No, I can not make a real review of this film…

But why not?

I know the two makers too well, and the project. I have seen them pitching the film at several workshops. And I am just so happy for them that they have finished the work. A good film, an important film, a rich film. And taken for the Sarajevo festival recently.

So, you can not be objective, you mean?

There is no such thing as objectivity in reviewing films, and I normally can take the necessary distance, when I write about films made by people I know. But this time, no, precisely because of my admiration for Mina and Vesela, and their courage and their stubbornness to finish a project that will be well received outside

their own country and raise big discussion – it already has – in Bulgaria. It actually states that 60% of the parliament members in Bulgaria were agents for the communist regime! Just that statement – we are talking about a member of the EU! And not just Bulgaria, they also mention, or say point at the connection between the Greek Syriza and the billionaire Kokkalis, who was a stasi agent during GDR. And talk about Bokova, who was appointed for a job in the UN. She was a key person in the communist times.

So, you think the two directors are courageous and stubborn… are they also good filmmakers, are they artists?

Mina is an excellent animator, her dramatic drawings of ”the Beast”, aka communism, are of high artistic quality, some are like paintings you could hang on the wall, if they were not moving, and Vesela, well I have kind of been in love with her since I met her years ago. Her energy, her talent as an actress and producer and director. She is a gift to the film playing the young woman, who goes around the world to find out whether there is anything good about communism. As an actress she knows the métier, she is present and she has passion, when she asks questions. She plays a young woman, who has a dialogue off-screen with her grandfather, who lived during the communist period and ended up being part of the Goriani resistance movement.

What was that?

I had never heard about it but I understand from the granddaughter in the film that she wants to have him and this guerilla movement ”into Bulgarian history”, which has so far not been possible and there is another strong point that the film makes: The period of communism is not dealt with in the school books in current Bulgaria. You understand why, when you in the film, person by person, is told what this and this parliament member did during the years of communism and when you see and hear about the concentration camp Belene, where thousands of opposition people ended their lives. This is the strong side of the film, the focus on Bulgaria – present and past. It’s actually quite shocking and they tell it well through the story of the grandfather, who was a true communist, but was imprisoned for his criticism of the regime, was hired – because of his intellectual skills – as an agent, who did economical analysis, before he went for the Goriani group.

I sense there is a but…?

Ah, you want the reviewer to be critical even if he says he won’t! Well, and it sounds crazy to say so, but there is too much in the film. I could have lived without the visit to Cuba, I am a bit fed up listening and watching Zizek again and again. It’s probably my fault but I think he is a showman and I don’t get what he says because I always study his crazy body language. It’s like Mina and Vesela wants to broaden out what has happened to Bulgaria. Does it work? I´m not sure. Anyway there is so much dynamic in the film created (also) from the clash they construct between the animated Beast-sequences and Vesela going around, or with her sitting at the archive staring at the files of grandfather. Those moments are maybe the key moments of the film, emotionally.

As you don’t want to give pens to the film, how do we end this non-review review…

With a quote, words to that effect: … at the camp (Belene), the prisoners, those who were condemned to death, were given a mirror, so they could look at themselves for the last time before they were executed.  

http://beast-film.com/beast-film_home/index.html

Bulgaria, 2016, 91 mins.

Photo: Mina Mileva and Vesela Kazakova

… with the subtitle “Sibiu International Film Festival” has existed since 1993. This year it takes place October 17-23. The Romanian festival in Sibiu sent an email about the selection that has been done and the interesting thematic grouping of the films which have been done as well as the competitive sections listed with an award for “Outstandox”, “Romanian documentaries”, “Central and Eastern European documentaries” and “Student documentaries”. Here is the text:

“We have received over 1,200 submissions from all over the world, many of the documentaries dealing with extremely interesting subjects and using surprising approaches, making it difficult for the Selection Committee to pick the 100 films that make up this year’s official programme and various sidebars.

The 23rd Astra Film Festival welcomes the audiences to an exciting documentary cinema week. A selection of the best new international, Eastern European, and Romanian documentaries dealing with some of the burning issues in contemporary reality, are grouped in the theme programmes Inside Radical Islam, No Place Like Dis-place, Citizens of the Online World. Strong authorial voices and outstanding skills are reflected in the films in the theme sections Self-Family-Society, Doc-vlog, Circumscribed Spaces, Stories from Urbania, and OutstanDox. Surprising stories and incredible characters emerge from the films in the theme sections Encounters, Refurbished Past, and Reality Under Cover.

This year, Astra Film pays tribute to the work of Fred Wiseman (photo), and invites you to meet a legend of documentary cinema.

A special programme features recent works of the great masters of documentary cinema Patricio Guzman, Gianfranco Rosi, Werner Herzog and Thom Andersen.

Last but not least, the new formats – VR, 360, webdoc, full dome –  are present in the New media – immersive documentary programme: The Future Is Now.”

Many of the films have been reviewed or noted on this site like “Depth Two”, “Don Juan”, “Train to Adulthood”, “The Dazzling Light of Sunset”, “The Dybbuk, A Tale of Wandering Souls”, “Among the Believers” and “Sonita”.

http://www.astrafilm.ro/official-selection-2016-1.aspx

Let’s start with this information: Mariupolis is a city in Ukraine at the Azov Sea and with the river Kalmius. Half a million citizens. The war in Eastern Ukraine has reached Mariupolis. A quote from a Cineuropa interview with Mantas Kvedaravicius: ”… I came to Mariupol in March 2015 to see what was going on because it had become a front line, and the city was in an ambivalent situation: neither Ukrainian nor pro-Russian. Once I went there, it was obvious that the situation there – with a zoo and a theatre near to the front line – was unique, and something could be conveyed about the way space and politics interact with the human body…”

Kvedaravicius, whose last film (his first) ”Barzakh”, a masterpiece, took place in Chechnya, has again created a tense work of a beauty that lies in the aesthetic choices he has made with the camera, that he and two others have operated. You enjoy frame by frame, scene after scene, sequence after sequence the way he

has placed the camera and the naturalness with which the editing takes you around. Impressions: on board a fishing boat, at home with a family, soldiers playing chess, rehearsals for the celebration of Victory Day, music being played, a church ceremony, the animals in the small zoo if you can call it that, the steel factory, a wedding, a man smoking a cigarette… and the shoemaker in his workshop, the one who brings peace to the narrative. And again and again the image of the theatre buiding, inside and outside.

To the story – which makes me comment that here is a film that (as many Lithuanian documentaries do) is a total denial of the constant cry from broadcast people ”what is the story”. Here are many stories if you want to use that word. Examples: A shot from above of citizens, who one by one turn the sign of the cross on their way to the church. The camera moves up on the profile of a bearded man in action and after moments it goes to his hands which are pulling the strings of the bells that give us listening viewers the sound of beauty. And then back to the citizens on the ground. Superb! Or a Greek statue of a female body in focus with the camera following a flie moving around as if it caresses. Stories.

The editing principle of the many impressionistic scenes, many of them going back to persons we have met before (the shoemaker, the man doing illegal fishing from the bridge, the young girl who is a reporter and who we meet in the tough war scenes at the end of the film) is difficult to describe. There might be an inside/outside, conflict/peace – and there might be associations that I don’t get as I don’t understand Ukrainian and Russian.

How shall I leave this praise of a film that develops and towards the end brings images of exploded cars and destroyed buildings, and has scenes where the population is taught how to put out fire… I want to and will remember the shoemaker repairing shoes and having conversations with clients and family. A location that comes back, with peace, a statement of survival of humanism, as this great director has delivered with what is only his second film.

Lithuania, 96 mins., 2016.