Six or seven years ago Amy, Donato and I were asked by director/videographer Juan Manuel Sepulveda to look at some early rushes of what became his Ballad of Oppenheimer Park (2016), a powerful documentary concerning a group of mostly indigenous people living in Vancouver's downtown eastside. The production raised a number of ethical questions that resulted in SFU's School for Contemporary Arts (where Sepulveda was a grad student) instituting policy guidelines for artists working with lives not their own.
My favourite scene in Ballad -- it's social punctum, as it were -- comes at 17:10, when a park denizen asks the camera operator to "Put the camera this way a little."
The operator complies, only to adjust it slightly for what I take to be aesthetic reasons.
Better, right? A diagonal composition (now pointing due north).
The Ballad of Oppenheimer Park can be seen here for a limited time only.
(Note: my screen grabs are reformats of the original picture ratio.)
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