Amateur filmmaker Urs Amrien was looking for someone to edit together the footage he had been shooting of bears in the wilderness. He approached the Lucerne School of Art and Design, hoping to be put in touch with a student who would take on the task. That’s how he came into contact with Morgane Frund, and how she began work on the project that was recently shortlisted in the Documentary Short Film category for the 96th Academy Awards.
Bear isn’t at all the movie Frund expected to make. Along the way, it turned into a documentary about voyeurism, the male gaze and the objectification of women. As Frund discovered, the video tapes Urs had enlisted her to digitise and edit had more than imagery of the natural world on them. They also contained footage he had secretly shot of young women on the streets.
“At the time, I was really interested in questions around animal documentaries – how we as humans look at animals and what we project,” says the director, who was a first-year student when she first encountered the amateur filmmaker. In her graduation year, she started working in earnest with Amrien. She was intrigued by the filmmaker, a middle-aged man working in logistics who had seen a documentary on TV about bears and had been inspired to go out into the wilds and capture them on camera himself. “He invested so much energy and time in doing this project. I wanted to understand more about it.”
Frund believes that the filmmaker simply forgot that the tapes also contained the furtive, peeping tom-like footage he had shot of women. “He really did do these trips to film the bears but when he was in the city, that’s when he happened to film women.”
The amateur filmmaker was “a very open person.” He didn’t think that filming the women was wrong. When Frund explained she wanted to deal with his voyeurism in the documentary, he accepted it. “He was OK with it. He said that nobody is perfect.”
Amrien was reassured that Frund was also appearing on camera. Bear includes footage of their discussions together in the editing suite as well as of a trip they took together to an art museum.
Frund insists that her goal was never to “expose” the filmmaker or to hang him out to dry. Nonetheless, there is something disturbing and creepy about his footage of the women.
“At the beginning, I saw a clear, clear parallel between what he was doing with both images. My first concept was that he films women like animals – and he films animals like women. Voyeurism is the same in both cases. But then I realised that was way, way too simple and that it wouldn’t work like that.”
But was what he was doing illegal? “It’s a very complicated question. I have heard various responses about it. I don’t know if there is [anything illegal] actually about the act of filming itself but if you want to show the images, there are different rules depending on the country. Public space is different from private space.”
Frund identifies with the women in the footage. She has endured her own grim experiences being stared and objectified by men.
“But I was also building a connection with him. I was the director and he was the protagonist. I had a responsibility towards him. I think that empathy and also care were important in the process beside how much I can disagree with things he has done and said.”
This was a student project. Most of the teachers understood what Frund was trying to achieve. “They also told me to be careful with a few things,” she remembers of the ethical dilemmas the documentary posed and the “existential crisis” she felt while making it.
“I think the male students were very uncomfortable with the film. Some of them became aware of something they might be part of and they had difficulty as to how they dealt with the film,” she notes of the initial response to the doc.
Bear had its premiere at the Internationale Kurzfilmtage Winterthur back in 2022. Since then, it has screened all over the world, everywhere from Berlin to Guanajuato, from Brussels to Tel Aviv.
Wherever the film has screened, intense discussion has always followed. “I think in Switzerland people maybe identify a little more with Amrien. Or they know someone who might be a little bit like him. There was maybe more this impulse to protect him. I think also in Switzerland, I am not sure how we deal with conflict…confrontation in a Swiss documentary film is not that usual. So there was more unease or fear.”
When Bear had its premiere in Berlin, some in the audience questioned Frund’s decision to include footage of the women. This, they argued, made viewers complicit in spying on them and objectifying them all over again. “It was mainly that. That I was doing the same thing as him,” the director says of the objections some spectators raised. “That’s the biggest paradox about the film. If I could have done the film without showing the same footage, I would have.”
Amrien attended some of the early screenings in Switzerland. However, he found the Q&As very stressful. “He felt he had to defend himself and he was not comfortable with it,” Frund remembers. She accepted that it was part of her job as a director to answers questions and respond to criticism about the documentary but felt that he, as the protagonist, had no such responsibility. She didn’t object when he bowed out of the limelight – but she has kept him fully briefed on what has been happening to the documentary.
Making the documentary has made Frund yet more aware of how we remain surrounded by images seen through the “male gaze.” Whether in advertising or museums or on the mass media, “we are all under the influence of these images.” She wants filmmakers to explore “new ways of looking at each other, of filming each other.”
Since completing Bear, Frund has made another short documentary, Out Of The Blue, a video essay reflecting on an auteur film which caused a scandal because of its sex scenes. “It’s also about voyeurism but more in the context of sexuality,” she explains. The director is now planning a first feature length doc – but it’s too early to divulge details about it. In the meantime, Bear is on the Oscar trail. Getting onto the shortlist is a triumph in itself for a graduation project shot on a tiny budget but this is clearly a film that gets under the skin of viewers wherever it is shown
