How great is this? We won’t know until it’s all edited and presented, but I see the potential for this to just detonate. A rippling effect. This is citizen cinema. Small, inexpensive cameras placed in the hands of people whose voices we’d never hear; whose lives are overlooked and disregarded. Massive respect to Moon/Sodderland for undertaking this.
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Drawing parallels between the work of filmmakers is often about vague and academic speculation. But in this case, I feel the connection and influence is direct enough to make a case.
Colossal Youth
Born Into Brothels
and Boomtown Babylon
My compadres Vincent Moon and Lotje Sodderland are currently out in Phnom Penh, Cambodia running the pilot of what will become an infinite global web project of interconnected one-shot stories from slums and squatter communities in cities around the world. The films are made by giving cameras (Kodak Zi6s) to the people themselves, and asking them to film their lives and their environment as they see it.
From the first week of the operation, a dispatch >
“The slum community which flanks the Boeung Kak lake has been living under threat of forced and abrupt eviction for years – and last week a fire blazed through a large portion of the settlement, destroying 160 family homes. We explored the neighbourhood and spent some time in the home of a widowed community elder-lady called Sophat. With Smey as our interpreter, we talked at length about the issues afflicting the community (powerlessness, exclusion, intractable poverty). We left feeling inspired her enthusiasm for the ways in which our little grass-roots documentary project might help communicate stories from within the community to the eyes of the political elite – as well as an international audience of web users when we put the film online.”
“We arranged for our first workshop in a room normally used for dance rehearsals by the Children of Bassac. We gathered about ten excited bright young things to seed the project and start shooting stories. Then we ran into this super-sharp boy called Robbie – 18 years old, trying to go to school but usually too busy trying to scrape together some cash selling water and fruit. He invited us into the home he shares with his mother, disabled father and younger brother and totally got into doing a test shoot. He and his mother were incredible – they shot a simple, one-shot piece of powerful amazingness, in about 5 minutes flat.”
Read more > The Garage, Production Notebooks > Boomtown Babylon. Updates soon…