Laura Poitras Takes Documentaries Into the Future With Field of Vision
Laura Poitras doesn’t like to rest on her laurels. Less than a year after winning a Pulitzer prize for reporting on Edward Snowden’s NSA revelations and netting an Oscar for the ensuing documentary Citizenfour, she’s back in the spotlight with Asylum: a new short-form episodic series. In it she shadows Julian Assange as he publishes classified diplomatic cables and seeks asylum in Ecuador’s London embassy
Three episodes of her series, which serve as a prequel of sorts to Citizenfour, premiered on Sunday at the New York film festival. The shorts – scored by Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails – were completed under the banner of Poitras’s new visual journalism unit, Field of Vision, which she recently launched with fellow film-maker AJ Schnack and producer/writer Charlotte Cook, in collaboration with The Intercept, the adversarial journalism website she co-founded in 2014 with Jeremy Scahill and Glenn Greenwald. Both are funded by billionaire Pierre Omidyar’s First Look Media.
Field of Vision aims to commission 40 to 50 original episodic and individual short-form nonfiction films each year. At Sunday’s premiere, Field of Vision not only screened the Asylum episodes, but also unveiled five additional commissioned shorts, some of which are now available to stream online. Standouts were Kirsten Johnson’s The Above, which ominously contrasts surveillance blimps in Afghanistan and the US, and Heloisa Passos’s moving Birdie, about a homeless fruit vendor and his two dogs trying to get by on the bustling streets of Rio (Poitras says Birdie will get follow-up installments).
Dressed all in black and seated in the sleek offices of The Intercept in Manhattan the morning after the premiere, Poitras speaks excitedly of how Field of Vision came about: “I wanted to be able to hire a team of people who would be commissioning videos – visual journalism – to see the range of people’s skills and talents within the non-fiction community.”
It was while working on the final edit of Citizenfour that she enlisted Schnack and Cook to help her with the venture. Together, the three assigned stories from around the globe that they felt merited a platform, to directors of their choosing. The results make up what they dub “the first season”. A second batch of shorts is set to debut in early 2016.
Poitras stresses that Field of Vision is first and foremost “film-maker driven”. She and her co-creators stay true to that mission by entrusting their commissioned film-makers with telling the story the best way they see fit. Directors retain copyright; and should they choose to extend the short into a feature, they can do so without interference. Contributors are paid out of the budgets Poitras and co allocate for each individual project. And while the shorts that have premiered so far are all commissioned works, they’re open to receiving pitches from film-makers unfamiliar to them.
The existence of Field of Vision was only made public earlier this month, shortly before the NYFF event was announced. Schnack says they kept the news under lock and key to avoid building hype – and potentially failing to deliver on it: “We wanted to be more just like, ‘OK here we go, and in just a few weeks you’ll start to see the work.’”
He needn’t have worried. Field of Vision is a bracing initiative that takes the documentary form into new and exciting directions. The five shorts that screened on Sunday were all unequivocally strong, as were the first few episodes of Asylum. Field of Vision’s impact has yet to be assessed, but it’s hard not to feel that Poitras, Schnack and Cook are on to something huge.
“I think creatively it opens up possibilities that maybe weren’t there before,” says Poitras. “We’d rather take risks and learn from them if things don’t work, than not take risks. There’s no reason to not take risks.”
Cook adds: “Feature films are a huge commitment. We really hope film-makers use this [new format] to play around with the art form and try different things, things they might not normally do.”
Despite their excitement over the possibilities of visual journalism, Poitras, Schnack and Cook shot down the notion that short-form film is the way of the future.
“The future is a more fluid landscape,” says Cook. “We now live in a world with so many different opportunities and different ways of consuming film-making. We’re just glad to be a part of trying new things in that way.”
Poitras insists that she still loves long-form storytelling, and that she’s in no way trying to change that with Field of Vision. In fact, she’s working out how Asylum might work as a feature. The director is still in the process of shadowing Assange, who remains under house arrest at Ecuador’s London embassy.
“To begin with something from the past and bring it to present day has really been interesting, in terms of narrative,” Poitras says of Asylum. “It’s not necessarily what I had planned when I began filming with him.”
For upcoming projects, Poitras says she’s intent on including the talents of high-profile narrative voices. She confirms that House of Cards show-runner Beau Willimon has agreed to direct something (“He’s a huge documentary fan”), and that she’s had discussions with the Bourne Ultimatum director Paul Greengrass, about contributing. She also has her sights set on Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, the brothers behind the Palme d’Or winning dramas L’Enfant and Rosetta. “There’s a kind of urgency in the way they tell stories – it’s very influenced by non-fiction storytelling,” she says of the pair.
On top of launching Field of Vision and completing Asylum, Poitras is in the midst of preparing for an exhibition at New York’s Whitney Museum of Art, set to open early next year. This marks her second collaboration with the Whitney: her films about politics post-9/11 featured in the 2012 Whitney Biennial. For the showcase, she’s creating an installation of immersive environments that build upon the themes she explored in her trilogy of films (My Country, My Country, The Oath and Citizenfour), about NSA surveillance and post-9/11 America.
[Nigel M Smith the Guardian's entertainment writer, based in Los Angeles. Formerly managing editor of Indiewire, he has also written about film and culture for USA Today, Bullet Magazine and MTV.]