We're super excited to announce this private screening of Tom Allen & Leon McCarron's latest film, Karun: Misadventures On Iran's Longest River.
To access the film, please update your profile with your email address and we'll send the password out to all members towards the end of the week.
Tom will be joining us to answer your questions and discuss the film over the coming days. If you enjoy the film please help Tom spread the word! You can find more information here.
Karun: Misadventures On Iran's Longest River (Full HD Movie) from Tom Allen on Vimeo.
@hitriddle Hi Matt! Very kind of you to mention the cinematography – it's funny what a different perspective can bring, because when I watch Karun alongside our next film The Last Explorers, the camerawork in Karun looks awful!
I learned a heck of a lot with Janapar, which entailed 4 years' worth of shooting practice. I've shot a few other trips since then, and I'm always watching other docs and films for inspiration, but I guess it does come down to experience. Hopefully the next film will take it up another notch!
In terms of how we planned this film – journeys like this are always reactionary affairs and so the filming has to follow suit. There are also social sensitivities to take into account; it takes a while to build up trust, so it's not that realistic to march into people's homes swinging a camera, especially in Iran. So we tried to make sure that if we weren't able to capture a specific moment, we told the story in retrospect as soon as possible so we could reconstruct it in the edit, which you'll notice we've done a lot (borderline too much).
When it came to creating it, we worked through the raw material ourselves, logged and transcribed it all, and made a 15-minute taster to get people's interest. We then spent a long time nailing the concept for the feature length version, and settled on a story which would play to the strengths of the material, which we felt were the unpredictable and almost farcical nature of the adventure, together with the huge role that Iranians played in setting us straight and helping us along. Then we enlisted a very talented edit producer and an editor to work fulltime on actually cutting the film, who we briefed with what we wanted and then took a step back to act as executive producers, rather than spending loads of time in the edit suite. It's tough to get objectivity on your own self-shot material so better let someone else craft it with fresh eyes!