5Q: Dustin Grella / PRAYERS FOR PEACE
Posted by CQ Central
Dustin Grella
1Q: Tell us a little about the origins of PRAYERS FOR PEACE, from concept to financing.
I don’t know that it was ever a conscious decision. The film is entirely non-fiction, and I tried to keep as close to the facts as possible, so the story unfolded relatively naturally. I write every day, so after I walked past the ribbons, I went home and wrote about it, and while I was writing it I knew I was going to make a sound piece out of it. I was trying to make it feel a little like an Ira Glass narrative, very Americana. When I started looking for a topic to do the animation on I realized that I already had this sound piece finished and could simply animate on top of it. I don’t know that I ever sat down and said that I was going to make a film about my brother. I think this goes back to the question of what motivates me, when I said that the creative process is exciting, that I never really know what is going to happen next. I could be writing a letter one day that becomes a sound piece another day that becomes an animation the next, I don’t ever really know.
I think I might have just done that. The film’s creation was very organic. I just had to sit in the studio and do the work. As I mentioned before, the whole thing is a narrative of what actually transpired. I was walking home, I saw the ribbons and went home to write about my thoughts. After making the sound piece and deciding to turn it into an animation I decided that the shots should be long and slow so that the viewer has the opportunity to digest the story and not get hung up that it is entirely drawn with pastels on a sheet of slate. I storyboarded what I could, and pulled a lot of the sound and imagery off of Devin’s laptop, although the images for the end didn’t arrive until months later. I had some ideas of what I wanted to use, but this film’s creation was very organic. I just had to sit in the studio and do the work. I found the reference footage for the very last shot a few days before I used it. My Uncle Art gave me hours and hours of family VHS tapes to go through and I was getting sort of tired and drifting out and would have missed it entirely, but my girlfriend leaned over my shoulder and said, “Whoa!” Even though I did a lot of the work on the film, the film itself kept shifting forms and I really didn’t know what it was going to be about. It wasn’t until it was all over that I realized it wasn’t really my film at all, I was just there to put it together. Read more
Tags: 5Q, animation, Dustin Grella, non-fiction, Prayers for Peace, SHORTS, war.
REVIEW: COOKING HISTORY
Posted by Cynthia Corral
COOKING HISTORY
For the first time since viewing CANARY I find myself in the middle of a film review conundrum, wondering how to explain how absolutely awesome is COOKING HISTORY, even though I turned it off around the halfway point and have no intention of ever returning.
It all depends on your horror threshold. I would guess this documentarian secretly wants to direct some hilarious horror films, because that is almost what you have here. It certainly is a documentary, filled with interviews with the people who were called upon to cook for troops in six different wars, and they are quite incredible. These heart wrenching stories of poisoning loaves of bread for the enemy or leaving out the last meal for the dead soldiers are overlaid with the recipes: “Bread to poison 300 soldiers”, “Pancakes to feed 1 million dead”. Humorous and heart breaking at the same time. It is drop dead serious but also told with a twisted sense of humor.
There are some very difficult scenes you should be warned about. At one point a cow is graphically slaughtered and it takes a very long time for the cow to die. A very. Long. Time. There is similar scene with a pig. I have a pretty high threshold for horror, but I couldn’t take this. I wouldn’t be surprised to hear there are walkouts during this movie if people aren’t prepared… so go in prepared.
It really is a fantastic documentary. The war stories are horrific, but they need to be told and they need to be heard. The director cuts from an interview with a soldier explaining how a tank would have crushed him “to mincemeat” in a field to a shot of a former cook pushing meat through a grinder. Actually there are many shots of the grinder, at any opportune moment it seemed.
There is a definite twisted, dark humor in the telling of these tales, and there is horror that is almost impossible to look at. But it brings to life the shocking details of these war stories that are so easy to feel are just stories. It is much easier to listen to battlefield tales without seeing a pig get his throat cut. Hearing how a tank would have crushed the soldier to mincemeat really doesn’t have the same effect as watching the meat get pushed through the grinder while listening to the soldier’s own words.
I did not finish the movie. I regret that I cannot hear the rest of the stories. But my threshold is apparently not high enough to get through this. It will be good for there to be walkouts because it will mean the film had the desired effect on people – War is not pretty, it is about throat cutting and meat grinders. Some soldiers will take a very, very long time to die. War is awful. People will be talking about this documentary during the festival, and that will be a good thing.
Prepare yourself, and go see it.
WED 2/24; 6:00pm (C12)
THU 2/25; 1:30pm (C12)
MON 3/1; 7:00pm (C3)
Dates, times and venue subject to change, check the Cinequest website for updates.
Tags: cooking, cooking history, DOCUMENTARY, REVIEW, war.