“IN LOCO PARENTIS” is the first Irish documentary that premiered with great success in the main program of the world’s largest documentary film festival in Amsterdam, after which it was selected for the main program of the Sundance Film Festival. Neasa Ní Chianáin is one of Ireland’s most celebrated documentary filmmakers, and her previous documentaries have had considerable international success. David Rane is an experienced producer and director, who received one of the most important European awards, the BAFTA Award. This author and life couple has spent a full year in the school, preparing a project that took a lot of production and creative efforts to achieve its top quality.

This observational documentary follows a year in the lives of two inspiring teachers in the only elementary school with boarding facilities in Ireland. Headfort School, the school not much different in appearance from the legendary Hogwarts from Harry Potter, with its buildings from the XVIII century, with secret doors and magical forests, is the home of John and Amanda Leyden for 46 years and the background of their exceptional careers. For John, rock music is another subject to Math, English, Latin and religious education. He cherishes a special kind of youthful revolution by teaching responsibility and independence in equal respect, wrapped in heavy metal or pop, encouraging the children to play whatever they want in the school basement rock club. For Amanda, the key liaison with children is a book and she uses all ways to catch young minds. The children sit as transfixed when she leads them on magical journeys with fantastic heroes of different stories.

Besides directing, Neasa Ní Chianáin was an inspired and omnipresent cinematographer in this film, and David Rane had a difficult task to record sound discreetly following Neasa, besides his production work and directing. “We wanted to film a year in the life of the school, just to keep track and observe, no interviews, no divine voice that leads the audience… We knew that for us it means full immersion in order to gain access to the intimacy that we wanted to capture.”

Ireland, Spain, 2016, 99 mins.

http://www.inlocoparentis.ie/

http://magnificent7festival.org/en/

No doubt, the biggest applause of the festival went for Miroslav Janek on the fifth day of the Magnificent7 festival in Belgrade. His film ”Normal Autistic Film”, made with a warm heart by the Czech veteran, cameraman and director, and for many years also editor, a job he now leaves to his wife Tonicka, demonstrates how strong relations he is able to build with children. Before with ”Unseen” (1996) and ”Kha-chee-pae” (2005) and now with this work on five clever and creative children with aspergers syndrom.

I believe that the biggest part of documentary filmmaking is NOT shooting, Janek said in the masterclass the day after the screening of the film. He referred to how he dealt with the kids. ”I went to visit them and maybe I shot one hour with them during a day. The rest

of the time we were together”. Janek was shooting over a period of two years with one year of prep including talks with people/experts in aspergers syndrom. All together he spent 7-10 days with each of the five kids, with whom he is still in contact.

You get the impression that Janek very much – as a true documentarian – works according to intuition. ”I am the happiest guy if I come home with 15-20 minutes and I know there is a scene or some shots that I can use”. ”I just let it up to life”.

”With this film I stayed 5 weeks in the editing room because I liked the material so much. But then I gave it all to the editor, Tonicka, who is my wife, together with a book where everything shot has been noted and characterised. It is Tonicka, who finds the film. And then 2 ½ month passes and what happens… one day she can bring a scene and ask ”is this what you want?””.

Janek talked about making trailers. First he was sceptical but when he had done it with Tonicka a couple of times, for this film and for ”Olga”, the great film about Havel’s first wife, he found out that the process itself clarifies and leads you to the film.

Openings… so important he said and showed the one for ”Unseen”, which is excellent as well as the one for ”Kha-chee-pae”.

… and there were talks about the five kids: Lukas, Denis, Hamid, Marjam, Majda – and moderator Zoran Popovic wanted to know the favourite of the workshoppers. Seems like all of them were loved. Of course!

www.magnificent7festival.org 

Documentary is the art of meetings. This was the starting point of Belgian Jérôme le Maire, when he talked to young and younger filmmakers at the Magnificent7 festival in Belgrade. The title of the very well prepared class could also have been ”the story of my film”. It all started with a book about the phenomenon ”burned out”. le Maire met with the author and with a psychoanalyst and a psychologist – and started a research. I became friend with the author, Pascal Chabot, and he let me meet a girl who had had the experience, as well as a ”professor in burn-out”, to whom I showed my previous film, ”Tea or Electricity”. I explained that I wanted to make the film in direct cinema style. He liked the film and the idea.

The third meeting was with Esmeralda together with the psychoanalyst and the psychologist. She worked in a consulting company and sat in an open space office – I met people there but would it be interesting to film people in front of computers? No…

The breakthrough came, when the writer Pascal was invited to the hospital to talk to members of the staff. He was invited by Marie-Christine, who was to be the main character of ”Burning Out”. This

was six months after I had read the book. It takes time to make films. Good films. I decided to film in the hospital and had to cut the link to Esmeralda, whose story had meant a lot fo me.

Then came the long procedure to get the permission to film. Where can I go and where can I not go. I went there three days a week, Came in the morning, met someone and asked if I could follow them. They found it strange with this man going around with them with a notebook – what is so interesting, they asked.

Main character became Marie-Christine, the anesthetic nurse, who was interesting because she was interested in changing the bad working situations. 2nd was the surgeon Sarfati, be careful with him, people said, but I met with him, showed him my Morocco film (”Tea or Electricity”), he became a friend, and then Sabrina, nursing assistant, who said that so far nobody had had any interest in what she was doing…

I brought the camera. Well, first I took photos and filmed with a small camera to make them feel comfortable with the situation – but after months I still did not have the authorisation, I was pushed from one to the other. It took me 3 months to get it! But at that time I already had the confidence of the characters, they trusted me and I trusted them. Why did it take so long time to get an ok – it was also because that I had to, again and again, promise not to damage the image of the hospital. I will listen to you, you will see the film before it is finished, but I have the final cut. ”Are you a fireman or a pyromaniac”, they asked! I said to the management, ”I have the message of hope”, ”I felt I had a role” and I decided to be a character, who interferes by asking questions. The audience had the right to know that there was someone behind the camera. I filmed first for half a year, and then had to get out in the sun, I started to feel traumatic and then I came back and concentrated on the characters…

Jérome le Maire ended his masterclass by giving facts: 1 ½ year of research, 1 year of shooting, and for the editing I also attended the DOKInkubator, three sessions, very helpful for me, again a meeting. The film will be broadcast on arte in November, it is being released at theatres in Belgium. It was at IDFA and then quickly after that at Magnificent7 in Belgrade.

Photo: Maja Medic.

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

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

 

 

 

The master of refined style, Audrius Stonys, decided to take us on an unusual pilgrimage to the inaccessible heights of Tian Shan mountain on the border between Kazakhstan and China. In the areas of this Mountain of Heaven, which looks like an unknown and inhospitable planet, he devotes all his attention and creativity to an amazing person who has spent thirty years observing and monitoring the state of the giant glacier, so important for the science, but also for the whole planet. Through an unusual intimate portrait of a mountain captive in constant motion, Audrius Stonys masterfully poetizes relations of the heroine and the environment, nature, sky, beings with whom she shares the loneliness, the rigors of the climate and the beauty that surrounds them.

To his story in present time, meticulously woven without words, Stonys adds another important layer, a layer of long time flows. This film plunges deep into time, and in the compounds of past and present builds a brand new, poetic and timeless relations. Audrius Stonys is one of the most important European authors because of this complex weave of time in his films and amazing ability to capture and express the feeling that through spaces, people, events and phenomena converge and break all previous deep and very distant reflections of time.

The author was drawn to the fact that the woman glaciologist is his compatriot: “It is very unusual for a woman from Lithuania to explore ice on the remote Tian Shan, at the end of the world, without any connection with the rest of the world. Scientist Aushra, living high in the mountains, in a wooden house near the huge glacier, did measurements for many years, every morning and evening, summer and winter, and sent them to the control center in Almaty. She gave her whole life observing glaciers in Kazakhstan.”

Lithuania, Estonia, 2016, 56 mins.

http://www.efis.ee/en/film-categotries/movies/id/18547

www.magnificent7festival.org

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