Brother Number One

Blog

• Nominated for the Human Rights Defender Award

  • Posted 10-05-12
  • Category Director's diary

  Annie and Rob have been nominated for the Human Rights Defender Award being presented on the 12th May 2012 in Auckland. We know everyone nominated is thoroughly deserving so it is an honour to be in their company.

  

• Thanks for having us London

  • Posted 28-03-12
  • Category Director's diary

  Thanks to John Biaggi and Andrea Holley and all the HRW team - great festival!

  We had a fantastic premiere screening at the Curzon in Soho with a big audience of 150+. Quite a lot of ex-pats by the sound of the Q and A. They've also made some lovely posters for each of the films that form a little exhibition at the Curzon.

  

  We sold out at The Ritzy for the last screening. It was great to have Alain Werner, one of the lawyers in the film, able to attend this screening and update us all on the case. Here's the before, during and after:

  

  Lovely for me to meet other filmmakers and I'm staying in a lovely hotel right in historic Kensington, on a 4th floor which once must have been a maid's room.

  

• Exhibition: A reporter’s dangerous guided tour through Democratic Kampuchea

  • Posted 21-03-12
  • Category Director's diary

  Elizabeth Becker was one of only two Western journalists allowed to visit Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge. In 2011 she donated digital copies of the color photographs and recorded interviews she made on the rare 1978 reporting trip to Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge to the Bophana Center in Phnom Penh.

  

  Last month the Bophana Centre held an Exhibition of her work which she attended:

  The open-air gallery was packed. Cambodians lingered over the photographs of the empty city of Phnom Penh under the Khmer Rouge, of Pol Pot and other leaders, of rural scenes, of an empty Angkor Wat and of soldiers preparing for battle on the eastern front. They pulled on headphones to hear the voices of Pol Pot, Ieng Sary and Ieng Thirith on my recorded interviews.

  Surprisingly, I saw Cambodians taking each other’s photographs in front of my large portrait of Pol Pot.  When I asked one young woman why, she answered that she had never seen a photograph of Pol Pot before and that some of the young people questioned whether he existed. I couldn’t have been happier to see my thirty year old photographs and recordings boost interest in discovering the history of that unspeakable time.

  - Excerpt from Elizabeth's guest blog on New Mandala

• 2012: Director's Update

  • Posted 29-02-12
  • Category Director's diary

  Brother Number One is now fully entrenched in the festival circuit – Rob and I made it to Melbourne, and the to IDFA in Amsterdam of course, and then before the jetlag was even over, off he went to Biarritz to FIPA, which required us (at pretty short notice) to produce a French subtitled version as it was in competition. I wrestled with Google Translate and my schoolgirl French until the wonderful Deborah Walker, translator extraordinaire, rescued me. In the meantime, Chakara is doing a Khmer version, which looks beautiful with such graphic text.
  
  I’m off to Adelaide (not Biarritz I know) to AIDC where I’m going to be something called an F4 master, and then Rob and will be off the London for the Human Rights Watch Film Festival (for those in the UK, log onto http://ff.hrw.org/london, showing at the Curzon Soho and the Ritzy Cinema, both of which sound very London-esque and non-multiplex. Has a great lineup of films and I know they work hard to bring filmmakers together so that will be a blast – and it will be great to catch up with John Dewhirst’s family too who will come down from the Lake Districts to the screening.
  
  We have now signed with a distributor too, Cargo Releasing who are supportive and organized . . so many of my summer days have been spent in editing rooms, subtitling and editing down broadcast versions. Just as well we had a lousy summer.
  
  More news too, we have written two study guides, with most of the writing by Amy West, a PhD graduate from the University of Auckland. One is for English and Media Studies, and the other History and Social Studies. Brother Number One does seem to address such a range of issues and we had such a rich bank of archives, it seemed a no-brainer really to try to reach out to schools and universities. Kate Stevenson has been wonderful as always, managing her partners highly successful gaming site and working hard to organize the guides online, contact the teachers and all. Lots of clips online if you click on the website.

  
  And the other big thing is we are going into a theatrical run here in New Zealand, pretty much nationwide we think. Whereas this is no blockbuster perhaps, we think it has widespread appeal and the critics have been uniformly very positive. Our P and A (publicity and advertising) budget is pretty modest, so word of mouth will be important, so any help from you all would be fantastic.

• Report from IDFA

  • Posted 25-11-11
  • Category Director's diary

  Lovely Amsterdam, so different as a city to Auckland. Canals and trams and bicycles and historic buildings, cheese and chocolate.  A different sense of history for sure. IDFA’s signs are everywhere, from its tent, to Docs for Sale and the Forum through to the various cinemas. Rob arrived and the man that ate fried tarantulas in Cambodia headed for the handmade chocolate shop in Amsterdam. Always prepared to sample local delicacies.

  

  I have been incredibly busy with meetings. My strategy right or wrong was to pre-arrange meetings with distributors and sales agents, meet with them, then follow up to see who is interested and what the best “fit” would be. So I plunged jet lag and all, mostly meeting at Docs for Sale, a digitized bank of docs, including BNO – most buyers if they are not attending the pitch forum listening to, and hopefully investing in, new projects are skimming their way through the documentary bank.

  

  Our screenings have gone well: one daytime one, and one tonight at 10.15 pm and then another Saturday at 4.15 which is a good time given the chill in the air.  People here are hugely multi-lingual and the lingua franca is English rather than Dutch, which is convenient and they all pick up on the nuances within the film.  The audiences here are moved as elsewhere and the questions pretty much follow similar lines as they have in New Zealand and in Australia.

  There are strong Kiwi connections here – the volunteer who picked us up has a mother from Palmerston North and Rob and I will be talking on a radio show called English Breakfast, subscribed to by the large Kea community here. The journalist was born in New Zealand to Dutch parents.

  With the film screenings having gone well so far I am now, finally, getting a chance to look at some of the films myself. Making “engaged” creative documentaries may be harder these days as broadcasters head towards popular factual but clearly look at the range and depth of works here, there are still many filmmakers sufficiently passionate and/or crazy to keep it up.

  Here is a video of one of the Q&As:

   

  

• Best Director for Brother Number One’s Annie Goldson

  • Posted 17-11-11
  • Category Director's diary

  University of Auckland Media Release | 17 November 2011

  Professor Annie Goldson from the Department of Film Television and Media Studies has been named Best Director Documentary at the AFTAs, the Aotearoa Film & Television Awards (formerly Qantas).

  The award was for her film Brother Number One, a powerful documentary on the torture and murder of New Zealand yachtie Kerry Hamill by the Khmer Rouge in 1978. The film follows the journey of Kerry’s younger brother, Rob Hamill, who travels to Cambodia to retrace those fateful steps taken by his brother.

  “We worked extremely hard to bring this film to the screen and it is an honour to receive recognition. Rob was a great character to work with and it was such an important story to tell,” Annie says.

  The AFTAs recognise excellence in the New Zealand Film and Television industries and were presented at the Viaduct Events Centre on Saturday 12 November.

  Brother Number One was launched at the New Zealand International Film Festival earlier this year. It was also selected for the Melbourne International Film Festival and will screen at the 24th International Documentary Film Festival in Amsterdam later this month. It is due for a general theatrical release at selected cinemas in March 2012.

  The film involved Masters students from the University’s FTVMS department - graduates Melissa Kent (archivist), Creda Wilson (assistant editor), Kate Stevenson (publicity and outreach), as well as current Masters student and recent Fulbright scholar Ghazaleh Golbakhsh (director’s assistant).

  Annie Goldson is well-known for her powerful films and has been producing and directing award-winning documentaries, docudramas and experimental film and video for 20 years. Her next projects include a documentary for Maori Television titled He Toki Huna; and a docudrama William Mariner and the Port au Prince, an early Pacific contact story based in Tonga. Annie is co-producing and co-directing the film with Rebecca Kelly. William Mariner received funding from the FRDF fund and also from the Screen Producer’s Association after it won Best Pitch for a new film.

  Brother Number One was funded by TV3, NZ on Air, the New Zealand Film Commission with generous support from The University of Auckland Faculty of Arts research fund.

  

• NZIFF has been a blast!

  • Posted 09-09-11
  • Category Director's diary

  The New Zealand Film Festival has been a blast, and now is slowly drawing to a close (with Hamilton, Nelson & New Plymouth still to go). It has been fun traveling with the film, and it strikes me how different our cities are in New Zealand, quite different in feel, geography, character and architecture.

  We managed to get marooned in Dunedin in the snow for an extra couple of days: magical, except we never left the Octagon and in Christchurch I managed to get in some disaster tourism (ferried around by the generous Nick Drake), and experienced my own vigorous aftershock. I also had quite a Wellington experience staying at the fabulous Museum Hotel. I walk in and there is Stephen Fry being interviewed (in town for The Hobbit) in front of the classic wearable arts ensemble – a suit of armour made of used teabags.

  

  Audiences have been really appreciative of the film, and we have some received some heartfelt comments on Facebook. Our joke is that we should have gotten Kleenex as a sponsor. In Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch we opened the film with Cambodian dancers – dressed in their gold and silk, elegant and gracious. Not only did this add greatly to the feel of the film, but meant we also liaised closely with the local community in those cities. Chakara Lim, our associate producer, has been able to draw dancers together seemingly effortlessly up and down New Zealand although I know how hard he works behind the scenes. I think that the dancers really helped to get the word out and draw the Cambodian community to the film.

  

  It is interesting to hear what people say in the Q and A, too. “Did you ever ask the Karma question of Duch?” is asked frequently, and many have asked Rob if he feels his journey, and the film, has helped him. Many thank him for his courage and emotional honesty.

  Next is a short sweet theatrical so let’s hope we are coming to a theatre near you . . . more on that very soon!

  - Annie

• Vann Nath

  • Posted 06-09-11
  • Category Rob's journey

  I write with great sadness  to tell you that Cambodian painter and S21 (Toul Sleng prison) survivor Mr Vann Nath died yesterday 5.9.11 aged 65.
  
  Vann Nath is best known for his paintings depicting graphic scenes of torture and dehumanization that went on within the walls of S21.  He also did two paintings for me.  The first, on my request, was of a photo of my brother Kerry and his girlfriend Gail on board Foxy Lady.  The second very poignant painting was produced on Nath’s insistence.  It is an image of how he remembers seeing my brother being escorted into the prison by a young guard.

  

  'People died one after another, and at about 10 to 11 pm the corpse would be removed, and we ate our meal next to the dead body and we did not care anyway because we were like animals,' he said. 'I lost my dignity.'
  
  Mr Vann Nath was the first witness to take the stand in the trial of Duch.  He told the court that he wanted 'something that is intangible: that is justice for those that already died.'
  
  'I hope that by the end of the tribunal that justice can be tangible, can be seen by everybody,' he said.
  
  Vann Nath had a unique way of dealing with the past horrors.  In the few meetings I had with him he resonated calmness and dignity.  Even when discussing the terrible treatment he experienced he did not openly display his anger.  Vann Nath’s character is beautifully captured in probably the most poignant moment in Brother Number One.

  My thoughts are the Vann family and the remaining known survivors of S21, Mr Chum May, Mr Bou Meng and Mr Norn Chanphal.

  - Rob Hamill

• Brother Number One launch in Auckland and Melbourne

  • Posted 31-07-11
  • Category Director's diary

  So Brother Number One is finally completed and launched which has involved moments of apprehension, relief and excitement.
  
  I often think of documentary filmmaking as sculpture. After months of chipping away at hard rock (230 +hours of footage) an amorphous lumpy shape emerges. This is then honed and polished and honed again and begins to look like a film. The process, though it has its pleasures, is simultaneously nerve-wracking and tedious; you don’t know if you even have a film until the shape emerges and it just takes such a long time, endless hours, to discover it. Then everything accelerates all of a sudden, small changes make heaps of difference, and you, or you and your editor, having worked in relatively solitary fashion, are now joined, budget permitting, by a wave of fresh creativity - musicians, composers, graphic designers, colour graders, sound designers and mixers, online editors and so on.
  
  Towards the end of the film, the relationship of filmmaker to subject also shifts and becomes central to the process again, as it had been in production. I usually keep subjects away from the editing room until the assemble edit is semi-coherent, as it takes considerable experience and effort to sit through 4+ hours of rough sequences. But once it is at about say two and a half, I bring the subject in and discussions begin. I am always clear that editorial responsibility has to lie with the director as there needs to be a single shaping vision. But then I welcome comment and critique and am always prepared to discuss any issues and problems. Rob has been fantastic, making thoughtful and useful suggestions that we incorporate while at the same time, after some fairly vigorous debates, accepting scenes that James Brown, the editor and I, were reluctant to change.
  
  

  Premiere Screening -- Auckland from BNO Team on Vimeo.

  
  
  For once, I finished the film well in time, two weeks before its premiere screening at the New Zealand International Film Festival in Auckland. We had gotten very strong reviews so ticket sales were great, in fact, our premiere was sold out – 800 seats filled and the follow up screening on the less premium time of 3.30 on a weekday afternoon also sold well. The film has an interesting composite of niche audiences: there is a general audience of course, but there are also those from the rowing community, the Cambodian community which is Auckland is sizable, people interested in human rights issues, those from the anti-Vietnam activist days, backpackers and Kiwi travellers who have visited Cambodia, Buddhists, and a range of students interested in Asia studies, history, and so on.
  
  We decided to introduce the film with some performances, so Chakara Lim got busy corralling dancers. They were brilliant and for them, it was a great opportunity too, as performing at Sky City which has a good stage in front of a full house extended their reach beyond the community venues they are more used to performing. We surprised everyone by starting with hip-hop crew Infamous Noodles, five lovely boys who donned the “universal” garb of the dance, managed the athletic moves and finished with that lovely Cambodian gesture of hands in prayer. Then five women, performing a local variant of the Cambodian classical ballet, a Wishing Dance – poignant given that this dance, so loved and admired by the French colonials, was stamped out by the Khmer Rouge for its “decadence”. Then a Peacock Dance, a highly costumed “mating ritual” type of performance with a single pair of dancers circled each other balancing their shimmering green tails.
  
  So a great launch and a warm response.
  
  Then was off to Melbourne, which was also a wonderful screening, our “international premiere”. It is such a great and bustling city: whereas Auckland is really a series of villages and the “action” in often in the suburbs, Melbourne is hugely lively with fabulous restaurants reflecting its cultural mix.
  
  Rob, and Rachel his wife and I arrived together and met Gail Colley, who had been Kerry’s girlfriend at the time of his capture. She is an important presence in the film, but had yet to see it, so I was apprehensive about how she may be affected. We were whisked off to a festival dinner which are always fun. Lots of international filmmakers always – an English funder, a Korean short filmmaker and a relatively “big-name” indie American director sitting with me. The meals are always something of a relay race, as filmmakers and their handlers are taken off for introductions, raced back for a meal, then off again for a Q and A. The restaurants learn what to do, ie constant stream of small tapas type platters as no one ever has time to eat a proper meal.
  
  Rob and I spent the whole of Friday doing interviews – the media again were very responsive and I was impressed with the degree of homework they had done. Live radio on the ABC’s flagship show first, which is always slightly nerve-wracking, then a series of smaller stations, magazines and the Melbourne Age. Rob has found he has had several “breakthroughs” this trip, for example, being able to express aspects of his story without being overcome emotionally. He is not sure what this means, but thinks it represents some progress in the grieving process not towards “closure”, that word that doesn’t make much sense to me, but perhaps in the direction of making memory and the past more bearable to contemplate.
  
  Again, there was pretty much a sold-out audience at the Greater Union 6, a bustling multiplex and again, a very warm and responsive audience. We had pondered whether Australians would understand some of the New Zealand references for example in Kerry’s “confession” – everyone laughed, painfully, at his suggestion that Colonel Sanders had been his CIA instructor, but the suggestion that the CIA had offices in Whangarei, Auckland, Wellington, Blenheim, Wanganui, Whakatane, Gisbourne, Taupo and Westport (which is so tiny) also caused some amusement. The sense of his courage and desire to communicate beyond that dark hole seemed to make sense still. Remarkable document.
  
  We travel to Wellington next for another leg of the New Zealand Film Festival, so will report on that trip soon. Meanwhile submissions to the international festivals continue with some positive signs emerging here and there.

  
  - Annie

  ---

• The finishing touches at Park Road Post

  • Posted 22-06-11
  • Category Rob's journey

  A message from Rob sent from the coalface at Park Road Post:

  
  

   

  21 June 2011:
  So Peter Jackson (we fondly refer to him as PJ) didn't front today but sent his apologies and love (well, I'm sure he would have had he know we were there!) What an amazing facility. Spent the day going over the sound edit, making sure music not over powering voice overs, narrations etc. The film looks amazing on the big screen and sounds terrific in the theartre setting. Annie Goldson and Peter Gilbert doing great work.

   

  

   

  22 June 2011:
  Back at the coal face at Park Road Post (PJ sure to make an appearance anytime soon) and currently watching on film Meas Muth, the former chief of the Khmer Rouge navy. He's the man who had the power to release my brother immediately following his capture. Seeing this man on the screen makes my blood boil.

   

  

 1 2 3 >  Last ›