Today’s film, shown in association with Brightwide, whose slogan ‘Watch Think Link Act’ echos LIDF’s commitment to filmmaking for social change, is a paradigm  for both party’s belief that film, through bringing about awareness, has the power to alter society.

Human Organ Traffic asks a number of questions for which there are no simple answers: ‘If it was a question of life or death for you or a loved one, would you be willing to pay to attain an organ illegally?’, ’should organ donation in living donors be made legal everywhere, even if the donors are most likely doing it as a result of extreme poverty and desperation?’

In an attempt to shed more light on these questions the director of H.O.T sought to document the experiences of the donors, from Brazil to Nepal, all of whom are deeply impoverished.
We also meet the middle agents who take a cash cut from the operation by putting the potential patients in touch with the right people.
The experiences were as varied as they were fascinating. From donors who felt it was worth doing on account of the large sum of money they received, to others who were conned out of any money at all, to the truly shocking disclosure that 95% of all organ donations in China are from executed prisoners, of which the money paid for them goes to the government.
Organ trafficking, it seems, is big business, and the only ones who appear to loose out in this global trade are the donors.

The enlightening panel after the film gave us an insight into the mind of a surgeon, who performs hundreds of transplants a year, and the director of the National Kidney Foundation, both of whom tackled the debates surrounding the ‘Opt- Out’ donation scheme being proposed by the government, and the severe complications, including the death of the donors, that these illegal operations can cause.

H.O.T is a call to arms for all those who get to watch this great documentary, but I’m yet still unsure what side is best to join.

This was a particularly touching pairing of a short and a feature both with the central themes of displacement. In A Letter Home, an Iranian-American woman, the director Shahrzad Davis, writes to her deceased mother, explaining how she has taken it upon herself to take a spiritual and physical journey to discover her roots. She combined images of her mother in the past, rather as though we were watching a ghost. In The Women From Georgia, groups of surprisingly older women from Eastern state have moved to work illegally to the US in order to send money home, living together in ‘hotels’, really two or three bedroom apartments that are full of beds and often rather far away from their jobs which are mostly caring for the elderly. Some have not seen home for years. As one woman watched a video sent to her by her husband telling her via this modern postcard that she was “the best wife in the world”, it felt rather that she too was communicating with the dead; in a terribly poignant moment she kissed the screen. Levan Koguashvili’s film appeared to move most of the audience, who waited for some time before breaking into a round of applause at the film’s end.

More excellent UK shorts were being shown at the Stevenson Theatre to start off this, the last day of the Festival, at the British Museum today.

Films such as ‘Companion of Kings’, about the people who frequent the dog tracks, somewhat of a hidden British tradition, and ‘Peter in Radioland’, a mish-mash of styles overlapping to create a representation of the closing-in world of Peter, an ex-teacher retreating into the safe, non-modernised world of “analogue”, were indicative of experimental styles of documenting experience. They often used voiceovers of the subjects, played over images of them not speaking, which gave the effect that they were sending you their thoughts.

A slight sense of déjà vu as we started this afternoon’s pieces with ‘Pollphail’, a brief piece about the abandoned and never-used purpose-built Pollphail village in Scotland, built to house the army of oilrig builders that never came, their usefulness becoming moot as the industry changed while their homes were being built. An artist, Mick McCraw, was building models and creating an exhibition of disappearing photographs of the empty buildings. The village looked coincidentally like that spraypainted in style by Agents of Change at Wednesday’s Horse Hospital showing of ‘The Ghostvillage Project’, so if the landlord really was keeping the location secret, as Timid was suggesting, the secret could be out. (EDIT: It is.) It’s exciting when these visual links are made and stories overlap – the bigger picture of the UK as a whole.

1. How did you meet Dan Perjovschi and what did you aim to capture in your film about him?

I met Dan in Paris while he was at the Récollets and I was attending the Ateliers Varan. I wanted to make a film about the relationship between the contemporary art scene and society, and I felt Dan and his art to be a paradigm of the critical sense applied to these systems.

When I first began to discover his creative process I thought we could collaborate on two different “rough materials”. He was working on the level of information (press, internet etc), and I would develop the narration through his actions, and at the same time I could work upon the level of the common reality that surrounds us, with some intersections that interrupted the narration.

In the space of the film we could somehow return the man to the centre of things, at least in the imaginary axis of the sight. I think that this was our central point of contact.

2. I love the way you mirror Dan’s interest in the little things that often get over looked, the beauty in the tiny details, through your patient way of filming. For example, lingering on the way a person walks or drinks, that captures their character beautifully. Did you find on being with Dan, that you were looking at things around you in a different way?

Dan’s interest is beyond the things themselves. For example when you see him looking around, you could never know what he is really looking at. That’s why when you compose the frame around what he sees, this frame should be introducing a question. Because the amazing thing happening there, is not in front of his eyes but behind them.

We each see the reality around us in different ways. Dan revels the inner paradox of human systems. Regarding this film, I desired to practice a gesture of empathy.

3. How does Dan see your film? As an extension of his art, the creation of an entirely new piece of art, or as something very different altogether?

Dan really accepted my film happening, without any control and I deeply appreciated this.

4. If you could pick anyone, what other artist would you most like to make a film about?

I would never make a film ‘about’ anyone, it would be impossible. I would make a film ‘with’ someone.

It was refreshing to sit in the reclaimed Horse Hospital building in Bloomsbury last night and enjoy some UK shorts. As Festival Director Patrick Hazard explained, there sadly haven’t been enough UK features to dominate at our venues, but there are an abundance of exciting short pieces. The films were all between five and twenty minutes long, meaning the evening was fantastically varied and stimulating.

Part 1 of this evening started with the unlisted, quirky and timely ‘Credit Crunch’, which featured individuals giving sound bytes about their most personal possession, their purse, with stories entertaining and touching forming along the way, despite the owners of the purses not being pictured. James Newton’s ‘The Space You Leave’ (2009) was even more affecting, telling the personal stories of mothers and fathers and their families left in a limbo of unknowing when their children, in this case their sons, disappear without trace.  Neither of the mothers, expressing their feelings of loss, could bear to look at the camera, although Tim Reilly, whose son has been missing for far longer, and whom was featured in another documentary last year, could look at us directly and imploringly and enquire about his son. Read the rest of this entry »