Zev Robinson

There were about 27 interviews included in Life on the Douro, if you include a couple of tour guides. Some other people played an important role, even though they didn’t speak or their interview wasn’t included for one reason or another. Here are the interviewees, and a couple of other people as well. Antònio Agrellos, [...]

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Done! I came back home three weeks ago with plenty of new material, great interviews with Fladgate Partnership chairman Alistair Robertson, Paul Symington and Dirk Niepoort, and edited non-stop to get the finished film out to the Douro Film Harvest. The film’s narrative structure was already in place, but with some gaps, and I needed [...]

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I spent all day at the iconic Quinta do Noval on Thursday, July 21. I first heard about its history a year ago when I interviewed Jose Alberto Allen, whose family owned it in the 19th century, and then learned more about its history from Cristiano Van Zeller, whose family bought it from the Allen [...]

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On Monday, I traveled from Porto to the Douro Valley, and stayed at the Fladgate Partnership’s Vargelas estate, warmly hosted by Alistair and Gillyane Robertson. I interviewed Alistair to get the history of the company going back to 1692, one of the missing pieces I need to finish the film. I just needed a brief [...]

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Outside of three important interviews, the reason for this trip is to get quality visual material that will convey much of the story. On Saturday, I filmed for a couple of hours during a boat ride on the Douro around the area of Porto and Gaia courtesy of Oscar Quevedo, complementing two previous ones in [...]

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I’m feel an urgency to get some very high quality shots to finish Life on the Douro. Yesterday, I got a few hours of shooting in Gaia and Porto. Great, sunny day, and I had to ruefully tear myself away to go have lunch with Ryan and Gabriella Opaz of www.catavino.net and then we all [...]

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I’m feel an urgency to get some very high quality shots to finish Life on the Douro. Yesterday, I got a few hours of shooting in Gaia and Porto. Great, sunny day, and I had to ruefully tear myself away to go have lunch with Ryan and Gabriella Opaz of www.catavino.net and then we all [...]

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Life on the Douro is in the final stages of editing, and I’m working on the audio, agonizing over the right mix of the interviews, casual conversations, background sounds, and music. The music should convey a certain sense of pace and atmosphere, but be neutral, so that it doesn’t impose an emotional mood. It shouldn’t [...]

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I met Ryan and Gabriella Opaz of http://catavino.net somewhere in cyberspace after finishing my first wine documentary, La Bobal, which started out an idea for a short film but ended up absorbing my life. We met in person in London at the beginning of 2009, and gradually became collaborators and friends. Through Ryan and Gabriella, [...]

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