Freelancer Anthea Harvey, is and experienced Film Editor who recently finished the documentary film Inside Hezbolla, an MI2 Production. Anthea shares her work experience while editing in Tunisia.
Inside Hezbollah is an observational documentary looking at the popular support for Hezbollah in South Lebanon and following the build up to the 2009 elections. The Director was looking for a British editor to collaborate on the film in order to add the Western perspective to his own experience, and to add UK television high production values and documentary style to the film. The film was to be privately funded and sold to worldwide distributors/broadcasters on completion.
The edit was initially supposed to be in Beirut, with the opportunity that gave for shooting pick-ups, but the security situation after the elections meant that working on a film about Hezbollah (seen as a terrorist organisation by many) might have been dangerous.
As the Director is Tunisian we relocated and for the first two weeks of the edit I was put up in a resort hotel on the Tunisian coast – the edit suite was in my sitting room and I could swim in the pools or the sea when I took a break from the edit!
For the remaining 6 weeks I commuted between my budget hotel in Tunis to the Director’s post-production suite, housed in a converted garage next to his home. This involved directing Arabic speaking taxi drivers, in French, across the city to the suburbs. A daily linguistic adventure!
The edit suite was fully equipped, but still under construction, with a dubbing studio being built into the same space while I was cutting. With temperatures outside hitting 38-40º the air conditioning was always on – but unfortunately that kept overloading the LX supply so power cuts were frequent… [cmd S, cmd S, cmd S]
Working hours were much shorter than in the UK, with a 9-4 day being quite normal, and breaks for long chats and the occasional swim being almost insisted on.
There was another editor working alongside me from time to time, who was cutting teasers and extracts from the same doc material, but targeted to the Arabic market. It was fascinating to see how different the editing style was. Sequences were cut like Hollywood film trailers, and music was big, loud and dramatic. The commentary style was equally dramatic, and was intended to lead the viewer rather than appear impartial. It was useful to see the Arabic TV style when it came to working on the voiceover script with the director, as I could see where he was coming from and show how it differed from the British doc style he wanted me to lend to the film.
Inside Hezbollah was filmed in Arabic and French, but the film was to be dubbed into English with an English commentary. Unfortunately translations weren’t ready by the time I started the cut, and arrived sporadically through the edit (right up to the day we recorded the English dub!).
The last few weeks of the edit were during Ramadan, so everyone was fasting from 6am until 7 or 8pm, and most of the businesses in the country were either closed for a month or only open for a couple of hours in the morning. It was really interesting to see how the working patterns of everyone in the team changed to adapt to the Ramadan fast. I’m not a muslim, but I didn’t want to offend the people I was working with, so I would usually fast during the day and only drink water (or sneak a biscuit) when there was no-one else in the room. The Director tended to work from midnight to 4 am, so he would review the cut and work on scripts while I was at my hotel, and I’d come in to his comments in the morning. In the evenings I benefited from the family breaking fast, joining them for a big noisy home-cooked meal. They really made feel part of the family.