The Cinema Lounge

Being Flynn: Q&A with Director/Screenwriter Paul Weitz

By Anita Glick, DC Film Society Member

A screening of Being Flynn was held on February 21 at AFI Silver Theatre and Cultural Center. Director/Screenwriter Paul Weitz discussed the film and took questions from the audience; AFI’s programmer Todd Hitchcock moderated.

Being Flynn is adapted from Nick Flynn’s 2004 memoir Another Bullshit Night in Suck City. The book is a series of vignettes detailing Nick Flynn’s fatherless childhood, his mother’s suicide and his time working at a homeless shelter—where he comes face to face with his dad. The movie explores the bonds--fragile and unbreakable--between parent and child.

Paul Weitz co-directed About a Boy which earned him and his brother Chris an Academy Award nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay.


Todd Hitchcock and director Paul Weitz. Photo by Jay Berg.

Todd Hitchcock: Thank you for bringing your great work here and thank you for spending time with us here in Washington.
Paul Weitz: I’m really excited to be here. Last time I did a Q&A in Washington, the person moderating said he was with the Woolly Mammoth Theatre. I write plays as well. I remember he asked me, “What’s more important to you--film or theater?” I feel like theater is much easier than film but film is more important to me.

Todd Hitchcock: I wanted to ask a couple questions just to get things started. I know this is a project that you spent some time on. It started around ’04, I believe, and is based on the memoir that has the fantastic evocative title of ...
Paul Weitz: Yes, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City.
Todd Hitchcock: I just wanted to hear you say that. Eight years later we have the film. Just from your perspective, and knowing what it takes to shepherd projects through in Hollywood--is that a long time to put in to getting it developed? Is it typical? What’s your take on that? I can also understand it took some work in getting the studio involved.
Paul Weitz: Basically it was sent to me and over the course of seven years I wrote 30 drafts of it. I know it is that many drafts because I number them on my computer. Nick Flynn, whose memoir and whose true story it is, read most of those drafts. He was nonjudgmental and generous of spirit. Initially the budget was around $25 million. I can completely understand why the studio was not going to make it for that. The budget got lowered and lowered. Happily, it ended up being a fraction of that. Happily, because by the time it got to Focus, they were giving me odd notes such as reassuring me it was okay not to redeem De Niro’s character--the opposite of what you expect from studios. But I would not have gotten to make it without De Niro sticking with it. He read it and everybody sort of tightened their belt straps. It’s quite frightening getting to make something that you really feel can be something that’s important to you. Weirdly, although it is someone else’s narrative it was very very personal to me. It boiled down to some themes I kept touching base with over those seven years. The first of which was whether we are fated to become the father in this case, or whether you can create yourself. What you have to own; parts you don’t like about your heritage and also the aspect that it was about creativity in particular to me as it relates to ego. It is a lesson in humility.

Todd Hitchcock: I believe we need to talk a little bit about De Niro. It’s great to see him with deep investment in a character; we have not seen this from him in a while--the De Niro that we all think about from his filmography.
Paul Weitz: I needed some snow. We were shooting in New York in winter and spring and you never know when it is going to snow, of course. I got a weather report one day a month before shooting and it said there was going to be a blizzard the next day. I called De Niro up and asked him, 'Where are you? Are you in New York? What are you doing tomorrow?' He asked, 'Why?' "How would you feel about throwing on some costume and going out in the snow with me?" He understood that during the shooting period we might not have appropriate weather. It was like a student film. We went out with no permits, De Niro and a car, me and a camera guy. We jumped all around the city. Primarily we got our best stuff in the financial district during rush hour — because I knew everybody would be rushing by the camera and De Niro — they all just wanted to get to work. The first thing that we shot was really like a student film, essentially. In the film there’s a section after he has been kicked out of the shelter, where he’s out on the streets and wandering around saying that the doctor said that they are going to have to cut off his toes.

Todd Hitchcock: You, of course, have worked with him before.
Paul Weitz: I worked with him recently on Little Fockers which, if I was to write a memoir about the full gamut of the film making process, it would be called "Focking and Sucking." It could not have been a more different experience. I also met him because he was one of the producers of About A Boy, a film I made with my brother. That film has a little boy whose mother is depressed and in the beginning of the movie the little boy is depressed. He was an unknown kid that we had chosen. He has become a star now (Nicholas Hoult). When the studio saw the dailies they said you have hired a completely non-emotive little child who appears to be depressed. We said that is because he is in the movie and he is going to be fine. But we sent the footage to De Niro and we said do you agree and if you do please call the studio. He saw it and he told the studio to back off, that the kid was going to be okay. So I have gotten to spend some time with him. It took me quite a few years to understand that he was joking three-quarters of the time. He is incredibly dry. He really isn’t difficult but because he is Robert De Niro you can’t tell when he is pulling your leg. He doesn’t appear to care if you know that he is joking. By the time I got to direct this he was very empathetic to me. The first thing I shot with him was him coming down those courthouse steps after he has lost his cab license. And he says I am going to put this in my book, Memoirs of a Moron. I had this idea and I went up to him after he did the first take and I said Bob, how about you raise your arms in mock triumph as you’re coming down the stairs and you're mumbling the thing about memoir of a moron. He looked at me and he went "Hmm... I don’t know and it’s my first day and I don’t want to go over the top, that sounds really big — Bob, scratch that, do whatever you want to do and I’ll give you some other notes" and I thought — my first note on this movie and it’s so important to me and I gave him a bad note. I made up for it by every scene that we shot that day and there were a good 5 or 6 of them. I’d come up to him and say, "Bob how about you raise your arms in mock triumph" and we both laughed about it. Luckily I felt quite comfortable with him, oddly.

Todd Hitchcock: I think we could do the next hour with you just telling us Robert De Niro stories. That would be fun. But I want to bring in audience questions.
Audience: How did making this film impact how you think the plight of the homeless can be handled?
Paul Weitz: Nick Flynn, whose memoir the film is based on, understands much more (on a societal level) about homelessness than I do. I understand there a couple of you in the audience that work with the homeless in a very substantial way. I’m extremely grateful for people who are able to focus on a problem and try to tangle with it. My only approach here was to approach everybody from Bob’s character to some of the day players. Some of the day players were formally homeless individuals. I just tried to portray that each person has a particular root to that circumstance. From spending some time with these people, I was really struck by the wide variety of stories of their lives and the wide variety of the people who work at Homeless Shelters. All I tried to do was be specific with Bob’s character. I did feel lucky that along with the actors there were some non-actors that had been homeless.

Audience: When you were writing this, did you find the problems were substance abuse, social, biological, personal or something else?
Paul Weitz: I feel that to some degree the father reminded me of my own father. There was something about the book that had a fable-like quality to me. Am I fated to become my father? In terms of the entry into it, I was going through Paul Dano’s character. It’s a generational thing. It was alcohol and now it is spoken about much more in the open. It’s been de-stigmatized. Bob’s character is of the generation of my father. My father was a relatively successful person but he always dreamed of being a writer and he would write late at night. He started drinking early in the day. But, lucky for me he was around and he was very loving. I got some great gifts from him. I do identify with the human demons aspect of the story. When De Niro, Nick and I went to meet Nick's dad he was living in an assisted care facility near Boston. We sat down with Jonathan [Flynn] and he said to De Niro “So, do you think you can pull this off?” (audience laughs) Nick said, “Dad he’s a very well known actor. He did The Godfather.” Jonathan said, “I hear you’re good, but are you going to be able to play me?” (audience laughs) In the film I think at the core level Nick has not been able to process his mother’s suicide. He can’t ask his dad for love but there are some harsh lessons in survival he can get. I know I didn’t directly address your question because I really don’t feel capable of it.

Audience: How difficult is it to make a movie now?
Paul Weitz: It’s easy to make a film. You can make a film very inexpensively now. It is just difficult to get it distributed and to get people to come see it.

Audience: Thirty drafts! Do you go back to the old ones?
Paul Weitz: Sometimes I go back to the old one but in this case once my bluff was called and I was actually given a number ($) at which to make it and De Niro said, “Okay, I’ll do it for that”--I just knew I could not shoot anything that could not be in the movie. The last scene in the movie is actually not in the memoir. It was the only scene that I was not sure I was going to shoot it and not include it. Particularly because we shot it the first day that Paul and Bob were acting with each other. I didn’t know if that relationship would be present enough to warrant it. It was encapsulating some things that I thought were important in the script. I like writing and if I could I would have kept on writing drafts. One thing about being a director, you need to make a lot of decisions very fast and need to accept the fact that you are going to make a lot of bad decisions, so you have to make them quickly. I don’t go back. When I realized I was really going to make it, I went immediately to a café and wrote a 200 page book of every shot. In particular I wanted to know how the end of one scene would relate to the beginning of the next. In a story about two characters equally you need to do a lot to sew it together. It is complex and needs to flow.

Audience: In the last scene when the father is at the poetry reading after Nick has won an award it was interesting to see how he would handle it.
Paul Weitz: I really liked that scene. It was the last day of shooting. In theory I wanted to be showing the moment of maximum emotional impact between the two of them and glossing over with irony and other elements. It is interesting to me that Nick takes ownership of it. I know that in real life Jonathan said to Nick, “You are going to win the Nobel Prize before I do, you bastard.”

Audience: What made you think Paul Dano could handle working head to head with Robert De Niro?
Paul Weitz: I knew that he had acted with Daniel Day Lewis a couple of times. I had read that Daniel Day Lewis doesn’t leave character. Paul said he once called him when they were shooting There Will Be Blood and Daniel said "hello" in character. I thought if Paul was not intimidated by that he could work with De Niro. Paul is a smart guy and he is respectful as well. De Niro has been around long enough that he would not want to put up with any crap from anybody. I tend to want to direct people to suppress their emotions because I think that is what we normally do. I felt like that was his approach.

Audience: I appreciated the orientation of the De Niro character with Dano at the poetry reading. They were facing each other but Dano was not looking straight at him.
Paul Weitz: That was Bob’s decision, on the first day of them being together. It illustrates Jonathan not giving of himself when his kid is reading his poetry.

Audience: Have Nick and Jonathan seen the film? What comments have they made?
Paul Weitz: Nick really put his life on hold. He was there throughout the shooting--generous and giving. The only very disturbing part and an issue was the day of his mother’s suicide which he made the decision to come see. Actually, I think it was healthy in terms of an additional distancing moment for him. It was quite beneficial to me because I had gotten to be friends with him. He had seen various cuts of it. His dad has seen the trailer. Apparently he really liked the part where he said, "You are me I made you." He asked to play it again and again. Nick is going to show it to him.

Being Flynn opens in DC on March 9.

NOTE: Being Flynn doesn't just address big issues--it's doing something to make a difference. To help those who continue to face homelessness, 100 percent of the ticket sales for the March 7 premiere will benefit Boston Medical Center's Elders Living At Home Program, the agency that gave Jonathan Flynn a place to stay.

20th Annual Environmental Film Festival

Friends With Kids: Q&A with Director/Writer/Actor Jennifer Westfeldt

By Annette Graham, DC Film Society Member

At an advance screening of Friends With Kids on March 1 at AMC's Georgetown Theater, the director, producer, screenwriter and actress Jennifer Westfeldt answered questions about the film. The discussion was moderated by the Washington Post's 'On Parenting' blogger Janice D'Arcy.

Friends With Kids is a comedy exploring the lives of friends--couples and singles--whose relationship with one another changes when children come into the picture. Jennifer Westfeldt, known for writing and acting in the 2002 film Kissing Jessica Stein, takes on four roles here; she is the film's director, writer, star and producer. She began her career as a theater actress in New York, starring in Broadway, regional and off-Broadway productions and has received numerous awards.

Janet D'Arcy: This is a really honest depiction of married life with kids. One interesting thing about it is that you don't have any kids. Where did the inspiration come from?
Jennifer Westfeldt: I do have a dog that feels like a daughter (everyone laughs). The inspiration really came from watching so many friends and people in our lives start to have children and make that transition and the sensation of being out of synch with your peer group--watching them change before your eyes and go away for a bit, and watching the friendships change and the relationships and romances change. You feel a bit left out but you are also observing how everybody feels a little bit differently. That's where the germ of the idea came from. Ironically, three months after we wrapped the movie my manager and business partner sat me down and said, "We're having a baby together." And I said, "You don't need to do that for the press tour." (everyone laughs) They had their baby two days ago. It's just amazing. Maybe we'll start a trend.

Janet D'Arcy: One of the elements that fascinated me about the movie was how deeply you go into the male perspective. How were you able to observe that?
Jennifer Westfeldt: I don't know how to answer that. I'm an actor first, so that I think that in terms of the writing, I try to play every part--boy or girl, old or young and think about what would feel truthful to me based on how I hear people speak. I don't have a great answer for that.

Janet D'Arcy: The casting here was just incredible. The group had such chemistry that it felt to me that it was voyeuristic at some points--as if you were just eavesdropping on a really good group of friends. How did you assemble this cast?
Jennifer Westfeldt: I'm still pinching myself that this group of actors agreed to do this tiny movie in the dead of winter in New York last year, which was the worst winter in 40 years in New York. We did not have a very glamorous or luxurious shoot. Adam has been a dear friend for almost 15 years, so he was a natural person to come aboard. He actually read the first draft of the screenplay. The day that I finished the first draft, we had invited some actors over to read it cold at our dining room table. We made pasta and had wine and it was just low-key. Adam [Scott] came, among others and read. After that moment, I felt like "I'm done." If we can ever have your schedule free enough to do it, we sort of based everything around that. Kristen [Wiig] and Maya [Rudolph] have worked together for years so they have such a built-in history. Jon [Hamm] has worked with Kristen and Maya on SNL and Chris O'Dowd just worked with Maya and Kristen on Bridesmaids and Eddie Burns is best friends with the cinematographer. Megan's [Fox] husband did a movie with Adam ten years ago. There were a lot of connections among us that existed; in this case it was really helpful since you have no time to shoot it and not a lot of takes and any built-in chemistry is to the good.

Audience: What was it like directing yourself?
Jennifer Westfeldt: It was a challenge. I was not planning on directing this movie; it was definitely not what I wanted to do. In every Indie film, there is one magical moment where the cast that you want comes together. Jake Kasdan was going to direct it and I was really excited about that; we've been trying to work together for a long time. He was still working on Bad Teacher and it kept extending and we didn't really know when we'd find that 4-week chunk when everyone was available. And of course that happened in the dead of winter a year ago. At that point I would step in or we would lose the opportunity. Jake basically made a bargain with me to be on set every day of the shoot itself to watch the monitor when I was on camera. And he became the mentor of the project which is the only way I would have accepted the challenge. My DP Will Rexer was an amazing partner and collaborator and really helped me with the steep learning curve. But I had another set of eyes. It was a challenge. I don't know that that aspect of it I'd do again. We shot this in 24 days last year with babies and toddlers most of those days.

Audience: About the ending--why did you decide to have them come together rather than lead their separate lives?
Jennifer Westfeldt: This was the ending from the beginning, from that first table reading. Adam and I believed in it. I felt like I'm not sure what the message would be if they ended up estranged and we left the theater worrying that we had ruined this child's life. I think the premise of the selfish single thinking they can have it all and beat the system and avoid complications and avoid the compromises and the messier parts of life--there needs to a lesson, there needs to be consequences and I don't actually see the ending as running off into the sunset. Let's see how that goes. I think it's going to be a long road for them still. I think they're beginning again at the end of the film and it may or may not work and might continue to be complicated.

Audience: Are you going to do a sequel? (everyone laughs)
Jennifer Westfeldt: I don't know what we'd call it, Kids with Friends. I'll take suggestions.

Audience: You had a lot of little kids to direct. How well did they take direction and how many takes did you have to do for some of these complicated-looking scenes?
Jennifer Westfeldt: We got really lucky for the most part, considering what a disaster it could have been. There were a few days that were dark days on our set because of the kids. For me it was a window into the world of parents on some level because the kids will do whatever they want when they want and nothing else. So if they don't feel like doing what you're doing, you have to wait it out, do something else, frame them out of the shot, come back, play a game with them, try to make them laugh. You felt a lot like a circus performer, trying to get them excited. In particular the two scenes at the end--the three year old playing two and a half at the end. We double cast that with two different actors, not twins, I couldn't find twins who could say lines and look like the younger version of Joe in most of the movie. So we just figured we'll shoot these scenes with two of them and one of them will give us a performance. On that day we had the tantrum scene to get and the scene where we put them to bed. I stupidly thought that the bed scene would be easier to start with because the tantrum I felt like we'll wait until they're tired and tantrum-y. And that was a terrible mistake because no child wants to get into bed ever and definitely not in the middle of the day in front of strangers with large cameras. So both children melted down, "Mommy, I want to go home," devastated, screaming, sad. I started to cry; I was going to be carted away by Child Services, having scarred these kids for life. That was a bad day. And we had to shoot that whole scene without the kids just hand-held, just me and Adam talking to the kids. And we had to wait until one of them was in a good mood. One moment they were so unhappy and I thought I had destroyed their lives and the next moment.... It was such a lesson. Those scenes were really hard. Oddly the tantrum scene was easy. "Hey, do you want to hit Adam and kick the floor?" "Yeah!" But getting them to bed and say lines, that was not of interest. It was a challenge. The Joe we had for most of the shoots, Theo, was like the light of the sun on the set. He was a most special beautiful kid and we couldn't wait until he got there every day because he put everyone in such a great mood. He's probably the best actor in the film.

Audience: What was your budget?
Jennifer Westfeldt: The budget was low. It was under $10 million. I'm not allowed to say how much under $10 million but not a small amount under $10 million. Every indie film is hard to get off the ground. Money is hard, in these times especially. This one was different from my first two films in that the other two we raised private equity share by share, so there were many many investors. Which is longer and harder in a sense but it's also easier in a sense because no one really has a say; everyone is just visiting. But they're not full-on partners with you. This was different in that we fortunately found Red Granite pictures and they had been reading scripts for two years looking for their first project. And they wanted to do this one, so they were all in. I had never had that experience before where someone wrote the whole check and wanted to be a big part of it. So that was faster in some ways but more complicated because you have partners in every way, and you already have so many people working on it. So it was very fortunate but posted a different set of challenges too.

Audience: How did you get Mike Nichols [executive producer] involved in the project?
Jennifer Westfeldt: We were lucky enough to workshop the screenplay for a long weekend at a place called New York Stage and Film which is my summer creative home. It's a great place on the Vassar campus during the summer where playwrights go to work out their material before it comes to New York. I've done a lot of plays there. They produced a four day workshop with the actors and we started the process with just a cold table read with some screenwriting mentors. And Mike was one of those. That was a great fortunate thing but also terrifying. I remember I had just gotten off the plane and we all came in and no one had looked at the script in months and I looked up at this long long table and there was Mike and next to Mike was Tina Fey and I thought, "This is a terrible idea, terrible idea, this is going to go very badly." We ended up having him on roundtable and getting noticed. Mike really responded to the material. He was moved enough to say he wanted to get involved and kind of godfather it.

Audience: You've written a lot and now directing is added to your resume. In what directions do you plan to go?
Jennifer Westfeldt: I thought I was just going to be on stage my whole life. That was all I ever planned for or wanted to do. It was ironic that I went to LA and did a sitcom to get on to Broadway. You never quite know where your path will lead you. Kissing Jessica Stein just organically came to pass. I was on a show and I had two months off and we were going to put up a night of sketches. It became this little play that we ran for 3 nights in the basement of a church. I got back to LA and my agent called and said all these studios called and wanted to make it into a movie. And I was, "Huh? What? We just invited our friends and family." I didn't understand how that happened. So I really feel like the Indie film thing just happened to me. I didn't ever think about it. I'm still learning every day and every second and trying to rise to new challenge. But it's also exciting especially as a woman to have a bit of say in your creative destiny. We happen to be at a moment this year in particular where so many women are doing that. It's a really cool time between Tina's success on 30 Rock, and Kristen and Annie with Bridesmaids and Miranda July, Lena Dunham, Rashida Jones just wrote something that she's in, there are 5 movies at Sundance that have women writing for themselves. There is a wave of people trying to change the reality and have more stories that speak to women and more roles for women. I'm excited about that, I don't want to let that go entirely. I've only made one movie every five years, so I'm not exactly prolific, but I'm going to try to keep mixing it up.

Audience: After doing all this, do you want to have kids?
Jennifer Westfeldt: We don't know; we love kids and our friends' kids, our lives are so crazy, I've been on a plane every day for the last 3 weeks. And it's hard to know how that would fit in. That may happen; but I don't know.

Friends with Kids opens in the DC area on March 9.

The 41st International Film Festival Rotterdam

By James McCaskill, DC Film Society Member

Year after year the International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR) attracts top quality filmmakers from around the globe. Not surprising since approximately 350,000 tickets are sold which makes this one of the world's largest festivals. This year it continued the tradition of mixing bright young directors with their first films and experienced maestros. Coming as it does just weeks before Berlin, a film festival that ranks with the best in the world, Rotterdam does not sense that it is losing top films to its larger competitor. IFFR brings superb films that are overlooked by Berlin and Cannes. Some of those attending Berlin moan about losing the absolute top tier films to Cannes. I would be amazed if that thought entered into the thinking of the IFFR leaders.


Posters from the IFFR, above and below


The Rotterdam festival is divided into three parts: Spectrum (films by experienced directors and master filmmakers of artistic and experimental cinema). Seventy-two films from thirty-two countries were screened this year. Bright Futures (idiosyncratic and adventurous new films by novice directors) and Signals (thematic programs and retrospectives "offering insight in topical as well as timeless ideas within cinema", their press release says). In addition their commercial arm, CineMart, is a co-production market that attracts 800 sales agents, distributors and fund raisers from seventy countries. That's power in this time of worldwide economic problems so many come seeking the Next Big Film.

Opening Night film was the world premiere of Lucas Belvaux's 38 Witnesses (38 temoins, France, 2012). The film is freely adapted from Didier Decoin's book that itself was based on the 1964 murder of Kitty Genovese in New York, whose cries for help were ignored by everyone. The book and film transplant the murder to Le Havre and studies the different memories of the witnesses.

Only Rotterdam, in presenting the works of the Chinese independent filmmaker Ai Weiwei whose works are most often screened in private home and small cafes in China, would construct a Chinese cafe in which to screen Ai's films. Seating only 20 at a time, you really do have the feeling that you are in a clandestine space watching films that the Chinese government would rather you not see. Among the films screened was one you probably won't see at your local cinema, the 150 hour Beijing 2003, a documentary of ring roads and boulevards. As one might expect of an underground filmmaker, Ai did not attend, fearing arrest upon his return. Ai has been severely beaten by police in the past.

One of the pleasures that Rotterdam offers me is the opportunity to meet with directors from countries that do not have a strong film making tradition. This year I met with Uganda's JOSEph S KEN (sic--that's how Joseph Kenneth Ssebaggals spells his nom de film) on his debut film A Small Piece (Uganda, 2011). Ken told me, "Before coming up with the story I went to visit my village, to hide out and write. I met this guy, a strong witch doctor, and interviewed him. From that interview I developed this story. Told him, 'I think we are going to do film in my village.' In traditional times a strong witch doctor would have been a rich guy. Now he works as a sharna boy (gardener) for my grandmother. I had a good time with him; he told me a lot--how everything works. He contacts spirits in trees, in traditional times spirits would come and talk telling you who is giving you problems, who is causing trouble. In the film I have family fighting each other, that's to move the story along. In the past females would select a wife or husband for you. Today people make their own choices. People do fight to protect land. You don't just come and take land. Today rich people bribe local officials to take land in cities. No one bothers in rural area. My sister financed this film, she knew from experience how films are made. I studied in Kenya and know how to develop a script, how to edit and do post-production so I don't have spend money on that. If I had had funds I would have had a bigger cast and crew. Coming to Rotterdam means a lot to me for future films. I can use this experience to speak with people about funds. When they ask to see what I have I have done I can show them A Small Piece and the Rotterdam exposure. My next film will be different." Ken's film shows talent and now he may be able to make a film with a greater possibility of wide distribution.

My highlight at Rotterdam was asking the Press Desk for assistance in speaking with filmmakers from Arab Spring countries, expecting two and having sixteen show up. That's a different article.

AND THE WINNERS ARE ...
The winner of the Audience Award was Monsieur Lazhar, a film in the spirit of Être et avoir (Nicolas Philibert, 2002), in which the Algerian immigrant Lazhar helps a primary school class come to terms with a tragic loss, while benefiting himself from the innocence of the schoolchildren. Monsieur Lazhar, which also took the award for Best Canadian feature film at the Toronto film festival and was in the running for an Oscar for Best Foreign Film, will be given a Dutch theatrical release on 22 March 2012 by Imagine Nederland.

In the Dioraphte Award winner Goodbye, a young female lawyer tries to leave Iran. This personal, gripping film by Rasoulof, who himself has been the subject of legal persecution in Iran for his films, was made thanks to a contribution from the Hubert Bals Fund. Other films scoring highly in the audience award poll included Hugo by Martin Scorsese, Die Unsichtbare by Christian Schwochow (Germany) and the topical documentary Back to the Square by Petr Lom (Norway).

The three equal winners of the Tiger Awards, given to a director's first or second film are:

Clip by Maja Miloš (Serbia, 2012) A vigorous, rebellious, authentic, honest and revealing film using modern means to depict in a punchy way the mobile generation, who capture their lives through images recorded on their phones. An emotionally disturbed main character in a fractured family, within a broken society, Clip provokes many questions and gives no answers. Clip saw its world premiere in the Tiger Awards Competition 2012. The film is produced by Film House Bas Celik (Serbia).

De jueves a domingo by Dominga Sotomayor (Chile/Netherlands, 2012) This film is a very precise and gentle depiction of the intimate space of a family. We are captured in a journey seen through a child’s perspective, and recall the moments of our own childhood, at the same time experiencing and understanding all the complexities that adult life entails. The minimalistic story is revealed through the fresh angles of the camerawork. A gentle piece, rich with sensitive observations. De jueves a domingo was supported by the IFFR’s Hubert Bals Fund for script and project development and was selected for the Hubert Bals Fund Plus-program. The film saw its world premiere in the Tiger Awards Competition 2012 and was produced by Forastero and Cinestación (Chile) in co-production with Circe Films (Netherlands). Sales agent is FiGa Films (USA).

Egg and Stone by Huang Ji (China, 2012). The director creates a sensation by telling the private story of a girl who unwillingly becomes trapped in a life on the margins. The taboo present in the film is broken by means of poetic language. The director does so with a convincing author’s approach and sensitive direction of non-professional actors. The beautifully framed, conscious choice of camerawork is relevant to storytelling, and unveils human secrets. Egg and Stone saw its world premiere in the Tiger Awards Competition 2012 and was produced by Yellow-Green Pi and Panorama (China).

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