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Keeper received Five Stars. It was made at a Kino Euphoria (a KinoKabaret in Helsinki).
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Dave Lojek on the making of Keeper
KinoKabarets
Participants form creative teams and develop, write and shoot short films within 48 hours. Their motto is “Do well with nothing. Do better with little. But do it now!” . KinoKabaret cells exist in countries all over the world. During these pop-up events, Kinoites live, eat, and work together. Read more about the Kabarets. Dave Lojek is a German director and manager of KinoBerlino organising KinoKabarets in Berlin.
Participants form creative teams and develop, write and shoot short films within 48 hours. Their motto is “Do well with nothing. Do better with little. But do it now!” . KinoKabaret cells exist in countries all over the world. During these pop-up events, Kinoites live, eat, and work together. Read more about the Kabarets. Dave Lojek is a German director and manager of KinoBerlino organising KinoKabarets in Berlin.
 Dave Lojek
I wanted to take an original screenplay with me to a KinoKabaret event in Helsinki. I asked John Fraser to write a screenplay.
I had received several screenplays from John all of which were well-written but expensive to produce. The film making workshops that we call KinoKabarets require a different type of screenplay because of the no-budget rule. The exact conditions and limitations are listed in my perpetual screenplay contest (details here). Most people who submit their screenplays don't abide by these rules. But John provided a do-able screenplay for KEEPER, which was very nice of him. The concept of KinoKabarets consists of a large portion of coincidence flavoured with a megaton of luck, so we do not recruit cast and crew before the event. What I brought to Helsinki was just my strong editing laptop and my experience of having directed, edited, produced, and distributed 175 films before this one, bundled with 1300 film festival selections and 200 awards to my name.
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John Fraser was born and raised on Tayside, Scotland. After 30 years, John moved away and has spent the past 20 years living and working from Manchester, and travelling globally. He is currently on assignment in the Middle East for an Oil & Gas corporate.
From an early age, John has had a keen interest in photography and writing. Scriptwriting felt like a natural extension. KEEPER came about following a challenge from Dave Lojek. This was to come up with a short that would resonate in a location such as Finland. As with all of the Scandinavian countries, there is natural beauty in abundance. John’s idea was to take that beauty as a setting and then build to a conclusion with a twist at the end – turning the beauty on its head. |
Emma in Keeper
I was lucky to meet the French women Emma Chaibedra and Clarisse Chr again, whom I had worked with in Budapest in April 2018 for my film SNITCH. The cinematographer Sean Monroe was born in the United States but studies in Germany. I met him in Helsinki, liked his attitude and Canon C200 camera. He was able to get the basic footage we needed. As a bonus, Emma's boyfriend, Samir Abdessaied, volunteered to record the sound and the actor Joseph Stacey read the narration in a nearby sound recording studio for me.
Sean
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Jean-Christophe, Clarisse, Joseph
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Irini, Sean, Samir
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The preparation (casting, crew assembly, location scouting, scheduling, jewellery collection from the kinokabaret participant women) took about 2 days. The filming was delayed due to prior projects that had detained the French crew. So we had a meagre 3 to 4 hours one summer morning to shoot Emma's scenes and 3 more hours to collect the ambient images and introductory time lapse. Editing took another day. The composer Jean Christophe worked on the music for 1 hour, the cinematographer became his own colourist and graded the footage a little bit. The film was premiered in a beautiful cinema in Helsinki 3 days after I had pitched the project. Thirty other shorts were shown, most of which were made in the same "round". Final music and audio mixing took another day and the distribution has been going on since August 2018. Only 12 festivals have screened KEEPER so far. It is just a miniature where almost nothing happens.
To a large extent the images, acting, narration are true to the screenplay. My philosophy is to trust the screenwriters to know what they want. This methodology helps me to produce and direct the film and not to ponder, what it will be about. I delegate the thinking to the authors, conveniently. I often make films that tell me something about myself afterwards.
At a KinoKabaret, everyone has the following costs: travel, their own equipment and costumes, participation fees for the event, public transport, pocket money for survival in foreign cities, food outside the event premises. As well as education in the individual crafts, either institutional or auto-didactic, Kino Euphoria Helsinki offers vegan breakfast and dinner. The equivalent Berlin event has offered a choice of vegetarian and omnivore dinners in the past. I actually borrowed the vegan cook from Helsinki for my Berlin KinoKabaret in 2018.
The film as you see it in BIAFF was 98% finished under the time pressure of 3 production days. Otherwise it could not have been premiered in the cinema in Helsinki. The time constraint is one of the main foundations of this film making movement: see www.kinokabaret.org.
Just minor touch-ups are usually done for distribution. In my case the German and Spanish subtitles and DCP, mp4, and other compression formats.
In Helsinki, people saw about 30 short films that same night. There were much more violent, poetic or nudity works among them, which absorbed most of the audience attention. Still the comments on Keeper were good and audience members came to me afterwards to praise the tonality of the film.
Since then the film has received a few awards in Berlin and was also selected for several film festivals abroad. One of my friends in Berlin told me that Keeper is my best work from the few that she knows. That surprised me, as nothing much really happens. Maybe there is time for audiences to breathe and think away from the hectic media overdose as they watch Emma fumble with that ring of hers. Or maybe it is the second layer and eerie undertone of something fishy, that happened before the film begins.
Dave Lojek
APEIRON FILMS | www.apeiron-films.de
KinoBerlino - International Filmmaking Workshop + Monthly Open Cinema Screenings
kinoberlino.de | Festival Director & Producer
Film & Festival Report - film-report.net
To a large extent the images, acting, narration are true to the screenplay. My philosophy is to trust the screenwriters to know what they want. This methodology helps me to produce and direct the film and not to ponder, what it will be about. I delegate the thinking to the authors, conveniently. I often make films that tell me something about myself afterwards.
At a KinoKabaret, everyone has the following costs: travel, their own equipment and costumes, participation fees for the event, public transport, pocket money for survival in foreign cities, food outside the event premises. As well as education in the individual crafts, either institutional or auto-didactic, Kino Euphoria Helsinki offers vegan breakfast and dinner. The equivalent Berlin event has offered a choice of vegetarian and omnivore dinners in the past. I actually borrowed the vegan cook from Helsinki for my Berlin KinoKabaret in 2018.
The film as you see it in BIAFF was 98% finished under the time pressure of 3 production days. Otherwise it could not have been premiered in the cinema in Helsinki. The time constraint is one of the main foundations of this film making movement: see www.kinokabaret.org.
Just minor touch-ups are usually done for distribution. In my case the German and Spanish subtitles and DCP, mp4, and other compression formats.
In Helsinki, people saw about 30 short films that same night. There were much more violent, poetic or nudity works among them, which absorbed most of the audience attention. Still the comments on Keeper were good and audience members came to me afterwards to praise the tonality of the film.
Since then the film has received a few awards in Berlin and was also selected for several film festivals abroad. One of my friends in Berlin told me that Keeper is my best work from the few that she knows. That surprised me, as nothing much really happens. Maybe there is time for audiences to breathe and think away from the hectic media overdose as they watch Emma fumble with that ring of hers. Or maybe it is the second layer and eerie undertone of something fishy, that happened before the film begins.
Dave Lojek
APEIRON FILMS | www.apeiron-films.de
KinoBerlino - International Filmmaking Workshop + Monthly Open Cinema Screenings
kinoberlino.de | Festival Director & Producer
Film & Festival Report - film-report.net
