Sarajevo Film Festival Opens With Kaurismäki

Look at the photo from last night’s opening of the 23rd festival in Sarajevo. Surrounded by appartment buildings, a huge screen, a red carpet and how many spectators – thousands? – to watch Aki Kaurismäki’s ”On the Other Side of Hope”, the right choice for an opening film: It is an excellent piece of work by the Finnish auteur, it is about the most pressing issue in today’s Europe, how do we welcome refugees, who want to live in our countries – in a superb mix of humour and seriousness, and for someone like me from the North: this is also Finland as it used to be, flavoured by wonderful music performances. How lucky we northeners are to have original directors as Roy Andersson and Aki Kaurismäki. Enjoyed to be there with people smoking on our row, with a technical fault that gave a break, with a brilliant atmosphere. Open air screening. My wife and I were back at the hotel at midnight.

Before that – with good friend from Bolzano Georg Zeller and his girl friend Azra Frchko, raised in Sarajevo – we had meze at a restaurant facing the National Library, destroyed in 1992 and now restored to be the Town Hall of Sarajevo, a beauty, currently with an exhibition of paintings by local master Mersad Berber.

The bridge to the theme ”Dealing with the Past”, a focus of the festival.

www.sff.ba

Sarajevo FF, Redgrave & Dealing With the Past

Arrived in Sarajevo this afternoon surviving a pretty windy flight from Vienna – I’ll never get used to flight turbulence! And it feels provocative when several people around me has fallen asleep ignoring the most bumpy moments.

But wonderful to be in Sarajevo again invited by Masa Markovic, industry coordinator and responsible for the programme Dealing with the Past”, that includes a well deserved (and so obvious) Tribute to Joshua Oppenheimer, who has, if anyone, dealt with the past in his two films ”Act of Killing” and ”The Look of Silence”. Happy also to see that Danish Lars Feldballe-Petersen’s fine ”The Unforgiven” (photo) is included as is Bosnian ”Restless Dreams” by Muris Beglerovic. I will get back to the exciting initiative ”Dealing with the Past” later.

One who is also dealing with the past is Vanessa Redgrave, who was meant to come to Sarajevo – with me as the one asking some questions after her debut as a film director with ”Sea Sorrow” – but cancelled. I had seen her film or maybe it is better to say her visual statement on the situation for the refugees. She makes a personal journey back to her childhood during WW2, she interviews Lord Dubs, a brilliant man who came to England as a refugee with the Kindertransport and she and he make parallels to the refugee children of today, who come without parents to end up in the Calais ”jungle”, that Dubs and Redgrave have visited. She talks about the Human Rights Declaration that was presented by Elinor Roosevelt in 1948, about the Geneva Convention, about the declaration for rights of children. Redgrave is passionate, but not a filmmaker, and she also includes Shahespeare in her statement for humanity.

www.sff.ba

Message2Man Selection

The annual international film festival of documentary, short, animated and experimental films “Message to Man”, which will be held from September 15 to 22, 2017 in St. Petersburg for the 27th time, has announced the competition programs.

We (Allan Berg and I) have seen five of the ten films in the full-length international competition. About “A Modern Man” wrote Allan (in Danish, here a clip, shortened, translated by me): Maybe she (Eva Mulvad, director) wants to build a new modern film style, where the characteristic is, that the film – freed from the literary progressive narration, and freed as well from the journalistic investigative drama – functions on old cinematographic conditions by putting scene by scene next to each other… Only Connect as said English director Lindsay Anderson

“Cameraperson”  by Kirsten Johnson is also competing, one of the

most acknowledged documentaries of the last year, no surprise it is here, happily surprised on the other side I am to see Georgian Mariam Chacia with her “Listen to the Silence” (Photo)  – after the screening in Leipzig I wrote: …an impressive work by the director and her producer Nik Voigt. It has a wonderful 9 year old boy as the main character. He is deaf, lives in a public school with other deaf kids, that is his world, and this is where his parents come to see him for a very short time before they want to go home again…

And ”Stranger in Paradise” is there, by Guido Hendrikx, got these words on this site: …A chamber play, original and intelligent, unfolds according to (that’s where the documentary part comes in) Dutch and European rules for getting an asylum…

And finally one I have seen but not written about, a graduation film from Zelig film school, by Cecilia Bozza Wolf, ”Vergot” , a strong family and identity drama with two brothers as leading characters.

More information about selected films in the competition categories, check

http://message2man.com/en/ 

Rati Oneli: City of the Sun

One more good example from the wave of the new, well deserved, praised Georgian documentaries that offer an artistically formed interpretation of life and people in the country in the Caucacus. This time the location is Chiatura, a dying city that used to live from its mining industry. It is now falling apart, a future is difficult to see – and yet the population tries to find ways out of the misery.

A miner goes to perform in local amateur theatre, when he is not underground. A music teacher – apart from when he is teaching and performing local songs, and some he has composed himself – hammers to destroy abandoned buildings to set free metal that he can sell. Thirdly two young women run to stay fit.

These are the characters in a film that makes them represent the society falling apart. Their stories are intertwined and you follow

them into sequences: the miner in the theatre, the teacher at rehearsal lessons etc. But the ambition of the director goes beyond the character description, he wants to create an elegiac atmosphere in his narrative construction. He is in and out of buildings, he is up – many drone shots – and down on ground and underground. He plays with light and shade, he puts the characters (especially the miner) in positions, where we as viewers are invited to be with them, to interpret the sad life situation they and the city is in.

It feels too much sometimes, there is a bit of cinematic overkill and a pretty schematic montage, where you don’t really get close to the characters – expect for a longer sequence towards the end where the music teacher comes to what used to be ”Ministry of Communications”, where a party is being held, where the guests dance, where he, the music teacher sings ”I long for you, for you my magnolia”, and his own composition. And there he is afterwards, alone, eating the remains from the table. Here there is a sense of true presence contrary to scenes, which are too much ”did you get it viewer”, like the three miners underground toasting the greyness of the city and their life, and the scene at the end where you follow a man from behind his back walking to see the demolition of a concrete building.

The impressive film is in competition in Sarajevo this coming week.

Georgia, 104 mins.

http://www.sff.ba/ 

Jude Ratnam: Demons in Paradise/ 2

The film by Jude Ratnam had its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival. I had seen it but promised not to write a review before the festival. I have now returned to the film, which made and makes a strong impression on me. Why? This is what I will try to find out with the following text.

It is always difficult to find your own tone in a documentary. To create an atmosphere, a space for the viewer where he/she can be and stay, caught by the strength of a story. Ratnam succeeds – because he uses the cinematic language in a brilliant way. There is a rythm, fine cinematography and a commentary, where Ratnam in first person expresses his feelings bringing back the horrible memories he and his family have ”etched deeply in my (their, ed.) mind”. He says so when he recalls how and when he and his parents were fleeing the capital in Sri Lanka, Colombo – he being 5 years old – in July 1983, when the war started, that suppressed the tamil population, that fled to the North; a war that took the country into terrible violence until peace was made in 2009.

It is his story, with the train going North as the metaphor, the timeline that comes back again and again. The scoop for the film is that Ratnam gets his Uncle back from Canada and into the film. He was one of the freedom fighters, who was not with the Tamil Tigers but with TELO, one of 16 militant groups against the Sinhalese. With him the film goes back in time. He goes to the village where he lived, is being recognised by Sinhalese citizens, who were hiding tamils. He goes to his friend Andrew, who says that they were fighting for a socialist revolution – contrary to what the Tigers were standing for. There are many touching moments with Manoranjan, the Uncle, who is the character through whom terrible internal fights between the groups are revealed, including a massacre on members of TELO (Tamil Eelam Liberation Organization) by the Tigers.

How did our hopes for an independent state, The Tamil Eelam, turn into such cruelty? I actually at the end wanted the Tamils to lose the war against the Sinhalese government, says Ratnam at one point with reference to these internal Tamil fights, which are talked about  by not only him and the Uncle but also other Tamil fighters, who walk roads where kid were burnt alive with tyres around their bodies.

At one point you see the Uncle cutting rails into pieces as it has been done to remove the memory of horror – ”the rails that saved my life”, as Ratnam puts it. ”Be quiet, speak not in tamil language”, Ratnam’s mother told him. Today Ratnam’s son has been given a Tamil name, Nethran. Is it over? Is there a reconciliation process? Could that be the next film by Ratnam? Will he stay with themes from his country like his mentor Cambodian Rithy Panh has done?

Below you will find a Youtube link to a half hour interview with Ratnam from the Doc Day in Cannes this year.

http://www.upsidedistribution.com/flyer/upside1466_DiP_flyer.pdf

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y3u5wzYsAlk

Niewiera/Rosolowski: The Prince and the Dybbuk

At the Krakow Film Festival I saw convincing clips from a film that I had heard about/seen pitched for a couple of years – and wrote this:

… If I was a festival programmer (and I am for Magnificent7 Belgrade and DocsBarcelona) I would keep an eye on…:  Elwira Niewiera and Piotr Rosolowski, who made ”Domino Effect”, are working on ”The Prince and The Dybbuk”, which is announced to be ready this September. It is a fascinating story about Michal Waszynski, ”the son of a poor Jewish blacksmith from Ukraine, died in Madrid as Prince MW, Hollywood producer and exiled Polish aristocrat. The producer Malgorzata Zacharko showed wonderful material, including an archive clip where the Prince is smoking a cigarette in his palazzo in Rome. He could have played in a Visconti film with that appearance…

It was taken for premiere at the Venice International Film Festival, in the VENICE CLASSICS – Documentary on Cinema competition section.

Kasia Wilk brought the good news on Polish Docs, link below. A small quote outlines the film: “The Prince and the Dybbuk” is a cinematic journey on the trail of Michał Waszyński, filmmaker and human chameleon, who in flight from the spirit of intolerance continually changed his identity, rejecting his Jewish origins and hiding homosexuality.

Photo: Waszynski with Sophia Loren.

http://polishdocs.pl/en/news/3628/the_prince_and_the_dybbuk_at_the_venice_international_film_festival

Loznitsa and Dostoyevsky

One more Odessa-story of quite a different flavour. Vassilis Economou has for Cineuropa interviewed Sergei Loznitsa, whose fiction film, ”A Gentle Creature”, was shown at the festival. As always it is interesting to listen to the director, whose documentary ”Austerlitz” has travelled the world. Read the whole interview, link below, here is a clip:

Cineuropa: A Gentle Creature is loosely based on the short story of the same name by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Do you think that he still remains an inspiration for current events?


Sergei Loznitsa: I believe that nothing much has actually changed in Russia since Dostoyevsky wrote his story. Dostoyevsky was a prophetic author. He predicted the horror that arrived in Russia soon after. In The Demons, one of his most prophetic novels, he describes a very particular type of human being – immoral, very devious and dishonest. They appeared in

Russia at the turn of the century; they multiplied massively and at a certain point took over the country. Dostoyevsky depicted this atmosphere that generates the “demons” and encourages this type of devious behaviour. I was inspired by this concept introduced by Dostoyevsky, and I used it as a starting point for my film.

Are we still facing the same demons? 
If we compare the Dostoyevskian era to our contemporary situation, I feel that we are in a worse position now. In a way, this is quite logical if we consider the millions of people who have perished in this country over the past 100 years. Those who were sacrificed certainly represented a different spectrum of the human character, totally opposite to the one of the demons. The negative selection in the population led to devastating results…

Looking forward to seeing the film and to the upcoming documentaries by the super-productive director: I’m working on two documentaries. The first, entitled Victory Day, was shot in Treptower Park in Berlin on 8 and 9 May; it’s a place that ex-Soviet citizens, now German residents, visit to commemorate the victory in WWII. The second is a montage of archive footage of the show trials that were held in Moscow during the Stalinist period. The film will be called The Trial. I’m also preparing a new feature film, and I just came from a location-scouting trip in Central Ukraine.

http://cineuropa.org/it.aspx?t=interview&l=en&did=332151

Dixie Land Wins in Odessa

Had to bring this red-carpet-photo of producer Ilona Bicevska with protagonist Polina with the most amazing hat, and her parents, who are also in the film, the winning film, Dixie Land, Best Ukranian film, at the Odessa International Film Festival some days ago.

A well deserved award to those on the photo, and to the makers, Roman Bondarchuk and Darya Averchenko.

I attended the Ukranian premiere in Kiev at the festival DocuDays earlier this year and wrote:

…The film about jazz music performed by kids in a band in Kherson Ukraine, led by their old teacher, who founded the band just after WW2, picking up homeless children to give them the chance to develop their skills, gave them a life, simply – is a warm, so well made – Bondarchuk has indeed a documentary-eye – interpretation of a happy childhood, where kids have a good time developing their creative skills. As it is written in the catalogue: We all live once in Dixie Land – the country where politics, money and death do not exist at all…

The film will late August be at the MakeDox Festival in Skopje, Macedonia – and hopefully at many other festivals to come.

DocAlliance: Hybrid Films

Look at this list of films presented by DocAlliance:

Life in Denmark (Jørgen Leth)

Cooking History (Peter Kerekes)

Blind Loves (Juraj Lehotský)

Alda (Viera Čakányová)

Ex Press (Jet Leyco)

The Wolf from Royal Wineyard Street (Jan Němec)

The Perfect Human (Jørgen Leth)

Love from Above (Petr Marek)

I can warmly recommend you to take a film historical look at the two films by Jørgen Leth, “Life in Denmark” (1972) and “The Perfect Human” (1967), both of them have been inspiring new generations of filmmakers in Denmark, the latter being the starting point for the film he made with Lars von Trier, “Five Obstructions” (2003). Jørgen Leth celebrated his 80year birthday this year, he is still going strong, working on a biographical film, working title “I Walk”.

“Blind Loves” (2008) by Juraj Lehotsky with Marko Skop as the producer was one of my favourites, when I was working with the training program Ex Oriente being able to see how the director found solutions that quite rightly can be called hybrid. As can for sure another masterpiece, “Cooking History” (photo) (2009) by Peter Kerekes.

The rest of the package I have not seen – yet. Here is the intro made by the DocAlliance, that again shows generosity and sense of artistic quality:

“Is it possible for a documentary film to capture reality in a way that is undistorted? Is it possible to truly see reality reflected in a documentary film? Where is the boundary between documentary and fiction? In our selection focused on hybrid films, we examine the borders of fictional worlds.”

Available until August 6.

https://dafilms.com/program/633-hybrid-films

Khaled Jarrar: Displaced in Heaven

Found this on FB the other day, posted by Palestinian multi-artist Khaled Jarrar: Happy to announce that the film that I’m working on since two years ‘Displaced in Heaven’ is nominated to The Film Prize of the Robert Bosch Stiftung.

And I am happy to say that I have read the script of Palestinian Jarrar, whose work as an artist and filmmaker I have been trying to follow since I met him in 2011 at the Storydoc workshop in Greece. Trying to… not easy, since his activist work has brought him to galleries and exhibitions and streets in for example Paris. His film “Infiltrators” has gone all over the world. I wrote these words about it on this site: …a film that with its non-aggressive approach gives the viewer a unique account of the climbers, big and small, old and young, who go to Jerusalem illegally. To work first of all. It uses a non-linear structure, it has many angles and stylistical elements that wonderfully surprise you as a viewer, who is used to strong films in all genres, aggressive against the Israeli occupation. You have sometimes a clear laugh when you see the different ways of climbing, sometimes you laugh because of the absurdity, and sometimes you are moved and feel angry: this can not be true, this is not civilisation 2012! But it is.”

Under the title “A Dinner that Never Came” Khaled Jarrar has written a kind of background treatment for the film “Displaced in Heaven”. It is long time ago a story has moved me so much. Here is a long quote and a link to where you can be acquainted with it:

I wrote most of this story from a refugee shelter in Wessel, Dortmund, in mid-September 2015. The story is largely put together from notes and images gathered along the course of a journey I undertook, using false papers, from Mytilene, Lesbos, through to Athens, and then across Macedonia, Serbia, Hungary, and Southern Europe. I travelled with Nadira and her family, all of whom carry Syrian-issued documents for Palestinian refugees, who were fleeing civil war in Syria. I came to know the family well from the time I met them in Mytilene, on September 7, 2015, but their journey as refugees had started when they escaped from the Yarmouk Refugee Camp in Damascus and made their way to Istanbul in 2014. For that journey they carried Ahamed Abu Zamel who later died in Istanbul, from an injury to his head. Upon reaching Istanbul, after an unsuccessful first attempt to cross the sea in the so-called “death boats” six weeks before, they succeeded in reaching Mytilene.

When I met them, the family consisted of Nadira, a seventy-five-year-old wheelchair-bound woman; her daughter Mona, a school teacher; Nadira’s son-in-law Yousif; and Nadira’s son Mohie, a university professor. Mohie had left his wife Reeman, his eighteen-month old son Kinan, and his new born baby Jasmin in Istanbul because he was afraid to risk their lives after the unsuccessful first attempt to cross the sea. With tears in his eyes, he left his family in the hope that he could bring them to Germany if he managed to make it.

In 1948, Nadira Hawwari, then nine years old, was forced like hundreds of thousands of Palestinians to leave her hometown, Nazareth, in Galilee, and flee to Syria where she settled in the Yarmouk Refugee Camp in Damascus. Nadira lived her life in this overcrowded place, started a family, worked, and somehow made a home in this permanent temporary state of being a Palestinian refugee. In 2014, like millions of people living in Syria, she was forced to leave home again as a result of the unremitting violence in Damascus. Fearing for your life wherever you go — Daesh, the Al-Nusra Front, Bashar Assad’s brutal forces, everyone hell-bent on making life unliveable — this was Nadira’s life before she left. So she was forced to leave again, to leave what had become home, again, and journey towards Istanbul….

Photo: Mona, Yousif, and Mohiee pushing his mother Nadira to cross the border to Serbia

http://www.theabsenceofpaths.com/commission/a-dinner-that-never-came-1