AFI's blog

By Lydia Ianni
Special to the Daily News

Mark Peranson’s debut film WAITING FOR SANCHO offers Festival-goers more than simply a look at the making of BIRDSONG, a beautifully stark black-and-white film depicting the Three Wise Men. Peranson focuses on the process of making of a film, using extremely long takes made with a small HD camera that gives the feeling of being an invisible visitor to this set.

Peranson’ s ability to create a film that makes the viewer feel that they are part of the set stems from the fact that he himself was a part of this film within a film. Peranson plays the part Jesus’ father Joseph in BIRDSONG, and on his days off he picked up a HDV camera with a built-in microphone to document the film. It was this close connection with the crew and the unobtrusive nature of a small personal camera that Peranson believes allowed him to get such an intimate view of the set.

WAITING FOR SANCHO
3:30 p.m. Wednesday, November 5th @ ArcLight Hollywood 14

SANCHO offers both an uncompromising and comprehensive look at what it is like to be on a film set and part of a creative team. Certainly Peranson catches moments of hilarity as crew members explain to the director that traffic refuses to stop for their film, and costume designers carefully wrapping costumes around cast members who are twirling around with their arms in the air, looking ever so slightly silly.

But SANCHO also focuses on what anybody who has been on a set can tell you: There is a great deal of waiting. This may sound like it would make the film tedious, but it is only through this unmitigated look at life on a set that the viewer gets both a real and honest understanding of the beauty and occasional absurdity of filmmaking.

This absurdity begins with the film’s title. The title WAITING FOR SANCHO is reminiscent of Samuel Beckett’s play Waiting for Godot in which two characters wait for Godot, a character who never appears and may not even exist. The play focuses on the absurdity of the two characters who wait for someone in the absence of any proof of his existence. WAITING FOR SANCHO keeps an air of absurdity while losing the nihilism and hopelessness of Beckett’s work.

According to Peranson, SANCHO captures the “absurdity inherent in the processes of waiting on a film set.” Indeed, much of film consists of waiting. Waiting for traffic to stop, waiting for sound, waiting for the director to say, “cut.” In particular, the filmmakers, and by extension the viewer, wait on an actor named Sancho, who seems to take just a little bit longer than everyone else, “If you look you will see that for most of the film, everyone is waiting for Sancho.”

WAITING FOR SANCHO offers viewers something decidedly outside the mainstream Hollywood norm. It offers none of the standard bloopers or flubbed lines often found in these types of films. By taking an unflinching look at the creative process of filmmaking, Peranson offers moviegoers a rare and honest look at filmmaking.

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