Artist Jeremy Ratzlaff has been making videos for 10 years, but he believes his newest video — which the prestigious Yorkton Film Festival (YFF) recently selected to showcase — is the most touching.
Ratzlaff, 27, directed a video called Madhu Kumar’s Stories of Immigrant Women, a four-minute film about the female artist who paints pictures of immigrant women and uses augmented reality to help tell their stories. Ratzlaff — a video producer for CBC Arts — had seen Kumar’s work at an art gallery in Assiniboia and decided this was a project worth pursuing since he wanted to know more about her and her creative methods.
“A lot of the art world attempts to be abstract and it would be harder to connect with, but this (video) isn’t one of those,” he chuckled. “This is a story that I think you can connect with very, very quickly (and is easily accessible).”
Ratzlaff — who has spent his career following and working with other artists — met Kumar beforehand to discover what she was like and what she would be doing. With video camera in hand, he followed her as she visited the homes of several immigrant women.
He spent two full days over two weeks filming, followed by nearly two months of working on the video. It took that long to create, he explained with a chuckle, since he is a “slow, painfully slow, meticulous perfectionist.” It was also tough to put together since he shot more material than he needed — his video had to be fewer than five minutes — or had ever done before.
Eventually, he whittled his project down to under four minutes.
“But it was tough to choose what to leave out,” Ratzlaff added.
Ratzlaff has never directed a documentary before, but he knows documentarians attempt to capture real emotions and human drama for their work. He managed to unexpectedly do that while visiting the home of a Syrian woman. The Syrian woman had experienced abuse there and had fled to Canada with her son. She was working two jobs and barely making ends meet.
During filming, Kumar pulled out an envelope filled with money and gave it to the woman to help with rent. The woman broke down crying since she was so overwhelmed.
“I got to capture that and it was beautiful,” Ratzlaff recalled. “When you watch the film, you see them embracing on the couch after the money got exchanged … I just used a snippet of that emotion in there without you fully understanding why or what’s around it.”
Ratzlaff completed his film last June and posted it to the CBC Arts website. He then submitted his video to the Yorkton Film Festival once nominations opened in the fall.
The event was supposed to occur May 21 to 24, but organizers cancelled it due to the pandemic — a first for the 73-year-old international festival. However, YFF still produced a slate of final nominees for this year’s Golden Sheaf Awards competition. Organizers selected Ratzlaff’s video for the category of short subject non-fiction. He considered it a milestone since this was the first time the YFF has short-listed his video.
“That’s very exciting because ever since moving to Saskatchewan five or six years ago, and dipping my toes into the film community, everyone talks about Yorkton … ,” he said. “Yorkton is the longest-running film festival in North America. It’s got a lot of history and prestige, and that’s sort of the crown jewel of what you can achieve as a filmmaker in Saskatchewan.”
Before the pandemic hit, Ratzlaff had built up a successful business and was receiving paid projects. However, with the coronavirus cancelling everything, he now has time to work on a long-delayed personal project.
“(It’s) a narrative short film, because every filmmaker eventually wants to build their own narrative film,” he added, “and that’s the end goal for me.”
