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I find striving consciously for the impossible a life-affirming characteristic. A complementarian contradiction.

Creating Character driven Documentary holds this contradiction. Deciding what the film is about while acknowledging that reality for sure will change this decision.

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The documentary film genre consists of a mix of components, some within and some beyond our control.

The documentaries where we use interviews, archive, voice over, animation etc. are to a certain extent under our artistic control.

With Character driven Documentary film it is the opposite.

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For me a character is a person that the film presents with a past, a present and a future. In direct cinema it is one of the biggest achievements when you are able to spot and film events in the present in a way that will tell us something about the past.

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There is no such thing as stories in reality, only events. A chain of events, random and chaotic. It is what you and I do between the time we get up and go to bed. Or after …

Events happen, stories are created. Events take place in the real world, stories take place in art.

And yet, we very often mix them up.

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I believe it is a common human reaction to avoid frustration if possible. So, it is very tempting to fool ourselves into believing that by describing events, we tell a story.

If reality holds some very dramatic events, it is easy to get blinded by reality.

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We applied for deficit coverage from the Danish Film Institute. Ten minutes into the screening the film commissioner fell asleep. After long discussions we decided not to wake him up.

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The main obstacle is that we have adopted the terminology from fiction. The result being that it is a total mess.

I suggest abandoning the fiction terminology from documentary film all together, and to name the documentary text according to its purpose.

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I believe that this contains what a director of a Character driven Documentary is looking for: To spot people in a situation that will generate the realization of abilities.

The inevitable story.

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Maybe the often-seen reluctance to ‘story’ is, that we hear it as a request for a specific dramaturgy when the word ‘story’ is introduced.

Or it simply is the word in itself; I mean, a story only exists when it is there – and it is not until the film is shot or even edited.

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I think that – contrary to fiction – a documentary scene can be constructed of multiple shots from different locations and different time. It makes sense to work with this dramaturgical difference in what a scene is, since we don’t control the shooting as it is the case in fiction and therefore constructs the scene in the editing not on location.

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Is it the film, that was nominated for Best Documentary at IDFA? she asked. And did not win?

I confirmed. Then she declined. And regretted not being able to offer taking it into her sales catalogue, but the timing made it too difficult.

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Light can be measured both as a dot and a wave. This is of course an impossibility but nevertheless a well-documented fact.

This is what the father of quantum mechanics, Danish Niels Bohr, named Complementarity: a relationship in which two sides of an issue not only compliment but also exclude each other.

The director of a Character driven Documentary also works in the world of complementary contradictions, conducting an artistic interpretation of real events without violating reality.

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Imagine I am sitting in my living room together with my son and daughter. I turn towards my daughter and say: ‘I have no words to express how proud it makes me to be your father’.

The framing and the position of the camera will determine the subtext of this scene: How proud I am of my daughter; how glad my words make my daughter or how sad they make my son.

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If you have two different shots in a scene, that are too complicated or unclear to understand, the audience will get confused.

If you have two different shots in a scene, that are easy to read but point in two different and unexpected directions, the audience will get curious.

It’s the unexpected combination of simplicities that creates complexity.

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She was looking for film projects for a theme evening at ARTE. She congratulated me for my good producer’s work: It’s spot on for my theme, she said.

I answered that I had no idea about the theme and that it was merely a lucky coincidence.

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A very wise DoP, I know, after many years realized that he was always looking for three different types of shootings with his characters:

The once-in-a-lifetime situations.

The routines.

The impressions.

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A sound technician friend told me, that in the days of sound tape she used to let the tape keep rolling on location when the DoP stopped filming, which very often gave some golden recordings because no one paid attention to it.

Today the sound stops when the camera stops.

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A 10-minute taxi ride shared with a commissioning editor changed my perception of their profession forever.

I referred to her as my financier. I’m not your bloody financier, she said.

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When you edit fiction, the editor refines the already created. When you edit Character driven Documentary, you create a form from the unfinished.

This means that the documentary editor needs to listen to the material differently than the fiction editor.

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A good colleague of mine, a Danish editor, usually starts the editing process by looking for moments rather than start editing the film. And especially important for him: Marking up moments is based on an emotional experience, not a search for structure. It is merely the act of registering moments that does something to him; no analysis, only reactions.

And by doing so, interesting enough he often ends up with scenes, that later tends to structure the film.