NFB Pause with Bruce Alcock and Jeremy Mendes
2021 · 2m · Canada
Directed by Simon Rouillard
Genres: documentary, essay film
Tones: contemplative
Creative directors Bruce Alcock and Jeremy Mendes discuss building the mobile experience Far Away From Far Away on Fogo Island. They explain their use of the Fogo Process and shooting on iPhone for interactive storytelling.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Two minutes of creative directors talking process feels like the opposite of subversive—it's basically a behind-the-scenes DVD extra dressed up as cinema. Unless Rouillard found a way to make craft documentation actively strange, this lands squarely in the consensus lane.
Rouillard positions this precisely within the essay-film tradition of artist interviews and process documentation, where form and content become inseparable; the decision to document the Fogo Process itself—that deliberate, island-rooted methodology—through iPhone intimacy suggests a filmmaker aware of how medium mirrors message.
The real move here is probably the iPhone choice: shooting a film *about* mobile/interactive storytelling *on* iPhone collapses the distance between subject and method, and in two minutes that kind of formal coherence is everything.