Four Documentaries Selected for Inaugural Editing Lab

The Sundance Documentary Film Program recently announced its selection of projects for its first-ever Documentary Editing and Story Lab. Seven filmmakers whose projects have previously received funding from the Sundance Documentary Fund were invited to participate in the five-day program at Sundance Village in Utah. Director/producer/editor Mark Becker, director Mercedes Moncada with editor Vivana Garcia-Berné, director Hank Rogerson with editor Victor Livingston, and director Shiri Tsur with producer Avi Banon will attend the Labs.

“For some time now, we’ve been looking to complement the financial assistance provided by the Fund with creative support,” explains Diane Weyermann, Director of the Documentary Film Program. “In documentaries, editing is where the story is found. It’s in that part of the process that the structure and the narrative emerge. We’ve identified editing as one of the areas in which feedback and professional guidance could be most beneficial to the filmmakers. Ultimately, we just want to help filmmakers make the best films that they can.”

Mark Becker’s documentary Romantico is one of the four projects invited to participate in the program. “Sundance is a real resource for independent documentary filmmakers who are so often alone in their process,” he says. “Documentaries have so much nuance that you really need some outside perspective. Once you have some feedback, you can move forward with more confidence.”

At the Labs, Becker and the other Fellows will receive feedback from creative advisors, including editors Alex Cooke, Jean-Philippe Boucicaut, Kate Amend, and Richard Hankin, and directors Robb Moss and Vikram Jayanti.

Becker’s first feature-length documentary, Romantico follows two Mexican musicians who left their homes in Salvatierra, Mexico and immigrated without documents to San Francisco. When Becker encountered them, they were roaming between the many restaurants of San Francisco playing romantico music for tips in order to support their wives and children in Mexico.

“This actually started out as a ten-minute film about musicians in San Francisco’s Mission district, and their itinerant lives,” he explains. “But within the first week of filming, one of the musicians suddenly felt compelled to go back to Mexico to see his mother who was quite ill. All of the sudden I had lost my main character and I was forced to re-think the entire film. I had to ask myself, ‘Should I go to Mexico?’ And I decided that I should.”

At that point, the film that Becker had conceived as a ten-minute short obviously took a different turn. Over the course of the three years that he has spent working on the film, Becker has worked entirely alone, serving as the film’s director, producer and editor.

“Between grant writing, research, production work, and taking on other jobs, I’ve been pulled in about one thousand directions so I haven’t had the time to really concentrate on editing,” he says.

Becker and the six other Fellows will arrive at the Lab with a rough cut of their films, and will focus on selected scenes, concentrating on story, character development and dramatic structure. They will work closely with the creative advisors who will also discuss the films and evolving rough cuts.

“I have a total of about ten hours of film, which is not a lot of footage for a 70-80 minute film. Shooting film - rather than video - forces you to shoot in a certain way. You have to be mindful of the editing process. I’ve been trying to figure out the structure of the film as I go along. A second set of eyes will be extremely helpful in making sure that the editing makes the film feel the way I want it to.”

At the Lab, director Mercedes Moncada (Mexico) and editor Viviana Garcia-Berné will join Becker to work on editing her documentary The Immortal. Moncada’s film tells the stories of twin brothers from Nicaragua who fought on opposite sides of the contra war during the 1980’s and their attempts to reconcile with each other in a divided and devastated country.

Shakespeare Behind Bars is the project of director Hank Rogerson (U.S.A.) and editor Victor Livingston. Rogerson’s film documents the members of an all-male Shakespeare company at a Kentucky prison who confront their pasts and futures as convicts while rehearsing and performing a full production of The Tempest.

From Israel, director Shiri Tsur and producer Avi Banon bring On the Objection Front – A Personal Journey to the Lab. In this documentary, Tsur presents the stories of high-ranking officers in elite units of the Israeli military who refuse to serve in the occupied territories and are willing to voice their objections.