Ai Weiwei: Human Flow

Realscreen, the trade magazine, revealed yesterday information about some of the distribution aspects of the upcoming film by Ai WeiWei, ”Human Flow”, that I am sure I am not the only one who is looking forward to see. I have picked some lines from the article: 

”Filmed over more than a year and shot in 23 countries, the doc aims to capture the scope of the global migrant crisis, which involves more than 65 million individuals searching for a better life after having been forcibly displaced due to war, famine and climate change…

The film will be distributed in the UK and Ireland by Altitude Films a deal struck by Lionsgate International on behalf of Participant Media and AC Films. Human Flow is produced by Weiwei, Chin-chin Yap, and Heino Deckert. Andy Cohen of AC Films and Participant Media’s Jeff Skoll and Diane Weyermann are the executive producers. Amazon is holding the US rights.

The premiere of the film, that will have a duration of more than two hours, is not yet announced. When that is done, and we have seen the film, you can count on a follow-up on this site.

The chief editor of the film is Danish Niels Pagh Andersen.

On Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rWgC5pCR1AE

Ai Weiwei, in a one-minute visual, talks about his film.

Golden Apricot Festival Cancels Program

Shameful conduct at the Golden Apricot Film Festival in Yerevan that ends July 16…

“We want to inform you that the ARMENIANS: INTERNAL AND EXTERNAL VIEWS non-competition program is completely cancelled. We apologize for any inconveniences.” This was the content of an email that was sent to the filmmakers, whose films had been selected. Around 40 there were. The films were to be screened in a theatre that belongs to the Cinematographers’ Union of Armenia. The former director of the theatre Rouben Gevorgyants passed away June 23 and the new temporary director, when he discovered that there were two LGBT related films in the program, demanded to the festival to take them out. The festival would not do so and thus the whole program was cancelled.

Which naturally created a lot of protests from filmmakers, critics, rights activists et al., who wrote an official complaint including this: … “We condemn the actions

of both the Union of Cinematography of Armenia, that has dared to censor the special program of the Golden Apricot International Festival because of the themes broached in the films “Listen to Me: untold stories beyond hatred” and “Apricot Groves”, and the Golden Apricot management, that has sent a note to 37 film directors without any explanation, rather than putting all its efforts to restore the whole program in another venue.

By removing the program from the festival, the “Golden Apricot” is giving a green light to censorship in Armenia and confirming that in Armenia any film can be treated in an arbitrary way. Moreover, the Armenian people are well acquainted with the results of censorship when taking into consideration the incidents of censorship during Soviet times, by the Young Turks, by  the Ottoman Empire and others… We are calling upon the organizers of Golden Apricot to protect the films selected by them, instead of issuing an apology, and to restore the whole program and screen all films in another place and to publicly condemn the actions of the Union of Cinematography of Armenia. Only by restoring the program can the festival maintain and protect its former reputation.” 

Also from outside the country there was an immediate reaction – Canadian-Armenian filmmaker Atom Egoyan and his actress and activist wife Arsinée Khanjian posted an announcement on Facebook decrying the decision to cancel the slate of films. They also argue that the best way to honor a late cinematographer is to ensure that the medium continues to flourish and proliferate:

“We are very concerned about the censorship by the Union of Cinematographers and the following decision to cancel an entire programming by the Golden Apricot Film Festival. Atom was President of the Festival for almost ten years and it’s dismaying to see a festival that we both proudly advocated for within the international film community in the name of films and filmmakers that spoke of such urgent human rights issues can be suppressed, especially when these ideas need to be discussed and brought to light,” said the announcement by the two Diasporan artists.

“Surely there is no better way to honour the spirit of an important Armenian filmmaker, Rouben Gevorgyants, than by making sure new films from Armenian voices can be seen and shared. We have never heard of a program of new films being cancelled to commemorate a cineaste’s death as a sign of mourning and respect! This claim seems, therefore, quite preposterous. We urge the Festival to review this outlandish decision. We urge the Festival to present this programme of thought-provoking work which reflects the true diversity of voices present in Armenia today and the Diaspora alike,” added the announcement.

I was in contact with Inna Sakahyan, producer and director at Bars Media and right now working on a film with a LGTB topic. She sees it very difficult if not impossible to get funding in her own country or in the region and internationally there is topic-wise a huge competition. I saw the trailer, it is excellent. Help needed!

Sources:

https://www.newsinfo.am/eng/article/view/NyZ2EX63N7

http://www.gaiff.am/

http://armenianweekly.com/2017/07/11/two-lgbt-themed-films-at-the-center-of-controversy-at-yerevans-golden-apricot-festival/   

Polish Doc Promotion

What is the best country in documentaries right now? I have for decades tried to answer that question based on what I have seen at festivals and online. When I was working at EDN at the beginning of the 2000´s I always said Finland, a country with a documentary culture that has a good financial support. Now I am not so sure that the artistic quality is the same as then, I might be wrong, whereas I can only salute what comes from Poland of original work from experienced directors and new talents. The Danes reading this will say that ”we” are also doing well, look at the amount of good films that travel to festivals, yes yes, and let me also include Norway as a country that delivers important documentaries these years.

Back to Poland and Polish documentaries. Yesterday a newsletter came in from KFF Sales and Promotion which is ”… a new branch of the Krakow Film Foundation, so far devoted to the festival promotion of Polish films under the brands of Polish Docs, Polish Shorts and Polish Animations. Starting in 2016, film promotion is also accompanied by sales, which seems to be a natural development of the Foundation’s former activities. KFF Sales & Promotion is the only selling agency of documentary films in Poland and the first one dealing with promotion of Polish documentary cinema on such a large scale. Every year, in the database of films represented by KFF abroad, there are over 70 films.”

The main emphasis in the newsletter is put on the success of Piotr Stasik’s masterpiece “21xNew York” that travels to numerous festivals in Italy, Estonia, South Africa, Macedonia, Lithuania. The film was reviewed on this site in connection with last year’s Krakow Film Festival – http://www.filmkommentaren.dk/blog/blogpost/3578/ – I was at a critics panel, where the film was number one but the jury decided not to give it the main award it deserved.

For more info on Polish documentaries, check this site or go to

http://polishdocs.pl/en/news/3610/21xnew_york_on_world_tour

DokuFest Kosovo/ Competitions

Many tweets fill the world of today… One for us film freaks came earlier to day: DokuFest XVI announces the full slate of films in competitions, featuring an outstanding body of work!

Yes the organisers can be proud of their work in selecting the films for the competitions which are divided into the sections ”Balkan Dox”, ”International Dox”, ”Human Rights Dox”, ”Green Dox”, International Shorts” and ”National”, the latter meaning films from Albania, Kosovo, Macedonia – mostly short films.

Let me mention some of the films, that I have seen and eventually also written about on this site:

”Machines” by Rahul Jain, ”A Hole in the Head” by Robert Kirchhoff, ”Mogadishu Soldier” by Torstein Grude and Niels Pagh Andersen, ”Nowhere to Hide” (PHOTO) by Zaradasht Ahmed, ”The War Show” by Andreas Dalsgaard, Obaidah Zytoon and ”Woman and the Glacier” by Audrius Stonys.

http://dokufest.com/ 

Dokufest Kosovo 2017

I was in Prizren last year and loved it. This year my August trips to the region go to Sarajevo and Skopje. But I will follow Dokufest on this site and start with a copy-paste from the announcements coming from the organisers:

The theme of FUTURE will be highlighted in the upcoming edition of DokuFest, running from August 04-12 in Prizren, Kosovo. We will take a daring look into future’s uncertainties, challenges and hopes through a fusion of a carefully curated film strand, visual exhibitions, various master classes and talks, collaborative workshops, diversified music performances, as well as platforms for use of new media and new technologies.

The seeds for this edition’s theme arose from the recent years’ growing move of citizens striving to have a stronger say in their own future. Our program will be a glimpse between dystopias and utopias, borders and openness, fear and love.

Competitions will be announced on July 10 on festival’s website, link below.

”North Korea seems interesting to almost everyone these days but few would imagine a concert of legendary Slovenian rock band Laibach in Pyongyang in celebration of countries national holiday. That’s exactly what happens in Morten Traavik’s and Ugis Olte’s wry and humorous film Liberation Day, a first such concert for a western rock band.” The film is one of 7 films in the music category, already announced.

”…a retrospective of British filmmaker John Smith’s work, by showing 21 of his films and hosting a master-class with the filmmaker. John Smith (photo) has been a pioneer in the British avant-garde film scene for over three decades. His films are known for their ingenuity, inflammatory wit, and unorthodox storytelling.”

http://dokufest.com/

Peter Kerekes: Censor

High expectations. What else can you have with a project from Peter Kerekes, who won a big award at the Karlovy Vary festival the other day. Let me remind you of the many entertaining and thought-provoking films by the Slovak director, who refrains from making observational documentaries, has developed his own style, as you can see for yourself in the short film “Second Chance” from 2014, “Cooking History” (2009), “66 Scenes” (2003) and “Velvet Terrorists” that he made with colleagues, among them Ivan Ostrochovsky, who is the script writer of “Censor”. Here is a quote from Variety about the film and the award:

““Censor” directed and produced by Peter Kerekes, and written by Ivan Ostrochovsky, has won the 14th edition of the Karlovy Vary Film Festival’s Works in Progress competition, which is open to projects from Central and Eastern Europe, the Balkans, Turkey, Greece and former Soviet territories.

The jury… awarded the prize to the Slovak film for “its original and vivid human portrait of a lonely woman.” The film centers on Irina, who works as a censor in a prison in Odessa, Ukraine. She spends eight hours a day in her office reading love letters. “Through her, we follow various love affairs that only she can observe,” according to a statement. “Although she sees how women being used, and how the relationships end in disaster for them, she cannot take any action. She is a single woman and after 12 years of reading love letters full of the lies men tell, she is not capable of any relationship. If a guy on a date says, ‘You are special,’ she feels sick. But, of course, even she dreams of love.”

http://kerekesfilm.com/?lang=en 

Svetlana Alexievich – a True Documentarian

I have for the past weeks been reading the Danish translation of ”Second-Hand Time” by Ukrainian/Belarussian author Svetlana Alexievich, 2015 Nobel Prize winner, a brilliant book, an amazing insight to what it meant to live in Soviet Union and today in Putin’s Russia. ”A history of human feelings” as she writes in the text below (from her website), were she describes her documentary method; must be an inpiration for all documentarians…:

I’ve been searching for a genre that would be most adequate to my vision of the world to convey how my ear hears and my eyes see life.I tried this and that and finally I chose a genre where human voices speak for themselves. Real people speak in my books about the main events of the age such as the war, the Chernobyl disaster, and the downfall of a great empire. Together they record verbally the history of the country, their common history, while each person puts into words the story of his/her own life. Today when man and the world have become so multifaceted and diversified the document in art is becoming increasingly interesting while art as such often proves impotent. The document brings us closer to reality as it captures and preserves the originals. After 20 years of work with documentary material and having written five books on their basis I declare that art has failed to understand many things about people.

But I don’t just record a dry history of events and facts, I’m writing a history of human feelings. What people thought, understood and remembered during the event. What they believed in or mistrusted, what illusions, hopes and fears they experienced. This is impossible to imagine or invent, at any rate in such multitude of real details. We quickly forget what we were like ten or twenty or fifty years ago. Sometimes we are ashamed of our past and refuse to believe in what happened to us in actual fact. Art may lie but document never does. Although the document is also a product of someone’s will and passion. I compose my books out of thousands of voices, destinies, fragments of our life and being. It took me three-four years to write each of my books. I meet and record my conversations with 500-700 persons for each book. My chronicle embraces several generations. It starts with the memories of people who witnessed the 1917 Revolution, through the wars and Stalinist gulags, and reaches the present times. This is a story of one Soviet-Russian soul.

http://www.alexievich.info/indexEN.html

Street Photography 1917-2017 /Jean Hermanson

Swedish master of photography Jean Hermanson is also at the Street Photography exhibition in Copenhagen. With photos from

Dublin in the 60’es. I picked – with the help of curator Finn Larsen and a link to information about his exhibition in Swedish town Landskrona 2016 – one:

A girl on a rainy street in Dublin 50 years ago. Of course it reminds me of the boy with wine bottles in Paris, caught by the camera of Henri Cartier-Bresson. The girl in Dublin carries a bottle of milk and – can’t really see it – a pack of cigarettes? She is waiting for cars to pass so she can pass and go home to mum and dad. The Swedish filmmaker and photographer caught the situation and as a true documentarian conveys the atmosphere. In an upcoming film about Hermanson, he says ”when it rains, it is damn poetic and sensual”. And a text taken from the Landskrona exhibition:

At the end of the 1960s the photographer Jean Hermanson (1938–2012) travelled to Dublin. His plan was to follow in the footsteps of James Joyce, with the camera as his instrument. But instead of recreating Leopold Bloom’s route on that famous day he chose to point his camera at the children. Children became Hermanson’ guide in the streets, in this world of both darkness and play, and his documentation of their life developed into a large, full work with a strong feeling for the children’s experiences. The photographs from Dublin were Hermanson’s first major photographic work. But almost fifty years were to pass before he began to sort the rich material towards the end of his life…

The film being made on Hermanson is produced by Stavro Film and supported by SVT, Sweden among others. So at some point it will be broadcast. Link below.

http://stavrofilm.se/?p=1042

Gadefotografi 1917-2017, Øksnehallen, København. 28. juni – 1. august, Daily 10.00 – 20.00, Friday and Saturday 10.00 – 22.00.

www.dgi-byen.dk/oeksnehallen/

 

 

 

 

Street Photography 1917-2017 /Jens-Olof Lasthein

Swedish photographer Jens-Olof Lasthein travelled six years in the Caucasus area. In the Street Photography exhibition in Copenhagen his newly published photo book ”Meanwhile Across the Mountain” is represented through big panoramic colour photos documenting everyday life from the countries in the region plus a 20 minute long slideshow of great quality. As one who has visited Georgia and Armenia several times I was happy to get acquainted with Lasthein’s well composed and poignant pictures. One of them above:

Grozny, Chechnya 2011: The boys stand in a ruin, behind them a ruin landscape as well, and a church and some buildings, appartments probably. What is the future for the boys, for Chechnya, from where we nowadays are used to see glossy propaganda pictures from the Russian led Kadyrov regime. The photo is of course taken out of a context, when watching the slideshow you get the sense of watching a film with a narrative. Lasthein was interviewed in connection with the book coming out, here is a quote, link below:

”Now, about street photography. For me, the term simply means that I start out by working in the streets. Occasionally, I can be so lucky as to catch something in an instant, but mostly I need more time with my subjects. I have learned that only through getting to know people really well am I able to put myself in the most unpredictable situations. These surroundings then evolve and become circumstances that take me much farther than I could ever have imagined. Searching for these moments is very much what drives me.”

https://www.lensculture.com/articles/jens-olof-lasthein-meanwhile-across-the-mountain#slideshow

Gadefotografi 1917-2017, Øksnehallen, København. 28. juni – 1. august, Daily 10.00 – 20.00, friday and saturday 10.00 – 22.00.

www.dgi-byen.dk/oeksnehallen/

Street Photography 1917-2017 /Krass Clement

1991, Moscow, the failed coup d´état, extensively described in literature and films. I am right now reading the documentary novel ”Secondhand Time. The Last of the Soviets” by Svetlana Aleksijevitj, where she brings together conversations she has had with Russians over a period of 20 years. The life in Soviet Union including reactions to what happened in 1991. In films ”The Event” by Sergei Loznitsa comes to my mind, filmed in St. Petersburg. Eminent use of archive material.

Danish photographer Krass Clement was there, in Moscow, where he did not take pictures of Jeltsin in front of the parliament in Moscow or other post-coup events – he went to attend the funeral of three of the victims of the riots. In Krasnaja Pesnja Park. At the exhibition ”Street Photography” five of his photos are presented, see one of them above.

They stand like statues, lined up, two men, two women, they are touched by the situation, are they relatives to the deceased, are they present because they were, like many, for the coup that the so-called junta wanted to happen to save Soviet Union – we are not told, Clement does not want to inform, he aims at conveying a moment in the lives of four people, a serious moment, a moment of grief, a moment ”where noone talked”, my translated title of ”Hvor Ingen Talte”, the photo book, Clement published from Moscow. He – as written on his website, link below – wants ”to capture a state of mind”.

Krass Clement, educated at The Danish Film School, published his first book in 1968. Photos from his last book ”Impasse Hotel Syria” are on display at David’s Samling in Copenhagen.

http://krassclement.com/introduction.html

Gadefotografi 1917-2017, Øksnehallen, København. 28. juni – 1. august, Daily 10.00 – 20.00, friday and saturday 10.00 – 22.00.

www.dgi-byen.dk/oeksnehallen/