American Cinematographer - April 2008 - 74

Sundance 2008: Mining for Movies 8mm, 35mm, VHS and 3⁄4" video. To visualize the family’s escape from Laos, Kuras wanted to mimic Thavi’s point of view when he fled through tall reeds. “I knew I would use Super 8 for the memory sequences and blow it up optically to 16mm,” she says. “I went out in the fields and ponds of Shelter Island [New York] and ran through the reeds, as though I were Thavi escaping, and then Thavi would enter that same frame. Thavi essentially gets to step into his own point of view. What differentiated the feeling of memory and of docudrama in some of the shots was a fine line, though; I had to experiment with angles and how Thavi was framed to counter the feeling of re-enactment, which rang false to me.” As often happens in documentary filmmaking, chance and circumstance sometimes forced Kuras’ choice of format, but she discovered that even a consumer camera or non-professional medium could yield compelling images in the project’s evolving collage. “I shot another escape sequence, this time a real one, on VHS,” she says. “One day we got a call from a local Lao family who had been held up by an Asian gang in Brooklyn. They were going to be killed if they didn’t come up with $4,000 in the next 24 hours. We had to leave right away, and VHS was the only camera I had in my apartment at the time.” The scene is framed from a low angle in the front seat of the car because Kuras was driving and shooting at the same time, using her knee to keep Thavi in the frame. Rain pours down outside as Thavi questions the family and addresses the camera/Kuras. “The tape had already been used, so I just recorded over it,” she says. “I actually like the way the camera created a bit of a shutter lag. It looks quite painterly and beautiful.” Most of the film was shot on 16mm — 11 Kodak stocks, several of which were discontinued over the In a frame from Nerakhoon, Laotian immigrant Orady Phrasavath glances outside at her son, Thavisouk, as she discusses the state of her family with director/ cinematographer Ellen Kuras, ASC. A-list cinematographer, Kuras has shot dozens of projects, participating in cinematography’s evolution from a wholly photochemical process to an increasingly digital one. That evolution plays out in Nerakhoon, which contains some of the first 16mm images Kuras ever shot and concludes with images captured on the digital Red One camera. Nerakhoon chronicles the experiences of Thavisouk “Thavi” Phrasavath, a Laotian immigrant whose family was split apart in the aftermath of the Vietnam War. After Communist loyalists kidnapped Thavi’s father, his mother fled to the United States with Thavi and three of his five siblings; they settled in Brooklyn. Assuming his father to be dead, Thavi became the family’s unlikely patriarch as they struggled to integrate into East New York’s gang-plagued Southeast Asian community. Kuras’ work on the project began in the mid-1980s, after she received a grant to make a documentary short about the Laotian community in Rochester, New York. She had recently earned a degree in anthro- pology and was preparing to study cinematography at the Lödz Film School in Poland. She wanted to learn to speak Lao and put word out that she was seeking a native teacher. “One day, Thavi called me up and said, ‘Who are you, and why do you want to learn my language?’” she recalls. “We ended up spending a lot of time together, and in the course of those meetings, I asked him about everything from Lao mythology and philosophy to the events that happened to him during the bombing of his hometown during the war. That’s how Nerakhoon came to be.” The goal was not a purely vérité documentary. “I wanted to explore how people vicariously experience memory, to recapture the sense of Laos’ past in [Thavi’s] mind and re-create it in a dramatic form,” says Kuras. “That allowed me a lot of room for visual experimentation.” She shot mostly in 16mm using an Arri 16SR-2 mounted with a Zeiss 10-100mm zoom. “I felt symbiotic with that camera, my first camera,” she notes. Eventually, she incorporated more than a half-dozen other formats, including Super 16mm, Super 74 April 2008 Nerakhoon images courtesy of Pandinlao Films LLC.

American Cinematographer - April 2008

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