Whorkshop The Filmed Portrait

Laboratory of The Filmed Portrait

Since 2009, and as part of the annual Play-Doc festival, seven young film-makers from different backgrounds and places have come together in Tui for each to make a film portrait of one of the town´s inhabitants. Each year the same film-makers are reunited with their subjects and live together with them; and both the film-makers and their subjects experience the effect of the passage of time on each other. This year, the laboratory reaches its third edition with the derived-portrait, the aim of which is to continue to build the image of the "other", but on this occasion by filming the relation of the "other" with the persons who surround him, and who share his world. The path we started out on with the portrait-through-encounter, and that we continued in the second edition with the portrait-through-memory, now arrives at a new question: What of each of us can be seen in others? This time the camera will not be pointed at the subject directly but will move around to see and hear how much of the subject resides in others; how much of him others can give us; how much the film-maker can capture of his echo. This latest portrait then is a derived-portrait, it is one more step in the exploration of the peaks and troughs of this basic form of documentary cinema, a form that we set out to test and question when we embarked on this joint venture.

One more year and there is a new challenge for us to take on with the same or, if possible, greater energy now that the links that are established are strong enough to hold us together along the trail of shared experience, accompanied the whole time by the camera. And all this pushes us forwards into the depths of that intense experience that concentrates in one sweep of the artist´s brush both the film-maker´s search and the view through the camera´s eye that unites us, every one of us, with the "other", that is to say with the world.

By Marta Andreu, workshop director.







English Galego