American Cinematographer - April 2008 - 76

Sundance 2008: Mining for Movies hardcore communist nation that wasn’t issuing visas to Western journalists, much less filmmakers, so I hid my SR-2, three mags, tripod and film in a bag. While we were waiting to get on our plane in Bangkok, a man next to us in line started chatting with us, and it turned out he’d been a filmmaker in Laos. When we got to Laos, he bribed the officials to let us through; he took a Hi-8 camera we’d brought just for the hell of it and told them, ‘It’s for home videos.’ So they gave us permission to shoot ‘home videos,’ and meanwhile, our bags were stuffed with film equipment!” Intending the Laos material to be poetic, Kuras shot all the footage at 32 fps and looked for images that could work as visual metaphors. One of these opens the film. She recalls, “I saw these kids playing with some water buffalo, and it struck me then that Thavi had really lost his childhood because of the war. Here were these two kids playing freely, like they didn’t have a care in the world. To me, that represented the loss of innocence in the world and Thavi’s loss of innocence in particular. We jumped out, and I reveled in shooting the lush setting sunlight on the pond, with the kids oblivious to the camera.” The last shot of Nerakhoon was captured with one of the first Red Ones tested in the field. “A friend of mine visited New York with one of the Reds, and I was very excited to try it,” says Kuras. “Thavi, being an engineer and an emerging editor, was also keen to see it at work. I took him, his wife and their new baby into my backyard to shoot them for the postscript of the film. Thavi looks especially happy in the scene because we were using the Red camera for the first time!” Kuras took Nerakhoon to Deluxe Toronto for the visual end of post. “Their support was instrumental,” she says. “They embraced me and this project; they moved schedules around to accommodate my crazy work schedule; and they organized the entire in-line workflow.” She color-corrected with colorists Mila Petriki from Toronto and Joe Gawler from New York; Kuras and Gawler had collaborated on Personal Velocity (AC April ’02)and The Ballad of Jack and Rose (AC April ’05). “I envisioned Nerakhoon as a film with narrative, vérité and poetic components, so I wanted to do a more sophisticated grade than one would normally do for a documentary,” she says. “Documentaries don’t necessarily have to look gritty to be real and believable. “During the transfer, I noticed the older Kodak stocks held up really well, especially the 48. I was amazed we didn’t have that much digital restoration to do on some of the material.” She worked with an HDCam-SR transfer from a Spirit Datacine and will eventually film out from the HDCam-SR after doing a digital intermediate. (The movie was projected digitally in HDCam at Sundance.) “Because Deluxe Toronto can transfer from 16mm to HDCam-SR on the C-Reality, Company 3 generously allowed us to use its Spirit Datacine machines in New York. I like the look of this film in linear space rather than log film space; I love the creaminess and velvet quality of the Spirit, and I want to retain that feel. Also, because of the multiple formats, I knew staying in linear space would help the imagery be more consistent.” Though Kuras is the cinematographer, writer and director of Nerakhoon, she decided to share the directing credit with Thavi, who also edited the project. “This film is about history, philosophy, life and death as experienced by this family, and it was therefore crucial that it have a very personal voice,” she says. “The process of making it was really a long dialogue with Thavi and his family. I wanted to share with him the means to tell his story.” — John Pavlus ¢ Kuras, a frequent guest and award winner at Sundance, is making her directorial debut with Nerakhoon, a project that took 23 years to complete. course of the production. “In time, I definitely made a distinction between the looks of the stocks, but when I started shooting, I was more naïve, and some of my decisions were ruled by what ASA I thought I could support with available light,” says Kuras. She matched the properties of some stocks to re-photograph archival footage projected onto a wall or playing on a TV. “I reshot some Kodachrome footage of the Pathet Lao taking over the country, and I knew I wanted to keep those colors really saturated, which is why I used [100T] 7248. For shooting off the TV screen, which was daylight-balanced, I used [250D] 7297 when the screen was dim and 48 without a filter when looking for cooler, richer blacks. I experimented a lot to see which stocks would render the best look.” Kuras traveled to Laos in 1995 to capture the film’s emotional climax, wherein Thavi reunites with his two sisters who were left behind with a grandmother. Capturing the scene took a stroke of luck. She recalls, “At the time, Laos was a 76 April 2008

American Cinematographer - April 2008

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