Nordisk Panorama: dok.incubator
Full house at 9.30 in the morning at Panora Cinema in Malmö. As in previous years dok.incubator offered the audience of festival people, sales agents, broadcasters and fellow filmmakers « an exclusive showcase of eight outstanding documentary features just before their premiere” as it is written at the site of ”the institution”. Because this is what Czech Andrea Prenghyova and her team has made the dok.incubator. An institution… that with help of excellent editors and developers help films to be finished. She proudly told the audience about what films participating in previous editions have achieved in terms of distribution all over the world. Amazing it is and no doubt that a film that has been at dok.incubator has good chances to get into IDFA to mention an example of a festival every young and new filmmaker wants to be at.
That does not mean that all was appreciated by this blogger. Andrea Prenghyova, with whom I worked for many years within the Ex Oriente
workshop, knows that I think the presentation is much too formatted: Hello presentation from a tutor, hello from one from the film team, then a trailer, some words again, and then two scenes and some final words about what they are looking for and when the film will be ready. For one sitting in the cinema it feels much too schematic, why not, as a colleague said to me, in some cases, show the first 10 minutes of the fine or rough cut that exists as the films are close to be finalised. Or drop the trailer and show longer scenes… Break the rules.
Anyway, let me mention 3 of the 8 projects that I liked and think/hope will end up as good films with several layers:
”On Your Marks” (Slovakia/Czech Republic) by Mária Pinciková is about the Sokol movement ”that gathers thousands of people every six years in Prague to creative impressive mass performances”. It is full of humour, it has two characters – a young man who does not really know how to flirt with a girl, and who has a strong mother – and an older man, who has been part of Sokol for a long time and who is not content with the way the parade down towards Moldau river is performed. Growing-up. Post-communism. Czech humour as we know it from Forman and Menzel.
”Cuban Dancer” (Italy, Canada, Chile) by Roberto Salinas – it was at DocsBarcelona a couple of years ago and if the material shown here ”keeps its promise”, a fine film will be there about the young man, who goes from Cuba to the USA to make a career as a top dancer.
”The Earth is Blue as an Orange” (Ukraine/Lithuania) by Iryna Tsilyk – I saw it in Kiev at the DocuDays, I still can’t see the final film from what was presented here in Malmö, maybe in that case would have been better with the start of the film but still the scenes presented were full of energy and atmosphere, so hoping it will be put well together at the end. I understand that the sales agent CAT&Docs has signed up for the film.
