Quixote

Behold the preview for The Windmill Movie - a sort of hybrid documentary/feature portrait of a conflicted artist (is there any other variety?), pieced together by a man who is also sort of a hybrid: tie-maker/budding (now budded) filmmaker Alexander Olch (his name is linked to an interview with the Boston Globe).

The crux of the movie seems to be about telling "the story," and telling it successfully - without really having a clear vision of what "the story" is. It's a storyteller's perpetual conundrum: how do I tell "the story" the real story, when its form is vague and hazy and elusive. This can feel a daunting impossibility - though you have a haunting sense that "the story" is nonetheless there and tugging at your soul to do it justice.

As a TV news reporter, I was regularly ramrodded by impossible stories that wanted telling. I would arrive on the scene of some "newsy" event, and feel, quite certainly, that there was nothing particularly meaningful about the house fire or the flu outbreak, but rather, the "real stories" were sliding around the periphery like shadows in a gyroscope. Feature pieces too - those spotlights on humanitarian workers and dog carers - seemed a sham. What appeared heartwarmingly straightforward always coursed with a more beguiling message bubbling just underneath the obvious song-and-dance.

It was a constant struggle, since while it was simple enough to capture the cardboard scene, and to report back the rehearsed answers, what I wanted to do was hone in on the heartbeat - reveal whatever it was that animated everything else. The story of life, seemed to me, the tale that was screaming to be told.

My news days are long past now. I've become a free storytelling agent. So when stories beckon me with shadowy hands and say "do me justice," I have nobody to answer to but me. Hence, why I've posted a lot about documentaries lately. It's what's on the brain, you see. I look to others who have gone before and struggled and ask:

How did they do it?

How did they do it?

How can I do it?

Can I do it..?

somewhere between dandelions & sunlight

“Everyone hears the future in a dream.” - Isaiah Zagar

Artist Isaiah Zagar is the subject of a new documentary created by a fellow Boston University alum. My jaw dropped when I read the filmmakers' philosophy on the style of this documentary - a difficult mix of surrealistic perspective with real-life - as it articulates exactly what I'd like to achieve through the documentary medium... a visionary inkling I initially saw long ago in a newsroom and a mere daydream. Could its realisation also be in my future...?

Photo is by the always-surrealistic Tim Walker.

Are Americans all Genetically Modified Organisms???

Wow. So this blog has turned a bit political lately. Sorry. Nothing clears a room faster than soap boxing and politics. But the documentary Food, Inc. premiers in the States this week, and oh my, if I wouldn't love to be among the first to see it.

You see, I have an enormous soft spot for well-done documentaries and anything that doles out criticism of corporate farming, mass-produced over-processed packaged goods and those frightening food conglomerates who make a mockery of capitalism and consumer choice (you did know that when you're at the grocery store you're not choosing between Cool Whip and Dream Whip, oh no, you're choosing between Philip Morris and, oh, Philip Morris... after watching their US tobacco profits dry up, they needed to diversify and try and do us all in with the likes of Cheese Whiz and a whole host of other supposedly edible atrocities. Click on that link, you'll be shocked at what they own.)

My favourite part of the trailer above, however, is when they reveal that "so much of our industrial food turns out to be rearrangements of corn." It's true! My dad's family used to own a little frozen pizza company called Tombstone. They sold it to Kraft years ago (which was since bought by, ha, of course, Philip Morris) and we caught wind that they were experimenting with substituting the tomato sauce with flavoured corn starch to save money. Delicious and nutritious - non?

Eat aware people. Eat aware.