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Collaboration is a balance of different points of view without a feeling of compromise. Collaboration is multiple media overlapping to tell a story with a deeper strength than one facet could alone. Collaboration sounds impossible, doesn't it?
Michael Palmieri and Donal Mosher refer to themselves as one of those rare cases where the compromise is actually better than either of their individual points of view. As a documentary filmmaking team and a couple, collaboration runs like wildfire through their work. Mike is a film director, musician and perhaps best known for his music videos with Beck. Donal is a photographer, musician, writer (and documentary subject himself, in THE KEY OF G, a film about a family of San Francisco artists caring for a handicapped man). To watch October Country, their first film together, is to watch two storytellers float effortlessly between the visual, the written, the sung.
How did they do this without wringing each other's neck? I can't say for sure. I'm overdue for a lesson in collaboration and I've never been a good collaborator. To me, work begins in isolation and rises to meet the world on the legs of a young horse. I'm scared my horse will fall flat and I don't want to talk to anyone at all in moments like that. As for multiple disciplines, sure, we all dabble, but in an internet world where content is king, we are forced to confront new media constantly in order to survive - songwriters make visual identities, filmmakers blog, anyone with an iphone documents, everyone tweets. What content is sacred, let alone special? Must we all make something in every form possible? I struggle with my own results like a child frustrated with crayons, longing for a dead cellphone battery and an inky Sunday Times.
October Country transcends all that, of course-- a lesson in collaboration that shows no seams and no guile. October Country began as Donal's photography and journal project about his troubled family. Over time, it organically took motion as the two began to film the family. The haunted soundtrack Mike wrote rumbles underneath as the Mosher's reveal themselves as ghosts in their own lives. Donal tells his own story as he makes his family portrait, leaning hard on the precision and decency of Mike's outside eyes as cinematographer. Like a family talking all at once at the breakfast table, writing, music and picture bring out the best in each other as Mike and Donal do the same. I guess the old fashioned Renaissance man isn't stuck on email after all.
I met Michael and Donal in a friend's apartment on Avenue A in NYC. I met them between planes, in motion from one film festival to another, where their work has been received with such praise that it is almost embarrassing. Spent, happy, laughing, I caught them in a moment of wondering aloud how they'd feel to be home for more than a few days, when they'd find time to work on their newest ideas and whether they should just pack it all in and start a taco truck together.
Let's hope not, for our sake. But those would probably be some really good tacos.
Thanks, guys.
ps
More about October Country here.
The book that influenced Donal so much - Avery Gordon's Ghostly Matters.
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