DOC Meeting Argentina/ 2
In the ”conferencias”, three broadcasters in a row: History Channel Latin America, ORF Austria, ZDF/arte. Three different profiles. And three different ways of presentation. Miguel Brailovsky from History Channel Latin America used power point as the presentation tool, when he told the audience that ”tv is entertainment”, ”factual entertainment” and proclaimed that next year will be 100 years after Titanic, and that will be strongly marked in the programming of his channel. His clips were purely American commercial style, his presentation effective.
Frans Grabner from ORF in Austria, on the contrary to the power point, opened his textbook and looked down at his handwritten notes. For him the development of a film project is the most important, he wants to create a relationship with the director. We should not lose the audience, he said, and continued to express his concern about the tv audience – no young people watch television – ”sometimes I think that I am producing more for the past than for the future”. But let’s make films for the audience and not for the ratings. Grabner referred to the strong film tradition in Austria after the world war 2, with names like Haneka, Glawogger, Geyerhalter and Ulrich Seidl, and showed a clip from the Bosnian director Begovic wonderful and original ”Totally Personal”.
Reinhart Lohmann from ZDF/arte’s theme evening department placed his 10 handwritten A4 pages on the table, started to read, but dropped the link to the paper, put the pages away, expressed his pleasure to work in arte from the very beginning – same picture in two countries, two languages – at the same time as he was worried about the influence of the internet on the future of arte. Lohmann showed a 9 minute long compilation clip with quotes from arte programming the last year on Latin America. Quite impressive with reference to great films like ”El Olvido” (photo) by Heddy Honigmann and ”Sins of My Father” by Nicilas Entel.
