The third edition of the HipTrip Travel Film Festival took place from October, the 27th until the 30th, in both of the cinemas that belong to the Romanian Cinematheque, Eforie and Union.
The festival broughtmore than 20 international films (most of them are Romanian premieres) and organizedthe video production workshop “the alive Bucharest”, held by the Irish explorer and filmmaker Leon McCarron, who is a member of the Royal Geographical Society in London and who is specialized in long distances expeditions.
Among the HipTrip titles, one of them was the documentary Looking for Exits - Conversations with a Wingsuit Artist (Denmark - France, 2015, directed by KristofferHegnsvad); its editor is the Romanian Paul Colcer. Ellen Brennan is the best wingsuit flying pilot in the world. Called “the bird-woman”, Brennan dares jumping off the highest cliffs of Mont Blanc; over there this sport is legal and she has been living there for a few years. The director KristofferHegnsvad says that when he saw her jump from a 4,000 m. altitude cliff, he was truly fascinated and that Ellen turns this sport into a visual metaphor of the difficult choices we have to make in our everyday life.
What was difficult about making a documentary on the wingsuit flying topic is that the images were supposed to be out of the Youtube convention, where this sport is represented exotically, as a source of adrenaline, with shots from the jumping moments. KristofferHegnsvad chose to reduce the shootings from the subjective angle and focus on the relationship that his character has with this sport, both by talking to her and with the use of long shots that block the temptation of associating the jumps only with extreme sensations.
On the evening of the screening of this documentary, the Aarc team was present at the q&a and made a few interviews with the director Kristoffer Hegnsvad and the editor Paul Colcer. We also talked to the festival selectionist, Cătălin Olaru, about the films he chose for this year.
Paul Colcer, despre Ellen Brennan, femeia-pasăre:
Cinematography: Valeriu Ciubotaru
HipTrip 2016
Paul Colcer despre Looking for Exits
