Finally I get the chance to bring to you a still from one of my favourite scenes in ”The Other Side of Everything” by Mila Turajlic: Srbijanka Turajlic, the mother of the director and the protagonist, is polishing the silver in the flat, where it all takes place. It warms my heart that the Serbian film, winner of main award at IDFA, yesterday got three (!) awards at ZagrebDox: Best film in regional competition, the Fipresci Award and the Audience Award + eight screenings at the festival. Let me give you the motivation texts from the two first ones, two different ways to approach the film it is:

A film that fluently brings together a narrative of extreme opposites, combining the ordinary and the epic. Intimate scenes of a mother-daughter relationship play out against the backdrop of a turbulent history, in a country that continues to change. We have admired the clear structure of a complex narrative, as well as the sensibility to capture great documentary moments…

And the second one: An honourable woman who doesn’t think she needs to be honoured. An apartment that was never intended to be an apartment but has existed like that for over seventy years. Pragmatism that became a passion upon the political stage. The film manages not only to unite, but to reveal and even harmonise…

The Grand Jury Award for Best film in international competition went to – no surprise – Talal Derki for his ”Of Fathers and Sons”, that was also given the ”Movies that Matter Award”. The first lines of my review when I watched it the first time went like this:

It stands out. I can not avoid superlatives. And I can not express in words, in a language that is not mine, how I feel after having seen Talal Derki’s new film. Or how I felt while watching it. It is a film that hurts and makes you depressed, sad is too weak a word; it goes to the heart and to the stomach; two boys and a father who loses a foot – it’s all destined by the prophet, he says – the upbringing to Jihad, to kill the enemy,..

Both films are on my list of Best Films 2017 as are those which were given Best film of a young author up to 35 years of age, Polish Marta Prus ”Over the Limit” and the ”My Generation Award” that went to ”Human Flow” – the ”My” refers to that this award is given by the founder and director of ZagrebDox, Nenad Puhovski, who motivates the award like this:

(The film) is not only a monumental portrayal of one of the major crises of our times, but also a dramatic yet personal extension of Ai Weiwei’s exceptional artistic work, and, last but surely not least, also a significant contribution to activities in the field of promotion of human rights.

Many more awards and special mentions, see link below:  

Links to The Other Side of Everything

http://www.filmkommentaren.dk/blog/blogpost/4096/

http://www.filmkommentaren.dk/blog/blogpost/4090/

Link to Of Fathers and Sons

http://www.filmkommentaren.dk/blog/blogpost/4094/

Link to Best Documentaries of 2017

http://www.filmkommentaren.dk/blog/blogpost/4121/

Link to full list of awards at ZagrebDox

http://zagrebdox.net/en/2018/news/14th_zagrebdox_awards 

Every year the festival in Kiev picks a theme that is reflected upon in the festival programme – and at the opening of the festival that has always been a fest in itself… This year – according to the organisation committe, as it is put – ”the topic of equality is related to many social problems and challenges. Human dignity, freedom, justice and equality are the values which underpin the concept of human rights.

Meanwhile, the value of equality is accepted by only a half of the population of Ukraine. So equality requires action by human rights advocates. This year, we would like to talk about what equality is and how we can profess it in our everyday lives. What is it, anyway — an abstract, intellectual concept or a practical value, which can help us achieve respect, harmony and security?…

This statement is visually interpreted in a festival symbol, see photo:

…This time, our festival poster is a labyrinth. An optical illusion made of high-rise buildings with attached balconies, omnipresent parking lots and squads of armed men in black — they appeared on our streets recently, it is unclear whom they report to, and they carry their own special ideas about equality.

It is a metaphor of insanity which we are descending into, because we do not stick to the value of equality. First of all, equality before the law. We resist changes and modernisation. We paint an arch in rainbow colors and then, scared of who-knows-what, repaint it back in gray. We worship makeshift structures with crosses, which used to be tents, but year by year they petrify and expand in length and width. We worship an iron woman with a sword. As a symbol of simple female happiness.

The concept of equality is multifaceted, and we invite you to the festival journey to look, compare, discuss, and try to understand how to build life, city, our country, how to search for an exit from the labyrinth…

http://docudays.org.ua/eng/

… is a festival that I like a lot – because of its atmosphere, its dedication to what is going on in the world, its always innovative set-up, and critical approach to its own country and its social and political conditions – and because of the people, who stand behind the festival with a good nose for good films. I will be there again this year: March 23 is the opening.

The content of this year’s film programme has been revealed step by step. For the first time there will be an Ukrainian feature length competition, DOCU/UKRAINE, with 6 films, there is a DOCU/WORLD with 12 films and a DOCU/SHORT with 12 films as well. Not to forget, not in competition as the sections mentioned, DOCU/BEST with 5 films ”about struggle”. About that the following great text is taken from the website of the festival, written by one of the brave women of the festival, Viktoriya Leshchenko:

”Birth, struggle, death, rebirth are the climax points for each human being who resists, who fights, who never gives up, who is ready to smile in the face of the predetermined hopelessness. The media world whispers: we are masters of our own fate, and as soon as you start to believe in success, the hard shell of circumstances will give in under the pressure of social media calls. Let us now dive into a less popular truth about how courage is the only life measure. Kierkegaardian courage, with which every protagonist of these films accepts their challenges every moment, deserves admiring attention. This year, let us focus our eyes on the Philippines, Ukraine, Congo, Aleppo and Tel Aviv, on the places where people constantly meet challenges regardless of their sex, gender, status and the documentary filmmaker who records their difficult struggle.”

The five are ”Delta” (PHOTO) by Oleksandr Techynskyi, ”Bobbi Jene” by Elvira Lind, ”Makala” by Emmanuel Gras, ”Last Men in Aleppo” by Feras Fayyad and ”Motherland” by Ramona S. Diaz. More on

http://docudays.org.ua/eng/

From wintercold Copenhagen it looks good – the documentary community performs well in many corners of the world. Facebook and newspapers bring back news from the Berlinale, where a hybrid doc/fiction, Romanian “Touch me Not” takes the Golden Bear, ZagrebDox has opened with Marta Prus fine “Over the Limit“, veteran festival in Paris Cinema du Réel has announced its program (we will get back to that), here on www.filmkommentaren.dk we have covered intensely the Docs&Talks festival, soon Copenhagen will be filled with CPH:DOX documentaries, the Oscars are close, the Americans – shame on you – will not let in the Syrian producer and a main protagonist from “Last Men in Aleppo“…

Let’s stop for a moment in Lithuania that celebrates its 100 year right now, where dear friend Arunas Matelis has his “Wonderful Losers-a Different World” running in cinemas. I was in contact with him and he told me that the film has an attendance of 9000 viewers, quite a lot for a documentary and quite a lot for a small country – he hopes, he says to me in a mail from Dublin, where the film has been shown these days, to reach around 12000. The film has found its place in commercial cinemas and Matelis is a master in promotion. Look at the photo of one of his protagonists, Danish Chris Anker Sørensen, who is carried around in the streets of Vilnius.

Arunas Matelis will at the end of this month be in Kiev for the DocuDays festival that starts March 23 and includes a retrospective of Matelis film – “Before the Flight Back the Earth“, the bicycle films and a collection of his great short films. More about the festival above.

REVIEW WRITTEN BY GEORG ZELLER

„Democracy. Ever heard about?“ asks the guide to the visitors of the German parliament. They have. But through little role plays and corny jokes, they are taught in a more practical way how the MP’s job influences the German society.

And the viewer of Marie Wilke’s AGGREGAT – shown at the Berlinale’s Forum section – learns how democracy works in times of political disenchantment and the reign of populism. According to her documentary, the key is the intense work of single individuals who don’t get tired of doing little steps on an everyday basis.

Wilke’s sober observations show politicians participating in workshops where they learn to reply to racist arguments, journalists who elaborate how to reach their target with the message they want to propagate,  members of regional parliaments trying to create personal contact to the population, or the political institutions opening their doors to the public in order to counterargument populist convictions.

Similar to her earlier work „Staatsdiener“ (Civil Servants, 2015), Wilke doesn’t add any kind of direct comment to her mostly rigid observational images. Strong and long black frames lead from one scene or situation to another and Alexander Gheorghiu’s camera often leaves important elements of the scene deliberately outside the frame, the viewer understands it anyway. With this stylistic approach, there is some strong resemblance to the works of one of Wilke’s teachers, Harun Farocki. But differently from many of his films, she doesn’t present her protagonists as small cogs in the machine of capitalism, but actually underlines their pro-active role in the shaping of society.  And doing so, the film even touches the viewer in a strong emotional way: leading from desperation when facing nationalist masses shouting foamy slogans, to some sort of hope, for example when a politician with Senegalese roots convinces a journalist, that being German and being member of a leading political party, he doesn’t identify himself as a minority.

Germany, 2018, 92 mins.

ZANBO ZHANG: THE ROAD

It worked very well: The screening of the Chinese film followed by a talk with a good panel and an interested audience. There was full house in the cinema last night at Cinemateket in Copenhagen for the opening of the festival, that continues in the coming days.

For three years the director had followed the construction of a highway in the Hunan province – a highway that was opened in 2013. As one of the panelists, third from right on the photo, Yang Jiang, who works at DIIS (Danish Institute for International Studies) said, ”it’s a thriller and a dark comedy”, a very precise characterisation of a film that puts its focus on the people involved in the building; those who had to move from their house – the locals – those who work their – the laborers – and those who fight to get recompensation for their lost work because of assaults from hired gangsters – the fighters. The locals, the laborers, the fighters, this is how the film is chaptered, a film that has many layers and many protagonists. Mr. Meng is the man from the

construction company, who is the one who promises and promises the workers that they will be paid, and there is grandma Ou and her son, who have to move… and many, many others.

The construction company is to be supervised by the local communist party members, who are the ones to exercise the government’s plan to make a new infrastructure for China. Yang Jiang said that what we saw is just one case in the strategy for a new infrastructure and it has actually helped the Chinese economy. That has experienced a boom, said another panelist, Luke Patey, also from DIIS (outside the photo) but has not made the Chinese population in general more happy; research has proved that.

There were questions from the audience to the film and luckily Steen Johannesen, Danish editor on the film, was present. He could answer some film-related questions. One was of course why the people in the film talked so openly about corruption; there are several scenes where you actually see envelopes go from the hands of the construction company representatives to the local party members. Johannesen’s answer to that was very simple: They are open-mouthed as they know that the film will never be shown to a bigger audience! Professor Jun Liu from Copenhagen University talked about the ”red envelope” tradition in China, which is not only meant for bribing but is also a common family tradition, where older people – as an example – give the young ones money. But, he stressed, it is never revealed how much money there is in the envelope!

For me the film is about inequality Luke Patey said as an answer to a question from a man in the audience, who did not really experience, what the film wanted to say. Johannesen said that the main theme for him was the corruption. One could add the total disrespect shown in the film towards the environment or to the graves, to history that have to go because the highway, the catastrophic working conditions, the lack of organisation of the workers, the late payments and compensations, the mafia methods etc. etc.

When you create a concept like Docs & Talks you have to be sure that the film can create debate and make an audience curious to know more. This opening event presented a perfect match thanks to a good film and a good panel.

The Danish co-producer of the film is Plus Pictures/ Mette Heide, the film has been supported by DFI (Danish Film Institute), DR, SVT, IKON from Holland and others and has had a strong festival carreer.

Photo: From left Jun Liu, Yang Jiang, moderator journalist Lene Winther and editor Steen Johannesen.

China, Denmark, 2015, 95 mins.

http://www.theroad2015.com/