Film History/ France

From Ukraine to Paris where the festival ”L’Europe autour de l’Europe” with a program of European films took place from March 14 till yesterday April 1. A celebration of the author film it is, the film d’auteur, with hommages to masters like the actor Jean-Pierre Léaud, born in 1944 with an early debut in 1959 in the legendary new wave film by Francois Truffaut, ”Les Quatre Cent Coups”; Antoine Doinel he is and we met him again in that role in several films by Truffaut, who is said to have seen Léaud as his alter ego. Léaud has played in films by Jean-Luc Godard and Jacquette Rivette – you remember the masterpiece ”La Maman et la Putain”? – and in the festival in Paris, he is in the latest film by Catalan director Albert Serra, ”La Mort de Louis XIV”.

The festival is run by Irena Bilic, it is the 13th edition of an impressive festival that runs in 13 different Parisian cinemas, including a couple of cultural institutes and an American university’s ”Arts Arena”, where I had the pleasure of presenting Danish Phie Ambo’s ”When You Look Away”, that was very well received by an educated audience of primarily Americans living in Paris.

Bilic also celebrated the Baltic cinema. Lithuanian Audrius Stonys had put together a program of films by Jaak Kilmi from Estonia, Viesturs Kairiss from Latvia, Arunas Matelis and himself from Lithuania.

I was not there but the organisers told me that it had been quite difficult to draw an audience to the Baltic films, as it was for the films in the Prix Sauvage competition, 8 fictions films and 1 documentary. I was in the jury with fine people like Polish Rafael Lewandowski and Bulgarian Ralitza Petrova. We gave the award to ”Colo”, a beautiful film by Portuguese Teresa Villaverde. Our jury motivation goes like this: « For the humanity and deepness with which it treats its subject matter and for the precision of its formal choices, while always remaining sincere, the Prix Sauvage goes to Colo by Teresa Villaverde. »

www.evropafilmakt.com

Film History/ Ukraine

Exciting it was to visit Dovzhenko Film Studios in Kiev, originating from 1927, carrying the name of Alexander Dovzhenko (1894-1956). And sad as well as the buildings stand alone (apart from a couple of sound studios and a fantastic store with props) and deserted – as I have experienced in other former Soviet republics, Latvia being one of them. But you can easily imagine the studio, that is like a small city in itself, with everything needed space-wise for big productions, flats for the important directors – and Dovzhenko was here.

Just to remind us, a text clip I googled:

”Along with Dziga Vertov, Sergei Eisenstein and Vsevolod Pudovkin, Alexander Dovzhenko is one of Soviet cinema’s early masters. Best known for his silent films, Zvenyhora (1928), Arsenal (1929) and Earth (1930), Dovzhenko holds a dominant place among avant-garde directors. It has generally not been recognized that Dovzhenko’s early canon was also an integral part of the Ukrainian cultural renaissance. This work looks at Alexander Dovzhenko’s Soviet Ukrainian trilogy in the light of the silent cinema’s early aesthetic and presents an analysis of the silent trilogy in the context of the Ukrainian Cultural Renaissance (1917-31)[2] and its dialogue with a wider modernist avant garde.”

The studio is today owned by the Ukraine state.

Photo taken by Roman Bondarchuk: Ellen Fonnesbech-Sandberg, Dar’ya Averchenko and me.  

http://rayuzwyshyn.net/dovzhenko/Introduction.htm

Civil Pitch Winners at Docudays

I had the privilege to moderate the final pitch session of the Civil Pitch at Docudays festival in Kiev Ukraine. 8 projects were presented to a panel of documentary producers, festival people and distributors. Projects which were quite young but pretty much alive and kicking. Read what Roman Bondarchuk from the festival rightfully said:

“It’s incredible that these projects didn’t even exist as recently as two weeks ago. That filmmakers and activists exist each in their own worlds and rarely cross paths,” says Bondarchuk, a member of the competition jury. “And it is also incredible that for me personally some topics presented by the participants were absolute discoveries, and they made me want to engage these topics myself. In the end, although we have selected only four projects as winners, all of them had a great opportunity to meet renowned professionals of the European film industry and receive consultations about their projects.

I can only agree with him and hope that the film projects, most of them aiming at 20-25 minutes, will be realized. 4 of them will be helped by start money, each of the winning projects will receive $5,500. The funds for producing these short documentaries are

provided by the USAID/ENGAGE activity, which is funded by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and implemented by Pact in Ukraine.

And the winners are

1. ‘UFO RESCUE MISSION’ by the director Oleksiy Radynski and the activist Oleksandr Burlaka (#savekyivmodernism movement). UFO is a fantastic architectural building in Kiev, threatened by the plan to be “integrated” by a shopping mall…

2. ‘NO STATUS. UKRAINE’ by the director Dmytro Tiazhlov and activist Kateryna Babich (“No Borders” project). Three immigrants waiting for/hoping for asylum in Ukraine, helped by the “No Borders” people

3. ‘SHUT THE FUCK UP!’ by the director Taisiya Kutuzova and the activist Yelizaveta Sokurenko (NGO Human Rights Information Center). A 17 year old young man stands up against the local authorities and their corrupt actions.

4. ‘BEHIND THE KITCHEN DOOR’ by the director Yulia Kochetova-Nabozhniak and the activist Natalya Dorofeyeva (CO “UCO ‘Legalife Ukraine’”). Sex workers. PHOTO from the award ceremony.

http://docudays.ua/eng/2018/news/kino/civil-pitch-winners/

Arunas Matelis – Class with a Master

Confession: I insisted to be the one to talk to Lithuanian Arunas Matelis in the class that the organisers of Docudays in Kiev had set up to celebrate the director and his work for the last 25 years with his short documentaries, his ”Before the Flight Back to the Earth” and the new one, ”Wonderful Losers”. As you can see from the photo he was also in the jury – one of them – of the festival, watching 6 Ukrainian feature documentaries and a short film program.

Insisting… as I have known Matelis since the beginning of the 1990’es where he with Audrius Stonys came to Bornholm to the Balticum Film & TV Festival as young talents impressing us all with their word-less visual poems, a word Matelis used at the class, where around 25 people attended – many more will have the chance to see what we talked about, when Docudays put the recorded talk online.

I put two short films into the program: ”Flight Over Lithuania” that he made with Stonys for an Expo Exhibition in 2000 and ”Ten minutes Before the Flight of Icarus” from 1990, a film that was shot just before the country, the beautiful country described in ”Flight Over…”, became independent.

Arunas Matelis is a man of reflection, a man who – now he does more than when I met him 25 years ago – does not like to talk about his films because words take away from the images, the visuals that he put so much emphasis on. I am in Paris now coming from Kiev this morning and I see with great pleasure that some of his films – as well some made by Audrius Stonys – are shown in the festival I attend, Festival des Films Autour de l’Europe. It is therefore more than appropiate to say that Arunas Matelis is un grand auteur. 

New Top Portraits

After a long time with three male directors, three female directors go to the top of the filmkommentaren.dk:

Maite Alberti, Agnès Varda, Giedre Zickyte.

Maite Alberdi, Chilean director, is known for her warm-hearted films, to be mentioned ”Tea Time” from 2014 and ”The Grown-Ups” from 2016, many times awarded, both of them got the main award at DocsBarcelona. She co-directed in 2016 the short film ”I’m Not from Here”, a gem of a documentary, with, to the right

Giedre Zickyte from Lithuania, who made the beautiful love story ”Master and Tatyana” in 2014, introducing to us the superb photographer Vitas Luckus and his dramatic life in Soviet Lithuania. Before that, in 2011, she had made ”How We Played the Revolution” that goes back to 1984, the beginning of perestroika in the USSR, where the rock group Antis had an impact on the fall of the empire…

Agnès Varda is in the middle, 89 years old master of cinema, who needs no further introduction for her volume of short films, fiction and documentaries, the latest – together with photographer JR – ”Faces, Places”, full of energy and originality.

Docudays – TV and Documentaries

Angelina Kariakina from Hromadske (google it, interesting online channel) was the moderator and she did a good job, keeping the panel engaged:

Olga Zakharova from Media Group Ukraine that includes a big commercial tv channel, Ivan Bukreev from NLO TV channel, also a commercial channel and Kenan Aliyev from the Russian language TV channel (started in 2014) Current Time TV.

The questions for the three dealt with the possibility of matching the documentary film sector and its productions with television. The two Ukrainian channel representatives mentioned what they had done in terms of documentary broadcast, not a lot, but some series and the sentence ”our audience is not interested in documentaries” came back again and again; the audience go to our channel to get away from problems of social and political nature – words to that effect.

Whereas Kenan Aliyev told the audience that his channel buys into 100 documentaries per year, being an alternative to the official Russian tv channels, ”a project of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) in cooperation with the Voice of America” with a budget to be approved by the American Congress. We have to prove that we reach an audience, Aliyev said, being proud to say that the documentaries are more watched by his audience than the news.

Aliyev, based in Prague, has set up shorter documentary shows called ”Unknown Russia” and ”Unknown Ukraine”, and he has a slot called ”Real Cinema”, where Vitaly Manski presents the documentaries coming to the channel. The same Manski is now finishing a film, supported by Current Time TV, called ”Putin’s Witnesses” dealing with how Putin came to power. He showed a clip from the film and on the screen waiting to be shown as well, but there was no time for that, was ”Lida” (PHOTO) by Anna Eborn, bravo, a fine piece of creative documentary. I have met Aliyev several times now, in Riga for the Baltic Sea Docs, in Prague for the East Doc Platform and now here. He is very interested in collaboration with festivals. Good news in times where public broadcasters in Europe are cutting down, playing a minor role in support of documentaries.

docudays.ua/eng/2018/events

Docudays: Looking for Lenin

Up, up, up the slippery street Andriyivskyy Uzviz to the fine Triptych Gallery together with Da’rya Averchenko and Roman Bondarchuk to watch the exhibition ”Looking for Lenin”, Da’rya chose the photo to accompany the text: Gagarin, Stalin and Lenin watching television! And here comes a copy paste of a text from the website of the festival, more to be found via link below:

”Ukraine’s Leninfall is perhaps the most sensational of symbolic purges in the contemporary world, but not the only one. Swiss photojournalist Niels Ackermann and French journalist Sébastien Gobert travelled extensively across Ukraine in the wake of the Revolution of Dignity in search of the fragments of the crumbling Soviet past. Myroslava Hartmond, a contributor to their joint book of the same name, which was published in 2017, and managing director of the Triptych: Global Arts Workshop gallery in Kyiv, reflects on the importance of taking stock of fallen Lenins in the context of this year’s theme of equality. The project is supported by the Swiss Embassy in Ukraine and the Journées francophonie 2018 programme.

Niels Ackermann and Sébastien Gobert’s ‘Looking for Lenin’ is a snapshot of a country in crisis that captures Ukraine at war with its past, its Russian neighbour, and its identity. The series, which reveals the different fates of statues across the breadth of the country, had great success in the global media, became the basis of a book of the same name published in the UK and Switzerland, and has been exhibited in France, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, Turkey, Lebanon. All over the world, Ukrainian Lenin was cited as an example. Because this series resonated with the reassessment of the symbolic vocabulary of cities worldwide – the Rhodes Must Fall campaign in South Africa and the UK, the removal of Confederate monuments in the US, as well as heightened sensitivity to Belgian colonial statues…”

http://docudays.ua/eng/2018/news/docu-info/photo-exhibition/

Warscape Winner Work-in Progress

At Docudays 2017 the winner of the Warscape competition was a film project with Valeriya Treshchova as the director. A film about herself living in Kiev with her father and mother living in Donetsk. In other words, in the war zone. When she pitched the project, she had very little material, first and foremost some skype conversations with her father, who suffered from amnesia. I am writing this in the past as her father passed away a couple of months ago. This is how the director presented the film a year ago:

“This film is a “message about hopelessness”. Hopelessness of war will be shown through the story of my father, whom I knew totally different before this war. Now I learn to show my feelings and to forgive, because ‘tomorrow’ can never occur. The war reminds us about it every second. My dad is trying to regain his life, being trapped into double isolation between his lost memory and new uneasy reality of his hometown”.

I was invited to attend a rough cut screening at the festival the other day together with representatives from the Red Cross, who has supported the film as has the festival, and the teacher of young Treshchova, acclaimed Ukrainian director Sergey Bukovsky. The screening was hosted by Darya Bassel from the festival.

What we saw was very promising. The film, right now with the working title ”Double Trap”, portrays the father in a beautiful way, a charismatic smiling man with a daughter, who goes back home to mum and dad, to a place, where there is reason to be scared. The father enjoys his music, Jethro Tull, John Mayall etc., takes his daughter to his childhood’s school, does the dishes in the kitchen, sits there and gets his pills from his wife, remembers back in time but has no comments to the war going on, which could be the reason for his amnesia. Bukovsky told us about the family archive that could be part of the film as well, bringing back a time where reality was quite different. The ambition is to make a feature documentary.

Look out for this film, representatives for autumn doc festivals.

Last Men in Aleppo..in Kiev

I have just come back from giving an introduction to a screening of “Last Men in Aleppo”, written and directed by Feras Fayyad, produced by Kareem Abeed and Søren Steen Jespersen Larm Film Denmark, co-directed by Steen Johannessen. A screening in Ukraine Cinema in Kiev within the program of the Docudays ua festival. Full house = close to 500 people in the cinema. Most of them young people. The reason for me giving this introduction was that the Danish ambassador could not be present – I did not mind saying some few words about the film that is winning awards all over = meaning, much more important, that it is shown globally. And I passed some words about my personal experience being in Damascus for the DoxBox documentary festival until it had to stop in 2011, alas. The director of the festival, Orwa Nyrabia, is now appointed director of IDFA festival Amsterdam! There IS an audience for documentaries, also in Kiev at the Docudays festival, I have attended three screenings with full houses and one with 300 spectators, Arunas Matelis, “Wonderful Losers”, this afternoon. It’s all very professionally organised. More will follow, and on behalf of the Embassy of Denmark and Danish documentary it’s nice to see not only “Last Men in Aleppo” but also “Distant Barking of Dogs” by Simon Lereng Wilmont, “Lida” by Anna Eborn and “Bobbi Jene” by Elvira Lind.

http://docudays.ua/eng

CPH:DOX 2018/ 12 Days

RAYMOND DEPARDON: 12 DAYS

Wow – Raymond Depardon’s latest film 12 Days made a deep impression. It is simple, powerful, sober and precise.

In France, a citizen who is involuntarily committed to psychiatric treatment has, within 12 days, the right to have his case overlooked by a judge, and it is this meeting between the patient, the mental health system and the system of justice Depardon examines in his documentary.

The film opens up with the camera moving slowly through the empty corridors of the closed ward of a psychiatric hospital ending up in front of the locked door, immediately installing the claustrophobic sense of being deprived of one’s freedom. It sounds like a cliché as I write it, but in the film it’s an important and very powerful scene.

When we are in the small court room with the patient, his or her lawyer and the judge, every case opens up to poignant, universal and fundamental questions of ethical, societal and political order.

No one is being judged or demonized and there are no easy answers, but the imbalance of power within the system is clearly visible.

How do you oppose when authority has decided what is “in your interest”? Are the lines blurred between incarceration and forceful psychiatric commitments? Is the system reacting adequately when there are children involved? Why medicalization and not psychotherapy? What if symptoms of work harassment are mistaken for a psychiatric diagnosis of the individual? Should you have the right to decide whether you want to live or not? These questions are put forward by the psychiatric patients themselves who, in their own words and in a language so different from that of the medical and jurisdictional officials, arguments clearly and rationally.

This is the patients’ opportunity to have their voice heard. The majority (but not all) of the films cases opposes to the medical decision of their forced hospitalization, and they have the right to appeal the verdict of the judge, who is practically always in agreement with the psychiatric expertise. But the judge agrees when one patients states that she won’t appeal because it would be of no use: “That’s exactly it, it would be of no use at all”. “Thank you for your abuse of power” as another patient bluntly puts it.

Besides the corridor scenes (a returning theme) and the court room sessions, 12 Days is composed of a number of carefully framed images of the surroundings of the hospital, grey everyday life, that works as tableaux of society as we have organized it.

A truly cinematic examination of a crucial ethical subject by a master eye, 6 pens without hesitation.