Shoot the Messenger

New works by Paul, and updates

noreply@blogger.com (Shoot the Messenger) — Tue, 18 May 2010 18:00:00 +0000

Shoot the Messenger's animator Paul Morstad has just completed some new works that will be shown next week at Vancouver's Jacana Gallery. Paul's paintings are extraordinary and they use many of the themes present in Shoot the Messenger: birds, geography, history, and land.

Our production team is back in Montreal after an incredible shoot in Lebanon, and then a hectic ten days at Hot Docs in Toronto, where Liam was a finalist for the Lindalee Tracy Award for emerging filmmakers - based on footage from his previous shoot for this film in October 2009. In the end the award went to a most deserving filmmaker, Ayanie Naseem whose first film, Forgotten was made for $40. He is a great young talent, keep your eyes on this guy...

Musically we continue to be inspired by one of the central characters in Shoot the Messenger, whose beats are providing much encouragement as we return to the daily grind. Our film's composer Radwan Moumneh's new collaboration Land of Kush is due for release at the end of May which will lead undoubtedly to some mind-blowing live experiences.

As we comb through the footage from this last shoot, there are some unbelievable moments that really do feel like 35mm fiction film - thank you Canon 5D ! But there are also some interesting challenges with this camera and I think we will see some exciting new ideas coming out of the film community over the next several months on how to best use this new tool.

Sarah

Week 2

noreply@blogger.com (Shoot the Messenger) — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 12:37:00 +0000

Waiting, and rolling... waiting and rolling. We are operating on what everyone here refers to with a shrug and a laugh as Lebanese Time, so in between shoots there is a lot of coffee drinking, hummus eating and watching of Egyptian spy movies in Arabic. This is the halfway point for me on this trip and the more I learn, the more I need to know - an old adage but a true one. As a friend told me the other day, he could spend an hour laying out his personal argument regarding Lebanon's relationship with Syria, then another hour laying out out the complete opposite argument, which would also be true.

One thing is absolutely clear: the aid being provided, and the education in the camps is abysmally low. An article in yesterday's Daily Star reports that nearly nine out of ten Palestinian refugees believe that services provided by the UN are insufficient. This comes as no surprise since this is the same thing I've been hearing and seeing since we arrived: the education system is failing students, and access to health care is a major problem. Even with the efforts of organizations such as the Ghassan Kanafani Foundation that provides innovative creative development for kindergarten students, it seems that the UNRWA schools that follow are so insufficient that there are massive shortfalls in access to proper education for Palestinians.

Within this reality and the many layers of complex truths that make up the Lebanese political and social fabric, we have been meeting and filming some extraordinary people. Yesterday we visited PARD, and spoke to the project manager for the clinic outside of Shatila camp. They provide services to approximately 50 patients every day and treat everything from chronic diseases to STDs. The woman I was speaking with told me that in the 16 years she has been doing this work, she never forgets a face. This comes in handy when some detective work is needed to try to guess what health issue a devout woman is facing, who cannot say the ailment or symptoms outright. Many women (and men, more recently) are unaware that the symptoms they are experiencing are the result of unfaithful partners.

PARD clinics in Southern Lebanon must first run workshop topics by the local Sheik to get his approval. Information related to reproductive health is a big problem, especially in the Gatherings - informal settlements on the outskirts of the camps. One midwife rotates through six Gatherings in her five working days, delivering babies and providing information.

A few days ago we filmed an event for Yawm al-Ared, Palestinian Land Day. For the first time, the celebrations were outdoors on the Corniche, which is the seafront boulevard that borders the Mediterranean and downtown Beirut. Traditional Palestinian Dabke dancing took place throughout the afternoon and performances on the main stage went on into the night. The setting was beautiful and the crowd was jubilant. I was squeezed between a massive throng of people with my wireless shotgun mic encased in its fuzzy windscreen to muffle the sea breeze from the microphone, trying not to block anyone's view or bash anyone in the head with this strange looking animal. Young kids would reach out instinctively to pet the fur casing, looking up at me questioningly when they felt the insides of the microphone instead of a pet.

A big breakthrough was finally receiving our army permissions this morning to film in the refugee camps to the south and the north, which are much more difficult to get into than the camps in Beirut. In the next few days we will go north to Nahr el-Bared, or what is left of it after the 2007 clashes in the camp; and south to Ain el-Helweh, where there seems to be the stirrings of similar outbreaks. There is a lot of spin regarding what happens when there is violence in the Palestinian camps, and who is involved. But when violence erupts in one of the camps it results in a massive migration of refugees to another refugee camp, crowding an already overcrowded area and stressing local resources even further.

There is no room to build and the structures in the Beirut camps just keep getting taller and taller, built up by smuggled in bricks, enforced by wire and wood. 30,000 people fled Nahr el-Bared in 2007, mainly to nearby Beddawi. Resources are so stretched, and programs so underfunded, that another forced migration would result in a major humanitarian disaster.

sarah

Week 1

noreply@blogger.com (Shoot the Messenger) — Tue, 30 Mar 2010 08:20:00 +0000

As our flight bounced and skidded onto the runway, popping open a baggage compartment and freaking out a few nervous flyers, I grinned with anticipation. Beirut seemed positively delighted to see me, with its Mediterranean blue skies and perfect spring light.

This is our second shoot. We've got twice as much equipment, twice as much time and twice as many crew members (producer Sarah Spring and I). The days of juggling a slimmed-down sound package and an improvised camera rig are over. Over the past month, I've built up a rig that satisfies most of my demands, feels almost like an Aaton XTR and is modular enough to go from a discrete handheld camera to a shoulder-mounted setup, making subject tracking a lot easier. I parted out 3 different modular setups from the good people at SHAPE and rebuilt something that looks like a cross between the front end of an Italian cafe racer and a ground-to-air rocket launcher. We're using a 5 inch external HDMI monitor powered by a battery pack from an old portable DVD player, mounted on a Manfrotto Cine Arm. Manual focus is now a breeze. Our audio is now all external, recorded on 4 channels to the Zoom H4N using the onboard stereo microphones for ambient sound as well as a wireless Sennheiser shotgun and a wireless lavalier. Our synch problems have almost totally been solved using a brilliant piece of software named PluralEyes which analyses the waveforms of the camera's bare audio files and matches it with the field recordings. No more slates, no more awkward clapping in front of the subject... it's plug and play.

Firmware 2.0.4. came out just days before we left, and we're now happily shooting at 24P. Canon also released a plugin for FCP that makes importing and pro-resing the footage a much simpler process. Essentially, we are now importing footage that looks like 35mm film and synching 4 channels of audio right after we shoot, something that seemed impossible just 5 months ago. It's a brave new world for documentary filmmakers.

As a photojournalist, I've found the transition from shooting stills to shooting video remarkably fluid. I'm interested in developing a shooting style that speaks the language of cinema but also is dressed up by the sartorial formality of photojournalism (how's that for an oxymoron?). Like many photographers, I'm twitchy, zooming with my feet and constantly looking around for new ways to compose an image. This doesn't work when you're shooting video. Now, when I enter a location for the first time, a size it up as best I can and take stock of my shooting positions, angles, lighting and opportunities to make interesting pictures. It's a delicate dance, especially in the tight confines of the refugee camps we're working in.

We've spent the past few days with Yassin in Burj el-Barajneh camp, hanging out with him and watching the pigeons fly overhead, forced up into the sky by long poles with Palestinian flags on them. Yassin grew up flying pigeons with his best friend Hassan, and his stories are priceless. This has been an incredibly productive week. I'll pass the phone to Sarah, whose first impressions of Beirut this past week are strikingly similar to mine way back in 2006:

"Sunny and hot, cloudless and almost muggy, there is a cool breeze swishing past my face smelling vaguely of the Mediterranean. Beirut's zillion cars that unceasingly swarm through the city, unhindered by traffic lights, speed limits, pedestrians or direction, their horns constantly honking sharp demands that full-on collisions be avoided, please.

i'm lying on my friend Firas' couch with the glass balcony door slid open and a view of beirut's maze of rooftops stretching out in a horizon of grey concrete. Firas worked with Liam on his last trip, and has completely welcomed us into his life, introduced us to his friends, fed us and hugged us and housed us.

Friendship is the overwhelming theme of the trip so far: so many people who are easily, effortlessly and definitely friends. I am giddy from so many new perspectives on the film, the city and the region. And many people are giving us contacts in the camps they think we should talk to. Our ideas about the film are becoming more focused on departure from the victim narrative that is overwhelmingly prevalent in representations of life in the refugee camps. We're going to speak with young people who are making music, creating comic books, getting politically involved, studying medicine, weaving patterns and creating a living for themselves. What is the burden of their identity? How are they reshaping it? Throughout, the birds will swirl overhead and every person will connect in some way with the pigeons that are also trying to make their way home.

Every day we meet with more people who give us information and contacts. Over drinks, over coffee, the list of people who we are going to be setting up interviews with in the camps surrounding Beirut grows all the time, and so until we get our papers for the south we are going to be busy.

One person I'm excited to meet is a young photographer, Hoda, who took part in an NGO's photography workshop in her camp. The eleven-year old's photos are extremely good and are part of an exhibition that we saw yesterday. Through a dinner party here that Firas threw on Friday, I met Lina, a Palestinian woman who works with the NGO and who invited me to see the exhibit, where I met Ramsay, one of the old guard AFP photographers who instigated this program. Plans are already underway for the next project: fully equipped, permanent photography studios in the camps. The kids have had some extensive training already and will now have photographers from Beirut on hand on a regular basis to hone their skills.

The list goes on, so many people in Beirut are spending their time in the camps, working with people, sharing their skills, trying to help in some way. It's surprising to me how many have committed so much time but so much about Beirut surprises me. That I feel so at home here, for one. There is a rollicking art scene with films, concerts and events happening every night. Dinners, drinks on one of the main strips, loud conversations with locals and ex-pats, jaded photojournalists and foreign correspondents, people from all over the middle east and around the world who have gotten the 'bug' - fallen head over heels in love with Beirut."

March shoot

noreply@blogger.com (Shoot the Messenger) — Mon, 22 Mar 2010 15:26:00 +0000

Some recent gifts from the technological-powers-that-be are a handy firmware that lets you pro-res the Canon's footage right in Final Cut 7 without having to go through Compressor, and then today a wonderful little program called Pluraleyes which syncs up the video with the external audio in no time flat. Just tested it on our footage from yesterday and works like a charm! This will save HOURS of work sync-ing up the footage in post.

Tomorrow Liam and I (Sarah) are leaving for the second shoot. Slightly different setup this time - we have a LOT more gadgets! And we'll be bringing a nifty little GPS device to track our movements so that the web geniuses at StressLtdDesign can do some fun mapping of this shoot.

The Gatherings

noreply@blogger.com (Shoot the Messenger) — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 18:15:00 +0000

Just catching up on posting some articles we've been looking at, here is a piece about the approximately 200,000 Palestinians in Lebanon living outside of UN jurisdiction on the outskirts of the refugee camps. These clusters of communities are called 'Gatherings' and are some of the worst in Lebanon. Rest here

Work permit restrictions on Palestinians in Lebanon

noreply@blogger.com (Shoot the Messenger) — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 18:05:00 +0000

A recent article in the Daily Star lays out the debate over opening up work permit restrictions on Palestinians in Lebanon: "Until recently, over 70 professions were off limits to Palestinians. An amendment in 2005 allowed them to obtain work permits for low-level clerical and manual labor but maintained a veto on fields like medicine, law or engineering. Very few Palestinians have work permits, forcing them into unsecure jobs where they could face unlawful dismissal or lower wages than their Lebanese counterparts."

Read the rest here

Demo

noreply@blogger.com (Shoot the Messenger) — Wed, 30 Dec 2009 18:02:00 +0000

We have about ten hours of footage from Liam's shoot in October. The images are incredibly beautiful and it looks just like film. So far so good with the Canon 5D MkII! The Zoom H4N field recorder worked well too. Liam's shots of pigeons landing on the roof with the sun setting behind them, their ankle bells tinkling, takes your breath away.

The stark realities of day-to-day life are also much clearer. Little has changed for the 200,000 Palestinians living in refugee camps in Lebanon and they continue to be abandoned by the State, and the International community.

An older woman remembers being exiled from Palestine in 1948:

"We were told to leave the place only for seven days and come back. For eight months we waited and nothing happened. We did not even take any clothes. Seven days, seven months, seven years and 70 years and we never went back. We were cheated and they say that we escaped. Haifa can not be left. No other city is like it. What is Beirut, Lebanon or whatever. Now this camp is exactly in the middle, 80 km from Beirut and 80 km from Haifa."

The connection between carrier pigeons and Palestinian refugees is explained in this way by Deeb Zebid, whose flock is so familiar the he knows each bird by name:

"There is only one tie between pigeons and Palestinians; that is the loyalty to the land. The return to the land because it is one’s right."

Over in Vancouver, Paul is working away on animating the bird's journey, and on how to visually expand the film's themes of imagination, isolation, escape, and memory.

We're getting ready to make a demo over the next month. It's a mini-test run: what's the look and the feel of this documentary? How can we convey the story this film will tell, in five minutes?

Throughout this process, our team is very inspired by this song by Fairouz called Ya Tayr (Oh Bird). A good soundtrack to this exciting push into January.

Fairouz - Oh Bird

Oh bird
Oh bird atop of the world
Could you tell my beloved what I'm dealing with?
Oh bird

Go ask them about me to the one who's companion is not with him
He's scarred with the injuries of love
He's there not telling me what pains him
While thoughts of childhood recur in his mind

Oh bird who takes with him the color of the trees
There is no longer anything but waiting and boredom
I wait in the sun's eye on the coldness of stone
The hand of separation guides me
I beg your feathers which equal my days
And the thorny rose and the grains of air
If you're going to them and the paradise of love
Take me if just for a minute and bring me back

Sarah

Paydirt

noreply@blogger.com (Shoot the Messenger) — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 06:52:00 +0000

Shoot postponed in Burj el Barajneh due to sudden unrest. My guy refused to let me come in Saturday, citing security issues. Wow, frustrating. I spent the day wondering if my aspirations to direct a film were misplaced, feeling like the world was conspiring against me.

Sunday, I woke up at 5:30 am, gave myself a kick in the ass, grabbed my camera and took a service taxi to the legendary Souk Al-Ahad. No "Ahad!" moments, but I met some sketchy people who were selling pigeons beneath a dank overpass. My fixer picked me up at 8 and we hit the road, bombing down the coast of the Mediterranean in his incredibly robust Beetle, driving at breakneck speeds. We cruised through all the checkpoints and finally arrived in Sour (Tyre), where we met up with Jaber, a program officer with a local human rights organization. Jaber seems to know just about everyone. After the necessary introductions and Arabic coffee (on the beautiful beach behind his house) we went to a busy marketplace in old Sour that could only be accessed by a small, nondescript passageway. Unreal. We had a quick lunch and discussed the plan for the day. Jaber told me about a man who keeps an archive of books and artifacts from pre-1948 Palestine. Fisk wrote an article about him; check it out. Mahmoud's museum was full of sad reminders of everyday life in a simpler time, from keys to people's homes in Galilee to seemingly banal household items stamped "made in Palestine". He gave an extraordinarily eloquent interview, recounting the day he fled his home and came to Lebanon in gripping detail.

We were scheduled to meet a young pigeon handler on the edge of Al-Buss camp at 4 pm, so we hustled our way down there and slipped in the side gate, where we met Mohammed and his flock. The sun was low in the sky, and as I climbed up the rickety ladder to their rooftop with 40 pounds of equipment on my houlders, I started to really get a sense of how crazy this project might become. On the roof, Mohammed whistled loudly at the birds as they swooped in circles over the camp, hurling pieces of dried lime from a Palestinian slingshot into the sky to drive them higher and higher. Over the wall of the camp, the Mediterranean sea sparkled in the waning light and a convoy of UNIFIL forces paraded past the banners for Amal and Hezbollah leaders.

Afterwards, my fixer was talking to a couple of the kids and asking about other pigeon handlers and one of them casually dropped a name: Deeb. I've been looking for Deeb for weeks now and was starting to think he was a mythical character. A self-styled pigeon king, Deeb is the guy who knows about the practice of sending messages by bird. After days and days of hearing that I was on a fool's errand, this was music to my ears.

Meeting Deeb made me realize how passionate pigeon fanciers are about their hobby - which for him, is a full-time job. he described in intricate detail the different features that make a bird more desireable, and told us about rich Beiruti fanciers coming to his house and offering untold sums of money for his flock. We were at his home for about an hour, and during that time, 5 people came by to talk pigeons. We'd hit the motherlode. That night, Firas and I drove haphazardly around Tyre, talking about the people we'd met, politics, love and life, partly lost, partly just exhilarated and exhausted by the mind blowing day we'd had.

We're returning on Wednesday and Friday to "shoot the messenger". Wow. And yes, in case you were wondering, that's a handmade pigeon tattoo on the guy's arm from when he was detained in the occupied territories.

Showtime

noreply@blogger.com (Shoot the Messenger) — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 05:40:00 +0000

Over the weekend I met my first pigeon handler. I had been scouring an area near wealthy Ras Beirut looking for a cafe that I'd heard sold birds. I got a lot of weird looks going door-to-door, asking shopkeepers if they knew where I could find pigeons (and making appropriately ridiculous hand gestures at the same time). Finally, a car mechanic with wild eyes pumped my arm firmly and led me down a side street, around a corner and up the stairs of an apartment building to the roof. After reading about this phenomenon for so long, I was amazed to see it in action. These aren't your run of the mill street pigeons; these are Columba livia palaestinae. I was instantly stuck by how beautiful they look as they soar over the city in one big flock, directed by owner Abed, whistling and waving large bamboo poles to direct them. Abed gave me some tiny beaded angle bracelets, rings and bells that fit on the legs of his birds as a souvenir. More on this in another post, but let's just say I got some great footage over the weekend.

This week got off to a good start; I got a call from the army press office informing me that my permissions had come through. Incredibly, I was granted access to every camp I requested. After that I got my friend's driver Hisham to take me to Hezbollah's press office, where I explained what i would be doing and gave them copies of all my permissions. It was very telling to compare the business cards of the Ministry of Information (police), Army HQ and Hezbollah. Hezbollah's card was printed on heavy textured paper with a gold laminate. Bling. The others looked like something you print at home. I got a kick out of showing them to my friends who live here, who thought it was hilarious.

Later, I met with Firas, who will drive me to Tyre in his 1960's VW Beetle on Sunday to meet with a former militant turned human rights activist who will help me. From there I will visit Al-Bass and Rashidiyeh camps, and work my ass off. You can see factsheets on the camps at the UNRWA site.

The next day, I met Yassin for lunch; he's going to help me do sound and find me some characters for the work in Burj-el Barajneh. After our meeting, I went with him back to the camp to listen to his music and to get to know him better. I spent 5 hours in his studio, sitting through power outages, listening to some of the freshest arabic hip hop I've heard, desperate to shoot but without the necessary permissions from the camp leaders (tomorrow, they say). Yassin is one hell of a talented kid. He was explaining the lyrics of his music, and I was amazed by how he played with the language, interpreting and reinterpreting words that sound the same but mean different things in incredibly experimental ways. Check out his myspace page and send him props; he's going through the difficult process of applying for visas and permissions to go to school in Canada to master sound engineering. Cross your fingers, he deserves this chance.

As we walked through the checkpoint at the gates and into the camp, I looked up and saw three flocks of pigeons whirling like dervishes from three separate rooftops. The sight of it made me giddy with anticipation for the next 12 days. And man - what a place to film in. With such restricted access and so much tension in the camps, you feel privileged - if that word can even be applied to this situation - walking around and getting full Palestinian hospitality. It's difficult to describe how dire the living conditions are in the camps, and how resilient the inhabitants are. This is a place with a million stories and one long, sad history.

So, Thursday, Friday and Saturday, I'll be back in there. It's incredible to think that the past week has just been legwork, bureaucracy and sitting down, talking to people and building relationships. I think I expected to jump off the plane and start shooting, the way I'm used to working as a news photographer. This film is a bigger commitment in every way, because the project has so many individual threads of complexity, and so much depends on being able to weave it all together.

I've got two moleskines stuffed with notes, reflections, ideas, interview questions and little-known facts to act as my shooting bible. i feel a little like a one-man band at the moment - director, production coordinator, DP and grip all at once. Somehow, it's working - I feel incredibly focused. Time to go shoot.

Ignition

noreply@blogger.com (Shoot the Messenger) — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 09:10:00 +0000

This seems like a good omen; I found this ancient piece of pottery in an antique store. Apparently it came from the Phoenician city of Jbeil (which may be the oldest continuously inhabited city in the world). Yes, it's a pigeon.

It's hard to believe I'm finally back in Lebanon with enough funding to shoot a project I've been dreaming about for over two years. Props to Loaded Pictures for helping to make it all happen.

I've had a busy time here in Beirut so far. After a run-around day applying for the necessary permissions from the police and military, I went out for a few beers with Mitch, a terrific writer/photographer I met here in 2006, and Johan, who was passing through after 8 weeks in Iraq with the NY Times. I got the lowdown on sketchy security contractors, hashish runners and the Sunni-Alawite clashes in Tripoli. Earlier in the evening, a grenade attack on a cafe left 8 people wounded in Jabal Mohsen, an Alawite neighborhood. This was followed by a retaliatory attack in the nearby Sunni neighbourhood of Tabbaneh. Sectarian clashes in the area are a growing concern, especially since they seem to mirror incidents that sparked the civil war in 1975.

But that's not why I'm here. I'm looking for pigeons, and pigeon handlers, and specifically people who do this in the 12 official Palestinian camps that are scattered across the country. And while I'm assured that this phenomenon is very much alive and well, it seems more difficult than I thought to track these people down. This is exacerbated by the fact that my fixer was in a serious motorcycle accident last week. I spoke to him on the phone the other day and he sounded about as good as anyone can sound with a shattered arm - which means I need to opt for Plan B.

Forunately, in Lebanon there are only about 2 degrees of separation between people. On Thursday, I met with an awesome production coordinator here named Rana who passed on the name of a Palestinian cameraman who might be able to help, and a guy I worked with in 2007 thinks he can help me on Monday. Later that night I went to see Montreal's ECP DJ at Zico House on Spears street (thanks for the tip Patricia B.!), where I met a guy who runs film workshops for Palestinian kids. I left as the dance floor swelled to the beats of what could have been a Megasoid track and walked home, a lamb soujouk in hand and the promise of a busy weekend ahead.

Friday, I played the waiting game, working on leads, leaving messages and emailing key people in between snacking on some of the best hummous I've ever had, with fresh vegetables from the market. This led to a very long and very overdue jetlag nap, followed by a very short and very painful home haircut (note to self: $5 beard clippers purchased at an electronics store in Ashrafiyeh might not be the best tool). At midnight, I got antsy and went to a nearby bar run by a former photojournalist, where I met a very nice arms dealer who gave me an interesting ride back to my place, pulling high-tech weaponry out of the back seat of his convertible to show me while keeping the other hand on the wheel. I love this place.

noreply@blogger.com (Shoot the Messenger) — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 18:16:00 +0000