Matchstick Women and Man

Electronic Press Kit

This Monday the press junket group went to see the films Private History ( Gábor Bódy, Péter Timár, 1978)  and The Danube Exodus ( Péter Forgács, 1998)  at IDFA at Pathé Munt. We saw the two films that were created from a lot of archival film material. Our focus was on the latter one and its director Forgács. Private history, that Forgás got his inspiration from, was politically charged but the message was hidden behind the surface: on the surface there was "microhistory" that did not seem to make a general coherent storyline. We saw archival footage edited together with music that sometimes was a pain for the ears. There was footage of Hitler and nazism implemented in the film, but only for a fleeting moment. The Danube exodus had a more prominent line of action. It conveyed the story of jews escaping from a gruesome future when Nazi Germany took over Central Europe. The story told about a captain of a two boats who sailed long distances and experienced difficult times w

This week it was time for the second filming day. The crew went to the place of Wouter, which is located in the west of Amsterdam and started to prepare for the makeup scene, where Wouter would do his entire makeup and put on a wig to show his drag persona. Rosa was ill, so Julija had to step in to do sound. Leyla decided not to do the poetic shots because it did not feel natural. First we started filming additional b roll, as we knew this was very important. Then we set up the camera for the make up scene. We decided to film this 'scene' from various angles. This took approximately 2 hours. It took a while because Wouter is not yet very experienced in putting on make up. When we finished the make up scene we went to dam square. Here we filmed at a place where Wouter has taken pictures of the most famous drag queen in Amsterdam. This was our final day of filming. The rest of this week was all about preparation for the press junket. Julija and Jürgen did research on the

Week 11 consisted of research of Wouter's work so far and preparing call sheets and plans for filming. We knew that we'd have a very limited time for filming, since Wouter would only be available for filming for two days since he has a very busy schedule with his school. The group decided which locations could be done on which days and we contacted Wouter to make sure of the schedule. The fourteenth of November was our first filming day. Pien, Leyla and I began by getting the equipment and carrying them to Wouter's house near Nieuw West. We received a warm welcome by him and filmed him doing ordinary things at his own little apartment. He presented us the pictures he had taken for his art project about abused drag queens and talked about himself and his childhood connecting to the present day. We filmed b-roll and for example took shots of different objects at his house, the surroundings (a beautiful view from the high floor he lives in) and of him walking outside. We all

This week we had a long interview with Wouter. The whole group met him for the first time (and acknowledged that he is a lovely person). We had a few issues with setting up the equipment, but otherwise everything went great; Wouter shared his story very freely. Something the group learned was that active listening should not be done during recording, as later a lot of the audio was deemed insufficient for the film due to the "yeah"s from us. However, we got a good bunch of nice material for the film during the interview, but did not necessarily learn anything new that was not mentioned before in the earlier interview. Personally during the time of the interview I wished that we would have stuck to the questions prepared beforehand, but in the end the interview flow was really nice and we had a nice time. Other things we did during the week were beginning to think about the press junket and practise our editing style. 

This week we interviewed a French backpacker near BG1. We first tried to interview a person from the boat company near school, but the only person who would've otherwise been willing to be interviewed had a terrible rash and told us that most groups try to interview them every single year. Understandable that most of them were utterly tired of this. We continued carrying the equipment around, and only after a few minutes of walking Pien spotted an interesting looking young man. He agreed to be interviewed and even waited for the longest time while we were hunting down an audio cable (that we had with us the entire time). We then asked him some questions that he answered despite being really insecure about his English. He told us that he had walked all the way from rural France to Amsterdam and was going to continue his travels until he would arrive in Norway. He told that he was doing this to take a break in his studies. It was interesting filming him, but at the same time we wis