Bubosc; early days.

MIFF 2018, XXII: France had strong presence

Dominique Dubosc and Pierre Assouline were the two veteran French 'stars' that shone on the Mumbai winter sky last week as they participated on the 15th Mumbai International Film Festival for documentary, short fiction and animation films. The week-long festival concluded late at night on the 3rd of February. Dominique served on the International Competition Jury while Pierre was part of the National Competition judges.

Two films from France competed—The Surabhi Family and Ice—though the latter was a co-production with Estonia. Originally titled Jaa in Estonian, Ice is directed by Anna Hints, who was not only present but took part in an Open Forum too. There was an 11-film retrospective of Dominique Dubosc and a special package of 22 French Shorts and Experimental films, curated by Gabriele Brennen of the 3iS International Institute for Image and Sound, Paris was screened. 3iS is an international school where forty foreign students are enrolled every year. In addition to film and TV, 3iS also offers training in digital animation, video games, performing arts and an English-only Masters programme. 3iS is part of the Erasmus European network and a member of CILECT, the worldwide network of top film schools, founded in 1954. 

Gabrielle was associated as a founder with the Extravagant India! Programme, ‘Festival International du film Indien’, for a few years, but she told this writer that she is no longer part of it.

Dominique Dubosc (France) is not as well-known as he deserves to be, considering that imdb has only twood his films listed and you will have trouble finding a third on other websites too. After getting his diploma in ethnography and psychology in 1965, Dominique Dubosc started working as a photographer. He taught social anthropology, directed short films, taught the history of ‘syndicalism’, and was a television director. Since 1987, he has been teaching cinema at Middlebury College and Columbia. Tongue in cheek, he told this writer that he had studied anthropology to avoid getting drafted into the Algerian war, which was mandatory for all young Frenchmen, "...so I am a fake anthropologist!"

(In his own words)

“I started by making three short documentaries in South America at the end of the sixties:

Cuarahy Ohecha (What the Sun Sees) - Manojhara (In the Region of Death) - Los Dias de Nuestra Muerte (The Days of our Death).

At the beginning of the seventies, having become an activist at the « Cahiers de Mai », I hurriedly put together several struggle films that workers on strike or who had decided to go on strike asked for. Most of these films are lost, but the first one and the last one remain: The Penarroya File: the Two Faces of the Trust and LIP, or A Taste for Collective Action, which was released in theaters in April 1976. and selected at the Cannes Film Festival (Perspectives du cinéma français), in 1977. It was 70 minutes in length and made in 16 mm. The Cannes verion is 55 minutes.

After the relative failure of the film, I attempted to make, in 1981 about a couple, who were friends of mine (Passage to India), I thought: if you want to talk about intimacy, talk about yourself. That is how I embarked, through the years, on the realisation of four autobiographical films, each very different from the previous: The Documentary Filmmaker or a Childhood Tale (1988), The Letter that Was Never Written (an hour-long single-shot for the LIVE series – 1990), Celebrations (1991-1999), Paraguay Remembered (2011-2015).

In 1994, I made another attempt to produce a series - not of television programs but of Lumière Shots - to mark the centenary of the invention of the cinematograph. The result was only 17 one-minute shots by Robert Kramer, 1 by Chris Marker, 2 by Guy Olivier and 5 by me.

On American Election Day 2004, I was having lunch with Jonas Mekas in New York. The way he was eating his lobster made me think of Koulechov’s famous experiment and inspired the short film Election Day. Four years later, I was again in New York on Election Day. I had the more obvious idea of filming the result of the election in Harlem. The film was first called Obama Song, and then, when the hopes of that autumn night had faded, I renamed it Dreaming on 125th Street.”

He told this writer, "There were so many people, dressed in all kinds of costumes. I had only 60 minutes of film and wanted to use all 60 in my final cut. Suddenly, a woman almost flew past on a broom, like a real witch. I captured that shot, but before I could cut and end my film on this point, she came back, right of camera to left. I was afraid she would come back again, left to right, so I requested her to kindly stop for a moment. The shooting took two hours. Ultimately, I could salvage 17 minutes of the 60 I had in my camera.”

I first made Palestine Palestine (2001), First Prize of the Sucre Human Rights festival, then Palestine Remembered, Grand Prize of the « Traces de Vies » festival 2004, and thirty odd sketches and stories that I’ve regrouped, with The Dream of the Blue Circus, under the title New Travels in Great Garabagne (2017). You can also see the three parts of this film separately, under the titles: Inside the Wall, Darkness Moves and Rainless Rain

(In July 2002, the designer Maja Daniel was invited to Palestine by the Consulate of France in Jerusalem, and the Palestinian Ministry of Culture, to revive a project drawing schools in Ramallah and Gaza. Dominique Dubosc decided to accompany him. Dominique's project was to create a movie showing Dominique and Maja's different perspectives. All throughout the spring of 2003, one day a week, Maja agreed to improvise under the eye of the camera, drawing images that evoke both Palestine and a wider world.  Dominique then spent several months with an editor to rework the images shot on the spot to give them a painterly quality, and added background music, to evoke a sense of memory. The film that results from these two elaborations is the memory of a journey, or rather, a journey in the memory of two travellers).

Having strong political views, Dubosc is troubled by the fact that the French government never apologised for the atrocities in Algeria. "Take the example of the West German Chancellor Willy Brandt, who unexpectedly dropped to his knees when he visited a memorial for the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in 1970."

Dubosc conducted an interactive session at MIFF, titled ‘The cruelty of Observation and the tenderness of Gaze'. He was in conversation with Amrit Gangar, who had curated the 11-film Dubosc film package.

Gabriele Brennen served on the Animation Jury for the 19^th International Children’s Film Festival of India, Hyderabad, 2015, where she said, “Local content and local flavour was important in approaching social themes for children’s films. You cannot sell a movie with French or German locales in India as children would not understand the cultural nuances or even the basics of the region, or the children of that region.” Words of wisdom, but she had already made her mark in India seven years before, with her short fiction film, L’écrivain (the Writer).

The film was about Satek Mitrovista, in his fifties, an eclectic writer with ambiguous sexuality. While his unsold books will be crushed to dust with the pestle, he meets Olivier, twenty-five, a young fashionable writer. The 18-minute venture won the Golden Lamp Tree Jury Prize in the International Category of the first Short Film at the International Film Festival of India (IFFI), 2008

Creator of the Extravagant India !concept (Festival at the Péniche Cinéma, in 2009), she also conceived the Short Film Evenings of the Péniche Cinema and the programming for them. She was associate editor of the programme Chemin d’artistes, produced for Arte by Images et Compagnie.