Based on scripted material and filmed like a documentary by Danish ‘Borat' Mads Brügger, to denounce the post-colonial model in Central African Republic, The Ambassador is a typical hybrid film, blurring the limits between fiction and non-fiction. What do you make of this new filmmaking trend?
With more and more directors using amateurs and handheld cameras there is no doubt that hybrid films have gained prominence in the last 5-10 years. Many such films are being awarded at documentary festivals but also major film festivals such Cannes, where Thai film Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives won a Palme d'or in 2010. From being a little lab, for a devoted few, hybrid filmmaking has become mainstream within the arthouse sphere. At New Danish Screen, we've supported 12-15 films that are considered as hybrid films.
Are there different categories of hybrid films?
I've tried to identify four different groups within hybrid filmmaking, looking at them from an audience perspective.
The first category consists of ‘real-not' movies, documentaries that you watch thinking they are real until you realize it was all a set up.
The second category would be films such as Borat or The Ambassador that use fake elements to have an effect on reality. By creating a character [the white ambassador, mix of Bernhard Prince and Dr. Muller from Tintin in The Ambassador], the director triggers some things to happen. These ‘artistic' interventions on reality are perhaps the strongest form at the moment.
The third category is authentic fiction. Fiction films that have documentary-like feels, with a strong sense of reality, such as Tobias Lindholm and Michael Noer's prison film R that we supported. It's based on a real story, with real settings, and the directors wanted the film to have a docu -feel. Someone said: ‘There is nothing more unreal then yesterday's realism'. And indeed, many directors in their creative search push the boundaries even further to see when a fiction film feels really real, even more real.
The fourth category is films where the director constantly shifts from fiction to reality. This was the case with Brigitte Stærmose's short film Out of Love.
But often hybrid films raise ethical questions...
With Out of Love we presented it as a work in progress. The film depicts the lives of children in postwar Kosovo through monologues performed by children. Some monologues are authentic, others are not. They are based on real interviews with children that were then re-written by Danish scriptwriters. Several documentary filmmakers said this was violence against the children and argued that we should have let them tell their own stories. Ironically, UNICEF showed it as their Film of the year because they felt the film had empowered those children and they found the ambivalence in the film very interesting.
Mads Brügger's role play in The Red Chapel and The Ambassador is also very manipulative...
You have to ask yourself what you gain by exposing a certain reality. If you only expose innocent people it would be terrible. With Red Chapel and The Ambassador, Mads gives access to people, information, environments we would never see otherwise. In The Ambassador, he is more of a performance artist than a journalist in disguise. He leaves his journalism behind and he is not perceived as a journalist It's much more powerful I think.
A lot of documentary filmmakers simply want to leave the traditional rules of filmmaking. They give a sense of breaking boundaries, and it's exciting for audiences as well. Borat audiences are teenagers. They don't really care about how the film is made. They just want a good laugh.
It must be hard though for commissioners to work around a hybrid film, trying to decide which department - fiction or documentary - is going to support such a film...
At New Danish Screen, we don't have this problem because we support both documentaries and feature films and even computer games with our DKK28 million annual budget. We don't have any rules really and support whatever we find interesting, unlike the other film commissioners within the Danish Film Institute. I think artistically hybrid films are better off within the documentary genre, but their budgets tend to be more expensive than for the average documentary, so sometimes two commissioning editors end up collaborating on a hybrid film. It's not so easy when you have boxes you want films to fit in.
Do you have other hybrid projects in development?
We have in the editing room a TV series called The Detective (Detektiven) directed by Christoffer Dreyer. It's about a detective bureau in a small town where nothing usually happens. It deals with a dying countryside, where schools are closing, issues that can be difficult to tackle in a traditional documentary. Then it puts a detective story on top. It will perhaps be a four or six part TV series.