The 24th Edimotion Film Festival in Cologne

Fiona Strain ASE

Simon Njoo ASE, Scott Walmsley and myself have just returned from a wonderfully inspiring trip to Cologne, Germany where we participated in the Edimotion Festival, which focuses entirely on Editors! Every film screened is followed by a discussion with the Editor, there are master classes and workshops on genre editing, editing internationally, women in film, diversity, and collaborating with our sound colleagues.

In 2019, The Edimotion Curator, Dietmar Kraus and I discussed plans for Australia to be the guest country in 2020, but of course COVID and then the Ukraine war made it seem unwise to travel to Europe. However, with Dietmar persistently urging, we managed to make it this year, the festival's 24th year.

We felt very privileged to receive funding from Screen Australia as well as Spectrum Films who helped with our travel costs, as well as an enormous amount of background work by our wonderful president Danielle, to make it all happen.\

Scott and I travelled to Cologne via the "Down Under" Festival in Copenhagen where a film I had worked on, The Koalas, was screening, and Simon Njoo’s film The Moogai was opening the Festival. We attended a reception at the Australian Ambassador to Denmark's residence, enjoying schnitty sangers, champers and pavlova gin.

Scott and I continued on to Cologne a little later, already adapted to the time zone, and met up with Simon who arrived directly from Australia a couple of days prior to Edimotion.

Simon had the huge task of running a masterclass on Friday 11th October, for practicing Editors at the International Film School in Cologne. The theme was a tricky one: The Pleasure in Fear - Editing Thrillers, where he was tasked to get inside the psychology of a film and its audience in order to deliver a meaningful cinematic experience, and demonstrate how to achieve that through editing.

Simon had prepared a comprehensive session where he talked participants through his approach. He chose scenes from features he had worked on: The Babadook, The Nightingale and The Stranger, screening and comparing scenes from the films at various key points in their script. He engaged everyone in active discussion throughout, and the session was completed with participants given a choice of scene to edit from The Stranger.

The response from the Editors who attended the masterclass was very enthusiastic, saying Simon was calm and generous with his explanations and gave them a really inspiring experience. They would have eagerly continued on into the night.

Instead, we headed over to the Opening Night, received our Edimotion carry bags, our environmentally friendly cardboard name tags and watched Anna Zeitland (1994). The film was edited by Gabriele Voss, who received a lifetime honorary award for her work that evening. Although there were English subtitles on the movie, we were unable to understand a lot of the speeches as the live transcription service hadn’t been delivered, so we had some very hilarious moments as we put Google Translate into action on our phones.

The next day, Saturday 12th, was huge for the festival - and us - with screenings all day, workshops, as well as the International Film Editors Forum (IFEF). Simon was able to catch Karen Pearlman's masterclass on the Influence of Women in Editing Revolutions (via video link in the middle of the Australian night), with her German colleague Angelika Lepper, who is also committed to gender equality. The response to this session was great, with attendees mentioning that Karen is able to put complex ideas into clear language, and has an obvious enjoyment of the editor's craft.

Scott and myself attended IFEF, a five hour discussion session run in a World Cafe format, where 28 Editors from across the world were tasked with the question: What is the role and value of the Film Editor in the production process?

Shane Woods (appearing via video link) painted a rather frightening scenario, explaining how the streaming boom flowed on to a boom in production, but now, things are slowing down as the business imperative kicks in. In the UK, 50% of freelancers are now out of work and 81% of finances are affected in the film industry.

Shane discussed the idea of finding better ways to impart value to our work, citing the example of one Oscar winning Editor who doesn't charge the full rate, but chooses the jobs that interest him with the proviso that he gains a bonus if the film makes it into festivals or wins an Oscar.

Shane also discussed the threat of AI, and how we are the guardians of our data. It is a valuable resource and AI is useful for us to use most efficiently within our own closed work environment. We are also the ones who need to make a business case as to the value we add to a production, the skills, resources and benefits. Read more about the role and value of the Film Editor in Shane's newsletter.

From here we broke into groups to discuss the particular issues that we see affecting Editors individually, and in our country. Everyone agreed wages are stagnating, and there is a lack of opportunity for career development. An Editor from Argentina mentioned politics swinging more towards right-wing governments, quickly resulting in reduction to Arts funding, and an Editor from Spain mentioned he continues to work as a psychologist part time as he finds it hard to negotiate extra money for editing.

We discussed the Editor's contribution and the essential core values of the Film Editor - in the context of AI not having these abilities. Such as being able to work with emotional nuance, being able to understand subtext and subtleties, our ability to build emotion realistically and to create surprise in our edits. And, importantly, we have the ability to work outside rule-based systems and formulas!

We spoke about how we can continue to be valued as important in the filmmaking process.

As a profession we need to understand the changes in media, develop skills in AI to make it work for us, so it is important we launch into this new era with eyes open and curiosity, to make sure that we understand the benefits and limits, and are in control.

It was discussed that we should have a set of guidelines to send to producers and government to recognise the rights of Editors to have reasonable schedules, conditions and pay and to further remind people in the industry that it is humans that innovate, not AI.

Then the question was posed: who actually gets the time that we save with AI?

After this session, Scott and I rejoined Simon briefly and hot-footed it back to the cinema where I joined three other Editors to discuss the work we do outside our own countries. There was Hamed Mohammadi from Iran, who had moved to Germany where he can make films that broach political issues more freely, Aurora Franco Vogeli, who moved from Brazil to Switzerland, and was quite funny as she discussed how staid things felt when she first arrived in Switzerland.

Also on the panel was Sarah McTeigue who originally hailed from Ireland, followed love to Italy, progressed to a new love, which grew to include two children and a career in features in Italy. I spoke about the work I do in Myanmar, where I go for periods of five to eight weeks every couple of years, teaching editing and post-production skills to documentary students.

We had a fabulous reception after the panel, there was Australian wine, and much animated conversation. After the reception, Scott and I popped back up on stage to say a little about the ASE.

I was very proud to let them know under the stewardship of Danielle as President, the Guild has grown from 500 to 800 members since I was last at Edimotion in 2019. I described our continuing relationship with other Guilds through ASIG, lobbying our government for Australian content on streaming platforms, as well as the fact we have a strong relationship with the international editing group TEMPO which began when I previously came to Edimotion.

The audience were amazed when Scott described the events the ASE holds, the dedication of our volunteer committees, the podcasts, the work on diversity and inclusion. They were particularly taken by his explanation of the fact that Australia is such a multicultural society and for us to truly be able to represent our culture we need to include greater perspective, point of view and diversity from within our craft, not just through our actors. And then the audience nearly fell over when he explained that we have 15 different awards to present this year, as well as the introduction of this year's ‘Cutting It’ Festival.

Even at Edimotion - which honours Editors from Germany, Switzerland and Austria, they only have three awards. Submitted films are viewed by a preselection panel, selected for the festival, then judged live by juries who sit in on each of the documentary, feature and short film screenings. This year they also had a junior jury of 16-19 year olds who critiqued and evaluated the competition films from their own perspective under the mentorship of experienced Editors, and decided their own awards.

After our ASE intro, Simon Njoo was introduced by Dietmar, for the Guest Country screening - The Nightingale.

As anyone who has seen the film would attest, The Nightingale is not easy viewing, and there were a few people who left the cinema during the screening. However, Simon put the film in context by explaining that the director, Jennifer Kent, had done her research and countered that the full truth of the colonial experience in Tasmania was very much harder to stomach.

Simon discussed how the film easily received funding after the success of The Babadook on which he also worked with Jennifer. There was a very close, trusting working relationship between Director and Editor. The edit suite was generally closed to producers so they were able to work truly to Jennifer’s vision!

In close editorial collaboration with Jennifer, Simon had to calibrate very carefully how long certain shots played on screen, to run that little extra for the audience to feel the visceral impact. There was some discussion about the shots used to portray Clare's point of view and how they made her experience feel palpable and real. Simon also explained how he balanced the focus of the violent rape scenes on clothing rather than flesh in order to make the context of those violent scenes about much more than sex.

It was a strong finish to the Australian focus of the festival, the discussion went until we were told to leave the cinema after midnight, and we went out into the cool Cologne night to eat pizza, drink Kölsch and continue talking until 4am!