During the deliberations for the Filmmaker-sponsored Cinema Eye Heterodox Award -- an award honoring a fiction film imaginatively incorporating documentary technique -- the jury talked about the relationship of place to the filmmaking process. Most documentarians going to a place are guided -- and most often limited -- by what they find there. They can make widely divergent films -- everything from a Harlan County USA to a Vernon, Florida -- but they creatively respond to the events, characters and rhythms of their locations.

It's not uncommon for fiction filmmakers to make movies about places they don't know well at all. Many if not most filmmakers today imagine their stories set in a kind of "generic normal" universe. Then they location scout -- usually to a location defined by its state's available tax credits. Sometimes the specifics of their eventual shooting locations seep into the movies, transforming them.... And sometimes not. Often a bland, class-less backdrop devoid of regional specificity is what winds up poorly representing the diversity of American life. (And then, there are fascinating films by filmmakers who willfully, perversely avoid the reality of their surroundings -- but that's another article.)

Matthew Porterfield's Putty Hill won the Heterodox Award, and it's an example of an entirely different kind of fiction filmmaking. As we discussed at that jury deliberation, Porterfield deliberately relinquished some of a fiction filmmaker's usual control by allowing his setting and the real people he found there to shape the film. He took a step back, allowing his non-actor performers to become true collaborators by inviting them to place their daily lives into his movie. I think it's a haunting, beautiful film that is also a welcome respite from so many of today's over-determined indie dramas.

There's another film we support opening this weekend -- Tariq Tapa's Zero Bridge -- that is also inseparable from its location. This neorealist, DV-shot tale is the first film in over 40 years shot in Kashmir, the territory disputed by India and Pakistan. When I wrote about Tapa for our "25 New Faces" in 2008, he said, "I spent every summer and extended vacations [in Kashmir] with my father's side of the family. But when the war began in '89, I didn't see them in a decade. When I went back in 2002, my cousins and I had grown apart. I thought it would be interesting to make a movie because no one knows about daily life in Kashmir, and it was also a way for me to reconnect with my family and heritage." In a production that had to deal with car bombs and random shootings, Tapa had to be for his non-professional crew and actors not only director but film school teacher, explaining his process by showing them DVDs of such movies as Tree of Wooden Clogs, The Bicycle Thief, and Il Posto.

One of cinema's first pleasures for its early audiences was the ticket it gave them to other places. So, if you're in New York this weekend, consider visiting Kashmir and suburban Baltimore in the form of Tapa and Porterfield's pictures. And while you're there, think about how your own stories can be enriched by the places you shoot them in.

Best,
Scott Macaulay
Editor

TICKETS NOW ON SALE FOR IFP'S SCRIPT TO SCREEN CONFERENCE IFP's Script to Screen Conference explores new opportunities available to indie filmmakers and writers with this full day of workshops, seminars, and networking on March 5. Anchored by conversations with veteran writer/director Barry Levinson (Diner, Avalon, Sleepers) and hot newcomer Mark Heyman (Black Swan), the day will also feature a look at new platforms for writers with Carol Kolb, Head Writer of the Onion News Network; a case study with the creative team behind Sundance breakout Martha Marcy May Marlene; and once again - a chance for selected attendees to pitch their script idea to a panel of experts. Full details on panels and tickets here
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