DocuDays 20th Edition 2023 Opening

I was in Kyiv last night. Again. For the opening of the 20^th edition of the DocuDays ua International Human Rights Documentary Festival. Online via Facebook. It was like it was before in the Zhovten Cinema: An opening with speeches in Ukrainian and English including one from a representative from the main sponsor of the festival, the Swedish Embassy in Ukraine (bravo Sweden for the continuous support), clips from the many competition programmes, a hall full of spectators…

And yet it was different. Of course it was. Ukraine is at war. The film program illustrates this and there were strong emotional moments of demonstration and commemoration during the opening ceremony:

The whole hall of spectators stood up with signs “#free Maksym Butkevych”, the human rights activist and journalist, who was working with the festival and who was captured by the occupiers and sentenced to 13 years of prison for “his support for IDPs during the war in Donbas and because of his history as a journalist for the BBC…”being “labelled as a neo-nazi and British spy” (Wikipedia).

Dary’a Averchenko, head of the festival’s communication department, made a speech that commemorated film editor Victor Onysko “who died defending Ukraine”. His widow Olga Birzul curated a program “Editing Transition” in memory of her husband. On the festival website (https://docudays.ua/eng/2023/news/intervyu/kritichniy-poglyad-na-kino-musit-buti-bazovoyu-navichkoyu-olga-birzul-pro-programu-montazhniy-perekhid/) there is an interview with Birzul, who for many years took part in the programming of the festival. I remember Roman Bondarchuk, director and art director of the festival characterized her as “the soul of the festival”. A quote from the interview: 

… First of all, I wanted to talk in detail about the whole variety of montage in this programme: as a technique, a political gesture, a reconstruction of memory and a time machine. I tried to show the scale of this phenomenon. After all, montage is the grammar of the film language. Before the emergence of montage theory, cinema was pure entertainment. After that, it became an art. 

At first, I chose three films, as you say, political ones: The March on Rome by Mark Cousins, Private Footage by Janaína Nagata and Arcadia by Paul Wright. Together with their critical optics, they all are just suited for a montage cinema slot. But I couldn’t get Lea Glob's beautiful Apolonia, Apolonia out of my mind. I felt that conceptually it was a bit out of place. It's a personal and even confessional film, which, by the way, also includes a lot of politics and activism, but at the same time, editing stops playing a major role there. The film is not cut up or used as a method of researching reality. In Apolonia, Apolonia, we see the other side of documentary cinema – a work with time…

Ahhh, clever words. The festival opened with the film by Alisa Kovalenko, reviewed/ praised on this site, “We Will not Fade Away”, a masterpiece.

https://docudays.ua/eng/

still: we will not fade away 

Mariam Chachia & Nik Voigt: Magic Mountain

I was a juror at the DocsBarcelona and contributed to the jury choice of Georgian documentary “Magic Mountain” for the main award in the Panorama section. In beforehand I had written the following key words for the deliberation meeting, having seen the film:

…beautifully crafted cinematography, dares to go for long atmosphere creating sequences, multilayered, people, history of the country, the landscape around…

Cinematography first, excellent work by Voigt through the many years of shooting – the two started filming in 2014. With the camera he is inside and outside the impressive Abastumani, he is there when it is light and when it is dark, catching panoramas of the mountain and the landscapes and making superb observations of the people in the tubercolosis sanatorium. Going close when the director Chachia goes close to meet, talk to and play backgammon with the men, who for many have been there for years. 

The film is full of long sequences that serve to create the nightmarish atmosphere that met Chachia, when she was ill and now, when she returns to experience the sadness and melancholy that reign at the magic mountain building, that is taken down as it has been bought by the Georgian oligarch, who by the way is also the one, who transported trees for his personal park in the film of Salomé Jashi! A building in decay, poverty and decadence.

Abastumani is a historical place – a member of the Romanov czarist family is said to have been there and was cured for the disease, a statue of him was built in gratitude - and taken down when the communists came to power and made the hospital a famous health place in the USSR. 

Thus the film has many layers but for me the patients and the staff were the main attraction. A conversation with Ismaël  that Chachia has, is both full of humor as it takes place - he is planning to go home to meet a woman, he has met on the phone, to have a life with her - and of sadness when later Chachia is informed by other patients that Ismaël passed away after he left Abastumani. Or Manana who can not take her pills even if the doctors try their best, she denies, she can not swallow them. Very touching scenes. Or the unlucky priest or…

It all comes together in a beautiful film, emotional and informational it is and it has found the right tone for its narrative and cinematic interpretation. Wish it a good further festival life.

Georgia/Poland, 2023, 73 minutes.

DocuDays Kyiv Workshops

We continue presenting to you this year's DOCU/PRO programme. On June 4-7, the Industry Platform invites you to a series of workshops. The participants will have a chance to understand the intricacies of editing and marketing strategy, analyze successful production cases, and discuss peculiarities of creative approaches to producing successful films in the genre of creative documentary.

The series of events will open with a discussion on one of the most important tools of the film language. At 2 PM on June 4, we invite you to an online workshop The Art of Documentary Film Editing with two editors. Dana Bunescu (Romania) and Niels Pag Andersen (Denmark), who are among the most experienced film professionals in Europe, will open the doors of their editing rooms and share their knowledge about the fascinating ways of translating reality into film.



The dialogue about methods of work will be continued by two prominent filmmakers. Elvira Niewera, a jury member of the DOCU/WORLD international competition, Polish-German director and screenwriter, will reveal the details of her own creative techniques in a conversation with the renowned Ukrainian director Kateryna Gornostai. We are waiting for you at the Zhovten cinema at 11 AM on June 5, at the event About Documentary Films and Beyond.
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The next workshop will help you understand how to effectively promote your film. How to make your film stand out among the others? How to find and keep in touch with your target audience? During the workshop, our guest Mirjam Wickenkamp, an expert in the field with over 15 years of experience, will discuss in detail all the steps of PR and effective communication campaigns in a conversation with moderator Anastasia Klysakova, a marketing specialist. The online event Mark Your Film on the Map: Marketing Strategies for Documentary Films will take place at 11 AM on June 6.


Case study “A House Made of Splinters” – From Development to the Oscar Campaign will keep us focused on success stories. Monika Hellstrom, one of the most famous documentary film producers, will talk about her work on A House Made of Splinters, her approaches to producing this widely recognized film, and her experience of organizing the Oscar campaign. The conversation will be moderated by Darya Bassel, Docudays UA programmer, DOCU/PRO director and producer. We’ll meet online at 11 AM on June 7.



To participate in these events of the Industry Platform, don't forget about your accreditation. The events DOCU/PRO TALK: European Solidarity Fund for Ukrainian Cinema and Case Study: How Can Films Bring the Victory Closer? Civil Pitch Experience are open for everyone.

Honorary Heart of Sarajevo to Mark Cousins

In recognition of his outstanding contribution to the art of film, director and writer Mark Cousins will receive the Honorary Heart of Sarajevo Award at the 29th Sarajevo Film Festival. 

This will not be his first encounter with the city - his first visit to Sarajevo was during the Siege, in the mid 90s. He and the Edinburgh International Film Festival had visited the Obala Art Centar cinema, where they showed films in support of Sarajevo’s besieged citizens. That cinema will come to be the birthplace of the Sarajevo Film Festival. 

„Taking films from the Edinburgh International Film Festival to Sarajevo during its siege showed me why movies matter. Most things I've done since have been influenced by those scary, inspiring weeks in 1994. Going back to Sarajevo for the first time, after 29 years, will open a dam of emotions for me. The Honorary Heart of Sarajevo will take pride of place in my home and remind me of the need to take risks, to act in solidarity. I can still learn from the young man I was and, far more so, from the pioneering people in Sarajevo who understood that movies aren't just a pastime. They are a crucial part of our lives. I'm so grateful“, said Mark Cousins.

Mark Cousins is a Scottish-Irish filmmaker. His themes are the inspiring power  

Mansky & Titarenko: Eastern Front

Mantas Kvedaravicius Mariupolis 2

In 2011 I attended a Summer School in Neringa Lithuania for film students. A film by Mantas Kvedaravicius was shown, his first.

”Stasys Baltakis, teacher at the Lithuanian Academy of Music and Theatre, the film school of the Country, introduced the film and its director. ”He is not a film director, he is a thinker”, he said about the debutant Kvedaravicius, who made the film over a period of years, now completing his PhD (and a book) on the affects of pain. And the film is about pain, about people in Chechnya, families whose members disappear or have undergone torture. Shot illegally, and with one year in the editing, the film expresses pure love and respect for the characters without turning to sentimentalism…

The camera catches magical moments inside the houses, the characters tell their stories of pain and torture, mainly off the picture, car trips give the narrative a flow and information about how a devastated city looks, at the same time as the Russian authorities have done a lot to lighten up mosques and other buildings. Pure facade for the invisible violence, it seems. While watching the film you sense a growing anger and sadness witnessing the life of people, who wait and hope…” (from the review of Barzach, 2011)

”Kvedaravicius, whose last film (his first) ”Barzakh”, a masterpiece, took place in Chechnya, has again created a tense work of a beauty that lies in the aesthetic choices he has made with the camera, that he and two others have operated. You enjoy frame by frame, scene after scene, sequence after sequence the way he has placed the camera and the naturalness with which the editing takes you around.

How shall I leave this praise of a film that develops and towards the end brings images of exploded cars and destroyed buildings, and has scenes where the population is taught how to put out fire… I want to and will remember the shoemaker repairing shoes and having conversations with clients and family. A location that comes back, with peace, a statement of survival of humanism, as this great director has delivered with what is only his second film…” (from the review of Mariupolis, 2016)

And now Mariupolis 2, shot by Kvedaravicius, shown at festivals and awarded as the best European documentary at the EFA ceremony in Reykjavik in December. The film was before that shown at IDFA where it was introduced like this: “In 2022, Mantas Kvedaravičius returned to the ruined city of Mariupol in Ukraine to film the people he met for his 2016 documentary Mariupolis. There, he was killed in early April by Russian troops while documenting the Russian invasion of Ukraine. His fiancée managed to escape with the footage. After his death, producers and crew gave their all to edit his final, unfinished film and show it to the world.”

Watching the film I can only echo what was written about the two previous films. Mantas Kvedaravicius shows his respectful approach to human beings in need, he stays with them, no sensationalism, he follows them when they clean the ground after the Russian bombings, when they gather to eat in the cellar, where they pray and sleep, when they prepare a soup outside, where two men transport a generator at a place, where two corpses lie on the ground, accompanied by the sounds of bombings around all the time, “let’s go to the mass grave” someone says referring to the airstrike in March of the Theatre of Mariupol, where civilians had found shelter.

The great director Mantas Kvedaravicius created with this film what one of the legends in documentary history called “the sense of being there”, with love and respect. RIP

Stonys & Briede: Bridges of Time

This is a text I wrote for the premiere of the film, 30^th of June 2018:

Wow, it's tomorrow at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival that Bridges of Time has its premiere. The film, a co-production between the three Baltic countries, is introduced like this by the festival: "Kristīne Briede and Audrius Stonys’s meditative documentary essay portrays the less-remembered generation of cinema poets of the Baltic New Wave. With finesse, they push beyond the barriers of the common historiographic investigation in order to achieve a consummate poetic treatment of the ontology of documentary creation."

A fine intro, however, I would make it a bit longer with these words: "This is a film for all cinema lovers. It tells about the Baltic poetic documentary cinema that was created during the Soviet Union. In opposition to the USSR propaganda films. It was a wave of a personal free visual language that celebrated life and humanity. Together with Latvian Kristine Briede, Lithuanian director Audrius Stonys, who in his own work continues the tradition for a poetic look at reality, has picked magical moments from unique long and short documentaries to let them meet the old masters as they look today or when they were in front of the camera decades ago. The directors in the film about this special artistic phenomenon in film history are Herz Frank, Uldis Brauns, Ivars Seleckis, Andres Sööt, Robertas Verba, Henrikas Sablevicius, Arvis Freimanis, Mark Soosaar."

I have been invited to come for the premiere in Karlovy Vary, which I do with great pleasure as someone whose professional life changed completely in the 1990'es, where I discovered the Baltic documentary on the island of Bornholm where a festival, Balticum Film & TV Festival took place until 2000. Today it is my joy to go to Riga every year to take part in the Baltic Sea Docs that is a continuation of the adventure on Bornholm, as is the collaboration of the three Baltic countries cinema-wise with this celebration os something very special - the film will be followed by a superb retrospective of the primarily short documentaries made by the masters in the documentary. 

Arunas Matelis: Wonderful Losers

This is a text that I wrote in October 2017 when Arunas Matelis film had its world premiere:

… with the subtitle ”A Different World”, a film that many of us, who think Lithuanian Arunas Matelis is a great artistic documentary film director, have been waiting for – will have its premiere at the Warsaw International Film Festival that takes place October 13-22, a festival for fiction, shorts and documentaries. Arunas and his wife Alge, from their Studio Nominum in Vilnius, have produced a film of high quality (I have seen it just before final cut) that deserves to travel the world because of its cinematic qualities and its invitation to us viewers to look into – as the subtitle says- a different world. It’s (also) a film on professional cycling that touches upon existential questions. Here is the synopsis from the site of the film, link below:

”For spectators, cyclists in the back of the race are simply the losers. They are called water carriers, domestics, gregarios, and Sancho Panzas of professional cycling. Moreover, they have no right to personal victories - these sportsmen sacrifice their careers to help their teammates. We follow the magnificent world of the race from the point of view of the doctors' team situated in a claustrophobically small medical car surrounded with wounded cyclists. The life of the medical team in race reminds one on the frontline of war. Cyclists crash, rise and race again. And amongst this fight, many magnificent things happen. This film-odyssey reveals the untold world of the wonderful losers, true warriors, knights and monks of professional cycling.”

From a production point of view the credits show an amazing list of co-producers (with 10 cinematographers!) – let me mention them from the credits: Stefilm Italy, Dok Mobile Switzerland, Associate Directors Belgium, VFS Films Latvia, Dearcan Media N.Ireland/UK, Planet Korda Ireland, SUICA Films Spain, Arturas Jevdokimovas for Kino Kontora.

Normally you say that too many cooks spoil the meal – having known Arunas Matelis and his work for more than 25 years I can assure you that this is a film that has his signature.

Wish you good luck with the premiere!

http://www.wonderfullosers.com

DocuDays UA Civil Pitch at Hot Docs

Copy paste from the FB page of DocuDays:

"We received 150 applications for the Civil Pitch 2.0 programme. The jury selected 4 projects that received not only grants for film production, but also mentoring support at all stages of their work. Please welcome the world premiere of the winning films at the 30th anniversary Hot Docs Film Festival in Canada!

All four short documentary projects tell stories about war and people from a unique perspective. "..Pavlo Dorohoi's 89 Days takes us into a Kharkiv subway-station-turned-bomb-shelter-turned-back-into-a-subway-station; in Under the Wing of a Night, director Lesia Diak immerses herself in 11-year-old Olesia's new life in Belgium as she waits for her father's nightly call from back home; Halyna Lavrynets's Guests from Kharkiv watches activist Nelia try to resettle city-dwellers into rural Ukrainian life; and Anastasiia Tykha's Our Robo Family celebrates the children's robotics and programming group Roboclub Vuhledar. Enjoy the freshest Ukrainian documentary talent of 2023!" comments Myrocia Watamaniuk, the Hot Docs Film Festival programmer.

Find the screening schedule, tickets, and other necessary details here. And in June, expect the Ukrainian premiere of the films at the anniversary Docudays UA.

"Civil Pitch 2.0 started at the end of 2021. We actively planned the workshops, took care of the applications, and were in constant contact with foreign tutors. A few days before the full-scale invasion, we were still planning the workshop programme and even hoped to bring our tutors to Kyiv. The very existence of us, of this workshop, and ultimately of this four films, seems like a miracle now, given everything that has happened and is happening. I am grateful to everyone who has supported us along the way: the programme team, tutors, donors, and, of course, the filmmakers and their crews who have worked hard on their projects. 

When we resumed our activities under Civil Pitch 2.0 after the start of the full-scale invasion, we changed the project's slogan to "Cinema that brings victory closer." That was more than six months ago. Today, I don't know if cinema can really bring victory closer, but I do know that cinema can help us survive the most difficult events and make sense of them. I hope that Civil Pitch 2.0 films will allow both foreign and Ukrainian audiences to understand what is happening to us," adds Darya Bassel, the director of the DOCU/PRO Industry Platform.

CPH:DOX 2023 Scores Biggest Audience Ever

The 20th anniversary of CPH:DOX became a record breaking year for Denmark’s largest film festival. During the festival, the audience number reached 125,680 – in total. Audiences flocked to the cinemas – both in Copenhagen and in the 28 municipalities that were part of the festival this year.

Anna Dziapsh-ipa: Self-Portrait Along the Borderl

I'am in that weird situation that I have not seen the final version of a film that has its premiere tomorrow in Nyon in Switzerland in the presence of the director, a dear friend of me - and my wife - Anna, who we met the first time in Tbilisi way back in 2009 and since then have kept contact with. She presents herself as a filmmaker and visual artist, indeed she is, and she has done so much for Georgian documentary through the company Sakdoc that she runs together with Salomé Jashi. BUT back to her film that I will write more about when I have seen the final version. Here is the intro from the festival's website:

"Anna Dziapsh-ipa was born of the union between an Abkhazian man and a Georgian woman. In Self-Portrait Along the Borderline, she skilfully weaves together unique archives and fragments to offer a personal and political biography of Georgia-Abkhazia relations. This vibrant exploration foregrounds a divided identity caught between the margins..."

After no success with festivals like IDFA and DOKLeipzig this fine autobiographical documentary essay finds its premiere at Visions du Réel in Nyon in Switzerland, where it will be shown tomorrow monday April 24, world premiere, and the director will be present.

I saw a rough cut long time ago and wrote to Anna: "Love it. It has humour, it has sadness, it is original in shape and has magic images taken by you, plus all the archive including those of yourself, I especially love the one where you look at the camera for a long time and then comes the smile...The spider methaphor, yes, I think it works, happy to have your grandfather so present, the man with the surname you carry (he was a famous football player!)... and your wedding, wow that was big, you use it perfectly... 

If you are not in Nyon to watch the film, click below and watch the trailer, that is wonderful:

https://www.visionsdureel.ch/film/2023/self-portrait-along-the-borderline/ 

Circle Women Doc Accelerator to Cannes

Copy paste from (part of) article of today's Cineuropa, written by Vladan Petkovic: 

CIRCLE Women Doc Accelerator, an exclusive training programme for female-identifying documentary filmmakers, has selected the four projects that will take part in its showcase as part of the Cannes Docs programme of the Marché du Film(16-24 May) for the fourth consecutive year. Previous winners include Lin Alluna's Twice Colonized [+], Ágnes Horváth-Szabó and Anna Nemet’s Beauty of the Beast, and Maja Prelog's Cent’anni....

Khaled Jarrar: Notes on Displacement

I have written 13 blogposts about Khaled Jarrar on this site – since I met him in Ramallah and in Corfu in the Storydoc workshops organized by Greek Kostas Spiropoulos more than a decade ago. I have talked with him for hours about the Israeli occupation, about his own family and its fate, about his period as bodyguard for Arafat, about his film “Infiltrators” and about his humanistic work as an artist doing happenings around the world – you can read more about this by writing his name in “search” on this site.

No surprise for me that he with his newest film, “Notes on Displacement”, involves himself as the director and cameraman, who goes with a group of Syrian Palestinians on their journey that ends in Germany after troubles at borders in Europe. Troubles to say the least. Humiliation after humiliation. No food or non-eatable food, children and old people, father and mothers, grandparents. It’s chaotic and the film conveys this chaos. There are many night scenes, where you can´t see what happens but you hear voices crying out for help or rough answers from the authorities including the one of Jarrar, who often speaks on behalf of the refugees. And with the refugees with all the warmth and compassion you can come up with in the turbulent situations.

Content as described by Jarrar: “Nadira, an elderly Palestinian, has been a refugee since the age of 12. Now she has to evacuate Damascus, too. She and her daughter Mona feared for their lives there, but the idea of a safe existence elsewhere is a distant dream. (I) filmmaker Khaled Jarrar received unsettling videos and voice messages as they cross to the Greek island of Lesbos. I join them there, on the long road to a new life…

My grandmother Shafiqa was forced to leave her home in Haifa, her Jasmine tree, her cup of tea on her balcony and her view forced me back in time. Nadira’s plea brought me to the front lines; creating new memories by walking this new exodus together. We were real time inside the frame capturing the present to battle the past - creating a communication between the two. As the director from behind the camera I was driven to offer images of our own making, outside the never-ending western paparazzi image onslaught of displaced refugees. This film is for us, our values, our knowledge, our experiences…”

Do I need to say that the film includes images of boats on the water full of people in need, crying for help – of tents where people are together waiting waiting waiting – of clashes with police and guards at borders, especially the Hungarian one is hard to watch and tolerate for its lack of humanity… It’s hard to watch.

Happy that there are artists like Khaled Jarrar, who has the personal courage to get involved and communicate, this time through film.

Palestine, Germany, Qatar, 74 mins., 2022

6 pens.

Honorary Award to Helena Třeštíková

DocsBarcelona will pay tribute to 73-year-old filmmaker Helena Třeštíková, one of Europe's leading contemporary documentary filmmakers. Her extraordinary career of more than fifty titles will be recognised with the Honorary DocsBarcelona Award 2023, an award that celebrates "a prodigious production strongly linked to her homeland, the Czech Republic. Today, her films are already a legacy and a first hand document of the last half-century of the country's history. Třeštíková will receive the award at the opening of the event, which will celebrate its twenty-sixth edition from 18th to 28th May and will bring more than thirty documentaries to the CCCB and the Aribau Cinemas.

Helena Třeštíková briefly held the post of Minister of Culture of her country in 2007 and delved into the life and work of fellow Czech director Milos Forman with Forman vs. Forman, a film premiered in 2019 at DocsBarcelona and the Cannes Film Festival. With a powerful focus on human relationships and social issues, Třeštíková has built an extensive filmography where time-lapse shines, a resource often used by the filmmaker to follow her characters through decades of their lives.

DocsBarcelona recognition will be completed with a retrospective at the Filmoteca de Catalunya, which will include three of her most celebrated titles: *Katka(2010), a portrait filmed over fourteen years of a drug-dependent teenager struggling to overcome her addiction; Private Universe (2012), in which Třeštíková films a Czech family over nearly four decades against the backdrop of the fall of Stalinist socialism and the entry into the European Union, and the recent René - The Prisoner of Freedom (2021), the sequel to René (2008), in which the filmmaker reunites with her protagonist, a young man she filmed for twenty years in a juvenile prison. The film is a portrait of an outsider who is highly critical of society and the system in which he does not fit in.

Třeštíková will also offer a masterclass with an intimate and carefully chosen selection of the sequences from her filmography that have most influenced her. The session will be hosted by Marga Almirall, from Barcelona Women's Film Festival, coorganizer of the envent.

Copy-paste from DocsBarcelona website.

6 pens.

CPH:DOX - Two Winners and One More

 I watched two winners of the CPH:DOX 2023 yesterday. One at home and one in the cinema:

"Mrs Hansen & the Bad Companions" by Jella Bethmann (Denmark, 90 mins.) won the Nordic Dox award, so well deserved a recognition for a warm, sweet and touching visit to the chaotic house of Inger Lise Hansen, a wonderful 80 year old woman, who has opened her home for men and women, who have problems dealing with the society and life as such. Inger helps and the film's portrait of the relationship between her and the young Martin, who has lived in the house for 10 years, is simply beautiful.

"Motherland" by Alexander Mihalkovich and Hanna Badziaka (Sweden, Ukraine, Norway,  92 mins.) won the DOX:Award, for its (quote from jury motivation) "... unfolding the complexity of living within an oppressive and unjust system (Belarus and its army). It poses questions about the idea of an individual choice within a cornered society. The title of the film is a way to give back the power to the women who are at the forefront of this fight.” Yes, the strongest part of the film goes with the presence of Svetlana, a mother whose son was killed in an army poisoned by the so-called Soviet origin dedovshina culture. The cinema was full for the screening of the winning film, great!

Quite a move to go to watch - on my MacBook Pro - "Soviet Bus Stops" by Kristoffer Hegnsvad (Canada, Denmark, 57 min.), a lively journey through many of (or was it all?) the 15 former republics of USSR with energetic photographer Christopher Herwig, whose passion for the bus stops gives the film a special flavour as does the meetings with some of the architects and researchers, who made and studies these gems here there and everywhere. It is entertaining at the same time as it puts the stops into a historical context, I loved it, also because I have been in (some of) the countries visited. Next time I know where to go... More about the film here: https://www.sovietbusstops.com/about 

6 pens.  

CPH:DOX 2023 online til April 2

CPH:DOX rolls over you like a strong warm pacific wave in the cold Danish springtime, and if, like most of us, you have your ordinary job to look after on the side, it can be hard to keep up, you just hold your breath and roll along.

By the time this year’s winners has been announced, you are only just getting a grip of what you would like to see. Planning your personal festival program (thank god the paper program is back!) takes time, changes as you read reviews and get recommendations from friends, and is often filled with regrets, as you realize you’ve missed the last screening of a film you didn’t know you MUST see.

On this last weekend of CPH:DOX, a few thoughts on what I have chosen to see this year. There are still films to see on the big screen, extra screenings are coming up in the following week and fortunately there is also the online platform PARA:DOX to catch up on a selection of the rest.

What I did see?

The Super 8 Years, literary cinema by Annie Ernaux and her son that adds another dimension to her oeuvre, made of private home movies beautifully filmed by her late ex-husband, wonderfully edited together with the authors words. Whether you have read the Nobel-prize winner or not, don’t miss the film on PARA:DOX.

Joan Baez in person. The air was thick with love when three generations were gathered in Bremen for the Danish premiere of Joan Baez, I Am a Noise, a well-crafted film made with an incredible personal archive, surprisingly private.. – “I want to leave an honest legacy” Baez said.

I only watched one of the films in the main competition, so that’s my personal winner for now: On the Edge, with the more pertinent original French title État limite, a highly relevant political film about a psychiatrist in a public hospital outside Paris trying to work humanely under inhuman conditions, asking questions about the state – and the limitations – of the welfare state today.

Hypermoon (after reading Tue’s comment) and Budding Humans (if you need a feelgood film, try a fly-on-the-wall doc about the friendship between two two-year-olds).

I also tried out UNG:DOX, the festival’s selection of films for high school students, where I watched two rather weak French films: The Other Profile (Le vrai du faux) and The Flag (Le Repli, interesting subject, terrible film).

What am I looking forward to:

Under the Sky of Damascus tonight Saturday in Empire, archive master Sergei Loznitsa’s latest film The Natural History of Destruction, The Hamlet Syndrome, The Eternal Memory and, of course, the winner of the festival Motherland, the winner of the Politiken:DOX Award Apolonia, Apolonia, now running in the Danish theatres, and much more online…

What do I miss?

Nicely curated thematic side programs and retrospectives. A big festival should also connect with the past and share film history with its audience. This year, for example, it could have been interesting to look back at how the Iraq War has been depicted and reflected on in documentary films..

Thank you for the feast so far CPH:DOX and happy birthday!

Watch CPH:DOX 2023

STILL: stillbilledet kommer fra On the Edge (État limite), director Nicolas Peduzzi, GoGoGo Films.

CPH:DOX Forum

I've seen it many times before and I love the look of it! A huge room full of documentary people, directors and producers with ideas, more or less developed film projects, clips - called trailers or teasers - meeting with broadcasters, sales agents and distributors to pitch. 20 minutes so you have to be prepared to say what kind of help you need and you have to know in beforehand to whom you are talking... Lots of meetings...

I've seen it at IDFA in Amsterdam and at DOCSBarcelona and I´ve always admired the organisers, who - also here - make it work, creating the flow needed so the commissioning editors know where to go, helped by smiling staff members with lists and of course also one, who from the stage ring a bell to say "time is up, ladies and gentlemen, move to next meeting".

The Forum pitching itself takes place at the Royal Theatre's traditional "Stærekassen" (!) in the mornings and the meetings at Odd Fellow Palæet (!) five minutes from there, words from the internet:

"The Odd Fellows Mansion is a Rococo town mansion in Copenhagen, Denmark, named after the local branch of the Independent Order of Odd Fellows which acquired the building in 1900..."

So that's where I went after having been to the Cinemateket to watch Margreth Olin's impressive "Songs of Earth". Full house, applause after the film. Big audience potential.

Coming to the Odd Fellow Palæ I was not allowed to go into the Forum meeting hall as I have (only?) a press badge, but I met an old friend Massimo Arvat in the lobby, Italian producer from Turin, who is still going strong with a lot of work for television, corporate films and of course creative documentaries. He declared his love for CPH:DOX, second time he was here, no project this year but networking of course. We had a good chat.

Fortunately the artistic director of the festival Niklas Engstrøm passed by and I told him that I would like to experience the atmosphere and see how it goes for, especially, the Georgians who I know so well from working with the Film Mentoring Program of CinéDoc Tbilisi and from many visits to the country. He opened the door for me and I joined the table of producer Irina Gelashvili and director Keti Machavariani, who monday pitched the project Here, Between This Sea And Those Mountains, "A family saga of a father and daughter - Gogi and Helena, two politicians from different generations - is intertwined with Georgia's century-long struggle for freedom." It will be a good film, I am sure, that will also, of course, include the turbulent political situation of the country with massive demonstrations against the government. But I also went to say hello to Julien Pebrel and Tamar Kalandadze at their table, pitching with Sakdoc's Keti Kipiani a project called Kartli: "A former soviet sanatorium on the edge of the Tbilisi Sea has harbored refugees from Abkhazia for over 30 years. Now in a precarious state, the building can no longer shelter them, uprooting and pulling apart this big family of refugees yet again." And one more - dear to me - project from Georgia, Boxes from Georgia, presented by director Gvantsa Meparishvili and producer Tiko Nadirashvili: "Volunteers from Georgia, Ukraine, and Russia join a charity for Ukraine in Tbilisi. In this microcosm of regional issues, hard work and solidarity spark unlikely friendships - but power struggles ruin this dynamic, turning best friends into enemies."

Leaving the place having met so many good friends from my past at EDN, including many from arte - Germany and France, good to see them here in Copenhagen.

It's another sign of success for the Industry section of CPH:DOX - the amount of decision makers, who attend and take meetings with filmmakers from all over, including the Caucasus countries and of course Ukraine.

CPH:DOX: Morning With Filmmakers

“Dialogues on Craft” is the title of four morning sessions at the CPH:DOX in the Charlottenborg Kunsthal, that is turned into a cinema during the festival. 90 minutes per session. With Wendy Mitchell as moderator. I attended the first one, which was very interesting because of the well thought dramaturgy:

Two filmmakers on the stage, Estonian Anna Hints who has made “Smoke Sauna Sisterhood” and Chilean Maite Alberdi, whose “The Eternal Memory” was praised the other day on this site (http://www.filmkommentaren.dk/blog/blogpost/5116/).

Introduction by the moderator, a few questions to have the filmmakers tell the audience about their films – I was surprised that we were very few who had seen both films out of a good audience, maybe 100.

And then the floor was given to the filmmakers. Maite Alberdi had chosen a clip from the Sauna film, Anna Hints a clip from the love story of Alberdi. The two films and directors were there because both go very close to vulnerable themes. 

For those of you who don’t know the Estonian film, here is the catalogue text from the Sundance Festival, where the film was awarded:

“Tucked in a lush green forest in southern Estonia, a group of women gather in the safe darkness of a smoke sauna to share their innermost thoughts and secrets. Enveloped by a warm, dense heat, they bare all to expel fears and shame trapped in their bodies and regain their strength.” 

And “The Eternal Memory”, also a Sundance winner, is ”an intimate account of a woman’s deep love for her husband, who is slowly losing his memory.”

The directors had good questions to each other; Anna Hints explained the dilemma she had when she had decided not to show the faces of the women, and then one said but I want my face to be shown. She found a solution that works so fine as she becomes the one, who reacts to the stories being told. Beautifully shot is the Sauna Sisterhood film and as Maite Alberdi said so well: In the beginning I was looking at the bodies but then I quickly started to feel comfortable and also listened to the stories… let me add that the film has not only strong stories but also great anecdotes full of humor. Like in the clip from Maite Alberdi’s film, where Augusto is suffering enormously, “help me” he says to his wife in the scene that is followed by another scene where he is dancing to a melody!

I had to leave before the end of this fine session going to Stærekassen, the small stage of the Royal Theatre, where 8 projects from Georgia, Armenia, Azerbadjan, Belarus and Ukraine were pitched. Also here lots of people, many taking notes before meetings that are held tomorrow.

Still: cph:dox

Anne Regitze Wivel: Lige før døden (2)

Det her er den bedste film jeg nogensinde har set. Sådan har jeg nogen gange efter teksterne til sidst sagt til mig selv og enkelte andre. Efter et filmværk af Bergman og af Tarkovskij, af Jon Bang Carlsen, Jørgen Leth og Anne Regitze Wivel - i biografen. Denne gang igen: Anne Wivels nye film er den bedste. For mig nogensinde, der hvor jeg er i mit liv nu. Netop lige nu i alderens memento og under smertens medicinbehov. For alle andre nårsomhelst, filmkunst i hemmelighedstilstanden, hvor ”den ydre verden er en til hemmelighedstilstand opløftet indre verden”.

 Har plejernes centrale uforglemmelige personalemøde ikke simpelthen en fælles sjæl af varme, forsigtighed, kyndighed, hensyn, kærlighed? Ligesom Anne Regitze Wivels fortællestemme er ét langt digt som i sig måske rummer hele filmen i en omfavnelse. Et digt, en poesi, et spring og en værdifuld ændring i betydning fra det konkrete i handlingen til det tankemæssige i forståelsen. Jeg kan se Anne Wivels film gang på gang og blive fortrolig med døden til den kommer bag på mig midt i mine forberedelser.   

 Denne indsigt ligger, tror jeg, ikke i de medvirkendes udsagn, i deres replikker, ikke i den vidunderlige scene under alle indlæggelser, at bestille morgenmad: juice, kaffe, bolle med ost og marmelade, nyt vand, iskoldt vand. ”Kan du huske alt det?”spørger han venligt. ”Ja”nikker sygeplejersken. Med det inderligste smil. Nej, indsigten ligger i hele det store filmdigts hemmelighedstilstand. 

”Lige før døden” er den bedste film jeg nogensinde har set.

 NOTE

Hemmelighedstilstand er Inger Christensens oversættelse af Novalis’ ”altomfattende sammensmeltning af ord og fænomen – ’das äussere ist ein in einen Geheimniszustand erhobenes Innere ’”

Læs i hvert fald også Tue Steen Müllers meget personlige anmeldelse nedenfor.

Still: Palliativ Afdeling, Bispebjerg Hospital, København.

Anne Regitze Wivel: Lige før døden

Jeg ved ikke om de studsede de to unge kvinder, som sad ved siden af mig i Cinemateket forleden aften. For der gik ikke længe efter filmens start før der kom nogle små hulk fra mig. Efterfulgt af øjne der skulle tørres, men det skulle kvindernes øjne også. For mit vedkommende fordi min søster Regitze (!) døde i år og en masse billeder væltede frem i mit hovede i mødet med billederne på lærredet. Men også fordi denne smukke film ramte præcist den stemning af omsorg og nænsomhed, som jeg oplevede på Rigshospitalet akkurat som det skildres her på Bispebjerg Hospital. Hvor er de dog fine sygerplejerskerne og lægerne, når de skal tage sig af mennesker... lige før døden. Hvor får de dog de kræfter fra? Det taler de klogt om. Om at huske.

Anne Regitze Wivel har fået adgang til at filme møder, hvor personalet på den palliative afdeling taler om de patienter, som filmen følger over lang tid, to kvinder og en mand. I situationer som virker så naturlige og kærlige også når deres tilstand forværres.

Det er så den observerende side af filmen, som forløber parallelt med instruktørens personlige fortælling om dengang for 12 år siden, hvor hun nærmest boede på hospitalet, på værelse 9, hvor hendes mand var, lige før døden. Anne Regitze Wivels evne til det poetiske filmsprog - det visuelle og hendes stemme og tekst - træder vidunderligt frem, som det har gjort i alle hendes film. Hun løfter fortællingen fra det registrerende og personlige, blandt andet ved at bevæge sig rundt på Bispebjerg Hospitals område med de mange skulpturer.

Ove hedder manden, som har ondt, men også kræfter til at tale med sygeplejersken og rose den trøje, som hun har strikket, en mand som siger at han har haft et langt og godt liv men som til sidst må give slip. Filmen følger ham til han ligger død på sengen påklædt, klar til at blive lagt i kiste.

Min far hed også Ove, så der kom lige et par hulk mere og nogle flere erindringsbilleder frem.

Den skulle jeg nok ikke have set, sagde jeg til min kone, da jeg lettere rystet kom hjem. Nu, nogle dage senere, er jeg glad for at jeg gik i biografen og for at filmen eksisterer og skal rundt i landet via CPH:DOX. Hvor er den vigtig!

Tak!

Eva Weber: Merkel

• ... Hun var opvokset i ddr og vænnet til at vente, afvente, aflæse, tie, lytte, overveje og tænke inden hun handlede. Husker tydeligt den “Elefantenrunde” på valgets aften i 2005 hvor hun var netop sådan indtil Schrøder havde talt sig tom! Og så slog hun til. Gysende god.
• Sådan skriver Lise Amdisen, min gamle ven og kollega i en kommentar på min Facebook side og jeg vil om filmen føje til at det er en omhyggeligt gennemført og virkelig vigtig film som jeg vil se igen ja, igen og igen. Alene at følge Merkels blikke gennem optagelsernes vilje og klippets vedholdenhed. Det er smukt. 

Maite Alberdi: The Eternal Memory

Take a look at the top page photos, Chilean director Maite Alberdi is the one to the left. A true documentary star, whose films "Tea Time", "The Grown-Ups" and "The Mole Agent" have been praised on this site. Her new film "The Eternal Memory" has been awarded many times. I have chosen to bring the fine annotation of CPH:DOX, here it is:

Beautiful and genuine, this Sundance winner from Chile is an intimate account of a woman’s deep love for her husband, who is slowly losing his memory. An audience favourite and a contender for most beautiful love film of the year.

Paulina and Augusto have been together for 23 years. She is a former Minister of Culture and an actress. He was a popular TV journalist for many years. They live in the beautiful house they built together many years ago. It is filled with memories that Augusto is slowly forgetting. For he has Alzheimer’s and his memory is leaking out of him until he can’t even recognise himself in the mirror. But even though Augusto is alone in his head, Paulina is constantly by his side. The more he forgets, the more her love for him grows, because even though he forgets, her feelings remain the same. ‘The Eternal Memory’ is a touchingly beautiful film about the love of two people cast in the purest form. A deserving winner of this year’s Sundance Festival.

Chile, 2003, 85 mins.

 Still: CPH:DOX

Carl Olsson: Vintersaga

Jeg kan ikke lade være: Jeg bevæger mig her til morgen gennem et regnfyldt indre København, det nærmest flyder med vand i gader og stræder, for at komme frem til byens bedste biograf Grand Teatret, hvor der er pressevisning på Carl Olssons nye film, som er i hovedkonkurrence ved CPH:DOX. Hvor herligt det er at sidde i en varm og tør biograf OG se en flot film på det store lærred med en gennemarbejdet lydside og med masser af sne på de præcist komponerede flotte tableauer fra et smukt Sverige befolket af mennesker, som taler med hinanden i dialoger, som er ganske hverdagsagtige. Som når kvinden, som er lastbilchauffør, taler med sin mor, mens hun drøner gennem det sneklædte landskab. Hvordan har du det, hvad laver du, jeg har lige set xxx på tv, jeg stemte på ham, hvordan er vejret osv. Eller som når de to brødre ryger en cigaret udenfor det bageri, hvor de arbejder og taler om at brødre skal holde sammen. Eller som når to mænd sidder overfor hinanden og den ene taler om sig selv som en flink fyr og du kan stole på mig Jörn og kom bare forbi Gällivara om du vil. Words to that effect..

Carl Olsson har valgt ud med omhu. Der er unge piger i bil, som snakker om parfume og spiser en tør cheeseburger. Der er arbejdsmænd i et skur i en havn, som spiser. Der er chauffører på et cafeteria. Men der er også royalister, som spiser fint og synger en hyldest til kongen - og senere ser og hører man en pianist, som fører an da "Du Gamla, Du Fria" synges af en forsamling, man ikke ser. De sidste to er kostelige scener, den satiriske vinkel er klar. Ellers ser jeg filmen som en underfundig kærlighedserklæring fra instruktøren til sit land. En Sveriges-film langt væk fra den som Jan Troell lavede i sin tid, tættere på Roy Andersson i sine opstillinger og ordknappe situationer.

Med sans for det barokke som når den ene af to motorcykelpiger spørger hvad 5% af evigheden er!

Og med en unik sans for det visuelle, jeg har nævnt lastbilen på landevejen, men kunne også fremhæve isbryderen, som kværner gennem det frosne hav eller måske den smukkeste tre-delte sekvens: Et hus i baggrunden, lyset slukkes men kommer igen, da det bliver oplyst af et forbipasserende tog. Huset kommer igen senere i filmen, nu nærmest totalt dækket af sne og toget kører forbi. Og huset kommer igen, en ældre kvinde sidder ved et bord og læser eller gætter krydsord - og toget drøner forbi. 

En natklub set udefra, en altan med unge som ryger og snakker med hinanden, et par som boller på et hotelværelse, ikke meget romantik over den akt, men også to som er på ornitologisk udflugt og glæder sig, da de finder de fugle, som de havde ønsket at filme.

Der er mange, mange andre situationer og stemninger, som Olsson får frem i en smuk rytme. Han peger ikke fingre, hans ærinde er at fange en stemning i billeder og dialoger mellem ganske almindelige borgere af forskellige aldre i forskellige situationer, for det meste udenfor hjemmets fire vægge.

Jeg forlod biografen og gik ud i den danske regn godt underholdt og overbevist om at "Vintersaga" har fortjent at være i festivalens hovedkonkurrence. Gå i biografen og se den!  

Sverige, 2023, 82 mins.

Still: Final Cut For Real

Mia Engberg: Hypermoon

First a flashback to 2013 where I saw the director’s “Belleville Baby” and wrote (on this site): “Swedish Mia Engberg’s”Belleville Baby” is beautiful. Why, because it has a feeling, an atmosphere, a personal tone (the director’s own voice and her text is excellent) and a well told story from the past, where the director fell in love in Paris, lived with him for some time, experienced him becoming a criminal, because of his immigrant background, an honest film that also includes reflections on the fimmaker wanting to convey the good story, whatever the subject of the story thinks... it is so well made with a mix af material – super 8 blurred images, photos, newsreels and tv-reports from riots in France, home video from the director with her small son, all framed by the myth of Orpheus and Eurydike. An essay film on remembering, and remembering different moments and events, maybe they never took place. Impressive work by Mia Engberg.” She made in 2019 ”Lucky One” according to CPH:DOX, I have not seen that.

And then... 

Langballe & Konopka: Theatre of Violence

Denne tekst er taget fra Line Bilenbergs pressemeddelelse sendt ud som foromtale til én af de stærke film i CPH:DOX hovedkonkurrence. Anmeldelse af filmen følger op til premieren:

Emil Langballe (tidl. Q's Barbershop m.fl) og polske Lukasz Konopa har helt ekstraordinært fået lov til at følge forsvarsadvokat, den karismatiske Krispus Ayena og hans hold, samt anklagerteamet i den kontroversielle sag om den tidligere børnesoldat, Dominic Ongwen, der i december 2022 blev dømt for 61 ud af 70 anklagepunkter ved den internationale strafferet i Haag...

Masters of DOX - ZagrebDox 2023

Here is a copy-paste from the website of Croatian ZagrebD0x (March 26 - April 2), a good read:

Master, expert, maestro, connoisseur, virtuoso... The ‘title’ can be given both to a craftsman and an artist, but one thing is for sure: with it we address only the best in our business. Masters of Dox, a long-time programme section of the ZagrebDox International Documentary Film Festival, has been made up of films by authors at the top of the world film for years, but not necessarily documentary! The 19th festival edition brings six new titles directed by prominent film artists, undoubtedly masters of their craft.

Latvian Nat. Film Prizes: Lielais Kristaps

Sunday is the ceremony, where Latvian film is to be praised in all categories you can think of, also for camera, sound, editing etc. and what is attributed to fiction filmmaking. I have a heart for Latvian documentaries so I limit myself to mention the five nominated in the section “long documentary”. I have seen three of them. They are:

Bach against Covid / Bahs pret Covid (Latvia)Directed by Ivars Zviedris

The director is – for me – a true documentarian (btw. the title of one of his films) and it is no surprise that he makes this film, as Baltic Sea Docs manager, critic Zane Balcus wrote to me: Ivars Zviedris manages to capture current issues in society – be it political, economic, or social processes or shifts… Here he has filmed during the Covid period documenting visual facets of lockdown and its imprint on the life of the film’s protagonist – the cello musician Normunds who plays his instrument for the tourists in Riga Old Town…

Hecuba's Question / Hekabes jautājums (Latvia) Directed by Pēteris Krilovs, Iveta Budreviča

Krilovs… have followed his many films, and his “Klucis. Deconstruction of an Artist” is for me a masterpiece in storytelling. This one Zane Balcus gives these words: ”This film Krilovs has directed together with Iveta Budreviča, close friend of the film’s main protagonists. Through associative representation of a dream told by Krilovs at the start of the film, the directors draw us into the world of the musician Rolands Ūdrītis, who after the tragic accident a few years back has not recovered, and his wife Ilona Balode. We are asked to imagine and then follow how their life goes on and what strength is needed to endure and keep up the hope.”

My Mother the State (Latvia, Iceland)Directed by Ieva Ozoliņa

Fascinating universal story, straight forward and emotional, about looking for a sister and finding out that you have not only one but four sisters “scattered all over the world”. It’s an incredible story and the protagonist is one, who never gives up in her search for family and herself.

Before the Light / Svārstības (Latvia) Directed by Kristīne Briede

Kristine Briede made the magnificent “Bridges of Time” with Audrius Stonys, she is one of the most knowledgeable I know from the Latvian documentary scene but what I did not know, but now saw, she is also one who points in fine cinematographic language at an incredible story from nowadays Latvia – as it is written in an introduction of a review in the magazine Kino Raksti: Would it be normal for us if women were allowed to work as doctors or teachers only under the supervision of men? Why then is this considered normal within the Lutheran Church and in the work of a pastor?.. The personal service stories of three women - Dace Balodes, Rudīte Losāne and Agrita Staško – are being unfolded.

The Land / Zemnieki (Latvia) Directed by Ivars Seleckis

Ivars, my hero, my friend, known him for more than 30 years, I am biased, here is what IDFA wrote when it was shown there last year: In The Land, Ivars Seleckis’s measured, observational images capture the cycle of the seasons in a rural community in Latvia. Fifty years ago Seleckis shot another film in the same region: The Corn-Bins (1973), which documented a major shift in the country’s agriculture. The upscaling of farming had already been started under Stalin—because groups were easier to control than individuals—and these huge farming concerns ushered in the collapse of traditional agriculture… how is it today, Ivars goes back to meet the farmers of today. 

Still: "Bach against Covid", the cello musician Normunds. 

Alisa Kovalenko: We will not Fade Away

Andriy, Liza, Lera, Ruslan, Illia. Ukrainian protagonists in this heartwarming and also touching documentary from the village Stanytsia Luhanska near the frontline, which after February last year is occupied by Russia. They are teenagers, they have hope, they have dreams, they are creative. They take photos, make music, repair and build motorbikes, plan to be an actor, they have fun as teenagers have and should have…They look for ways of having a good life in spite of the sounds and dangers of the war close to their homes. They live with their families, mums and dads and grannies. They are full of energy, they want to get away from the village, they call it “an asshole”. The film offers them to have a short break from being there, when they are invited by a famous sports commentator to get a tour to Himalayas. They go. A once-in-a-life experience.

Alisa Kovalenko is the director, she has – together with Serhiy Stetsenko – filmed the teenagers, and their families from 2019 till 2022 with an extraordinary attention to and sensibility for what it means to be on the edge of adulthood, as one family member expresses it. As she showed in a previous film “Home Games”, Kovalenko knows how to find the beautiful moments in the daily lives of the boys and girls and make those into a Cinema language she masters. Without breaking any ethical borders.

Andriy, the boy who has his garage for the motorbike, arranges in this place a New Year celebration with an electric light show, pours champagne in two glasses, hands one of them to his granny: “Thank You for Being There for Me”. Another granny talks seriously to Illia, who wants to be an actor: You must leave from here if you want to be an actor, if you stay you can be a policeman. In a previous scene you have seen Illia paint his face white making him look like the sad clown in “Les enfants du Paradis”. And you see Lera (or is it Liza, I mix them up sometimes, sorry) listening to her mother telling her that women are there to be married and serve their husbands. And Ruslan is at his computer rapping a great poem. Earlier you have seen him down in the mine doing the dirty job his father does. 

The last 20 minutes of the film describes the trip to the Himalayas – after the film has shown - with a lot of humour – the joyful training moments they perform at home to be ready for the trip that leads them so say that they want to stay here. So this is what beauty looks like! Energy all over, as there is in the whole film that is beautifully edited by Maryna Maykovska and Kasia Boniecka. They have found a flow and yet there are observational poetic moments without any “action”, many times with music that fits the situations and you are happy, when the film does not go down in black upon their return to their homes. A superb montage with the teenagers closes the film and highlights that the intention of the film is to give an homage to LIFE and YOUTH. You leave this masterpiece full of (unbearable?) hope. Slava Ukraini!

Ukraine/Poland/USA/Norway, 2023, 98 mins.

Still (FIFDH Geneva)

CPH:DOX 4 More Competition Lists

I have already posted the list of films in the main competition of CPH:DOX http://www.filmkommentaren.dk/blog/blogpost/5104/

- here comes the other competition films listed one after the other taken from the website of the festival...

Sarajevo Film F.:Winner of True Stories Market

Vesi Vuković won the award endowed with prize money amounting to 10,000 euros for the story “The Hero from Arena”

As part of the special edition of the “Dealing with the Past” programme held in Sarajevo and online at Ondemand.kinomeetingpoint.ba, the Sarajevo Film Festival's “True Stories Market” award was presented in Sarajevo. The winner of the “True Stories Market” award for 2023 is film theorist VesiVuković from Bosnia and Herzegovina, who received the award for the story “The Hero from Arena”.

The award endowed with prize money in the amount of 10,000 euros is awarded by Sarajevo Film Festival, Obala Art Centar and Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung (FES) Dialogue Southeast Europe...

CPH:DOX – DOX:Award 2023

Below you find the 13 films that have been picked for the DOX:Award 2023 competition, but first some introductory words from the festival:

”Marking the 20th anniversary of the International Documentary Film Festival CPH:DOX, the 2023 edition will offer an outstanding programme of approximately more than 200 films by established and emerging filmmakers as well as talks, debates, performances, exhibitions, parties and much more. The festival takes place 15-26 March 2023. 

CPH:DOX’ industry events will include the financing and co-production event CPH:FORUM, CPH:CONFERENCE and INTER:ACTIVE symposium. The industry programme runs under the banner “Business as Unusual” between March 19-24. Read more about the key dates and events in the industry programme here.” 

DOX:AWARD 2023 – the full line-up of nominated films – if you click on the title you will find more information:

After Work (Erik Gandini, Sweden)
A thought-provoking film that looks at the phenomenon of work in the 21st century with a sharp eye and an equally sharp humor. 

Eat Bitter (Ningyi Sun & Pascale Appora-Gnekindy, Central African Republic/China)
A local construction worker and a Chinese engineer are assigned to build a bank in the Central African Republic.

The Hearing  (Lisa Gerig, Switzerland)
Four asylum seekers reenact their conversations with the authorities in a role-playing game that reverses the roles.

Light Needs (Jesse McLean, United States)
Generous and imaginative film about the inner life of houseplants, which takes other life forms seriously with creative and artistic originality. 

Motherland (Alexander Mihalkovich & Hanna Badziaka, Sweden/Ukraine/Norway)
Dark and monumental film from Belarus, where corruption and a brutal military culture push young people to choose sides.

On the Edge (Nicolas Peduzzi, France)
A young doctor with an exemplary humanist spirit fights a brave battle to hold together the run-down Paris hospital where he works.

The Other Profile (Armel Hostiou, France)
An elementally suspenseful and completely unpredictable detective story from Kinshasa, where a French film director has to find his own double.

Songs of Earth (Margreth Olin, Norway)
The mountainous landscapes of Norway provide the monumental backdrop for a magnificent, existential journey with the filmmaker’s parents as its human yardstick.

A Storm Foretold (Christoffer Guldbrandsen, Denmark)
Christoffer Guldbrandsen’s long-awaited film about Donald Trump’s former adviser Roger Stone is a chilling report from the rotten core of power. 

Theatre of Violence (Emil Langballe & Lukasz Konopa, Denmark)
An epic and unshakeable drama of guilt and punishment about the first ever court case against a former child soldier accused of crimes against humanity.

A Tiger in Paradise (Mikel Cee Karlsson, Sweden)
A surreal journey into singer José González’s inner world of thoughts and shadows, staged with dark humor in the picturesque Swedish countryside.

Total Trust (Jialing Zhang, China)
The first major film about the Chinese surveillance state is a disturbing tale of technology, abuse of power and (self-)censorship in the 21st century.

Vintersaga (Carl Olsson, Sweden)
The human comedy unfolds in an aesthetically uncompromising and unmistakably Nordic saga in 24 chapters with dark humor and a sociological gaze.

Alisa Kovalenko: We Will not Fade Away

The following are quotes from an interview I made for the IDF in December 2021, with Alisa Kovalenko and Stéphane Siophan, producer of the film:

What do you learn about yourself from filmmaking?

A: We learn to know ourselves through the world around us. We see the reflection of the world in ourselves. Coming into contact with something new, with a new experience, with a new world, always opens something in you, expands your inner space, and opens doors to new rooms. You watch and feel others, but through them you begin to better feel yourself. You learn to listen to others and, at the same time, listen to yourself. Because documentary filmmaking develops in you a unique ability to listen and see more, a capacity for supersensitive perception, it fills and opens up new meanings. We reveal ourselves through the world. The world does not exist without an observer. And it’s incredible how you can be an observer of two worlds in documentary films, the outside-world and inside-world, at the same time. While learning about the world, you always learn about yourself. That's why documentary filmmaking is the best way to meet and have such an important dialogue with yourself.

Beautifully said… Let’s go back to Expedition 49. Where are you? Finished shooting?
A: I have just returned from Nepal, where I have finally filmed the incredible expedition of the five teenagers I have been following for two years for Expedition 49. It was a tough travel. We climbed up to the Annapurna basecamp, but we were also stuck in Kathmandu in the middle of the Covid-19 lockdown. In any case, in the end it was a wonderful journey that changed us all. We have started editing with my editor Marina Maykovskaya, and I feel a bit overwhelmed because I realize that I've been filming five different personalities. Now I have to assemble different lifelines and narrative lines into one, but it’s a good challenge! I will keep filming a bit in Donbas while I'm editing, to show how this expedition has affected my characters and which turns their lives take. The expedition itself is only a small part of this teenage adventure documentary, which takes place mainly on the Donbas steppe, in these dying frontline coal-mining settlements. It's not a mountain film or a typical coming-of-age movie, but a multi-layered story touching upon a generation of children who have spent half of their lives in a war. It's the story of working-class kids, which I also consider myself to be.

Photo: Alisa Kovalenko

CPH:DOX - Change Project

The second edition of CHANGE is now ready to reveal its 2022/2023 lineup. CHANGE is a collaboration between CPH:DOX, EAVE, European Audiovisual Entrepreneurs, Europe’s leading training, development, and networking organisation for producers, and IMS, International Media Support, promoting journalism and documentary film to strengthen the capacity of media to reduce conflict, strengthen democracy and facilitate dialogue.

The partners’ goal being to increase equality and access to the international film market, the programme aims to stimulate inter-regional co-production and to connect projects, filmmakers and producers from the European Eastern Partnership countries (EaP) with international film professionals gathered annually at CPH:DOX.

The line-up of selected projects covers a wide variety of current topics spanning from the historical nuclear disarmament of Ukraine and its consequences, Abkhazian and Ukrainian refugees in Georgia, the ongoing non-violent resistance in Belarus, a female filmmaker’s gaze in the patriarchal Azerbaijani society on the gradual disappearance of the Caspian Sea, and a year of the current war in the life of four generations of women from Mariupol.

The selected projects are:

• A Bit of a Stranger, prod. Anna Kapustina, dir. Svitlana Lishchynska, Ukraine
• Boxes from Georgia, prod. Tiko Nadirashvili, dir. Gvantsa Meparishvili, Georgia
• How Long is the Echo, prod. Vahan Khachatryan, dir. Merri Mkrtchyan, Armenia
• Kartli, prod. Ketevan Kipiani, dir. Tamar Kalandadze and Julien Pebrel, Georgia
• Keepers of Heritage, prod. Irina Gleashvili, dir. Keti Machavariani, Georgia
• Nuclear-free Ukraine | Nuclear-freeworld, prod. Anna Palenchuk, dir. Kornii Hrytsiuk, Ukraine
• Strange Sea, prod. Aysel Akhundova, dir. Lala Aliyeva, Azerbaijan
• Voices.Streams by Belarusian filmmakers DocWave

CPH:DOX åbner med Twice Colonized

Niklas Engstrøm, kunstnerisk direktør for CPH:DOX, siger:

“‘Twice Colonized’ er en af årets absolut vigtigste dokumentarfilm. Filmen sætter fingeren på kolonialismens personlige konsekvenser og giver os et tiltrængt nyt perspektiv på vores egen historie. Den er båret af en dyb vrede og en vilje til at kæmpe for en mere retfærdig verden, men uden at miste fornemmelsen for virkelighedens nuancer og kompleksitet. På den måde kan ‘Twice Colonized’ forhåbentlig være med til at starte nye samtaler op her i Danmark om koloniseringen af Grønland og om, hvordan afkoloniseringsprocessen kun kan lykkes, hvis vi alle - både grønlændere og danskere - engagerer os i den.”...

Doug Aubrey: Legacy of an Invisible Bullet

First some introductory words:

A filmmaker, Doug Aubrey, who has had a camera in his hands since he was a teenager, gets thyroid cancer. More than five years ago. He decides to turn the camera towards himself, he who his whole life has been filming social and political conflicts, been at many war zones, makes “an attempt to make sense out of my life, love, death, war and peace.” He makes 170 short films (!), altogether 10h30mins, which are made into a feature (117 mins.) and chaptered into 16 films or videos. I have seen the feature and two of the chapters, both around 45 mins. This text makes a focus on the feature:

Sarvnik Kaur: Against the Tide

One more documentary film from which I learned – this time about the koli fishing community in India close to Bombay. And one more documentary film where beautiful friendship is conveyed and forms the foreground of extremely difficult life conditions with a struggle to have a family life. Built around scenes in the families, celebrations, fishing, selling the fish, visits to the city and doctors and first of all conversations between the two male protagonists with drinks on the table, the film brings the viewer into understanding how hard Life can be and yet: Remember you are a Koli, you fear nothing. The Sundance catalogue text is precise when it comes to content, so here it is: 

”Rakesh and Ganesh are so close, they consider themselves brothers. Both are fishermen of Bombay's Indigenous Koli community, but they've taken contrasting paths. Rakesh uses his inheritance — his father's boat and the knowledge passed down by generations of Koli fisherman — to fish in the traditional ways, while Ganesh — who was educated abroad — has instead embraced modern, technology-driven, and environmentally destructive methods of deep-sea fishing, causing increasing friction between the friends. But with declining fish populations caused by pollution and invasive species, neither man is finding much success, adding to the burdens facing their young families, and testing the bonds of their brotherhood.”

India, 94 mins., 2023

Photo: Sarvnik Kaur, director

Fipadoc 2023

It’s a beautiful and elegant website to enter, the one from FipaDoc in Biarritz that introduces itself like this:

"We believe in true stories. Stories from here and there, of laughter and tears, stories simple but extraordinary, brave and surprising. Stories that open our eyes to those around us, that change the world, that inspire and stay with us forever. We believe in documentary films.”

Voila, and looking into the program, there is a strong film line divided into categories and an industry section with pitching and meetings. With a lot of festival categories being competitive. So there are juries with well known names like Nordisk Panorama’s Anita Reher, producer Iikka Vehkalahti, director Salomé Jashi, producer Uldis Cekulis, director Rachel Leah Jones, producer Alexandre Cornu, director Marta Prus and festival director from Ukraine’s DocuDays Vika Leshchenko…

Just to mention a couple of titles – in the Musical Documentary section Jørgen Leth and Andreas Koefoed are represented with beautiful “Music for Magic Pigeons”, in the International section there is Davide Ferrario’s “Umberto Eco – a Library of the World” that I would love to watch, in the Impact section there is Nikolaus Geyrhalter’s impressive “Matter out of Place” and in the French “Godard. Seul le Cinéma” by Cyril Leuthy. When you surf on the website you can watch the trailers and the one about Godard looks great.

Industry Days: There is a special focus on the Baltic countries and Finland, “Dive into the Baltic Sea” (hmm…), with Latvian Zane Balcus as moderator, there are pitching days organized by my old colleague from EDN Ove Rishøj Jensen and of course Ukraine is the guest of Honor under the headline “Visions of Ukraine”. 9 films have been selected and there is a Ukrainian panel present for a discussion: Viktoria LESHCHENKO,Docudays UA, Olga GIBELINDA, director, Ivanna KHITSINSKA, producer, Roman BLAZHAN, director, Andrii LYSETSKYI, director, OLHA BESKHMELNYTSINA, producer. Lysetskyi’s fine “Liturgy of Anti-Tank Obstacles” (2022) is shown in Biarritz as is “Ukrainian Sheriffs” by Roman Bondarchuk, produced by Latvian Uldis Cekulis. With whom, allow me a small flashback, I was in Biarritz years ago, with Archidoc, where Cekulis made a case study on his wonderful "Klucis. The Deconstruction".

And there is much much more to experience, put together by producer Christine Camdessus and her team. Wish you a good festival, starting today.

https://fipadoc.com/en

 Still: Umberto Eco Library

Overture IDFA Forum 30 Years

Memories… Names, film projects, episodes. 30 years of IDFA Forum! Actually I don’t remember the first time I was there. Was it the first edition? At the time I worked at the National Film Board of Denmark and had a seat in the Board of the EU Documentary office. But I remember that Dane Thomas Stenderup, representing the EU office based in Copenhagen traveled a lot to Amsterdam to meet with Adriek van Nieuwenhuijzen and Ally Derks and other team members...

... to talk about how to set up, what has now become the most important documentary meeting place in the world. Documentarians in the world unite. 

An event that many came love and many came to hate: Is there really money to pick up, many said? Is it a financial market? A meeting place? Many thought, what even is this pitching? It is absurd to think you can present your film idea in 7 minutes. You have been working on it for years! But it turned out that the pitching itself was followed by conversations, discussions, networking. It became obvious that you had made yourself visible, inspired, and engaged, a lot of work waited for you.

I have talked with many veteran documentary filmmakers, who remember the first time as a scary one, a kind of exam; at the same time as it was a good start for gaining the knowledge they needed to build their international careers. And again and again I have heard, even among the skeptical, comments like: “You have to go to the Forum every year”, “You have to show your face otherwise people will think that you are not in the business any longer”! It became the meeting point and being sentimental, I sat there as an observer for the plenary pitch session thinking: “Wow all these people are involved with documentaries! What a show of solidarity!

A few words about the projects: I was part of the selection team for the Forum projects several times when EDN (European Documentary Network) existed as a partner for the Forum. It was always great fun, and a challenge, to find a balance between the more creative films and those that had television as a clear target for their presentation. You knew to expect strong journalistic BBC documentaries in the run for a pitch seat and that they would get it, whereas a personal poetic documentary from Serbia would have difficulties getting a place at the table. Fair enough for commercial thinking but let me at this point stress that Adriek and the team have been great in their continous flexible search for changing the original model – shifting from one huge plenary session to smaller group meetings with the chance to go deeper with each project. Here is a quote from an IDFA article from 2019: “…the Forum is adjusting to changing financing structures, while opening up to also include films with less clear-cut narratives and new ways of storytelling.” Meaning less boring formatted projects, more surprises, more experiments – that’s how I see it.

The editors and pitchers: The Forum must also be entertaining – we observers sit there expecting some show elements from both sides of the table. When Viktor Kossakovsky was pitching you had someone, who knew how to catch attention with a globus for “!Vivan las Antipodas!”. There have been people “dancing” their project – and honestly I miss the at times tough dialogues between Arte’s Thierry Garrel and BBC Storyville’s Nick Fraser. Representing the auteur tradition and the investigative journalistic/historical. Later on, Iikka Vehkalahti from YLE joined the table with competent and humorous support, when appropriate, for the artistic documentary. Not to forget wonderful Diane Weyermann, always pleasant to listen to hear. RIP. Who has taken over from these docu-stars? Far too often you hear “thank you for the pitch” and/or “we have a meeting later today!” Boring and incompetent.

As I write this (August 2022) I am sitting in Skopje at the MakeDox festival and there is a Forum taking place for Southeast Europe. In the beginning of September, there is the Baltic Sea Docs and later the same month there is the Nordisk Panorama… and so on and so forth. These are many regional alternatives to the IDFA Forum and many represent first steps for filmmakers before being selected for the Forum in Amsterdam.

The IDFA Forum of today: It’s the full package. You arrive. You can be trained for pitching. You can have your trailer checked and improved. You can have all kinds of information on the market. You are invited to sessions and receptions to meet colleagues and funders…the “only” thing the Forum does not deliver… you don’t learn how to make films…but it can give tools and inspiration.

Tue Steen Müller

August 2022

dok.incubator presentation

Always a fine experience to attend the yearly presentation of upcoming documentaries developed at the dok.incubator workshop that has its address in Prague due to its Czech founder and manager Andrea Prenghyova. There was a presentation at IDFA this year, I was not there, but the presentation was repeated in a hybrid form yesterday: a welcome by Head of Studies French producer Christine le Goff and Prenghyova with le Goff giving a brief welcome intro to the film and filmmakers, seven there were, five of them women as le Goff pointed out in the beginning. All very precise and professional. To remind you, dok.incubator is a rough -cut workshop, this was the 12^th edition with a slogan on the poster: Work Hard – Fly High. During the years the workshop has existed I have only heard positive feedback from participants praising the selection of tutors, many of them of course editors.

For me watching the seven project presentations (hello from the teams, trailer, talk, one or two scenes, final comments on funding/wishes for sales agents/festivals) I decided to pick out three films that I definitely would want to watch when they are finished. Here they come:

“Blix, Birds & Bombs” by Swedish Greta Stocklassa, a Czech/German/Swedish production with the fine old (now 94 years) gentleman, the Swedish diplomat Hans Blix. I think we all remember Blix, appointed by the UN to go to Iraq to investigate if Saddam Hussein had or produced weapons of mass destruction. 700 inspections “but in no case did we find weapons of mass destruction”. CIA, the Americans and their allies, did what they could to bring Blix into miscredit… the rest, the invasion into Iraq is history. Stocklassa stressed in her presentation that the film has its focus on the man, Hans Blix, who we see in his apartment in Stockholm and in his armchair answering questions to the young director or feeding the birds outside his window. It will be an informative and entertaining and thought-provoking film, I am sure.

Equally promising is “Pure Unknown” by Italian Mattia Colombo and Valentina Cicogna, an Italian, Swiss and Swedish coproduction. The text from the presentation sounds like this: “Every night nameless bodies land in Dr. Cristina Cattaneo’s autopsy room. She calls them Pure Unknown. The Pure Unknown belong to the fringes of society. They are homeless, prostitutes, runaway teenagers. Lately, they have mostly been migrants, rejected by the Mediterranean Sea onto the shores of Italy. If all rights belong to the living, nothing is left to the dead. So what happens when the dead have lost their identity? In the face of this growing multitude, no one seems concerned about their right to dignity. No one but Cristina”. Nothing to add, I was touched by what I saw and by the charisma of the doctor,

It will and should travel to television and festivals.

I have written about dok.incubator film presentations before and hoped for film projects with a more clear stylistical approach. For sure the workshop’s primary aim is to find films with a theme that is timely, fair enough, but it can also be combined with an “auteurish” approach like South Korean Juyeon Yang’s “My Missing Aunt”, a personal film, where the director tries different storytelling methods to dig out the mystery about her aunt, who killed herself, or did she? Memories, witnesses, testimonies… and chapeau for the workshop that it also includes a project from another continent.

Still med Hans Blix

https://dokincubator.net/?utm_source=sendinblue&utm_campaign=2022%20ONLINE%20preview%20CONFIRMATION%202&utm_medium=email

CPH:DOX lancerer ny streamingtjeneste

WHEN TREES BLOOM AT HOME AGAIN

Filma Film Fest Ukraine:

WHEN TREES BLOOM AT HOME AGAIN

migration as a result of military conflict

After February 24 we all began to live in a new reality shaped by the full-scale war waged by Russia against Ukraine. The passage of time is now marked by shelling, air-raid alerts, curfews, and most recently, by blackouts. The lives of people and all other creatures have become ultimately precarious. Cities and villages are smashed into ruins, and whole ecosystems are perishing. Thousands of Ukrainians (often with animals and plants) have to flee the war to other cities, regions, and countries. To express solidarity with every human, every living being who has lost or had to flee their home, we decided to make migration in armed conflict the topic of this year’s only “Filma” program.

As a feminist collective, we encourage you to show solidarity with groups who experience discrimination. That’s why it’s important for us to screen these films,where directors tell the stories of their own migration experiences, or keep their creative concepts as non-stigmatizing, non-exoticizing as possible. We believe that this solidarity is impossible without comprehensive critical re-evaluation of the systems of oppression (such as colonialism, patriarchy, capitalism, etc.) and power structures. That’s why every film on the program marks our attempts to discuss complicated, often silenced topics, including the bio- and necropolitics of EU/West imposed on migrants during waves of migration in the second half of the 2010s and at the beginning of the 2020s; apartheid against Palestinians and the settler colonialism of the State of Israel; the telling inaction of the international community in regards to wars of aggression waged by Russia in the 1990s–2020s; the impact of the legacy of colonialism on the armed conflicts and ethnic cleansing in South Asia, Southeast Asia, and in the Near East.

Our program consists of eight films arranged to make up a single meta-story about the loss of home and the long way back to the homeland. We would like you to start with “Remember the smell of Mariupol” by Zoya Laktionova, and then move on to “My Favorite Job, 2022” by Sashko Protyah. In Zoya’s film, the author travels through the memories of her hometown that become entangled with horrendous images of war.

The story of volunteers filmed by Sashko Protyah demonstrates how courage and grassroots self-organization saves lives even when it is deemed impossible. In both works, the authors reflect upon the loss of their hometown Mariupol which was occupied and virtually destroyed by Russia in the spring of 2022.

We recommend you next watch “Newsreel 63 – The Train of Shadows” produced by the Slovenian collective Newsreel Front, “Purple Sea” by Amel Alzakout and Khaled Abdulwahed, and “Landscape of Terror” by Kasia Hertz. The authors of the video essay “The Train of Shadows” reflect upon the ethics of cinema by telling the intermingled story of railways, migration, and cinema. In this work, Amel Alzakout combines her chronicle of migration through the Mediterranean sea with reflections on the fragility of life, her relationship with her husband, and the dehumanizing nature of the contemporary media. Kasia Hertz filmed the stories of refugees who survived the inhuman conditions and violence at the border between Belarus and Poland at the end of 2021. Each film shows how perilous, if not deadly, the road of those seeking asylum may be.

Then check out the films ”I Swam Enguri” by Anuna Bukia and “The Turtle’s Rage” by Pary El-Qalqili. Along with the characters of her film, Anuna crosses the border from occupied Abkhazia to Russia and witnesses the aftermath of the war in her home city of Sukhumi. Pary El-Qalqili tells the story of her Palestinian family to show how devastating the trauma of forced displacement can be.

We conclude this cinematic journey with the film “5 Exchange Lane” by Anirban Dutta. “The Turtle’s Rage” and “I Swam Enguri” both depict a journey to an occupied home which is filled with disappointment and sorrow. However, the story of the Cole family taking their journey accompanied by the film director is filled with the fragile hope of regaining memories of home, of reconciling with the pain of its loss.

We named the program “When Trees Bloom at Home Again”, because we believe that every place has the power to restore itself. And that like trees, the feeling of home will sprout and blossom, despite all attempts to destroy it. We dream that all those who want to return will see that bloom again.

https://filmafest.org/en/

Mila Teshaieva & Marcus Lenz: When Spring Came to

The Russian massacre in Bucha in Ukraine is well known and talked about. This film documents the cleaning up after the Russians left. It’s not nice to look at. Corpses in black plastic bags being collected and transported, names spoken out of murdered citizens, registration of the deceased, insight to apartments, where the Russians took siege, mourning, of course there is a sad atmosphere but there is also a will to carry on with life. Documentation of war crimes in Bucha has been collected. It’s terrible. The film, shown as part of the Luminous section at IDFA, documents, there are talks with survivors, it is important that the filmmakers were there and were there so quick after the massacre in March this year.

Allow me to change language and quote the Ukrainian author Serhiy Jadan, who spoke at a book fair in Frankfurt. How do you speak/film about Butcha when the war is over:

La poésie après Boutcha et Izioum est certainement possible, voire nécessaire. Cependant, l’ombre de Boutcha et d’Izioum, leur présence, va peser de tout son poids sur la poésie d’après-guerre et va largement déterminer son contenu et son ton. C’est une prise de conscience douloureuse mais nécessaire du fait qu’à partir de maintenant, le contexte des poèmes écrits dans notre pays sera celui des charniers et des quartiers bombardés... 

Germany, 2022, 66 mins.

Photos: Mila Teshaieva (radioeins) Marcus Lenz (wild films) Serhiy Jadan 

Mila Turajlic and Labudovic

Serbian director Mila Turajlic is my cinematic historian, when it comes to tell me about the history of Yugoslavia and Serbia. At IDFA she presented her two new films “Non-Aligned: Scenes from the Labudovic Reels” and “Ciné-Guerrillas: Scenes from the Labudovic Reels”, plus had a live documentary performance about the reels together with her colleague Maja Medic. But let me take a flashback to the filmkommentaren archive, where you can find words about her previous films “Cinema Komunisto” and “The Other Side of Everything”. About the former: 

Lea Glob: Apolonia Apolonia

Main award at IDFA 2022 for Danish director Lea Glob for a film she has been working on for 13 years. A huge achievement to say the least. I saw the film two days ago at home online and was planning to write a review, but after this announcement of to night it was much easier to let the jury speak as well as quote the fine description from the IDFA website:

"This film has characters who breathe life and take us on a journey, opening us up to the worlds of culture and art, of business and politics, of the mechanics of a success story. It is infused with love..." the Jury statement.

"When Danish filmmaker Lea Glob first portrayed Apolonia Sokol in 2009, she appeared to be leading a storybook life. The talented Apolonia was born in an underground theater in Paris and grew up in an artists’ community—the ultimate bohemian existence. In her 20s, she studied at the Beaux-Arts de Paris, one of the most prestigious art academies in Europe. Over the years, Lea Glob kept returning to film the charismatic Apolonia and a special bond developed between the two young women.

The result is a fascinating portrait, spanning 13 years, of a young woman trying to find her place in the art world. Apolonia is confident in her talent, but her path is not always an easy one. Life is not a storybook; one of the lessons Apolonia learns is that women painters have to make more sacrifices and overcome greater obstacles than their male counterparts do. This also applied to the friend she lived with for a long time, Oksana Shachko, one of the founders of the feminist action group Femen. Apolonia’s resilience is put to the test." the IDFA website.

Apolonia, Oksana, Lea... three women, three approaches to life and art and society... three women from different parts of this crazy world we live in... three women full of life and hope... living on the edge... life and death.

Alina Gorlova: This is Not Putin's War

Verzio Documentary Moments

When you have been watching scenes and footage from 8 projects at the Verzio DocLab Budapest last week there are moments of what you could call authentic truth that stay in your mind. Let me mention 4 of them:

A mother draws the curtain and lets in the sunshine to the room, where her grown-up son sleeps. She caresses him, he looks at her and the dog that also waits to be included in the moment of happiness. The severely disabled son smiles. Anna Rubi caught this moment that will leave no one untouched when “Your Life Without Me” comes out and will create debate in Hungary that “still lacks humane state care”.

Black & White, a mother and her daughter Erin (MacPherson), the director, sits next to each other with a cup in hand. None of them talks but you sense in this moment that something is wrong because of the framing and because the scene stays long. That unique cinematographic moment will stay in “The Pursuit of Grief” – the mother has lost her husband, the daughter Erin her father.

One-two, One-two-three, wife and husband train dance steps in their kitchen in “Dreams at Sunset” by Ibolya Simó. The scene is fun to watch – and touching as you have just been told that their two sons have passed away, one after cancer, the other took his own life. They now want to make reality out of “it is never too late to start living”, a sentence from the catalogue.

Another dance scene moment in a house in Budapest where the director Sára Timár dances with her old father thus showing her love to him, who used to be an important person in Hungarian dancing. This poetic dance moment followed in a scene, where a visit to the cellar reveals that something completely different had been going on… “Under the Dance Floor”, working title of the film-to-be.

Young filmmakers with an eye for people and situation. You need to be curious and have the skills to get close to achieve moments like these.

www.verzio.org

Foto: Anna Rubi 

Verzio DocLab 2022

From tuesday till saturday 8 film projects were being worked on in Budapest as part of the Verzio Human Rights Film Festival. The filmmakers came with their material and were met by mentors and colleagues, who gave them feedback in order for them to develop their projects and make - for their presentation today - a scene that could prove their film skills and tell the audience, what the film would be about. No trailers, no money talk, a brief verbal presentation and then the scene - or two - edited during the four days.

It was pure pleasure to be part of the mentoring team (Austrian director Michael Seeber, Spanish editor Diana Toucedo, Hungarian editor Brigitta Bacskai) walking from room to room in the infamous CEU Library, where there are no students due to the conflict between the Hungarian government/Victor Orban and the university founded by George Soros - that resulted in the move of the university to Vienna. But that's another story you can google on your own...

It's amazing what can be achieved creatively in so few days and it was my impression that the panelists (representatives from the festivals FipaDoc in Biarritz, Biograffilm in Bologna, from KinoDok in Czech Republic, Claudia Rodriguez Valencia from Colombia, Danish film consultant at the Swedish Film Institute Jannick Splidsboel, Hungarian film directors Asia Dér and Klara Trencsenyi, whose wonderful film "The Missing Tale" had its Hungarian premiere at the Verzio festival two days ago) appreciated the non-classical-pitch situation.

Also during the week there were two so-called masterclasses. The two editors Diana Toucedo and Brigitta Bacskai talked about their profession and I had the pleasure to have a conversation with Michael Seeber, who is a very knowledgeable person in the European film scene, having made documentary films and tv series and fiction. Seeber had chosen the title of the conversation, "Pursuing focus in our films — The creative possibilities", showing clips we did both of us. Seeber showed a text clip from his upcoming film on Ida Halpern, Austrian ethnomusicologist, looking fwd. to see the final result.

The titles of the projects presented, look out for them:

• Up in the Air (Ukraine)

• Your life without me (Hungary)

• 2158 Stories (Denmark)

• The pursuit of grief (South Africa) 

• Albada / From the morning (Venezuela) 

• Under the dance floor (Hungary)

• Dreams at sunset (Hungary) 

• El cielo esta azur y el mar esta tranquilo (Spain)

  The workshop was organised by Péter Becz, filmmaker (by the way making a documentary in Denmark about a Hungarian chef based in DK!) assisted by Hanna Kadar and Anna Bölcsföldi, two great young women who made our stay effective and enjoyable.

  Still: ...Hungarian film directors Asia Dér and Klara Trencsenyi, whose wonderful film "The Missing Tale" had its Hungarian premiere at the Verzio festival two days ago) appreciated the non-classical-pitch situation.

Verzio Budapest 2022

The International Human Rights Documentary Film Festival starts tonight. The director Oksana Sarkisov writes the following strong welcome words with the headline 

“Taming the Fire”

In 2022, the phrase “world on fire” is more than a metaphor or a reference to some past or remote incidents. The war in Ukraine and its global resonance, the growing number of casualties and millions of refugees and internally displaced people worldwide, the deepening energy crisis, and the alarming consequences of climate change are transforming our daily lives, and with it, the whole planet. For a thinking and engaged mind, it is impossible to stay adrift and look aside. Camera in hand, documentarists continue exploring the world’s most pressing problems, giving each abstract concept a human dimension and a personal, poignant, subjective touch.

This year, Verzió features powerful visual stories of courageous journalists, women overcoming traumatic violence, young generations exploring complex family histories and identities, and activists resisting dictatorships and corporations while advocating for radical change to build an inclusive, peaceful future. We prepare a special program, Solidarity UA, which highlights the complexity and richness of Ukrainian society, and commemorates the life and work of Mantas Kvedaravičius, who was brutally killed while filming in Mariupol.  

Filmmakers are increasingly involved with the stories they document, reflexively expanding the potential of documentary’s testimonial power. Intense observation and thorough research are continuously enhanced by new media. The possibilities offered by VR and animation change the ways we think and relate to the very notions of “document” and “documenting.” Beyond formal experiments, what unites these films is the urgency of the issues addressed.

The hot topics at this year’s festival are symbolized by burning flames. Fire implies danger, but it also brings warmth and light, and can gather a community together. We hope that Verzió will serve as such a gathering for all those concerned with today’s burning topics and those willing to face these pressing issues head on.

Welcome to the 19th edition of the festival. Feel the warmth of human connection and join the community of documentary film enthusiasts.

photo: Oksana Sarkisov

European Film Awards Documentary

https://europeanfilmawards.eu/en_EN/selection-documentary-current

Click above and you will see the shortlisted documentaries for the European Film Award in the documentary category.

Today the nominations for the award to be decided in Reykjavik on the 10th of December were announced:

The House of Splinters. By Simon Lereng Wilmont

Mariupolis 2. By Mantas Kvedaravičius 

The Balcony Movie. By Pawel Lozinski

March on Rome. By Mark Cousins

Girl Gang. By Susanne Regina Meures 

Congratulations!

AWARDS AT THE 26TH JI.HLAVA FF

What is a documentary?

What is a documentary 

At my first day in Zelig Film school i met a man named Tue Steen Müller that immediately asked us to present ourselves and talk about a documentary we saw. I briefly explained what brought me to love films and especially documentary. And while hearing all the other future 'cinema people' answers my mind started drifting about in how many aspects a movie can create a connection with people. So when the man who lived in the cinema industry for a long time asked us newbies to write 3 words that described what we think a documentary is I immediately wrote down the word Adventure. Adventure is the key word of my life, and since every form of living organism, human or not, is living one, a documentary is the mean of trying to take that content and bring it to the World. A documentary is definitely something different for the ones who make it and the ones who watch it. From my point of view as an, hopefully, future film maker I see a mean of taking my passion into something that can be an insight of an aspect of society, the care for a dear friend and his issues, an event i care about, a challenge i want to win in researching, respecting and sharing the realities and truths of a story that will cause a reflection in the watchers mind. Until now i've always been on the other side of the picture, watching and enjoying the love that film makers bring in their movies. Trying to get the knowledge out of it and make it mine, using cinema as a door that lead to inspirations through a storytelling that will answer all the questions that comes in my mind. Documentary as a viewer is about intriguing my curiosity and finding myself surprised from how much Adventures can be different. Quoting one of my favorite movies 'To see the world, things dangerous to come to, to see behind walls, draw closer, to find each other, and to feel. That is the purpose of life.' and that is what i want my movies to be. 

Riccardo Brugnara 

The Truth about Documentary  

When a group of 25 students are being asked ‘What is Documentary?’, the word ‘truth’ comes up multiple times. This makes sense, you would say. You could even say that this is what differentiates documentary film from fiction, being about a true story. We could define this as a characteristic of documentary, but somehow this does not seem right. What even is truth? When is a film enough truth to be considered a documentary? 

For me, this aspect cannot just define documentary film, but it is one of the fascinating parts of it. It is interesting that documentary is indeed about a story that is true, but it is more than that. It is a lens to see a small part of the world through. Because it only gives a frame to look through, this makes it possible to focus on certain elements without viewing the whole event. This means the film is a version or a part of the truth that interests and moves the maker, and therefore highlights this specific part of it. It is about observing a subject, reflecting on it and finding the perspective that moves the most. 

Because that is for me what documentary should be: moving. Moving in the literal meaning of the word; to activate the viewer to take action or change their thinking or even their behaviour. But also moving in the broader sense, that is opens the viewer to emotions. These could be either positive or negative, but it is the impact of emotions you feel from a film, that sticks with you. It is like with people in real life. We tend to forget what people look like or what they said, but will always remember how they made us feel. The stronger these feelings, the better the people stick with you. I think the same applies to documentary. The ones that moved you, that make you feel strong emotions, are the ones that have an impact and will be remembered. 

The big impact emotions have in documentary, also makes the medium highly subjective. This case, together with the fact that it is not possible to portray the whole objective truth, is the beauty of documentary film. Having to choose the perception and perspective of the film, gives the maker the ability to control the focus of the narrative, and therefore of the topic. For the viewer, this could mean a completely new way of seeing someone or something as they would never see it by themselves. To be able to be blown away by a film, discover and feel new things, even if they might think to know the ‘truth’. To play with the interpretation of the truth, and finding the perspective and form that moves the most, that is for me what documentary is. 

Annieke Boer

Zelig Film Fest Bolzano/ 2

Here is how the director Kyrylo Naumko introduces his film “Dear Odesa” on the website of Zelig (https://www.zeligfilm.it/it/):

I did not notice exactly how and when life in Odesa became unbearable. But, probably, last 2 years I had a terrible feeling of disgust mixed with love. I was irritated by many things: the mayor who was a bandit, the widespread apathy of most residents of Odesa to the problems of the city, and chaotic construction. Plastic balconies on the facades of historic buildings, air conditioners, huge advertising signs – all these are pimples on the body of my beloved city. A city that could once breathe freely. Until recently, this worried me almost the most in life. Now, after the war started, the only thing I want is for this city to just stand. Just exist. Please.

Ukrainian documentaries are shown at festivals all over the world in this time of war, in solidarity with Ukraine. The film by Kyrylo Naumko was shot before the invasion in February. It is a young man’s declaration of love to his city, nicely created with atmosphere and with three fine protagonists – the mother of the director, his friend Mykata and the director himself. Should definitely be taken by festivals with or without a focus on Ukraine.

The film team included cinematographer Hannah Hütter and editor Lydia Gasparini. Deservedly praised on stage by the audience and the supervisor of the film Robert Rombout.

Zelig Film Fest Bolzano

Zelig Film Fest Bolzano

10 films, 28 graduates… 5 films were shown last night, 5 will hit the screen tonight. I am not here to review the films but I will not refrain from saying that the general quality is high, that I do appreciate the policy of the school to have a diversity of themes from the students and I say Bravo to the school making a Fest out of the presentation of the graduation films. They deserve it!

Here are the introductory words on themes, from the school, to the 10 films of the Fest: …From the remote villages of an island of the Indian Ocean to the urban periphery of Barcelona; from the historical venues of the magnificent Odesa in Ukraine to the small alleys of the city centre of Genua, in Italy; from cold winter of Hamburg and of the internal Austrian landscape, to the sunny streets of Palermo, Sicily, until the remote rehearsal locations of a particular theatre company in the undergrounds of Milano: as for every three years, ZeLIG films are an insight into humanity, into the diversity of contemporary society and they will make you laugh, cry, smile.

Matilde Ramini is one of the students graduating from Zelig Documentary School, she presented as director the film “Fuoritempo” at the Zelig Film Fest that takes place 28-29 of October at the Filmclub Bozen (Bolzano). Three years ago she was asked by a teacher, me, to write a small essay answering the question “What is a Documentary”. She wrote in Italian, here are the two first paragraphs from a fine text: http://www.filmkommentaren.dk/blog/blogpost/4679/

La scorsa settimana la lavagna bianca della ZeLIG traboccava di sostantivi, verbi ed aggettivi. Non si è trattato (solo) di una lezione di grammatica inglese, bensì di mettere nero su bianco le parole che ci sono venute in mente quando Tue ci ha chiesto di pensare al documentario. Il risultato è stato un puzzle semantico, nella cui incompletezza e contraddittoreità ci possiamo rispecchiare in trenta.

Una cosa è emersa chiaramente: fare documentari significa esercitare la settima arte. Non inferiori alla fiction, i documentari sono film in piena regola e come tali è la loro estetica e la loro poetica visiva a caratterizzarli. La creatività e l‘abilità di sottrarsi ad una certa pretenziosità estetica sono per alcuni di noi le principali caratteristiche del documentarista e della documentarista…

Looking forward to the five films of tonight, starting with “Dear Odesa” by Kyrolo Naumko, who is in Ukraine whereas his mother (protagonist of the film) and his sister will be present at the screening.

The Zelig website gives you information about the graduation films, including credits, technical information, trailers, bios of the film team members and director’s introduction: https://film.zeligfilm.it/en/ What more to want?

Awards of the 10th Aegean Docs

The Best Foreign Film Award of 1.000 euros. Shared equally to:

Maija Isola (Finland), Leena Kilpelainen.

and

 Looking for Horses (Bosnia-Herzegovina/France),Stefan Pavlovic

Best Greek Film Award of 1.000 euros with the support of Greek Film Centre:

The Bet (Greece)Maria Leonida.

The Award of Best Production, 500 euros is awarded to:

Ksenia Gapchenko from Russia for the film “How to Save a Dead Friend” of the director Marusya Syroechkovskaya, Sweden/Norway/ France/Germany

Ksenia Gapchenko, with emotion, told us: 

«On February 24^th a country where my mum was born and I spent my childhood, was attacked by the country of my father. For me it was a great tragedy. I decided to leave Russia. Since April I’m not living in Moscow, the city I once loved a lot. 

I condemn violence and war. I’m trying to start my life in Europe with my daughter, who is my support, love and the best companion.

I hope for peace in Ukraine and freedom for Russia».

Best short film award of 500 euros:

Menores (Spain),Juan Trueba

Honorary Distinction «10 years AegeanDοcs»

The jury of AegeanDocs awards the honorary distinction "10 years of AegeanDocs" to director Eva Stefani for her valuable contribution to the establishment of Creative Documentary in Greece.

Honorary Distinctions are also awarded to:

A Jewish Life(Austria), Christian Kermer & Christian Krienes, Austria for their contribution to saving the memory of the Holocaust 

The Other Half (Greece), Georgios Moutafis for his dedication to researching and documenting the refugee drama.

What is a Documentary?

While in the Greek island: Two mornings with film students from Romania, organised by Ana Vlad, documentary teacher at the university and a film director I have known for many years. Pleasure to work with her. I asked the students to take part in the game I have introduced on many occasions. Armine Vosgarian put the words together in an essay like this:

“Write down the first 3 words which come to your mind when hearing the word documentary.”, says Tue Steen Müller, the visiting lecturer for today. I haven’t written a single word on the zoom chat. My keyboard wasn’t responding to any commands. I even hit it, but no use. Ironically, I was chosen to write a tiny essay on the words that popped  on the chat. This was the first time I saw most of the students, online or offline, so I can’t grasp the meaning of those words in terms of the projects they are working on, but, from the discussions held during the session, I understood that forces such as: curiosity, patienceand love drive us in our documentarian journey.

Curiosity drives every artist. There was another word used such as insight which is a consequence of curiosity focused towards one’s inner self. Curiosity is the first impulse of a child and this innocence is what saves the artist. This was one of the key elements we learnt in acting school. If you lose your curiosity, you are not willing to learn anymore, to love anymore and to, eventually, live anymore.

Some terms as authenticity, truthand purity were put on the table. One of the students placed Werner Herzogbetween words like reality and trust. Here we leave space for philosophy. If we are in search of truth as artists, we are saved, as long as we know we can never embrace it in its completeness. If we listen to Aristoteles, everything we see is a copy of a divine plan and art is a second hand copy. The purity and authenticity comes with the strength of the artist when he is open to the world. Even when he isolates himself from everything, he has to be open, like a medium for ligth or darkness, whatever suits him. 

Others proposed the terms like realand human. We, humans, are real and authentic through our continous struggle of moving on. Some believe that is human to forget, some say is human to forgive.

  We, as documentary makers, can participate in the process of our characters healing. While we observe and express our own emotions when choosing the angle and shots of that character’s space, we are entrusted with their exorcism. We are like guides. I believe the process is quite different from the fiction film because we hold a heavier responsibility.

  The connection we create with the characters who are human beings, breathing beyong our pixels, contributes greatly to the path of both the filmmaker and the one portrayed. When making a documentary, you are responsible for the message. We are still under the protection of the large umbrella of poetry and free expression, but all the politics brought on screen weigh more than in fiction. Even in feature films, we ingest the message differently when we see the words: based on real events. 

  In documentary making, we have a mission. We will never be able to point out the truth, but we have to try, relentlessly, to show what our characters believe to be the truth, especially when their voices were rarely heard.  If we doubt the people or the situation we chose to portray, then. with empathy and honesty, we have bring our own truth that counterpoints them.  

  Documentary is life, more than anything, with all its complexities and we need courage to hold on to it. Lord Byron sayd something like truth is stranger than fiction. Well,  we have a saying in Romanian. “Life beats film”

Photo: Ana Vlad

Aegean Docs 10th Edition/ 3

An important film was programmed last night in the cinema in Myrina:

A Jewish Life

Direction Team: Christian Krönes, Florian Weigensamer, Christian Kermer, Roland Schrotthofer. Israel, Austria, 114 mins. 2021.

Annotation: Marko Feingold, born in 1913, grew up in a Jewish working-class neighborhood of Vienna. Fateful twists and turns helped him survive the concentration camps of Auschwitz, Neuengamme, Dachau and Buchenwald. After the War he (illegally) aided tens of thousands of survivors out of Europe to what would become Israel. At the age of 105, A Jewish Life is his story, in his own words shortly before his death.

After the film there was a short skype Q&A with Christian Kermer. I asked him how it was possible to have a 105 year old man talk so well and precise. The answer was that the film crew spent 14 shooting days with him with some breaks, when he was not feeling good. The story of a man, told by himself, a man who remembers as we should remember, a man who talks about Austria and Anschluss that was welcomed by most Austrians… A dark spot in Austrian post-war history.

Aegean Docs 10th Edition/ 2

It’s your night, Kostas Spiropoulos, the director of Aegean Docs, said to me. He knows that the two films shown last night are very much appreciated by me, and written about on www.filmkommentaren.dk

They are “Looking for Horses”, quote:

"Stefan Pavlović did it all on his own. In one scene he helps Zdravko get his hearing aid correctly set in another with the camera on a tripod he films himself and Zdravko at the table, close together; Stefan puts his head on the shoulder of Zdravko in a scene of joy and sadness, a beautiful and warm moment among many in a film full of poetry, a chamber play set on a lake, a film that caress its viewer – like the horses are caressed. Documentary at its best! 

Pavlovic took part in the Q&A via skype.

And ”How to Save a Dead Friend”, directed by Marusya Syroechkovskaya. The producer Ksenia Gapchenko was there for a long and good Q&A. Quote:

The title could also have been “Marusya and Kimi” putting the focus on what it is, a love story, with a start, a middle and an end – told in a film language that is touching, that is sweet and funny – and sad as it evolves, with the self-destruction of Kimi, who dives more and more into using hard drugs and “looks at the camera and not at me” as Marusya says. A tragic love story, yes, but full of warm scenes with the two, scenes you can only characterize as poetic.

Aegean Docs 10th edition

Lucky us, my wife and I, to be invited to Aegean Docs on the island of Limnos. The 10th edition of a special documentary film festival that takes place in 9 (nine!) islands in the North Aegean Sea: Lemnos, limnos, Ikaria, Agios Efstratios, Samos, Fournoi, Oinousses, Psara, Chios.

The organiser is Storydoc that you can read about in many posts on this site – it arranged training sessions with international names taking part as tutors, Stan Neumann, Niels Pagh Andersen, Emma Davie, Mikael Opstrup, Iikka Vehkalahti, Erez Laufer, Madeleine Avramoussis.

Storydoc is run by Kostas Spiropoulos and Chara Lampidou.

The opening night includes two films that I have reviewed – here are some clips from the texts:

Leena Kilpelainen: Maija Isola (Finland)

… To be honest I had never heard of Maija Isola before so I thought, why the film had been chosen (for DocsBarcelona, ed.). Watching yesterday, the answer was given. What a life (1927-2001) she had as an artist, a traveller, many men, constantly in the process of creating, with the connection to Marimekko as the backbone. She tells the story herself via her diaries and via her daughter, who lives in a house full of the mother’s creations, it’s a chronologically told adventurous film with lovely archive footage from the places, she went to, Paris being number one, but also Algeria, New York and sometimes back to – mostly – snowy Finland. It is simply a pleasure to be with clever, reflective Maija Isola in her search for what is the meaning of it all. And despite the many love stories her happy moments being alone. It’s a film with many layers and a huge respect for the audience. "Master of Colour and Form" is the subtitles to the film, indeed, we see that!

Eva Stefani: Days and Nights of Demetra K(Greece)

… Eva (Stefani) is there with the camera, asks questions to Dimitra, laughs with the charismatic woman, go with her to conferences about prostitution and prostitutes, to political meetings, sees her with her dozen of cats, hears her family story – in a film that falls in two parts, first one in Dimitra’s brothel, second one in her flat in the middle of the city. The film is a true evidence of how important it is to be close to and like the one you are filming and have curiosity to human life as it unfolds outside normal circles. Eva Stefani wants to learn about life when she films and in this case she gives the audience the wonderful opportunity to meet Dimitra, a strong and yet vulnerable woman taking us around in the streets of Athens. Could you move a bit Dimitra so Acropolis can be seen in the picture… Dimitra, can you turn on some light… they collaborate Dimitra and Eva Stefani, the unique Greek filmmaker.

Curiosity and Love... Magnificent7

Total trust can only come from curiosity and love, Heddy Honigmann said in an interview. The director who passed away this year continued by saying that she loved the people, she films. That is so obvious in her “Oblivion” from 2008, that was shown at the Magnificent 7 in Belgrade as a tribute to the great filmmaker. A screening with around 200 spectators and a long warm applause following. Honigmann: One of my producers once said that I should film horrible people… but why should I… I want to film nice people.

Curiosity and love… could be the words characterizing this year’s edition (number 18) of the festival in Belgrade. Pawel Lozinski’s “Balcony Movie” is indeed carried by the director’s interest in people passing by, interest and love, caring and searching for an answer to the question “what is the meaning of life?”

The same goes for this year’s discovery, “The Wind that Moves Us”, where Catalan Pere Puigbert in his first feature length documentary declares his love to nature and people and lets his grandmother declare her love to her late grandfather, beautiful!

Curiosity and love is what drives the Elvis Presley fan, magnificent teacher Kevin when he inspires the kids in the Belfast school to understand the world around them in “Young Plato” and what makes Dr. Popov and his colleagues in the Bulgarian “A Provincial Hospital” be the heroes they are in the film by Ilian Metev, Ivan Chertov and Zlatina Teneva.

And there is no doubt where Dutch director Oeke Hoogendijk puts her sympathy and love in “The Treasures of Crimea”, when she films the woman, who asked colleagues at the Crimean museums to have their treasures go to the exhibition in Amsterdam.

Curiosity and love, well you could not make “Zoo Lockdown” without that as Andreas Horvath has done. 

Nordisk Panorama/ The Forum

The 29th edition of the Forum for Co-Financing of Documentaries. I was there for the two days, where 24 projects were pitched to a panel of TV-editors and Film Fund/Institute consultants with another 22 listed in the catalogue as observers, who could - as those behind the 24 mentioned - have individual meetings in the hours following the public show.

Is it a show? For us in the audience? Yes and no, depending on those pitching and those responding. And on the moderators skills. They were good, Cecilia Lidin and Mikael Opstrup. Well prepared, knew in beforehand who could be interested, always supporting towards the filmmakers at the other end of the table. Professional in other words creating the special family-like Nordic tone. That has the bad side that noone dares to be critical which sometimes creates a monotone atmosphere, where one editor says that he/she agrees with the previous one and "Thank you for the pitch" and "We can talk more in an individual meeting". Fair enough but boring for the audience.

I will now bring in some comments on some of the projects, mostly those where I simply look forward to see the film.

Nordisk Panorama/1

Nordisk Panorama in Malmø. In Sweden. Sunday. Had our passports ready in the train for border check. But no check. 5 minutes to the Scandic Hotel and voilá you are at the very well organised Nordisk Panorama with a fine selection of documentaries and short films to be shown in cinemas around the city - and with seminars, many of them at the hotel.

I managed to go directly to an inspiring meeting with Finnish composer Sanna Salmenkallio, who has made music for films like "Three Rooms of Melancholia" by Pirjo Honkasalo and for several films by Virpi Suutari. The one hour long session was moderated by Gitte Hansen, who is also one of the selectors of films for the festival. The focus was on the music Salmenkallio made for the film by Suutari on the architect couple Aalto, a masterpiece it is, very much because of the music. If you want to know more about the composer, visit

https://www.nordicfilmmusicdays.com/sanna-salmenkallio-fin.html

And then two films: The Danish produced "The Killing of a Journalist" by Matt Sarnecki, a shocking investigative documentary (edited by master Janus Billeskov Jansen) about a totally corrupt, criminalised political Slovakia. A thriller to watch with a courageous journalist and his girl friend as victims of a detailed planned murder - an example of a journalistic documentary of highest quality.

And then "How to Save a Dead Friend" in the Panora Cinema in an almost full hall. The director Maruysa Syroechkovskaya and her Swedish producer Mario Adamson were there and I - as moderator - had an easy job to have the audience put questions to the young director, who is travelling from festival to festival with a film that deservedly is short listed for a European Film Award in the documentary category. Marusya has written about the film here: 

http://www.filmkommentaren.dk/blog/blogpost/5021/

I will have the chance to meet the Russian producer Ksenia Gapchenko at the AegeanDocs Festival in Lemnos next week, also there the film will be shown.

Magnificent7 Belgrade 2022 Matter Out of Place

Magnificent7 Belgrade 2022 Zoo Lockdown

magnificent7 Belgrade 2022 The Treasures of Crimea

Magnificent7 Belgrade 2022 A Provincial Hospital

Magnificent7 Belgrade 2022 Young Plato

Magnificent7 Belgrade 2022 The Wind that Moves Us

Magnificent7 Belgrade 2022 Balcony Movie

Magnificent7 Belgrade 2022 Pawel Lozinski

I Have No Idea How Much They Loved It – but I think they did, the audience for the masterclass with Polish Pawel Lozinski. We (Lozinski and I as the moderator) enjoyed a lot what we were asked to do: Choose 7 shots/sequences from your films and talk about them. Mostly about the form, the aesthetical choices after setting up the clip with some background information on content.

”Birthday” from 1992 was the first shot, the film that won the first prize at the festival on Bornholm, Baltic Film & TV Festival. It was the first film of Pawel Lozinski, a tough one on the famous Jewish Polish writer Henryk Grynberg searching for the remains of his father, who was killed during the war. Shot on 16mm film.

Later on Lozinski made the film ”The Way It Is” from his neighbourhood (1999), ”Chemo” from 2009, which is a film he decided to do when his mother got cancer, the controversial ”Father and Son” (2013) that was meant to be a film by Marcel and Pawel together, but Marcel decided to make his own version… It did not make the conflicted relationship between them easier!

If that was the reason for Lozinski to make ”You Have No Idea…”, I asked him. Could be, he said about the film that was shown in the cinema later that same friday.

As a small gift to the audience, ”Sisters” (11 minutes) was shown, a film that Pawel Lozinski shot when he had a break in shooting ”The Way It Is”. What are you doing, the sisters asked the director when they met in the courtyard. I am making a film about interesting people in my neighbourhood, he answered. Are we interesting, they asked. See the film, Yes they are!

Magnificent7: Heddy Honigmann in Memoriam

Heddy Honigmann died May 21 this year 70 year old. Some of her films have been shown at Magnificent7. On Sunday the 18^th at 6pm one of her masterpieces, “Oblivion”, from 2008 will be shown for us to remember a magnificent documentarian.

Here are some quotes about Heddy Honigmann:

In August 2007 Allan Berg and I started filmkommentaren. The first post/review of a film published was „Forever“ by Heddy Honigmann, a lovely film where the director takes the viewer to the cemetery Père Lachaise in Paris. An essayistic film about Life and Death made by the Dutch master, whose films I have followed with pleasure during decades – do you remember ”Metal and Melancholy”, ”Oblivion”, ”O Amor Natural” and the recent ones ”Buddy” and ”Around the World in 50 Concerts”? And many more. (Tue Steen Müller)

”In 1994, the director made ”Metal and Melancholy”, also from Peru, seen through the taxis and their double-job drivers. This new film from Lima is melancholic as well, and beautiful, but you also feel a well-documented anger on behalf of the people you meet who struggle every day to survive”. A humanistic, political film for a big audience. Thank you! (Tue Steen Müller)

Heddy Honigmann is a documentary filmmaker who breaks through impenetrable walls with her warm, carefully measured and dedicated communication with people in her films. This time, she decided with considerable courage to make a film about people who have already entered the second century of their lives. Contrary to the incidental news that someone anonymous until then or someone famous, celebrated his hundredth birthday, this great film directly confronts us with fascinating characters full of passion, spirit and life. This is the unique document about active life of people at the beginning of their second century, valuable because it reveals to us people that we could read about in legends, but very few people could meet them in person. Heddy Honigmann masterfully introduces viewers to the active lives of her enchanting heroes who never cease to amaze us - from a woman who, as a bewildered girl, watched one of the greatest evils in history, to a man who passionately seeks an answer that will change the destiny of humanity. A sensational drummer, sexologist, philosopher, doctor, characters whose vitality gives this film a wonderful, exciting inner rhythm. (Svetlana and Zoran Popovic about ”100 UP)

A precious documentary that reveals to us the depths of human experience and wisdom…. Could go for all her films …

On the 18^th there will be a text by about “Oblivion” by Svetlana and Zoran Popovic.

http://magnificent7festival.org/en/index.php

Magnificent7 Belgrade 2022

"We haven't seen so poetic documentary for a long long time! Beautiful shots, true beauty of the nature and people, true beauty of the documentary!"

A visit "behind the scene" is this email text from from Svetlana and Zoran Popovic to me, who had asked the festival directors to watch "The Wind that Moves Us" by Pere Puigbert from Catalonia, Spain.

Just one example of our many exchanges of comments during a selection process, this time for the 18th edition of Magnificent7 that I am proud and grateful to be part of.

I put that to tell you, dear Belgrade audience, that we who select have promised each other that we film lovers must be full of enthusiasm, joy and respect before we say "yes, we must have that film", "yes, we must have this film for you the audience, who deserve to be treated with the best of the best".

The camerawork of Pere Puigbert in "The Wind that Moves us" is excellent, nature and man, every image is a composition as are the ones of Austrian master Nikolaus Geyerhalter, who returns to the festival with his stunning "Matter Out of Place" about rubbish here, there, and everywhere on the planet, we live. His film is a true proof of the director's aesthetic ambition to sometimes even turn the unattractive scenes of reality into surrealistic paintings while at the same time as he sends this message: Shame on us, what can we humans do better?

People... documentaries about us who have different lives, different opinions and who like to express them, to open up if we are asked in a gentle way. By, for instance, a man on a balcony. So happy that Pawel Lozinski will visit the festival with his awarded "Balcony Movie" that he shot over a couple of years catching moments of joy and grief pointing his camera from his balcony to those passing by asking questions about how they feel, how they live, what are their plans for the day. Crazy Poetry? Indeed! Existential and Philosophical. Absolutely!

Philosophy, Yes... "Young Plato" by Irish Declan McGrath and Neasa Ni Chianáin is a film from Belfast, a superb observational documentary, uplifting and hopeful from a city with a bloody past AND with a charismatic teacher, a fan of Elvis Presley, who take care of the kids with love. Teaching love. Oh, they know how to talk, these kids, and welcome back to Neasa Ni Chianáin and David Rane who were here with "In Loco Parentis".

Two films are shot during the Covid pandemic: "Zoo Lockdown" by Andreas Horvath and "A Provincial Hospital" by Ilian Metev, Ivan Chertov and Zlatina Teneva.

Who has not dreamt of being in a zoo when there are no visitors? To observe the animals? Do they behave in a different way, are they happy that nobody watches them all the time or do they miss the curious tourist glances? It's a lovely film and we hope many will bring along (bigger) kids to the cinema to watch the film, that was made when the Salzburg Zoo was closed because of Covid-19.

Ilian Metev, whose "The Last Ambulance" we enjoyed years ago at the festival, is back with his film colleagues Chertov and Teneva. Metev himself was in lockdown in London while the film was shot but the material provided again included a doctor – doctor Popov, who with humour and warmth encourage the covid patients at the ward to cheer up and decide to live on. The film is, as we have witnessed multiple times at the festival, crossing the line from reportage to become a documentary with great, caring protagonists who work under – an understatement – unbelievably hard conditions.

Going behind the news, the dry documentation facts, is "The Treasures of Crimea", a documentary thriller, simply. With footage from court rooms, with a focus on to whom belong the treasures that came from a Crimea that while the exhibition took place in the Netherlands was annexed by Russia in 2014. Where to send back the treasures? Dutch author Oeke Hoogendijk is fantastic to make a dramatic story out of the controverse – there are tears and laughter and wonderful protagonists.

It is not enough to have interesting and fantastic stories. You have to know how to tell them, how to use the cinematic tools at your disposal – the French call it to be an "auteur". We offer you 7 documentary authors; we hope that our excitement will be yours as well. Love is all there is!

Tue Steen Müller

Copenhagen

September 1, 2022

Baltic Sea Docs 26. edition Ukraine

Baltic Sea Docs 2022: Four films were screened made by Ukrainian directors and/or about Ukraine directly or indirectly. And at the pitching forum there were projects like "Little People" by Ivan Sautkin, "Iron Man (One Day I Wish to see You Happy)" by Maryna Nikolcheva and "The Blessed Ones" by Andrii Lysetskyi. One of the tutors was Roman Bondarchuk who was there with Darya Averchenko and their youngest child Luka, 18 months. So naturally there was a focus on the country at war, also "outside" the film event with a photo exhibition portraying Ukrainian refugees in Latvia; the mayor of Riga talked as did the Danish photographer of the portraits, the director of the Danish Cultural Institute in the Baltic countries with long speeches by the Latvian and Danish foreign ministers, all condemning the war - outside on the square facing the Russian embassy.

All three film projects named were awarded at the closing ceremony on a boat on the Daugava river, "Iron Man" through an invitation to the producer Oleksandra Kravchenko to come back to Baltic Sea Docs... She was there before with what became the amazing "Roses. Film Cabaret".

I got a copy of "Estonian Film", a special edition made for the Cannes Film Festival with a focus on Ukrainian Film, excellent with articles/interviews with filmmakers from the country including two important documentary voices, producer and industry head of DocuDays Darya Bassel and veteran Serhiy Bukovsky, whose last masterpiece on composer Silvestrov was reviewed on this site (http://www.filmkommentaren.dk/blog/blogpost/4714/)

A couple of quotes from the interviews made by Maria Ulfsak and film consultant at the Estonian Film Institute Filipp Kruusvall:

... While big businesses are leaving Russia, while governments stop buying Russian gas and coal, film festivals and other cultural events seem to be totally disconnected from reality. They say we are "above" this, culture is not politics. You know what I think about this? It's a luxury to have the possibility to take such a position. You don't have the luxury of being apolitical, or think that art and films exist in another universe, where we all can calmly reflect as friends on the genocide that is happening right now in front of our eyes. When it's about your life or death, you don't have this luxury. You know deep inside that culture is politics... (Darya Bassel)

... I guess documentaries will rocket. This genre already reacts quickly to current events in life. Also, in feature films, the theme of war becomes the main one. In many cases, this will be rather superficial, declarative. It will take decades for a deeper artistic understanding of this subject... We continue to meet with our students online. Many are filming what is happening right now. Hopefully, soon we will collect all the filmed material into one extensive war anthology... (Serhiy Bukovsky).

Slava Ukraini!

Baltic Sea Docs 26. edition "Mental Health...

... in the Times of War" was the title of a seminar at the Baltic Sea Docs. Including as moderator Rebecca Day, Ukrainian filmmakers Roman Bondarchuk, Ivan Sautkin, Anna Machukh, CEO of Odesa International Film Festival and Latvian producer and cinematographer Uldis Cekulis. The seminar took place at the Welton Riverside Hotel that faces the Daugava river with a fine look to the impressive very much discussed National Library, which I find a fascinating piece of architecture.

Roman Bondarchuk said that his problem was to re-find the level of sensitivity, when you and your family are trying to establish a peaceful life and when you can only plan two years ahead, being in exile.

Ivan Sautkin told that he during Maidan for the first time had seen a dead body, that he had sleepless nights, that he and his family - four kids - were trying to do their best in a situation, where there is no job and thus no money. (Anna Machukh presented results of a survey that documented that 44% of the Ukrainian film people were without job) he was referring to the Babylon'13 site where you can find lots of visual material from and about the war but also about Maidan and Ukrainian culture. Short documentaries.

Bondarchuk told about how the organisers of the DocuDays festival were in constant contact organising and informing, and about the war archive that is being built, including evidence of the war crimes committed and being committed by the Russians. "We try not to think about our mental health". My comment: It is indeed impressive how active the DocuDays people are in conveying information, trying also to convince festivals around the world that there are numerous competent film curators who can help putting together programs with Ukrainian documentaries.  

Uldis Cekulis showed clips from "Ukrainian Sheriffs" (director Bondarchuk) with my favourite protagonist, the mayor of the village where the film takes place... the mayor who was kidnapped and tortured by the enemy. He and his wife are now living in Latvia.

The seminar was organised by Lelda Ozola Creative Europe Latvia together with her colleagues from Lithuania and Estonia. Well done! 

Baltic Sea Docs 26. edition

Monday morning. Copenhagen ariport. Departure for Riga. Beautiful weather. Arrival one hour later at 9am, 20 minutes ahead of time. Hugging friends upon arrival at the hotel, shaking hands with newcomers. Lovely to see - after years - Ukrainian Darya Averchenko, her husband Roman Bondarchuk and their third child, wee Luca, and Scottish Emma Davie. Same procedure as previous years: group sessions where projects are talked about. After two years of corona the majority of filmmakers are present but there are also some who turn up on the screen taking part via zoom. It works all right. 18 projects, good quality, preparing for pitching thursday and friday.

And in the evening film screening at the K Suns. "Fragile Memory" by Ukrainian Ihor Ivanko. Beautiful, touching meeting between the director and his grandfather Leonid Burlaka, who suffers from dementia. And film history it is with clips from many of the works he filmed employed by the Odesa Film Studio. And a look into a family with a worried grandmother, who sees her husband fading away. The film is superb in creating a balance between the private and the public, waiving a flag for a sustainable protection of the film reels.

It is easy to see how good a cinematographer Burlaka was in his active life, it is even easier to see how fine an artist he was as photographer, pure poetry, pictures of the family and from the many travels he was allowed to go on by the Sovjet authorities.

A grand opening it was with a zoom link to the director interviewed by BSD manager Zane Balcus. 

What is a Documentary?

Life People Reality Subjectivity Perspective Rhythm Observation Truth Poetic World Imagination Discovery Unfiltered Raw Story Real Unique Relationship Experiences History Time Communication Values Changes Memory Passion Revelation Era Generation Commitment Achievement Care Psychology Environment Makedox

What are the three words that come to your mind when I say documentary? Was the question I put to the participants of the development workshop in Skopje, arranged by the brilliant team of Makedox led by Petra Seliskar.

Greek producer Mina Dreki put together a small essay from these words, that came out as a kind of a manifest - a gift to the festival from its participants:

"Documentary filmmaking is not about the truth, it is a poetic commitment and creation, unfiltered or not. Through our subjectivity and perspective, we observe, we experience, we communicate our reality. Through our imagination and passion, we discover the connection between time and changes, people and relationships, experiences, and history. We act as a bridge between raw stories and revelations, our job is to add rhythm and share it with the audience and our era, as if we share our own values. Our world, all generations need unique stories. Documentary filmmaking cares about life, people, and us."

From, tutoring together with Ieva Ubele, producer from Latvia and head of the Beldocs Industry.

Srdan Keca: Museum of The Revolution

To safeguard the truth about us, were the words architect Richter used, when he presented his plan for a Museum of the Revolution to be built in Belgrade in 1961… Director Srdan Keca takes this - with great propaganda archive material - as the starting point for his version of the truth as he sees it in a film that is quite as unconventional as Richter wanted the museum to be. Keca works with several layers surrounding three people, who live in and around the basement of the museum, that is what was left of a vision, conveyed in magic luminous sequences of light coming in to the place, light spots of hope, where Milica and her mother Vera stays together with the old woman Mara, who has no contact to her daughter, who she “gave away” to the social system. In the darkness of poverty they are. Kecha stresses this with compassion, when his camera caresses them, often by taking away the sound staying long on their faces. 

The love relationship between Milica and her mother is beautiful, their life is a constant struggle to survive as polishers of car windows to earn some money to send to the father, who is in prison. The architectural point of view stays in the picture: Modern conventional ugly buildings are constructed now in Belgrade along the river of Sava. Keca paints with his camera in a film that asks the question: Is this what we want to safeguard?

Serbia, Croatia, Czech Republic, 2021, 91 mins.

Mijke de Jong: Along the Way

Zahra and Fatima are twins and the protagonists of the Dutch film that was shown last night at the one year old Cineplex that is now the main screening venue for the Sarajevo Film Festival. The film’s title is “Along the Way” and it was shown as part of the Dealing With the Past program. I had the pleasure of introducing the film and moderate the discussion with the assistant director Natascha Erfanipour. An easy job as the young Dutch woman with Iranian roots spoke lively about how the film came to become the drama it is, a drama yes, but with so much authenticity that I took for a documentary the first time I saw it. But the twins are acting and they are acting so well – but it took time to get to this, explained Erfanipour with a smile. But all – almost all – is based on their own stories, told to the film team, made into a precise script to be followed. In some scenes they had to be angry with each other, that was difficult for them…

The story is one of those, we have met so many times in these hard times, a refugee story: the twins buy themselves way to Istanbul, get separated from mother and siblings, work to save money for the ocean trip from Turkey to Lesbos, they succeed, they get to the camp everyone knows, Moria, and they reach Athens to have a very emotional meeting with the mother and the daughter. In Istanbul they meet Rahim, a young man, who is a smuggler and for whom Zahra works to collect money to cross the EU…

There are more to be experienced, some personal statements from refugees not to be revealed here but I hope you get the chance to watch this fine film “based on a true story” with Zahra and Fatima, who in real life are now waiting for getting asylum in Germany and at a longer perspective to be filmmakers. Wish them all the best!

The Netherlands, 2021, 80 mins. 

Anna Shisova: The New Greatness Case

One of my Russian friends wrote this to me not long ago: “A few days ago…Two women and their five children aged 7 to 11 were detained at the Ukrainian Embassy in Moscow yesterday. The children drew a poster “No War” and went with it. All of them were detained by the police. At first they were kept in a paddy wagon and then they were brought to the Presnenskoye police department. They were going to leave everyone at the station but then children and their mothers were released. Now parents are waiting for a court, fines and are afraid of deprivation of parental rights, they are looking for a human rights lawyer…”.

Surprised? No, I guess not, if you follow the reports coming from Russia. I used to go to Russia for film events and I know a lot of filmmakers, friends with whom I have talked about Life that passes while you are not busy doing something else than making films. Always being careful not to get into trouble when demonstrations take place. As Anna Shisova, the director of “The New Greatness Case” chosen for this Human Rights Day said in an interview: “For 10 or 20 years, the legal system in Russia has drifted in a totalitarian direction. We have many new laws. One of those laws says that if you say something bad against authority, you can be put in jail. Another law punishes extremist organizations, which means you are guilty if you say something against authority within a group.”

Words I have heard again and again when visiting St. Petersburg or Moscow. Often said with a twist of irony making fun of the regime and its leaders.

After February 24 2022 I have not travelled to Russia – and many filmmakers have left the country. The brutality has grown, demonstrators are knocked down and imprisoned. And the brutality in the war against Ukraine is indescribable. There is no need for irony – there is a need for constant good journalism AND documentaries like “The New Greatness Case”.

The film: Anya Pavlikova. 17 years old. She is in a court room behind the terrible glass room, we know so well from films about and news from Russia. Her parents sit in front of the glass room. The camera catches the nervous face of Anya , she seems to be on the edge of a breakdown. Fear! A judge enters the room and reads out the verdict: Anya is sentenced to 3 years of prison for her participation in a group of youngsters called “The New Greatness”… The beginning of a superb film.

Anna Shisova’s documentary is what a documentary should be: It documents and it interprets, it asks for reflection, it has a strong emotional impact on the audience. It tells the story of youngsters, who were chatting on the internet discussing all kind of matters including social and political. And it stays with the parents and makes a gripping portrait of the mother.

We know all that, what we did not know, at least that goes for me, is the skills with which the regime works with informers, who - as the film shows so well – infiltrated the youngsters, invited them to have their own “office” and pushed them to go for demonstrations with leaflets. Until they were arrested for wanting to go against and overthrow the government etc. Anya was one of them caught by the surveillance cameras set up by the secret service people. In a room that comes back again and again with the main informer in the picture. Absurd!

Contrary to many other films on opposition from Russia, like the ones on Navalny, Boris Nemtsov, Anna Politkovskaya, “The New Greatness Case” goes with Anya to her family, especially to her mother who turns fear into a hunger strike and herself into one of the many political activists, we hear too little about.

The film has been characterized as “a chilling portrait of the intensified crackdown on dissent and free expression in Putin’s Russia” (Sheffield DocFest). True!

Below is the link to the UN declaration of Human Rights.

Read the paragraphs and tick the ones you find relevant for a discussion after the film screening. Quite a lot I would say!

 https://www.ohchr.org/en/human-rights/universal-declaration/translations/english

Sarajevo Film Festival/ 2

It was presentation day for the four stories at the TSM, True Stories Market. It took place at the Atrium of Hotel Europe; four people, two women, two men on stage and a full house of interested people, among them film producers and directors, who might be interested to make the stories into films or tv programmes.

Moderator was film director and journalist Croatian Robert Zuber, who had a fine way of connecting the four stories and asked the right questions at the right moment.

First in line was Enes Hodzic, journalist from BIRN (Balkan Investigative Reporting Network). Working title for the story “Forbidden Monument” referring to the fact that the local authorities do not want a memorial to be raised in the city of Prijedor, where 102 children were killed during the war in the beginning of the 90’es. Hodzic showed a very emotional interview clip with Ešef Dzananovic, who survived three concentration camps to know afterwards that two sons, 4- and 9-year-old, his sister, 17, his wife and his mother had all been killed. 30 years later he is still searching for their remains – the neighbours witnessed what happened, he says, but do not want to tell anything… Unbearable!

Also from BIRN was Aida Trepanic, whose story also is from Prijedor in the North East of Bosnia, in Bijeljina where notorious Akran and his Serbian Volunteer Guard killed, among others the husband of the woman, who witnessed the murders taking place – also caught by the camera of the photographer Ron Haviv. The woman does not want to be seen, she is afraid of the consequences her children could meet visiting the street, that now bears the name Street of Serbian Voluntary Guard!!! With a manipulated voice she is telling her story. Amazing and touching.

Serbian Jovana Blanusa from a company called Next Game in Belgrade told the fascinating story about Marino Zurli, a journalist, filmmaker, writer, who after the Second WW committed his working life to bring families together, who had been split because of the war. He conveyed his discoveries through the paper Arena with photos and texts, but he also made films from his discoveries – as the company of Jovana did, one was shown as part of the presentation. “The Hero from Arena” is the working title of a film to be about “a discreet hero of great deeds”.

Finally filmmaker Mladen Ivanovic from Montenegro, studying at the Zagreb film academy, showed a 7 minutes long clip from a film he has almost finished but wants to extend to a feature or eventually use as a pilot for a series about pits in former Yugoslavia. Pits which are difficult to recognize as nature has done “its job”, covering the killing fields, the concentration camps where – in this story – the Ustasha fascists came to pick up the people to bring them to a place to be executed. Ivanovic is definitely a talented filmmaker, the film he showed, from which the 7 minutes were taken could go to festivals when finished and from that he can make a longer film than this “Depths of Velebit”.

Tough stories, yes, but should be told as many have said after the presentation as the right-wing politicians in this region and elsewhere want to rewrite history and erase stories like these from the collective memory. 

Sarajevo Film Festival/1

After two years I feel privileged to be back to a festival that has given me so many fine moments. The atmosphere in the city of course, a city that celebrates cinema with its many genres, a festival that greets talents, have loads of workshops, gives out awards to well known figures in world cinema, this year from Ari Folman who is here with his new film on Anne Frank to Danish Mads Mikkelsen, who is also on house walls with his saying that a Danish beer is “probably the best in the world” – I am not so sure!

The first days for me have been occupied by being part of a small “Dealing With the Past” tutor team that works with four projects, which are to be presented to an audience today, an audience of filmmakers, who hopefully are seduced by the power of the stories pitched in words and images on the small stage in Hotel Europe. Filmmaker and journalist Robert Zuber will be leading the pitch, online from den Haag the amazing editor Natasa Damnjanovic has put the visuals together, online from Paris is film director Mila Turajlic and I have mainly given advice on how to structure the presentation. “Dealing With the Past” this year have as contributors filmmaker Mladen Ivanovic, film producer Jovana Blanuša, and two journalists from BIRN Aida Trepanic and Enes Hodzic. BIRN stands for Balkan Investigative Reporting Network. Will get back to you after the presentation with info on the content of the four stories presented. For me, the only one in the team who does not speak the language, these sessions have introduced me to war history through personal stories – information and emotion like documentaries should give.

The “Dealing With the Part” also includes film screenings. I will be moderating a couple of them, new films, high quality. More will follow.

Niewiera & Rosolowski: The Hamlet Syndrome

… first names Elwira and Piotr, Polish directors, awarded for previous works “The Domino Effect” and “The Prince and the Dybbuk”, both praised on this site for their originality and professional skills. The same goes for this new film that demonstrates how literature, theatre and cinema can be welded together to create a tension that for this viewer has been sitting in mind and stomach for days the two times I have watched it on my MacBook Pro – the third time will be in a cinema. A promise to the filmmakers.

Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, I asked the 11 year old grandchild this morning if he had heard about him. Indeed he had, “it is him with “to be or not to be”, the everlasting sentence, that is the core of the theatre play five Ukrainians perform with Roza Sarkisian, theatre director as the observant and often provoking master on the stage – together with the film directors who came with the script after having casted the protagonists.

One by one, following their monologue or dialogue rehearsals on stage, the film takes the viewer out in “the reality”. Katya who is meeting witnesses to document the war in the country – she was in Maidan and she was volunteering in the horrors in the Eastern part of the country. She sits with a microphone in a quiet garden with a woman, who tells how she was tortured by the occupiers. In a very emotional scene with Katya and her mother the latter expresses her anxiety not knowing what Katya was doing as a soldier.

These combined scenes are extraordinary: Slawik and his father, on stage in a phone call, where Roman, actor, “plays” his father, followed by Slawik meeting his father playing table tennis and having their conversation. ”You took ten years of my life”, the father says. And Rodion who has suffered because of his sexuality – with his mother in rainy weather who talks about how difficult it has been for her to accept that his son is “different”. Rodion performs a magnificent monologue on stage. “To be a LGBT in Donetsk”, where he comes from.

Why am I Hamlet is a question the five have a quick answer to. Oksana, feminist, who plays a central role in the last scene of the theatre play. No spoiling. 

The five have all been going through therapy. A quote from an interview with Elwira Niewiera in Business Doc Europe June 2022: “All five characters underwent therapy after their experiences of war, which was a core consideration in their participation both within the stage play and the film. “We made the decision that they are the right protagonists to go through this process…because all of them made therapy before. This was very important for us,” says co-director Elwira Niewiera, adding how once the actors immersed themselves into the play, it then became “an artistic process.”

Yes, the reason for the film to be so strong, so intense, so extraordinary in conveying the traumas, is that the filmmakers and their protagonists have made an artistic interpretation, what they have experienced before February 24 this year – the play was performed October 2020.

And after February 24, after the brutal invasion from the Russian barbarians… reading the text at the end credits, unbearable at the same time as you more than respect their courage: Katya, Slawik and Roman are in the army, Rodion sews military uniforms in Lviv, Oksana acts at a theatre in Poland and is involved in humanitarian aid.

Poland/Germany, 2022, 85 mins.

Docu Talents from the East 2022

Baltic Sea Docs 22

The projects to be presented in the yearly documentary gathering, number 26, since 2005 held in Riga Latvia, have been selected with Latvian Zane Balcus as the head of the Forum, she rightfully describes in the following way:

“This international event for professional documentary filmmakers is the only one of its kind in the Baltics and is held in high regard throughout Eastern Europe. Every year, the BSD gathers over 100 professional filmmakers from the Baltic Sea region, as well as from Eastern and Central Europe. Participating in the forum is an invaluable way for filmmakers to find funding for the production of their projects and to further ensure that their films reach a wide audience across Europe.

The forum is held in English and participation is free of charge.

In addition to the public pitching session, the forum holds preparatory workshop and seminars that is open to not just BSD participants, but also to students and representatives of the Latvian film scene. Apart from the professional activities, a programme of the highest quality documentaries is offered to the general public in Riga and the largest Latvian cities.”

The latter – the film program – has not been published yet, the same goes for the so-called decision makers BUT 18 projects from Lithuania (2), Estonia (2), Georgia (3), Latvia (3), Finland (1), Poland (3), Germany (1) and Ukraine (3). Projects from Russia and Belarus have not been invited.

For the workshops leading to the pitching session the Baltic Sea Docs have invited the following to be tutors: 

Roman Bondarchuk | film director, cinematographer | Ukraine
Emma Davie | film director | Scotland
Phil Jandaly | film editor | Sweden
Tue Steen Müller | documentary consultant | Denmark
Mikael Opstrup | documentary developer | Denmark
Laila Pakalniņa | film director, producer | Latvia
Dagne Vildžunaite | film producer | Lithuania

Brief annotations to the selected projects you can find here:

https://dokforums.gov.lv/industry/selected-projects-2022/

Turkan Huseynova: Papanin

Turkan Huseynova is a young filmmaker from Baku. Last year she took part in the Jihlava FF with her documentary “Papanin”,

Which appeared in the “Joyful Section”. Well placed even if the film refers to a district in Baku that is to be demolished. Huseynova visited with her camera, made the film in beautiful black and white, you sense that she is a photographer, who knows how to compose images in a fine framing. Another proof of quality is that she as a true documentarian can get close to people, gain their trust and have them talk. The 19 minutes include a love story told by an old man, who lost his wife. Beautiful.

Huseynova is now participating in the Mentoring Program of CinédocTbilisi.

Proud to be her mentor, new film will come from her. As with "Papanin" with love as a central theme.

Azerbaijan, 2021, 19 mins.

Sarajevo FF Documentary Competition

1. DIARY OF A BRIDE OF CHRIST / TSCHODENNYK NARECHENOI CHRISTA, Marta Smerechynska (Ukraine, 2021, 90 min.) – World premiere

2. LIGHTS OF SARAJEVO / SVJETLA SARAJEVA, Srđan Perkić (Bosnia and Herzegovina, 2022, 68 min.) – World premiere

3. LITURGY OF ANTI-TANK OBSTACLES, Dmytro Sukholytkyy-Sobchuk (Ukraine, USA, 2022, 12 min.) – World premiere

4. PAYING A VISIT TO FORTUNA / FORTUNA VENDÉGEI, Mátyás Kálmán (Hungary, Croatia, 2022, 74 min.) – World premiere

5. SHADOWED BY THE PLANE TREE / ÇINAR AĞACININ KÖLGƏSINDƏ, Aynur Elgunesh (Azerbaijan, 2022, 18 min.) – World premiere

6. THE CHALICE. OF SONS AND DAUGHTERS / O TAHTAI. SAVENDAR TAI SEIANDAR, Cătălina Tesăr, Dana Bunescu (Romania, 2022, 83 min.) – World premiere

7. THE FILM FACTORY / TVORNICA FILMOVA, Silvestar Kolbas (Croatia, 2022, 15 min.) – World premiere

8. TOO CLOSE, Botond Püsök (Romania, Hungary, 2022, 85 min.) – World premiere

9. BABAJANJA, Ante Zlatko Stolica (Croatia, 2022, 14 min.) – International premiere

10. RETREAT, Anabela Angelovska (North Macedonia, Germany, 2022, 30 min.) – International premiere

11. WE, ... COMPOSITION / WIR, ... KOMPOSITION, Visar Jusufi (Kosovo, Germany, 2022, 15 min.) – International premiere

12. BIGGER THAN TRAUMA / VEĆE OD TRAUME, Vedrana Pribačić (Croatia, 2022, 91 min.) – European premiere

13. ANOTHER SPRING / JOŠ JEDNO PROLEĆE, Mladen Kovačević (Serbia, France, Qatar, 2022, 90 min.) – Regional premiere

14. A PROVINCIAL HOSPITAL / EDNA PROVINTSIALNA BOLNITSA, Ilian Metev, Ivan Chertov, Zlatina Teneva (Bulgaria, Germany, 2022, 107 min.) – Regional premiere

15. ATONAL GLOW / ATONALURI GABRZKINEBA, Alexander Koridze (Georgia, 2022, 67 min.) – Regional premiere

16. BEAUTY OF THE BEAST, Anna Eszter Nemes (Hungary, Serbia, 2022, 47 min.) – Regional premiere

17. FRAGILE MEMORY, Igor Ivanjko (Ukraine, 2022, 85 min.) – Regional premiere

18. LIVING TOGETHER / ZUSAMMENLEBEN, Thomas Fürhapter (Austria, 2022, 90 min.) – Regional premiere

19. MICROBIOME, Stavros Petropoulos (Greece, 2021, 27 min.) – Regional premiere

20. NO PLACE FOR YOU IN OUR TOWN / NIAMASH MIASTO V NASHIA GRAD, Nikolay Stefanov (Bulgaria, 2022, 81 min.) – Regional premiere

21. RIBS / REBRA, Farah Hasanbegović (Bosnia and Herzegovina, Hungary, Belgium, Portugal, 2022, 9 min.) – Regional premiere

22. MUSEUM OF THE REVOLUTION / MUZEJ REVOLUCIJE, Srđan Keča (Serbia, Croatia, Czech Republic, 2021, 91 min.) - B&H premiere

Alexandru Solomon: Cold Waves

The Romanian director – and cinematographer – and producer - and festival organizer of One World Romania – Alexandru Solomon is being celebrated at the Transilvania International Film Festival in Cluj that runs now and until the 26^th of June. I discovered that through FB where a fascinating clip is shown of his 2007 masterpiece “Cold Waves”, one of the three films at the festival. I know how good a filmmaker Solomon is but had forgotten if I had seen this cold war film. Luckily it is available on https://dafilms.com, the excellent platform for quality documentary films, praised on this site again and again.

155 minutes, divided into three parts that take you to Radio Free Europe’s fantastic achievement bringing radio broadcasts to Romanians, who were fed with the daily propaganda of Ceausescu. The RFE people were in constant danger of being caught and brought to silence by the regime’s Securitate. RFE operated from abroad – Germany and Czech Republic – and Solomon includes the protagonists in his film, both those who were outside and those who stayed in the country, and those who remember what RFE meant to them. Here is the synopsis from DocAlliance site:

”During the 80’s, Radio Free Europe was the secret relief and confidant of its Romanian listeners. The Radio was Ceausescu’s most important enemy; he even hired Carlos the Jackal to close it down. All the protagonists of this story confront themselves once more in COLD WAVES: speakers of the radio, along with terrorists, listeners as well as party and Securitate officials, Romanians, Germans, Americans and French alltogether.”

“…The world has changed, there are different wars now. But if you listen to the voices, you may get a better picture.

The film played for 12 weeks in Romanian theatres. It deals with the love and hate story between Radio Free Europe, the Romanian audiences and the communist regime.”

The film? Totally fresh, full of fine cinematic solutions, I was never bored, I met some charismatic people, who fought for freedom from communism, but I also met a man who worked for Securitate and denies that the service did anything wrong and had nothing to do with the deaths of three of the RFE leaders. He is now (in 2007) in the Romanian parliament! In other words: Great film!

Romania, 155 mins., 2007 

DOK Leipzig News

DOK Leipzig will host its 65th edition in local cinemas and venues once again — a decision that signals the festival’s continued commitment to bringing back cinema culture and shared festival experiences.

From 17 to 23 October, DOK Leipzig will screen new documentary and animated films from around the world, along with creative XR works and thematic film programmes. The team looks forward to welcoming numerous international filmmakers and guests to Leipzig, where works will be explored with audiences at film talks and master classes. Turning the focus back to on-site events is the festival’s response to the need for direct exchanges among visitors and industry professionals — which were missing in the last two years due to pandemic adjustments.

However, some of the online features will continue in a reduced format, including recorded film talks. Selected films will again be available on demand throughout Germany via "DOK Stream" following the festival, with this year’s lineup focusing on the award winners.

DOK Industry is also prioritising a return to physical attendance at events for film professionals. Some areas will still be accessible online, such as livestreams of project presentations and talks, along with two days of post-festival digital networking for participants.

As in previous years, this year's festival poster design was created by Leipzig graphic artist Stefan Ibrahim. It features the key to an old East German-style lock, which many audience members may still recognise. Further key imagery will be sprinkled throughout the festival’s in-person and online offerings for audiences to discover.

“We deliberately allowed for many interpretations with our design," festival director Christoph Terhechte says. "The films and works in our programme are united by their curiosity about the world. They open up new perspectives and previously unknown worlds, so to speak. But the key is also always a symbol of home — people who have to leave their homes often keep their apartment key as a symbol of connection to their home, their origins and past. As a festival with an East German history, we opted for a key style from the German Democratic Republic."

A number of festival themes have already been selected. DOK Leipzig will emphasise its long-standing connection to Eastern Europe with a programme of current feature-length films that offer insights into life in the region’s countries. The festival will also increase support for networking among documentary and animation filmmakers through new formats. Additionally, four of the programmes will explore the different artistic styles of animated film.

This year’s Retrospective will focus on documentary works by female filmmakers from the GDR. The Homage is dedicated to renowned Serbian documentary filmmaker Mila Turajlić, whose work explores the historical significance of moving images. Two other programmes feature films that address the climate crisis, resource scarcity and environmental activism.

From today through 15 July, festival fans can secure Early Dove accreditation at a discounted rate for access to film screenings, talks with inspiring guests and industry events.

Free tickets for film screenings are available to anyone who takes part in DOK Leipzig's audience survey. The festival wants to get to know viewers better by gathering feedback from past and future visitors. The English version of the survey is available from 20 June via dok-leipzig.de.

Films and XR works can still be submitted until 1 July. The deadline for the DOK Co-Pro Market is 21 July.

AWARDS of the 62st Krakow Film Festival

DRAGON OF DRAGONS AWARD for the contribution into development of the world animated film

JARMO JÄÄSKELÄINEN (Finland)

KFF RECOMMENDATION to the European Film Award in a documentary category 

BOYLESQUE, dir. Bogna Kowalczyk (Poland)

INTERNATIONAL DOCUMENTARY COMPETITION 

Having watched all the competitive films the International Documentary Jury of the 62st Krakow Film Festival consisting of: Till Brockmann – chairman (Switzerland), Christine Camdessus (France), Ohad Milstein (Israel), Petrula Veljanovska (North Macedonia), Agnieszka Zwiefka (Poland) has decided to award the following prizes:

THE GOLDEN HORN for the director of the best film – Denis Dobrovoda for The Cathedral (Slovakia)

THE SILVER HORN for the director of the film with high artistic values – Shaunak Sen for All That Breathes (USA, United Kingdom, India)

THE SILVER HORN for the director of the film on social issues – Laura Sistero for Tolyatti Adrift (Spain)

SPECIAL MENTION for The Hamlet Syndrome directed by Elwira Niewiera and Piotr Rosołowski (Poland, Germany)

SPECIAL MENTION for Fragile Memory directed by Igor Ivanko (Ukraine, Slovakia)

The FIPRESCI (International Federation of Film Critics) Jury consisting of: Nino Kovačić (Croatia),  Yun-Hua Chen (Taiwan), Giuseppe Sedia (Italy) has decided to award the International Film Critics Prize to Hirotoshi Takeoka  for Adamiani (Japan, The Netherlands)

INTERNATIONAL SHORT FILM COMPETITION

Having watched all the competition films, the International Short Film Jury consisting of: Juliusz Machulski – chairman (Poland), Olga Lucovnicova (Moldova), Andrea Martignoni (Italy), Anita Reher (Denmark) and Amer Salmeen Al Murry (United Arab Emirates), has decided to award the following prizes:

GOLDEN DRAGON for the director of the best film – Jay Rosenblatt for How Do You Measure A Year? (USA)

SILVER DRAGON for the director of the best documentary film – Raúl de la Fuente Calle and Amaia Ramirez for Maldita. A Love Song to Sarajevo (Spain)

SPECIAL MENTION for Hardcore directed by Adán Aliaga (Spain)

SILVER DRAGON for the director of the best animated film – Diana Cam Van Nguyen for Love, Dad (Czech Republic, Slovakia)

SPECIAL MENTION for A Goat’s Spell directed by Gerhard Funk (Germany)

SILVER DRAGON for the director of the best short fiction film – Karolina Porcari for Victoria (Poland)

SPECIAL MENTION for The Swarmers directed by Alison Kuhn (Germany)

Jury Award for the Best European Film (Krakow Candidate to the European Film Award 2022 in the short film category) – Diana Cam Van Nguyen for Love, Dad (Czech Republic, Slovakia)

The International Federation of Film Societies (FICC) Jury consisting of: Eugene Dugan-Brause (United Kingdom), Ritesh Basak (Indie), Karolina Nowacka (Polska) has decided to grant the Don Quixote Award to the film Parizad directed by Mehdi Imani Shahmiri (Iran) and the Special Mention to the film: Love, Dad directed by Diana Cam Van Nguyen (Czech Republic, Slovakia)

INTERNATIONAL DOCFILMMUSIC COMPETITION

Having watched all the competition films, the International DocFilmMusic Competition Jury consisting of: Włodek Pawlik – chairman (Polska), Roman Gutek (Polska) and Robert Kirchhoff (Slovakia) has decided to award the following prizes:

GOLDEN HEYNAL for the director of the best film – Lucie Králová for Kapr Code (Czech Republic, Slovakia)

SPECIAL MENTION for Cesária Évora directed by Ana Sofia Fonseca (Portugal)

NATIONAL COMPETITION

Having watched all the competition films, the National Competition Jury consisting of: Piotr Stasik – chairman, Daria Kopiec, Kuba Mikurda, Anna Sienkiewicz-Rogowska, Małgorzata Szyła has decided to award the following prizes:

GOLDEN HOBBY-HORSE for the director of the best film funded by the President of the Polish Filmmakers Association – Elwira Niewiera and Piotr Rosołowski for The Hamlet Syndrome (Poland, Germany)

SILVER HOBBY-HORSE for the director of the best documentary film over 30 minutes – Bogna Kowalczyk for Boylesque (Poland)

SILVER HOBBY-HORSE for the director of the best documentary film under 30 minutes – Marcin Lesisz for The Rocking Horses (Poland)

SILVER HOBBY-HORSE for the director of the best animated film – Marta Pajek for Impossible Figures and Other Stories I (Poland, Canada)

SILVER HOBBY-HORSE for the director of the best short fiction film – Michał Toczek for A Dead Marriage(Poland)

The Award of the President of the Polish Filmmakers Association for the best film editing – Milenia Fiedlerfor The Voice (Poland)

Maciej Szumowski Award for remarkable social awareness patronized by ZAIKS– Bartłomiej Żmuda for God and Lunaparks’ Warriors (Poland)

The Award for the best short and documentary films producer in Poland funded by the Polish Producers Alliance (KIPA) and FDR Studio –Magdalena Kamińska and Agata Szymańska (Balapolis) for the film The Hamlet Syndrome (Poland, Germany)

Best Cinematography Award under the patronage of The Polish Society of Cinematographers funded by Black Photon – Wojciech Staroń for the film The Voice (Poland)

THE AUDIENCE AWARD

Boylesque directed by Bogna Kowalczyk (Poland)

Pere Puigbert: El Vent Que Ens Mou

The google translate of the Catalan title goes like this: “The Wind that Moves Us” for the film, that won the first prize in the DocsBarcelona Latitud category. And I don’t hesitate to say that this was so well deserved, actually I think it is the best film I saw at DocsBarcelona 2022, the 25^thedition. Far from the journalistic tradition of Catalan documentary, much closer to the Baltic tradition of poetic documentary that I have praised so many times on this site: Few words, images that carry the film, slow film, excellent camera work, a tribute to the world we live in, to the small things in daily life that we often forget about, to the connection between man and nature, the wind that moves us. Filmed in the Empordá region in Catalonia, the Girona area.

Landscapes manipulated by the wind, trees, sheep, apple orchards. An old woman who cries when she thinks about her beloved, late husband, she is now alone, lonely?; no she has her children and grandchildren, and the small blond boy plays a role in her life. “Get the broom”, she says, and he does and he also tries to help her when she frees the walnuts from the shells with a hammer. Otherwise he tumbles around being observed by the camera of his father, director and cameraman, who makes films (from his website) “inspired by nature”. So often his images makes me think of paintings, nature morte or surrealistic landscapes à lá Yves Tanguy or Salvador Dali.

What is a story, it is often discussed at pitching sessions. Here “a pregnant woman eating an apple in the shade of a tree” is a story in all its calmness and insisting on the image. The action? The woman caresses her stomach and it is beautiful because the director-cameraman has put the camera in the right caressing place. The film is full of sequences like this. It is Cinema.

Catalonia, 78 mins., 2021

DocsBarcelona – Films

There is quite a distance from “The Territory” by Alex Pritz to “Maija Isola” by Leena Kilpeläinen. Both are films that have seen selected for the Official Panorama competition program of this year’s DocsBarcelona. “The Territory” is a product made according to the standards of National Geographic, “Maija Isola” is a classic creative documentary on the life of the Finnish artist, whose name is connected to the world famous brand of Marimekko. “The Territory” comes with awards from the Sundance festival, “Maija Isola” has been to design and architecture festivals. “The Territory” is full of music and sound effects, no second you are left alone as a viewer, the sound tells you what to think and feel of the important topic: the Amazon being deforested and the fight to survive for the Indigenous Uru-eu-wau-wau people of Brazil. For me a complete over-kill sound-wise, whereas the makers of “Maija Isola” chose to ask the brilliant composer Finnish Sanna Salmenkallio to guide us through the fascinating life of Maija Isola. 

To be honest I had never heard of Maija Isola before so I thought, why the film had been chosen. Watching yesterday, the answer was given. What a life (1927-2001) she had as an artist, a traveller, many men, constantly in the process of creating, with the connection to Marimekko as the backbone. She tells the story herself via her diaries and via her daughter, who lives in a house full of the mother’s creations, it’s a chronologically told adventurous film with lovely archive footage from the places, she went to, Paris being number one, but also Algeria, New York and sometimes back to – mostly – snowy Finland. It is simply a pleasure to be with clever, reflective Maija Isola in her search for what is the meaning of it all. And despite the many love stories her happy moments being alone. It’s a film with many layers and a huge respect for the audience. "Master of Colour and Form" is the subtitles to the film, indeed, we see that!

Diversity has always been what the DocsBarcelona festival has been seeking, I can say so having been involved in the selection until this year. I have written about the fine “Fire of Love”, I liked “Dreaming Walls” about Chelsea Hotel in NY, there were great moments in the French “Penelope My Love” on autistic Penelope and her mother, the director of the film, “A Thousand Fires”, “President” and “Nelly and Nadine” are masterpieces written about on this site before, the same goes for “Myanmar Diaries”, whereas “Aya” is too much staged and made up to be at a documentary film festival.

There are still some films to be seen and some I have forgotten about. That’s how it is at a festival. Awards will be announced tomorrow.

Sara Dosa: Fire of Love

Katia and Maurice. Volcanologists. Scientists and Filmmakers. A couple. Married in 1970. Decided not to have children. That would have prevented them to do their work or with a better phrase: to Live their Passion. The dangerous passion that killed them. A quote from Wikipedia:

”In June 1991, while filming eruptions at Mount Unzen in Japan, they were caught in a pyroclastic flow, which unexpectedly swept out of the channel that previous smaller flows had been following and onto the ridge they were standing on. They were killed instantly along with 41 other people…”

Click above and you will know what a pyroclastic flow is.

Which you actually don’t need to know, it’s enough to watch the unique footage they shot during their work, Katia getting closer and closer to the lava, challenging nature, taking photographs, documenting – with Maurice filming. When they were not rushing from one volcano to the next, they wrote books and made films from their 16mm footage. To earn their living.

I have been to 23 eruptions, Maurice says, so no problem if I die tomorrow…They lived to be 49 and 50. But they live on thanks to this fascinating love story narrated by American Miranda July, whose mesmerizing voice puts it all together information-wise and creates atmosphere.

Love story – the film also includes lovely, charming tv interview clips where the flirt is obvious. He, the performer, she always smiling, what a charisma. Away from the volcanos there was burning love. 

Canada, USA, 2021, 93 mins.

DocFests in Belgrade and Warsaw

Beldocs in Belgrade started two days ago, Millenium Docs Against Gravity takes off today. The latter in 8 cities and with an online version from May 24.

Both have industry sections and both have a focus on Ukraine. In Belgrade it makes me happy to see that “Outside” by Olha Zhurba closes the festival – and that excellent “Museum of Revolution” by Srđan Keča was the opening film. Both documentaries have been reviewed on this site. In Warsaw is shown “House of Splinters” shot in Ukraine by Simon Lereng Wilmont and co-produced by Ukrainian company Moon Man.

High quality program at both festivals – Let me highlight (Warsaw) “Young Plato” from Ireland by Neasa Ni Chianáin and Declan McGrath as well as the lovely “Skál” by Cecilie Debell and Maria Tórgard, a love story from Faroe Islands. In Belgrade you can only welcome a retrospective of films by Želimir Žilnik and the great documentary by Mantas Kvedaravičius“Mariupolis” (PHOTO on FB link) from 2016. (I just read that the film material Mantas was shooting in Mariupolis has been edited and will be shown in Cannes.) In memoriam of a fine filmmaker murdered by the Russians in the war.

… and then Belgrade has a Danish focus without any actual reason but thanks for that and for showing Jørgen Leth’s classic “The Perfect Human” and “The Five Obstacles”, made together with Lars von Trier. More about Beldocs here:

https://www.beldocs.rs/en/films/

Back to Warsaw where the festival runs all year round as it says: with an online platform, with distribution in cinemas and a considerable number of audience. To quote the site of the festival:

The cinema section, taking place in seven cities (for the tenth time in Wrocław!), attracted 65 295 attendees. Viewership numbers of the online section add up to 40 418 e-tickets. Assuming that most people don’t watch movies alone, our online audience must have been larger: international festivals multiply online viewership numbers by 1.7. Therefore, our online edition reached a total of 68 711 people. The total number of attendees of the 18^th edition of our festival, which ended last Sunday, is 134 006.

Take a look at the program:

https://mdag.pl/19/en/warszawa/sections

Marusya Syroechkovskaya: How to Save a Dead Friend

Filmed by Kimi Morev and Marusya Syroechkovskaya 

Edited by Qutaiba Barhamji

Sweden, Norway, France, Germany, 103 mins., 2022

I have previously posted a beautiful text by Marusya - http://www.filmkommentaren.dk/blog/blogpost/5021/

where she writes about her film. 

I write this using her first name. I met her in Moscow in 2019, and in Riga, and in Prague talking about/pitching her film that I am totally in love with and have seen a couple of times. Together with producer Ksenia Gapchenko.

The title could also have been “Marusya and Kimi” putting the focus on what it is, a love story, with a start, a middle and an end – told in a film language that is touching, that is sweet and funny – and sad as it evolves, with the self-destruction of Kimi, who dives more and more into using hard drugs and “looks at the camera and not at me” as Marusya says. A tragic love story, yes, but full of warm scenes with the two, scenes you can only characterize as poetic.

Poetic: When I met Marusya in Moscow, she tried to explain – in vain – the system where you can create music by touching the image. I still don’t understand it but the film shows me, when Marusya’s fingers on a photography go from the head of Kimi to his arms and hands, to his legs and feet. Amazing!

Not to forget the many faces of Marusya being filmed by Kimi, caressing her, teasing her saying that he wants close-ups of her pimples, or caught when she is posing for the camera or dancing as if she was Anna Karina in a Godard film.

The music plays an important role in the film. Nirvana, Kurt Cobain – it’s not my generation’s music, I am older, much older, from the generation of “happiness is a warm gun in hand” as Lennon sang. 

As the film progresses Marusya, they were married and divorced, continues to film Kimi, she becomes more and more one who documents, what happens to him, who “has been in and out of a mental hospital five times in two years”.

It’s not easy for her so she also turns her camera, her shield, towards Andryusha, the 18 year older brother of Kimi, a lost soul, who reflects on how much better and easier it is to die from an overdosis…and she follows a couple of times their strong mother introduced up-front in the film at the funeral of Kimi: He had so much pain, Marusya, she says.

The love story is told voice-off by Marusya, the right solution, with breaks of documentary archive material from riots in the streets where demonstrations are being “handled” with brutality – and with clips from new year speeches of the President of Russia.

That is not so important for me, when I think about the film I return to the sequences of love and hope and passion of the two. How – funny and sad – how Marusya sees how their life could have been, followed by the surrealistic floating ending of the high-rise buildings, where they were together. Superb, simply.

I knew in beforehand how good an editor Qutaiba Barhamjiis is – what he has done here is extraordinary. There is so much tense energy in all the scenes. He lives in France, Marusya and Ksenia have left Russia, wish them all the best whereever they are.

Sidabrinė gervė 2022

The national award ceremony in Lithuania takes place 6^th of June. With many categories and a lot of nominations attached. I take a look at the ones for Best Documentary that has a very strong line-up. 

I had seen four of the five but got a link to the fifth Mončys. Žemaitis iš Paryžiaus (Rež. Linas Mikuta, Prod. Jurga Gluskinienė), a well-made classical (good cinematography, fine mix between archive, shots from France and Lithuania including interviews with his sister and sons) bio about the interesting Antanas Moncys, who performed his sculpturing art in – primarily – Paris but kept his cultural roots in his works, being a samogitian, i.e. from a region in the North-East of Lithuania. Shame on me who has been to Lithuania so many times, being ignorant about Moncys, but now I know about a great artist working from wood and at the next voyage I will try to visit the museum dedicated to him in Palanga.

No further intro needed to  Mr. Landsbergis. Sugriauti blogio imperiją (Rež. Sergei Loznitsa, Prod. Uljana Kim)that I saw at IDFA, where it received the main award and where the protagonist, professor Landsbergis, was present to talk to the audience after the screening for more than an hour. Charisma is the word. What a man!Read more here: http://www.filmkommentaren.dk/blog/blogpost/4991/

And I am getting sad to write about  Pavyzdingas elgesys (Rež. Audrius Mickevičius, Nerijus Milerius, Prod. Rasa Miškinytė), such a great film (English title: Exemplary Behaviour), read all about it here: http://www.filmkommentaren.dk/blog/blogpost/4648/ The sadness comes from knowing Audrius M. and his long preparation for a film that he could not see finished himself, he died in 2017.

And ”The Jump” by Giedré Z, an international film success, loads of festivals and awards already, an amazing achievement by the director, who has been present at so many festivals to meet the audience and has taken care of the national distribution herself.  Šuolis (Rež. Giedrė Žickytė, Prod. Giedrė Žickytė, Uldis Cekulis) Read more: http://www.filmkommentaren.dk/blog/blogpost/4125/

Švelnūs kariai (Rež. Marija Stonytė, Prod. Giedrė Žickytė) – ”Gentle Warriors”, a debut of the young talented director with Giedre Z. as producer. I saw it being pitched, I saw a very promising rough cut but have not seen the final film that also has had a fine distributed in Lithuania. 

DocsBarcelona 2022

The programme is out for the 25th edition of DocsBarcelona. Twenty-five editions!!!

Which means that I have become 25 years older as has the founder of it all Joan Gonzalez, who back then in a workshop in Granada proposed to EDN (European Documentary Network), represented by Anita Reher (now head of Nordisk Panorama after years at Flaherty in the US) and me, to establish what became DocsBarcelona.

I have been there all the time to see with admiration how Gonzalez has expanded what in the beginning was a so-called industry event and later a festival and then much much more.

Here is a quote from this site last year in December:

The L’Acadèmia del Cinema Català included on December 2 six new Membres d’Honor to salute their contribution to the film industry in Catalonia. One of them was Joan Gonzàlez, director of the festival DocsBarcelona and producer of more than 100 documentaries, and with a background at the TVE and TV3. In 1996 he created DocsBarcelona that also exists in Medellin and Valparaiso. DocsBarcelona distributes documentaries to more than 80 places in Spain, and now DocsBarcelona headed by Gonzàlez is working on “nextus” that aims at making documentaries part of the school curriculum.The prestigious award to Joan Gonzàlez is the first one given to a documentarian... continues

Marusya Syroechkovskaya: How to Save a Dead Friend

Filmed by Kimi Morev and Marusya Syroechkovskaya 

Edited by Qutaiba Barhamji

Sweden, Norway, France, Germany, 103 mins., 2022

With the subtitle … a message from a silenced generation here is the director’s personal statement:

”On the 24th February 2022, Putin and his government expanded his cruel and devastating war on Ukraine. 

I fled Moscow as the ensuing crackdown on opposition voices inside Russia increased to drown us all out. 

Honestly, I was scared for my wellbeing amidst the establishment of a new law against “fake” news (even calling the war in Ukraine a “war” or expressing disagreement with it now means the threat of up to 15 years in prison); people being getting arrested, beaten, and tortured (not only while protesting but one can also get arrested just standing on the street); the police coming for you at your house; those against the war finding a “Z” graffitied on their door... 

There is a website created by the so-called Committee for the Protection of National Interests with a constantly updated list of “traitors --enemies, cowards and runaways”, from whom, according to Putin, society must cleanse itself: "Any people, and even more so the Russian people, will always be able to distinguish true patriots from scum and traitors and simply spit them out, like a midge that accidentally flew into the mouth”. 

Putin is brilliant at isolation, gaslighting. He excels at separating and dividing. He is the poster image for an abusive relationship, but this relationship you cannot leave. I can only agree with a fellow filmmaker Erika Lust with her portrayal of Putin as a great example of a destructive and exploitative patriarchal mindset - violent and oppressive, abusing power and violating human rights in the name of greed. 

By allowing Putin to stay in power for so many years, allowing him to methodically destroy Russian civil society unchecked as he shut down independent press, and any possible horizontal ties between people all these years, we, the Russian people, fertilized the ground for this terrible war. 

We didn’t stand up for ourselves, or when we tried, our voices were not loud enough. 

However, there is no point and no use in self-pity. Our responsibility now is to not stay silent, to keep doing whatever we can to stop this violence by any possible means. And to offer a narrative to the endless stream of Russian lies and propaganda. 

There are no doubts Ukrainian people will win this war and Ukraine will rebuild itself. But I can't see how Russia will be able to move forward. Putin has taken care of that. 

So, for the moment, I am a citizen of nowhere, somewhere, anywhere except Russia...and although this love story was born on the ground sown by an autocratic government, it is a love story that could happen wherever voices are silenced. 

March 24, 2022

Marusya Syroechkovskaya: How to Save a Dead Friend

Filmed by Kimi Morev and Marusya Syroechkovskaya 

Edited by Qutaiba Barhamji

Sweden, Norway, France, Germany, 103 mins., 2022

Kimi passed away on the night of November 4th, 2016. 

He wasn’t just my lover and husband, he was also my best friend, my dreamy soul mate. But he was giving up -- on his future, dreams, his looks even...he was sinking more and more into self-destruction, and it was hard for me to see how the person I love so much destroys himself. He didn’t accept any help from anybody, it was impossible to get through to him, and the only thing I could do was just to be with him. 

How do you keep someone who does his best to disappear? I wanted to be there for him, but the whole situation hurt me a lot as well. Then my camera provided me the distance I needed, making everything looked not real. Maybe filming for me became the same as drugs became for Kimi—an escape from reality, from everything that didn't work out for us. This experience made me think about the nature of film as a medium that captures time and keeps everything and everyone in one collective space. It reminded me of watching old wartime newsreel footage and realizing that although these people died a long time ago, somehow, they are still here, alive in the footage. Was it maybe the way to save Kimi? Or maybe I could save him if he somehow becomes music? Maybe scanning Kimi’s body with the sonification app VOSIS and turning it into music is also a way of keeping him and letting him stay for as long as possible. In the end, music and his poems are is what left of him. 

I also wanted to save the time, space, and things that formed me and Kimi as we were growing up, and HOW TO SAVE A DEAD FRIEND is also a tribute to films of Gregg Araki and Harmony Korine; artwork of David LaChapelle; to lots and lots of music: from post-punk and grunge to emo and witch house; to Windows Movie Maker transitions, early web aesthetics, and internet forums - back when the internet wasn’t yet controlled by corporations and censored by the government, when it was a place where you could freely express yourself and find belonging, occupying your dial-up for hours. 

How do you find a language for the film that spans 12 years and wasn’t meant to become a film while it was shot? The idea was to give a feeling of how it was to grow up in the 00s, to dive into sunny summer days and kaleidoscope of formats, pulsating visuals, and sounds coming from all directions. 

As time passes, as we see a chain of similar New Year addresses by presidents, the winter dark days take hold, isolating people from each other in their apartments. Our immediate outside world, once so enticing now becomes more and more violent, with less music and fewer friends around. Colors become muted, less saturated; cuts become longer. And Kimi is fading away into the darkness. 

When you lose someone close — someone who knew you well — part of your story disappears along with him. All that is left to do is to pick up the remaining memories before they turn to digital dust. 

Rita Baghdadi: Sirens

”With jet-black hair, leather boots and an uncompromising sound, metal band Slave to Sirens smashes every obstacle to pave the way for other female musicians in Lebanon. In Rita Baghdadi's instant Sundance audience favourite, we follow the band's five young members as they struggle with music, each other and the unrest in the country. The overriding protagonists are the band's biggest egos: the two headbanging guitarists who share a complicated past! Withexplosive chemistry and youthful stubbornness the five women play as loud and fast as they can for a brighter (or darker) future.”

That is the synopsis from cph:dox website. Inviting it is. I saw on my computer a film that has been to Sundance and many other festivals this year, including One World in Prague, where I heard members of the intl. jury talk positively about it. I managed to see it via the website of the Copenhagen festival and I can only echo what has been said: Talented interpretation of creators who have difficulties in fitting into a conservative society due to their sexual orientation, the music they play – and the emotional conflicts between Lilas and Chery. It’s all about catching the atmosphere of where the protagonists are and who they are. The film does that in a fragmented nervous rhythm – before and after the explosion that changed Beirut August 4 2020 and made people go to the streets.

Lebanon, USA, 2022, 78 mins.

Daniel Roher: Navalny

Det er jo ikke fordi historien om Navalny ikke er kendt og fortalt igen og igen. På nettet, i tv-reportager og i dokumentarer. F.eks. har BBC i 2021 produceret ”Manden Putin ikke kunne dræbe”, som kan fanges på https://www.dr.dk/drtv/program/manden-putin-ikke-kunne-draebe_273354.

Det er en klassisk BBC-dokumentar, hvor arkiv veksler med interviews og hvor der gives baggrundsinfo om andre forsøgte giftmord. Og tales om myrdede oppositionspolitikere som Boris Nemtsov og journalisten Anna Politkovskaja. Og om Navalnys opvækst, politiske karriere og tvivlsomme deltagen i nationalistiske demonstrationer. Hans pro-russiske holdninger til Krim og Donbass er blevet kommenteret i stærke vendinger af ukrainere på de sociale medier.

Ikke desto mindre skal I gå ind og se ”Navalny” i de biografer, som CPH:DOX sender den ud til. Det er en docu-thriller, som festivalen skriver, formet over den skabelon, som producenten CNN bruger med en charmerende, artikuleret hovedperson i centrum, som mestrer internettet, hvor han ekvilibristisk taler direkte til seeren og i en helt fantastisk satirisk dokumentar (et scoop) fører rundt i Putins Palads ved Sortehavet. Den kan I se på YouTube.

Tilbage til Daniel Rohers dokumentar og til den sekvens, som er hele filmen værd, en perle på højde med Heynowski/Scheumann’s interview med Congo-Müller i sin tid: Navalny har med fantastisk hjælp fra Bellingcat’s Christo Grozevog journalisten Maria Pevcikh tracket, hvilke FSB-agenter, som har fløjet til Tomsk i den periode, hvor Navalny var der. Deres telefonnumrefinder de og Navalny ringer op til flere af dem, der lægger på, når han spørger dem, hvorfor aktionen gik galt. Med Navalny i centrum sidder de tre i billedet og reagerer på hvad de hører. 

Men én vil gerne tale, Konstantin Kudryavtsev, som fortæller at giften – novichok – var placeret i Navalnys underbukser og hvis ikke flyet var landet i Omsk efter 40 minutter, var aktionen sandsynligvis endt som planlagt. Med Navalnys død. 

Daniel Roher var bag kameraet i huset i den tyske landsby, da Navalnys opkald blev foretaget. Alt blev optaget og den del af de 49 minutters samtale mellem Navalny og Kudryavtsev, som er med i filmen, er helt forrygende.

Julija Navalny er med sin mand hele tiden, deres to børn er udenfor landets grænser. Hun er stærk, når hun insisterer på at ville se sin mand på hospitalet i Omsk og hun er til stede i retssalen, når hendes mand tegner hjerter til hende på glasburet, som bruges når fanger i Rusland bringes til retten. Navalny rejste hjem til Rusland, hun rejste med, gud ved om hun ikke hellere ville være blevet i den tyske landsby med grønne marker og æsler, som de giver gulerødder. 

Bulgarske Christo Grozev fra Bellingcat er den tredie hovedperson. Han er graver-journalist og har undersøgt adskillige giftmord-historier. Her er han den saglige informator og han bringer respekt for det arbejde Bellingcat udfører, lige nu i Ukraine.

Navalny sidder i fængsel nu, han har sultestrejket, han har kontakt til sit hold udenfor, de af dem der ikke er fængslet eller gået i eksil, han kommunikerer, opfordrer til demonstrationer. Hvor længe han skal sidde i fængsel, vides ikke, der tales om 20-30 år…

USA, 2022, 98 mins.  

Michael Graversen: Mr. Graversen

Ærlig, følsom, kærlig, oprigtig. Ord der karakteriserer filmen om Michael, hans far og hans mor. Svend-Aage og Astrid. 

Forløsende, aldrig anklagende… for Svend Aage var der jo ikke, da Michael som barn fik kræft og var gennem mange års behandling. Han drak, det gik ned ad bakke og han mistede sin tøjforretning. Astrid var den, som var på hospitalet hos Michael, som altså nu vender tilbage til sit barndomshjem for at lave en film om sin far , som er tørlagt og har energi – og om sin friske mor som har viet sit liv til hunde og hundetræning og hundekonkurrencer. Huset er fyldt med pokaler, hun har vundet. 

Michael er ikke kommet for blot at kigge tilbage, han vil skubbe forældrene i gang, nej sammener et bedre ord, for de har jo ikke meget at tale om, når de sidder der ved middagsbordet. Og Michael vil gerne ind på farens værelse, hvor han opholdt sig meget for sig selv med sin alkohol. Michael spørger om han ikke må komme med ind, men nej… i starten af filmen.

Og Michael inspirerer faren til at købe blomster til Astrid for at fejre deres 40 års bryllupsdag, hvilket også omfatter at besøge kirken, hvor de blev gift. Det viser sig senere at være den forkerte kirke! Det vækker latter. Der er i det hele taget mange fine øjeblikke, hvor man griner med og ikke af de to.

Så filmen har en udvikling. Michaels hensigter lykkes. Også at forældrene flytter fra rækkehuset i Grindsted for at komme nærmere Michael og hans familie med børnebørn på Sjælland. Det kan kun gå godt.

Inden da har Michael kørt forældrene til Odense Sygehus, hvor han opholdt sig så meget under sin sygdom. Det kommer der fine følsomme scener ud af.

Godt at Michael som instruktør ikke maser sig ind i billedet. Der er for mange film, hvor instruktøren insisterer på at være med, her er Michael bag kameraet og blander sig nænsomt. Vi får ikke meget at vide om misbruget og den hårde tid det må have været for Astrid, savner vi det? Næh, der skal også være noget at forestille sig, ig-å, (ikke osse) som de siger i Jylland og som Svend-Aage siger det. Meget usagt, mange pauser, tak for det!

Danmark, 2022, 82 mins.

https://www.dfi.dk/viden-om-film/filmdatabasen/film/121421