DOXBOX Damascus Diary 4

It is monday morning and once again I find myself with Pirjo Honkasalo and Niels Pagh Andersen, who are to talk about ”3 Rooms of Melancholia”. For four hours with 25 people in the hall. It goes very well, we manage to relate to the audience – Niels invites us with his gesticulating, competent, open-minded generosity to the world of editing a material that has a very small ratio (1:7 at the highest) and Pirjo sits there full of professional dignity. A film director from a generation where you make films when you have something to say. She shoots on film and she pushes the button when her intuition and the situation invites her to do so.

Later in the afternoon I saw the first prize winner of Leipzig 2007, ”Don´t Get me Wrong”, a Romanian film by Adina Pintilie. Shot in a psychiatric hospital the director has chosen a mere observational approach to the patients, which makes you feel pity for them but also highly embarrassed as the director has no voice, no point of view. We are invited to a peep show to watch grown up naked people having their diapers changed again and again. It crossed my border of what you can film, when the people being filmed do not know that they are being filmed.

One of the Arab Film Institute films showed talent: ”Bird of Stone” by Hazem Hamwi. It is a film – as Niels Pagh Andersen said – with a visual power and an ambition to question what is normality. The main character is Abu Hajar, a man who is barking like a dog when people ask him to do so, a man who takes his own way in life and literally when he walks in the desert or in the modern machinery world, where the filmmaker takes him. The interviews with him shows a philosopher in life, whereas the people talking about him, situated at the end of a corridor, like they were taken in for questioning, well they represent our tendency to talk about other people, especially those who are a bit different. A film that can travel!

Finally the darling of the festival so far, a full house saw Aleksandar Manic ”The Shutka Book of Records” from 2005. They loved it as did my blog-colleague Allan Berg when he was in the jury in Slovenia a couple of years ago and gave Manic a prize for this highly entertaining documentary from the Roma capital in Macedonia.