Leonard Retel Helmrich
Leonard Retel Helmrich was born in 1959. He finished the Netherlands Film Academy in 1986 as a fiction director of the short fiction film called DE DRENKELING (THE DROWNING MAN). In 1990, he made THE PHOENIX MYSTERY, his first feature-length film. His documentary MOVINF OBJECTS (1991) has won several prizes at International film festivals.In the past few years, Leonard Retel Helmrich has given workshops to lecture his "single-shot cinema" theory all over the world. Aside from teaching, he shot several short documentaries before, during and after Suharto stepped down as president of Indonesia. With his feature documentary THE EYE OF THE DAY, he instantly became famous in the documentary film world and won many international awards (see the short filmography below). SHAPE OF THE MOON, a follow-up to THE EYE OF THE DAY, was selected for many important festivals and won the prestigious Joris Ivens Award at the IDFA competition 2004 in Amsterdam, as well as the top documentary award at the Sundance Film Festival.
STATEMENT BY THE DIRECTOR: THE SINGLE-SHOT CINEMA
I have been following Rumidjah and her family for several years, and they have allowed me to film crucial moments of their everyday lives. From my first contact with the neighborhood of Rumidjahs family, I became known as a person with a camera. For them, the camera in my hand is part of my identity, my body. This association has made it possible for me to capture intimate scenes devoid of camera shyness or self-consciousness, like the one involving Rumidjah's neighbor who lost her apple.
To get this close to the skin of the people, all the scenes of SHAPE OF THE MOON were filmed according to the principle of the single-shot camera, which I have been giving workshops on these last years in countries like the USA, Uganda, Indonesia and Germany. I have been developing this method by carefully comparing film history with the history of other forms of art, like painting, sculpture, architecture, music and poetry.