Far Out in Miami
Local filmmakers show at MIFF
The conundrum of documentary filmmaking is that the amount of money that can be made upon a documentary’s completion rarely warrants the effort needed to complete the massive endeavor. Documentaries are labors of love.
Far Out Isn’t Far Enough: The Tomi Ungerer Story is playing at the 2013 Miami International Film Festival (MIFF). The exceptionally produced documentary is written, directed and produced by the Miami-based filmmaker Brad Bernstein, and documents the subversive and perverse Alsatian illustrator, political cartoonist and children’s book author Tomi Ungerer.
Bernstein’s Corner of the Cave Media is based out of a chic Midtown Miami loft directly above trendy hotspots Sugarcane, Mercadito and Ricochet and was the home-base of the project.
The 98-minute feature length film combines traditional documentary storytelling with original animation from over 70 years of art from the renegade artist. The team filmed interviews with Ungerer in France, Ireland and New York. They also filmed in Nova Scotia.
Brad Bernstein and Rick Cikowski The mixing of animated clips of Ungerer’s original illustrations is a dynamic element of the piece that was overseen by the editor, Rick Cikowski, a Miramar resident who commutes daily to the Midtown Miami studio.
The filmmakers worked directly with Ungerer’s museum and obtained the high resolution scans that were traced over. The filmmakers had to guarantee Ungerer that they would not change any of the colors or lines from the original works.
“The animation was easy to do,” said Cikowski. “His art is so vivid anyways that you can already tell a story from his pictures, so we just animated what those stories are.”
Far Out debuted at the Toronto International Film Festival and is a part of the Knight Documentary Competition at MIFF. To attend the screening and learn more about the film, click here.
