Jennifer Baichwal, Canadian documentary filmmaker was “excited and happy”To win an award at Ji.hlava Documentary Film Festival “Into the Weeds: Dewayne ‘Lee’ Johnson vs. Monsanto Company.”
Johnson, who was diagnosed with a fatal form of Non-Hodgkin Lymphoma (NHL), took Monsanto on trial. Monsanto claimed it did not warn about the cancer risks associated with Roundup herbicide.
“I love this festival and I have never been able to come in person, because I have children. Now, they have grown up and they don’t care what I do,”She said that she was praising other nominees for the Testimonies section on Saturday.
Earlier during the week, Montréal-born Baichwal discussed her decades-spanning career during a masterclass moderated by Ji.hlava’s chief Marek Hovorka. Her 1999 doc was her first. “The Holier It Gets,” about her father’s wishes to have his ashes scattered at the source of the Ganges.
“If you want to know anything about my family, that’s the film to watch. And it’s deeply embarrassing for that exact reason,”She stated that confessing to it allowed her to explore the issues of confessional working.
“Many of my students immediately go to personal stories. But just because it happened to you, doesn’t mean other people will find it interesting.”
“I didn’t show the film to [my siblings] before it was finished. I knew I would get all kinds of ‘you can’t use that, I look fat!’ What I learnt is this dialectic of scale and detail. The big picture only has meaning when you are connecting it to something extremely particular.”
The other thing she learned was that things don’t go according to plan.
“Have a plan, but be ready to abandon it. If you don’t follow what is happening, you are doing a disservice to the context and to the people,”She said.
“We have a line at the bottom of every film that says: ‘It was shot and edited without a traditional script.’ It’s an ethical issue as well, because who am I to say I have any idea of how to convey, say, the city of Norilsk? It comes from the practice of deliberate humility.”
Baichwal explained that she was influenced by her childhood sense of not belonging to any place. “My Indian family thought we were weird. My British family basically disowned my mother for marrying my father.”
But while she doesn’t believe in the objective truth in a documentary – “it’s bullshit” – you can still be truthful.
“It involves empathy, even for the people you disagree with, a real exchange of vulnerability and knowledge. You don’t necessarily become friends, it’s more [about] trust and intimacy. And that goes both ways.”
Baichwal also discussed her experiences working with Nicholas de Pencier and Edward Burtynsky as a photographer, which she later married. “Manufactured Landscapes,” “Watermark”And “Anthropocene: The Human Epoch.”
Talking about the eight-minute opening tracking shot of a Chinese plant in 2006. “Manufactured Landscapes,”She said: “We got so much flak for that sequence from our broadcasters. You go from being somewhat interested to being bored and angry. ‘When is this bloody scene going to end?’ But you come out of it with a recognition of scale.”
As pointed out by Hovorka, the film’s ending turned out to be equally haunting.
“There was nothing natural. No birds, no trees, no insects. The ground we were standing on, I don’t know what that was. And the terrible thing was, people were living there. This wasn’t some industrial wasteland,”She elaborated.
“The reason why I wanted to put it at the end was because it was a revelation for me. We are all going to end up like this if we don’t change the way we live.”
China was a difficult place to shoot, so a minder was sent along with the crew.
“When I was arguing with him about whether we could shoot something, [cinematographer] Peter Mettler would be already filming. I feel sorry about it, but not too much.”
They were able to interview protestors on the final day.
“We got chased by the police. They wanted to take our footage, which we deliberately did not process there. We just managed to get out of the country,”She said that they also shared their experiences in Norilsk (Russia), during filming “Anthropocene.”
“Two days in we got arrested. They claimed we came under false pretenses and tried to get us to sign a confession that we had lied. They kept harassing us for the entire shoot.”
“To China and Russia, we probably can’t come back.”