Antalya FF – Pitch of Turkish Docs & Ai WeiWei

The pitching of 6 Turkish documentary projects took place wednesday mid-day with a good audience and two competent jury members Sevdije Kastrati from Kosovo and Dennis Wheatley from the UK. Slightly different from what we are used to in European pitch sessions, the Antalya Film Forum has chosen to give 8 minutes for presentation, including clip plus 5 minutes for the jurors to ask questions and/or give comments. Tomorrow night the two winners of each 8000$ for development will be announced and I will write a bit more about the projects, two of them connected to Cyprus and one dealing indirectly with the Kurds.

And the day ended with the screening of Ai WeiWei’s ”Human Flow”. After the festival had managed to get hold of a copy that was not damaged. The cancellation of the first screening raised a lot of speculations about censorship – the film touches upon the Turkish-Kurdish relationship – which is totally nonsense. There is no reason NOT to believe what is detailed described in the statement of the festival that I referred to in the previous blogpost.

The film is brilliant, an extraordinarily rich 140 minutes long documentation of the world we live in. There are texts on the screen, facts from places full of refugeees and migrants, poetic sentences from writers, a film full of different styles, Ai WeiWei in the picture, reportage style, some fantastic almost surrealistic sequences, stunning images (PHOTO), interviews with many UNHCR representatives, small warm scenes, children children children, it’s masterly put together. It deserves a longer review and that will come the next time I see it on a big screen.

www.antalyaff.com

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Tue Steen Müller
Tue Steen Müller

Müller, Tue Steen
Documentary Consultant and Critic, DENMARK

Worked with documentary films for more than 20 years at the Danish Film Board, as press officer, festival representative and film consultant/commissioner. Co-founder of Balticum Film and TV Festival, Filmkontakt Nord, Documentary of the EU and EDN (European Documentary Network).
Awards: 2004 the Danish Roos Prize for his contribution to the Danish and European documentary culture. 2006 an award for promoting Portuguese documentaries. 2014 he received the EDN Award “for an outstanding contribution to the development of the European documentary culture”. 2016 The Cross of the Knight of the Order for Merits to Lithuania. 2019 a Big Stamp at the 15th edition of ZagrebDox. 2021 receipt of the highest state decoration, Order of the Three Stars, Fourth Class, for the significant contribution to the development and promotion of Latvian documentary cinema outside Latvia. In 2022 he received an honorary award at DocsBarcelona’s 25th edition having served as organizer and programmer since the start of the festival.
From 1996 until 2005 he was the first director of EDN (European Documentary Network). From 2006 a freelance consultant and teacher in workshops like Ex Oriente, DocsBarcelona, Archidoc, Documentary Campus, Storydoc, Baltic Sea Forum, Black Sea DocStories, Caucadoc, CinéDOC Tbilisi, Docudays Kiev, Dealing With the Past Sarajevo FF as well as programme consultant for the festivals Magnificent7 in Belgrade, DOCSBarcelona, Verzio Budapest, Message2Man in St. Petersburg and DOKLeipzig. Teaches at the Zelig Documentary School in Bolzano Italy.

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