Yung Chang's This Is Not a Movie is playing on MUBI from April 18 - May 17, 2020 in the CANADA NOW series.
Greetings cinephiles and seekers of truth!
I’m thrilled to be presenting my latest film, This Is Not a Movie, with our collaboration with MUBI.
This Is Not a Movie is the first feature documentary that I’ve made since my collaborations with Montreal’s EyeSteelFilm. How do you tell a story that spans 40 years of journalism? By assembling a team of creators from producers Anita Lee (NFB), Allyson Luchak, Nelofer Pazira, and Ingmar Trost to cinematographer Duraid Munajim to editor Mike Munn to my composers Ohad Benchetrit and Justin Small.
When I first started researching the film, I imagined that Robert Fisk would be a very somber, brooding, morose character. I thought he would be intimidating. Here’s a dinosaur of journalism, a part of a “lost generation” of reporters, the only Western journalist to interview Osama bin Laden three times and he’s going to eat me alive! But, in fact, he’s quite the opposite: welcoming, charming—always relentless and intense—but verbose and generous. This pointed me in the creative direction of the film: Join Fisk in his present-day investigations and let his conversations guide the structure of the movie. As a result, I think Mike, the editor, captured the essence of the present to past organic structure of the film exactly as I had imagined it: Free-flowing, yet hard-hitting, driving Fisk’s ideas that are intricately woven into the spine of the film, almost like a dream (or nightmare)-like essay. You come out of it in a daze. But hopefully aggravated to ask bold questions and maybe a energized with a tad bit of anger against the inhumanities those in power wreak on individuals.
I had no idea where the film would take us... it’s the first film that I couldn’t impose a defined structure or narrative. So I just had to go with it.
And that was also to compliment the journalistic integrity of the film. I’m not a journalist, I’m a filmmaker, so I had to shed a lot of my filmmaking habits especially when making observational film. There’s no second takes. The production had to be messy and fast and Duraid couldn’t miss any of the dramatic moments we needed for the film. Joining Fisk in Bosnia felt like I was part of an espionage film, but without the Hollywood sheen. It was dangerous to visit arms factories and weapons dealers. It was that trip in particular that taught me a lot about the kind of journalism Fisk does.
I want this film to test your own beliefs of journalism, the subjectivity of truth, our complicity in war, and what, if any, is the relevance of the written word in the changing face of media consumption.
Especially now, while we live through a pandemic, sorting fact from fiction becomes our responsibility as citizens of this fragile world to ensure our own collective survival.
Thank you for your time.
P.S. All of the stories Fisk writes about in the film are available on his newspaper, The Independent. I encourage you to follow-up with this film by reading some of his columns and especially his books, The Great War for Civilization and Pity the Nation.