Taking the Camera Outside

I film outside. I take my camera, my phone, and I record in the world, not just in controlled studio environments. I share ideas as they develop, sometimes even collaborating with others on sound or camera work. The essay form invites this kind of openness—not necessarily collaboration in the practical sense of shared authorship, but collaboration on the human level of idea-sharing, of being receptive to what the world offers.

 

Berlin's busy cafes are a particularly fertile location for catching ideas and writing them down. There's something about the ambient energy, the low hum of conversation around you, that helps you stay focused even amid interruptions. It trains you to hold your concentration without needing perfect silence, which mirrors the act of filming itself—being present to your subject while the world continues around you.

 

Filmbüro: A Space for Working Openly

My Filmbüro—literally "film bureau" in German—is designed around this principle of working in public. I share my office space with other people in a cooperative, a Genossenschaft. We share ideas, there's a dynamic exchange. It's a dedicated space where I can sit down to edit and write, but it's not isolated from the world.

 

I have my desk, my microphones, my equipment, my cameras. A map of the world and pictures for inspiration. My editing program runs on a large external screen connected to my laptop, with an external keyboard and mouse—everything I need to come in, work, write narration, and edit. This is where I finished My Sister Shira, a film I worked on for almost two years of laborious effort, though much of the material I shot fifteen years ago or more.

 

The Essay Filmmaker Needs a Home

A film essayist might travel and film around the world, but they need somewhere to call home. Home is where you record your narration, because narration deserves an aftermath—it needs to come after you've digested the material you filmed, after you've gained some distance from it. You sit down in your space, take a deep breath, drink a good cup of coffee, and begin to work.

 

That's where you edit your films. You need a larger screen to see the material properly. You need patience. You need to play with footage, to try different configurations, to access all those external hard drives full of archival material. The Filmbüro is where all those elements come together—the raw footage from the world, the narration recorded in solitude, the editing that synthesizes everything into a coherent vision.

 

Why Public, Not Private?

Working in public is a philosophical commitment as much as a practical one. The essay form is fundamentally about subjective perspective—one person's way of seeing—but it's not solipsistic. It exists in dialogue with the world. By working openly, by sharing space with others, by filming in cafes and on streets, I stay connected to that dialogue.

 

There's a balance to strike. I'm not advocating for constant distraction or performing your process for an audience. The work itself still requires deep focus, long hours of solitary concentration. But the permeability matters. Ideas come from unexpected places. A conversation in the collective workspace might shift how you think about a scene. The rhythm of a cafe might influence the pacing of your edit.

 

The Filmbüro embodies this balance. It's a professional space with all the technical infrastructure I need, but it's also a social space where ideas circulate. It's where solitary artistic work happens in proximity to other people doing their own solitary work, and that proximity creates something valuable—a sense that making films is not a hermetic activity but part of a larger cultural practice.

 

A Method, Not a Rule

This approach works for me and for the kind of films I make. It might not work for everyone, and that's fine. Some filmmakers need complete isolation. Some need the structure of a traditional production environment. But for the film essayist—someone working with a camera and editing software and microphone, recording reality from their own point of view—working in public can be generative.

 

It keeps you honest. It reminds you that films are made for people, even when they're deeply personal. It allows the world to seep into your process in small, productive ways. And it creates a sustainable practice—a way of working that doesn't depend on waiting for perfect conditions or complete isolation, but that can happen in the midst of life itself.

 

That's why I work in public. That's what Filmbüro represents. It's a space that acknowledges the essay film as both an intimate, personal practice and a public, cultural act—a space where the door is never fully closed, because the world outside is part of the work.