The Q&A On Audio
Here’s the link as provided by artrlight. Thank you.
I’m shocked at the degree of rhetoric coming from both sides. This is not a Q&A that was ever going to yield any answers.
Just as I had anticipated, Tom’s interpreter was brought in to rubberstamp the films claims, in absentia of context. They showed him/her the fiLm over a few nights with some extra shots before and after. After which the said interpreter gave his/her seal of approval and then said, they anted to remain anonymous. That’s hardly an objective assessment that would stand. Talk about garbage-in-garbage-out.
I’m appalled at how inarticulate Ms Ayala is in this interview. I understand English is not her first language, but she comes over as a petulant child insisting on having things her way. Maybe it works for her to force things through with the force of her pushy persona, but her answers weren’t really enlightening of what they were thinking. It struck me that whatever it was they were thinking, it didn’t have much to do with responsible reportage.
The questioners also line up their rhetorical ducks in line and Dan refuses to answer the questions. Violeta kind of raves with inarticulate “you knows” punctuating what is essentially a stream of self-justification. The AWSA reps are asking pretty forensic questions about tapes and who asked what questions when which don’t really go to the heart of the matter.
I’m aghast at the sense of what Dan thinks is polite, where he’s willing to break trust to get the shot, but that’s all okay in film making; and what Violeta thinks is human rights being more important than politics. It’s as if they’ve decided they just won’t see the problem as a probelm, and therefore it’s not a problem. They’re like non-contenders in the basic ethics stakes.
Which naturally begs the question, how come these other people are so upset? Dan replies he dosn’t want to comment to a pointed question. I’m sure Dan wouldn’t because there’s not an answer he could give that would make him look good. It’s a really ghastly Q&A. Nobody sounds good or decent. None of it is in the least bit edifying. It just makes us confront the obtuseness of Tom, Dan and Violeta and Kemal and Fetim and the privileged-to-be-black dude and the Australian dude.
A Lot Of Fuss For A 1/4Million Bucks
The other thread where we discussed the issue of releases and translations got a little long so I started to add an entry here for the continued joy of gratuitous argument.
To put things into a little perspective, ‘Stolen’ got less than $250k from Screen Australia which, on one hand is a lot of money but on movie-making stakes, is peanuts. All this arguing over a measly $250k film. I don’t think James Cameron would get out of bed in the mornings for a $250k film. Nonetheless we have this incredibly stupid controversy which cannot be resolved because nobody seem to have enough clout or financial wherewithal to sort it all out.
ScreenHub Goes To Bat For Tom
Anyway, here’s David Tiley from ScreenHub’s account of the Melbourne Film Festival screening, abridged:
The screening itself passed off quietly, to a fascinated audience. The q&a was moderated by Andrew Dodd, and recorded for Radio National, who asked questioners to identify themselves, and their affiliations with Polisario or the filmmakers.
That didn’t work for long. A variety of people attempted to cast doubt on the plausibility of the story, with a series of mannered micro-speeches; the film’s attackers in Melbourne were clearly disciplined, well-rehearsed and courteous. At least one person supporting the film seemed to share the same passion for planning.
Producer Zubrycki, never relaxed in public, was clearly tense. Fallshaw and Ayala were defensive and hectoring, reflecting their behavior in the second half of the film.
Afterwards, the cinema was abuzz with excited discussion. As I said to one viewer, “I haven’t seen something like this for a long time. It feels like the Seventies.”
“No”, she replied. “The Seventies were much worse.”
The extraordinary thing about this film remains its honesty, which has clearly evolved to anticipate and respond to criticism – an evolution which is only possible with easy digital recuts.
Audience members I talked to generally disliked Fallshaw and Ayala, who admit they dealt with the Moroccans, who seem self important and grandiose, who bully interviewees late in the film.
But it remains convincing – there is slavery in the camps, it takes a certain cultural form, it is named as such, and the film provides a fascinating picture of the experience of enslavement in action.
It is also obsessed with its own story, which shifts from slavery to Polisario’s attempts to deal with a public relations problem. It doesn’t enter the politics of the struggle – we don’t even get a map for around an hour, even though the film is crossing borders. While it defines slavery as present across the region, it never provides a wider context.
And so it went. The most telling 2 paragraphs of David Tiley’s article is here:
Polisario is clearly attacking details of a film which most of our readers have not seen, in order to question the whole, attacking the motivations of filmmakers, and painting itself as staggeringly benign.
It is possible to smell a number of rats in this situation, but the biggest rodent is being dragged around by Polisario. And the inadequacies of the filmmakers are clearly visible in the film.
So here we are with all this controversy about the film and whether it’s accurate or ethically compromised or even down right dodgy. Tiley’s being disingenuous himself when he argues that:
- if Polisario is attacking the details in order to question the whole,
- Then this imperfect procedure brings doubt on the Polisario’s main point
- and therefore the Polisario cannot be itself staggeringly beign.
EXCEPT the third line also runs the same trope of questioning the detail in order to cast aspersion on the whole. You can’t condemn a method and then use it yourself to condemn a party.
It is logically self-defeating. But I guess it looks good on the page – until you put it to proper scrutiny. Not that I give a shit about the Polsiario and their politics. I’m sorry to disappoint some people, but this blog just isn’t about that part of the issue.
David Tiley also writes at the end:
Given the pressure that Polisario and its friends in Australia, particularly inside the ALP, have brought to bear on this matter, the statement is unsurprising.
But it does not represent either a shift in policy or a rejection – Screen Australia would never claim that a production it funded reflected any official point of view.
That’s a little slippery there. A non-endorsement does not mean a policy shift, true enough. However, a non-endorsement might easily mean it’s a rejection under the guise of plausible deniability, which is something you wouldn’t put past politicians and bureaucrats. i.e, we ARE rejecting it, but not in a way that says so.
Which happens to be exactly what they’re doing, as I’ve been told by people inside Screen Australia. So David Tiley’s assertion is flat out wrong.
The fact that Screen Australia would never claim that a production it funded reflect any official point of view, is not what is being questioned. What is being asked is why would Screen Australia make a point of its non-endorsement if not but to avoid legal ramifications? – Like, the absence of signed releases and that sort of thing, perhaps?
One thing I have noticed with the side of the film makers to date is that logic doesn’t seem to be their strong suit and truth claims seem to be too difficult for them to address. Instead, it’s the insidious machinations of the Polisario and its long reach across the globe that gets trotted out. Which it might well be, but even then the defenders of the film don’t seem to be on top of their philosophical position.
Maybe it’s a Post-Modern problem after all, where there is no fixed ‘Meaning’, only the small-m meaning we draw from the text and the very modality of the various modes of truth claims coalesce into a socially formed *meaning* kind of hyper-real relativist mind space. (Oh, get me my vomit bag!)
I have to confess I’m getting really tired of wrestling with this topic. It’s not much fun. And to that extent, I don’t take too kindly to the film makers.
For a start, the Gen Y film makers of ‘Stolen’ probably are generationally (and I do grossly generalise here but…) the sort of people who think nothing of illegally downloading pirate songs onto their iPods and iPhones and not bat an eye-lid at the copyright infraction. Run cracked versions of software on the computers, run pirated videos on their DVDs. Why on earth would they care about truth claims and verification and release forms and legalities? Why bother? Nobody ever knew nothing, right? Make up the meaning as you go along. Shout out long enough that there are slaves in the camps, maybe then the meaning of slavery will warp enough into the image they want? Nothing unethical in that is there? How could there be, when ethics itself can’t get established in the motile sea of flexible, ambiguous meaning?
Cue my Vomit bag, please.
The Art Neuro Weblog 
Let’s hear the unasked questions then, in the Q&A.
Mine is this:
Why was it necessary to spend some months with a professional story editor in the USA to create the storyline of this film?
Was the American studio time paid for out of the Screen Australia grant or was additional money raised for the work in the USA?
If the latter, where did it come from?
Is there any obligation to spend Screen Australia money on developing the Australian film industry?
I could find on the internet some information about funds the filmmakers received to make Stolen. The funding came from FFC and AFC which became Screen Australia and they also received some money from NSW FTO. Although we don’t know how much money they received from elsewhere. That could be another question which you can ask the filmmakers or SA.
This is how much the filmmakers have received for The Wall of Shame, Born In Captivity which all resulted in Stolen:
Film Finance Corporation: December 2007 :
FFC Special Documentary Fund :$231,582.00
Australian Film Commission (July, September, November 2006: $70.000.00
NSW Film and Television Office (FTO), Development Projects Contracted 2007-08: $14.950.00
Maths are not my forte but I think the total is 316.532 from public sources.
I think one thing that needs to be said is that the respective funding bodies the, AFC, the FFC and NSWFTO would have put their money in on the basis of the project proposal – not the film it finished up being.
From what I understand from Screen Australia that inherited the project, the film changed entirely, late in its production – which dovetails with all accounts.
So it’s not as if these funding bodies put in their money agreeing with the notions contained in the film. As much as I would enjoy kicking these film bureaucrats in the rear for funding a film they now want to distance themselves from, it wasn’t exactly something under their control. Nor am I suggesting that it should have been.
Sometimes, it’s just the way the cookie crumbles.
As Robert Palmer once sang, “She’s so fine, there’s no telling where the money went!”
http://www.spectator.co.uk/australia/5289343/diary.thtml
Philippe Mora
Wednesday, 26th August 2009
Philippe Mora opens his diary
I was in Sydney’s Chinatown, enjoying delicious steamed lobster with ginger and attending the recent Film Festival, when I got a dramatic phone call. An old friend and cameraman for three of my films, Carlos Gonzalez, was calling from Los Angeles to say that a West Saharan woman, Fetim, from Tindouf refugee camp in Algeria, was flying in to Sydney to denounce a film portraying her as a slave. Carlos was a friend of Fetim, and he asked me would I meet her at the airport. He said the family was very distressed at the allegations and felt betrayed by the Australian film-makers who had lived with them on the pretext they were making a documentary about a family reunion.
Frankly, after decades of battles I have issue fatigue. But I knew Carlos had impeccable credentials on this issue, known as the Forgotten Conflict. He had risked his life in 2006 to go into occupied Western Sahara to film interviews with indigenous children who had been allegedly tortured by the Moroccan occupiers. (Morocco had invaded in 1975.) He was arrested and interrogated for eight hours on 3 June 2006 by Moroccan police and intelligence officers, including the notorious alleged torturer Mohammed El Hassouni, known as ‘Moustache’. He was then promptly deported and denounced in the Moroccan press, to our great amusement, but not to his, as being a spy for Hugo Chavez and Mossad. Since I knew he was neither but a director of children’s shows for Nickelodeon in Hollywood and a generally standup fellow, I agreed to help his incoming ‘slave’ friends.
Fetim and her husband Baba arrived chainless early in the morning and I greeted them with Kamal Fadel, the Australian representative of the Polisario, the political organisation that had flown them out. Charismatic, smart and open, I immediately liked Kamal and his two guests. Slaves with passports! They headed for friends in Glebe, where all slaves hang out when they’re in Sydney.
Then the whole thing blew up. Fetim’s dramatic denunciation of the film Stolen that night at the festival ended up on the front page of the Sydney Morning Herald. The ABC’s 7.30 Report went after the flaws in the film. Stolen received a barrage of blistering criticism for mistranslations, re-enactments, lack of releases from leading participants, Mondo Cane-type sensationalism, blurring of facts, maps and history. One of the film-makers’ aunts vigorously defended the film on blogs. Meanwhile I had re-connected with old mate, wit, great writer and political connoisseur, Bob Ellis, and as an unlikely Poirot and Sherlock Holmes duo we made some inquiries. An angry UN interviewee cried foul at the film, as did a key translator. Ellis and I exchanged opinions on the film way too rude, if not obscene, for publication in this august magazine. The Morocco-Polisario conflict underlying the debate was not a left-right debate as the film-maker’s aunt tried to make out. In fact, James Baker, no pinko, had tried to help the Polisario with vigour in the Nineties.
Producer Tom Zubrycki announced people were trying to ‘do a job’ on the film. He backed out of an interview with me. We met tyro filmmakers Dan Fallshaw and Violeta Ayala in a bar and complained the problem was that people were jealous of them, that Ellis had fought with his wife (sic), that slavery is a state of mind, and other irrelevant inanities. Ellis, like a cultural Grim Reaper, said to Fallshaw, who blanched: ‘You are going to jail, son.’
The story continued last week when a revamped version, with piquant deletions, was shown at the Melbourne International Film Festival with a disclaimer belatedly added by co-financier Screen Australia. Questions about whether Polisario-haters in Morocco contributed funding to the film remain unanswered.
Other serious queries remain about this film, and as a sometime documentary film-maker I maintain that fakery and fraud, if that is what this is, hurts us all as film-makers, journalists and film-goers. It’s my opinion, for example, that it is either dishonesty, negligence or incompetence not to get releases from people one is portraying in a film making such grave allegations. I am no saint, but certain standards should be de rigueur. Perhaps there was acute First World arrogance in this situation. A few Australians pontificating about alleged slavery and really hurting people in the guise of helping them is a bit rich. An Italian NGO in the camp described Ayala as a ‘mythomaniac’.
By contrast, a recent positive highlight was vicariously going into orbit and repairing the Hubble telescope. My wife Pamela and I met six of the astronauts who fixed it in May at a special event at the Academy in Beverly Hills. The astronaut film-makers took up 30 cameras including an IMAX 3D camera that could only film for eight minutes. At a mission cost of US$1.1 billion to fix the Hubble, the eight-minute film element must be the most expensive movie ever made. The bemused astronauts, dressed in Jetsons-style retro blue overalls, mingled with us Hollywood types over drinks and snacks. We watched extraordinary footage of the mission with the jubilation of being in space popping out of the screen.
I am working on a 3D film about the life of Salvador Dali with producer Fred Bestall of Delux Films in Luxembourg, so I am immersed in notions of surrealism. I don’t think one needs to contrive surrealism because arguably life itself is often surreal. A Daliesque thought: perhaps molecules from the hands of refugees on my hand rubbed off on the Hubble mission astronaut’s hand? The Hubble is searching for the origin of the universe, the refugees search for justice and food for their children. Do these connections mean anything or are they random events? Is all this surreal? Dali himself said: ‘I don’t do drugs. I am drugs!’
This bit is amusing:
“Ellis, like a cultural Grim Reaper, said to Fallshaw, who blanched: ‘You are going to jail, son.’”
Comment on The Spectator:
Marcia Woodward
August 27th, 2009 4:01pm
I live in the camps part of every year, and know Fetim and the family personally–they are lovely neighbors; their daughter Leil is our English student; I have had tea and dinner in their home. I was dumbstruck at the audacity to make such a fake film! What are they getting out of it, I wonder? And of course, at what cost to the beleaguered Saharawi? Thanks for taking a stand on this, and if you need any further verification, count me in! (I coordinate a team of volunteer English teachers in the 27th of February Camp, and live there part of every year.)
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