Crossing Borders
July 30, 2016 at 07:36 am
Earlier this month I had the privilege of bringing Nowzad: Warzone Animal Rescue to the Crossing Borders Workshop in Asan, Korea.
Organised by the EDN – European Documentary Network and the Broadcast Content Promotion Foundation, this workshop allow me to share my work and get feedback from skilled peers attending the workshop and several experienced instructors from across Europe and Asia. I am especially thankful to have had the opportunity to receive notes from veteran editor Phil Jandaly, Producer-Editor Steven Seidenberg and the Deputy Director for First Hand Films, Gitte Hansen
In addition to the group and individual sessions, I am thankful to have had the opportunity to watch The Chinese Mayor by directed by Hao Zhou and produced by Zhao Qi and With or Without You, directed by Hyuck-jee Park and produced by Kyungsoo Han. Both documentaries took 2 or 3 years to complete and had me hooked from start to finish with their great pacing and storytelling. I was glad to have producers for both films with us for Q&A sessions after each screening.
You can check out trailers for both films here:
And fortunately, this was just the first phase of the workshop. I am looking forward to reuniting with my colleagues fro the Korea workshop at at the upcoming DOK Industry event later this year in Leipzig, Germany. There I will have the chance to pitch Nowzad: Warzone Animal Rescue along with a second project that I am currently developing with Nona Maria and Christy Anthonis in front of large panel of broadcast executives from across the world. I recognise the importance of this opportunity and I am very thankful to have it. Lastly, I would like to extend my heartfelt thanks to Mi-Jin Lee and the rest of her colleagues from the Broadcast Content Promotion Foundation of Korea for taking such good care of us while attending the workshop in Korea.
For any of my friends working in documentary either here in Asia or Europe, I would urge you to consider applying to the 2017 Crossing Borders workshop. You are sure to find it a rewarding experience.
PS: Seeing my high school buddy Chiman Song was a huge bonus too. <3 Chi-monster, hope to catch up with you again soon. ^_^
Nowzad: Warzone Animal Rescue for the 2016 Crossing Borders Workshop
July 11, 2016 at 09:28 amDear Friends & Colleagues,
For over a year now I have been developing Nowzad: Warzone Animal Rescue, a documentary series about 2014 CNN Hero of the Year Pen Farthing and his vet team at the Nowzad Animal Clinic in Kabul Afghanistan. You can check out our official trailer here:
Nowzad: Warzone Animal Rescue – Official Trailer
I am honoured to formally announce both our developmental effort around the Nowzad: Warzone Animal Rescue program and it’s selection for the 2016 Crossing Borders Workshop.
I am looking forward to attending the discussions with this year’s trainers and meeting my peers that will be attending the workshop with me. This journey has been a long one, with great promise and equally great setbacks.
Despite these challenges, I remain indebted to Pen Farthing and Nowzad Dogs, the Nowzad Team, Afghan filmmakers Ro Ya Heydari and Edris Salehi, former Nowzad Clinic general manager Louise Hastie, graphic designer Stephanie Medeiros, Independent Minds Productions editor Anna Dollero, Terry Garcia at the National Geographic Society and Mark Bauman at Smithsonian Enterprises for each of their valuable contributions to this journey.
I would like to especially thank Chris Humphrey, my colleague at A+E Networks Asia, for encouraging me to send in the program for consideration. You can learn more about the Crossing Borders Documentary Campus here:
http://www.documentary-campus.com
Wish us luck.
Yrs,
– Waise Azimi
Si Medea
July 11, 2016 at 08:35 amA few years ago Jenny and Blonski invited me to visit with them at their new apartment in QC. There, I had a chance to meet their pup Angelo for the first time while Jenny cooked up a delicious, aromatic chicken and rice dish for us.
And over that lunch we sat down together to discuss their vision to create a space where they and likeminded artists could find a canvas for their art. I was honoured that they thought to invite me to join them in this effort.
Fast forward to the present, what began as a conversation over a good meal and an adorably hyperactive rescued puppy has blossomed into the Langgam Performance Troupe. It is no longer just Raymond and Jenny’s dream.
The troupe is now home to what is clearly a unique group of dedicated performers and production staff united by a shared vision to “Just do it” no matter how much the odds might be stacked against them.
To see my friends Jenny & Raymond together with their colleagues in last Sunday’s staging of Si Medea, was a delight for me. I rejoiced through every minute of each performance for both my friends and this amazing group of collaborators that have joined them on this journey.
Keep going. <3
PS: For those of my friends who missed the production run, you can read Katrina Stuart Santiago’s excellent review of Si Media for the Manila Times here:
Work riddles. ^_^
June 26, 2016 at 04:53 am“… Built in measureless eons behind history, there lay the nightmare corpse-city of R’lyeh…”
Sizzling Tigers
June 10, 2016 at 04:00 pmWhile combing through my YouTube account I re-discovered this very early promotional sizzle for Asian Tigers, developed with Maricel Royo, Sol Galang the some of the excellent talent at Engine Room and Independent Minds Productions.
Using mostly found footage, it still plays well after all these years. Am glad again for all the generous support I received from my friends and colleagues for this development effort.
Asian Tigers, Burning Bright!
May 8, 2016 at 04:17 amSo after almost 3 years of keeping this under wraps, I feel that this is now a good time to share an effort I am very proud to have been involved in; the developmental pilot episode of ASIAN TIGERS.
Originally developed after an informal expression of interest from Kevin Dickie, SVP for Content at Discovery Networks Asia-Pacific, this pilot episode follows two up and coming Mixed Martial Art teams in the Philippines as they try to train and raise up champions from among the ranks of their fighters. You can check out our pilot episode here:
ASIAN TIGERS – PILOT EPISODE
In this story, there are several heroes – I’ll do my best to mention you all but if I miss anyone, please do let me know and I’ll be sure to amend the note.
First among the heroes I would like to thank are Charissa Pammit from Unitel Productions, Inc., Sol Galang from Independent Minds Productions and Javier Abola from Overwind Creatives. Without the backing of these three people and the resources and energy they brought with them, all of this would never have been possible.
At Unitel I would like to thank Maricel Royo for first seeing the initial promise in the idea and keeping it on file, Madonna Tarrayo for plucking it out of the file and agreeing to champion this program at the 2013 Asian Television Awards Super Pitch event, Cha for directing the development of the project at Unitel and Luis De Guzman for stepping in as the inexhaustible production manager for the Unitel production team that included cameraman Christian Andrew Tobias Nopia and sound man Hapse.
At Independent Minds I would like to thank Sol Galang for augmenting Unitel’s resources with his own substantial capability. Among his team I must thank his brother Mulawin Galang and cameraman Bryan Jeff Duhaylongsod Mojica, they provided essential extra camera operators and equipment for the production that helped ensure we had exciting footage and plenty of options when we got to the editing suite.
In addition to the on-site production Sol and his team produced the title credits at the beginning of the pilot, recorded the voice over with Ebong Joson and mastered the sound of the final cut. Among the troops involved in these efforts I would like to thank Anna Dollero, Mara Bernaldo, Carl Chua, Awin and Pj Martinez for their great contributions.
Like much about this pilot, the post production phase was a multi team effort. Timmy Del Rosario at Engine Room provided a strong rough cut that Javier at Overwind Creatives then used to shape the exceptional final cut the pilot that exists today. They had to wade through a lot of rushes and both did a superb job of finding the shots we needed and editing a sharp pilot. I am thankful to have had the opportunity to work with them both.
Lastly I must thank the true Asian Tigers of this story; the MMA teams, coaches and fighters that gamely shared their lives, victories and failures with us. At Fight Corps MMA I would like to thank MMA star and head coach Mark Striegl, the family behind Fight Corp, Nicho Tabora, the twins Miguel Tabora and Inigo Tabora and their fighter Ric Myler Guillermo Empil for all their assistance and access in Baguio and Manila. Back over in Manila I must thank gym owner of Ultimate Fitness Metrowalk and team captain for Submission Sport Philippines Erwin Tagle, his coaches Froilan Sarenas and Jason Townsend and their fighter Reign Sotto for giving us the access we needed to create an amazing pilot episode.
While sadly, despite our best efforts we were not able to pick up a commission for this program, I am still thankful for the interest and support we received from our colleagues Discovery Networks Asia-Pacific, including Senior Vice President for Content Kevin DIckie, President of Production and Development Vikram Channa and DNAP executive producer Emile Guertin.
It is my sincere hope that all of us can look back on and be proud of the incredible amount of work that went into the ASIAN TIGERS pilot. I feel extremely privileged to have had the chance to work with this small army of collaborators and it is my sincere hope that one day soon I will be able to properly thank everyone involved for their faith in me.
Keep burning bright, all you brave Asian Tigers. <3
Agus Pratama, Afghan Star
May 3, 2016 at 09:29 amWhen I joined Tolo TV one of my first assignments was Afghan Star, a music program similar to American Idol.
For 10 years this show had given Afghan men and women a precious chance to sing and shine. It remains the most popular TV show in Afghanistan and I relished the challenge of working on the 10th season of the show with my fellow producers Hamid, Sajid, Zuhal, Fatema, Tamim, Musadiq and Mujtaba.
Now on the surface, this TV show might have seemed like a cheap knock off of American Idol. But in Afghanistan it did more than provide young men and women their 15 minutes of fame. When in power, the Taliban banned music and singing – and they hated Afghan Star and what it represented with a passion. Just showing up and auditioning for Afghan Star was a powerful personal statement about the kind of life these young Afghans wanted to live in.
With that in mind I went about my work. Just like American Idol our show featured auditions throughout the country’s major cities but this year we also offered online auditions for people outside the country. As could be expected, they came from all over the world hoping for a spot on our show: Afghans in Germany, Afghans in Holland, Afghans in Canada and so on it went… until he showed up.
On a grainy video a thin, young man introduced himself in thickly accented English before launching into a ballad in perfect Pashto, one of the major languages spoken in Afghanistan. None of this was out of the ordinary for our online auditions, save for one important fact – unlike everyone else, the applicant was not Afghan.
His name was Agus Prattama and he was from Indonesia, of all places.
Out of a sea of Afghans here was this young man from a far away island nation dreaming of becoming an Afghan Star. I immediately sat up in my seat when I saw his video.
To put this into some context, for almost two decades young Muslim men had been seeking out Afghanistan to fulfil their dreams of living the short, brutish and nasty life of a jihadist. They came from all over the world to fight and die in Holy Wars against Red Afghans, Soviet Russians and most recently against Godless Americans. .
And then, there was Agus – the outlier from Indonesia. Here was a young Muslim man that yearned to come to Afghanistan not to pick up a Kalashnikov and Koran but to pick up a microphone and sing the latest Pashto and Dari pop hits instead. Right away, I could see that Agus had a poignant story. I loved his motivations for wanting to come to Afghanistan and believed Afghans throughout the country would be touched by his unabashed love for their music.
I had to have him on the show but we faced a problem.
According to the rules of the online auditions only Afghan nationals or men and women of Afghan descent were eligible to apply via online auditions. As an Indonesian without any Afghan blood, Agus was ineligible to join the show. Not to be deterred I sat down and wrote a lengthy appeal to Massood Sanjer, the Channel Manager of Tolo TV at the time, asking him to provide some kind of exemption for Agus that would allow him to join the show.
Thankfully, it did not take much lobbying. Never one to miss out on a great story, Massood quickly saw the value of inviting Augus over to the program and agreed on a compromise with us. Agus would not be allowed to compete in the main competition but we could invite him as a special performer for an upcoming episode. Thanks to Massood, the path to Afghan Star was now clear for Agus.
Together with Zuhal, I shared the good news with Agus over Skype and a few weeks later he took his first trip outside of Indonesia, arriving at the Kabul International Airport on a blisteringly cold winter day. Several of our producers had went ahead to meet him at the airport but he was worried about getting lost among strangers in a strange country and refused to come out of the arrival terminal until he met with Zuhal, our producer who had been his principle point of contact with the team.
After Zuhal rescued rescued him from the arrival terminal, Agus became a star from the moment he stepped out of the airport. He was followed by our cameras and producers everywhere he went. As part of his backstory our producers Sajid and Zuhal took him to Karga Lake, a popular weekend destination outside of Kabul and over to the Tolo TV guesthouse to meet our finalists for this season. Agus and the contestants didn’t share a common language but they could sing to each other and so that is how they communicated. Agus would sing a song in Pashto and the finalists would come back at him with a song in Dari. In the video I reviewed, he looked at home and among friends.
When I did manage to free myself from work, I was able to join Agus and Sajid on a trip to downtown Kabul. He was keen to do some shopping for friends and family back in Indonesia but Agus was not so keen on Kabul in December. Coming from a country blessed with an eternal summer, Agus had never experienced cold like this before. Instead of shivering like most people he developed a bizarre reaction to the weather. He would gag – as if nauseous. Walking around the downtown markets with Agus, Sajid and I tried to keep a straight face and look after him but we couldn’t help breaking out into fits of laughter as he gagged his way on through the bazaar crowds.
Despite the cold, Agus gladly drank in the rest of it. He stopped and grabned photos with the young boys selling carpets and in the bazaars and asked for selfie’s with old men pushing along their fruit carts down Kabul’s streets. And at the end of a busy day, he would go back to his room at the Kabul Park Star and post about his adventures over his social media accounts. And as Afghans grew to know more about him, they too began to love this sweet oddball from exotic Indonesia.
A few days before his performance on Afghan Star, Tolo News came out to do a story on him. We all met up in the garden outside of the Lapis offices at Tolo. Shakeela Ebrahimkhel, a tough respected journalist with Tolo News had come out to do the interview. She sat down with Agus and talked about how he had found his way as an unlikely Afghan Star special guest. Agus revealed that he had been singing all his life, mostly Indonesian ballads but while working at a manufacturing company that specialised in pipes, he met Afghan refugees living in the area and began to learn about their lives and culture.
It was these refugees who first introduced Agus to Afghan music. Intrigued, he began researching Afghan music over the web, watching and listening to YouTube videos featuring classic and contemporary Afghan singers. Soon he started to try and sing some of his favourite songs, applying his powerful vocals to Pashto and Dari lyrics. And he just kept at, getting better and better with each try – till the day Agus sent in his video to us. At the end of the interview, Shakeela asked for a preview of his upcoming performance. Agus obliged her, launching into a ringing Pashto ballad.
In front of Agus sat this remarkable journalist journalist, she had been married off as a teenager during the Taliban and then later widowed as a young woman, forcing her to raise her three young children alone and without help. Shakeela was tough as nails but seeing this young man from a faraway place passionately sing a song from her own culture moved this hardened journalist to tears. She’d never seen anything like it. In that moment, I knew I had made the right choice bringing Agus to Afghan Star. Stuck at recording studio we, couldn’t be present in the millions of homes across the country but I was now sure Agus would reach out and touch their lives.
What Agus didn’t share with Shakeela was that he had been orphaned as a teenager, he lost both his parents in a horrific car crash. When I learned of this later, it put everything I knew about Agus in a new light. This young man radiated warmth and kindness to those around him and to be that kind of a person after a devastating tragedy like that takes a special kind of soul – and Agus had it. I was glad that through Afghan Star he was going to have a chance to shine brightly for his parents up in Heaven.
But the night of his scheduled performance it looked like he wouldn’t be shining for anyone. I arrived at the Red Cross set to find Agus sprawled across the floor of the contestant waiting room, fantastically no-joke sick. The freezing weather, the strange food and pressure of singing for millions of people finally caught up with him. He had flown hundreds of miles for this moment and we had spent thousands of dollars setting this up but I was not about to shove him onstage in that kind of a condition. I reassured him that if he didn’t feel well enough to perform he didn’t have to go on stage.
But tonight, nothing was going to stop Agus. When the time came around for his performance, all the shivering and moaning stopped. A newfound strength flowed into him and he stood up, eager and ready to make the most out of this moment. I ran out onto the set and next to Sajid, just outside the view of our broadcast cameras waiting for Agus to make his entrance. The lights dimmed and out he came, swaddled in beautiful traditional Indonesian robe. The crowd leaned forward in their seats… and for Afghanistan and himself, he sang:
Top 11: Agus Pratama / مرحله ۱۱ بهترین : آگس پراتما
Fast forward a year from that moment, Agus returned back to Indonesia – with thousands of new fans from Afghanistan. He regularly posts new songs in Dari and Pashto to his social media accounts and they rake up thousands of reactions. Hamid left Afghanistan with his family to start a new in the United States through the Special Immigrant Visa program, Sajid also made his way to the US with the same visa program, Fatema and her fiancé left Afghanistan for Germany and now live there as refugees, Tamim is with another employer in Kabul and everyone else including Zuhal are still with Tolo.
As recently as last week I was watching Senior CNN Correspondent Nick Paton Walsh’s report on Tolo as a follow up to the aftermath of the January attacks that left several of our friends colleagues dead and wounded. Towards the end of the program, I could clearly see he was reporting from the Afghan Star recording studio. Behind Nick and in the cutaways I recognised everyone from the team; there again was Wahdat with his wacky hairstyle operating one of the cameras and our handsome Jim Morrison lookalike Shakib, creeping along his dolly tracks for a shot.
Clearly, against the darkness Afghan Star continues to shine.
To Afghan Star team in Kabul and around the world, Agus and everyone else I met and worked with at Tolo, I urge them that to no matter what, keep on singing. <3
The Locarno Film Festival for Afghan Filmmakers
April 21, 2016 at 02:10 amDear Colleagues,
If you are an Afghan filmmaker based in Afghanistan, please read on.
I am currently providing unofficial assistance to one of the programmers for the Locarno Film Festival (LFF) in Switzerland. The Locarno Film Festival is well known worldwide as a festival of discovery. Throughout its history the festival has discovered new trends and launched the careers of numerous directors and actors. You can learn more about the festival here:
http://www.pardolive.ch/pardo
The LFF has just launched a new section titled: Open Doors Hub, this section will run from 2016 to 2018 and aims to discover filmmakers from Southeast Asia – including Afghanistan. You can learn more about the Open Doors Hub here:
http://www.pardolive.ch/satellites/open-doors/about.html
I know how difficult it can be to produce and submit a feature film to an international film festival and would like to provide my experience as a filmmaker to those thinking of applying to this section.
While I cannot offer any help with financing, I can provide peer review services of your work and help put you in-touch with the Open Doors section programmers to begin talking about entering your film for this section of the LFF.
You can get in-touch with me via my website message system, you will need to enter your name, E-Mail address and your message. Browse through my website and you should find it.
Please let me know if you’re interested in getting in-touch, I would be happy to help!
Yrs,
– Waise Azimi
Plugging the Baghch
April 3, 2016 at 06:01 pmSo proud of my time working with Wajiha, Ahmad, Zubair, Rafi, Javed and Khadijah jan on Baghch-e-Simsim/Sesame Street – Season 4.
My sweetest memories of my time at Tolo TV are with this amazing team. It was truly a special thing, having the chance to bring learning and laughter into the homes of families across Afghanistan.
Sharing their new official Facebook page, they are all jans forever. <3
