Scenes…

… or you could also say moments from films that don’t leave you even if you have been watching many, really many as I have during the last month or so, in Leipzig, in Copenhagen, in Minsk, in Amsterdam or Paris. Mostly on my MacBook Cinema, through links, not perfect I know that, but practical.

I have picked three, a Danish/Basque, a Dutch and a German/Argentinian.

In ”Pelota II”, a film by Jørgen Leth and Olasz Gonzalez Abrisketa, the cameraman Dan Holmberg knows what he is doing, when he travels the Basque towns and villagers to film the frontons that are used to play the national sport, pelota, that he, Jørgen Leth and Ole John made a film about in 1983. Now the Basque has asked them to come back to remake an informative and artistic interpretation of the culture, in the style of Jørgen Leth, conveying his fascination with his so well known voice taking the viewer along. The sequence with the frontons, one after the other, is so beautifully photographed and put together.

A totally different camera style is used by Dutch Morgan Knibbe in his ”Those Who Feel the Fire Burning”. For a long time the camera

is up in the air, moving along walls, at the beaches where the refugees come into Europe, in the streets where they try to find a worthy life – and then suddenly the flow stops and there is a long focused moment with a Senegalese immigrant, who talks to his wife and promises her to bring back shoes and clothes, a declaration of love, ”I still remember how we spent the last night together just before I left” – more than two years ago! This scene comes at the right moment, brilliantly thought.

As is German Kral’s wonderful ”Our Last Tango” with María Nieves Rego and Juan Carlos Copes, legendary tango dancers, now 80 and 83 years, a love story from Buenos Aires (a city close to my heart, my father was born there), an elegantly constructed film where the dance is in focus. However it is the faces caught by the camera that stays in my head. The face of María, full of passion for the tango, for life, for the young dancers who are to take over. The camera catches the light in her eyes as well as in the eyes of the young dancer, who is to dance tango on a small table as María did with Juan Carlos. Great scenes of today and from archive material.

Photo from “Pelota II”, the bags are full of the balls picked for the pelota matches. How the balls come into life is the red thread of the film. An amazing craft!