Cannes Director Stephan Komandarev Wraps Production On Doc ‘Life From Life’ (EXCLUSIVE)
Bulgarian helmer Stephan Komandarev, whose critically acclaimed feature “Directions” played in Cannes’ Un Certain Regard sidebar, has wrapped production on the documentary feature “Life From Life,” the director announced this week during the Thessaloniki Documentary Festival. The film explores the hurdles facing organ transplant recipients in Bulgaria, once among Eastern Europe’s leaders in the medical procedure, but now ranking last on the continent for the number of transplants performed. Komandarev said the inspiration for “Life From Life” came while he was developing the script for “Directions,” in which a heart transplant is central to the film’s interweaving storylines. During his research he met Georgi Peev, a recipient of heart and kidney transplants, as well as a competitive swimmer in Bulgaria. “He’s an amazing person,” said Komandarev. “He’s one of the main heroes of our documentary film.” The director planned to follow Peev and his teammates as they trained for the European Transplant Swimming Championships in 2020. The coronavirus pandemic, however, upended those plans. “We changed the idea of this documentary film in order to try to show what is happening in Bulgaria,” said Komandarev. In the end, he broadened the lens of “Life” to include patients waiting for organ transplants, as well as a doctor who coordinates with donors. “We included a lot of new heroes in the film.” Komadarev spent close to a year shooting “Life From Life,” maintaining strict protocols on set, since many of the film’s subjects who were awaiting transplants were in a particularly vulnerable group. A doctor who worked for five years in the medical profession before turning to film, the director even put his medical training to use during production: when his DoP lost his nerve while filming a particularly graphic scene of an organ transplant, Komandarev picked up the camera and shot the scene himself. “Life From Life” is produced by Komandarev and Katya Trichkova for Argo Film, in coproduction with Bulgarian National Television and with the support of the Bulgarian National Film Center. Komandarev is shooting for a theatrical rollout in Bulgaria this fall, before the film airs on the public broadcaster—a move that he hopes will broaden both its reach and its impact. “The basic idea is to change the situation in Bulgaria,” he said. “We have a film that is very human. It’s very touching.” He added: “We became very close with all these people that we shot during the pandemic that are waiting for organs. Somehow, the main idea is to help them.” Komandarev’s widely heralded “Directions” was the first installment in a trilogy about the social inequality and moral ills plaguing both Bulgaria and Europe. His 2019 follow-up, “Rounds,” had its world premiere in Sarajevo. “Hello,” the final feature in the trilogy, is set to begin production this fall.
Study Nixes Life In Clouds Of Venus, But Maybe In Jupiter’s?
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — A new study is throwing cold water on the possibility of life in the clouds of Venus. Scientists from Europe and the U.S. Reported Monday there isn’t nearly enough water vapor in the scorching planet’s clouds to support life as we know it. The team looked into the matter following September’s surprise announcement by others that strange, tiny organisms could be lurking in the thick, sulfuric acid-filled clouds of Venus. Through spacecraft observations, the latest research group found the water level is more than 100 times too low to support Earth-like life. “It’s almost at the bottom of the scale and an unbridgeable distance from what life requires to be active,” said the lead author, John Hallsworth, a microbiologist at Queen’s University Belfast in Northern Ireland. His team looked at the most dry-tolerant and also the most acid-tolerant microbes on Earth — and they “wouldn’t stand a chance in Venus.” While the latest findings veto Venus at least for water-based organisms, they identify another planet — Jupiter — with enough water in the clouds and the right atmospheric temperatures to support life. “Now I’m not suggesting there’s life on Jupiter and I’m not even suggesting life could be there because it would need the nutrients to be there and we can’t be sure of that,” Hallsworth stressed to reporters. “But still it’s a profound and exciting finding and totally unexpected.” Further studies will be needed to ascertain whether microbial life might exist deep in the clouds of Jupiter, according to Hallsworth and NASA astrobiologist Chris McKay, a co-author on the research paper published Monday in the journal Nature Astronomy. As for Venus, three new spacecraft will be headed there later this decade and early next — two by NASA and one by the European Space Agency. Hallsworth and and McKay don’t expect their results to change regarding uninhabitable water activity at our solar system’s hottest planet. “It’s unfortunate because I’m very interested in searching for life on other worlds and I would love to think that Venus is habitable,” McKay said. The scientists behind the September study possibly hinting at life in the Vesuvian clouds based their findings on the presence of the toxic gas phosphine. On Earth, it’s associated with life. The researchers argued that Venus’ phosphine levels are too high to be geologic in origin. “We are not trying to push Venus as a definitely habitable world. So far all conventional interpretations say Venus is inhabitable!” said Massachusetts Institute of Technology astrophysicist Sara Seager, part of the September team. Regarding the latest study, “we are tremendously enthusiastic about leaving no stone unturned, in case there is life on Venus,” she added in an email. There’s always the possibility that any life in Venus’ clouds — if it exists — could be totally unlike anything on Earth and adapted to the hothouse planet’s extremely hot and harsh conditions, according to scientists. “If there is life in the clouds of Venus, then this life has to be ‘Life as we do not know it,’ said astrobiologist Janusz Petkowski, a colleague of Seager’s at MIT. “The question is how different that life can be?” ___ The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
In ‘Zola,’ Janciza Bravo’s Cinema Of ‘life At High Volume’
NEW YORK -- It’s not easy to put a finger on Janicza Bravo’s cinema. In describing her work, which now encompasses nine shorts and two feature films, including the new film “Zola,” you want to use words like surreal, disturbing, satirical, absurd, otherworldly. “These are all very good, sexy words to me,” Bravo says, laughing. In Bravo’s hands, the viral tweet storm is a “Wizard of Oz”-like fairy tale that turns nightmare — a hallucinogenic but clear-eyed adventure through sex work, social media, race and violence that’s both fantastical and darkly real. Comedy and horror intertwine. So do movies and the internet. “I think it very much still is a ride,” says Bravo. “I just don’t know if it’s always a pleasant one.” For even some of Bravo’s closest collaborators, explaining the feeling and style of Bravo’s disorienting, dreamlike movies can be tricky. Midway through making “Zola,” her production designer, Katie Byron, turned to her and asked if Bravo had done a lot of ketamine. “I’m unfortunately a little straight edge,” says Bravo. “I’m just very attracted to creating work that feels a little larger than life. It’s just next to it. It’s something kind of familiar but we go to 11.” Bravo’s “life at high volume” filmmaking has drawn widespread admirers. Her second short, 2013’s “Gregory Goes Boom,” starred Michael Cera as an embittered paraplegic. Jeremy O. Harris, the “Slave Play” playwright, happened to see it at Sundance and fell in love with it. At the time, he figured Bravo, from her name, was Polish. Bravo was, in fact, born in New York but raised in Panama before moving to Brooklyn when she was 12. Her parents were both tailors, a source of Bravo’s stylishness. “The thing that I loved about that film then and about all of her films since is that she has this very sly, chaotic way of dealing with the darkest truths of American history while making you laugh throughout it,” Harris said while nursing a hangover and picking up smoothies after a celebratory “Zola” screening in Fort Greene, Brooklyn. Harris became friends with Bravo about seven years ago. When the possibility of making “Zola” came up, Bravo asked him to write it with her. For Harris, “Zola” represents more than your average Hollywood breakthrough. “This is a moment of profound catching up,” says Harris. “The work that she’s been doing has been so consist that I think people didn’t have a Rosetta Stone for the language she was speaking in. We’re not used to hearing a Black woman speak in languages this complex inside independent cinema.” “Zola” was originally set up with James Franco directing. That version of the film, the filmmakers say, was a more carefree romp. Bravo and Harris approached King’s Twitter thread — a colorfully told, often funny tale that brought phrases like “vibing over our hoeism” into the lexicon — with more reverence. To Bravo and Harris, the thread was a modern-day Homeric epic. They wanted to ground the film in Zola’s perspective and capture the way Black women can be treated as disposable, and the traumatic fallout of white appropriation of Blackness. “When Janicza came on board, it became more about my voice,” says King, who’s an executive producer on the film. Her tweets have been published in a cloth-bound hardcover. In the film, Zola (played by Taylour Paige) is a Detroit waitress whose newfound friend, a customer she waits on, Stefani (Riley Keough), urges her to come along on a weekend in Florida to party and make money stripping. Keough plays Stefani as mimicking Zola by immediately adopting her mannerisms and phrases. For Harris, it’s a kind of blackface without the makeup; one scene he compares to Spike Lee’s “Bamboozled.” We watch as Stefani drags Zola into a hellish situation. “Zola” turns the camera around on whiteness. It's a theme found throughout Bravo’s work, including her previous feature “Lemon” (about an aggressively unappealing failed actor, made with ex-husband and frequent collaborator Brett Gelman); and a series she’s currently developing with Jake Gyllenhaal as Dan Mallory, pen name A.J. Finn, the bestselling novelist who was found to have fabricated a brain tumor and a tragic past for himself. For Bravo, whiteness is often treated as invisible and neutral. Her experience is the opposite. “I wanted to be in conversation with whiteness and I wanted to talk to that because I hadn’t really seen anyone doing that, especially in comedy,” says Bravo. “Usually when things were about race, they were explicitly about race. And I am interested about folding race into my everyday circumstance. That is how it for me. It’s my own processing of feeling limited or feeling less than and what it is to wear this skin and wear this body.” But “Zola” — still a ride, remember — cloaks its thoughtful mediations. Throughout the movie, whenever a bit of dialogue matches King’s tweets, a Twitter ding sounds like slot-machine chimes. It’s a touch King considers “priceless.” “When I watch the film, it’s kind of a time-traveling moment. It’s like I suddenly forget where I am and I’m back in 2015. She really paints that image,” says King. “The movie, it feels like Twitter. I don’t know how to explain that, but it does. From the quotes to the chimes to the lighting, it feels like you’re in the internet.” Whether because of her identity, international childhood or artistic instincts, Bravo's knack for making the familiar seem foreign seems perfectly matched for “Zola,” a movie with one foot in real life and another in a strange, ethereal digital reality. The movie, she says, is a love letter to the story’s birthplace: the internet. “Why it was being made was because the internet said it had to be,” says Bravo. “It was this kind of theater event in October of 2015. This audience showed up to it and they clamored and they catapulted it. And that day ended with the period of: This has to be made into a movie. And then it was.” ——— Follow AP Film Writer Jake Coyle
