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...

In the morning all was well. After the workgroup with Tom, Cathy and Julija headed to BG1 to edit our fiction film. Leyla, Pien and I took on a path to Cafe de Jaren to brainstorm ideas for our second documentary. We drank coffee and came up with the idea of documenting the Little Plant Pantry. Happy with our finding, we started doing research for both documentary ideas. Suddenly we started receiving ominous messages from Julija and Cathy. Editing was not going well. We finished our sandwiches and hurried to BG1 to look into the difficult situation.  We talked it through, and will just have to work on the fiction film for a bit longer than expected. Bad news - but nothing we could not handle.  -Rosa

So far so good! During weeks 5 and 6 of the film practices course we have rehearsed scenes, practiced lines and done most (if not all) of the shooting in different parts of the city of Amsterdam. It has been an interesting process with a lot of disagreements, but also moments of common happiness with what we have gotten done so far. Through our mistakes we've had some great learning opportunities. Our recent lessons include the importance of keeping up with the  schedule and being well prepared with props before each shoot. Personally, it has been a new challenge to act in front of a camera. Many times I was told to do less, which is not always easy whilst most of my experience is from very dramatic theater productions.our -Rosa 

Today we met at 9 to start rehearsing our scenes.  The first scene we rehearsed was our bathroom scene. In this scene we see liz who is suffering from anorexia, getting out of the toilet, while she just puked. Her best friend Jess is outside the bathroom and hears some weird noise coming out of the toilet.  We filmed this scene in the bathroom by BG1. We filmed it from two sides, so we could see which side would provide us with better lightning. In this scene, we have a master shot and a close up, of the two talking. The rehearsing went fine, and we were very pleased with the lighting. The sound went okay too, however we wil probably record the sound of her puking outside the scene.  The second scene we rehearsed, was in the building were the cafe prisma is located. In this scene Jess gets confronted by bullies. For this scene we decided when watching everything back, that we might want to change the shot.  First we were thinking of shooting this scene from ...

Week 3. We are still working on the concept of our film, which has to be finished this week. We know where we want to take the story, but it's hard to get the details right and make final decisions on where we want to take the script. This made for some heavy discussions in the crew, but all with good intentions as we want to make the best script we can. On Monday we had an easy morning and started with presenting our findings of the analysis we did on the style of Andrea Arnold's films Fish Tank and Red Road . Here, we discussed elements like cinematography, sound and setting. The analysis helped us get a clearer vision on where we had to take our own film as being inspired by Andrea Arnold. After class, we headed to what's starting to look like our signature working spot: Prisma, next to Oudemanhuispoort. We ordered a bunch of coffees and snacks to beat the Monday Blues and got to work. This is where things started to get a little messy. We had some major disagreements...

Hello everyone! How are you? Have you missed us? No? Well, what a bummer, we will have to speak to the wall again...  Oh wait, are we hearing something? Some tiny excitement-filled cheers? Are that you lovely readers? So what can we say, we're simple people, you give us a bit of attention and we will share with you all our life story as if we're fourteen years old kids who first time in their lives had vodka&orange juice... Probably right now all of you are getting crazy flashbacks of your teenage years... So here is a photo as a reminder that a drink containing juice, does not necessarily mean a healthy drink. Why we are talking about this? You probably came not for this but wait a second. We just want to remind you that even we're with professional filming equipment it doesn't say that we're good with it. Oh boy, this just made us feel and act like teenagers again, just this time... filming equipment replaced good old vodka with orange juice. Vide...

Matchstick Women and Man A man impatiently enters a budget drugstore. He cuts in line and demands pills that his shrink gave him. Without those pills he wouldn’t last until next week. After a brief struggle, the apothecary asks for the package, but in the end the seemingly important pills are nothing but ordinary vitamin pills.  A good start for the second year at Media and Culture, don’t you think? In our first seminar of the year our group got the assignment to make our own version of the scene from Matchstick Man (2003) we just described. During a brainstorm session all kinds of ideas came up. The theme of making someone believe that he or she needs something or someone, seems the most interesting theme from the scene. We all agreed that this theme would take place in a dystopian setting. This could take shape in the form of a placebo or the indoctrination of a group of people. One of the ideas that we had was of a diegetic commercial. The commercial t...