I Ran Iran: a feel-good film project foiled by politics

by Jamie Rhein on

I’m wild about independent films with ultimately feel-good heart. Milk and Opium is a film that caught my attention in 2007. So did Binta’s Great Idea. Here’s another film project I’m excited about: I Ran Iran. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem, from what I’ve discovered, that the film has been completed. That’s too bad. The trailer and the story behind the film are intriguing. By the end of the trailer I was smiling and curious as to what happened to the project. Intrigue and smiles means two thumbs up by me.

Here’s the scoop. Tyler MacNiven who, along with his teammate B.J. Avril, won season 9 of the Amazing Race, set out to make I Ran Iran as a way to illustrate the warmth and hospitality of the Iranian people and the richness of their culture. To do so, MacNiven set out in 2006 with his best friend, Bobak Bakhtiari, an Iranian-American, to run the the 1000 miles or so between the Persian Gulf and the Caspian Sea. Some of Bakhtiari’s family still live in Iran so family visits were also in order.

Unfortunately, the two were stopped from completing their journey a few days after it started because Iranian officials were concerned that the purpose of the run was political. It wasn’t, but from what I read in MacNiven’s explanation in this Lonely Planet article, he made an off-handed comment about Iran’s ability to pursue nuclear energy to a reporter. That comment snowballed into a political statement, something MacNiven was horrified by.

Instead of finishing their run, MacNiven and Bakhtiari were told to leave Iran. About a week after starting, lickety split, they were in Amsterdam with memories of Iran still floating through their heads as they tried to wrap their minds around the unexpected scenery change.

I’m hoping this project is able to be completed and am wondering where it now stands. Perhaps there is a funding issue. Perhaps there are political issues. From what MacNiven wrote, it’s too bad if there are political issues because from what they found, there is a warmth towards Americans by many Iranian people.

If MacNiven and Bakhtiari are unable to complete the film as they intended, I’m hoping it shows up in a larger venue in another film about the trials and tribulations of making a film in another country. I feel as if I’ve been engrossed in a book and have reached the end, but the last two chapters are missing and the author has disappeared.

Reading this story is a reminder that when traveling in another country, off-handed comments and actions can have unintended consequences. It’s unfortunate that exuberance and curiosity can sometimes kill the cat, or at least curtail its efforts.

Here’s the trailer.

‘Workingman’s Death’ Film Review: Dirty jobs, global edition

by Jerry Guo on

Michael Glawogger’s “sequel” to Megacities (which I reviewed last week in two installments, part 1 and part 2), Workingman’s Death, also documents the plight of workers from around the globe. It is not meant of course, by any means, to be Megacities II.

His style has evolved in the last few years, from a more experimental approach in Megacities, with its exploration of staged shots, unorthodox soundtrack, and a complete lack of structure to a more traditional documentary approach in Workingman’s Death.

In Workingman’s Death, Glawogger hews a more traditional approach to documentary filmmaking than in Megacities. He rejects reenactments, but he also does not favor the shaky first-person style common to many documentaries. Rather, he crafts his images with close attention to traditional cinematic forms-composition, color, lighting, camera movement-which juxtaposes with the jumbled and often jarring sights within these alien workplaces. Even without reenactments of intimate moments-the dehumanizing striptease scene in Megacities, for example-Glawogger still conveys, through the contrast of time and place, a poignant sense of personal narrative.
In one scene, the camera looks out at the Ukrainian miners, who are having a picnic of sorts. They proceed to carry on a seemingly mundane conversation about their daughters. Only the viewer can appreciate the bizarre gaze of the situation-their picnic is in the crawlspace of a deadly abandoned mine buried deep beneath the barren land.

I think what makes these two films stand out is that they reject the more or less standard conventions of documentaries to rely on a “voice of God” narrator (see Michael Apted and his 7UP series). While Megacities is to some extent filmed in the interventional mode-due to the staging of certain scenes-this film, as well as Workingman’s Death, is very much in the observational spirit. Glawogger, stripped of his voice and presence, certainly still stamped his own editorial style on the two films, by overlaying found objects, such as background sounds, text, archival footage, and conversational recordings, to the recorded image.


Workingman’s Death relies more heavily on dialogue, which contributes to developing the characters that he encounters. Here, on-camera characters provide the narration. Glawogger shows rather than tells. We hear the dialogue between two Indonesian sulfur carriers: “I like the way she moves,” says one about his favorite prostitute. “Well, moves aren’t everything,” cracks the other. Such intimacy enable the viewer to develop empathy with the workers, who are humanized here.

One of the sulfur carrriers proceeds to narrate, through dialogue, his life outside the sulfur field. “I go down to Banyuwangi after weighing in. You have a little fun, you come back up here, climb the mountain, go back down, and have your load weighted,” he says with little expression. The backdrop, a moonscape set against a sky shrouded by the volcanic smoke, underscores the despondency of this situation. We realize these workers spend their precious earnings on prostitutes because it is the only happiness they can procure.

Workingman’s Death boasts of a substantially more tangible structure to Megacities, namely in the narrative arc that revolves around five distinct profiles which together trace the progression of a worker’s paradise from the past to present and the future. He begins in the figurative past, in a sequence titled “HEROES,” alluding to the Stakhanov worker’s mentality that grew from the Soviet communism movement.

Glawogger splices in footage from Enthusiasm (1932) that sets the paternal lineage between the two generations of miners. The next three sequences-GHOSTS, LIONS, and BROTHERS-all reference this Stakhanov sensibility, but places the gaze in the present, as Indonesian sulfur workers have to contend with Japanese tourists, Nigerian goat butchers fight for the heads and skins while the choice cuts are ferried far away, and Pakistani workers disassemble the ships that have made the international shipping business possible.

Through these workers, Glawogger gives the viewer a glimpse of the implications of globalization, although he shows rather than judges. These scenes, more so than the ones in Megacities, also show processes, which in itself give the film a skeleton of structure. For instance, we follow the sulfur carriers in an epic journey from the volcanic hell-hole to the weighing station miles away. We follow the butchers on a typical day’s work in the killing fields, in all its blood and glory.

The next sequence-FUTURE-brings the story to a hopeful resolution in China, where workers no longer toil in the death-defying conditions that their Ukrainian comrades must endure. Finally, he ends at a steelwork complex-turned-fairground, an epilogue that, by paralleling the abandoned heavy equipment at Duisburg with the Promethean struggles of the Stakhanov worker, elicits the nostalgia of a past era.

Unlike most filmmakers, Glawogger moved from a more experimental school of filmmaking, as seen in Megacities, to the more conventional mode in Workingman’s Death. But through both films, Glawogger has redrawn the limits of documentary filmmaking. His restaging of events in Megacities calls into question the axiographic nature of pursuing the truth and of imagining reality. His postmodern approach to narration in both films, and in particular the skillful use of alternative soundtracks, has introduced new possibilities of storytelling. And his minimalist structure in Megacities, and to a lesser extent Workingman’s Death, furthers his thesis that the world often cannot be reduced into simple narratives.

‘Megacities’ Film Review: An eye-opening tour of the world’s greatest cities (part 2)

by Jerry Guo on

Read part 1 of my review.

Megacities in particular features a rather unorthodox audio track that escapes categorization. While Workingman’s Death employs a soundtrack composed by the industrialist musician John Zorn, Megacities relies on the “discarded” sounds of the local environments and cultures to fashion a coherent narrative voice. In this way, Glawogger becomes one of the refuse-combers that he films in Mexico City and Mumbai, gleaning what others in a global consumer society have left behind.

He astutely employs sound to highlight the absurdity of everyday situations-the squishing of headless chickens flapping around in a bloody oilcan, the overly-saccharine Latino pop music playing during the striptease, triumphant blares of unseen trumpets during an awkward photo shoot of Mexican soccer players, who happen to be standing next to a trash heap.
In Megacities, Glawogger also experiments with other audio narrative devices, such as replaying previous dialogue on a cassette player and verbalizing (although not in his own voice) what he imagines people on a Moscow subway are reading on their way to work. Such elements, including his emphasis on filming locals who are singing (even staging a scene in which one woman mouths the words of a Russian song into her phone), establish a lyrical, larger-than-life atmosphere that envelopes what would otherwise just be the unseemly underbellies of urban decay.

But Glawogger is sometimes not as circuitous in his objective; he occasionally voices his own belief through surrogates, as in the scene in which we hear a New York radio personality’s speel on living in the Big Apple, that it was “a city of disguises and masks. This city expands and collapses.”

Megacities may at first seem like a complete postmodern repudiation of traditional constraints on structure and conventions of storytelling. There is no narrative arc or character development (in the sense that they change through the course of the film). Glawogger admits that the first iteration would have surprised viewers even more, “I was collecting bits and pieces … the first cut that I showed to people, they thought it’s a confusing pile of images, and it took very long till it got its form.”

The finished form, through its minimalist structure of twelve snapshots of people and places around the world, speaks to the very nature of its subject: the global diaspora. By giving us hundreds of jumpy snippets of life in Moscow, New York, Mumbai, and Mexico City, Glawogger underlines the complexity behind these megacities, from the geopolitical to the cultural and sexual. He glorifies the diversity and bewilderment of the new world order, a place where you can walk two blocks and fall down the rabbit hole. To place these stories into neat little boxes with a storyline from A to B would be to attempt to simplify the indivisible.

But Glawogger does retain some semblance of structure in Megacities, most significantly in the use of motifs. In Mumbai, he finds a backroom shopfloor brimming with Indian workers sewing blue robes. In the next sequence in New York, we see these blue robes being hawked by a streetside vendor (in the DVD commentary, he admits to staging this New York segment). In another scene in Mumbai, he captures the image of a girl hidden away in an alleyway, holding a baby chick. Later in the film, we see a salesman selling baby chicks for a peso out of a rolling car to little kids.

Such connecting motifs highlight Glawogger’s thesis about how globalization has impacted every corner of the globe, from the slums of Mexico City to the slums of Mumbai. Thus, his editing choices reflect Nichol’s belief that “…images are not quite as unmanageable as they appear. They can be joined together with words or other images into systems of signs, and hence, meaning.” Glawogger has sewn these little patches of the everyday fabric of life into a flowing tapestry of the human condition.

Stand By Me while traveling the world

by Abha Malpani on

Award winning producer and film director Mark Johnson, recorded a guy on his street singing “Stand By Me”; then he traveled around the world and recorded about 100 other local artists doing the same. He edited some of the snippets of their footage into a video, and this (video below) is the result. It’s just too awesome. There is also a documentary film co-directed by Johnson, expanding on the same idea — you can see the trailer here.

This initiative of course is part of a larger program called “Playing For Change” which aims to connect the world through music. The foundation provides musicians around the world facilities to play music and enhance their skills, therefore not only making their lives better but also demonstrating how music brings people together regardless of cultural and socio-economic differences. Current projects include building a music school in Gugulethu (South Africa) to provide the youth there an alternative to the daily violence and deprivation they face; rebuilding and enhancing Tibetan refugee centers in Dharamsala and Kathmandu; and building an arts center in Johannesburg.

Here’s a recently recorded interview with Johnson by PBS’s Bill Moyers, and a Q&A with him on ComingSoon.net.

Talking Travel with the Filmmakers of PBS’s new travel series, Roughing It

by Jerry Guo on

Christopher Rufo and Keith Ochwat are a couple of fresh filmmakers who, on a whim, decided to fly to Mongolia, where they managed to camp with a tribe of nomadic reindeer herders, challenge a provincial wrestling champion to a match, and drink tea with Mongolian president Nambaryn Enkhbayar. Oh, and they’re just 23.

Their half-hour documentary, Roughing It: Mongolia, will be making its premier later this summer on PBS, and they’ll be turning it into a series, called what else but Roughing It, coming out in late 2009. Here’s more from our interview:

What traveling experiences have you guys had before setting on this documentary?
CHRIS: My first real adventure travel experience was with Keith during the summer of our sophomore year in college. We had arranged jobs as English teachers in Guangdong, China. But the morning we were supposed to leave, we got a frantic call from the Chinese school administrator: “The children have been poisoned and the school is closed. You cannot come anymore. I’m very sorry!” But, luckily, they didn’t cancel our airline tickets. So we went to China with no plan whatsoever. We ended up as extras in a Chinese rap music video, hitchhiking 19,500 feet up the Himalaya in the back of a dump truck, and steamboating down the Yangtze River with thousands ofThree Gorges Dam refugees. We were hooked. From that trip, we realized there was a really good chemistry of us two on the road. Almost effortlessly, we met fascinating people and found ourselves in fascinating situations

KEITH: Chris has lived abroad and I have traveled throughout Europe on a number of trips. But we both agree that it wasn’t until we got away from the tourist trail and left the city lights behind that we truly found adventure. In China, we pushed ourselves hard to put away the travel guides and rely on our instincts and on those we met to take our travels to the next level. What we learned led us to the incredible adventure we found in Mongolia.

How’d you know what to do and see in Mongolia? How can readers avoid the Lonely Planet trail and really rough it?

CHRIS: It’s simple, but my best advice is to be curious. I’m surprised at how many people I see who spend most of their day finding the cheapest hostel, hunting down the pizza place in the guidebook, and getting drunk with the Australians at the backpacker bar. You have to think like a journalist–meet people, ask questions. Get over whatever timidity you might have. Hunt around in the strange parts of town, ask to go along with people. If you’re respectful and genuinely interested, they will welcome you into their lives and culture.

KEITH: As Chris mentioned, a little respect will go a long way when you’re trying to rough it. Regard for those who live in the country you’re visiting-sometimes, just a smile-opens doors to festivals, celebrations, restaurants, and people that you would never find in the best travel guides. No matter how remote or ‘off the beaten path’ your travel guide claims it is, if you’re reading it, so are thousands of other travelers. We’ve had tremendous luck meeting interesting people, and finding once-in-a-lifetime situations. And I know our success meeting interesting people has been because of the attitude we have when we’re traveling.

How did you land the chance to drink tea with the Mongolian president?

CHRIS: A lot of phone calls, e-mails, and pestering the Ambassador– plus some tactical exaggeration. We had a paper-thin resume at that point, so we had to stretch it. I think the president was a little surprised when two kids showed up for the interview in running shoes and wrinkled polo shirts.

Is Mongolia very difficult to travel through on your own?

CHRIS: Mongolia is a challenging place for independent travelers. There are less than 1,000 miles of paved road in the country, which complicates the logistics for getting anywhere. In the first week of filming, we had to sneak around a Bubonic plague quarantine. I broke three ribs after getting thrown off a horse. Keith and I both puked after a dozen bowls of distilled yak milk–yak vodka–at a traditional wedding ceremony. And I would guess everyone who travels in Mongolia would have similar experiences. It’s the kind of place where adventure finds you.

KEITH: A perfect example of how physically demanding travel in Mongolia is what happened when we were tracking down an elusive tribe of nomadic reindeer herders. Our guide assured us it would take five hours on horseback to find them. Ten hours later, after crossing snowy mountain passes and miles upon miles of rocky, bumpy paths, the sun was setting and we hadn’t found the nomads. We had no tent and it was freezing cold-it was late fall and we were on the border of Siberia. All we could do that night was scrounge up some wood, make a fire, and huddled around it all night. The next day, we got back on our horses and rode another day before we found the nomads. If that wasn’t difficult traveling, I don’t know what is.

CHRIS: But even though you’re miserable at the time, these are the kind of challenges that make the best stories later. So, it’s difficult, yes. But to a lot of travelers, including myself, that’s a plus. Maybe a masochistic plus, but still a plus.

Would you talk a bit about the process of convincing a television network to run your documentary?

CHRIS: Like starting out in any of the arts, you have to pay your dues. I was working as a night security guard in Sacramento, editing the show and making phone calls during the day. Eventually, if the project has potential, some kind soul will take interest. We found some amazing support from KVIE, our local PBS station. Particularly two guys, Mike Sanford and Tim Walton, who spent a lot of time giving us editorial guidance and advice on the business end. They helped us craft an interesting travelogue into a polished PBS program. It was a long process. It was our first show and a steep learning curve every step of the way.

KEITH: It was just before Christmas, fourteen months after we had wrapped up filming in Mongolia, when we got our big break- a phone call from one of the major PBS distributors. Their development manager called and said, “I like giving good news during the holidays. We’d like to pick up Roughing It for national distribution.” Christmas came a little early for Chris and I last year.

CHRIS: We’re thrilled to be airing on PBS. It’s one of the few television outlets that respects its audience’s intelligence. It’s the only major network where independent producers have complete control over their work. And our travel documentary hero, Michael Palin, airs on PBS. His Himalaya series is a masterpiece and was a big, big inspiration for us.

Can you give us a preview of the eight-part series, Roughing It, coming out next year on PBS?

KEITH: Roughing It: The Great Pacific will take you through some of the most exotic and remote countries on the planet. We’re in the process of mapping out a rough path through Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, the Philippines, Papua New Guinea and East Timor. Chris and I will definitely be packing our pepto bismol and dramamine as we island hop across Oceania and delve into the indigenous cultures that have successfully fended off Western influence.

CHRIS: For better or worse, I think what ultimately sold us on the Pacific was the same thing that sold us on Mongolia: the exotic factor. Keith hanging out with cannibals–what in the world could be more compelling than that?

For more information about Roughing It, visit their website. They’re also on Youtube and MySpace.