God Provides: A Poetic Doc

0 Comments POSTED: September 12, 2007 11:19 | By: Jay Dart
God Provides 01.jpgGod Provides is a unique short-form documentary set in New Orleans in the aftermath of hurricane Katrina. The non-narrative format of this film creates a poetic glimpse into the lives of some residents of this devastated community. This approach stands apart not only from the inundation of coverage already given to this subject but also from the traditional format currently being applied by most contemporary doc filmmakers. Directors Brian Cassidy and Melanie Shatzky were gracious enough to share a few thoughts about the project.

What was your intention when you first decided to head down there?
After a while, I think its easy to become comfortable with devastating images if you see them over and over again and that is how we were feeling about the images we were seeing from Katrina. With God Provides, we just wanted to go down and maybe bring something back that showed a crisis in a different light.

God Provides 03.jpgWhat influenced your formal approach?
Formally, we both come from a background in still photography so we were bringing some of that discipline with us. We were really working from our intuition since we were not trained as documentarians. Because of our limited experience in filmmaking at the time, we were forced to make decisions in a different way.

Is short, non-narrative filmmaking something you hope to continue to do?
It really depends on the story that we want to tell and what is the best approach to tell it. Currently we are in the early stages of pre-production on a feature length narrative film. Though parts of the story will be scripted, we will also be using non-actors and documentary methods to bring it to life.

At what point did you decide to keep this a short doc?
We shot very little footage and were not entirely sure what we would do with the material once we returned. We were selective about what we shot and when we decided to turn on the camera, because we knew we didn?t want to go for any kind of easy sensationalism. It was almost as if we knew more about what we didn?t want, then what we did?and that meant less time with the camera rolling, and more time searching, wandering around and taking things in.

God Provides screens prior to The Wild Horse Redemption TONIGHT (Wed) @ 9:30pm and Friday @ 11:45am.

Categories: Canadian Film Programmes

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