DOK.Incubator 2016 Preview
It proved to be a lucky first round of cooperation between the Nordisk Panorama and DOK.Incubator, the rough cut workshop for documentaries. The Nordisk Panorama is a festival that through its industry activity, the Forum, was able to gather a big amount of broadcasters, sales agents and festival programmers for a sunday morning presentation of 8 films, which are on their way to be completed and/or do already have reached the point, where the picture is locked. It was full house in the cinema Panora here in Malmø yesterday and what the viewers experienced was Quality. It can be said as simple as that. DOK.Incubator is a workshop that goes for developing creative documentaries, in some cases I would say documentaries of fine artistic quality.
”Work Hard, Fly High!”, it was written on the poster on the
stage, where one project after the other was presented in this way: I.e., first a small presentation by one of the tutors of the team behind the upcoming film, then a brief talk by one of the filmmakers, then a trailer/teaser, then more talk and then the showing of one/two/three scenes from the film. The latter is a scoop (which of course can only be done because it is a rough-cut workshop, where the films are almost completed) because you ”see” the filmmaker, or let me put it in another way, you see who is a filmmaker… and you see the help the filmmakers have had from experienced editors. That is probably what is the most important element of the DOK.Incubator programme, that also includes information on the market (Peter Jäger was one of the tutors), marketing (Freddy Neumann), production (Ulla Simonen and Sigrid Dyekjær) and many, many others.
Where many of the trailers were formatted to be informative, mostly through images, texts that can be questions and lots of music – the scenes gave a sense of the aesthetic choice of the director, the famous ”handwriting”.
If you go to the link below, you can check the visual material, together with text about the films. I think all projects presented can end up being good films and at least two will fly high and be more than good. Excellent maybe. Masterpieces maybe. They are ”The Good Postman” by Bulgarian director Tonislav Hristov, produced by Finnish Kaarle Aho – in a village in Bulgaria near the Turkish border, the postman wants to run for mayor with the intention to welcome refugees into the small society. ”Burning out” was for me the other highlight of the morning, probably the highlight by Belgian Jérôme le Maire (”Tea or Electricity”), an observational documentary from a hospital, where impossible working conditions create tensions and conflicts in the staff – and a stress that can be fatal. And bravo DOK.Incubator for taking in a film like ”Guidance Through the Black Hole”, that is partly a black & white, partly a colour sketchy documentary with a buddhist bohémian Yugoslav, an artist in life, who has been drinking and smoking for decades, living the life in London’s Portobello. I have no idea of where the film directors Zlatko Pranjic and Aleksandar Nikolic will take me but I am willing to be brought along.
Andrea Prenghyova and her DOK.Incubator team are proud of what they are doing. They have all the reason in the world to be so!
