Name: La Tierra del Extraño
Genre: Documentary
Released: 2009-09-14
Duration: 1 h 26 min

an extraordinary doc, not just because I worked on it...

A Spanish expat returns to his native Catalan village to reveal the idiosyncrasies of life as it unfolds; children at play, the gossip of card-playing grandmas, the secret lives of cats, preparations for festivals that reveal age-old contradictions. Marrades creates a startling collection of simple pleasures and sublime banalities, finding the strange in the familiar and the familiar in the strange. This gifted filmmaker's contemplative eye for beauty in daily life is equaled only by his ear for it's intrinsic humor.

Xavier Marrades Orga was a graduate student in the Photography and related media department at the School of Visual Arts when I was advising him on his thesis project. The project was interesting, based on adding motion to photography, but he was distracted by personal issues and felt he needed to spend some time back home in Spain. He took a hiatus from the program, bought a Sony HDV camera and went home to Spain for several months. When he came back he showed me a rough cut of the Stranger's Land, a film that he had shot and edited entirely himself. I was blown away by the material. It was personal, yet universal, simple and elegant. 

In the 2-3 years to follow I committed to helping him finish the film in whatever way I could. We struggled with the technical limitations of the camera at first, devising a post-production work flow in which every frame of the film would be processed individually to eek out as much quality as possible. I taught Xavi the basics of color grading and he did a pass on the film, revealing that he was in fact color-blind. I did another pass using the Assimlate Scratch system, bringing the images to a place that felt as natural and true to his vision as possible. We're very proud of the finished result: a feature length personal essay - slow and contemplative, but never boring. -Jerome Thelia colorist NYC

The documentary is a form of non-fiction storytelling that aims to present factual information, insights, and perspectives on real-world subjects, events, issues, or people. Documentaries can cover a wide range of topics, including history, science, culture, social issues, nature, biographies, and more.

Dziga Vertov in Man with a Movie Camera (1929)

A Spanish ex-patriot returns to his native Catalan village to reveal the idiosyncrasies of life as it unfolds; children at play, the gossip of card-playing grandmas, the secret lives of cats, preparations for festivals that reveal age-old contradictions.

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La Tierra del Extraño

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