segunda-feira, 31 de dezembro de 2012
segunda-feira, 24 de dezembro de 2012
sábado, 22 de dezembro de 2012
terça-feira, 18 de dezembro de 2012
domingo, 9 de dezembro de 2012
Waking Dead Capital (Article)
http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2000/0515/6511098a.html
THE SHACK ON THE EDGE OF A SEETHING GARBAGE DUMP IN Quezon City, a suburb of Manila, suggests a loan prospect as unreliable as the hovel's hole-pocked tin roof. But inside, Tarsila Dawisa, 55, has an active business making rattan shelving units. It makes 5,000 Philippine pesos a month, about $125. That pays the electricity bill and buys water and food for her 12 family members, but isn't enough to get them a decent home away from the smelly, sooty refuse.
"If the government or someone can help me, I need a little more capital," says Dawisa, sounding--at least in the translated Tagalog--more like an M.B.A. than a gritty grandmother. "We'd increase our volume and be able to supply to exporters. That way we could make 9,000 or 10,000 pesos a month."
But Dawisa has no practical access to capital. She and her family have been squatting near the government-owned dump for six years; they cannot buy the land.
Impoverished but entrepreneurial, Dawisa is not alone. At a time when untold wealth is reaching all parts of the globe, four-fifths of the world's 6.1 billion people scrape by, many doing odd jobs or running small businesses.
As more of the world's poor congregate in cities, they ought to benefit from the specialized division of labor that has fueled growth in industrialized nations. But in many instances poverty just seems to get worse.
One school of thought blames the plight of the poor in the Third World on cultural factors. Something in the work or savings ethic, this theory goes, prevents them from fully developing like their Northern or Western neighbors. In the former communist world, state dependency fostered attitudes seen as discouraging successful enterprise.
There's another line of thinking: that much of the world has never done capitalism the right way. If it did, poor countries would be a lot richer. Enter Hernando de Soto, a 58-year-old Peruvian economist who made his mark a decade ago with the book The Other Path: The Invisible Revolution in the Third World (FORBES, Jan. 23, 1989). In it he argued that developing countries were poor not because the poor weren't entrepreneurial, but because they couldn't get economic oxygen.
The key to doing so, he said, was property rights--and for everyone, not just the elite. With such rights, land title could be leveraged with a mortgage, used as collateral for a bank loan, or sold more easily. If De Soto has his way, poor folks like Dawisa could soon get the access to the capital they wish for.
Licenses are a form of property. In Lima De Soto found that it took 289 days to register a garment shop with one worker, at a cost of $1,230--31 times the monthly minimum wage. To get permission to build a house on state-owned land took six years and 11 months of navigating the bureaucracy and getting papers notarized. For a private bus or jitney driver to obtain official recognition of his route, 26 months.
It's not that the Peruvian, or any government, sets out to make life hard for its poor people. Rather, inertia and entrenched interests weigh in favor of maintaining the status quo, and ruling elites seldom understand how serious an issue property law is. Says De Soto: "Emancipating people from bad law is a political job." Without the head of government making such changes a priority, they won't get pushed through multiple layers of bureaucracy.
Starting in the late 1980s De Soto, with the support of then Peruvian president Alan Garcia and his successor Alberto Fujimori, transformed his theory into action. He talked government agencies and private foundations across the globe into funding (now to the tune of $4 million a year) his Lima-based think tank, the Institute for Liberty & Democracy. With the institute he devised a plan to help Peru's poor get title to land and businesses more quickly and efficiently. Instead of going through up to 14 different government agencies to obtain a title, poor Lima residents only had to deal with one. The time it took to generate a title was reduced to four months; to register a business, it cost just $12.
Under the guidance of De Soto's think tank, 300,000 titles were registered in urban Lima from 1991 through 1995. Results were soon palpable. By 1998 the value of the registered urban land had typically doubled; previously nonexistent private mortgage and consumer credit markets had begun to develop.
Politicians in other developing countries took notice. A dozen called De Soto and asked him to come visit and dispense advice. Those calls, and an ideological split with Fujimori in 1993, spurred De Soto to take his "poor people's capitalism" program on the road. Since 1997 he's been brought in by the governments of Haiti, Egypt and the Philippines to undertake efforts similar to those in Lima. Other underdeveloped and former communist nations have expressed interest as well. "We're opening up a new paradigm for which there is no established system of collecting data," De Soto says of the assessment stage of his efforts. "We're looking at this from the point of view of the democratization of property rights."
His findings have proved controversial, but ultimately convincing. "Essentially we've been talking about the poor, but we haven't had a real understanding of who the poor are, what kind of resources they have available, what we can do so they can really participate in the development of the economy and of the country," says Ronaldo Zamora, executive secretary of the Philippine government. "What De Soto has discovered are things that change our perspective about the whole idea of poverty. The poor are not so poor, for instance."
Indeed. De Soto estimates that 4 billion poor people in the Third World and former communist nations hold, but don't legally own, real estate worth $9.3 trillion. That's 46 times the amount of all World Bank loans made over the past three decades. Without legal ownership, De Soto says, such assets are just dead capital. "These people have houses but not titles, crops but not deeds, and businesses but not statutes of incorporation," he says. "Without these essential representations, they have not been able to produce sufficient capital to make their domestic capitalism work."
In Manila, one way the poor obtain funds is through a method called "five-six." You borrow 5,000 pesos from a lender who trolls the alleyways and pay back 6,000 pesos within two months, in installments of 100 pesos a day. Bernadette Ubaldo, who squats with her family in a shack along a waterway not far from the Manila airport, borrowed from a five-six lender to buy a used refrigerator. "Sometimes we do five-six for food," she says sheepishly.
If you live in the U.S. or the U.K., you can take recorded deeds for granted; the notion of enforceable rights to real estate goes back to feudal times. On that foundation of ownership is built a huge edifice of capital that includes trillions of dollars in mortgage debt and trillions in real estate equity. Contrast that with the many parts of the world, from Mexico to Russia, where control of land has in the past century lurched from aristocrats to government confiscators to peasant squatters. It is likely, though, that basic property ownership early on underpinned economic growth. Nobel Prize-winning economic historian Douglass C. North asserts that the development of enforceable property rights was critical to mankind's move from hunter-gatherer to agricultural societies about 10,000 years ago.
What passes for property law in the Third World would give shudders to any mortgage lender. Consider the case of Rey Estillore, 60, who taught biological science at Manila's University of the East for 20 years. In 1993, one month after Estillore moved in to the simple home he'd built in Veteran's Village, a longtime squatter zone in Quezon City set aside for families of those who fought in World War II, a woman showed up claiming she owned his lot.
"I did some research on this before coming here, and I found out her claim was fraudulent," he says, sitting in the front room of his spartan home. "There are unscrupulous people who have connections within the bureaus and get spurious titles." The court case has so far cost him $2,500, and that's with legal help from friends at minimal or no charge. In the meantime, Estillore tries to scrape out a living in the printing business, with 1960-era presses that can't compete with more modern machinery. Without land to use as collateral, he can't afford better.
Scratch the surface and some 45 million of Estillore's 76 million countrymen probably have a similar story to tell. Philippine President Joseph "Erap" Estrada, who ran for office with the slogan "Erap para sa Mahirap"--Erap for the poor--realized previous administrations' efforts to alleviate poverty hadn't worked. So his government brought in De Soto and his team. Their findings: The country's legal and administrative systems force about 60% of Filipinos to hold their real estate assets outside the law. That translates into an estimated $133 billion in dead capital in the country--assets incapable of being used as collateral, mortgaged or easily traded.
De Soto's think tank is now working on legislation to streamline, among other things, the land title process while addressing the plight of millions of squatters, a myriad of government-established and private settlements and the complex history of Filipino property rights. They hope to have the laws ready to go in two years.
Change will come more slowly in Egypt. Zein El Abdeen, a 37-year-old Cairo taxi driver, lives with his wife and 9-month-old daughter, his parents, grandmother and his two sisters in a 900-square-foot home where his father has squatted for 40 years. The government has allowed El Abdeen and his neighbors to live on state-owned land (it belongs to the Ministry of Endowment), but has never granted them official recognition. "We're all aware of the bad part about living as we do," says El Abdeen. "At any moment the ministry could demand that we vacate this area."
El Abdeen dreams of opening a small factory to make plastic dishes. "But I need $1,500 to start, and I don't have anyone to lend me the money," he laments. "My father's home is worth around $35,000, but unfortunately he doesn't have papers, and no one will accept it as a guarantee."
De Soto's team, along with the Egyptian Center for Economic Studies, found that to acquire and legally register a lot on state-owned desert land in Egypt requires dealing with 31 public and private agencies, and red tape that can last from 5 to 14 years. No wonder 85% of Egyptians live in homes without functioning property titles.
Then there's Russia, where the very idea of middle-class property ownership is foreign. Plots of land are registered in one office, buildings in another. Meanwhile, to get a bank loan, one must put up 150% -200% of the face value of the loan in collateral, plus get three guarantors with good incomes. On top of that, it takes two months for the bank to process; interest rates are currently around 45%. But the cost of obtaining documents, presenting a business plan and getting everything notarized in addition to the other requirements make such loans out of the question for many small entrepreneurs.
Anna Kostrova, 30, is a born entrepreneur. Near her home in Dzerzhinsk, Nizhny Novgorod (250 miles northeast of Moscow), she ran akiosk near the bus stop selling chewing gum, cigarettes and candies when she was 25. After she got married and had two children, she and her husband decided to rent a small cafeteria. They were able to borrow money from the bank to get it started, but that was before the 1998 crisis. With her assets devalued she couldn't go back to the bank for the loan she wanted for a soda dispensing machine. Were it not for the assistance of a local microlending organization, Vozmozhnost, Kostrova would not have been able to expand her business. "I have a lot of plans to materialize," she says, thankful that she has a financing alternative.
Microlending--disbursing working capital in tiny doses to small businesses and solo proprietors--is now all the rage at the World Bank and other antipoverty agencies. But a well-entrenched system of deeds and mortgages would make this specially designed lending a lot more meaningful.
Stephan Schmidheiny, a billionaire Swiss philanthropist whose Latin America-focused Avina foundation has funded De Soto, says as much: "An important part of the work we do in sustainable development and entrepreneurial education is the framework. I found Hernando's approach the most convincing of any. The whole world talks about poverty alleviation, but very few have a practical idea on how to do it. He has."
DeSoto figures only 25 of the world's 207 countries are reaping the benefits of having a contractual, urban society. In the rest, the people congregate, but they lack a legal basis for exchange. "It's the industrial revolution happening 150 years later," he says. Think of it: It's not so much the lack of capitalist ethos that impoverishes the people of Peru or Madagascar, but the lack of durable capital that can be traded back and forth. Absent that basis for capital markets, the billions of dollars of capital showered on the world's poor by international agencies is like seed falling on barren ground.
A side effect of granting formal title to the poor's assets is a boost to government coffers. In Peru 276,000 extralegal entrepreneurs recorded their businesses voluntarily from 1991 to 1994. Over that period, the tax revenue from the formerly extralegal businesses was $1.2 billion. But the majority of the informal sector isn't staying outside the law simply to avoid paying taxes. The truth is, doing business outside the law presents all kinds of added costs. In Peru 15% of gross income in extralegal manufacturing is paid out in bribes, says De Soto.
As it stands now, De Soto's approach is promising but not proven. In Peru only a small percentage of the country's informal sector has new land titles. In Haiti, where his team began work in 1997, the package of laws they designed still awaits passage by the Congress. In Egypt, where De Soto began in 1998 and has 12 Peruvians and 30 Egyptians at work, the detailed assessment of the existing property and legal situation is under way; the Philippines is at an earlier stage of assessment.
The true test of his ideas will come after they've been tried in a variety of developing nations. If he can help alleviate poverty through legal reform and properly titling the slums of Latin America, an Islamic country, an Asian ex-colony and a former communist nation, De Soto will have truly proven his theory. And the Third World will owe him a big debt of gratitude.
THE SHACK ON THE EDGE OF A SEETHING GARBAGE DUMP IN Quezon City, a suburb of Manila, suggests a loan prospect as unreliable as the hovel's hole-pocked tin roof. But inside, Tarsila Dawisa, 55, has an active business making rattan shelving units. It makes 5,000 Philippine pesos a month, about $125. That pays the electricity bill and buys water and food for her 12 family members, but isn't enough to get them a decent home away from the smelly, sooty refuse.
"If the government or someone can help me, I need a little more capital," says Dawisa, sounding--at least in the translated Tagalog--more like an M.B.A. than a gritty grandmother. "We'd increase our volume and be able to supply to exporters. That way we could make 9,000 or 10,000 pesos a month."
But Dawisa has no practical access to capital. She and her family have been squatting near the government-owned dump for six years; they cannot buy the land.
Impoverished but entrepreneurial, Dawisa is not alone. At a time when untold wealth is reaching all parts of the globe, four-fifths of the world's 6.1 billion people scrape by, many doing odd jobs or running small businesses.
As more of the world's poor congregate in cities, they ought to benefit from the specialized division of labor that has fueled growth in industrialized nations. But in many instances poverty just seems to get worse.
One school of thought blames the plight of the poor in the Third World on cultural factors. Something in the work or savings ethic, this theory goes, prevents them from fully developing like their Northern or Western neighbors. In the former communist world, state dependency fostered attitudes seen as discouraging successful enterprise.
There's another line of thinking: that much of the world has never done capitalism the right way. If it did, poor countries would be a lot richer. Enter Hernando de Soto, a 58-year-old Peruvian economist who made his mark a decade ago with the book The Other Path: The Invisible Revolution in the Third World (FORBES, Jan. 23, 1989). In it he argued that developing countries were poor not because the poor weren't entrepreneurial, but because they couldn't get economic oxygen.
The key to doing so, he said, was property rights--and for everyone, not just the elite. With such rights, land title could be leveraged with a mortgage, used as collateral for a bank loan, or sold more easily. If De Soto has his way, poor folks like Dawisa could soon get the access to the capital they wish for.
Licenses are a form of property. In Lima De Soto found that it took 289 days to register a garment shop with one worker, at a cost of $1,230--31 times the monthly minimum wage. To get permission to build a house on state-owned land took six years and 11 months of navigating the bureaucracy and getting papers notarized. For a private bus or jitney driver to obtain official recognition of his route, 26 months.
It's not that the Peruvian, or any government, sets out to make life hard for its poor people. Rather, inertia and entrenched interests weigh in favor of maintaining the status quo, and ruling elites seldom understand how serious an issue property law is. Says De Soto: "Emancipating people from bad law is a political job." Without the head of government making such changes a priority, they won't get pushed through multiple layers of bureaucracy.
Starting in the late 1980s De Soto, with the support of then Peruvian president Alan Garcia and his successor Alberto Fujimori, transformed his theory into action. He talked government agencies and private foundations across the globe into funding (now to the tune of $4 million a year) his Lima-based think tank, the Institute for Liberty & Democracy. With the institute he devised a plan to help Peru's poor get title to land and businesses more quickly and efficiently. Instead of going through up to 14 different government agencies to obtain a title, poor Lima residents only had to deal with one. The time it took to generate a title was reduced to four months; to register a business, it cost just $12.
Under the guidance of De Soto's think tank, 300,000 titles were registered in urban Lima from 1991 through 1995. Results were soon palpable. By 1998 the value of the registered urban land had typically doubled; previously nonexistent private mortgage and consumer credit markets had begun to develop.
Politicians in other developing countries took notice. A dozen called De Soto and asked him to come visit and dispense advice. Those calls, and an ideological split with Fujimori in 1993, spurred De Soto to take his "poor people's capitalism" program on the road. Since 1997 he's been brought in by the governments of Haiti, Egypt and the Philippines to undertake efforts similar to those in Lima. Other underdeveloped and former communist nations have expressed interest as well. "We're opening up a new paradigm for which there is no established system of collecting data," De Soto says of the assessment stage of his efforts. "We're looking at this from the point of view of the democratization of property rights."
His findings have proved controversial, but ultimately convincing. "Essentially we've been talking about the poor, but we haven't had a real understanding of who the poor are, what kind of resources they have available, what we can do so they can really participate in the development of the economy and of the country," says Ronaldo Zamora, executive secretary of the Philippine government. "What De Soto has discovered are things that change our perspective about the whole idea of poverty. The poor are not so poor, for instance."
Indeed. De Soto estimates that 4 billion poor people in the Third World and former communist nations hold, but don't legally own, real estate worth $9.3 trillion. That's 46 times the amount of all World Bank loans made over the past three decades. Without legal ownership, De Soto says, such assets are just dead capital. "These people have houses but not titles, crops but not deeds, and businesses but not statutes of incorporation," he says. "Without these essential representations, they have not been able to produce sufficient capital to make their domestic capitalism work."
In Manila, one way the poor obtain funds is through a method called "five-six." You borrow 5,000 pesos from a lender who trolls the alleyways and pay back 6,000 pesos within two months, in installments of 100 pesos a day. Bernadette Ubaldo, who squats with her family in a shack along a waterway not far from the Manila airport, borrowed from a five-six lender to buy a used refrigerator. "Sometimes we do five-six for food," she says sheepishly.
If you live in the U.S. or the U.K., you can take recorded deeds for granted; the notion of enforceable rights to real estate goes back to feudal times. On that foundation of ownership is built a huge edifice of capital that includes trillions of dollars in mortgage debt and trillions in real estate equity. Contrast that with the many parts of the world, from Mexico to Russia, where control of land has in the past century lurched from aristocrats to government confiscators to peasant squatters. It is likely, though, that basic property ownership early on underpinned economic growth. Nobel Prize-winning economic historian Douglass C. North asserts that the development of enforceable property rights was critical to mankind's move from hunter-gatherer to agricultural societies about 10,000 years ago.
What passes for property law in the Third World would give shudders to any mortgage lender. Consider the case of Rey Estillore, 60, who taught biological science at Manila's University of the East for 20 years. In 1993, one month after Estillore moved in to the simple home he'd built in Veteran's Village, a longtime squatter zone in Quezon City set aside for families of those who fought in World War II, a woman showed up claiming she owned his lot.
"I did some research on this before coming here, and I found out her claim was fraudulent," he says, sitting in the front room of his spartan home. "There are unscrupulous people who have connections within the bureaus and get spurious titles." The court case has so far cost him $2,500, and that's with legal help from friends at minimal or no charge. In the meantime, Estillore tries to scrape out a living in the printing business, with 1960-era presses that can't compete with more modern machinery. Without land to use as collateral, he can't afford better.
Scratch the surface and some 45 million of Estillore's 76 million countrymen probably have a similar story to tell. Philippine President Joseph "Erap" Estrada, who ran for office with the slogan "Erap para sa Mahirap"--Erap for the poor--realized previous administrations' efforts to alleviate poverty hadn't worked. So his government brought in De Soto and his team. Their findings: The country's legal and administrative systems force about 60% of Filipinos to hold their real estate assets outside the law. That translates into an estimated $133 billion in dead capital in the country--assets incapable of being used as collateral, mortgaged or easily traded.
De Soto's think tank is now working on legislation to streamline, among other things, the land title process while addressing the plight of millions of squatters, a myriad of government-established and private settlements and the complex history of Filipino property rights. They hope to have the laws ready to go in two years.
Change will come more slowly in Egypt. Zein El Abdeen, a 37-year-old Cairo taxi driver, lives with his wife and 9-month-old daughter, his parents, grandmother and his two sisters in a 900-square-foot home where his father has squatted for 40 years. The government has allowed El Abdeen and his neighbors to live on state-owned land (it belongs to the Ministry of Endowment), but has never granted them official recognition. "We're all aware of the bad part about living as we do," says El Abdeen. "At any moment the ministry could demand that we vacate this area."
El Abdeen dreams of opening a small factory to make plastic dishes. "But I need $1,500 to start, and I don't have anyone to lend me the money," he laments. "My father's home is worth around $35,000, but unfortunately he doesn't have papers, and no one will accept it as a guarantee."
De Soto's team, along with the Egyptian Center for Economic Studies, found that to acquire and legally register a lot on state-owned desert land in Egypt requires dealing with 31 public and private agencies, and red tape that can last from 5 to 14 years. No wonder 85% of Egyptians live in homes without functioning property titles.
Then there's Russia, where the very idea of middle-class property ownership is foreign. Plots of land are registered in one office, buildings in another. Meanwhile, to get a bank loan, one must put up 150% -200% of the face value of the loan in collateral, plus get three guarantors with good incomes. On top of that, it takes two months for the bank to process; interest rates are currently around 45%. But the cost of obtaining documents, presenting a business plan and getting everything notarized in addition to the other requirements make such loans out of the question for many small entrepreneurs.
Anna Kostrova, 30, is a born entrepreneur. Near her home in Dzerzhinsk, Nizhny Novgorod (250 miles northeast of Moscow), she ran akiosk near the bus stop selling chewing gum, cigarettes and candies when she was 25. After she got married and had two children, she and her husband decided to rent a small cafeteria. They were able to borrow money from the bank to get it started, but that was before the 1998 crisis. With her assets devalued she couldn't go back to the bank for the loan she wanted for a soda dispensing machine. Were it not for the assistance of a local microlending organization, Vozmozhnost, Kostrova would not have been able to expand her business. "I have a lot of plans to materialize," she says, thankful that she has a financing alternative.
Microlending--disbursing working capital in tiny doses to small businesses and solo proprietors--is now all the rage at the World Bank and other antipoverty agencies. But a well-entrenched system of deeds and mortgages would make this specially designed lending a lot more meaningful.
Stephan Schmidheiny, a billionaire Swiss philanthropist whose Latin America-focused Avina foundation has funded De Soto, says as much: "An important part of the work we do in sustainable development and entrepreneurial education is the framework. I found Hernando's approach the most convincing of any. The whole world talks about poverty alleviation, but very few have a practical idea on how to do it. He has."
DeSoto figures only 25 of the world's 207 countries are reaping the benefits of having a contractual, urban society. In the rest, the people congregate, but they lack a legal basis for exchange. "It's the industrial revolution happening 150 years later," he says. Think of it: It's not so much the lack of capitalist ethos that impoverishes the people of Peru or Madagascar, but the lack of durable capital that can be traded back and forth. Absent that basis for capital markets, the billions of dollars of capital showered on the world's poor by international agencies is like seed falling on barren ground.
A side effect of granting formal title to the poor's assets is a boost to government coffers. In Peru 276,000 extralegal entrepreneurs recorded their businesses voluntarily from 1991 to 1994. Over that period, the tax revenue from the formerly extralegal businesses was $1.2 billion. But the majority of the informal sector isn't staying outside the law simply to avoid paying taxes. The truth is, doing business outside the law presents all kinds of added costs. In Peru 15% of gross income in extralegal manufacturing is paid out in bribes, says De Soto.
As it stands now, De Soto's approach is promising but not proven. In Peru only a small percentage of the country's informal sector has new land titles. In Haiti, where his team began work in 1997, the package of laws they designed still awaits passage by the Congress. In Egypt, where De Soto began in 1998 and has 12 Peruvians and 30 Egyptians at work, the detailed assessment of the existing property and legal situation is under way; the Philippines is at an earlier stage of assessment.
The true test of his ideas will come after they've been tried in a variety of developing nations. If he can help alleviate poverty through legal reform and properly titling the slums of Latin America, an Islamic country, an Asian ex-colony and a former communist nation, De Soto will have truly proven his theory. And the Third World will owe him a big debt of gratitude.
terça-feira, 4 de dezembro de 2012
sábado, 1 de dezembro de 2012
March / 2012 DOP Notes Rebelle: A Congolese Tale in Incredible Colour
http://www.csc.ca/news/default.asp?aID=1559
In the spring of 2011, Nicolas Bolduc csc travelled from Montreal to the Democratic Republic of the Congo to shoot Kim Nguyen’s latest featureRebelle, a drama about teenagers fighting with a rebel army. Bolduc had worked with Nguyen before, lensing his 2010 film La cité.
Other films Bolduc has shot include Le banquet (2008) and Denis Villeneuve’s short film Next Floor.
THE APPROACH
The Congolese way of life has an energy that director Kim Nguyen wanted to capture. He had visited Kenya, Burundi, Cameroon and Rwanda before choosing the Democratic Republic of the Congo. From Montreal I couldn’t quite understand the choice from a cinematographer’s standpoint. The pictures Kim had showed me after finding the first locations were so alien to me that I couldn’t even imagine shooting in a country so vast, chaotic and unfriendly. I couldn’t see the film. But Kim had felt something over there and it was difficult for him to explain what it was. Realism was the most important part of our work on the film, and the challenge was trying to capture the magic that transcends everyday life there.
As the plane approached the capital, Kinshasa, I could see thousands of grey metal rooftops stretched out as far as the eye can see, all scattered between trees like sprouts of broccoli. Abandoned, rust-coloured planes -- some no more than 10 years old -- sat on the runway, looted and gutted. I stepped out of the airport to a bustling crowd of taxi drivers, Congolese families, and people who were obvious airport pickpockets. It all was very chaotic and made me a bit uneasy. There was the smell of dust, smoke and burning plastic in the air, and the humidity mixed everything up into a salty tropical cocktail. Even accompanied by a security officer, the stories I had heard of corruption, violence and war obviously came to mind as we walked through the dark open-air parking. We drove for more than an hour toward the city on a six-lane boulevard with no street lamps, in a black cloud of dust and burning diesel. In the smog the slow traffic was lit only by the car headlights, and there were thousands of people everywhere. Some children were selling the traditional plastic bags of water to motorists. Others sold car carpets, cloths, toys or anything they could find to make a dollar. It seemed like a hell of a mess. The chauffeur leaned over and locked my door as I was texting my girlfriend about what I saw. The light of the phone in the dark could be seen from far away, he said. A minute later, a kid appeared from nowhere and fiddled at the door latch to go for the phone.
Not even an hour in Congo and my idea of the film we were going to shoot wasn’t clear, but I crossed off any classic storytelling, moody lighting and over-organized schedules serving complex camera work and machinery! All that was completely out of the question. Kim's approach seemed perfect for this place.
SHOOTING
When I was prepping La cité with Kim in 2008, we flirted with the idea of shooting it digital. In Tunisia, shooting in the desert with the dust-filled air, the washed out skies, and knowing that we were going to shoot with a lot of available light, including torches, well, there just was no compromise. Nothing could beat 35 mm. For Rebelle, we were going in a similar direction, lots of handheld with tons of natural light, but it was a more realistic tale that had to feel almost like a documentary. On top of that, there were some night scenes, and I didn’t want any of that classic "moon lighting" or any lighting, for that matter, that could feel artificial. So I didn’t even try to avoid digital, and just thinking of getting film in and out of the Congo was a logistical nightmare!
I tested the many digital formats available before the shoot, and I fell in love with the ALEXA in a flash. It was light, versatile, and I could pick it up with one hand and throw it on my shoulder for an improvised shot. The cards held 14 minutes of footage, and some takes would actually fill up the card. Sometimes during a very long take, so as not to break the actors' bubble, I would drop the camera on a thigh and my assistant would quietly reload in 10 seconds in the midst of the action. What an evolution! And the digital eyepiece was so bright and so precise that I could adjust the aperture by eye on the fly. It even gave any milky sky contrasted with dark black skin the depth I could filter and colour time as easily as with film.
There is no "culture" as we know it in Kinshasa. No theatre, no cinemas, no museums. But there are thousands of artists waiting to be pushed in the right direction. They don’t have the means to create, but the raw talent is quite remarkable. The kids Kim cast for the film lived on the streets. They had no parents and no education. They couldn’t even read or write, but their energy was astounding and genuine. Since they couldn’t read the script, the dialogue was improvised, and given that they weren’t trained actors, we shot the film in continuity to give them a sense of the complete story. Page one was day one of principal photography, and Kim took it one day at a time, feeding them information gradually. They were living the film as we went through the pages, and so was I. I woke up every morning without knowing what was to come, or how to shoot it. How rare is that in this business?
On set we would discuss the plan of action, and I would usually give myself a 300-degree radius workspace so I could pan and hop around the actors with Eric Bensoussan my first AC, and François Péloquin the boom operator. The set was always prepped to be shot from any angle. We would never rehearse because I feared we would miss the best action, and Kim wanted to keep the spontaneity in the acting. If we had to shoot something more than once, I became self-conscious, and the camera work didn’t feel as natural, as improvised, as documentary. If I knew too much what was going to happen, the feeling was lost. If we were loosing spontaneity, I would quickly tell Kim that I’d do something different in the next take. I would change the framing dramatically, back up quickly or get really close in the action. This was a game I loved to play with Eric the focus puller, who never got a chance to take a single mark on the whole film! When I would improvise suddenly, he was fantastic at picking up the pace and – I don’t know how – never got crosschecked. Except one time, on the second day of shooting, in a village plagued by cholera in real life, Eric was running madly at my side, and we were zigzagging between fake rebels shooting their way through a village. I felt him trip and fall and roll in a heap of garbage and torn metal. He got up dazed and unharmed, but he admitted that his judo years had come back to save his ass. The shot was in focus till he dropped. That’s a truly devoted professional.
On La cité the desert light had a soft, round texture, almost too perfect for photography. The February skies brought tons of dust and sand-pumped clouds that would reflect the sun like the biggest unbleached bounce I could ever dream of. Sometimes when the sun was out, I only had a difference of a single stop on the light meter between shadow and light. It was quite incredible. Kinshasa, on the other hand, is south of the equator, and July is their winter. During the two months I was there, the clouds were very low and thin and they felt wet. My Western instinct was constantly telling me it was going to rain, but it never did in two months. Not a single drop. The skies were milky, soft and terribly polluted. Three hours before the sun would set, it became an orange orb in the sky, as if it were setting. There was something very apocalyptic about it. The city itself has 8 million people packed in a cloud of diesel and humidity with open-air sewers and burning waste on the street.
To go as natural as possible, the simpler I built a lighting and camera package the more liberty I had and the more I could be in the actors' physical bubble. Kim and I always wanted to be close to Rachel Mwanza – who plays the lead Komona – with a 32 or a 40 mm, and this was quite challenging from the start because if there’s something insane to non-actors it's those three bumbling fools who are jumping around them every time they hear, "Action!" The actors had to get used to me and accept my presence, and they could never be intimidated by me, never wait for me, never redo a take because of me and never think I was anything other than part of what they had to do.
For the lenses, I opted for the Ultra-Primes because they’re sharp as hell, but also because they’re lighter than the Cookes for handheld. Furthermore, in wide-open mode the Ultras don’t have that strange circular flare effect like the Cookes do. Then I got the new SHAPE handheld grips that are made in Montreal, and they made an incredible difference for the camera work. While framing, I could adjust the handles with a quick click of a button and modify the configuration of my hands to almost anywhere around the lenses and follow focus. This was truly a major step for holding longer takes.
For the lighting package, while intentionally shooting in a 300-degree radius, large bleached bounces were often of no use, and HMI lights during the day were out of the question. In the jungle, there’s nothing I hate more than feeling the shadow of an HMI, bounced or not. I didn’t want to "feel" any light, and I was often so close with a 40 mm that I would have had problems with shadows anyways. But mostly – since I got so close to the actors, and their skin is so dark – I avoided the square bounce effect in the eyes of the actors. That felt phony and staged. Black actors have fantastic reflective skin to film, and the light, be it natural or artificial, just envelops their faces elegantly. Trying to light them artificially so that it seems natural isn’t as simple as with Caucasians, I find.
The only times we lit with HMI were for those rare day interior scenes, and I used the 1.8 ARRIs that are very powerful and that can be plugged into a wall. I would then bounce the light on an existing surface so the eye of the actor would reflect the set and not a white artificial surface. We also had a couple of small tungsten lights in the truck, some 650s, 300s and peppers that we used for the night shots, but I rarely used them, preferring normal sockets with bulbs that I could actually put in the shot or just throw on the ground like they would have done in real life.
One scene in the film that I’m quite fond of is the rebel camp scene at night. We were shooting at an old palace that Mobutu Sese Seko – the crazy dictator that ruled the country for more than 30 years - had built in the 1980s. The palace was inspired by a visit he made to China where he had been so fascinated by the Imperial Palace that he flew in 200 Chinese architects and painters and built a Chinese palace with a view on the Congo River. The insane buildings and ponds - where he would throw unwanted guests in the basin with the crocodiles - were now an abandoned concrete ruin, inhabited by thousands of bats. Our rebel camp, set in the old crocodile basin, was the biggest set of the film. The night scene was a victorious rebel party thrown by the leader to congratulate the soldiers on a successful assault. On the menu: an improvised soccer game, musicians, dancing, food grills on wood fires, the works. Rebel sentinels surveyed the camp, and actors roamed the scene participating in the celebration.
I was thinking if real rebels were having a party in this exact spot, how would they have lit the place with the little they had? So to remain authentic to our approach, I wanted to light the set, not the actors, and still be able to shoot 300 degrees. I asked our incredible set designer Emmanuel Fréchette to hang bare neons on the walls here and there and have a couple of wooden stands lying around on the set where I could suspend some clear household bulbs. We also built real wood fires everywhere, and I had the art department get the rebel vehicles' headlights pointing in the direction of the soccer game. That way, the camera was always getting a light in the frame at any moment or a violent flare. Even the main palace building in the background was lit simply with a double 4-foot neon thrown on the ground. The effect was amazing and the ALEXA was getting it all with so little light. We threw in a little smoke to get some silhouettes, and I put the camera on my shoulder. We did two improvised 14-minute takes of the whole scene without any rehearsals. I jumped around the kids playing soccer, I ran between them to catch some of the actors in the melee, I shot the sentinels guarding the citadel, I got wide shots and close-ups of the musicians, others eating, dancing, laughing, whatever I saw that could be cool. In two long takes, the scene could never be more natural. No one knew where I would be going next, and it kept the actors and extras in the moment and the team on their toes. In this case, the realism of the lighting was more important than the classic physical beauty of it. And it came out great.
Films are not shot in Kinshasa, or anywhere in the Congo, for that matter. The reasons are of course political, and that is why hundreds of United Nations trucks patrol the city. The armed rebels are outside the city, thank God, but when the sun sets in Kinshasa, it’s to each his own. The under-lit streets are very dangerous and no one goes out at night without a chauffeur, locked inside an SUV. Gangs of kids – the chégué - are hidden in shadows. These are just street kids with no families, trying to make a dollar. They have no guns because they’re too expensive, but knives and machetes are common.
In the script, there were a lot of night scenes, but they were almost all changed to day scenes because of the dangers of shooting night. We needed more guards and more police protection, but because of the corruption we couldn’t even trust the police.
This is why this film for me was not just a film; it had much more meaning than anything I’ve shot. Upon my return, my impressions of Kinshasa are a never-ending palette of colours, lights and shadows that stayed printed on my retina for months. Just can't wait to shoot like that again.
DOP Notes
Rebelle: A Congolese Tale in Incredible Colour
Rebelle: A Congolese Tale in Incredible Colour
by Nicolas Bolduc csc
In the spring of 2011, Nicolas Bolduc csc travelled from Montreal to the Democratic Republic of the Congo to shoot Kim Nguyen's latest feature Rebelle, a drama about teenagers fighting with a rebel army. Bolduc had worked with Nguyen before, lensing his 2010 film La cité. Other films Bolduc has shot include Le banquet (2008) and Denis Villeneuve's short film Next Floor.
 |
In the spring of 2011, Nicolas Bolduc csc travelled from Montreal to the Democratic Republic of the Congo to shoot Kim Nguyen’s latest featureRebelle, a drama about teenagers fighting with a rebel army. Bolduc had worked with Nguyen before, lensing his 2010 film La cité.
Other films Bolduc has shot include Le banquet (2008) and Denis Villeneuve’s short film Next Floor.
THE APPROACH
The Congolese way of life has an energy that director Kim Nguyen wanted to capture. He had visited Kenya, Burundi, Cameroon and Rwanda before choosing the Democratic Republic of the Congo. From Montreal I couldn’t quite understand the choice from a cinematographer’s standpoint. The pictures Kim had showed me after finding the first locations were so alien to me that I couldn’t even imagine shooting in a country so vast, chaotic and unfriendly. I couldn’t see the film. But Kim had felt something over there and it was difficult for him to explain what it was. Realism was the most important part of our work on the film, and the challenge was trying to capture the magic that transcends everyday life there.
 |
As the plane approached the capital, Kinshasa, I could see thousands of grey metal rooftops stretched out as far as the eye can see, all scattered between trees like sprouts of broccoli. Abandoned, rust-coloured planes -- some no more than 10 years old -- sat on the runway, looted and gutted. I stepped out of the airport to a bustling crowd of taxi drivers, Congolese families, and people who were obvious airport pickpockets. It all was very chaotic and made me a bit uneasy. There was the smell of dust, smoke and burning plastic in the air, and the humidity mixed everything up into a salty tropical cocktail. Even accompanied by a security officer, the stories I had heard of corruption, violence and war obviously came to mind as we walked through the dark open-air parking. We drove for more than an hour toward the city on a six-lane boulevard with no street lamps, in a black cloud of dust and burning diesel. In the smog the slow traffic was lit only by the car headlights, and there were thousands of people everywhere. Some children were selling the traditional plastic bags of water to motorists. Others sold car carpets, cloths, toys or anything they could find to make a dollar. It seemed like a hell of a mess. The chauffeur leaned over and locked my door as I was texting my girlfriend about what I saw. The light of the phone in the dark could be seen from far away, he said. A minute later, a kid appeared from nowhere and fiddled at the door latch to go for the phone.
Not even an hour in Congo and my idea of the film we were going to shoot wasn’t clear, but I crossed off any classic storytelling, moody lighting and over-organized schedules serving complex camera work and machinery! All that was completely out of the question. Kim's approach seemed perfect for this place.
SHOOTING
When I was prepping La cité with Kim in 2008, we flirted with the idea of shooting it digital. In Tunisia, shooting in the desert with the dust-filled air, the washed out skies, and knowing that we were going to shoot with a lot of available light, including torches, well, there just was no compromise. Nothing could beat 35 mm. For Rebelle, we were going in a similar direction, lots of handheld with tons of natural light, but it was a more realistic tale that had to feel almost like a documentary. On top of that, there were some night scenes, and I didn’t want any of that classic "moon lighting" or any lighting, for that matter, that could feel artificial. So I didn’t even try to avoid digital, and just thinking of getting film in and out of the Congo was a logistical nightmare!
I tested the many digital formats available before the shoot, and I fell in love with the ALEXA in a flash. It was light, versatile, and I could pick it up with one hand and throw it on my shoulder for an improvised shot. The cards held 14 minutes of footage, and some takes would actually fill up the card. Sometimes during a very long take, so as not to break the actors' bubble, I would drop the camera on a thigh and my assistant would quietly reload in 10 seconds in the midst of the action. What an evolution! And the digital eyepiece was so bright and so precise that I could adjust the aperture by eye on the fly. It even gave any milky sky contrasted with dark black skin the depth I could filter and colour time as easily as with film.
There is no "culture" as we know it in Kinshasa. No theatre, no cinemas, no museums. But there are thousands of artists waiting to be pushed in the right direction. They don’t have the means to create, but the raw talent is quite remarkable. The kids Kim cast for the film lived on the streets. They had no parents and no education. They couldn’t even read or write, but their energy was astounding and genuine. Since they couldn’t read the script, the dialogue was improvised, and given that they weren’t trained actors, we shot the film in continuity to give them a sense of the complete story. Page one was day one of principal photography, and Kim took it one day at a time, feeding them information gradually. They were living the film as we went through the pages, and so was I. I woke up every morning without knowing what was to come, or how to shoot it. How rare is that in this business?
On set we would discuss the plan of action, and I would usually give myself a 300-degree radius workspace so I could pan and hop around the actors with Eric Bensoussan my first AC, and François Péloquin the boom operator. The set was always prepped to be shot from any angle. We would never rehearse because I feared we would miss the best action, and Kim wanted to keep the spontaneity in the acting. If we had to shoot something more than once, I became self-conscious, and the camera work didn’t feel as natural, as improvised, as documentary. If I knew too much what was going to happen, the feeling was lost. If we were loosing spontaneity, I would quickly tell Kim that I’d do something different in the next take. I would change the framing dramatically, back up quickly or get really close in the action. This was a game I loved to play with Eric the focus puller, who never got a chance to take a single mark on the whole film! When I would improvise suddenly, he was fantastic at picking up the pace and – I don’t know how – never got crosschecked. Except one time, on the second day of shooting, in a village plagued by cholera in real life, Eric was running madly at my side, and we were zigzagging between fake rebels shooting their way through a village. I felt him trip and fall and roll in a heap of garbage and torn metal. He got up dazed and unharmed, but he admitted that his judo years had come back to save his ass. The shot was in focus till he dropped. That’s a truly devoted professional.
 |
On La cité the desert light had a soft, round texture, almost too perfect for photography. The February skies brought tons of dust and sand-pumped clouds that would reflect the sun like the biggest unbleached bounce I could ever dream of. Sometimes when the sun was out, I only had a difference of a single stop on the light meter between shadow and light. It was quite incredible. Kinshasa, on the other hand, is south of the equator, and July is their winter. During the two months I was there, the clouds were very low and thin and they felt wet. My Western instinct was constantly telling me it was going to rain, but it never did in two months. Not a single drop. The skies were milky, soft and terribly polluted. Three hours before the sun would set, it became an orange orb in the sky, as if it were setting. There was something very apocalyptic about it. The city itself has 8 million people packed in a cloud of diesel and humidity with open-air sewers and burning waste on the street.
To go as natural as possible, the simpler I built a lighting and camera package the more liberty I had and the more I could be in the actors' physical bubble. Kim and I always wanted to be close to Rachel Mwanza – who plays the lead Komona – with a 32 or a 40 mm, and this was quite challenging from the start because if there’s something insane to non-actors it's those three bumbling fools who are jumping around them every time they hear, "Action!" The actors had to get used to me and accept my presence, and they could never be intimidated by me, never wait for me, never redo a take because of me and never think I was anything other than part of what they had to do.
For the lenses, I opted for the Ultra-Primes because they’re sharp as hell, but also because they’re lighter than the Cookes for handheld. Furthermore, in wide-open mode the Ultras don’t have that strange circular flare effect like the Cookes do. Then I got the new SHAPE handheld grips that are made in Montreal, and they made an incredible difference for the camera work. While framing, I could adjust the handles with a quick click of a button and modify the configuration of my hands to almost anywhere around the lenses and follow focus. This was truly a major step for holding longer takes.
For the lighting package, while intentionally shooting in a 300-degree radius, large bleached bounces were often of no use, and HMI lights during the day were out of the question. In the jungle, there’s nothing I hate more than feeling the shadow of an HMI, bounced or not. I didn’t want to "feel" any light, and I was often so close with a 40 mm that I would have had problems with shadows anyways. But mostly – since I got so close to the actors, and their skin is so dark – I avoided the square bounce effect in the eyes of the actors. That felt phony and staged. Black actors have fantastic reflective skin to film, and the light, be it natural or artificial, just envelops their faces elegantly. Trying to light them artificially so that it seems natural isn’t as simple as with Caucasians, I find.
The only times we lit with HMI were for those rare day interior scenes, and I used the 1.8 ARRIs that are very powerful and that can be plugged into a wall. I would then bounce the light on an existing surface so the eye of the actor would reflect the set and not a white artificial surface. We also had a couple of small tungsten lights in the truck, some 650s, 300s and peppers that we used for the night shots, but I rarely used them, preferring normal sockets with bulbs that I could actually put in the shot or just throw on the ground like they would have done in real life.
 |
One scene in the film that I’m quite fond of is the rebel camp scene at night. We were shooting at an old palace that Mobutu Sese Seko – the crazy dictator that ruled the country for more than 30 years - had built in the 1980s. The palace was inspired by a visit he made to China where he had been so fascinated by the Imperial Palace that he flew in 200 Chinese architects and painters and built a Chinese palace with a view on the Congo River. The insane buildings and ponds - where he would throw unwanted guests in the basin with the crocodiles - were now an abandoned concrete ruin, inhabited by thousands of bats. Our rebel camp, set in the old crocodile basin, was the biggest set of the film. The night scene was a victorious rebel party thrown by the leader to congratulate the soldiers on a successful assault. On the menu: an improvised soccer game, musicians, dancing, food grills on wood fires, the works. Rebel sentinels surveyed the camp, and actors roamed the scene participating in the celebration.
I was thinking if real rebels were having a party in this exact spot, how would they have lit the place with the little they had? So to remain authentic to our approach, I wanted to light the set, not the actors, and still be able to shoot 300 degrees. I asked our incredible set designer Emmanuel Fréchette to hang bare neons on the walls here and there and have a couple of wooden stands lying around on the set where I could suspend some clear household bulbs. We also built real wood fires everywhere, and I had the art department get the rebel vehicles' headlights pointing in the direction of the soccer game. That way, the camera was always getting a light in the frame at any moment or a violent flare. Even the main palace building in the background was lit simply with a double 4-foot neon thrown on the ground. The effect was amazing and the ALEXA was getting it all with so little light. We threw in a little smoke to get some silhouettes, and I put the camera on my shoulder. We did two improvised 14-minute takes of the whole scene without any rehearsals. I jumped around the kids playing soccer, I ran between them to catch some of the actors in the melee, I shot the sentinels guarding the citadel, I got wide shots and close-ups of the musicians, others eating, dancing, laughing, whatever I saw that could be cool. In two long takes, the scene could never be more natural. No one knew where I would be going next, and it kept the actors and extras in the moment and the team on their toes. In this case, the realism of the lighting was more important than the classic physical beauty of it. And it came out great.
Films are not shot in Kinshasa, or anywhere in the Congo, for that matter. The reasons are of course political, and that is why hundreds of United Nations trucks patrol the city. The armed rebels are outside the city, thank God, but when the sun sets in Kinshasa, it’s to each his own. The under-lit streets are very dangerous and no one goes out at night without a chauffeur, locked inside an SUV. Gangs of kids – the chégué - are hidden in shadows. These are just street kids with no families, trying to make a dollar. They have no guns because they’re too expensive, but knives and machetes are common.
In the script, there were a lot of night scenes, but they were almost all changed to day scenes because of the dangers of shooting night. We needed more guards and more police protection, but because of the corruption we couldn’t even trust the police.
This is why this film for me was not just a film; it had much more meaning than anything I’ve shot. Upon my return, my impressions of Kinshasa are a never-ending palette of colours, lights and shadows that stayed printed on my retina for months. Just can't wait to shoot like that again.
Subscrever:
Comentários (Atom)