I am putting together a new production. It will be a short film. I cannot afford a feature length project, unless people actually give me funding for one. So until then, I will do shorts because a director has to direct and for better or for worse I've decided to spend my twilight years directing. Others might take up golf or gardening, but for me, it is directing because you get to mix with the living and I've always had a strong connection with those kind of people.
A few friends regard this as a wimpy thing to do and believe that somehow I should struggle on with a long production with a bunch of dedicated assistants pulling out all the stops to let me look good. Now, I have spent a fair old amount of time neglecting my own career and organising things so that others may have better opportunities, so you would imagine that I have accumulated a lot of goodwill. However, I have never found it lasts for long. And a feature length project unless stripped down to very bare bones usually pushes goodwill to the limit.
Some people might live with a suitably altruistic bunch of talented assistants around them, but here in Hong Kong, nobody knows how to pronounce the word, so I'm not hopeful. And when one notes that feature length micro-budget movies rarely climb even to the dizzying heights of "Paranormal" one can see why a strategy of shorts for festivals, while pushing forward feature length scripts towards producers who might be able to finance them, has its charms. The theory here is that, the script is the thing! And if it's a good one, it will attract the finance. And if one can show that one can direct, through the judicious accumulation of sample works, one can be attached as the director. If not, then take the money and run and make another short.
The curious thing about the film industry is that often or not the script is worth more than the film that is produced from it. And usually the micro-budget film merely tells one that more time should have been spent on the script, or that the project was under-resourced.
And so, here I am putting together a short film based upon a script send to me by Ahmed Ndao, a Senegalese musician living in Dakar. If you think you have problems finding finance, just head off to Dakar for a reality check. Ahmed is a great writer, writing in French, and we have been trying to find ways of collaborating for a long time. So I thought this short was something that both of us needed to do.
I've adapted it for Hong Kong and am now looking for all the components of the production. The amount of money I am putting into this ten to fifteen minutes should concentrate my resources and produce a good looking film, with a solid emotional punch.
The film is about a woman who works and sleeps on the streets. She scavenges and begs for her living, but on this day we find her finally seeing a hint that she can rise up a notch. Her only possible plan has finally come to fruition. But there are final hurdles to overcome.
As you can imagine, the plight of the street sleeper is very precarious and rarely is there any hope of something better once one is down that far. So this film is a far cry from the comedies and satires that I've been playing around with.
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