Hawke's Bay To Berlin – This Way Of Life (P.III)

This Way of Life is that rare thing – a truly quintessential Kiwi film. Shot over four years with no budget, the film follows the lives of Peter and Colleen Karena as they raise their six children on the thin edge between freedom and disaster.

The film has been selected to screen in competition at the Berlin International Film Festival, one of the top five festivals in the world.

Follow the filmmakers as they blog their journey from Hawke's Bay to Berlin.

Image: Cloud South Films.

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Part 3: That Small Dark Room

Editing is a funny thing. For me, all fired up with grabbing the perfect interview, editing is the last thing on my mind. For Tom, who dwells in the perfect frame and the ideal image, editing is a little closer.

But still that small dark room is not our natural habitat. There’s never enough air to go around and the process seems so painstakingly slow.

But for Cushla Dillion, our editor, the edit room is her kingdom. I can see the satisfaction gained from making a huge bunch of disparate shots flow together, from finding the layers of a story and making them explicable. Creating a new world an audience believes in and wants to inhabit.

Editing documentary is very different from cutting feature film where you are working from a script, telling someone else’s story.

In documentary, especially the more verité style we are addicted to, the editor must be a ‘sensitive,’ someone capable of perceiving and sensing the deeper threads of the story and connecting them on myriad levels.

Before Cushla our previous experiences with some editors was not so positive. Emotionally mechanical, technically clever ‘rationals’ without heart or deeper sensibility (Not you Ben!). So finding someone complex enough to revel in the complexity of our film is such a joy.

Bravo the real artist/editor, the revealers of meaning. They are the true storytellers.

NEWSFLASH: The German version of This Way of Life is to be called "Wie wir leben"

For more, See:
The Blog: This Way Of Life Goes To Berlin
The Trailer: This Way Of Life (official site)
Filmmaker's Site: Cloud South Films

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