This year’s Dragon Award, Göteborg Film Festival, for best documentary went to Obaidah Zytoon and Andreas Dalsgaard for The War Show. The prize is worth SEK 100,000 and is presented by the Swedish Union of Tenants (Hyresgästföreningen).

In The War Show the radio journalist Obaidah Zytoon personally and engagingly relates how the Arab Spring and the war in Syria have affected her and her friends.

The jury’s motivation: The award goes to a monumental and uncompromising film that combines extremely strong mate-rial with a unique and persistent voice of a generation. This overwhelming audiovisual experience holds us in a tight emotional grip as we live through the lives of an extraordinary woman and her friends, experience their lust for life, love and freedom, pitched against a devastating war. This film is a punch in the face to all of us. A reminder of our co-existence.

This year’s jury consisted of Iris Olsson, artistic director at DocPoint, Olivia Neergaard-Holm, director and Fredrik Egerstrand, director.

http://www.giff.se/en/artikel/here-are-dragon-award-winners (festival site) 

http://www.filmkommentaren.dk/blog/blogpost/3727/ (review)

“HOMO SAPIENS” is disturbing and fascinating fresco of the planet, an authentic futuristic vision of one of the great masters. Nikolaus Geyrhalter is one of the pioneers of modern documentary, who introduced documentaries into the sphere of post-apocalyptic visions with his early masterfully work “Pripyat”, and created one of the most impressive views of the world as a whole in his richly developed film “Elsewhere”. “HOMO SAPIENS” combines these essential topics and with the approach of a mature master introduces us to a purified essay of a superb style. Fully visual, without a word, with almost composed sound interventions, “HOMO SAPIENS” reveals on the big screen highly aestheticized scenes, which deeply engrave in the minds of viewers.

“HOMO SAPIENS” is a film about the fragility of human existence and the end of the industrial age, and about what it means to be a human being. What will be the traces of the species we call Homo sapiens, and to which we belong? Empty spaces, ruins, cities increasingly overgrown with vegetation, dilapidated asphalt: spaces that we currently inhabit, when people are not in them anymore. Now abandoned and in decay, gradually taken by nature, from which they were taken not long ago. “HOMO SAPIENS” is an ode to humanity seen through a possible scenario for the future.

About this great work Geyrhalter says: “This is not the first film in which I construct the narrative only through images. This is only the first in which there are no people. “HOMO SAPIENS” is perhaps the most photographic of all my films… For me it is a vision much closer to fiction.”

Austria, 2016, 94 mins.

http://www.geyrhalterfilm.com/en/homo_sapiens

http://www.magnificent7festival.org/en/

He was adressing the audience in the Sava Center and said that this amount of people at one screening is the same as we have had in one month in theatres in Germany! Where the film was released mid December. The reviews have been great in Germany but it seems to be difficult to attract the audience for a film like ”Austerlitz” directed by Ukrainian Sergei Loznitsa. I can only say that the Belgrade audience deserves a big Bravo to come and appreciate a film like this that is challenging. Well I know that many found it long and boring, but also that many left the cinema having experienced a piece of cinematic art.

There was a full house for the Q&A in the VIP room afterwards for a one hour session, where the director explained how he came to have an interest in holocaust tourism and how he made it into a film. Equally interesting was a friday morning where he was with young and younger filmmakers for a couple of hours showing examples from previous films.

As one of the trio of selectors (Svetlana and Zoran Popovic being the other two) I have been happy to present ”Austerlitz” at the Magnificent7 festival. With me it is a film that almost works physically. Loznitsa´s construction of the sound score is a superb

alliance to the black & white images, where there is no camera movement and where every frame is precise and full of meaning in its composition. Back to the sound… it goes on my nerves when I am confronted with the sound of steps of all the tourists, who are visiting the camps – after visiting several, Loznitsa decided to concentrate on Dachau and Sachsenhausen – in their almost naked summer dress with their smart phones clicking all the time, their audioguides linked to the ear, and their selfie-photo-taking.

There IS so much disrespect in the behaviour of the tourists, Loznitsa is not pointing at that, it is my interpretation based on his aesthetic somewhat pure approach. But you are not only shaking your head when watching: Suddenly he introduces a sequence of faces, who look concentrated at, well what it is, we don’t see it, but we read the faces and the emotions, and after some faces Loznitsa lets church bells ring… and I remember what he said at the workshop: you have to let the unexpected in because that’s what we as viewers actually expect. In other words it was exactly what I needed from the director, this gentle comment to the faces and their feelings.

40 shooting days, I never hide the camera, precise information on use of lenses, I don’t like people looking into the camera, lot of discussion on the quick cutting at the end of the film contrary to the long shots otherwise used. Loznitsa was generous in his explanations, a mild man, precise as the mathematician he is by education, an education he took before he entered the Moscow film school VGIK and made his first fine work, “Together we are going to build a house” (28 mins.) from 1995. I remember I had seen it before, maybe also awarded it at a festival, anyway it was fine to hear him talk about the film sequence by sequence, and if anyone thinks that Loznitsa is dry and clinical in some of his films, they might be right but here there is a lot of humour that he conveys in the way that he looks at people.

And constructs the film. Because a film is a construction, it is being built, as Loznitsa – and colleague Allan Berg – says again and again. This film was made on 35mm, 20 reels, 2 months of editing, no narration, just an idea, he said, structured like a reportage, “one day in the life of…” these people building the house, and to tell the audience that it was shot over some time, he let a sequence with a dog on the building site be repeated three times!

Cinema for me lies only in the pictures with the use of sound in a creative way.

How to… for every film I make there is a set of rules of “yes” and “no”. And after an editing Loznitsa produces a graph, where he can see how a film flow is with rhythm, where there is most energy – amazing, must be his mathematic background!

At the workshop Loznitsa also showed a clip from the short film he made in Riga from the Jewish cemetery and from “Landscapes” (2003, 60 mins.), part of “Riga Force Majeure”.

Sergei Loznitsa is a director who operates with fiction, documentaries and archive films. As for the latter, I can only recommend those of our readers, who are historically interested to watch “Blockade” (2005) on the siege of Leningrad, “Maidan” (2014) and “The Event” (2015). Loznitsa told me in Belgrade that he now prepares an archive film based on material from Stalin’s processes. He has the footage, it’s amazing he said, he looks forward to the editing process, were he normally includes Lithuanian Danielius Kokanauskis.

Several of Loznitsa’s film are available on DocAlliance, link below.

Photo: Loznitsa being interviewed by director Andrijana Stojkovic.

http://loznitsa.com/

http://dafilms.fr/search/?q=sergei+loznitsa 

 

The film tonight at the Magnificent7 festival in Belgrade deals with a topic that touches all of us, who one way or the other have tried to be exhausted to a degree that you can call it a ”burn-out” Svetlana and Zoran Popovic have written this text about the film, taken from the festival’s catalogue/website:

Great documentary undertaking! Jérôme le Maire is an author who enters with camera the places that are completely inaccessible and forbidden, and he records there the traditional battles, but also discovers for us completely modern, unexpected and astonishing ones. With discreet presence and careful observation the author develops a fascinating study of the contemporary world in which disappear havens for the weak and sick, in which disappear empathy, caring and the power of healing.

“BURNING OUT” is literally a drama of life and death. For two years, the Belgian director Jérôme le Maire followed the members of a surgical unit in one of the biggest hospitals in Paris. Constantly exposed to severe stress, with a lack of staff and with strict budget cuts, employees are fighting among themselves for resources, while the management imposes increasingly stringent criteria of efficiency and profitability. All over Europe ‘burnout’ has reached epidemic proportions among employees in the public and private sectors. Will we end up killing ourselves? Or will we be able to find meaning and joy in the work?

“Our modern world has turned the hospitals into health factories and patients into objects”, testifies Jérôme le Maire. “Efficiency, productivity, performance – this has become a mantra for managers. We knew for decades what happens if we expose the animals to stress: they will eventually eat each other. But what happens when you expose people to great stress?”

Belgium, France, Switzerland, 2016, 85 minutes

http://www.burning-out-film.com/

http://www.magnificent7festival.org/en/index.php

This is the text written by Svetlana and Zoran Popovic about Loznitsa’s film that will be screened at the Magnificent7 festival in Belgrade tonight:

Premiered at the Venice Film Festival, “AUSTERLITZ” is another distinct documentary made by Sergei Loznitsa, who is currently one of the most significant European authors. Made in the form of classical black-and-white film, without many words, without any comment or explanation, with distinctive style in which his previous documentaries were made, this film is a complex and surprising anthropological study of collective behavior and consciousness. With the precise distance, which he determines and then never passes, Loznitsa reveals a phenomenon that intrigues us and provokes, equally as much it confuses us. This is a film in which the author, with the means of exquisite photography, camera, editing and directing, creates an exciting essay filled with tension, which turns the viewer into the silent interested witness and questioning participant.

There are places in Europe that keep the painful memories of the past – factories where people were turned into ashes. These places are now memorial complexes open to visitors and receive thousands of tourists every year. The name of the film is taken from the novel of one of the most important contemporary writers from the end of XX and the beginning of the XXI century, W.G. Sebald, which is dedicated to the memory of the Holocaust.

Loznitsa wrote: “What am I doing here? What are all these people doing here, moving in groups from one object to another? The reason that brings thousands of people to spend their summer weekends in former concentration camps is one of the mysteries of these memorial complexes.” The film is an attempt to deliberate these mysteries.

Germany, 2016, 94 mins.

http://www.loznitsa.eu/

http://www.magnificent7festival.org/en/

This is the website and catalogue text written by Magnificent7 directors Svetlana and Zoran Popovic on the opening film of the 2017 festival:

The brilliant success of the film “Shine,” winning an Oscar and masterfully acting performance of Geoffrey Rush, have brought the story of a remarkable life path of the pianist David Helfgott closer to the wide audience, and the real hero of the film has gained worldwide fame as a unique artistic personality.

“HELLO I AM DAVID!” is the first documentary about this extraordinary pianist, a child prodigy whose career seemed finished after the dramatic nervous breakdown. And then, through the healing power of music and a great love for his wife Gillian, David Helfgott has found a way to return to normal life and to the concert stage. This masterfully made film, with superb cinematography, sound and editing, assures us in the irresistibly infectious passion and impulsiveness of David Helfgott. As a pianist, he plays only what he feels, and as a person he speaks without reservation what he thinks and touches people in the literal sense of the word.

Purified and straightforward, both in scenes of playing and in situations where the character is manifested, courageous to let life and the hero to directly create the most exciting, most funny and most unexpected scenes – this touching, inspirational film gives us a penetrating insight into the personality and musical life of David Helfgott. Finally, “HELLO I AM DAVID!” is a film about love: love of life, love of music – and deeply pervasive love between two people who are equally enchanting as they are different.

Germany 2015, 90 minutes

http://www.helloiamdavid.de/der-film.php

http://magnificent7festival.org/en

Of course documentary festivals react to what happens in the world right now. The Prague-based human rights documentary film festival One World does, as says a press release that came in this morning. An edited version comes here:

Theresa May’s announcement of a “hard Brexit”, Trump’s victory in the presidential election and the strengthening of the radical right, the reluctance of European countries to work together in dealing with migration. It seems as if our society is losing a much-needed ability to collaborate.

That’s why the 19th One World International Human Rights Documentary Film Festival wants to remind us of the value of collaborative effort and sharing. At a time of populist rhetoric, negative discussions on social networks and a flood of “fake news”, collaboration is a positive way to respond to a divided society facing a crisis of values.

“Collaboration is mainly communication and sharing,” said Hana

Kulhánková, who is the director of the One World Festival. “We have become accustomed to the word share meaning quickly forwarding a post on Facebook that we did not even read properly. Let’s go back to the original meaning of the word share. It means to give, to be willing to deny oneself something and consider the consequences of one’s choices on others.”

“Collaboration is not a given,” she continued. “It’s an ability that is gradually learned. Lately, however, collaboration has become an art that only a few have mastered.”

The slogan of this year’s festival campaign is The Art of Collaboration. It is a concept from the field of contemporary art, which has inspired One World and places it into a society-wide context. “We chose a very positive sounding slogan, because Czech society has for a long time been receiving rather negatively worded messages,” Kulhánková said…

Examples of collaboration or its absence can be seen across the whole festival programme, which this year includes over 110 films. This year’s new categories are Vote for Change! focusing on populist movements and civil society activists who have brought the need for change into the political arena. Migration remains a major theme for videographers and filmmakers in the past year, and therefore another new programme category is Dreams of Europe – films about refugees on their way to Europe as well as those who, after encountering the European reality, awake from a naive dream. In collaboration with the reSITE architectural and urban platform, the Faces of the City category was created following the relationship between people and the urban environment. The Family Happiness category meanwhile presents the western family and its importance in an individualised society. Traditional programming categories will again include Who Is Normal Here?, So-called Civilisation, The Power of the Media, Panorama, and One World for Students and Docs for Kids. In a special screening, videos by Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty on the borders of reportage and short documentary will be presented.

One World this year also introduces a new Czech Competition category, which aims to promote the screening of Czech documentaries at international festivals, from among whom a jury will be selected in this competition category.

One World 2017 will be held from March 6 to 15 in Prague and then will visit 32 other cities in the Czech Republic and Brussels. The town of Semily has newly joined the festival family.

www.jedensvet.cz