Roland Schlimme
Roland Schlimme is a Canadian film editor known in particular for his work with filmmakers Peter Mettler and Jennifer Baichwal. He's also worked on several projects with artists Phillip Barker and Laura Taler as well as filmmakers Alison Murray and Cliff Caines.
Career
Roland Schlimme began his film editing career working with Peter Mettler in an abandoned hotel outside Zurich on the feature documentary Gambling, Gods and LSD, 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 said, “The quarry scene was interesting because it was Roland’s idea, our editor, to use the opera . 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.”
Schlimme 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.”
Schlimme's film credits also include writing and music composition. In addition to music for films, Schlimme produces music as Rewaver.
Schlimme mentors and lectures occasionally and in 2012 he inaugurated the “Creative Editing and Sound” undergraduate course at Toronto Metropolitan University.
Accolades
The films Schlimme has edited have been featured at TIFF nine times and at Hot Docs eight times. Among many international accolades, they’ve won two Canadian Screen Awards for Best Feature Documentary, two Genies for Best Documentary, a Genie for Best Arts Documentary, and an International Emmy for Outstanding Documentary.Schlimme was the winner of the Directors Guild of Canada's DGC Craft Award for Picture Editing in a Documentary in 2020 for Meat the Future. He was a Canadian Screen Award nominee for Long Time Running in 2018 and a Gemini Award nominee for Acquainted with [the Night (film)|Acquainted with the Night] in 2011. He is also a two-time nominee for the Canadian Cinema Editors awards for Acquainted with the Night in 2011 and for The Ghosts in Our Machine in 2014.