The Krakow Film Festival is over for me. I have – with this one – delivered the agreed texts for the festival newspaper and I have watched the films in the Documentary Competition to give marks together with other critics. I have enjoyed the festival and yet… I was not there in persona! I had to stay home with my wife, who had a knee injury. We had both been looking forward to be in Krakow again after more than 10 years. A film festival is a place to celebrate Film, meet all the people involved, talk about films, have fun, I did not have that pleasure, alas. I was not for the masterclass of Marcel Lozinski, I did not take part in the 20 year celebration of Kieslowski, I did not meet brothers and sisters from Sweden, who make great documentaries for the moment. I would have loved to shake hands with and hug… No, I stop now!

But thanks to the professionalism and generosity of press spokeswoman Anna E. Dziedzic, with whom I have been in daily contact, and who have directed me to photos, texts, etc. on FB, Youtube, instagram and the website, I have felt the festival and am able to make this concluding text, a kind of conclusion, my impression of the competitive programme and the selection for that category, that included 19 films.

Like most documentary festivals it is obvious that the selection committee has been searching to cover themes of today: The war in Ukraine (“Alisa in Warland”, stupid title but fine film by a film student), “The Burden of Proof”, one more film about the big immigration issue in current Europe, “Employment Office”, I could repeat the sentence from before, unhappy people who are looking for a job and meet bureaucracy, “Life on the Border”, children in refugee camps depicting their situation in often very moving short clips, they are victims of ISIS, a film about Boris Nemtsov…

“I am looking forward to real life”, says the bearded, old man in the fine Canadian film “Manor” (PHOTO). “Here we don’t live, we just exist”, he says, as the psychiatric hospital, where he has stayed is closing down. I was very impressed by this well made, warm documentary as I was to see Wojciech Kasperski’s stunning “Icon” from a psychiatric hospital in Siberia. I remember his “Seeds” from 10 years ago, he is able to bring a philosophical element into his observation of human beings, who are outside our so-called normality.

The documentary competition programme is definitely characterized by seriousness. I could have wished for a bit more stylistical playfulness like there is in Piotr Stasik’s excellent New York film, in “Homo Sacer”, in the amazing Brazilian “Curumim” and in “The Nine” that has a social focus and a surprising way of telling a story about outsiders.

On the other hand, I don´t want to forget Swedish Sara Broos and her “Reflections” that is both very personal, joyful and painful at the same time, and on a constant search for a style, a way of telling a story, to make an aesthetic choice. Which are what so many Polish documentarians do and which is what a festival like the Krakow Film Festival wants us to appreciate. We do!

Last night the award ceremony was held at the 56th Krakow Film Festival. Projects in development, participating in the impressive Industry section, were honored and supported, and there were decisions made by juries in the many festival sections. I saw the films in the International Documentary Competition so I will limit myself to comment on that – a full list of prize winners can be found on the website of the festival.

The jury for the Documentary Competition chose to give the Golden Horn to the director of the best film, Zosya Rodkevich for the film “My Friend Boris Nemtsov”, a popular and – allow me to say that – political correct decision. The Silver Horn for best medium length went to Massimo Coppola for the charming “Romeo and Juliet” and the one for the best feature-length documentary film to Canadian Pier-Luc Latulippe and Martin Fournier for the film “Manor”. 

I was part of a 6 person critic’s panel that gave marks to the 19 films in this competition – published in the festival newspaper. I had “Manor” as one of the 4 I gave top points, whereas the two films that were number 1 and 2 on the critics list, both original and innovative in their cinematic language, Polish Piotr Stasik’s “21 x New York” and Brazilian “Curumim” by Marcos Prado were surprisingly not on the list of the jury. Stasik’s film with top points from all 6 critics! A great film, if he is disappointed, it is understandable.

The fourth one of my favourtites, Wojciech Kasperski’s “Icon” received the Fipresci prize, and was awarded as the best film in the National Polish Documentary Competition, plus it was recognized for its editing, for raising social awareness and for its cinematography.

The Award for the best cinematography funded by the HBO Polska went to Lithuanian Kristina Sereikaitė for the film “Dead Ears”, directed by Linas Mikuta.

And another partly Lithuanian film “I’m Not from Here” by Chilean Maite Alberti and Lithuanian Giedre Zickyte got the Prix EFA Krakow 2016 as best short film and qualifies therefore to the European Film Award.

One small consolation for the best film – according to me – Best producer in the National Polish Competition was Agnieszka Wasiak, Lava Film for her work on “21 x New York”.

www.krakowfilmfestival.pl

Apart from the already mentioned, see below, main award for Martin Solá’s “The Chechen Family”, the director Marcela Zamora received The Amnesty International Catalunya Award and the Jury’s Special Mention for her touching “The Room of Bones”. It is a film that has this story according to the site of the festival:

“A bold look at the social violence in El Salvador. The mothers who have lost their kids to youth gang wars look for their bodies in the Legal Medicine Institute, where corpses with no names or identifiable relatives pile up daily. During the last decade murdered people have amounted to tens of thousands. Forensic anthropologists in El Salvador face the titanic job of recovering human remains hidden in clandestine graves throughout the country. The majority are young, victims of various types of violence: attacks between youth gangs, people who vanish during their attempt to emigrate to the USA, and inside the deepest graves are victims of the bloody civil war which took place between 1980 and 1992.”

Photo: Marcela Zamora (left) with award and friend Maria Cille, one of many great DocsBarcelona staff members.

Also awarded, again one should say, was Polish Karolina Bielawska for her “Call me Marianna” in the New Talent Category

and Jorge Caballero for “Patient” in the Latitud category. Also this Latin American film deserves to be introduced to a European audience:

“Patient is the word that defines us when we need to follow medical prescriptions or we have to stay calm while we wait. In Colombia, a patient is not only someone who suffers an illness and hopes to overcome it, but also those who take care of that person and fight daily against an absurd bureaucratic system to make sure their loved ones receive what they need. Nubia is patient, and despite living anguished by the loss of her daughter to an aggressive cancer, she manages to navigate with admirable firmness the rambling processes of the Colombian health system.”

DocsBarcelona has screened 46 documentaries and most of the directors and protagonists have been in Barcelona to present their films. The nineteenth edition has increased its viewers by a 30%, overcoming for the first time the barrier of 10,000 spectators (the total assistance will be closed in a few days with DocsBarcelona online final numbers). In addition, the professional activities have gathered 980 professionals and more than 1,300 people have visited the exhibition “Seguir con vida”. (Doctors Without Borders, ed.)

www.docsbarcelona.com

On the last day of DocsBarcelona – in the afternoon – I attended the screening of ”Chechen Family” (”La Familia Chechena”) by Argentinian director Martin Solá, who brought to me not only a strong film but also the best Q&A discussion after the film, led by my colleague programmer Daniel Jariod, who provoked by me translated the words of the director into English – at a festival that still hesitates when it comes to use the English language at opening and closing ceremonies and at Question and Answer sessions.

Anyway, Solá told the audience how he worked with camera and sound to get into the sufist spiritual sessions, which are the core of this both beautiful and at the same time frightening tough interpretation of a phenomenon in an oppressing country. Solá sees the religion as a resistance to the official Chechnya that he visually catches in a long travelling scene from Grozny, the shining city or could one say the shined-up city. The film lives up to a sentence so often used on this site, a quote from Richard Leacock, it conveys ”the feeling of being there”.

No surprise that Solá got the first prize later that night at the closing ceremony of the festival. The English version of the jury motivation is not available yet – here comes the local:  

“una manera poètica de fer sentir l’interior d’una comunitat i de mostrar la identitat d’un poble en un context de violència històrica, a través d’un fort compromís amb la forma.”

and why not bring the English one used at the Visions du Réel in Nyon, where ”Chechen Family” won as well:

“The Chechen Family is an intense, unique, uncompromising film. This award is for the radical cinematographic gesture of making a film with and not about a community: a trance-like movie that disrupts the conventional flux of time and that offers both an individual and collective, ethic and aesthetic experience.”

I will get back with a mention of the other awards. Photo: the team behind the film and the main character. Taken from FB page og Solá.

www.docsbarcelona.com

Wonderful. The smell of books that meet you, when you enter the Altaïr Bookshop on Gran Via de les Corts Catalanes. You go downstairs to smell and have the best coffee in Barcelona together with film directors, whose films are in the programme of DocsBarcelona 2016. They are here for this noon intimate arrangement made by the charismatic owner of the place.

The filmmakers were Léa Rinaldi (”Esto es lo que hay” from Cuba), Marcela Zamora (”El cuarto de los huesos” from El Salvador), Pieter van Eecker (”Samuel in the Clouds” from Bolivia) and German Kral (”The Last Tango” from Argentina). I attended the introduction by the directors with clips from their films and enjoy to know that – apart from the tough documentary from El Salvador – they all have and have had theatrical release with quite a success. German Kral told me that 44.000 tickets had been sold in Germany for his film. Wow!

And then to the cinema to sit next to Maria Teresa Larrain in a cinema, where her ”Shadow Girl” had its second screening at the festival, where she pitched the film a couple of years ago. The film is strong and emotional in its description of how Maria Teresa grows blind, a film that is without sentimentality but full of reflections on what it means to become blind. She meets blind street vendors, she shows the film to them and it is said that the worst thing about getting blind is to lose your dignity. Maria Teresa does not, she is a role model of great courage in a film that has a clever personal text from her and a visual flow of colours. It must have a long festival life and come on broadcasters, this is also for you, or for us television viewers!

www.docsbarcelona.com 

Look at the photo. Gaudi. La Pedrera, built between 1906 and 1910, 92 Paseo de Gracia. A must-see for visitors to Barcelona. But also the yearly venue for master classes at DocsBarcelona like yesterday, where (from left to right with badge in hand) after the session Brian Hill (City of Dreams – a Musical), Sean McAllister (A Syrian Love Story), me as moderator, Rokhsareh Ghaem Maghami (Sonita), with Greek director Apostolos Karakasis as participant, were talking about intervention in documentaries with their films as examples:

Rokhsareh Ghaem Maghami changed the life of Sonita by helping her to make the music video that became a hit on the internet, went with her from Iran to Afghanistan to settle visa and passport so she could go to the US, where she is now. McAllister was arrested in Syria, his material was confiscated, the couple in the film, Amer and Raghda, had to flee the country for that reason, with their children as they were on the director’s tape. McAllister followed the couple when they ended up in exile in France and participated actively in the problems they had in their marriage. Brian Hill went to the Bombay school and made the kids and their teachers sing their social stories in the genre that he has created, the musical documentary.

From Gaudi’s architectural pearl after a good 90 minutes session to Aribau Club cinema where 120 people watched ”A Syrian Love Story” with a very, very pleasant surprise: Amer and Raghda, the son of Amer, and the 9 year old Bob, the child of Amer and Raghda came on stage to receive a more than a warm applause and to answer questions from the audience.

They will be there again tonight at the screening at Aribau Club 1 at 18.15.

Photo by Maria Cilleros

www.docsbarcelona.com

… and directors inform and answer questions after the screenings. The heart of a festival, is it not, when the filmmakers get the chance to have feedback from the viewers, who have enjoyed their work on a big screen, vice versa. The triangle: film, audience, filmmaker.

I attended three of these meetings yesterday. Louie Palu (and Devin Gallagher) showed and commented on his ”hell on earth” (my remark) documentary ”Kandahar Journals”, that have several layers: the diary reflections of the photographer Louie Palu, who has photographed and filmed everything himself, the information given about the geography of Kandahar, the almost unbearable photos and images of dead people, including the body parts of a suicide bomber… It stays in your mind this film as does the one by Friedrich Moser, ”A Good American”, that features the most sympathetic man you can think of, Bill Binney, and his lost fight with the NSA, that did not want to adapt his surveillance program that could have prevented the 9/11 to happen. Everything has a structure, says Binney, and the film has indeed one, a form has been chosen, one could almost say designed to convey this scandalous story. I had time to go to the Q&A of ”Daniel’s World” by Veronika Lišková, who gave the audience in a full cinema the background for her sensitive film about a paedophile, who has come out of the closet, so to say. The reaction from the Barcelona audience was very positive, a Brazilian filmmaker wanted to take the film to her country, that’s how a festival should work.

A couple of people I meet: Serge Tréfaut, Portuguese director, who just got an award in his home country for his ”Treblinka”, a hybrid film of great beauty, longing to see it on a big screen. And Arunas Matelis and his wife Alge, who were at the speed meetings with their ”Gladiators. A Different World”, a true international coproduction as it is about the bicycle riders of Giro d’Italia and Tour de France. With a Spanish coproducer, Matelis is now planning to get hold of the star Alberto Contador.

Today films and a masterclass with three truly international, award-winning directors: Rokhsareh Ghaem Maghami (”Sonita”), Brian Hill (”City of Dreams”) and Sean McAllister (”A Syrian Love Story”). ”Intervention or Observation”, the catalogue outlines as the theme. The answer is already given, the three of them intervene, so that is what is to be discussed at La Pedrera today at 5.30pm. How, why, with which consequences? Please come to Gaudi’s beautiful place! And then films and more films, hopefully with as many spectators as yesterday.

www.docsbarcelona.com