DocsBarcelona 2020/Treštíkova/Østergaard/Ai Weiwei
I have copy-pasted a part of the press release text about the competitive Panorama program, naming the top director names that will have their film presented in the online festival – reserved for the Spanish audience. Check the festival page for when the films are available. Between the 19th until the 31st of May. Here is the text, more about the program in the following days:
”13 works will compete for the DocsBarcelona Best Documentary Award in the Official Panorama Section: titles such as Vivos, by the Chinese artist, activist, and dissident Ai Weiwei, stand out. After focusing on the issue of migration in Human Flow (2017) and The Rest (2019), the filmmaker now travels to Mexico to report systemic corruption in institutions by focusing on the disappearance of some forty students who one September morning in 2014, while travelling to Mexico City to commemorate the 1968 Tlatelolco Massacre, were attacked by police.
Renowned for her original and poignant look at the subjects she deals with in her films, the Czech filmmaker Helena Třeštíková is the co-creator of Forman vs. Forman along with Jakub Hejna. A documentary about the figure of the Oscar-winning director of Amadeus and Someone flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, which is also a look at communism, the American Dream and the Czech independence process. Also a portrait of an artist is the first feature film (and film testament) of the recently deceased producer Artemio Benki: Solo accompanies the composer and pianist Martín Perino, witness of the struggle between his own genius and the effects of the mental illness he was diagnosed with .
Another centrepiece of the festival is Winter Journey, by Danish filmmaker Anders Østergaard. A hybrid, a fiction disguised as a documentary or vice versa, which reveals the existence of the Jüdischer Kulturbund, or Jewish Cultural League with which in the early 1930s Goebbels’ Nazi Ministry of Propaganda allowed Jewish artists to perform for Jewish audiences. A film about the meaning of being German, and how the children of the generation that lived through the war had to face its consequences. And with an added bonus: the legendary Swiss actor Bruno Ganz (Downfall, Wings of Desire) shines through in the dramatisations that the story incorporates, in what was his last film work.”
The photo above is from the film “Zona Arida” by Fernanda Pessoa, also at the festival.
https://docsbarcelona.com/en/noticies/descobreix-tota-la-programacio-del-docsbarcelona-2020
