As you made your film during the increasingly chaotic backdrop of the last year, how did you as a filmmaker control, ignore, give in to or, conversely, perhaps creatively exploit the wild and unpredictable? What roles did chaos and order play in your films? To edit The Oslo Diaries in this crazy political period was not easy. In a period during which peace is so out of reach, that only to say the word “peace” makes you sound naive and out of touch with reality, a period in which a new war happens every two years, it felt very subversive […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 26, 2018Directors Mor Loushy and Daniel Sivan hired two cinematographers to film The Oslo Diaries, their documentary on Israeli-Palestinian relations in the early 1990s. They did so for a specific reason: One cameraman (Avner Shahaf) would serve as lead DP on interviews, while the other (Alex Margineau) would shoot the film’s reenactments. The latter footage – shot in the vein of such films as No and Stories We Tell – was shot to blend seamlessly with actual archival footage from the era. Below, both cinematographers discuss their experiences on the project, which screens in competition at the Sundance Film Festival. Filmmaker: How […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 25, 2018Receiving its world premiere at Sundance,The Oslo Diaries is the latest from Israeli filmmakers Mor Loushy and Daniel Sivan, who last came to Park City with 2015’s Censored Voices, an exploration of Israel’s 1967 Six-Day War through long-buried audiotape interviews with its on-the-ground soldiers. A similar reexamination of history, The Oslo Diaries combines unseen-until-now archival footage with the personal diaries of, and present-day interviews with, the handful of participants in the top secret, backchannel — and ultimately doomed — peacemaking process that took place in Norway in the early ’90s. Filmmaker spoke with the two directors prior to Sundance about […]
by Lauren Wissot on Jan 21, 2018What fear — whether it’s personal, or one related to the development, financing, production or distribution of your film — did you have to confront and conquer in the making of your movie? My greatest apprehension centers round the question of how the film will be received by the Israeli public. This is a political film, about disturbing events that took place 46 years ago, during the 6 Days War – things that are not easy to accept, but are still relevant, shocking and painful today. It is a universal film, not just about the 6 Days War, but about war in […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 24, 2015