I saw this film at Sundance and was blown away. The director, Jason Kohn, spent 5 years making his debut documentary feature, after leaving Errol Morris’ company when he was 23. The influence of Morris is evident but Kohn has created something unique and dazzling in his interweaving of stories about money-laundering frog farms, kidnappings, ear reconstructions and political corruption in Brazil (all connected I assure you).

I went to hear Kohn speak at Kodak in New York yesterday and was doubly impressed as he described the painstaking preparation that went into every sequence. The documentary was entirely shot on film (except for 1 interview toward the end) and Kohn believes Manda Bala may be the last documentary to shoot interviews this way because it is such a slow and expensive process (reloading every 11 minutes for example). I was also amazed to hear that only 2 shots in the film were handheld (the work of cinematographer Heloisa Passos is particularly impressive). Kohn used a predominantly commercial crew in Sao Paolo as there isn’t really a vibrant independent film community there.

They ended up with 60 hours of footage which is a tiny shooting ratio for a documentary in this era of digital production - but still ended up editing for 17 months. The music in the film is awesome. Kohn collects Brazilian music and utilized some of his collection.

Manda Bala is screening as part of the Sundance Institute at BAM program but I believe it is sold out. The good news is it will be released theatrically in the US later this year.

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 7th, 2007 at 7:48 pm and is filed under Documentary. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.