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MillimeterFade to Black:
Suki Medencevic, Cinematographer
Sep 1, 2005 12:00 PM, By Michael Goldman
Bosnian DP Suki Medencevic had no intention of becoming a movie producer when he agreed to shoot Ivo Trajkov's critically acclaimed Macedonian film Golemata Voda (The Great Water) in 2002 (postproduction wrapped in 2004, and the film was released in the United States this summer). But the vagaries of film financing in Eastern Europe presented an opportunity, so Medencevic took it.
“By Eastern European standards, this was an ambitious film, and it was meant to be fully financed by the Macedonian and Czech governments,” Medencevic explains. “But there was a government change halfway through production in Macedonia, and with the change, the new government was not able to finish our financing. So we needed money to finish the film. I stepped in only because I happened to be the one able to come up with a substantial amount of money at that time, and that made me a producer.”
As it turned out, laboring on “the business side” helped Medencevic protect his precious Great Water imagery.
“I'm a cinematographer, and obviously, that is my main interest,” he says. “But by getting involved in helping to supervise the postproduction process, finding distribution, lining up a sales company, and so on, it was actually an advantage. I was able to make certain that no lesser quality print or digital version of the film got into cinemas, and that we had the best 2K master and negative. It's growing increasingly important for the cinematographer to stay involved through the [creation of the final negative]. Being a producer is actually a good way to make sure the job will be done the way you envisioned it.”
The movie tells the tale of a dying Communist politician in former Yugoslavia as he reflects on his childhood in a Stalinist-era orphanage. According to Medencevic, the story's multiple layers — present-day, extended flashbacks to 1945, and a handful of what Medencevic calls “magical realism” sequences — required extensive color manipulation, accomplished during a digital intermediate by colorist Demetri Kitsopoulos at Digital Film Lab in Copenhagen, Denmark.
After filming on Super 35mm Fuji stock (Reala 500D for day, and F-500 Tungsten for night scenes) in 2002, it took two years to finance and launch the DI — a long, excruciating, but worthwhile wait, according to Medencevic.
“I anticipated we'd do a DI right away, not only because we were shooting Super 35mm and had to digitally extract a 2.35:1 anamorphic negative for release, but also because we were doing so many color changes within certain shots,” he says. “In many scenes, we transitioned from one color scheme to another for storytelling purposes, and the DI was the only way to accomplish that. But the DI isn't the same trend in Europe yet that it is in the U.S., and it remains pretty expensive. We shot in 2002, but had financial issues in 2003 before finally finding the money to do it in 2004.”
Still, Medencevic emphasizes that Great Water, for the most part, typifies traditional European production sensibilities.
“There remains a difference in terms of how we shoot movies in Europe compared to the U.S.,” he says. “Since there is so little money, usually, the director and the DP tend to collaborate far more closely. In this case, the director is an old friend of mine. But on most films like this, I get involved early in designing the whole visual concept of the film, and I get more authority to make creative decisions. Plus, working in a place like Macedonia, you obviously have more logistical problems — you don't have communication with a lab like you would in other places. On this project, we got video dailies once a week, done by different guys — whomever happened to be working that day at the lab in Bulgaria. So, it was even more important that I got involved in designing the look early on.
“Generally, in Europe, we expect to have limited resources, and we rarely have a big lighting package. But that tends to make us very resourceful. That kind of resourcefulness, I think, is typical of European filmmaking.”
