Feature documentary The Coffee Man will be released online via iTunes this week. The film follows a former Olympian turned coffee pro, Canberra barista Sasa Sestic, on his path to winning the World Barista Championship in Seattle in 2015.
The film wasn’t originally focused on Sestic himself, the film’s director Jeff Hann told IF.
Hann was first introduced to Sestic through his brother-in-law, and over lunch one day they discussed making a film about the direct coffee trade, looking at how coffee is processed and sourced.
Hann packed his bags and with producer Roland Fravel followed Sestic on a bean-hunting trip around Ethiopia, visiting remote coffee farms.
“When we got back from that trip, I started editing something together; a bit of teaser. Then Sasa told us about this Australian barista competition,” the director said.
“We went along to that. That’s when I definitely started seeing his obsessive side come out more, because he’s a very competitive guy. That’s when I was like, ‘alright, this should be more an ob doc around you.’ He didn’t want that at all to begin with; I had to convince him."
Hann and Fravel travelled to the barista world championships in Seattle, looking forward to highlighting another side of specialty coffee – never seriously contemplating that Sestic would actually win: “We just thought we’d capture moments and capture behind the scenes [footage]."
The finished film captures the stress of the competition.
"[Sasa] ends up in hospital, he gets really sick. It shows it’s just like any sport; they take it so seriously. He was doing nothing but preparing for this competition for months. I really wanted to capture that and it didn’t really matter too much if he won or lost. But obviously him winning was great; because it made the way we made the film really work.”
After the world championships, Hann and Fravel began to seek funding to finish the film. Instead of using the typical financing pathways, they turned to the coffee industry.
“We had the golden boy of the coffee world. He was the most famous person in coffee at the time,” said Hann.
Post-production began with Hann enlisting the help of experienced editor Tony Stevens. Some 120 hours of footage captured over a year and a half meant it took five months to craft the story, with Hann travelling frequently to Canberra to get pickups with Sestic and his family.
The shoot took Hann and Fravel to Ethiopia, Honduras, Columbia and the US. In places like Ethiopia, they often had no more than 20 minutes in one place to get shots and do interviews – it was a matter of “running and gunning”, said Hann.
“In different situations you want more cameras and you want more crew to help out. It was tricky; those trips were really just running on no sleep and trying to do 10 things at once.”
Another challenge was time. One of the deals Hann and Fravel made with their sponsors was they would release the film while Sasa was still the reigning world champion. This meant a tight timeframe to edit and also affected the method of distribution.
The filmmakers decided to mostly forgo the festival circuit (give or take a Dungog Festival and a CinefestOZ) and instead released the film in May through cinema-on-demand platform Tugg, marketing it at cafes.
It’s been a successful approach, according to Hann. Over the past four months The Coffee Man has screened over 200 times in 40 countries, and has been translated into 12 different languages.
The film went on to win Best Australian Documentary at the Melbourne Documentary Festival and was nominated for a 2016 ATOM Award.
Hann describes the process of making The Coffee Man, his first feature, as “incredible”, re-affirming his love of “not knowing” inevitable to observational documentary.
“You follow something and see what happens. Obviously that could go completely wrong, but it’s good to have a bit of intuition."
The production inevitably entailed “drinking coffee non-stop”, and now Hann is a connoisseur: “When I started the film, I knew nothing about coffee. Now I’m a coffee geek.”
The Coffee Man is available to download via iTunes from Wednesday November 30.