Baltic Sea Docs+
The+ goes for the extra events organised by Creative Europe’s Latvian representative – formerly it was called Media Desk – Lelda Ozola.
First element of a long and good friday afternoon was the presentation of documentary series produced by Danish television, the DR3, a relatively new channel (4 years old) targeting a young audience, as the presenter Erik Struve Hansen said between 15 and 40. So out of my reach age-wise… anyway I had nothing specifically against watching 26 minutes of ”I am the Ambassador” aka the American Rufus Gifford. It was one of 10 episodes and it was light and entertaining and can not do any harm… One tutor colleague found it a disgusting promotion for the USA. Promotion it is of course, Gifford is a media person, who knows what he is doing. He is now being substituted by a Trump-lover, Struve Hansen, a woman who used to play in ”Glamour”!
Second element was the showing of one episode of ”Petra Goes Dating”, in this case in Belgrade, for me interesting to be back in a city That I have been visiting the last 15 years. A daring program, Petra goes the whole way, 3 Serbian men, the last one she stayed with for the night.
Third element was the presentation of Pitch the Doc by Polish Adam Paplinski, that I have written about before: … A fine initiative
in development, go the website and learn more and read the EDN interview where the Polish matchmaker explains more about Pitch the Doc that has a team of evaluators that is strong: Steven Seidenberg, Pawel Lozinski and Marijke Rawie.
From there I hurried to attend the Riga IFF (International Film Festival) Pitch Session organised by Vitaly Manski and his Artdocfest: 7 Russian projects were presented with clips and a support by Manski himself, fatherly and professional. In the audience were, among others, Baltic producers, who could maybe go in to make some of the projects happen. Let me mention two of the projects: Elena Demidova, whose ”Cranberry Island” I saw and reviewed in 2010, presented ”The Third Life of Marina Kleshcheva” (photo), who has been in and out of prison, and has acted in theatre and in a film by Loznitsa, if I got it right from the simultaneous translation. The other one that made me curious was ”My Name is Shchukin” by Alaxsandra Lihacheva, a portrait of an artist-to-be with a hard family background. As is written in the catalogue of the Baltic Sea Docs: He creates mind-blowing paintings and art-objects from everything around him.
