Entretien autour d’une bière à propos du travail à l’image sur "Kreatura", de Viki Aleksandrovich

Par Elio Balézeaux et Alberto Ploquin

Cette année nous étions six étudiants de la Ciné Fabrique et six de Louis-Lumière à être invités à Camerimage par Transvideo et K 5600. Voici un entretien que nous avons pu réaliser autour d’une bière (en anglais) avec le directeur de la photographie Dino Osmanovic et l’actrice Diana Zolotarova, qui présentaient le docu-fiction Kreatura, réalisé par Viki Aleksandrovich.

Kreatura suit la trajectoire de Diana dans la recherche de sa famille et de son identité, entre l’Allemagne, l’Ukraine et Israël. C’est un portrait intime et poétique où la frontière entre documentaire et fiction est extrêmement ténue. La caméra de Dino, le chef opérateur, brouille elle aussi cette frontière, les scènes documentaires ont une dimension esthétique très forte, et celles "mises en scène" sont souvent à la recherche d’accidents.

How was it to work with the director in this docu-fiction ?

We talked a lot about this documentary and fiction thing, there is a lot of dogma about it, people say : "It’s a documentary you can’t fake it". He has an opposite view of it, he likes to construct the scene. He creates an organic vision and illusion and it is the same vision than in fiction.
We worked one year and it was very close, and intense, and we get really to get known to each other. We talked a lot about atmosphere and identity. It was a big topic for all because Viki is from Kazakhztan and I’m from Bosnia. So the team was very fixed together to work on it for a year.
The biggest challenge was that the documentary scenes and the constructed scenes felt like one line. We had this conceptual thing that we don’t want to shoot the space so much, we wanted to be very close to the people and wide open.
We also had the idea to try a lot of things with perspective but after the first week of shooting in Ukraine, I felt we were to much in effects like in this 90 degrees shot. And we kept the wide shots for the end in the desert.

On the set, what space had the camera ?

Dino : We didn’t storyboard anything. The scenes were very long, we had key points we had to achieve in the scene and meanwhile I was improvisating. I was always editing the movie in my hand and when I thought it was boring I changed. I was totally free. Only two scenes were lighted, I had only one LED Felloni always backlit and an HMI 575. I was mostly trying to make it dark.

Diana : On the scene with my grandmother, we had been preparing. We decided where to shoot, but then it was 2 hours in a raw. Being with the camera was not a big deal, even if sometimes there were some conflicts.

Dino : We had conflicts ?

Diana : We had conflicts ! [Laughter] There were moments where I was just doing my thing, like I was doing a healing treatment, and Dino didn’t like this idea of spiritualism and he kept going into our space !

Dino : 45 minutes and nothing happened, I was shooting hand held, sweating, I had to do something !

What camera and lenses you used ?

Canon C300, I chose this camera because it’s a very light camera and very sensitive, you can shoot in 3 200 ISO and it’s not a problem. Most of the time I shot with prime lenses because it was important for us to always stick to a decision. In documentary, directors ask you to change quick and work with a zoom but there it didn’t felt right. We shot with Zeiss High Speed because it was important in the night to work at T1.3. I wanted to shoot in Cooke S2 but they weren’t available at the time so we shot only one of the four weeks with them. I didn’t use filters but the Zeiss are quite soft so I was happy with them. I didn’t want a very clean image.

Elio Balézeaux et Alberto Ploquin sont étudiants en 2e année Image à la Ciné Fabrique.
Six étudiants de l’Ecole Louis-Lumière et six de la Ciné Fabrique étaient invités à Camerimage par Transvideo et K 5600 Lighting.


Dans le portfolio ci-dessous, quelques images de Kreatura.