DOCUMENTARY
MIMMO
WINNER Best Feature Documentary, Nottingham International Film Festival
WINNER Best Feature Film, International Migration & Environment Festival
WINNER Best Mid-Length Documentary, Newsfest Las Vegas
WINNER Best Documentary Short, Rome Prisma International Film Festival (May 2021)OFFICIAL SELECTION North Dakota Human Rights Film Festival
OFFICIAL SELECTION Love Wins Film Festival, New York
OFFICIAL SELECTION Tortona Indie Film Session
SEMI-FINALIST Flickers’ Rhode Island International Film Festival (BAFTA-qualifying)
SEMI-FINALIST Dumbo Film Festival, New YorkFINALIST Birmingham Film & Television Festival
FINALIST Picentia Short Film Festival
NOMINEE Best Original Score, Rome Prisma International Film Festival (May 2021)
STRINGS ATTACHED
Making MIMMO
In October 2018, an Italian mayor was banished from his home town after being accused of corruption and malpractice.Under laws usually reserved for mafia bosses, he was ordered to leave the place of his birth until his case was heard. At the time Italian politics was gripped by populist fervour, and supporters feared he had fallen victim to attempts to blacken his name and remove him from office.That mayor was Domenico Lucano, named by Forbes in 2016 as one of the world’s greatest leaders. Lucano had founded a refugee welcome project years earlier in a final, desperate effort to rejuvenate his town of Riace, drawing new workers from the steady flow of refugees and migrants landing on Italy’s shores.
In May 2019, new elections forced locals to choose between Lucano’s liberal-minded reforms and a populist agenda put forward by supporters of the right-wing League party, which had pilloried the mayor for his refugee-friendly stance.Allowed back to Riace for just one hour to give his campaign speech, Lucano found himself justifying the welcome project he had founded decades earlier, long opposed by many and which had attracted world-wide media attention, for good or ill.‘Mimmo’ is the story of that week in May 2019 when a small-town local election seemed to bring the forces of populism head-to-head against his own vision of a more accepting, open-minded society. When everything Lucano had fought for hung in the balance.
Hampstead RFC
SHORT FILM
THE PART
BENEATH
A tongue-in-cheek tribute to sci-fi, made for London Short Film’s 90-second movie contest. With Erik Ros and Emily Cox.OFFICIAL SELECTION: Unrestricted View Film Festival, London, UK, April 2019
OFFICIAL SELECTION: Exploding Cinema, London, UK, December 2018
OFFICIAL SELECTION: Sci-Cine Film Festival, Leicester, UK, November 2018
OFFICIAL SELECTION: London Short Film 90-Second Sci-Fi Contest, April 2018
PHOTOGRAPHY
THE TRUTH (Behind the Scenes)
When a friend tells you he's shooting a short film and asks if you'd like to take behind-the-scenes photos, somehow the answer is always going to be 'Yes!'.Ben Brundell's mockumentary 'The Truth' was shot on a single day at Little White Lies in London. The lights were blazing, the extras were buzzing and Ben was poring over every shot and the tiniest inflections of each line.In some ways I was relieved to be behind my camera, grabbing those moments that may or may not make the final cut, instead of directing a delicately poised script in such a tiny window of time. You can see the intensity in Ben's calm-but-steady glare, his complete absorption in every sinew of the production.I'm strangely proud of the shots I came away with, quick flashes of reminiscence in the great froth of film-making.
Sofar Sounds
What started as a low-key jam session in a London flat in 2009 has now spread to over 300 cities, attracting thousands of artists and music-lovers to quirky locations in every corner of the globe.Sofar Sounds has evolved in giant leaps since that first impromptu gathering but stays true to the ethic - unearthing musicians you've probably never heard of and giving them the space to perform in a chilled, respectful atmosphere.
Sofar Sounds effectively gave me my start as a photographer, letting me into their world to capture the small moments and fleeting images that create the tapestry of memory.It was a hard slog, often shooting in low light and then labouring over which photos to include and how to bring out the best in them, all before deadline. It seems a far cry from video and film-making and yet the similarities are manifold and striking.
FILM NOTES
Aberrant ramblings on the screen experience
STILL (2023)
GENRE: Feature documentary
DIRECTOR: Davis Guggenheim
EDITOR: Michael Harte
28 July 2024
What made ‘Still: A Michael J Fox Story’ so damned good?A clue comes from its editor Michael Harte, who previously cut ‘Three Identical Strangers’ which also employed reconstruction filming to fill in vital gaps.Except with ‘Still’, the craftsmanship seems to reach a new level, with Harte helping to storyboard new footage during the edit and fitting it together seamlessly with the cut they already had:“We had an hour and a half assembly of just Michael J Fox’s audio book, and archive, and potential storyboards. And I had edited this on my own and sent it to the director Davis Guggenheim, and we were kind of excited about it. You could see that there was an arc there.I kind of got excited about this idea of an archival only film with Michael J Fox, but we had a couple of gaps in the story. But the pace of that cut was just relentless. I wanted this to be fast, and Davis was the same, but Davis and me decided we're missing a couple of moments in this.Maybe he can give us some audio, or he can re-record some of the audio that they cut out of the audiobooks? And Davis said, I'm going to record him on camera as well, just to be safe. And I got the footage back into the edit a couple of days after the interview.And I remember watching the interview and thinking, this is easily the best interview I've ever had in the edit. Easily. And I was so shocked and surprised how honest and funny he was.And he was like, okay, everything we've done, it's secondary now. That interview is the heart and soul of the story.So my job then was to figure that out, how do I add these two? You know, honestly, there's a version of this film where it could have been just that interview.Some of the reconstructions I thought were fantastic. Again, it's not like they were trying to trick us, but they looked like they were shot by Dean Cundey. They looked like they were from an 80s movie.They didn't seem at all out of place. I really bought into them. There was a couple of moments actually where I was almost full with the Back to the Future stuff, where I just thought, hang on, is that a behind-the-scenes shot there that I've not seen before?I think the trick with that was we storyboarded it in the edit, which is something I've never done before. We had a guy called David Navas. Davis was in LA, I was in London and David Navas was in Storyboard House in Barcelona. And we'd all get on a Zoom when the time allowed us.And he would do it in real time - he would draw the storyboard, and then he would put it on a screen and we'd say, okay, can you move him to the left a bit? And this kind of went on for a couple of weeks.But I think the reason it feels potentially like a Dean Cundey film is that we would start with a clip of Michael in his movies first and work our way out, as opposed to the other way around.So everybody, when they watch it, they say to me, oh my god, it's amazing that you found that clip - it was actually the other way around. We started with the clip and thought, where could this live?And we would then build, we would storyboard around these shots and repurpose the shots so that we always knew where the scene would end.”
Quotes from:
‘The Filmumentaries Podcast: No76 - Michael Harte’ - 12 May 2023
Freelance Producer/Director and Video Editor.Known for the mid-length documentary 'Mimmo', a profile of Italian mayor Domenico Lucano, heralded as one of the world's 50 greatest leaders by Forbes magazine in 2016 for his pioneering refugee work and rejuvenating the struggling town of Riace.Producing credits at top British production houses including BBC Studios, ITN Productions, BriteSpark Films/Argonon and Channel 4 News. Writer and director of narrative shorts including 'Seduction', 'The Runner' and 'Beneath'.Extensive experience in research, development, field producing, shooting and editing for high-end TV output, corporate video, short-form and long-form content; photography and photo editing; working with top onscreen talent; scripting for TV, video and news; and researching and writing in-depth features and analysis for websites, newspapers and magazines.Experienced user of Avid Media Composer, Adobe Premiere Pro and Adobe Creative Suite.
Showreels
Editing for News