By Ben Crosbie
How do you make a documentary film? Just do it! Nike-isms aside, it really is as simple as picking up a camera and shooting some film. Just like many other creative fields – writing, photography, painting – no amount of thinking or dreaming about it will ever get you as far as actually producing something, regardless of the quality of the final product. Now of course it’s not really just as simple as picking up a camera and shooting is it? It takes a lot of hard work, failure and discovery, and courage.
Our entry into documentary filmmaking came about quite organically. Tessa had worked as a writer on a doc during college for one of her classes, and really found it to be a highly creative and rewarding experience. I had been interested in narrative film throughout college, and produced a short film as a senior project (damn you GUTV film fest – all my friends liked The Spaniard, why didn’t you?) I had never really considered making documentary films, but had dabbled in the genre almost unknowingly with the classic “Drew Eats 30 Slim Jims and Then Gets Sick” – a short film I made sophomore year in college. After working a mere month at her 6:30 in morning job, Tessa came to the conclusion that she needed to do something else. Thus came the genesis of the “Kibbutz” documentary.
I was born in a Kibbutz (although have been living in the US since I was three) and Tessa had always been fascinated by my tales of the eden-like utopia where my mother’s family had come from. She brought up the idea of making a documentary about the Kibbutz at the end of the summer (2006), and I thought it was a great idea, so we ran with it. Well, we walked with it for a few months as we adjusted to our new “real-world” lives and didn’t really do anything with the idea until the winter.
Research
We decided to start researching Kibbutzim (plural) at the Library of Congress, to get a better grasp on what these idyllic little communes were all about. I had visited my kibbutz, Kfar Giladi, many times before, but had never really done any research on the history of the kibbutz movement. Crazy-homeless-person-reading-large encyclopedias aside, I highly recommend the LOC as a starting point for researching an idea (for DC based filmmakers at least). The little research we conducted that day started to give our idea some foundation. We also picked up the book “Making Documentary Films and Reality Videos” by Barry Hampe, to help us on the technical side of documentary film making. Most of the book was pretty useful, but we ignored large parts of it because it focused on large crew, film-based work, something we already knew weren’t going to do. But as most side projects go, we worked in spurts and didn’t commit much time to it until after all the hullabaloo of Christmas and visiting of families was over.
Once the New Year came, we decided we really had to crack down if we were going to jet off to Israel in six months. I honestly can’t remember how, but one day we just decided on focusing the film on kids from the kibbutz that were graduating high school and heading off for their mandatory military service. Great idea right? Well there is actually already a film out there that chronicles a very similar group of people – young Israeli’s who were taking a year break in-between their high school graduation and their military service. We decided that our film would be different enough because it would be told from a kibbutz perspective, and our kids would not be taking a year off. Just look at all the films already out there about the Iraq war (Iraq in Fragments, My Country, My Country, The War Tapes, for example). Films can have the same subject but still be unique.
So we set in motion trying to find some subjects for our film. At this point we had a great idea, but still no clue if there were even any kids in the kibbutz that would fit our criteria. I unscrupulously used my mother (free help!) to contact people she knew in the kibbutz, to see if we could find some subjects. Luckily there were three kids in Kfar Giladi that would be graduating high school and heading off to the army. We started contacting them via email, and they were all very excited to be a part of this film (do they have any idea that we will be following them around all the time with a camera?) At this point Tessa and I locked in our final answer and decided this is what the “Kibbutz Doc” would be about.
Phew, that was easy! Wait… how exactly are we going to get to Israel, what are we going to shoot the film with, what about audio, and editing? We have no idea what we are doing! We are two recent college grads with no real film experience trying to make a documentary in a foreign country. We’ll have to quit our day jobs, sublet our apartment and spend lots of money on equipment – shit, we’re screwed!
In the next post, we’ll tell you how we started to (or didn’t) figure all of this out!
