Picture this: You’re a college student with an interest in documentary filmmaking, and you sign up for a course billed as an exploration of direct cinema – a form of film that is meant to silently observe what is happening, as if the camera wasn’t actually there. You walk in the first day to find Kazuhiro Soda, an award-winning documentarian, in class and discover that you will not only learn from him, but make a feature film with him, too. Pretty wild, huh?
That’s the origin story for “The Big House,” a film directed by Soda, 14 student filmmakers and University of Michigan faculty members Markus Nornes and Terri Sarris.