With few well placed questions by festival director Zoran Popovic, director of “The Distant Barking of Dogs” Danish Simon Lereng Wilmont performed a fine 2 hour workshop, sharing with the participants the doubts he had had when filming in Eastern Ukraine, and the decisions to be made. Being asked about the final sequence, which is shot with her mobile phone by the babushka, the granny, Aleksandra is her name, Simon said, that he had made the decision to have it there NOT to end with a “happy ending” = granny and the boy Oleg sitting calmly in the landscape. She actually shot several scenes of the kids and their reactions, when bombs were falling, Simon said, but if I had put more in, it had ended being a war film and that was not the idea! The scene shows that Yarik is not as used to being in the war zone as Oleg.

Simon told about his two previous short documentaries that had children as characters – one about the son of a sumo wrestler and one about children fencing – and how he had problems getting funding for the film at the Danish Film Institute; should it go to the documentary consultants and/or the children film consultant. It helped, when the two short films won Al Jazeera awards that enabled the director and the producer Monica Hellstrøm from the company Final Cut for Real to start the research and casting. “I wanted a boy who lives in the shadow of the war”, Simon said, “how do you feel when you are afraid”, he asked Oleg, who answered in a way that made it easy for the director to make him the protagonist.

Funding-wise the film was pitched at Nordisk Panorama and later at IDFA in Amsterdam, where

Sundance’s clever Tabitha Jackson declared interest and committed, which made Nordic tv stations come on board, one after the other.

“I was very much hanging out with the kids, they often asked me to film, I ignored them to make them less interested and therefore more natural, when I started the shooting. I got into their world and also after a long time of skepticism from her side, I gained the trust of Aleksandra, who ended up cooking for us”. “We stayed in Mariupol, 25 kilometer from their place”.

Aleksandra became the narrator. “I did several interviews with her in the beginning to gain her trust and when they were translated, I discovered that she was excellent in phrasing what it meant to live in a war zone, so I decided to use that, we enter the war with her”.

“Slices of life… that’s what I wanted to show, but during the editing process and when pitching the project, I was constantly bombarded with questions about dramaturgy, the three arcs and all that…” (Shit, my comment!).

“We did editing for half a year, we had 9 cuts and at the 7^th and 8^th version I invited people like Joshua Oppenheimer and Niels Pagh Andersen to comment on what they saw. It was very helpful”.

Simon also talked about the two composers he had used, but I did not get that down on paper.

“The Distant Barking of Dogs” has won 19 awards (!) and the director is wanted everywhere. He has just left the hotel to go home from the Magnificent7 festival, where he had a great time with his son Fabian, 9 years old. Tomorrow Simon Lereng Wilmont goes to Washington and New York, two more festivals for a remarkable film:

I want you to stay with me, always, says Oleg to his granny Aleksandra. Of course I will, she says, and I get tears in my eyes, writing this.

www.magnificent7.org

 

 

 

Painting with an I-phone! I had the most amazing aesthetic experience for a long time in the cinema yesterday night at the Kombank Dvorana cinema during the Magnificent7 festival in Belgrade. 90 minutes with landscapes, rivers, valleys, woods, sunset, barely visible graphic prints on the film screen, from pleasure to nightmare, no dialogue, cinema pur, a rollercoaster of impressions and associations remembering our Danish master Per Kirkeby seeing some of the colourful images, created by Scott Barley, a visual artist using the film medium, making a visual installation in the dark room that the cinema constitutes, thinking of Casper David Friedrich of course but also of Muybridge and his horses or maybe better of the white horse in Pirjo Honkasalo’s “Three Rooms of Melancholia” – and towards the end it’s Götterdämmerung without Wagner but with lightning and thunder at a sound level that made me want to hold my ears and close my eyes to avoid the epileptic seizures that I could have inherited from my father. I can’t remember being so much physically attacked by the film medium. I read that the director is born in 1992, this Anselm Kiefer of cinema, gosh I was suffering with this nightmarish pleasure!

www.magnificent7.org

… indeed there is, at the new venue of Magnificent7 festival in Belgrade at a new time of the year, in June, where it previously was in January/February. The cinema Kombank Hall, before it was Dom Sindikata, totally renovated, has an atmosphere of openness, you feel welcomed, and sitting with around 1000 spectators watching a documentary on a big screen… what else can you ask for being part of a festival that is in its 14 edition and has always attracted the clever Belgrade audience. The image and the sound, no complaints from my side and the reception of festival director Zoran Popovic (Photo), when he goes on stage to introduce the film and the director/filmmaker present is second to none. The audience adores him!

There are still two of the seven films to be screened: Scott Barley’s “Sleep Has Her House” and Virpi Suutari’s “Entrepreneur”. Barley is here as is Sanna Salmenkallio, the composer of the Finnish film. Two extraordinary films to be enjoyed by the Belgrade audience inside – outside the cinema the temperature has luckily dropped from the 32 degrees yesterday.

More reports will follow but let me give you a quote brought to Belgrade by Georgian Stefan Tolz, artist Andy Goldsworthy about filmmaker Thomas Riedelsheimer: “Why are Thomas’ films so special?”, “I think it’s the fact that he does very little directing or asking me to anything in particular. He’s a hunter like I am. He’s always waiting for opportunities to occur”.

http://www.magnificent7festival.org

Magnificent7 festival directors Svetlana and Zoran Popovic write about the film:

“Giants and the Morning After” is a cinematic hit whose screenings are currently taking place throughout Sweden, while at the same time embarking on a trip to world festivals. The director’s trio, Malla Grapengiesser, Per Bifrost and Alexander Ryneus made funny and revealing walk through a Swedish small place in a country side. By combining myths, fairy tales and everyday realism, Swedish authors create a discrete comedy in a documentary of an unusual atmosphere.

Layers of past time interweave with everyday life. Beautiful, thick, dark forests enclose Idra. Neat spaces filled with houses, farms, small companies. Everyone here, both old and young, has one’s own business or entertainment, and together they create this little world in which everybody has an important place and a sense of belonging. In scenes of church gatherings, joint artistic endeavors, business ventures, children’s games or discreetly shot warm, intimate moments we witness the richness of life. Even when various newcomers are coming, planned or unplanned, they do not disturb the true peace of this small place immersed in a nature of the untouched beauty. Nevertheless, behind all this, in the darkness of the forest and in the shadows of giants that once shifted rocks, there is some dark anxiety that creates a threat to this rural idyll.

Malla Grapengiesser, Per Bifrost and Alexander Ryneus equally convincingly create a view of space and people, as well of intimate circles of friendship and love. They turn this seductive portrait of the seemingly sleepy Swedish countryside into a funny, lively and playful picture. Great, brilliant cinema!

http://www.giantsandthemorningafter.com/

Sweden, 2018, 88 mins.

No need to state that Thomas Riedelsheimer’s film on and with Goldsworthy, “Leaning into the Wind” is masterly done. A great artist filmed by a great cameraperson and photographer.

But what I was thinking of, watching the film last night at Magnificent7 in Belgrade, is the inspiration Goldsworthy is giving us. SEE, ENJOY THE WORLD we are living in, while we are here on this planet, and PLAY with nature. The artist has this wonderful childish way of taking leaves from the trees to put them on his hands or let them decorate the stairs in the city or flow in the water or… you can see that he enjoys it like when our grandchildren proudly take a leaf from the tree in the garden or take a stone and decorate it. Just you wait, Samuel and Anna, 4 years old both of them, when we come home, we have new things we can do in the garden with the inspiration of an artist, who in his sixties have kept the child within him.

http://www.leaningintothewind.com/

Festival directors Svetlana and Zoran Popovic write about the film:

“The Distant Barking of Dogs” started its impressive festival and award quest at the largest documentary film festival IDFA in Amsterdam where it won the First Appearance Award.

This is a film that follows a wonderful author’s thread initiated in the unforgettable poetic achievement “Ivan’s Childhood” about a boy and a war, made by one of the greatest film art masters Andrei Tarkovski. The space is close to Tarkovsky’s, now Ukraine, but this time it happens today and the hero of the story is called Oleg. He has ten years and does what all the boys in the world do – he plays, goes to school, and most of all, he likes to wander and discover the world around him. And the world begins from his yard and the street and spreads endlessly through meadows, forests, along riverbanks. And in this world of beauty and secrets the most important places have his brother, friend and grandmother with a big heart. But the dark outline of the invisible, yet dramatically present, and dangerous war noise becomes equally important and fills a little, almost empty village. Moments in which everything turns into fear, while the film becomes even more a moving poetic antiwar story about the small and unprotected in the whirlwind of big events.

Simon Lereng Wilmont discreetly, boldly and devotedly follows the little hero in various everyday situations, creating extremely convincing collisions of carefree childhood and cruel threats of war. The camera is not merely a distant observer, but always an accomplice in permitted and secret boyish endeavors. A truly great feat of a young documentarist who breaks linguistic and cultural barriers to create a work of universal value using the language of film images.

Denmark, Sweden, Finland, 2017, 90 mins.

http://www.finalcutforreal.dk/distant-barking-of-dogs