INTERVIEW: In ‘Rezo,’ an animated escape from the brutality of war
Photo: Rezo tells the story of Rezo Gabriadze and his experiences during World War II. Image courtesy of Film Forum press site / Provided with permission.
Rezo, the new film that mixes documentary storytelling with animation, tells a gripping human story of a young man trying to survive the brutality and uncertainty of World War II in Soviet Georgia. That young man would later grow up to be celebrated animator Rezo Gabriadze, and this new film is a cinematic exploration created by his son, Leo Gabriadze.
Running a quick, but moving, 63 minutes, Rezo is currently playing New York City’s Film Forum in the West Village. The narrative structure is unique, reminiscent of the adaptation of American Splendor from a few years ago, in that Leo chose to have a testimonial interview with his father and animated sequences to highlight memories of 70 years ago.
“The first time I approached this idea was in ’94,” Leo said in a recent phone interview. “Then I studied in the United States. In Los Angeles, I was studying animation. In the ’90s, it happened that there was a big animation boom because computer graphics were possible to do things not only by hand but with computers. At the time the software became available, you could do these kinds of things. When I was studying, that’s when I realized that my father’s stories and his drawings can be put together, and this could be made into a film. … I recorded his stories, but I couldn’t handle it by myself because as you know animation is quite difficult. It needs teamwork.”
After Leo hooked up with a movie producer who liked the idea, he started to collaborate with animators and build the movie. In his pursuit to tell his father’s story, the cold-hard truth was a secondary thought. This was a cinematic hour in which Rezo had the chance to remember, no matter how spotty that memory may be or how fantastical the dreams became.
“The way it works with my father, he’s a writer and a director,” Leo said. “So I grew up always reliving what he was telling. I never asked him, is it true, what’s true and what’s made up. We don’t ask him these questions. I take it everything is the truth, and growing up in the Soviet Union, my age of people and older we all had very good research because that was a subject matter that always was a lot on TV and movies. It was always a lot about those times and that war. The film is made out of a lot of small short stories of father that I put together and made it into the one story.”
Leo said he responds to emotional stories, and his father’s tale of survival certainly fits the bill of an emotional story. The fact that Rezo would become a dramatist later in life meant he also had a way with words in his retelling of the tale.
“Growing up in a household of a drama writer, I was listening to a lot of these kinds of stories since childhood,” Leo said. “When you listen to the story, and you smile or laugh or you get tears in your eyes, that means there is an emotional hook there. I knew that this story would work because the reaction that I had when I heard it for the first time, I teared up. I was laughing at the same time, so I felt this was ready to make it into the film. You test it on yourself, how you react to it. If I react well to the story, then maybe others would like it to. The director should … let the story kind of go through him and see how it affects him, and if the reaction is there, then other people will react to it.”
Leo started working on Rezo, but then had to take a break to film Unfriended, a 2014 supernatural thriller that feels a million miles away from the subject matter of this animated documentary. But the diversity of his artistic output seems to sustain Leo as a filmmaker.
“I just had a break in between,” he said. “First we shot the footage of father telling stories, but then I got a job doing another film in L.A, which is called Unfriended. Then I went there to do that film, and when I came back, then I finished [Rezo] and edited it and animated it and did the rest of the production. So if you combine all the time spent on it, it’s approximately two years it took.”
He added, with a laugh: “I don’t think I’m a good example for young directors. This is not right what I’m doing because every time I do a different thing; that’s not good. I think people need to stay with one genre and become better at it. My life has been all messed up, and I’ve been doing different things. Right now I’m working in the puppet theater directing puppet shows, so I’m all over the place. And that’s not a good example. That’s the life I have, and I don’t know what to do with it.”
There are some similarities between Unfriended and Rezo. Both projects had limitations, but those constraints excited Leo as a creative artist. For the supernatural thriller, he needed to tell the entire narrative by using only images on a computer’s desktop.
“You had a lot of limitations in how to be able to hold the audience attention for an hour and a half on the desktop,” Leo said. “It seems very difficult, and that’s why I liked it. In this case, it was challenging, too, because first we started with just my father telling a story and how to make it interesting and how to be able to keep the attention of the audience during the whole show. That was a challenge for me, but I thought somehow that this was very close to ancient entertainment, like Stone Age or the old times.”
What Leo means by “ancient entertainment” is that Rezo is almost like a community elder coming around a campfire and telling stories to family and friends. He believes this form of storytelling predates theater and the movies, and it taps into something almost in the audience’s DNA.
“People would gather around the fire, and one of the elderly probably would tell the story of hunting,” he said. “I thought this was a very ancient form of entertainment. How to tell that story would be interesting. … In literature, all the different literature genres can be written on a piece of paper. There’s one genre in literature that cannot be done. That’s the oral storytelling. It’s literature, too, but it happens to be a performance. You need an audience, and you need an author to tell the story. So for me [Rezo] is more like an animated genre of literature than a movie or a documentary. I don’t really consider it as a documentary film because it’s not a pure documentary. There’s a lot of fantasy, but also it has the elements of documentary, too, because father is telling his life story. He’s a storyteller, and not everything is true completely. He makes up things, but if his stories are emotional, then for me that is enough. I take it as a real story.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
Rezo, directed by Leo Gabriadze, is currently playing New York City’s Film Forum. Click here for more information and tickets. It is combined on a double bill with the classic animated film Tale of Tales.
