American Cinematographer - April 2020 - 25

t Joobeur and Gonneville observe a scene.
p Gonneville takes a break during the shoot.

Gonneville and Joobeur met in a
documentary-film class at Concordia.
When Joobeur pitched a project that
revolved around her Alzheimer'sstricken grandfather's experience of the
Tunisian Revolution of 2011 (the short
ultimately released as Gods, Weeds and
Revolutions), Gonneville volunteered to
participate. "At the beginning, I was
supposed to be the sound operator," he
says. "But the cinematographer dropped
the project a couple of weeks before the
trip to Tunisia, so I became the cinematographer."
During that first collaboration,
shot with a Canon EOS 5D DSLR,
Gonneville and Joobeur were "discovering filmmaking," he says. "I didn't even
know what an ND filter was. It was really
like a beginning, and we developed this
brother-and-sister
relationship.
Creatively, it's been very easy since then
to collaborate - very natural."
However, "natural" and "easy"
were not words that sprang to mind
when they embarked on the project that
became Brotherhood. Returning to
Tunisia to locate the men who inspired
the script was akin to searching for a
needle in a haystack. "We didn't really
remember which road we had taken a
year earlier," Gonneville says. "There

were so many possibilities."
Joobeur recalls that they selected
"an approximate location" and
proceeded to describe the men to
strangers they met along the way. "We
spent a full day doing that with no leads,
with a lot of comic moments," she says.
Some passersby were either suspicious
or intentionally pointed them in the
wrong direction. "Finally, as we were
giving up, we kind of took a back road,
and Vincent recognized a pile of rocks
that was next to the boys when we first
met them." A nearby shepherd pointed
the way to the right house.
The prescience of Joobeur and
Gonneville's initial instincts surprised
even them when, six months later, in
March 2018, they returned to Tunisia to
make the movie and discovered that the
first-time actors could deliver the goods.
"The boys ended up being really good
actors, and everything unfolded in such
a natural and cool way," Gonneville says.
"We kind of felt there was something
special from the beginning."
Gonneville used an Arri Alexa
Mini, recording 3.2K ProRes 4:4:4:4.
"That format was well suited for our
workflow and the reality of our small
production," he says. "I shot 3.2K
because although there is only a 3mm
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difference in the width of the imagearea size compared to the 2K image-area
size, I really feel that difference. A 50mm
lens suddenly becomes larger and more
pleasing, less 'TV.'"
The filmmakers decided to
emphasize people as much as places in
compositions. Gonneville was influenced
by Canadian photographer Larry Towell,
who "lives on a farm and has been taking
pictures of his family there for many
years," he says. "There's something so
intimate about it, so beautiful, and we
really wanted to get that with the family
[in Brotherhood]. The script itself has a
really intimate view on the struggle of
the fighters coming back to their families." Joobeur adds, "We wanted to
make the film a portrait of the people
and the landscape."
To reinforce the intimacy,
Gonneville proposed framing in the
1.33:1 aspect ratio. "It gives a lot of
importance to faces, and because this
movie is like a portrait, [that frame] was
just perfect," says the cinematographer.
"Personally, I like to compose a frame
that's more square than rectangle; I find
it more pleasing."
Although Joobeur had not previously worked in 1.33, she was won over
by the test shots Gonneville made on
April 2020

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American Cinematographer - April 2020

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