Maite Alberdi, Chilean documentary director, who made the wonderful ”Tea Time” in 2014 and the equally wonderful ”I’m not from Here” this year together with Lithuanian Giedre Zickyte, a film that is nominated for the European Film Awards – has already now obtained for her new work ”The Grown-Ups”, sorry that is long, the IDFA Alliance Women Film Journalists’ EDA Award for Best Female-Directed Documentary. The jury’s motivation:

”Beautifully rendered and brilliantly edited, The Grown Ups is an

impressively informative and utterly compassionate glimpse into the lives of Down syndrome adults who are, at age 40-something, stuck in a school environment that ‘normal’ society deems safe, but they know to be quite limiting. Filmmaker Maite Alberdi’s rapport with her subjects allows them to voice their innermost longings and admirable aspirations. Their engaging story is a mixture of heartache and humor, and hope for greater understanding of people with Down syndrome – or, for that matter, anyone whose perceptions and abilities are different from ‘the norm’…”.

The film is in the international competition for feature-length documentaries, as are two other films, that I have watched today:

In loco parentis, Irish, by Neasa Ní Chianáin, that takes the viewer to an Irish – international – boarding school, that is full of life and two charismatic teacher, who have been there for decades, it’s their life, they are a couple, and it is more than a pleasure to see how they with passion and warmth cope with the children, who are from 7 to 12… and how they pretty often, pretty exhausted, evaluate the day gone and especially children, who need a gentle push. Boys and girls are observed when they are taught, by these two teachers, primarily creative skills. For those of you at IDFA, the film is still screened 3 times. Photo from the film.

The Good Postman, Finnish/Bulgarian, by Tonislav Hristov, produced by Kaarle Aho, was a disappointment. I had high expectations after seeing clips at the DocIncubator presentation in Malmø earlier this autumn, but it did not get my attention and I wonder why. Is it because the sympathetic postman in the Bulgarian village close to the Turkish border, who wants to be mayor to revive the dead place by letting refugees come and live there, that he totally lacks charisma, having the same sad expression the whole film through, is it because the long-haired, chainsmoking communist candidate for the post irritated me, is it because the film is over-dosed with music that stresses the sadness, the elegic tone that the filmmakers want to create. It’s overkill. The film is still running a couple of times at IDFA, go and check if I am wrong.

www.idfa.nl

In the ”Guardian Film Today” that I subscribe to (it is for free and for everyone) there was tuesday 22nd of Nov. a review by Peter Bradshaw worth reading as most of his articles/reviews. Here is a text clip:

Most documentaries or studies of North Korea conclude that it is forever sealed in its own tyranny. For all the absurdity, for all the questionable semi-satire, Laibach actually made contact with North Korea and caused a crack in the wall. In its ridiculous way, Laibach’s 80s art-rocker doom version of The Sound of Music was a kind of peace process, and, like any peace process, it involved the fudging of principles. The “liberation” of the title might yet prove to be illusory for North Korea and Traavik’s wacky cultural diplomacy might lead nowhere. But it could prove to be more than a footnote.

Another fine push for the documentary to get around, read the whole review, link below:

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2016/nov/22/liberation-day-review-north-korea-laibach-documentary?utm_source=esp&utm_medium=Email&utm_campaign=Film+Today+-+automated+vB+curation&utm_term=200942&subid=19412929&CMP=ema_861a

www.idfa.nl

It’s absurd theatre! Well, I have tried it myself in 1967. To be called for military service in the Danish army. I chose the easy solution to take one (completely useless) year of service at the air force instead of the two year’s civil service it was back then, where you sent to the forest to sweep leaves up against the wind.

The young ones in this film had all applied for civil service because of their convictions. They had to appear (see the photo) in front of a committee to present their case, one could almost say pitch their point of view. As in pitching sessions the panelists sat with papers and only a few of them were to say something. The rest sat with stone faces that communicated that they did not like, what they saw and heard.

Take Roman Fedorov and his excellent speech for pacifism with references to Sakharov, Bertrand Russell, classic Russian literature – he gives his statement while the camera shows the non-reaction of the judge, who probably finds Dostojevski and other writers totally irrelevant for the case of Fedorov, the clever and brave young man, whose father is also interrogated about his (and the son’s) convictions.

There’s a nurse, uniformed military men, a woman who puts all the questions – in the room where Viktor enters asking for ”alternative military service”, because of his, as he puts it, ”non-traditional sexuality”. His case is discussed, a nurse comes in and says that she does not think homosexuality is a decease… But the camera and the sound catches the leading lady at the table saying to the military man next to her: ”… maybe he is insane”!

And the there is the well-formulated young man, who is there with his mother and who does not want to be drafted, ”to go and fight our brothers in Ukraine”. His appeal for ”civil service” is rejected… cut to a soldier’s choir and close-ups of young men, who have joined to ”do their duty”.

This is where the director comments directly on the consequence of the absurd theatre, which is a reality in Russia today, some call it mobilisation. The film shows a generation gap between the young ones who claim for pacifism and the stone-age panel, who has to act according to some paragraphs, they don’t understand. Is it a sad film, of course it is, on the other hand you feel happy to see the bravery of the young ones, who dare stand up for their convictions.

Objections – yes, the quotation of Vonnegut in the beginning is difficult to read and un-needed… would have preferred a small text at the end with info on the duration of military service in Russia today as well as info on how many who actually get ”civil service”.

On the other hand I salute that the director has refrained from easy critical comments in editing, the panels and the youngsters speak for themselves. See the film, it has some kind of a happy ending for the involved.

Russia, 63 mins., 2016

https://films2016.dok-leipzig.de/en/film/?ID=15304&title=Convictions

I had to choose that still from the IDFA introduction to the film that I have just finished watching. It’s a girl in pain, a victim from the brutal civil war in Somalia, that – says the end credits – has caused the death of 500.000. So far. She gets up and leaves the scene with her mother. She survives. I was afraid she would not make it like many others in the film. I could also have chosen a still of one of the two anynomous cameramen from Burundi. Sometimes they are not named, on the mentioned film credits they are. If OK their names should come out. They deserve credits for what they have given us, an insight to one of the many wars that seldom reaches the front page. Maybe they will come to IDFA? But before I go on, let me give you the catalogue background description of this documentary that is in the IDFA competition and deserves an award that can bring it to be screened all over: 

Since 2006, the radical Islamists of Al-Shabaab have been fighting

to overthrow the Somali government. Under the UN flag, the African Union is now engaged in a peacekeeping mission (AMISOM), with soldiers from Burundi and Uganda. These troops are fighting Al-Shabaab in the center of Mogadishu, Somalia’s capital city, with a population of two million. Documentary filmmaker Torstein Grude gave two African Union soldiers a camera with instructions to film whatever they felt was important. For an entire year, they documented diverse aspects of warfare, from firefights in trenches and life on the base to the dead and wounded lying in the streets. They also filmed conversations with local people hoping for food and water, soldiers fantasizing about women, and the arrival of an embedded journalist. War is shown to be banal and chaotic, with periods of boredom and instances of both compassion and gross inhumanity. Taken from no fewer than 523 tapes, this compilation gives an honest and sometimes revealing glimpse behind the scenes of war…

523 tapes in the hands of Torstein Grude and Niels Pagh Andersen, the again-and-again praised Danish editor, who has put the filmed impressions and interviews and battle scenes together in a way so it is watchable… even if a documentary addict like me had to look away from the corpses and the injured soldiers, and the scenes as well, where captured enemies, children fighting for Al-Sharaab sit there with grown-up soldies surrounding them. It hurts. They get close, the Burundian cameramen, because they film their friends and countrymen, who respond with fun or through serious comments on what it means to be a soldier and how difficult it is to distinct to be a peacekeeper from being a peacemaker (there is a fantastic scene with a UN officer telling a soldier, what he can say to the press, in this case CNN), light scenes, problems with payments, songs, civilians fighting to get clothes from the UN or someone else, death, burials – and going home after 15 months duty.

The film is chaptered in a clever way with a focus on a tape that has a description of the content. You know what the next scenes will include. What to expect, it’s well structured from soft to hard, light to dark, it’s hard but bearable, but rough. A film but also a valuable piece of simple documentation: This is what we saw, we were there. Thanks for teaching me, letting me into horror and letting me get out again with thoughts in my head, not ”only” shocked.

www.idfa.nl

Norway, 2016, 84 mins.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

They are quite different in themes and styles, the films that I am going to write about in this post. What they have in common is that the directors mentioned in the headline all have films shown at IDFA, Amsterdam – and that I have seen them, and like them, more or less, for various reasons.

Pawel Lozinski is an internationally known Polish director, whose film ”You Have No Idea How Much I Love You” (PHOTO) I reviewed in connection with its premiere at the Krakow Festival. With top marks, here is a quote: ”As a viewer you know these

stories, in a way it is very banal – a child feeling guilt because of the parents divorcing, just one of the themes coming up, the reason it is so good stems from the filmmaking, the three are so good, they are so well directed, the editing goes smooth from one to the other, you listen while you watch either the one talking or the one listening. Like he proved in “Chemo”, Pawel Lozinski has this unique skill of going to the core taking away all the unnecessary and bringing to us a cinematic conversation piece of universal reach.” It will raise genre discussions at IDFA!

Jerome le Maire, equally, is known in festival circles for his fine ”Tea and Electricity”. Here, at IDFA 2016, he presents, in a convincing observational style, including the director asking questions and getting involved and engaged, a scary story from a hospital in Paris, where he has followed the surgical unit, that suffers from stress and lack of resources and simple communication, making the staff ”Burning Out”, the title of this very strong film, that has a content far too familiar for a Dane, who has been close to hospitals a couple of times during the last years.

Olga Delane, Russian living in Berlin, puts with her ”Siberian Love” the viewer in a much milder mood with her charming, sweet and well made documentary from South-East Siberia, where her family lives. The starting point for the film, made together with Frank Müller, is that Olga is single, why is it so, her family asks her, when she goes back home to visit, you have to get married, become a real woman, hav children… but the focus moves from Olga to convey stories about the three couples she meets and is related to, with Olga behind the camera you get to know, how their life is now and how it is with love? They live in the countryside, they are farmers, they have a hard daily life, but they manage and they have many interesting remarks to Olga, the city girl. Yes, we are in the Russian province and there are alchohol problems and sometimes strong male chauvinistic comments, and men who want to fight, but there are also strong women, with strong personalities, who are not afraid to express their opinions. It’s a film made with love, you feel that right away. The family likes Olga and she likes them, and OMG how beautiful the landscape is – summer or winter.

Sebastian Cordes, young Danish director, has his film placed in the new ”slow film category”, and it is slow his ”A Place Called Lloyd” but for someone who loves Roy Andersson and Jørgen Leth, you see where the inspiration comes from and enjoy this absurd visit to a place where the employed people still come every day even if their Lloyd flight company was declared bankrupt in 2008. Image by image, sequence by sequence, through beautiful shots, you get into this world of dedicated people, who have the hope that things will get back to normal and the airplanes will leave the ground again.

Read more about the films and see trailers on

www.idfa.nl 

Yes, it started yesterday, the fabulous documentary event in Amsterdam and today it’s all over with screenings, masterclasses, the academy, some films are in competition, others are not, facebook is full of ”come and see my film”, there will be many full houses. And many who prepare their pitches for the Forum. With meetings and parties.

I am not there this year for family and friend reasons – birthdays – but I have seen some of the films already so comments will arrive on this site, don’t have time for longer reviews but I will pick some films via links and Docs for Sale. So check it out – there could be recommendations you want to follow.

For instance the world premiere tonight of Audrius Stonys‘ new film

– yes we love him here on filmkommentaren and have done so since his debut at the beginning of 1990’es. The title is ”Woman and Glacier” and this is what I wrote to the director, when I had seen the film:

“…Magic, Audrius, mind-blowing to be there, … Will watch again, it brings me in a meditative mood, love the way you use archive and the structuring with the musician. Thanks for letting me watch – on a computer… you will have a lot of success with that film…” and later on, ”… this quote from Swedish Sune Jonsson in 1978 fits well to your film, especially the last words “inner landscapes”: “…A documentary work is not intended for the esthetic connoisseur or the preoccupied consumer, but rather for people in vital need of increasing their knowledge: of transforming communicated environments, epochs, nature scenes into personal experiential substance – something with which to enrich their own inner landscapes.”

The IDFA website short description of the film: A filmic ode to a woman’s choice to live in solitude. For 30 years, a Lithuanian scientist has been conducting climate research at the Tuyuksu Glacier in Kazakhstan.

New (almost) wordless masterpiece by Audrius Stonys with his genius cameraman Audrius Kezemys.

www.idfa.nl