They keep on coming these strong philosophical cinematic essays from Poland. This time one from 2015 that I had not seen, a film that after touring at several American festivals with success has the chance to end up on the Oscar Nomination List for short documentaries. It deserves to be on that list!

On the photo you see one of the faces of the film. One of the faces that react to phone calls from men and women, who want to talk, who seek comfort and understanding of their problems, which normally simply come from loneliness. They call the gentle radio man Kuba. The other face is one of another young man, who takes calls from people in need of immediate medical help. He tries to find out what is wrong, gives advice to those calling on what to do until the ambulance arrives. It is sometimes a more than urgent situation or maybe it is already too late, and sometimes also he gets calls from lonely people. Help needed for the mind and the body.

It sounds very banal and it is on print, but interpreted into a film, within the frame that ”the end of the world” arrives very soon according to the Maya calendar, shot during night time, with dark images with the light coming from inside flats in appartment buildings, mixed in a brilliant montage with images taken from surveillance cameras, images of mostly empty streets, of ”lonely” cars or shot from the ambulance with the radio sound – yes, interpreted into a film that has a tone, and an atmosphere, it becomes an extraordinary documentary about the ordinary. A reflection on ”la condition humaine”.

It sounds very dark but there is also humour and light like when a woman wants to cancel the end of the world as she has experienced love – or the man who wants it to come, to have a new world arrive, where his dogs do not suffer from the noise of the world.

Poland, 2015, 38 mins.

It’s number 17, the workshop and pitching session in Lisbon, the Lisbon Docs 2016, organised by EDN (European Documentary Network) and Apordoc. Running parallel to the DocLisboa festival. Happy to see that the event is still alive and kicking after all these years. Remember how producer Pedro Martins and directors like Sergio Trefaut and Catarina Mouráo and many more set up the Apordoc in 1998 to be an active documentary organisation that among others had the MEDIA Programme supported Lisbon Docs as one of the activities as well as Docs Kingdom. As the EDN representative at meetings in Bruxelles in those years with the MEDIA executives there was always scepticism raised if the Portuguese event was worth keeping (as one of four EDN activities in Southern Europe) – it was obviously, and EDN director Paul Pauwels (photo), in a interview with Cineuropa, explains clearly why and puts words on the profile of the workshop of 2016 (October 16-22):

”It is always important to continue to learn and adapt to new realities. We have realised that even the most experienced of professionals can still find new elements that don’t only help them to present their project in a better way, but also make them think more deeply about it. When you have a lot of experience, it is easy to get caught up in a kind of routine. That makes things tricky, because you might not be thinking enough about storytelling or the market. So we try to provide a service that not only gives documentary professionals tools to develop their stories in the best possible way, but also to think about what the decision makers need and are expecting… Today, the event is much more of a “meeting point”. I believe that the whole process has become much more personal and much more professional. That’s why I think people still make the effort to come to these events – to see what’s going on. And, in the case of Lisbon Docs, I think they also get a very good idea of what is happening in Europe – a Europe that we would like to see united, even though we know that isn’t happening!…”

Link below to more about Lisbon Docs and the whole interview with Pauwels. It is fine to see a list of tutors, who know what a creative documentary is – director Lithuanian Audrius Stonys, local Graca Castanheira (one of the pioneers 17 years ago), Spanish Marta Andreu, Edda Baumann-von Broen, all round doc expert Peter Jäger and producer Christian Popp, previously commissioner at arte.

… and projects, more than 20, happy to see that Lithuanian producer Dagne Vildziunaite is there, as well as Shorena Tevzadze from Georgia, local Jorge Pelicano (director) and Romanian Alex Brendea and Irina Malcea, to whose project ”Teacher” I have high expectations.

List of panelists, read

http://www.lisbondocs.org/lisbondocs2016/en/

To be honest we lost our way at the big Cimetière Montparnasse. We had been talking about paying a visit to Sartre & Beauvoir or why not Gainsbourg, but suddenly my wife points and says, look, here is Joris Ivens. And many warm thoughts fill my head. His classic from Borinage (1936), his series from China that we bought for distribution at Statens Filmcentral (National Film Board of Denmark) and his last, the non-political film ”Une Histoire de vent” that I saw in Centre Pompidou with the presence of the director. I remember him sitting in his wheelchair with his beautiful white hair – as you see him in the film in the desert trying to tame the wind with his camera, as he hat put it. He lived from 1898 to 1989, google his filmography, an amazing oeuvre, a man of the world.

But this small personal report from a sunny Paris has its focus elsewhere. On the Americans in Paris. Not Gershwin or Minelli or Hemingway, not the burgers that are now available in almost every café but (first) on the Beat Generation and the exhibition about Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs, Ferlinghetti, Cassidy and so on at Centre Pompidou. We got there on the last day it was open and I had high expectations after all the clever observations our Danish Beat Generation expert par excellence Lars Movin had formulated. No disappointment – photographs, films, drawings, collages, paintings, politics, provocations, poetry, long interview with Ginsberg, who mentions Ezra Pound and Céline as inspirators among many others for the Generation, that I first learned about through Danish author and journalist Erik Thygesen, who back in the 60’es published translations of Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti and others in the book ”San Francisco Renaissancen”. Have it at home. Must read Ginsberg’s ”Howl” again in Danish language…

… and then a meeting – again – with still alive photographer Robert Frank, some of his photos from the monumental ”The Americans” and his film ”Me and my Brother” (1968) that I need to get and can get – through the publication of the publisher Steidl, here is a quote from the Steidl site:

”…It celebrates the return of the poetic essay as assemblage, the affirmation of the underground as a wild cinematic analysis in the form of a collage, and skillfully weaves together opposites, plays counterfeits against the authentic, pornography against poetry,acting against being, Beat cynicism against hippie romanticism, monochrome against colored…”

Sara Thelle called – in her text about Robert Frank on Filmkommentaren – ”Me and my Brother” ”a slap in my face”.

Look at the photo of Robert Frank, a reframed snapshot taken by me and my i-phone, Frank in New York around 1947, a photo taken by Louis Faurer, whose exhibition we visited at the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson. Some words about HCB’s house first: A three floor building in a nice area near rue Daguerre, adresse 2, impasse Lebouis, a private fondation with great exhibitions and ”conversations autour de la photographie”. Strongly recommended.. No photos of HCB but a wonderful book to enjoy, when you have done the three floors.

Louis Faurer, name looks French, no, he is an American in Paris, for the moment his photos are exhibited at the HCB fondation. Born in Philadelphia in 1916, he took pictures there and in New York, where Robert Frank invited him to stay at his place so he did not have to return to Philadelphia after work. People and situations in NY, very often around Times Square, a lot of love towards the ones he photographed, a fine sense of framing, praised by Frank vice versa, ”we never criticised each other”, Faurer has said. Faurer could afford his art, as he like many other creative photographers earned his money through fashion photography. Steidl, the publisher, again, a book about Faurer and the exhibition has been published.

… you don’t believe it, while writing this piece of text, a band is playing dixieland jazz in the street. America in Paris!

https://steidl.de/flycms/Books/Me-and-My-Brother-0409414457.html

www.henricartierbresson.org

The fine website of IDF (Institute of Documentary Film) also – besides concrete info on workshops and festivals – includes small interviews. Today one is published with Salomé Jashi, whose “Bakhmaro” and “The Dazzling Light of Sunset” have been written about on filmkommentaren. Jashi is to give a masterclass at the festival in Jihlava and will be a tutor for the Ex Oriente workshop. Here is a quote dealing with one of the eternal questions for documentarians, read the rest via the link below. She says:

Some years ago, when I visited IDFA for the first time, I observed that most of the films had very strong stories and characters but artistically I found them weak. But these films conveyed information, rose awareness, made me think and worry. I was asking myself whether it made sense to focus on style and form in documentaries, in the way I did, when information was so much more important in the world. This question has two sides and it’s a decision we make as filmmakers– is the issue more important or is it the artistic and aesthetic way we deal with our surroundings and create content. Even though I struggle in coming up with the answer, in fact I am still for the latter.

https://www.dokweb.net/en/

I refrain from a classic review of this shocking documentary that was launched yesterday on Netflix after having been premiered at the recent Toronto Film Festival. There has already been several praising texts in New York Times, Hollywood Reporter, Telegraph etc., and – in Danish – in the newspaper Politiken. If you want to read them go via the facebook page of Plus Pictures, the Danish production company of ”Amanda Knox”. The producer’s name is Mette Heide, who again has taken care of a big international documentary. With success. If you are one of those, who have never heard about this film before, scroll down and get the synopsis – and come back to…

… a fine interview (link below) with the two directors on the site of

the Danish Film Institute that also has supported ”Amanda Knox”. The first question you put to yourself is how they did get that deep access to a crime story that for years filled the electronic and printed media. The answer comes here:

“We got access to a lot of new material,” Brian McGinn says. “Material like phone and prison recordings, home video footage that Knox shot of the victim Meredith Kercher and photos of Sollecito and Knox, taken during their week-long romance, that had never been seen before and that offer an illuminating perspective on what happened behind the scenes. In that sense, I hope people come away from the film having a better understanding of the case itself…”

Rod Blackhurst says: “We were fortunate enough to get them all on camera – the defendants Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito, the main prosecutor Giuliano Mignini and finally Nick Pisa, a journalist for the Daily Mail, who was one of the first reporters on the scene. There have been several other television documentaries made about these people, but they all took outside perspectives. We wanted to make a film that looked at the story from the inside out. We wanted to make a story about what it felt like for all of these individuals to be caught up in headlines that came to define their lives and hear from them directly, in their own words”.

And that is what we get in this well told and well built story about the tragic fate of the two young people, told by themselves, from their perspective, it’s touching. It is ”in their own words” and especially Amanda Knox has the gift of being precise and analytical – and emotional – when she adresses the camera. See photo (taken by Rod Blackhurst). A media world of total hysteria. With Daily Mail journalist Nick Pisa as an example of how disgusting journalism, if you can call it that, can be. He has no regrets looking back on the way he covered the trials, he remembers how happy he was to have ”front page after front page” and how he always wanted to be the first. No matter the facts of the case. The other character who stands out in his own pathetic way is the public prosecutor Giuliano Mignini, who wanted to please the press by almost immeditately pointing at Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito as the guilty ones because of the way they reacted to the death of Meredith Kercher. They were kissing each other while the investigations took place! Therefore guilty! Mignini built up his own story with himself as a kind of pipe-smoking inspector Maigret, he loved the attention of the media, he became a hero in Perugia – and probably still is as many believe the two youngsters committed the murder. He did not care about facts and his incompetence is precisely revealed, when the deeper DNA examinations are performed. Apart from having built the film in an amazingly effective manner that suits the subject of a crime story, the filmmakers have succeeded in characterising the tabloid media at its worth and the lack of credibility of a law system, where personal vanity drives the main prosecutor.

Synopsis (from the DFI website): Twice convicted and twice acquitted by Italian courts of the brutal killing of her British roommate Meredith Kercher, Amanda Knox became the subject of global speculation as non-stop media attention fed the public’s fascination through every twist and turn of the nearly decade-long case. In a world that remains strongly divided on the legal findings, the film goes beyond guilt or innocence to shed new light on the events and circumstances of the past nine years. Featuring unprecedented access to key people involved and never-before-seen archival material, the film shifts between past to present, exploring the case from the inside out in exclusive interviews with Amanda Knox, her former co-defendant and ex-boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito, Italian prosecutor Giuliano Mignini and Daily Mail reporter Nick Pisa.

Denmark, 2016, 91 mins.

http://www.dfi.dk/Service/English/News-and-publications/News/September-2016/Amanda-Knox-interview.aspx