film meant to them.

Tia Lessin talked how about she doesn’t even like to use the word “subject” to refer to the people in her film, Trouble The Water, which is about Hurricane Katrina. Her main “subject,” Kimberly, was more like a collaborator: she wrote songs for the film, and shot some of the footage.

Lucia Small’s film, The Axe In The Attic, also deals with Hurricane Katrina; in order to acknowledge their uncomfortably privileged role in the midst of the disaster, she and her co-director, Ed Pincus, filmed themselves extensively, thereby becoming their own subjects.

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