DocsBarcelona 2018: Lovely film by Claudia Abend and Adriana Loeff, who in promotion of the film use this phrase as a logline, so precise it is: What happens when Life lasts longer than Love?

Take a look at the photo, Aldo and Gabriella in the airport of Montevideo waving goodbye to their daughter Leila, who lives in another country – as do all their children. The old couple do not live together any longer, they separated after 48 years, spending a lot of their active time in Venezuela, where Aldo was working in the construction business, and where the family life was pure happiness as shown in the huge amount of great family film footage that are shown skillfully.

But the film starts in present time. Old people enter a theatre stage to sit in a

chair and talk about their lives. Aldo is one of them. He does not hide that he is fond of himself, “I’m very charming”, “I will be good for the film”, he has Italian roots, he often speaks in Italian, as does his wife Gabriella. They were a remarkable couple, she a beauty, he very handsome – but something went wrong, when Aldo reached his fifties. He started to meet other women and the marriage was not as glorious as it used to be, of course. Gabriella tells that story and why she decided that they should separate before “it became hatred”. And she says, and you sense the pain she must have had, that she does always remember the bad moments and not the happy ones.

The film makes its focus on the couple Aldo and Gabriella, the other old people play the important role as a kind of Greek choir. With impressive faces that reminds us that there is nothing wrong with talking faces.

And there he is, Aldo, the old man, who you in the beginning of the film take a distance to, he is just too much, but gradually you start to have great empathy for him, who is alone and who has his good moments, when he meets Gabriella, when the kids visit or when he invites her out to a restaurant, buys roses, hope for her appreciation. He reflects so fine on his situation, with humour and self-irony.

What he does appreciate is the visit of the two female filmmakers. There is a wonderful scene, where he asks them, when the film will be finished, the answer is “in one and a half year or two” – do you know the Italian neo-realistic film directors, he says, they finished their films in 3-4 years! He is disappointed that no-one cares about the sculptures that he does. He goes to the gym, he goes to a café, sits there with his computer, as he does at home, where he closes his eyes and listens to Beethoven. Dreaming about, remembering what was once in his loneliness.

The directors have found brilliant cinematic solutions to portray old age and love that was and is no longer. It is a film for all of us – with a message, nurture your relationship, keep Love alive write

… a man who is 70 with a 65 year old wife, we have been together for only 27 years!

Uruguay, 2017, 86 mins.

http://www.laflordelavida-film.com/

www.docsbarcelona.com

… and it did so with a full cinema of spectators, who expressed their enthusiasm over the sweet film about the sweeet and charismatic man on the screen and in the cinema, where he got standing ovations. The film is a very entertaining portrait of a man, who is ill and often has to get oxygen to go on as he has a dream… from the catalogue:

“Petitet is a Catalan gypsy pursuing a dream. Former musician and son of one of the “palmeros” (hand-clapping performers) of the mythical Peret, he suffers from a rare chronic disease that causes acute muscle weakness. In his fifties, he wants to fulfil the promise he made to his mother before she died: to take Catalan rumba to the stage of a great theatre. The dream begins to

come true when a band of gypsy musicians (talented but undisciplined) gather together to try and play alongside a great symphony orchestra at the Gran Teatre del Liceu!”.

DocsBarcelona is an international documentary film festival but the opening night was performed totally in Catalan language with a tribute to the Catalan rumba and a man, who is living from being a scrap collector, whose heart beats for music. 

The international part of the festival takes off today with two films at the CCCB Theatre: “Wonderful Losers” by Arunas Matelis and “Experimento Stuka” by Pepe Andreu and Rafa Molés. The film by Lithuanian Matelis – http://www.filmkommentaren.dk/blog/blogpost/4048/ – will be shown not only in Barcelona but also around Catalunya.

http://www.docsbarcelona.com

… were many and you can read whoi got what via the link below. My positive comments are that the winners also here were made by directors from or dealing with Eastern and Central Europe. Serbian Mila Turajlic’s “The Other Side of Everything”, winner at IDFA 2017, was a candidate for a prize, the Romanian “Licu” by Ana Dumitrescu, who won at DOKLeipzig 2017, was in the Romanian guest country section – and the main winners were Danish Simon Lereng Wilmont with “The Distant Barking of Dogs”, shot in Eastern Ukraine, followed by Polish Marta Prus with “Over the Limit” and Hungarian Bernadett Tuza-Ritter with her “A Woman Captured”. I have in a previous post praised the winner of the best documentary from Caucasus, “Transparent World” by Vakhtang Guntsev-Gabashvili, Georgian director, who also works in Germany.

Let me stay a while with Bernadett Tuza-Ritter and Marta Prus, who were at the festival and met the audience answering questions that they have probably heard 20 times before. Bravo for coming, taking your time to make, what a festival should be: the meeting between the film, the filmmaker and the audience. And thanks for your ethical dedication to filmmaking. Both are still in contact with their protagonists – Edith from “A Woman Captured” is living with her daughter and grand daughter, working like hell to make ends meet, Margarita from “Over the Limit” has given up the sport, wants to settle down and have a child with her husband…

For me it was especially interesting to hear Marta Prus talk about her five-years-in-the-making of a film, where the first couple of years were spent to get permission to film from the protagonists, the three women, Margarita and her coaches Amina and Irina. She got close with her brilliant cameraman Adam Suzin, ended with 210 hours of material and stayed in the editing room in one year – and took part in several European training programs. “Over the Limit” is the feature length debut of Marta Prus, who before made “Talk to Me” http://www.filmkommentaren.dk/blog/blogpost/3545/ a fine work, where she showed her big talent, that will bring her to fiction film, she told us, being a true control freak, as she formulated it at the 45 minutes long Q&A.

http://www.cinedoc-tbilisi.com/?page_id=7022

“Everyone knows that I have three Motherlands. I was born in Georgia, worked in Ukraine and I’m going to die in Armenia.” A quote from an interview with Sergei Parajanov, this master of Cinema, whose life – with interviews, clips from some of his film, archive footage – is described in the Current Time TV production directed by Harry Tamrazian, feature length, informative, a good tv-documentary.

For me it was a dear re-visit of the world of Parajanov. That I wrote about five years ago when I was in Jerevan and visited the museum that is set up in his name – http://www.filmkommentaren.dk/blog/blogpost/2427/

The museum is not directly part of the film but several of his collages are in the film that competently takes you through his life, his imprisonment because of the Soviet regime accusing him of homosexuality – it was mentioned that he had an affair with a KGB-officer! The best parts, however, are the citations from his films, were you can see how totally visually he was thinking, in many ways revolutionising the cinema language. “Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors” and “The Colour of Pomegranates” – wow – the latter from 1968 still stands out. 1968 was not “only” political rebellion and the invasion of Prague, it was also the year where outstanding cinema was made. There is wonderful archive footage in the film about Parajanov, his voice is being heard, his beautiful relationship to Tarkovsky is explained as is his horrible fate and early death 66 years old suffering from years in labour camps.

After the screening here in Tbilisi I asked younger non-Georgian professionals about Parajanov – they had never heard about him! Now they have the chance to be introduced into his world!

The festival here in Tbilisi has a country focus on Romania. One of the films selected is “Cinema, Mon Amour” by Alexandru Belc from 2015 that has gone around to festivals like IDFA and DOKLeipzig, a Romanian-Czech coproduction, an HBO production, a very charming film because of its main character Victor Purice, whose life has been dedicated to keeping Dacia Panoramic Cinema, a man who suffers because there is very little audience coming to his films, but also a man who fights to improve the cinema facilities together with his two female colleagues. But still it is cold in the cinema during winter; the three brings hot tea and blankets to the few who come.

There are memorable moments in this film like when Purice enthusiastically plays air guitar to remind himself that he still is young!

After the screening Boglarka Nagy, who is the programmer of the Elvira Popesco cinema in Bucharest, which is part of the Institut Francais, told the audience what it means to run an arthouse cinema in a country, where the amount of cinemas have decreased dramatically. Boglarka won the Best Programming Award at the Europe Cinemas Award ceremony 2017.

On the photo you see Boglarka and me at a festival reception in restaurant Dariani, a fine place. I talked to the owner, who told me that Dariani was an artist and a muse for many painters, a kind of Georgian Coco Chanel.

http://www.cinedoc-tbilisi.com/