INTERVIEWS AND FEATURES

MOFFOM Forum 2005

At the 2005 edition of the festival, MOFFOM hosted the inaugural edition of its Documentary Forum, which is expected to become an ongoing part of the festival program dedicated to the exchange of ideas between documentary filmmakers in the form of moderated discussions open to the public. The theme of the first Forum was the so-called "Buena Vista Effect" - the nature of the growing cooperation between filmmakers and the music business within the World Music community. The panelists included both documentary filmmakers and representatives of various media.

John Caulkins (Founder and President, MOFFOM): Hello, welcome. Good afternoon. I'd like to thank everyone for coming to today's panel, which includes our guests and will be moderated by Keith Jones, our film programming director.

Keith Jones (Program Director, MOFFOM): Thank you, John. Actually the idea to put together this forum, which will consist of filmmakers, producers and journalists connected with the festival, came from John. He thought that since we had so many guests at the festival this year that it made sense to fins some space in which all of us could sit and talk about some of the issues that unite what we are doing with the film festival, documentary film culture generally, and the music industry. Very loosely this has been put together under the title "The Buena Vista Effect" which is a short hand phrase that John started using months ago, and by the time the catalog went to print we still hadn't come up with anything better...but what I really want to speak about, with the guests who I will introduce in a minute, is the evolution of the cooperation between documentary film and television with the music business. This of course raises the chance and amount of fundraising possibilities, and really opens a lot of doors for the type of films that many of us are engaged in making. At the same time it can also be a very strict and severe limitation for the way the film is marketed - there is a danger of the film becoming a slave to its soundtrack, and of other pitfalls. Briefly, I am the director of film programming for MOFFOM, but I am also a documentary filmmaker and am currently making a film in South Africa, "Taking Back the Stable", which is also a music-driven documentary. It is a straightforward cinematic documentary following established characters and so on, but the selling point, what allowed us to raise the capital to start making the film, was the fact that celebrity musicians are in it, and it sort of can be marketed through their personalities, especially in Africa. So this is something that I'm dealing with in my own personal career.

I'd like to introduce the guests, though. First of all, Steven Lawrence, who is one of the founders and directors of Link TV. Some of you were present at the screening recently of music videos that Link TV has been kind enough to assemble for the festival. We are very happy to have entered the second year of this cooperation and are happy to welcome Steve and Michal Shapiro from Link TV as special guests. Next, Banning Eyre, guitarist, journalist, music scholar and filmmaker, whose film done in cooperation with Link TV, "Festival in the Desert: the Tent Sessions" will be screened later on in the festival. You may have also heard Banning on the BBC this morning, as he had a wonderful program on the World Service dealing with the introduction of the guitar to Africa. Hopefully Banning will be playing some regional African styles on the guitar tomorrow, but we'll have to see how his hand holds up. Petr Doruzka is more of a local guest...I wanted to not have just a bunch of Americans, especially a bunch of white male Americans sitting in one row, which is how this type of forum always ends up. So I wanted to include more European guests. Unfortunately, Hanno Hofer is ill and cannot join us, as he should have provided another sort of regional balance. But we are very happy to have Petr here as one of the leading world music journalists in Europe and especially in the Czech Republic. Last but not least, this character on the end is Tom Pryor, the managing editor of Global Rhythm magazine, based out of New York and another leading figure on the world music scene. All of us are working together in some way, but we all have our own projects independently of that.

First of all, to kind of contextualize this and put us in some kind of forward momentum, right at the beginning, I will ask Tom Pryor to sort of sum of this type of film and its relationship to the music industry. Thanks, Tom.

Tom Pryor (Managing Editor, Global Rhythm): My pleasure. When I hear the term "Buena Vista" as a phenomenon, my take on that has to do with the marketing more than the actual records, because when the Buena Vista record came out in 1998, to be followed by the film, it changed the standard for world music marketing. Everyone is looking for the next Buena Vista hit, to the extent that they overlook other things, or they look for something like that to subsidize other projects. It often deforms the marketing side of it...but in terms of film market, I'm not the one to be speaking about it, as I'm not a filmmaker. Steve?

Steve Lawrence (documentary filmmaker and co-founder of Link TV): I can only speak as an American filmmaker, and I'm most familiar with the American market, which is quite different than it is in say England or France, or other European countries, where there is much greater support for documentary filmmakers. It's very difficult in the United States, where everybody's trying to get some piece of a very small pie in terms of financing. When it comes to music films, the piece is even smaller than you might expect. In the marketplace, documentaries and music films have traditionally not done very well. It's one of those preconceptions I was remarking on just the other day. Going back fifteen years or so, there was a film about U2, who were incredibly popular at the time. It wasn't a great film, but it should have done very well at the box office. I think there is a history of music films failing at the box office, and I think generally that's because the phenomenon has to do with paying attention to the celebrity of the moment, or what's hot. In the case of Buena Vista Social Club, it happened to be a group of elderly artists from Cuba who had a wonderful story to tell. I don't think "Buena Vista Social Club" as a documentary film is a masterpiece, not by any means. The emotion, and the music, and the story of Ry Cooder finding those musicians and bringing them out of retirement, and helping them to this world platform was so heartwarming, so engaging, and so romantic, that it was a success in the marketplace. But I think the actual success of the film

Banning Eyre (director, "Festival in the Desert the Tent Sessions"): ...was in the marketing...

Steve Lawrence: Right. And I can't think of another case of this happening. When talking about the "Buena Vista Effect" you are in fact talking about an anomaly particularly in the American marketplace and how that has impacted the music industry is something that Tom and Banning can talk about in particular because something that we are concerned with trying to present world music in the United States always have this shadow of Buena Vista hanging over our because everybody says maybe this group maybe this album will be the next Buena Vista.

Tom Pryor: I think it sort of set off a phantom expectation that a lot of our people our labels are looking to meet them. You know, it's this false expectation that people have that they are going to hit that big score again.

Steve Lawrence: I had some direct experience with this particular phenomenon many years ago I produced a film called "The Long Way Home," which was about a Russian legendary musician whose name was Boris Grebenshikov who had a famous group called Aquarium, which was this great underground Soviet rock band, and we made a feature-length film for Grenada TV that was virtually financed by Boris's US record label, which was taking a chance on him doing a crossover album. It's a beautiful film. It's directed by Michael Apted and it tells the story of Boris leaving the Soviet Union for the first time and trying to make an album in the West with all kind of bumps along the way, really practically destroying his own band and alienating his own audience in Russia. And actually it's a very bittersweet odyssey, it's a beautiful documentary but it was considered disappointing. The documentary itself wasn't disappointing but it didn't get played because the album only sold 100,000 copies, 100,000 units. Now for a world artist that's extraordinary but Boris was being marketed as a rock artist, as a crossover artist, so there was all this pressure. So this artist and his album were altogether considered a failure when in fact it was simply an experiment, and musically it was not a particularly successful experiment. So anytime there is this marketing pressure where a record label is investing a lot of money or a TV network is investing a lot of money, they are looking to the market place for a significant payoff. They may be investing three or four hundred thousand dollars on the film and two hundred thousand in the production of that album alone, and if they don't make that back, not only does it affect the marketplace but it affects the attitudes of the record label executives, network executives, anybody whose involved in the total picture here. And it builds up this wall, this idea that you shouldn't invest in these things because they won't make you any money. Money has nothing to do with art but in the case of albums and films it's partially what drives them.

Banning Eyre: I would just like to say that just to give a little perspective on how big of a success and how much of an anomaly Buena Vista Social Club was. You just said that 100,000 was a good number. That's a very good number for a World Music group at least. There are many world music groups that are happy to sell ten thousand. 25, 000 would be very good, very respectable. 100,000 is almost unheard of, meaning you have to go to the level of Youssou N'Dour, one of the greatest African singers, somebody universally recognized as one of the most successful in the world, to get up to those kind of numbers. "Buena Vista Social Club" the album, I think the last time I checked had sold somewhere in the neighborhood of five million. So if you think of five million as opposed to 100,000 then you get an idea of just the size of the shadow it casts. You know, ever since I've been involved with World Music I've sensed that there are these very, very different universes that are trying to communicate. You know in the beginning, before Buena Vista Social Club, the big thing with Africa was that everyone was looking for the next Bob Marley, for whom we're still looking! But in terms of the penetration of celebrity and their artistic power, I think that the whole phenomenon of documentary film and World Music is one that will stay with us even if we don't get to the next Bob Marley or the new Buena Vista, and I think the reason is that it addresses the biggest fundamental problem with marketing music from one culture in another culture, which is a problem of meeting. Most of the time you are dealing with music that you don't understand the lyrics of, let alone the cultures - let alone the histories. And so often, what makes people pay attention to a singer from Africa or the Middle East or wherever it might be, is the story. And if you don't have a story, it's really difficult to kind of make people take that initial leap to just pay attention. I mean the sound itself is very beautiful and people who are really attuned to that, music just in terms of beauty, people like jazz listeners, those are the kind of people who turn on to a foreign sound because they are struck by the beauty of it. That just isn't going to sell you 100,000 records most of the time. To get that you have to have a story and it has to be a compelling story, it has to be well told story. It has to be a story that comes across in the music just intuitively once you are looking for it, and Buena Vista accomplished that in an amazing way. I mean I agree with what Steve said. It's not a masterpiece of a film, but somehow it had this combination of having the right story at the right time, and the music conveyed the character of the story and the sense of history, which was very nostalgic, very powerful. Honestly, for people from a huge variety of backgrounds, because that five million reflects sales all over the world, not just Europe and the US. So I think that really is of course the attraction, and the great challenge to filmmakers is that the stories are that wonderful. You know, when I first started going to Africa to do work for the radio service, AfroPop Worldwide, I was already very interested in music, but it was meeting the people, seeing what they live on, getting a sense of what their lives were... all that in particular is the thing that really hooks you. It's the thing that really hooked me to work with it all these years, and I think that's what really hooks the film audience. And that is something that film is uniquely qualified to deliver to people, without them having to buy plane tickets. So I think that even if we don't get to the next Buena Vista, this relationship will continue to thrive with us forever and that's a good thing.

Petr Doruzka (music journalist and radio host): I am very much with you. I think it's the story. Every time I think about Buena Vista, for me that is a long-term process. You have a label at the beginning which specializes in music which is not very well known, artists almost unknown in the rest of the world outside Cuba. And then they are what I would call an "endangered musical species." Then after ten years, you have a best-selling album and you have a film that amplifies that situation but if we ask, "Is this the only example?" I think you find many other responses. And now I shall not talk only about documentaries, but about European music in general, about the music of the Balkan Gypsies. Fifteen years ago that was quite unknown in Western Europe and the rest of the world. But then you had the borders open up, and also you had the Yugoslavian wars and from that period came a film by Emir Kusturica that helped to promote Gypsy music all around the world. And that was "Underground".

Keith Jones: This is actually again something which is sort of a bi-cultural distinction, which was already pointed out. In Europe the success of "Underground" and Kusturica pushing that sort of Balkan music has been enormous and in fact in almost every city in Europe, not only in Western Europe, but all through Central Europe you find local bands who are heavily influenced by that style and playing that sort of music, which is totally removed from their own culture. Its influence in Europe cannot be overestimated. What Petr is saying is absolutely true, but I'm not surprised by Banning's reaction either, as that film was not marketed that way in the United States. It followed a very different sort of path. It was just an arthouse, marginal film there, marketed under Kusturica's name, rather than as part of this musical direction.

Michal Shapiro (Music Programming Director, Link TV): "Underground" has a cult following, but maybe not a large one.

Keith Jones: A cult following is something very different than this kind of massive response. In Europe its a completely mainstream phenomenon, anyone in the audience can comment on this as well. But it really broke out of the ghetto in a very similar way as the Buena Vista thing.

Michal Shapiro: I would just like to add something to the discussion, just because I've been thinking about what you've all been speaking about means. When I was listening to you speak the film that I kept thinking about was "O Brother Where Art Thou." To me this was a very interesting film, which did almost the same thing as the Buena Vista Social Club did, but for rural American music, which is no longer a mainstream phenomenon in the United States. We had the Coen Brothers make a film and they used that music, but it wasn't a documentary. It wasn't even about rural American music, but they used this as the leitmotif of what they were saying. I walked into an art supply store and there was a kid with a pierced everything and spiky hair listening to Ralph Stanley. This blew me away because I listen to Ralph Stanley, and of course I listen to Ralph Stanley! He's the greatest, but I said "Oh, my God! You're listening to 'Oh Death' - what is that?" And he said, "Oh, that's from O Brother Where Art Thou." I don't know what the sales figures are for that, but this re-enforces my feeling that marketing of music and marketing of film is I think... the filmmaker is music's best friend at this point, much more so than the music industry, because the filmmakers can make decisions about what their film is going to sound like, and since there is a mechanism in place for marketing the soundtracks, I think this is a very important thing to bring in. I don't think that you can force it. I don't think that it's the kind of thing that you can make happen, but it's serendipitous, just the way Buena Vista was.

Steve Lawrence: There's a phenomenon now which I just want to bounce quickly off of what Michal said. There's a film out in the US right now by Jim Jarmusch, who some of you may know, is a feature filmmaker, but more of a cult figure than a huge seller. The soundtrack to that film is completely Ethiopian jazz from the Sixties, or ninety percent of it is, anyway. That's really the theme for the Bill Murray character. Every time he takes off on the road to try to find these women...anyway, the point is this is exactly a case where the filmmaker's taste, the director's taste in music and interest in promoting it, can have a very large impact on the marketplace. Whereas the pure documentary, whether its an ethnographic documentary or not - and we show many of these documentaries on Link TV, where we try to show the best music documentaries we can possibly find, beautiful films that tell wonderful stories and introduce our audience to amazing music - will never have the same impact in the marketplace as a feature filmmaker embracing something, whether its Balkan Gypsy music or Ethiopian jazz. It's just not going to have the same impact.

Tom Pryor: I'm so glad you brought up "O Brother Where Art Thou" because there is such a linkage to make between that and what happened with "Buena Vista Social Club". I'm sure that in the roots Americana world, or in the folk world, there are probably conferences going on right now about the exact same topic, talking about how "O Brother Where Art Thou" raised odd expectations for their work.

Michal Shapiro: But it's never played on the radio!

Tom Pryor: Well, this is true. Apart from NPR and so on...but like Buena Vista it scanned into the Billboard Top 100, and that's pretty remarkable for music like this. I think it even cracked the Top twenty, but I'm not entirely sure. Still, I'd like to move beyond these kinds of big marquee films and talk about all the great stuff that's been done since then as a result. Steve was mentioning documentary films that tell wonderful stories, and even back stories that get people into these films, and then get them into the music. These may not get the play that Buena Vista did, but they're out there, and some of them are here at MOFFOM. "Milagro de Candeal" by Fernando Trueba is a film that's fantastic, and there are hundreds of these. "Genghis Blues" is another one I was thinking of. You know, he died recently, Paul Pena, only last week.

Banning Eyre: Well, "Genghis Blues" is a really unusual film, made by two first-time filmmakers, two brothers who you could say were out of their league. It's about a blind blues musician from San Francisco, of Cape Verdean background, who had this fascination with the radio. He tuned into short-wave radio and he heard one time Tuvan throat singing from this remote part of Central Asia, which we world music fans are familiar with from groups like Huun-Huur-Tu and others. He became fascinated with it and he recorded it off of short-wave radio broadcasts and learned how to do it, just intuitively, and then there was this moment a throat singer came to perform in San Francisco and Pena walked into a lobby where this guy was sort of receiving his audience, and he started doing it! And this created a sort of sensation, and a friendship with this artist ensued, and he was invited to Tuva to go and perform there, and the filmmakers went with him. And it's a story that's full of all kinds of unusual twists and turns, with a lot of complexities with this guy being able to travel at all, as he had health issues aside from being blind. So many things happened, and it has this whole "gonzo journalism" about it because its so outrageous, both the crew that goes and where they're going. Then he wins this contest, because he's so good at it, something you could never have planned. What I love about that movie, which for me is a much more satisfying film than "Buena Vista Social Club", is that it has so many elements of surprise in it. With "Buena Vista Social Club" they already knew exactly what they were going to find, and its done by the numbers - the story is all out there and they just sort of execute this plan. But you feel like you are in on this amazing adventure when you watch "Genghis Blues".

Ruhi Hamid (director, "Rock Star and the Mullahs"): Ultimately, the filmmaker is the best friend of the musician, as long as the filmmaker stays true to the story of that person and their narrative. I think filmmakers have to treat whichever documentary they make as a documentary. That means good characters and strong narratives. If you've got that, you can make a successful film. Moreover, in the UK we have the good fortune of having a strong documentary and television tradition. We have BBC 4, we now have More 4, which is a new digital channel. However, these kinds of films don't necessarily make it into cinemas. In England, "Underground" also was for a cult following, and it wasn't widely watched by a general audience that goes to the cinema. Whereas "Buena Vista Social Club" was, because it had the names of Wim Wenders and Ry Cooder behind it, and so that attracted an audience that went beyond the music. And as you said, that wasn't much of a good story - they go there, they find what they expect. Whereas "Genghis Blues" has a whole journey to it, tells you something about the land, the culture, the politics, the people, which is what I would say is the recipe for a successful film, whether a music documentary, or any documentary about a native culture.

Keith Jones: I couldn't agree more with Ruhi's comment. The character should drive any good documentary. That's of course the backbone of what the entire process should be about. What I've noticed in my project, and we go out of our way to stress this to people when we pitch the story, or talk with CEs, is that it's based on this main central character who has his own dramatic narrative within the bigger story we're trying to tell, which is of the history of this theater. We often get feedback from people who are already trying to connect it to the marketing of the music, and ask us these sort of questions like "Can you bring in both young and old musicians and get them to play together?" not thinking about how the scene might work in the film, but how it might possibly raise more interest in the music, which can then be used as a marketing device. In particular I've seen this happen in South Africa.

Romi Kaplan (director, "Meadowlands to Holyland"): I would also like to add something to Ruhi's comment. If you're not connected to these big networks for marketing distribution, and your interest isn't necessarily in pursuing some long-term wealth or fame, but in following a creative example, something like what Banning was talking about, I was wondering instead of selling one's soul and trying to follow this US model, whether the Internet offers possibilities for the diffusion of different stories and music. That way you don't have to follow one trend, you can still produce and market your own film without following that model. How to people who work in the industry view the Internet in terms of opening up marketing possibilities for the artist?

Tom Pryor: Well, I know in terms of music, that's obviously fantastic, in terms of direct downloads and the artist being paid. There's a great service out there called Calabash Music, which has really been working hard on fair trade music downloading for a lot of World Music sort of artists.

Banning Eyre: They're now moving into video as well.

Tom Pryor: That's true. And there's another route which is widely used, and that is going straight to DVD. In fact, one of the best films I've seen this year is a documentary about dance music entitled "Maestro", directed by this young film director, Jose Ramos. It's a documentary history of the roots of what became dance music in New York, sort of gay disco music, club music, really getting into the roots of the scene. It's a phenomenal documentary, but it only played at one or two festivals and then went straight to DVD, and he was very happy to do it that way. He feels he can still recoup his money that way and not have to worry about anything else. As far as the Internet goes, the platforms are there but I think they still need to be built upon, and need the wider adoption of high-speed connections by general consumers before that becomes a reality. But that's coming, and very soon.

John Caulkins (founder and president, MOFFOM): Could I just bring up, in relation to the home video market, one of the types of films we don't show at MOFFOM, the performance film. This is something that really drives the market in a big way, along with compilations of videos. How would all of you comment on that?

Keith Jones: While it's true that within MOFFOM we conscientiously don't show performance films, there is also evolving this kind of hybrid DVD, something between what used to be straightforward artist-based DVDs, which had some kind of really vague pseudo-structure added to them. Something falling between that and a proper documentary that could work in a cinema actually do have a chance to reach a film audience. For example, "Rachid Taha in Mexico" is maybe a half-decent film, but since it's only included as some kind of DVD bonus, it's impossible to take it seriously as a documentary. It's juts not presented in that way. In particular, and maybe even a better example, a film we may even consider for next year, is this Baaba Maal DVD. That's really an incredible documentary, but again, is just buried inside this packaging with a CD, a home market sort of thing. A final example would be Larry Weinstein, one of our main guests here at the festival, who was telling me just the other day that his film on Joaquin Rodrigo, the Spanish composer, which is a beautiful film, very elegantly done, a very sensitive portrait of Rodrigo at the age of ninety, a gorgeous film - this film is absolutely unavailable in any other form than to buy a CD from Decca Records of Joaquin Rodrigo's "Concierto de Aranjuez". Then, if you look carefully, there's a DVD hidden inside, underneath. It's not even credited properly on the box. So this is the fate of some of these films, even very good ones.

Michal Shapiro: I wanted to refer back, just as a footnote, to the discussion about the Internet. Platforms for artist distribution are expanding dramatically. At Link TV, we've been discussing this for months now. One of the things that is clear to us is that the industry is still grappling with this massive expansion, and we're sort of in flux right now. They are still trying to unravel what are the legal issues within this type of dissemination. So I think that yes, the potential is there, but I think it's really a wait and see issue, since the legalities have really not been worked out.

Steve Lawrence: I have a similar feeling about new technology, and about the relationships between artists and record labels. The technology is changing very quickly, and there are new high-speed delivery technologies. One of them is BitTorrent, which is a peer-to-peer form of transmitting video where the more people you have sharing a particular download, the faster it flies around. That allows you to take down a film in a very short time. But it doesn't matter to a certain extent unless people want to see what you've made - whether as a musician or as a filmmaker. So the key to it all, irregardless, is still the marketing, and that remains the greatest challenge. It's a wonderful thing if a record label will get involved in a film, and help a musician or a group to get a film made. Too often th efilm will get buried in a CD, as part of an add-on to a package. There's a wonderful little film that we play often on the channel called "Ostinato" about Bela Fleck and his collaboration with Edgar Meyer. It was directed by Bela Fleck's brother, Sasha Paladino, and it wasn't really available for general release. We had to go after Sony to get it, and it took us about six months to be able to show it on the channel, because they just had no idea how to offer it for television. Their idea was to just put it out as part of a CD and forget about it. But it was a wonderful little film, and Sasha has followed that one up with another film he made about Bela going to Africa to explore the African roots of the banjo.

Banning Eyre: That one's not made yet, but it's in the process.

Steve Lawrence: The record label again. They will put a certain amount into making the film, but they won't put up the money for post-production. Meanwhile the filmmakers channel all their energy into trying to finish it, and then Sony will have the right to put it out as part of a CD. So these hybrid CD-DVDs will be prominent in the marketplace, there's no doubt about that, but the problem is that the record industry view them purely as a promotional tool. They don't necessarily respect the rights of the filmmaker, or the instincts of the filmmaker, to tell a story, and the narrative may require that a film be shot of many months, and sometimes even years, to find all the beats of the story. Record labels are rarely going to support that kind of effort, so in the end, so much of this has to be done from the basis of independence, the passion of the filmmaker and the commitment of the musicians, and the determination to get it out. And then we have to look at alternative mechanisms, whether through a channel like Link TV, where we are fiercely committed to the documentary and to world music, and to American roots and ethnic music as well, as Global Rhythm is doing in the print media, Afropop Worldwide doing it in radio. There are these niches in the United States of alternative media that understand the importance of these kinds of films that you are showing at MOFFOM. But its still a niche, and world music for example, at least in the US marketplace, is considered to be somewhere between two and four percent of total sales. Marketing executives, or the editors of television networks, always look at the statistics and say that it's not enough for them to invest. The final story I will share with you is about a film which was brought to us about hip-hop as a global phenomenon, called "The Furious Forces of Rhymes" that's being made by an incredibly talented young filmmaker named Joshua Litle, and he has self-financed it through the demo stage, shooting for a few weeks in Senegal, and he has a beautiful film about the hip-hop phenomenon and where in started, in the Bronx in the Unites States in the late Seventies and early Eighties, and how it has spread all around the world, in many ways that are completely different to the mentality of hip-hop music in the United States. He has gone to every single television network, every single studio, every source of support, and everybody says "What a beautiful story, this is going to be so wonderful - come back when you're finished." Now we're trying to help him find private investments so that he can get the film done. So it's going to be a challenge, but at some point there will be another "Buena Vista Social Club". Through this agglomeration of different alternative networks, through the Internet, through radio and alternative TV, something will break out, something that tells a wonderful story, with an incredible album. It will capture the imagination, and open the door for more filmmakers and musicians.

Keith Jones: Maybe I'd like to ask Petr Doruzka to put this in the local context, to comment on what Steven has been talking about as it plays out here in Europe, particularly in Central Europe.

Petr Doruzka: Well, I remember that it was about two years ago that I spoke to a documentarist about local regional styles, something done I think for the EBU, the European Broadcast Union, in ten different countries, ten different places in Europe, including Moravia, a part of the Czech Republic. I don't remember the English name for the series...oh, yes, it was "European Roots" by Simon Broughton. I think it's going on, they are on the second or third part...

Steve Lawrence: We show some of those films on our channel. Many of them are great.

Petr Doruzka: Actually, I think this is a case where every film tells a story, definitely. You have rebetiko, very dramatic. You have a story of fiddlers from Finland...

Steve Lawrence: And "Building Bridges" on Bosnian blues, with Mostar Sevdah, and "Parno Graszt", and what else?

Michal Shapiro: "Moravian Carnival".

Petr Doruzka: Yes, that's the one. On "faąank", the Shrovetide carnival festivities here.

Steve Lawrence: That's a great project, because it brings together various European networks as the financing, and this the only model which is going to work for filmmakers. I mean, American filmmakers seldom get to make documentaries about music, because a lot of the financing has to come from Europe. They have to go to Channel 4, or they go to the BBC, or they go to Arte, because they can't get the financing at home. And it's a puzzle that you have to put together, one piece here, one piece there, and that can take a long time.

Petr Doruzka: Actually, I think you can also find many musical films that were made outside of Europe. Susheela Raman's last CD was partly recorded with musicians in Southern India, where Arte filmed her with the local musicians. That film is just now having its premiere, this week, I think. It should be out at any moment.

Ruhi Hamid: I just want to add that I've just now come from Sheffield, from the Documentary Festival, and the constant theme there was that it's pretty difficult to make documentaries full stop these days, because there's less and less money and the sort of entertainment and reality TV encroach on the commissions, let alone cinematic release. Then if you add music to it, that's even harder, and you can almost forget it unless as you say you've got an album, but then again, how do you know it will be a best-selling album? In Britain, we're increasingly tied to co-production, and that is the only way forward, in a sense, to get lots of different broadcasters across Europe and North America interested. You have to be lucky to get a cinematic release for any documentary at any time.

Steve Lawrence: Don Letts was just telling me here the other day that he felt lucky to get 70,000 pounds as a production budget for the film he did on Sun Ra that's showing here. That's a very small amount of money for a pretty serious music documentary.

Banning Eyre: I want to just add one thing about the Internet. With the changes in technology, the changes in platform and dissemination, everybody, whether they're trying to sell music or films, is very perplexed about where this is all going. I think that we're still at an early enough stage that none of us can really see it clearly, or at least those who see it clearly will be able to stand up and say told you so. But I don't think that with any confidence we can know what the world of selling and distributing is going to look like five or ten years from now - or at least from what I see, I don't feel confident about it. But I do have the sense that it ultimately is going to transform everything we're talking about here. On the one hand, you could fear that this is going to have a terrible effect on documentary filmmaking, because of the fact that record companies are taking this attitude right now that you can just give this stuff away as a promotion, that kind of degrading of the art form could be amplified by free distribution of video material, just willy-nilly around the world on the Internet. So it could reach the point where no one really has a sense of investing in it for anything other than humanitarian purposes, so that the only way you could make a serious documentary is if some eccentric millionaire gives you a million dollars. Well, that's sort of the most cynical, pessimistic view! Maybe we just have to keep hoping that there are surprises out there, that more than likely we'll see that in five or ten years it all looks different than what we expect. Maybe somewhere out there is still the secret of how to make this all work.

Ruhi Hamid: Maybe we shouldn't be looking at such high production values, with a technology like DV cameras. In documentary filmmaking that has democratized the filmmaking process to where directors can get out there and make films with their DV cameras, and increasingly there is that kind of alternative market with digital projections in cinemas, or where people are projecting films in their community centers or whatever. A lot of that is happening now in London, certainly. I guess if we don't worry about it being beautifully shot or fantastically recorded, the energy is there and that can still win through in terms of popularizing this type of documentary.

Banning Eyre: That's certainly true. The lowering of costs there is a powerful argument, but Keith mentioned the Baaba Maal film, and to me one of the things that is wonderful about that is that it's very obvious that it was shot over many years. You see concerts and footage from all aspects of his work, and it's because Palm Pictures has this huge library of footage of Baaba Maal from all points in his career, and you can really get a sense of who this guy is from watching this film. That's the kind of thing that I worry will be harder and harder to come by in the world that we seem to be headed towards.

Jeffrey Brown (film producer): I would like to add to what she was saying about how there is this clean slate because of the DV. There was a discussion at MIPDOC this year along the lines of how everyone was falling over themselves trying to please all these commissioning editors to try to get a little bit of this European TV money, and where you were not going to get that money you still end up having your leg pulled, and I've experienced this personally. There eventually comes a point where you just have to do it, and with DV you can, especially if you have friends who are passionate and will get involved with you for no money or little money and just do it. There was a very interesting discussion there with one gentleman who basically spelled it out quite well about using the Internet as a marketing tool. How is this impacting the World Music documentary in your experience? I've looked into it a lot, about using websites as a means of doing massive free marketing and publicity over the Internet.

Steve Lawrence: Well, you know, I can't point to any particular example where that has been that successful in the United States. I can tell you something about our audience, though. We did a survey of people who watch our channel, an online survey over the summer and we asked viewers if they interested in getting world music DVDs, and three-quarters of them said yes, they would be interested in getting world music videos, either by downloading or by getting music video compilations and world music films. I think there is an audience there, but the question is how to reach them. There just aren't any really successful examples yet, but there is an audience, both in the United States and now globally as well. There are a couple of companies, and I can't remember the name of one, but it was set up by a very rich young entrepreneur named Mark Cuban, if anyone's heard of him. He set up HDNet, which is a high definition network, and set up a distribution company, which has financed the last three films of Steven Soderberg, who is a very well-known director in the United States. They were also setting up a string of digital cinemas, not only in the United States but also around the world. It's not a question of the film traveling around, but there are servers in different places that can deliver movies to these micro-theaters, on very high quality, high definition video. Whether it's going to your home or whether it's going to a small theater, this idea of alternative entrepreneurs trying to capture this audience, saying they're going to finance and distribute films...of course, they're probably going to do a combination of mainstream and alternative films...that's an important step. I think the more that happens, and the more it gets out of the hardcore urban markets, the more interesting it will become. Our experience with Link TV is that something like sixty percent of our audience live in the rural United States, and these are the people who don't have alternative cinemas, don't have film festivals in their communities, access to the kind of films we're talking about. They don't have things like MOFFOM. But they get incredibly energized and excited by the types of films they see on the channel and they write to us about it. I think that over time, whether it's through a delivery platform like Link TV, or through digital cinema, or through BitTorrent streaming, or download capabilities, if this stuff is to be marketed, if there is word of mouth, if there can be a theatrical release, or a film festival release, that is critical. Use whatever marketing mechanisms are out there to get a review, get the word of mouth going, because once you do, it should start the ball rolling, it should snowball. Whether you sell 200 or 200, 000 units of your DVD is irrelevant, but you have to get that word of mouth somehow.

Michal Shapiro: There are several strands that are at work here. I wanted to stress and reiterate again that the ownership and intellectual property issue shave not really been worked out and addressed, so that when Banning talks about this fear of the terrible new world...

Banning Eyre: Well, I said that was the pessimistic view.

Michal Shapiro: Okay, the worst-case scenario would be a devaluation of intellectual property. I think in the next few years capitalism will assert itself, I mean people have to be able to make money so that they can pursue these things...however, it will have to worked out. We haven't done that yet. If you go to a rights collection agency, whether in Europe or in the United States, at this point they're mystified about what they should be doing.

Tom Pryor: Exactly. It took the straight music business about five years to figure out to handle things like Napster, and turn that kind of thing into a money making scheme for themselves. While they were fighting that battle, they didn't even know what was going on! I think BitTorrent forced the issue. One of the things I wanted to address in Jeffrey's question is that if you go beyond world music, there are other niche genres. At least in the US market, there have been some very successful examples of what they call viral marketing, and one the best, actually, is the sort of "jam band" circuit, that whole post-Grateful Dead hippie circuit. That was already sort of in place even in the Seventies, with that whole tape-swapping thing, but those guys have used the Internet like you wouldn't believe. They have used it as an incredible marketing tool to reach their own community. Granted, that's sort of a unique community, because it's insular and they don't really proselytize like we World Music people do, and try to get more people into it, they have more of a set market. But they have used viral marketing and direct DVD sales and even direct streaming video sales, and it's been incredible for them, they've done very well. It's these very small pockets of entrepreneurs who were the former tape traders back in the day. So there are other examples of this in other niche markets.

Banning Eyre: Just to spell out a kind of positive vision in contrast to the one I espoused earlier, you can imagine a future, a time where broadband activity is just worldwide, in all these remote areas. Our radio show Afropop Worldwide is a bit similar to Link TV in that our audience is rural and in smaller towns, and for the same kinds of reasons. You can imagine if every little hamlet in the world has access to all this culture, and they've figured out the payment issues to where your credit card is billed some minute amount of money every time you buy something, and this is just accepted as normal, then you have the possibility of reaching all these little niche markets which aren't connected by anything other than just interest. Then all sorts of interesting possibilities start to emerge, and maybe that's where we're headed.

Steve Lawrence: I just wanted to say one thing to anyone who's a filmmaker. Stay determined and keep at it. The stories that are out there are worth it.