Shanghai Portraits Project: Miguel Bustamante

CreativeHunt and SmartShanghai have been working with Lazy Susan Productions on their Shanghai Portraits Project and over the course of four weeks will profile each of the four directors who made short films for the series. The project challenged locally-based independent directors to represent "My Shanghai" in short documentary format, keeping the film length under four minutes and the budget under 3,000rmb.

In the last of the series, Creative Hunt chatted with Ecuadorian film maker, Miguel Bustamante of KinoCorp and creator of "Shanghai in Motion".






Why did you decide on the bike riding idea for your film? What was the thinking behind that?
Well, I was trying to find a subject for my film, but then I thought why should I focus on just someone – be it a taxi driver or someone who does massages – why? All these people live in this city and my impression of the city is all of them, so that's why I captured as much as possible with a wide angle lens. My subject was Shanghai itself, not a character from Shanghai. I wanted to express what everyone goes through in the commuting space.

I think that the biggest point that I wanted to make on my short was that most foreigners are 24/7 on the road. Whether you're going to work in a taxi or on a scooter, or especially if you have a bike, 90% of the time you're on it, for me anyway, you're wearing headphones. The whole city becomes a sound track. Music gives you different feelings depending on what you're listening to, it can transport you to different times in your life.

I didn't want anyone to grasp anything in terms of detail because when you're on a bike or in a taxi you're seeing something happening and you're like 'Oh look at that', and it's gone. That's Shanghai for me. You experience everything all the time but you never get a chance to actually see it fully. It's just a glimpse, and it's the same everyday – everyday you get to experience different things.



At the end of your film, there's a lovely sequence of a trumpet player – tell me about that.
We just ran into the guy on the street and he was playing the trumpet and people were all around him. He was a construction worker, his hands were all covered in paint, his shirt was open and he was just playing the trumpet on the street and I thought 'Yes! I want to get that guy for sure!'

What attracted you to the Lazy Susan Productions project in the first place, and how did you come to be involved?
The idea of showing your cultural point of view, your portrait of Shanghai is very interesting. Most people are going to focus on the Bund, the Pearl Tower – all these big things about Shanghai. There are so many little lanes and alleys that I think represent China a lot more though, things that are hidden, little streets within that were more like the traditional China. Lots of them have been blocked off though and you don't see this little neighborhood that's inside.

My cousin Pedro knows Khoby [van den Berg of Lazy Susan Productions] and she told him that she was trying to put the project together and so he called me and said 'You should go! They're having a meeting'. I was super busy and I didn't know if I should, but I knew Victor [Bastidas, another Portraits film maker] was going and at the last minute I decided to go and it all came together. I was this close to not actually working on the project!



Well I'm glad you did! How was it working with such a low budget?
There were a couple of things that we needed to get. For example, we built our own DIY steady-cam so I spent a bit of money on getting that, also finding the best lens for the wideness that I needed without damaging the quality too much

I wanted to do it really raw. Victor was driver and cameraman on most of the road shots and another friend, Charles Lanceplaine, he worked on camera on the balcony. Actually the idea changed completely once we'd started – it was going to have a completely different ending but then I found the trumpet guy. As soon as I found him I knew that was my ending.

How do you think your film fits in with the other three in the Projects series?
I've always wanted to make [creative] films but I've always been trapped on the corporate side so it's been difficult to actually freely express myself artistically through a film project. This is the first time I've done it – I think I perhaps have a different way of seeing things and that's why my short is quite different from, say, Gianpaolo's or Michael's [fellow Portraits film makers] which are more directed to an actual movie itself. I'm a musician and my life is all about music – I think my film expresses that, there's no dialogue at all. I'm talking about the cinematography itself – mine is a little more… on the go. I didn't set up lights I didn't do anything like that, I didn't spend two hours checking that the frame was perfect it was more like [snaps fingers] let's do it, let's go right now!

When I saw the first two short films, Gianpaolo's especially, I thought for a moment that I didn't do it right – mine doesn't have that narration, it felt more like a video than a film. After I'd seen all of them, though, I thought, no, I've done it, I've accomplished what I wanted.



What draws you to film as a medium? What does it have over, say, painting, or photography?
Well I like photography a lot as well. If you're able to capture something that can leave people breathless then I think you're doing a good job. Art's a mirror for life, but photography's not – it's just representing an idea, it's not a mirror anymore… it's like a lie, basically

How so?
You don't know the background of the photo you see, whether it was staged. You're never going to know if it's reality or not, so photography itself becomes a lie – a pretty lie, but a lie. Especially now, what with the digital world, it's hard to know how far something has been altered in Photoshop or whatever. Maybe 15 years ago it was totally different. You can still feel amazed at the feelings [photography] brings, but you're never going to be able to trust it

Film is also something that's not real, and that's the beauty of it. For me, movies are basically about entertainment. Film is to entertain, not to make you feel sad or bad about yourself or others. It's there to be magical – Hollywood is trapped into this thing of every story needs a happy ending. I don't think that's necessarily the case, but I do think film should be able to go beyond reality.

What's next for you?
In terms of projects, I'm documenting all that I can from the band I drum in, The Fever Machine in terms of our shows. We're going to hit the studio soon and make an album so I want to cover that as much as possible.



Can you talk a little about the film making scene where you're from.
Countries like Argentina, Mexico and Brazil are probably are the oldest Latin American countries with film history. By which I mean they've been doing full-length feature films since maybe the 60s or 70s. I would say that film making in Ecuador has a history of about a decade. Before that it was pretty sporadic – maybe during the eighties there were about eight movies done, most of the time on no budget at all. Sebastián Cordero has gone some way towards changing that: at the end of the 90s he made a film called Ratas, Ratones, Rateros and the movie was the biggest success of a movie ever been made [in Ecuador]. He didn't make any money out of it, there were no laws in place, so film theatres took 50% of the ticket price and another 25% for the municipality of the city. But Cordero comes from a really wealthy family so he could afford to make the film – it's really good in terms of cinematography, it's perfectly done but it's not a film that could really be broadcast anywhere else because it has a lot of Ecuadorian culture, and if you're not from there you can't really grasp all the jokes and stuff… it's pretty local. After that he won a Sundance award and he got funding from Mexico to make a huge movie called Crónicas. John Leguizamo acted in the movie, and it was filmed in Ecuador. He's making something else, probably coming out July 2011. I've seen the trailer and it looks spectacular. He's starting to create things that are more broadcastable to the world.

Can you see yourself going back to make films in Ecuador?
Probably at some point, yeah. There's a lot of people working in the industry but they're all so busy, they all have to eat – the advertising industry in Ecuador is humongous, there's a lot of money in it. That's what people wind up doing: if you're in film, video, animation, whatever, 90% of your energy will be focused on advertising because that's what gets the money. Here in Shanghai there's more spectrum. Back home it's TV commercials all the way, whereas here you get corporate videos, events, conferences, things like that.

We have all the colours in the world in Ecuador – rain forests, mountains, everything. There's a lot of creativity there, that's for sure.