Roland Schlimme is a
Canadian
Canadians (french: Canadiens) are people identified with the country of Canada. This connection may be residential, legal, historical or cultural. For most Canadians, many (or all) of these connections exist and are collectively the source of ...
film editor known in particular for his work with filmmakers
Peter Mettler and
Jennifer Baichwal
Jennifer Baichwal is a Canadian documentary filmmaker, writer and producer.
Biography
Baichwal was born in Montreal, Quebec and raised in Victoria, British Columbia. . He's also worked on several projects with artists
Phillip Barker and
Laura Taler
Laura Taler is a Romanian-born Canadian artist. Beginning her career as a contemporary dance choreographer, she now works in a range of media, including performance, film, sound, sculpture, and installations. Taler's films ''The Village Trilogy ...
as well as filmmakers
Alison Murray and
Cliff Caines Cliff Caines is a Canadian documentary filmmaker originally from Red Lake, Ontario. He is most noted for his 2015 film '' A Rock and a Hard Place'', a film about mining life in Red Lake which received an honorable mention for the Colin Low Award at ...
.
He began his film editing career working with
Peter Mettler in an abandoned hotel outside Zurich on the feature documentary ''
Gambling, Gods and LSD
''Gambling, Gods and LSD'' is a 2002 Canadian/Swiss experimental documentary film by Canadian film director Peter Mettler. It was shot between 1997 and 1999 in Canada, the United States, Switzerland and India, and is a "fragmented narrative" tha ...
'', tackling hundreds of hours of film and video to produce a fifty-two-hour assembly edit and a three-hour film. Of this period, Mettler would later remark, “I’ve never lived together with anybody as intensively as Roland. … He edited the day shift and I’d edit the night shift and we’d converse and show each other things in-between.”
Speaking of his contributions to ''
Anthropocene: The Human Epoch'', director
Jennifer Baichwal
Jennifer Baichwal is a Canadian documentary filmmaker, writer and producer.
Biography
Baichwal was born in Montreal, Quebec and raised in Victoria, British Columbia. said, “The quarry scene was interesting because it was Roland’s idea, our editor, to use the opera
ozart’s Don Giovanni">Don_Giovanni.html" ;"title="ozart’s Don Giovanni">ozart’s Don Giovanni At first, I thought, ‘it’s drawing too much attention to itself,’ but then I grew to love it because there is something so epic about that environment.” (The segment sets activity at the cavernous Carrara marble quarries in Italy to the second act of the opera, in which a statue takes its revenge on an unrepentant Don Giovanni.)
He works predominantly but not exclusively on documentary films and describes his approach to film editing with analogies to writing and music composition, stressing the importance of early-stage assemblies. In an interview published in 2012, he elaborated, “Assembly is a crucial stage because it's an exploration of the material, a time to experiment a bit, but importantly a way of evaluating the strengths and weaknesses of the material, what it might offer the film. The discussion about structure is based on the assemblies. … I work on a lot of unscripted material. This is the model of filmmaking wherein the activity in the editing room becomes something like the writing process, except that it's a process of juggling images, sounds, motions, words, music, etc. … it's important with these types of films to have the time to make it work.”
His film credits also include writing and music composition (''Trouble in the Peace'', ''Watermark (2013 film)">Watermark
A watermark is an identifying image or pattern in paper that appears as various shades of lightness/darkness when viewed by transmitted light (or when viewed by reflected light, atop a dark background), caused by thickness or density variations ...
'', and others). In addition to music for films, Schlimme produces music as Rewaver (along with Joseph Doane).
Schlimme mentors and lectures occasionally (including masterclasses at the Documentary Media MFA program at
) and in 2012 he inaugurated the “Creative Editing and Sound” undergraduate course at
The film’s he has edited have been featured at TIFF nine times (including a Gala, a Special Presentation, and the Master's Programme) and at Hot Docs eight times (including an Opening Night Gala); among many international accolades, they’ve won two Canadian Screen Awards for Best Feature Documentary (''