Reviews of New York Film Festival Sea Sorrow

A Conversation with Actress Vanessa Redgrave on Her Debut Documentary Sea Sorrow at the New York Motion picture Festival

Vanessa Redgrave'southward debut as a documentary filmmaker in Sea Sorrow is a plea for a compassionate western response to the refugee crisis.

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Award-winning screenwriter and filmmaker,Susan Kouguell is a screenwriting professor at Purchase Higher, SUNY, and presents international seminars. Writer ofSAVVY CHARACTERS SELL SCREENPLAYS! andTHE SAVVY SCREENWRITER, she is chairperson of Su-City Pictures East, LLC, a consulting company founded in 1991 where she works with writers, filmmakers, and executives worldwide. Twitter: @SKouguell

"Sea Sorrow reframes ideas that refugees are from a far off country."

-- Vanessa Redgrave

Nearly Sea Sorrow (From the NYFF)

Vanessa Redgrave's debut equally a documentary filmmaker is a plea for a compassionate western response to the refugee crisis and a condemnation of the vitriolic inhumanity of electric current right fly and conservative politicians. Redgrave juxtaposes our horrifying present of inadequate refugee quotas and humanitarian disasters (similar last twelvemonth's immigration of the Calais migrant camp) with the refugee crises of WWII and its aftermath, recalled with archival footage, contemporary news reports and personal testimony—including an interview with the eloquent Labor political leader Lord Dubs, who was one of the children rescued by the Kindertransport. Sea Sorrow reaches further dorsum in time to Shakespeare, non only for its championship merely also to farther remind us that we are in one case more repeating the history that nosotros have even so to learn.

(Notwithstanding from "Sea Sorrow")

The Documentary Choices

There are no definitive rules in documentary filmmaking and Sea Sorrow, which examines the historical context for the current migrant crisis, is no exception. A documentary tin can utilise the traditional 3-act structure or nontraditional narrative format. Ideas can exist presented objectively or subjectively. Documentaries can include stock film footage, still photographs, utilise talking heads, include the filmmaker in the story, employ alive action, animation, dramatic reenactments, and voiceover narration or just have the subjects and images solitary convey the narrative.

(A young Redgrave in WWII)

During the World State of war II bombing of London, a three-yr erstwhile Redgrave was sent into the British countryside where she was taken in past the town's residents. Redgrave, on photographic camera, recounts this feel intercut with yet photographs of her during this time, referring to herself every bit an "internally displaced person."

Redgrave's nontraditional narrative also incorporates a combination of archival footage (including Eleanor Roosevelt introducing the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948), still photographs, talking heads, and live action, as well equally a dramatized excerpt from The Storm performed by Ralph Fiennes and Daisy Bevan (when Prospero tells Miranda the history of their "sea sorrow" and how they came to be exiles on a remote island, the former seat of his power and prosperity). Extra Emma Thompson also appears in the film, reading from a 1938 edition of the paperThe Guardian, highlighting rhetoric heard today.

(Vanessa Redgrave at NYFF Press Conference)

Press screening Q & A with Redgrave and her producer Carlo Nero

Redgrave stated that she treated the movie equally if it were a poem, and chose picture show every bit the medium to deliver her message considering: "Moving picture is one of the arts — although treated like a prostitute most of the time, but it is an art — that can help people communicate and become rehumanized."

Redgrave connected by saying she hopes Ocean Sorrow volition help audiences take compassion for the displaced people shown in the film: "Exercise y'all realize how close we are? Information technology could be the states. What will we do if we are treated the way our country has treated other families? That can happen so easily and so chop-chop." She continued: "Do people accept imaginations? People don't have time for imaginations. … Film, like theater, tin can. It doesn't impose, it can help people terminate reacting and start thinking."

Sea Sorrow is indeed thought-provoking in its global glimpse into the refugee crisis, and it is personal. The film reinforces the major theme that history has repeated itself but it besides poses the question to the viewer that possibly today, given what history has taught us, that information technology volition not exist repeated.

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Source: https://scriptmag.com/features/conversation-actress-vanessa-redgrave-debut-documentary-sea-sorrow-new-york-film-festival

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