We're continually being asked about festivals, screenings and awards for Breadmakers. Here's the latest list, and rest assured we will update the list at regular intervals.
Glasgow Film Festival, Glasgow, UK, 2008
True/False Film Festival, Columbia, Missouri, USA, 2008
8th London International Disability Film Festival, London, UK, 2008
Quebec International Ethnographic Film Festival, Quebec, Canada, 2008
Sundance Film Festival, Park City, Utah, USA, 2008
Ofensiva International Film Festival, Wroclaw, Poland, 2007
Film Festival Dokumenter, Yogyakarta, Indonesia, 2007
Docudays - Beirut Documentary Film Festival, Beirut, Lebanon, 2007
Documentary Film Festival of IRAN, "Cinema Verite", Tehran, Iran, 2007
Seventh International Festival of Visual Culture, Joensuu, Finland, 2007
Bafta Scotland nomination in the best short film category 2007
Short Scottish Documentary Award, Edinburgh International Film Festival, Edinburgh, UK, 2007
Is the dough in the right place?
Saturday 26 January 2008
The List
From THE LIST magazine (issue 592)
A short Scottish documentary film is set to be screened at the world renowned Sundance festival.
The independent film festival, helmed by Hollywood star Robert Redford, will premiere Yasmin Fedda’s Breadmakers, a 12-minute film about a community of bakers with learning disabilities set in Edinburgh’s Garvald Bakery, which has already picked up the Best Short Scottish Documentary Award at the Edinburgh International Film Festival 2007 and a BAFTA Scotland nomination for best short film.
The film was made as part of the Bridging the Gap New Talent Initiative, run by the Scottish Documentary Institute and funded by Scottish Screen National Lottery, Skillset Film Skills Fund and supported by Edinburgh College of Art and ADMC.
Noé Mendelle, director of Bridging the Gap said: ‘It’s our first film to get selected by Sundance, and we hope this is the first of many more in the future. It’s a great endorsement of our hard work in the last few years, and a brilliant way for Yasmin and the Bridging the Gap scheme, to get noticed within the wider filmmaking community.’
Leslie Finlay, Development Executive at Scottish Screen added: ‘It is fantastic news that Breadmakers has been selected for Sundance, one of the world’s premiere showcases for new work. Breadmakers is a heartwarming film with a talented team behind it and exemplifies what Bridging The Gap and Scottish Screen are aiming to achieve through our New Talent Development Initiative.’
Presenting 120 dramatic and documentary feature-length films in seven distinct categories and 80 short films each year, the Sundance Film Festival has grown in stature since its conception over two decades ago. As a film showcase it has introduced American audiences to cult classics such as American Splendor, Clerks, Hustle and Flow, Maria Full of Grace, Napoleon Dynamite and Sex, Lies and Videotape. This year’s opening night film is the world premiere of In Bruges, written and directed by first-time feature filmmaker and award-winning playwright, Martin McDonagh.
The next Sundance takes place in Park City, Utah, Thu 17–Sun 27 Jan.
A short Scottish documentary film is set to be screened at the world renowned Sundance festival.
The independent film festival, helmed by Hollywood star Robert Redford, will premiere Yasmin Fedda’s Breadmakers, a 12-minute film about a community of bakers with learning disabilities set in Edinburgh’s Garvald Bakery, which has already picked up the Best Short Scottish Documentary Award at the Edinburgh International Film Festival 2007 and a BAFTA Scotland nomination for best short film.
The film was made as part of the Bridging the Gap New Talent Initiative, run by the Scottish Documentary Institute and funded by Scottish Screen National Lottery, Skillset Film Skills Fund and supported by Edinburgh College of Art and ADMC.
Noé Mendelle, director of Bridging the Gap said: ‘It’s our first film to get selected by Sundance, and we hope this is the first of many more in the future. It’s a great endorsement of our hard work in the last few years, and a brilliant way for Yasmin and the Bridging the Gap scheme, to get noticed within the wider filmmaking community.’
Leslie Finlay, Development Executive at Scottish Screen added: ‘It is fantastic news that Breadmakers has been selected for Sundance, one of the world’s premiere showcases for new work. Breadmakers is a heartwarming film with a talented team behind it and exemplifies what Bridging The Gap and Scottish Screen are aiming to achieve through our New Talent Development Initiative.’
Presenting 120 dramatic and documentary feature-length films in seven distinct categories and 80 short films each year, the Sundance Film Festival has grown in stature since its conception over two decades ago. As a film showcase it has introduced American audiences to cult classics such as American Splendor, Clerks, Hustle and Flow, Maria Full of Grace, Napoleon Dynamite and Sex, Lies and Videotape. This year’s opening night film is the world premiere of In Bruges, written and directed by first-time feature filmmaker and award-winning playwright, Martin McDonagh.
The next Sundance takes place in Park City, Utah, Thu 17–Sun 27 Jan.
The Reel Deals
An article by CHITRA RAMASWAMY of Scotland on Sunday.
WHEN the Bafta Scotland nominations were announced last year, most of us – myself included – homed in on the fact that only one woman was nominated in the Best Actress category. While we were busy bemoaning the lack of women working in the Scottish screen industries, we failed to notice that the short film category was dominated by women filmmakers alone. More surprisingly, all three films were documentaries.
When Stuart Cosgrove, Channel 4's director of nations and regions, presented the short film award in November to Alice Nelson for Losing Myself: Annie, a tender study of dementia, he said: "This year's short dramas were blown away by documentaries. What we know is that a young and precociously talented group of women directors have dominated short film-making in Scotland. What we don't know is what they will achieve in the future."The future is already looking bright for Nelson, as well as the other nominees, Yasmin Fedda and Yulia Mahr, all three of whom live and work in Edinburgh.
This month Fedda's film set in a bakery in Gorgie, Breadmakers, is at Sundance. Meanwhile Mahr, whose documentary Butterfly tells the story of a Scots girl with albinism, is set to make her first feature documentary exploring the condition in Kenya.
Most exciting of all is Nelson's next project, The Ten New Commandments, which will see 10 Scottish directors, both established and emerging talents, each make a short documentary on a different article of the Human Rights Declaration to commemorate its 60th anniversary. Irvine Welsh, Douglas Gordon and Tilda Swinton are all set to be involved and it is hoped it will premiere at this year's Edinburgh International Film Festival.
It's a genre that dates back to John Grierson, the Perthshire-born father of British documentary film, and his groundbreaking classics of the 1930s such as Night Mail. Like Grierson, many of the subjects this new wave of filmmakers are choosing stem from a commitment to social issues as opposed to the more salacious or faux-naif style of, say, Louis Theroux.
"Documentary is really healthy in Edinburgh at the moment," says Nelson, who started out as an artist in Dublin before studying at Edinburgh College of Art. "I find that the people here who are making short films are really passionate, and that they're making work just for that reason. This documentary on human rights really shows that.
In Glasgow, television and drama is strong but in Edinburgh there's a growing community of documentary makers. I think women are really good at relating to a subject, and getting inside it."All the women filmmakers I speak to credit this renaissance to a small research centre at ECA, staffed by just three full-time members.
The Scottish Documentary Institute was set up in 2004 by ECA's head of film and television, Noe Mendelle, and in that short time it has transformed the landscape of documentary film in Scotland. Nelson, Fedda and Mahr have all come through the centre, and the SDI's Bridging The Gap scheme, which every year commissions filmmakers to submit short documentaries on a particular theme, is the only such initiative in the UK.
"It does seem like there is a new wave of female Scottish documentary makers," says Sonja Henrici, head of development at the SDI. "Last year, five out of six of the Bridging The Gap commissions went to women. They just had great projects. This year we have selected five talented women again, from across the UK. We're trying to nurture a community of filmmakers with a creative vision for cinematic documentaries and a knack for storytelling."It's the SDI that is behind The Ten New Commandments.
The masterclasses they run have been hosted by filmmakers from Nick Broomfield to Kim Longinotto. Both Fedda and Mahr's films were made thanks to being selected for Bridging The Gap and with funding from Scottish Screen and Skillset.
The commissioned directors get £8,000 in cash and another £8,000 in kind for equipment, as well as the support to make their films. Though it started off as Scotland-wide, it has proved so successful, with around 120 films being entered each year, that it has been opened up to the rest of Britain.
"Through the SDI you realise there is an opportunity to make documentaries and an audience for them," says 27-year-old Fedda. "Having a hub like that is really encouraging." Nelson tells me she ended up at the SDI when the National Film School turned her down because she wasn't deemed "documentary with a capital 'D'. I got to the final 12 but they thought I was too much on the periphery of documentary film, whereas at SDI their attitude was all about making good films and not caring what category they fell into. I loved that."Mahr, who started out as a theatre director and is making her Kenya-based feature with the Institute, agrees: "When I went to the SDI I hadn't done a single documentary, but that didn't matter. There are so many great people coming out of that place. I was absolutely stunned when I saw it was all documentaries on the Bafta shortlist."In Bridging The Gap's fourth year, in which Fedda and Mahr were chosen and the theme was 'white', there were four other documentaries – beautiful, understated works about ice fishing in a small depressed town in North Dakota, and the huge and disconcerting market for skin-lightening products amongst the Asian community in Britain.
The stories may be varied, but what all these documentaries have in common is a commitment to their subjects and their own visual language.Another SDI alumni is Astrid Bussink, now based in the Netherlands, whose 2005 ECA graduation film, The Angelmakers – made with the support of the Institute and the winner of the Grierson best newcomer award at EIFF – is now being made into a film starring Helen Mirren and John Hurt. It's an astonishing piece of work about a Hungarian village made famous in the 1920s when a number of women poisoned their husbands with arsenic. For the film, by the way, the action is moved to Yorkshire.Bussink's next film, The Lost Colony, which travels to the world's oldest monkey laboratory in the former Soviet Republic of Abkhazia, will premiere this week at the Rotterdam Film Festival. Her work may take her all over the world, but Bussink says she loves working in Scotland.
"It's a great place to make documentaries. Especially at the moment, there is so much new talent. I find Scotland very supportive of documentary-making, which makes it a great place to experiment, and that's how great films are made."
WHEN the Bafta Scotland nominations were announced last year, most of us – myself included – homed in on the fact that only one woman was nominated in the Best Actress category. While we were busy bemoaning the lack of women working in the Scottish screen industries, we failed to notice that the short film category was dominated by women filmmakers alone. More surprisingly, all three films were documentaries.
When Stuart Cosgrove, Channel 4's director of nations and regions, presented the short film award in November to Alice Nelson for Losing Myself: Annie, a tender study of dementia, he said: "This year's short dramas were blown away by documentaries. What we know is that a young and precociously talented group of women directors have dominated short film-making in Scotland. What we don't know is what they will achieve in the future."The future is already looking bright for Nelson, as well as the other nominees, Yasmin Fedda and Yulia Mahr, all three of whom live and work in Edinburgh.
This month Fedda's film set in a bakery in Gorgie, Breadmakers, is at Sundance. Meanwhile Mahr, whose documentary Butterfly tells the story of a Scots girl with albinism, is set to make her first feature documentary exploring the condition in Kenya.
Most exciting of all is Nelson's next project, The Ten New Commandments, which will see 10 Scottish directors, both established and emerging talents, each make a short documentary on a different article of the Human Rights Declaration to commemorate its 60th anniversary. Irvine Welsh, Douglas Gordon and Tilda Swinton are all set to be involved and it is hoped it will premiere at this year's Edinburgh International Film Festival.
It's a genre that dates back to John Grierson, the Perthshire-born father of British documentary film, and his groundbreaking classics of the 1930s such as Night Mail. Like Grierson, many of the subjects this new wave of filmmakers are choosing stem from a commitment to social issues as opposed to the more salacious or faux-naif style of, say, Louis Theroux.
"Documentary is really healthy in Edinburgh at the moment," says Nelson, who started out as an artist in Dublin before studying at Edinburgh College of Art. "I find that the people here who are making short films are really passionate, and that they're making work just for that reason. This documentary on human rights really shows that.
In Glasgow, television and drama is strong but in Edinburgh there's a growing community of documentary makers. I think women are really good at relating to a subject, and getting inside it."All the women filmmakers I speak to credit this renaissance to a small research centre at ECA, staffed by just three full-time members.
The Scottish Documentary Institute was set up in 2004 by ECA's head of film and television, Noe Mendelle, and in that short time it has transformed the landscape of documentary film in Scotland. Nelson, Fedda and Mahr have all come through the centre, and the SDI's Bridging The Gap scheme, which every year commissions filmmakers to submit short documentaries on a particular theme, is the only such initiative in the UK.
"It does seem like there is a new wave of female Scottish documentary makers," says Sonja Henrici, head of development at the SDI. "Last year, five out of six of the Bridging The Gap commissions went to women. They just had great projects. This year we have selected five talented women again, from across the UK. We're trying to nurture a community of filmmakers with a creative vision for cinematic documentaries and a knack for storytelling."It's the SDI that is behind The Ten New Commandments.
The masterclasses they run have been hosted by filmmakers from Nick Broomfield to Kim Longinotto. Both Fedda and Mahr's films were made thanks to being selected for Bridging The Gap and with funding from Scottish Screen and Skillset.
The commissioned directors get £8,000 in cash and another £8,000 in kind for equipment, as well as the support to make their films. Though it started off as Scotland-wide, it has proved so successful, with around 120 films being entered each year, that it has been opened up to the rest of Britain.
"Through the SDI you realise there is an opportunity to make documentaries and an audience for them," says 27-year-old Fedda. "Having a hub like that is really encouraging." Nelson tells me she ended up at the SDI when the National Film School turned her down because she wasn't deemed "documentary with a capital 'D'. I got to the final 12 but they thought I was too much on the periphery of documentary film, whereas at SDI their attitude was all about making good films and not caring what category they fell into. I loved that."Mahr, who started out as a theatre director and is making her Kenya-based feature with the Institute, agrees: "When I went to the SDI I hadn't done a single documentary, but that didn't matter. There are so many great people coming out of that place. I was absolutely stunned when I saw it was all documentaries on the Bafta shortlist."In Bridging The Gap's fourth year, in which Fedda and Mahr were chosen and the theme was 'white', there were four other documentaries – beautiful, understated works about ice fishing in a small depressed town in North Dakota, and the huge and disconcerting market for skin-lightening products amongst the Asian community in Britain.
The stories may be varied, but what all these documentaries have in common is a commitment to their subjects and their own visual language.Another SDI alumni is Astrid Bussink, now based in the Netherlands, whose 2005 ECA graduation film, The Angelmakers – made with the support of the Institute and the winner of the Grierson best newcomer award at EIFF – is now being made into a film starring Helen Mirren and John Hurt. It's an astonishing piece of work about a Hungarian village made famous in the 1920s when a number of women poisoned their husbands with arsenic. For the film, by the way, the action is moved to Yorkshire.Bussink's next film, The Lost Colony, which travels to the world's oldest monkey laboratory in the former Soviet Republic of Abkhazia, will premiere this week at the Rotterdam Film Festival. Her work may take her all over the world, but Bussink says she loves working in Scotland.
"It's a great place to make documentaries. Especially at the moment, there is so much new talent. I find Scotland very supportive of documentary-making, which makes it a great place to experiment, and that's how great films are made."
Monday 21 January 2008
Breadmakers at the Alhambra
Breadmakers is to be screened at the Keswick Alhambra Cinema at 5pm on Sunday 17th February 2008 as part of a Keswick Film Club event.
Keswick Film Club began life in 1998 with the intention of bringing the best of World Cinema to Keswick. Since then it has won many awards from the British Federation of Film Societies including Best Programme four times, and regularly hosts 100+ audiences. In 2006-7 they were Film Society of the Year.
Breadmakers will be shown before 2 DAYS IN PARIS. As Peter Bradshaw (The Guardian) says, this is a very likable, smart, offbeat debut from Delpy as director, inevitably related to the Richard Linklater films in which she starred. Similar to the walk-and-talk intimacy of Before Sunrise and Sunset, but sharper, funnier and less syrupy, we follow a couple (Delpy and Adam Goldberg), she a Parisian, he a New Yorker, as they spend a weekend in her home town.
The film was written, edited, directed and co-produced by its star, who reveals a wicked sense of humour and a real understanding of relationships. She also wrote the music and cast her real parents as her onscreen ones.
In Philip French's opinion, Delpy's ego trip proves, fortunately, to be a happy, very funny excursion
Keswick Film Club began life in 1998 with the intention of bringing the best of World Cinema to Keswick. Since then it has won many awards from the British Federation of Film Societies including Best Programme four times, and regularly hosts 100+ audiences. In 2006-7 they were Film Society of the Year.
Breadmakers will be shown before 2 DAYS IN PARIS. As Peter Bradshaw (The Guardian) says, this is a very likable, smart, offbeat debut from Delpy as director, inevitably related to the Richard Linklater films in which she starred. Similar to the walk-and-talk intimacy of Before Sunrise and Sunset, but sharper, funnier and less syrupy, we follow a couple (Delpy and Adam Goldberg), she a Parisian, he a New Yorker, as they spend a weekend in her home town.
The film was written, edited, directed and co-produced by its star, who reveals a wicked sense of humour and a real understanding of relationships. She also wrote the music and cast her real parents as her onscreen ones.
In Philip French's opinion, Delpy's ego trip proves, fortunately, to be a happy, very funny excursion
Saturday 19 January 2008
Home Made Breadmakers
After visits to Poland, USA, Finland, Iran, Lebanon and Indonesia - it's closer to home for the next screening of Yasmin Fedda's Breadmakers.
Breadmakers is to be included in the Bonds of Belonging programme at the 2008 Glasgow Film Festival. The screening will take place on Sunday 17th February at 2.30pm in CCA5, and will then be available to view in the CCA videotheque from 19th February- 29th March.
Over the eleven days of the Festival there is a chance to see what will become some of the most talked about films of 2008. There are documentaries that will stir you to anger and tears and a special focus revealing the rich film cultures of our European neighbours in Poland, Hungary, Serbia, Romania and the Czech Republic. We have a dazzling crop of documentaries, an inspiring weekend of short films where you can spot the stars of the future and a return visit from Fright Fest that is not for the faint of heart.
Breadmakers is to be included in the Bonds of Belonging programme at the 2008 Glasgow Film Festival. The screening will take place on Sunday 17th February at 2.30pm in CCA5, and will then be available to view in the CCA videotheque from 19th February- 29th March.
Over the eleven days of the Festival there is a chance to see what will become some of the most talked about films of 2008. There are documentaries that will stir you to anger and tears and a special focus revealing the rich film cultures of our European neighbours in Poland, Hungary, Serbia, Romania and the Czech Republic. We have a dazzling crop of documentaries, an inspiring weekend of short films where you can spot the stars of the future and a return visit from Fright Fest that is not for the faint of heart.
True or False?
Breadmakers has been invited to the 2008 True/False Film Festival.
The True/False Film Festival offers a wonderful opportunity to watch, ponder and discuss excellent and creative films with a wide variety of filmmakers and aficionados. The festival runs from Feb 28 - March 2, 2008 in Colombia, Missouri.
For four days, downtown Columbia, Missouri is transformed into a Midwestern utopia. Here forward-thinking filmmakers and audiences celebrate a passionate engagement with the world through rambunctious live music, white-hot DJs and the liveliest new nonfiction films in the world.
The True/False Film Festival offers a wonderful opportunity to watch, ponder and discuss excellent and creative films with a wide variety of filmmakers and aficionados. The festival runs from Feb 28 - March 2, 2008 in Colombia, Missouri.
For four days, downtown Columbia, Missouri is transformed into a Midwestern utopia. Here forward-thinking filmmakers and audiences celebrate a passionate engagement with the world through rambunctious live music, white-hot DJs and the liveliest new nonfiction films in the world.
Most films come freshly discovered from Sundance, Toronto and other festivals, others appear mysteriously before their official premieres elsewhere. Sandwiched between the nonstop movies, we throw parties, host debates and field trips, and challenge local filmmakers to reimagine the possibilities of nonfiction filmmaking.
Young People Who Rock ... Sundance
From CNN. com
With 3,624 feature-film submissions, 24 countries represented, 81 world premieres, 16 North American premieres and 12 U.S. premieres, the 2008 Sundance Film Festival represents the best of the best -- including these filmmakers under 30.
The Short Film Category at Sundance is full of talented filmmakers, and Tadashi Nakamura and Yasmin Fedda, both 27, are two of the young standouts with their powerful social commentaries.
Nakamura is as a fourth-generation Japanese-American and second-generation filmmaker. His introduction to filmmaking happened at the super-ripe age of 9 days old, in a film directed by his dad, award-winning director Robert A. Nakamura. Now he stands on his own with his film "Pilgrimage," a tribute to a small group of Japanese-Americans in the late 1960s who transformed an abandoned World War II internment camp into a symbol of solidarity.
Fedda has traveled around the world to produce documentaries on subjects like the Santeria religion and colonial stipends in Syria. She is a Lebanese-Canadian filmmaker currently living in Edinburgh, Scotland, which is the scene of her latest film, "Breadmakers," about a community of workers with learning disabilities who make organic bread for local shops and cafes.
Tune into CNN.com Live on Monday, January 21, when I will interview Nakamura and Fedda during the 3 p.m. EST hour.
With 3,624 feature-film submissions, 24 countries represented, 81 world premieres, 16 North American premieres and 12 U.S. premieres, the 2008 Sundance Film Festival represents the best of the best -- including these filmmakers under 30.
The Short Film Category at Sundance is full of talented filmmakers, and Tadashi Nakamura and Yasmin Fedda, both 27, are two of the young standouts with their powerful social commentaries.
Nakamura is as a fourth-generation Japanese-American and second-generation filmmaker. His introduction to filmmaking happened at the super-ripe age of 9 days old, in a film directed by his dad, award-winning director Robert A. Nakamura. Now he stands on his own with his film "Pilgrimage," a tribute to a small group of Japanese-Americans in the late 1960s who transformed an abandoned World War II internment camp into a symbol of solidarity.
Fedda has traveled around the world to produce documentaries on subjects like the Santeria religion and colonial stipends in Syria. She is a Lebanese-Canadian filmmaker currently living in Edinburgh, Scotland, which is the scene of her latest film, "Breadmakers," about a community of workers with learning disabilities who make organic bread for local shops and cafes.
Tune into CNN.com Live on Monday, January 21, when I will interview Nakamura and Fedda during the 3 p.m. EST hour.
On a Roll
An article by Erlend Clouston in The Guardian on Wednesday January 16 2008.
The Gorgie district of west Edinburgh is a sinuous urban weave of railway lines and sandstone tenements studded with cheerful nodes of human activity, including Polish delicatessens, cobblers, a city farm, umpteen barbers, a gospel hall and Heart of Midlothian football club. Next week, audiences at Utah's Sundance film festival will enjoy watching another of the area's enterprises.
The Gorgie district of west Edinburgh is a sinuous urban weave of railway lines and sandstone tenements studded with cheerful nodes of human activity, including Polish delicatessens, cobblers, a city farm, umpteen barbers, a gospel hall and Heart of Midlothian football club. Next week, audiences at Utah's Sundance film festival will enjoy watching another of the area's enterprises.
Breadmakers is an 11-minute documentary about a bakery set up in a former ice cream factory behind a car dealership on Gorgie Road. What makes the enterprise unusual is the fact that all 12 people who work there have learning difficulties.
The director of Breadmakers is Yasmin Fedda, a 27-year-old Lebanese-Canadian, with an MA in visual anthropology and, it seems, an affinity with small-scale food production: her previous film, Milking the Desert, was set principally in the dairy of a Syrian monastery.
Humble material
Breadmakers is one of only 200 (out of 8,000) films to make it through the vetting process for what is the world's biggest showcase for independent cinema. The scale of Fedda's achievement with her relatively humble material can be measured against the subject matter of the other documentaries on offer at Sundance. These include the late head of al-Qaida in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, gang-rape in Congo, Russian fascists, and a dinner party with the president of Pakistan, Pervez Musharraf.
The Garvald bakery is one of half a dozen non-profit organisations that come under the Garvald Edinburgh brand, a voluntary organisation that runs projects "inspired by the ideas of Rudolf Steiner" in Edinburgh and the Borders and is registered to provide accommodation and day services for adults with learning disabilities.
The film is the result of the happy conjunction of Fedda's post-graduate stint in the bakery as a relief worker and the Scottish Documentary Institute (SDI), offering bursaries for short films on the theme of "white". Fedda has interpreted white, in this case, not as flour but noise: the susurrus of scraping and clanking that acts as backdrop to the manufacture of loaves. "I was very interested in the blending of creative and industrial sounds," explains Fedda, who is a former samba drummer. The SDI funding helped pay for Fedda's visit to Utah.
Filming people with learning disabilities presents particular problems; the line between art and exploitation can be fuzzy. Fedda was aware of this and her MA came in useful: "We were taught that the most important thing is the people, not the story." After each day's filming - she spent nine at the bakery - she and her camerawoman would reflect on their new material. "We would talk about it to make sure that everything was being shown in a humane way," Fedda says. The sensitivity paid off. Breadmakers won the Bafta award for best short Scottish documentary of 2007.
Unusually, Garvald Edinburgh demanded no control over the finished product. Its reward is an unexpectedly potent negotiating tool in its imminent funding discussions with Edinburgh city council. It is a delicate subject in the Garvald Edinburgh canteen. "We have the impression that around the top echelons of the council they don't recognise the excellent value for money that we offer," says day service manager Andy Hunter.
Steiner philosophy decrees that everyone's core spiritual being is perfect but sometimes the enveloping body and soul can be flawed; it is just a question of maximising ability. Unfortunately, Garvald Edinburgh's faith in the remedial powers of communal craft workshops - it also provides tuition in, among others, joinery, tool restoring, puppetry, woodwork and ceramics - is not shared by everyone.
Intensive fundraising
Garvald Edinburgh receives only a small weekly three-figure sum for each of its 83 city council placements, significantly less than it needs, and significantly less than its local authority-run equivalents bank. The gap has to be made up by intensive fundraising. The daily sales of around 130 loaves and 70 rolls at least help the bakery to break even.
Fedda's documentary does not offer a critique of Steiner/Garvald policies. In fact, it offers little in conventional cinematic terms. There is no commentary, no interviews, no eavesdropping, no love interest and no conflict, unless you count the moment when Chak-Hong Fung, one of the documentary's participants, in an apparent fit of pique, drops his dough mixture off the end of the table.
In the course of 11 minutes, the only plot is the narrative arc of granary batches from telephone order to delivery van. The only music is a sign-off, straight-to-camera, whistling of For He's a Jolly Good Fellow by 32-year-old breadmaker Thomas Griffiths. Considerable footage was shot of the funeral of a bakery colleague, but Fedda opted to exclude it: "It was a distraction and it took too long to explain."
Jim Hickey, a former director of Edinburgh film festival and Fedda's co-producer, speculates that it is this sparseness that seduced the Sundance selectors. "Struggling farmers, football hooligans, cosmetic surgery - we've seen all that before. This takes you to somewhere you would never normally see."
Monday 14 January 2008
Straight in at number 3
Yasmin has been listed by Scotland on Sunday in a top ten of faces to watch in 2008. This is what they said.
"3 FILM Yasmin Fedda:
Fedda is the young Edinburgh filmmaker behind Breadmakers, which won the Short Scottish Documentary Award at last year's Edinburgh International Film Festival and heads for Sundance this month. In the past Fedda has filmed a desert monastery in Syria, members of the Afro- Cuban religion Santeria, and a group of pensioners in Damascus. This film, though, stays closer to home. Following a community of workers with learning disabilities working in a bakery in Gorgie, in Edinburgh, it's a beautifully observed study of the complex systems of communication that the group use as they knead their loaves. We think Fedda's going places, and not just in Gorgie."
The full article can be viewed at:
http://scotlandonsunday.scotsman.com/performing-arts/2008The-10-faces.3642782.jp
"3 FILM Yasmin Fedda:
Fedda is the young Edinburgh filmmaker behind Breadmakers, which won the Short Scottish Documentary Award at last year's Edinburgh International Film Festival and heads for Sundance this month. In the past Fedda has filmed a desert monastery in Syria, members of the Afro- Cuban religion Santeria, and a group of pensioners in Damascus. This film, though, stays closer to home. Following a community of workers with learning disabilities working in a bakery in Gorgie, in Edinburgh, it's a beautifully observed study of the complex systems of communication that the group use as they knead their loaves. We think Fedda's going places, and not just in Gorgie."
The full article can be viewed at:
http://scotlandonsunday.scotsman.com/performing-arts/2008The-10-faces.3642782.jp
French Toast
Breadmakers will be shown at The Quebec International Ethnographic Film Festival.
This internationally renowned ethnographic film festival has moved from being a Montreal based event to one that now spans the province of Quebec. The University of Chicoutimi has joined the festival’s committee, thus reaffirming the success of their annual events devoted to the discipline of visual anthropology.
This year, the FIFEQ is celebrating its fifth anniversary and they will be holding events in Montreal, Quebec City and Chicoutimi on January 25th, 26th, and 27th 2008. Photography exhibitions, discussion tables and conferences will be presented in order to enhance their wide variety of films chosen for the festival…all of which are free of charge for everyone!
Dedicated to the promotion of ethnographic films, the FIFEQ will screen films created by new filmmakers from both Canada and abroad as well as from renowned figures in the discipline of visual anthropology and the social documentary genre. The festival is both a celebration of the discipline of visual anthropology, as well as a reflection on the debates and ethical issues surrounding the utility and relevance of employing visual media when studying cultures and societies.
This has all been made possible due to the efforts of anthropology students from Concordia University, Universite de Montreal, McGill, University of Laval and the University of Chicoutimi. The FIFEQ creates a forum for professors, professionals, students and others passionate about films and anthropology to watch contemporary ethnographic films on the big screen and in turn to exchange ideas, pose questions and learn more about film media within the domain of the social sciences
This internationally renowned ethnographic film festival has moved from being a Montreal based event to one that now spans the province of Quebec. The University of Chicoutimi has joined the festival’s committee, thus reaffirming the success of their annual events devoted to the discipline of visual anthropology.
This year, the FIFEQ is celebrating its fifth anniversary and they will be holding events in Montreal, Quebec City and Chicoutimi on January 25th, 26th, and 27th 2008. Photography exhibitions, discussion tables and conferences will be presented in order to enhance their wide variety of films chosen for the festival…all of which are free of charge for everyone!
Dedicated to the promotion of ethnographic films, the FIFEQ will screen films created by new filmmakers from both Canada and abroad as well as from renowned figures in the discipline of visual anthropology and the social documentary genre. The festival is both a celebration of the discipline of visual anthropology, as well as a reflection on the debates and ethical issues surrounding the utility and relevance of employing visual media when studying cultures and societies.
This has all been made possible due to the efforts of anthropology students from Concordia University, Universite de Montreal, McGill, University of Laval and the University of Chicoutimi. The FIFEQ creates a forum for professors, professionals, students and others passionate about films and anthropology to watch contemporary ethnographic films on the big screen and in turn to exchange ideas, pose questions and learn more about film media within the domain of the social sciences
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)