There were about 27 interviews included in Life on the Douro, if you include a couple of tour guides. Some other people played an important role, even though they didn’t speak or their interview wasn’t included for one reason or another. Here are the interviewees, and a couple of other people as well.
José Alberto Allen and Tomás Allen, Quinta de Villar d’Allen
On Monday, I traveled from Porto to the Douro Valley, and stayed at the Fladgate Partnership’s Vargelas estate, warmly hosted by Alistair and Gillyane Robertson. I interviewed Alistair to get the history of the company going back to 1692, one of the missing pieces I need to finish the film. I just needed a brief overview, but ended up with over an hour’s worth of material. More great stories, and more anxiety how I’m going to fit it all in.
I went on to Tua on Tuesday to film the old, disused trains in the station that once moved people and goods through the Douro Valley, probably before there was electricity in the area only a few decades ago, and that now rust away as silent and overlooked witnesses to another era. My shots were mostly still and lacking in movement, occasionally some people in the distance would walk through the frame, or the leaves of the trees would move with the breeze.
At times like that, when the shooting goes well, I feel like I’m a photographer who just happens to be using a video camera, and that my films should also be silent witnesses, telling all through images. Great photographs are that, capturing a whole world in an instant, and what need is there for words when an image can say it all?
But then I think about Alistair and the many others I’ve interviewed for Life on the Douro, thinking about the incredible stories I’ve heard, often told with love, passion, and humour, and how fortunate I have been to have had that experience, and that those stories should be more widely known, and again I wonder how I’m going to fit it all in.
(You can support the documentary - and spread the word about the Douro and Portugal - by pre-ordering a DVD - http://www.indiegogo.com/LifeontheDouro)
Since my early teens, I’ve had two obsessions - art and film. I did a lot of drawing and painting and saw a lot of movies, and after high school toyed with the idea of studying film but decided on art school instead. I continually had ideas for films but painting took up all my time and energy.
Then came the digital age. I could take my video camera out on the streets and capture whatever caught my interest and edit it on my computer, without having to worry about the whole process, equipment and cost involved in edting 8mm or 16mm film.
We moved from London to a small village in Spain in 2005, and built a new house where, after 25 years of fantasizing about it, I finally had a large studio space of my own. In the spring of 2008, about six months after we moved in, I took a walk through the vineyards, and decided to do a small video on grape production while continuing to paint most of the time. Within a few months, it became a full-time, all-absorbing project, subsequently leading to more wine documentaries, and for a couple of years, I hardly went into the studio at all.
I initially enjoyed the change. The wine world has certain parallels with the art world, both as an art form and as a social structure, but in wine, I’m merely a visitor and neutral observer, and the goings-on, arguments, and rivalries don’t affect me. Wine, however, is a fascinating culture unlike any other I’ve come across, involving many strata and segments weaving a complex fabric, where dirty fingernails intermingle with manicured ones.
But although the documentaries have gone from strength to strength, there were the occasional, and increasingly frequent pangs about not painting. I love filming and I love editing, but it is a complex process involving travel, other people, technical problems, sound, and a thousand distractions. Painting itself has no distractions - it is about solitude, with the canvas as your mirror. At times, when I see an individual working the fields by himself in the midst of thousands of vines, I think that that must be a similar experience.
Over the last few months, I’ve been painting again, preparing for a show in early 2012 (details to be announced) that will include paintings of amphorae and vases once used to store wine and olive oil, and video installations about wine, uniting the three elements - paint, film and wine - under one roof.
And Luiz Alberto http://www.thewinehub.com and I are planning a trip to Italy in October to start film for a documentary looking at wine and art, again bringing the three together.
Below is a photo of three new paintings, still a long way to go. Older, but finished, works can be seen at - http://www.zrdesign.co.uk
Life on the Douro is in the final stages of editing, and I’m working on the audio, agonizing over the right mix of the interviews, casual conversations, background sounds, and music. The music should convey a certain sense of pace and atmosphere, but be neutral, so that it doesn’t impose an emotional mood. It shouldn’t dictate to the viewer that which the film fails to convey.
Then there are background sounds ranging from birds to tractors, to the clanging of the bottling plant, to the snipping sounds of the pruning and harvest, all of these creating a rhythm and music of its own, all of them part of the story, and have to be edited as music, just as the music has to become a natural sound.
Life on the Douro covers centuries of history, family intermarriages, and fortunes and misfortunes, as well as today’s complex situation, problems and regulations, all to be told within a certain time frame. For now I’d like to get it in at 75-80 minutes, 90 minutes tops, although I may do a more extended video installation and a series of shorter films later on with the wealth of material that I have.
Everyone has their story, and every story is important and part of it, but if it becomes too dense, then the sense of time - and wine is nothing if not about time - becomes lost. Working long days in the field, grapes from countless vines picked generation after generation, vineyards planted so that they’ll be ready to give fruit for wine in five or ten years’ or another generation’s time - how do I depict that, the beauty of that, lost in modern urban life?
Then there’s the silence the mountains and the vines that also have their stories, more eternal and enduring than that of man, that have the first word and the last say, all of which has to be listened to and told.
I’m fascinated, sometimes amazed, by the stories I hear from the interviewees, and as I cut out a phrase, I ponder whether I’m getting to the essence of it, or whether I’m losing something essential. But there are moments when I look at the images of the terraced vineyards that I think that maybe I should cut it all out, and just let the birds and tractors and vines and mountains speak for themselves.
I met Ryan and Gabriella Opaz of http://catavino.net somewhere in cyberspace after finishing my first wine documentary, La Boba, which started out an idea for a short film but ended up absorbing my life. We met in person in London at the beginning of 2009, and gradually became collaborators and friends.
Through Ryan and Gabriella, I met Robert McIntosh http://wineconversation.com who in turn introduced me to the Rioja winery Dinastia Vivanco. That led to the idea of doing a short on their history which, five trips, three versions, and more than a year later, became the hour long film “Dinastia Vivanco: Giving back to wine what wine has given us” http://zevrobinson.com/video/making-the-dinastia-vivanco-documentary.
The Opai - the plural, they claim, of Opaz - also introduced me to Oscar Quevedo with the idea of doing a short film on his family’s winery http://quevedoportwine.com, but as always, a first trip led to a second. Then, at a famed Catavino barbecue, I also met Roy Hersh of For the Love of Port, and we subsequently made arrangements for a third trip to film the FTLOP Harvest Tour of the Douro last October.
Due to circumstances beyond anyone’s control, that was scuppered at the last minute, so I wandered the Douro by myself, camera in hand, for 12 days. Roy, realizing the value of the documentary, organized a very special tour with his FTLOP partner Mario Ferreira in February just for my film, getting me in to interview the major figures in the region’s wine production, and giving me the space and time to do my thing. There were concerns about the light and weather, but the gods smiled and the sun shone upon us, and I had just the right combination of fog in the morning, and mostly warm sunshine the rest of the time.
Now I’ll be going back a fifth time, as young Oscar is getting married, but after the wedding cake, I’ll be staying ten more days to film more material and get two or three interviews that the film needs to be completed.
If I hadn’t met the Opai, I’d be getting into trouble elsewhere, but neither film would have been made, and they have been supportive of each of my projects different ways, the latest with this post - http://catavino.net/please-support-life-on-the-douro-a-documentary-on-port-wine. I count on my friends to get me into trouble, and to get me out of trouble.
They invited to the EWBC in Lisbon in 2009, where I met Luiz Alberto who later came with us on the FTLOP tour, where we talked about doing a short film on Italian wine, art, and tourism in a single trip in October, but there’s already an understanding that the first trip will lead to a second.
I’ve also been filming and interviewing Ryan and Gabriella on and off over the last year or two - a project I’ll resume once Life on the Douro is done - with plans to make it into a short film.
About Zev Robinson
