Home

I was Here (????) [N/A]

Gallery Unavailable

Original Title:
I was Here

Ratings / Certifications:
 N/A

Runtime: 86

Authenticity vs performance in a mischievous film about the casting for a film, which turns out to be the one we are watching.

Overview from TheMovieDB

Do you want to be in a documentary? A bunch of Englishmen have turned up at the casting for a film that turns out to be the one we are sitting and watching. A mixed gallery of characters, who paradoxically are hoping to be cast in the roles of themselves. 'I was Here' is a social experiment with brains, a heart and underplayed humour. The many attendees are as diverse as people are in the real world. Young and old, funny and bitter, self-confident and nervous - what are they hoping to find by taking part in a film? The obvious answer is the simplest one: themselves. We look on from the other side of the camera, as they take part in the experiment. The contradiction between authenticity and performance is not just a question of identity. It is also one of the basic conflicts of modern documentary filmmaking, which Ola Jankowska and Nathalie Bianchieri turn into both a premise and a method.

Click the heading above to show or hide the text.

Additional information:

The Search Form


Production

Director:
Ola Jankowska
Nathalie Biancheri

Click the heading above to show or hide the list.

About the Movie Section

Most data and links to images for the Movies section come from TheMovieDB (TMDB).

Additional data for Film Titles come from The Open Movie Database (OMDb).

At least one plug-in comes from IMDb.

Data are -- hey, it's a plural -- subject to the limitations of their sources. (For example, TMDB search results currently max out at 20.) I am limiting myself to free data sources for now. (No, a "free trial" is not free.)

While much of the above data are retrieved directly from outside APIs and other such sources, data from American Film Institute (AFI) and British Film Institute (BFI) were manually entered the old fashioned way into a MySQL database. Re BFI I took the following liberties:

  • I added "runners up" to Top 10 lists, treating them as ties where applicable and numbering them accordingly at the bottom of each list.
  • Regarding those polls wherein "franchise" movies were submitted as one project until BFI's policy changed to regard them separately, I treated them as ties and renumbered the affected lists accordingly (e.g. the Godfather films).

Regarding profile removals and data corrections:

  • If you would like your profile removed from this site, please contact the source of this data directly, TheMovieDB. My assumption is: once it's gone from their site, it should soon be gone from this site.
  • If you would like to correct movie data on this site, please contact the source of this data directly, TheMovieDB. My assumption is: once it's corrected on their site, it should soon be corrected on this site.
  • For additional corrections and profile removals, please e-mail The Open Movie Database (OMDb).

Filtering is applied here to film projects flagged as "adult" by TheMovieDB. Pending "popular demand" I am contemplating a login and profile system with preferences (such as whether to allow adult images to appear) and permissions (such as data entry).

Whereas the overall purpose of this website is to serve as a personal demo/portfolio/workshop of web and data skills, this Movies section is not meant to compete with or substitute for far more definitive movie websites.

Whether or not he still clings to an award which he won in 1986 as a film critic for his college's newspaper, Jeffrey Hartmann is not responsible for the texts of overviews and biographies supplied by external data sources.