Andreas Koefoed: The Ghost of Piramida
Artur Liebhart, festival director of Planete Doc Film Festival, had planned the closing ceremony of his festival in an excellent way. Well, he could not know it but Danish director Andreas Koefoed was as the first award winner called to the stage to receive “Chopin’s Nose” for his film “The Ghost of Piramida”. He was accompanied by his three protagonists from the Danish band Efterklang, that made a great concert after the ceremony. On top of that Koefoed’s film was shown after all awards had been given out at this tenth edition of a festival that not only takes place in Warsaw but also in other Polish cities.
Back to Piramida, here is the description of the film from the hand of the director:
Accompanied by their taciturn and not visibly impressed Russian polar bear guard, the group goes on a audio treasure hunt in the empty buildings of the abandoned town, while the narrator, the former Piramida-citizen Alexander Naomkin Ivanovic, takes us back to a bygone era, when Piramida flourished and the immigrant Russian miners and their families lived in a Soviet parallel society far from the brutal reality of their homeland.
And here is my brief comment on what I saw: Koefoed has in an elegant way combined past and present in his charming presentation of a town that once was full of people and life but now is a place where a music band goes to pick up sounds for their next album. Russian Alexander provided the director with wonderful archive material and the three musicians give us good music and sound, at the same time as they are urban cowboys in a nature where even an Arctic fox could be dangerous! Not to forget that the film is beautiful to watch. This film is a small pearl and I have become a fan of Efterklang…
On the site of the Danish Film Institute – in Danish – you can read of the impressive distribution initiative taken by the band and director. 800 so-called private-public screenings in 52 countries!
Denmark, 2012, 65 mins.
