Gaspar Noah, the French-based Argentine filmmaker was at the Red Sea Film Festival in Saudi Arabia, where he was invited to give a master class and, incidentally, announced his next projects; a fiction featuring children and a documentary.
“I’ve already made a film about old age with Vortexso the next one will be different. I’d like to make a film where the protagonists are very young children, between three and five years old, with very little dialogue,” he explained speaking of his latest film, shot during childbirth and what’s to come.
“I like films with children. I don’t have children, but I get along well with them,” he said in an interview with the specialized site Variety.
a documentary
Of his other filmmaking plan, he said he’d like to “make a big-budget documentary, not because of the amount of money I could spend, but with all the tools that are used in commercials or feature films, with elaborate special effects , drones and an original soundtrack” where you can let your imagination run wild.
As for the ambitious documentary project, the director has assured that he is thinking about it for the big screen and, although he has several issues in mind, for now he prefers not to reveal them.
At least advance, says this takes inspiration from some old Russian or Chinese documentariess, which were essentially propaganda films, but could access huge resources, such as organizing entire army divisions.
When you see a movie like I’m Cuban Directed in 1964 by Russian director Mikhail Kalatozov, the whole island of Cuba helped make it happen.”
With that idea, he explained, “So maybe I could do something that’s a mixture of fiction and documentary. Another example is the 1929 film, Haxan: Sorcery Through the Ages, a documentary about witchcraft and the inquisition. But you see the guy had a studio, he had extras.” Same with documentaries that used cinemascope images on screen and no voiceovers.
current challenges
Furthermore Vortexpremiered at the Cannes Film Festival and which in Argentina could be seen at the Mar del Plata Film Festival 2021, the 58-year-old director, He is the author of other recognized and controversial films What Irreversible Y Enter the void.
Noah believes it one of the major challenges independent filmmakers face today is how to obtain funding sourcesin an industry increasingly dominated by streaming platforms that add more and more productions and monopolize the majority of the audience worldwide.
“I have no platform at home and I don’t watch TV. So when I want to watch an HBO TV show like EuphoriaI have to buy the DVD, which comes out two or three years after the show comes out on the platform,” he explained.
Because of this, the director makes many independent filmmakers, like at home, choose to produce their films themselves to ensure a theatrical release. However, most end up selling them to streaming platforms later, due to the strong financial pressures.
Noah says this after suffering a brain hemorrhage at the end of 2019 and then, with the onset of the pandemic, he spent most of the confinement watching films at home and assures that “what makes it possible for a country to produce great films is what happens there at a given moment and who finances movies and how much silk of freedom”.
Furthermore, he adds: “There are big countries that don’t make good films and there are small countries that make great films. For example, Mexican cinema is doing very well now, but it wasn’t always like this.”
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Source: Clarin
