Director Marc Isaacs welcomes us into his home and makes The Filmmaker’s House, a comedic utopian documentary defying conventional narratives codes.
The 2021 Cinéma du Réel (Paris International Documentary Film Festival) opened on Friday, March 12th, with online screenings available to France-based audiences. Among this year’s program is The Filmmaker’s House, a feature documentary by Marc Isaacs, one of the current major hits on the documentary film festival circuit, with selections at numerous festivals (Sheffield Doc/Fest, Doc Lisboa, IDFA, Hainan Island International Film Festival, WatchDocs). As part of Film Fest Report’s coverage of the 43rd Cinéma du Réel, I took the opportunity to watch and discover Marc Isaac’s work.
Serial killers, sex and celebrities : a good recipe to seek financing for a film. Director Marc Isaacs decides to take another route and makes his low budget documentary at home. The Filmmaker’s House is a touching and comedic film that defies conventional codes of documentaries.
Showing a variety of people that populate London, Marc Isaacs manages to give a quirky portrait of the city. Two English builders, a Colombian housekeeper, his Muslim Pakistani neighbour and a Slovakian homeless man incarnate themselves in the filmmaker’s house. Each character is introduced with straightforward features : gender, income, origin, religion. I can say roughly that each of them represents a category of people. Even though those characters could sound stereotypical, their personality added a lot of nuance and depth to the story. The four main characters living together make the combination unlikely and sometimes surrealist. Their exchanges output their differences, dislikes and discomfort, highlighting invisible frontiers between people.
Already disturbing while on the streets, the presence of Mikel (the Slovakian homeless man) in the house brings the most in the film. Smelly and dirty, he is humble about his situation but not shy about getting help. While Mikel enjoys his stay at the filmmaker’s, Marc Isaacs’ eye is not looking at him with pity, but with sympathy. Mikel being the centre of attention in the house and in the film, questioned hospitality. Who do we accept in our space, and what does it take to help others?
The film starts like a diary documentary: he checks on his mate Mikel at the hospital, says hello to the neighbour Zara, gives orders to his housekeeper Nery, and welcomes the English workers to his house… The shaky shots and the director’s voice make the film look like a candid filmed diary, at that moment, I did not ask myself how scripted the film was. Being naive, I let myself live what I thought was his everyday life. The camera angle being at a low angle shot, the characters acted somewhat awkward and it made me believe that it was unplanned and unscripted. Most of the film goes as every incident punctuates the film and the day of those protagonists. Becoming more and more obvious that incidents were not spontaneous, the director reveals a more dramatic and realistic upturn.
The way the director plays with the impression of an unscripted story, manages to question the essence of a documentary. With comedic tones, Marc Isaacs succeeds at telling us a dramatic subtext, in which the surrealism of the combination shows that cohabitation is unfortunately unrealistic. During those 75 minutes, four worlds collided into The Filmmaker’s House and made me believe in a weird utopia without frontier.
