Thursday, March 31st – 1:00 to 2:30 p.m. • Free and open to the public on UR Campus

Location : Ukrop Auditorium – Queally Hall – Robins School of Business – University of Richmond

• Free parking is available adjacent to the Robins School of Business in lots R8 and R9 •

Film Editing : A Key Component in Cinematic Creation

A masterclass by French editor Lizi Gelber with the presence of French Director Yves Jeuland

Lizi Gelber started her editing career working on feature films with directors Robert Altman (Ready to wear), Jean-Marie Poiré (Les Visiteurs), Roland Joffé (Fat Man and Little Boy with Paul Newman) and Michael Cimino (The Sicilian). She soon turns her editing talents to documentaries, often dealing with social and political issues, as in 2013 with Va’pensiero – Storie ambulanti (directed by Dagmawi Yimer) focusing on issues related to African migration to Italy; or in 2012 with Land Rush (by directors Hugo Berkeley and Osvalde Lewat) tackling questions of food sovereignty and land ownership in Africa, asking the question who actually owns Africa. She also exercises her editing skills on complex and composite genre films as the on-going film Brooklyn Roses (directed by Christine Noschese) shot over a twenty-year period, with the same actors playing the same characters as they age and where narrative and documentary footage interweave; or as the documentary The Agronomist (directed in 2003 by Jonathan Demme) profiling Haitian radio journalist and human rights activist, Jean Dominique, and intertwining historical footage of Haiti’s tumultuous past, actual interviews with Dominique, and dailies shot before his assassination on April 3, 2000. Her filmography also includes documentaries capturing prominent political figures, as director Yves Jeuland’s most recent film Un temps de Président (which she will use in this Master Class to illustrate the complexities and relevance of the editing process).

French director Yves Jeuland was authorized to film the daily workings of President François Hollande for six months during a particularly tense period ranging from the dismissal of Manuel Valls’ first government and its reappointment to the political management of the terrorist attacks in January 2015 (Charlie Hebdo).

Jeuland called on film editor Lizi Gelber and her artistic talent to compose a captivating cinematic narrative from the hundreds of hours of images. Result: a documentary, like no other, on the not-quite-so everyday life of a French President.

Using clips from Yves Jeuland’s Un temps de Président, film editor Lizi Gelber demonstrates the editing process while showing how it is a key component in cinematic creation.

Director Yves Jeuland and Editor Lizi Gelber will present their full 104-minute documentary Un temps de Président in the Byrd Theatre on Friday, April 1st at 4:15 p.m. • Free and open to the public

Editor Lizi Gelber’s interview

During the editing of Un temps de Président, we juggled between the objective constraints of telling a story about a very public figure and the freedom in creating a narrative which often took events out of the timeframe in which they occurred.

An editor, especially in documentaries, is constantly “cheating” by changing the order of scenes and “stealing” shots or events to place them in a different context.

I think of filming as collecting words and editing as writing sentences. I can only use the words that have been filmed by the director, but with the same footage I can edit sentences that are repetitive and choppy, or ones that are fluid and captivating.

In order to create structure and rhythm we choose the characters that are most interesting and decide which events to keep in the story, and yet the core of each character and the objective message of the story must be rigorously respected.