Magnificent7 Diary/ 4
The workshop connected to the Magnificent7 festival in Belgrade attracts more participants than ever. 70 young film students and first time filmmakers have registered to hear about the documentary filmmaking in the presence of the filmmakers, whose work have been shown the night before.
Saturday morning Mahdi Fleifel was the one. His film ”A World not Ours” had been overwhelmingly well received in the cinema and the director, with his own words, ”gave his cv” to the workshop participants. ”A World not Ours” is the first professional work of the director, who right now lives in a suitcase, travelling to festivals with his film – next venue is the Berlinale, where he will present a sequel to ”A World not Ours”. For the Dane, who writes these lines, it was great to hear about Fleifel’s fascination of the documentaries of Jon Bang Carlsen – ”Hotel of the Stars” and the two Irish works ”It’s Now or Never” and ”How to invent Reality”, commissioned by me when I was film consultant at the National Film Board of Denmark (Statens Filmcentral).
Woody Allen is a source of inspiration for the director, who at his office in London has a banner saying ”what would Stanley do” referring to Stanley Kubrick. Fleifel went to NFTS, the National film school in England, and what really pushed him to make the film from the refugee camp was watching Ross McElwee’s ”Shermans March”.
He talked about the technical side of the making of the film, where Danish filmmaker and cameraman Jesper Jargil had given him the necessary advice on what camera to buy for the job.
Sunday night’s film is ”La Maison de la Radio” by French Nicolas Philibert.
