DocsBarcelona Films Meet Audience
… and directors inform and answer questions after the screenings. The heart of a festival, is it not, when the filmmakers get the chance to have feedback from the viewers, who have enjoyed their work on a big screen, vice versa. The triangle: film, audience, filmmaker.
I attended three of these meetings yesterday. Louie Palu (and Devin Gallagher) showed and commented on his ”hell on earth” (my remark) documentary ”Kandahar Journals”, that have several layers: the diary reflections of the photographer Louie Palu, who has photographed and filmed everything himself, the information given about the geography of Kandahar, the almost unbearable photos and images of dead people, including the body parts of a suicide bomber… It stays in your mind this film as does the one by Friedrich Moser, ”A Good American”, that features the most sympathetic man you can think of, Bill Binney, and his lost fight with the NSA, that did not want to adapt his surveillance program that could have prevented the 9/11 to happen. Everything has a structure, says Binney, and the film has indeed one, a form has been chosen, one could almost say designed to convey this scandalous story. I had time to go to the Q&A of ”Daniel’s World” by Veronika Lišková, who gave the audience in a full cinema the background for her sensitive film about a paedophile, who has come out of the closet, so to say. The reaction from the Barcelona audience was very positive, a Brazilian filmmaker wanted to take the film to her country, that’s how a festival should work.
A couple of people I meet: Serge Tréfaut, Portuguese director, who just got an award in his home country for his ”Treblinka”, a hybrid film of great beauty, longing to see it on a big screen. And Arunas Matelis and his wife Alge, who were at the speed meetings with their ”Gladiators. A Different World”, a true international coproduction as it is about the bicycle riders of Giro d’Italia and Tour de France. With a Spanish coproducer, Matelis is now planning to get hold of the star Alberto Contador.
Today films and a masterclass with three truly international, award-winning directors: Rokhsareh Ghaem Maghami (”Sonita”), Brian Hill (”City of Dreams”) and Sean McAllister (”A Syrian Love Story”). ”Intervention or Observation”, the catalogue outlines as the theme. The answer is already given, the three of them intervene, so that is what is to be discussed at La Pedrera today at 5.30pm. How, why, with which consequences? Please come to Gaudi’s beautiful place! And then films and more films, hopefully with as many spectators as yesterday.
