On Monday 16 March, the Frontline Club hosted a preview screening of Masterspy of Moscow – George Blake, directed by George Carey. The film, which will be broadcast on Monday 23 March by BBC 4 Storyville, traces the life story of the legendary George Blake, a British diplomat who became a longterm double agent for the Soviet Union. Masterspy of Moscow clarifies the many myths surrounding Blake that persist, and culminates with an interview with the protagonist himself, from his cabin in the woods outside of Moscow.

Director George Carey

Following the screening, Carey began the discussion by highlighting that agents such as Blake often face serious identity crises.

“You’ve got these two lives, which you’ve got to keep separate. And you haven’t  just got to keep it separate in the sense that you don’t tell your boss what you’re doing. But you have to keep it separate from your wife, your children, and in the end from one side of your head. And it’s such a strain,” he said.

In Blake’s case, this was reinforced by his complicated, and at times unstable, background. He was raised in the Netherlands by his Calvinist mother and Jewish father with roots in both Cairo and Istanbul. After the occupation of his home country, young Blake fled to London with his mother in 1943.

The documentary narrates how the now 92-year-old former spy offered himself as a double agent to the KGB during his imprisonment in North Korea, and how he was later imprisoned for acts of treason. Blake escaped prison five year later, in 1966, and fled to Moscow where he remains to this day.

Carey explained to the audience how he tried to contact Blake’s former wife, who eventually refused to comment. Curiously, one of his sons chose a profession that Blake aspired to when he was young: he is currently a vicar in Surrey.

“But I decided not to include that. I felt the essence of the story was George himself,” Carey said.

He also underlined that aside from religion, Blake had been influenced by a strong moment of transition after the Second World War when anti-colonialist sentiment was sweeping the world.

“Who was whose spy was a very ambiguous business. What you had was the Americans, the British and the Russians, principally, in the early 1950s. All had their own staff agents and they all had their own informers. The trouble was that someone who was one of your informers (…) was probably informing somebody else as well,” Carey said.

He also pointed out that such inner frictions remain key up to the present day. Carey mentioned the recent assassination of Boris Nemtsov as one such example: “It is becoming clearer and clearer that this is because there are factions inside the FSB and the Kremlin.”

Nevertheless, Carey acknowledged that speculation is “almost axiomatic” when making a film about a spy and talking about secret intelligence services.

“You have to understand I’m just a humble old filmmaker. I do my best.” Carey said.

“What World Stories and the Why Foundation are doing is bringing very important, powerful documentaries to greater attention and to international audiences,” said Richard Porter, controller of BBC World Service English, on Tuesday 24 February at the Frontline Club. The event marked the launch of the World Stories series, an international documentary initiative, and featured a screening of one of the organisation’s most recent films: My Afghanistan – Everyday Stories of Bombs and Bullets, by Danish filmmaker Nagieb Khaja.

L-R: Nagieb Khaja and Christoffer Guldbrandsen

World Stories is a project established by The Why Foundation, an independent editorial organisation based in Denmark. Its CEO, Christoffer Guldbrandsen, shared with the audience their aim of ensuring that “compelling” documentary films reach an international and global audience, especially in areas outside the scope of the mainstream media market. In order to do so, World Stories works in partnership with local broadcasters on a global scale.

During the presentation of this new initiative, an audience member asked how editorial control was shared between the filmmaker and the World Stories project itself.

Guldbrandsen responded:

“The whole project is based on a collaboration between the filmmakers and The Why Foundation, so we cannot re-edit the film. The films are approved by the directors when they go out. What we of course respect and acknowledge, is that when you work globally there are different standards. And, as I said, our aim is to inspire freedom of expression.”

In addition to Guldbrandsen, World Stories is the product of a collaboration between BBC Storyville editor Nick Fraser, and Mette Hoffmann Meyer, head of documentary at the Danish Broadcasting Corporation.

Meyer told the audience of the “great joy” she experienced in spending weekends writing to broadcasters from Bhutan to Vietnam or Afghanistan. She also highlighted the importance of translating documentaries into other languages, in order that they have a chance to reach “the poorest people.”

“At the moment, the only niche audience [for documentary films] is in rich countries. World Stories aims to remedy this,” added Fraser.

Porter commented that they had committed a “substantial investment” to show 20 programmes under the Storyville global brand each year, something he thinks will give the BBC a “greater impact.”

To highlight the quality of documentaries that World Stories will endeavour to broadcast, a condensed edit of Nagieb Khaja‘s My Afghanistan – Everyday Stories of Bombs and Bullets was screened. In order to capture daily life in the country, the Danish journalist distributed mobile phones with HD cameras to 30 ordinary Afghan citizens, in order that they could record in firsthand their daily lives. The result is a surprising and moving story, offering an alternative to the Afghanistan that is depicted by the mainstream Western media.

On the subject of his film, Khaja said, “The thing with this movie is that is not a complicated movie, it is not a hardcore investigative movie. It’s about relations, about emotions… It’s about universal things.”

For more information on My Afghanistan, including upcoming screenings, visit the website here.

Bill Emmott and Annalisa Piras following the preview of their new film, The Great European Disaster Movie

“We are in an aeroplane, and we don’t know who is driving the aeroplane. We are in a storm and we don’t know what is happening to us…”. This was the idea that Annalisa Piras wanted to entertain in her new film, The Great European Disaster Movie, which previewed at the Frontline Club on Friday 23 January.

The film combines a fictional narrative, set in a dystopian future without a European Union, with interviews and analysis to demonstrate how both the political and financial union is gradually pulling itself apart. The film will be aired across Europe by eight different broadcasters, a feat Piras described as her “impossible challenge”.

Bill Emmott

Whilst the film was first and foremost an analytical exploration of the current problems that Europe faces, Piras said she felt that something more was needed to engage audiences in the subject.

“The attempt was to experiment a little bit with fiction, with graphics, with other elements in trying to make very complex issues such as the European Union crisis available possibly to a wider public than the one normally interested in reading The Economist or the Financial Times,” she said.

At the heart of the film was an attempt to understand why the European project was slowly falling apart, both economically and politically. Bill Emmott, the film’s executive producer, described it as two different battles: one fought in the head and one fought in the heart.

“The difficulty for the European Union is that so much of what it’s done is stopping you self harming, stopping you subsidise your steel or stopping you have trade barriers… So there’s too much ‘no’ in Europe, and what really the opportunity needs to be is the ‘yes’,” said Emmott.

The film was well received by the audience, with particular praise for the way value was placed on social and identity issues in Europe, rather than exclusively on economic problems.

However, a number of those present questioned the film’s strong pro-European stance. One audience member commented:

“It was ideologically and intellectually highly loaded. You have a number of prominent journalists, intellectuals… all very explicit and putting the case very clearly. And against that you have a very narrow-minded councillor from Margate who is scared of foreigners.”

Annalisa Piras

“We thought if we went into trying to give both sides of the arguments for all these very complex issues we wouldn’t have survived. We would have died in the process,” Piras responded.

“What interested me was to make a provocation… To make it entertaining, to make it scary, to push people to think about this scenario. The tragedy about the current debate is that this [apocalyptic] scenario is never evoked”. In doing this, Piras hoped the film would make viewers consider the potential unintended consequences if the European Union were to dissolve.

The discussion also focused on how much of an impact a partial dismantlement of the Eurozone would have on the economy as a whole. Some commented that a Greek exit would allow both Greece and the rest of Europe to flourish, whilst others predicted economic disaster.

“I think that opportunity and hope really need to be at the heart of what the argument has to be,” said Emmott. “That an open Europe, a Europe that’s connected, that a Europe that’s cooperative has provided, and will in the future provide, opportunities and hope for the people. That’s the argument from the heart surely.”

There was also criticism of the argument that a Europe without the European Union would slide back into war. One member of the audience described this idea as “the old bogeyman” of Europe. However, Piras was confident that this argument had a legitimate place in the film.

“I think that Ukraine is proving that, the fragile peace in the Balkans is proving that. We wanted to finish with the Balkans because we thought that remembering that only twenty years ago people were actually massacring each other on the borders of Europe… They remember the blood and they see Europe as a solution to not going back to the past,” she said.

Asked why the film did not feature comment on the current threat that Russia poses to Europe, Piras commented that she wanted the film to be an introspective analysis on Europe, without too much focus on external developments.

“The film at the end wanted to concentrate more on us, the Europeans, what we think we should do about what we have built in the last 60 years… The attempt was to make a very provocative, intense and strong film about who we are now in Europe, we Europeans, and what we want to do in the future.”

Follow Annalisa Piras and Bill Emmott on Twitter for updates on future screenings of The Great European Disaster Movie.

Bill Emmott and Annalisa Piras

“I hope you enjoy the film half as much as I enjoyed making it. Apart from the crazy bit,” director Morgan Matthews said on Monday 17 March at the Frontline Club as he introduced his new documentary Shooting Bigfoot in association with BBC Storyville.

Warning: Contains spoilers.

Director Morgan Matthews discusses his latest documentary, Shooting Bigfoot.

Following Bigfoot hunters across Arkansas, Pennsylvania and Ohio San Antonio, Shooting Bigfoot is an hilarious and at times heart pounding documentary. It starts with Matthews innocently following the ‘researchers’ and ‘trackers’ on the hunt for towering hairy creatures and ends with him getting a black eye in a torch-lit chase through the trees, reminiscent of the Blair Witch project.

After the screening Matthews answered questions from the audience, one of the first of which was: Who hit you?

“I prefer leaving it open ended . . . for people to make their own minds up. I don’t think it was Bigfoot.”

Matthews said that it seemed inevitable that he would be set up whilst filming but didn’t know from who or when and that he started to doubt and second guess everything he saw:

“When I heard those noises, I thought it was one of the guys in the wood playing a tape or something, rather than an owl. I kind of thought it was going to come one way or another but I wasn’t sure from which direction . . . apart from Dallas and Wayne. I never thought Dallas and Wayne were going to produce the goods.”

During filming Matthews spent time with three different groups of Bigfoot hunters (among others who didn’t make the final cut). Matthews spent hours alone whilst on stake out in the forest with Dyer and he is now in a row with him over the ownership of Matthews’ documentary footage – it seemed that that relationship was the one that had genuine tension. An audience member asked if Matthews felt safe with Rick Dyer?

“I never trusted Rick. That was what made him interesting. It was freaky at times and when you are in the tent in the woods and it’s four in the morning and there are weird noises around it is a bit freaky and Rick is . . . playing silly buggers. . . . I genuinely never felt Rick was somebody who would either harm me . . . well, hmm . . . I never thought that he’d actually, properly . . . I never thought that he’d shoot me. I don’t think he’s that sort of person.”

Another audience member pointed out the amount of weapons that were on display throughout the documentary and asked if the idea of hunting Bigfoot was just an excuse for blokes to swan about in the forest with guns.

“Almost all about that. . . . They’re doing it for different reasons. But ultimately they’re guys behaving like kids, in a good way, like kids in the woods”

However, Matthews said that he thought there was more to it:

“With Dallas and Wayne, they’re guys who had jobs who had a purpose who lost that and then found Bigfoot. That became their reason to get up in a way. They’re known within that world. With all these communities connected by the Internet somebody who was otherwise previously kind of isolated or weird now there’s a network of people they can be in touch with.”

Director Morgan Matthews introduces tonight's screening of Shooting Bigfoot. pic.twitter.com/9MV7Xf9WHs

— Frontline Club (@frontlineclub) March 17, 2014

Did you ever feel like you were exploiting them?

“I think it’s a fair question, I don’t think they’re mental as in mentally ill. They’re quite a bit bonkers in a way that they’re aware of, . . . they’re all showmen to an extent. They’re all aware of themselves part of what they’re doing is involving me in that show.

 

“I felt it went both ways, sometimes they were taking the piss out of me and sometimes it went the other way. It was genuinely a lot of fun. I laughed so much on that trip but genuinely with them. Tom [a serial Bigfoot film maker] just has you in stitches and sometimes it’s hard to hold the camera straight. When Chico [an ex-navy SEAL on the expedition with Tom] fell in the water we were all creasing up in laughter and . . . that’s with them, it’s not at them.”

Was there a point where you found yourself wanting to believe it?

“I think it started like that and I kind of wanted to uncover something . . . [but] I became interested in the story of people, where the lines between fact and fiction were very blurred and they almost invent their own reality and live in that. A case where you believe in something so much it becomes true. The parallels with religion were very clear to me.”

When asked if he felt any of the guys genuinely believed in Bigfoot Matthews said:

“Yeah, but it’s sort of when Tom says that people start believing their own bullshit, I think that’s kind of what happened.”

Shooting Bigfoot airs on BBC 4 at 9pm on Monday March 24, 2014. Find out more here.

Watch the full Q&A and the trailer for Shooting Bigfoot below: