… started yesterday with – as usual – a rich programme, the 36th edition, wow, some of the festival participants who walk into the lobby of the Scandic Hotel, where the reception is, were not born when the festival started… I was and I think I was at the first edition and for sure I have been to more than 20 of the 36 editions, maybe more!

Anyway, the decision to have the festival every year in Malmø has proved to the right one. It takes time to build a local audience but according to programmer Cecilia Lidin and Executive director Heidi Elise Christensen there is an audience that is local and not coming to the festival for professional reasons. They come for the films. Well done.

I arrived this morning, will view and write about a couple of films, attend some events and watch and listen to the Forum that is on monday and tuesday.

Recommendations from the “Best Nordic Documentary” competition programme, of films that have been reviewed on this site:

Robin Petré’s “Only on Earth: “Look at the photo… A douce painting by Edgar Degas, for me the first true documentarian? No, an edited still from a Danish documentary – coproduced with a Spanish company – directed by Robin Petré and with Ecuadorian cameraperson María Goya Barquet behind the camera. I became curious to know more about the latter, went to her website that with photos immediately proved a special talent for giving images an extraordinary poetic stamp that appeals to someone like me, who again and again stresses that documentaries are Films…” Quote from the review.

Christian Sønderby Jepsen’s “The Father, the Sons and the Holy Spirit”…”Der er Andreas, Christian og mig, Henrik og min far og min mor og min hustru. Alle drikker.” Det siger fortælleren. Det er altså personerne, og han er en af dem, hovedpersonen, første person, ental, og jeg er inde i et familiedrama, i gang med at lytte til og iagttage en sørgelig historie, og det er disse mennesker, jeg skal være sammen med en film lang. Jeg har problemer med at holde mig fast, for jeg kan ikke holde med, ikke identificere mig, ikke forelske mig, jeg kan ikke holde det ud. Jeg stødes fra, hvor jeg skulle trækkes ind og opsluges. Og jeg kan ikke bare afvise filmen, jeg får mistanke til mig selv, til mine evner til at udfylde min rolle, min opgave. Den at være publikum, som her viser sig som et ansvar. Først og fremmest gæstens ansvar, jeg skal være høflig og forstående og accepterende, jeg er i et fremmed land, hos et besynderligt folk, som opfører sig særegent, som taler et anderledes sprog. Men jeg er anfægtet og jeg kommer i tvivl. Jeg holder filmen ude fra mig, undrende… Citat fra min afdøde kollega Allan Bergs tekst om “Testamentet”, som han skrev I 2013. Jeg afslutter anmeldelsen med at bruge Allans ord om den nye film, fortsættelsen af “Testamentet”: FREMRAGENDE.

Areeb Zuaiter’s “Yalla Parkour”…”…Ahmed is sooo good for the film. Charming, natural in front of the Camera, (trying to) turning pain into happiness. And as a parkourist quite close to losing his mobility as he shows Areeb some videos, where his jumping made him end on his head…Of course you can´t help – when watching the film – think about Gaza today BUT as a well composed sometimes painful, sometimes joyful I enjoyed the film that also catches the Palestinian soul and I hope for the best for Ahmed and his parkourist teammates and his family, where ever they are.”

3 out of 12 competing films, I will be back with reviews on some of the remaining films in that category. And the best recommendation I can give: Go to the cinema, watch films on the big screen together with people from Malmø and abroad.

“Three cows – Joy, Crumb and Sweetie – live in the forest. Joy is grandma and Crumb is its child. They were both rescued to the forest pasture from the door of the slaughterhouse truck. Sweetie is Joy’s granddaughter, who was born as a surprise on the pasture.”

This is how the synopsis goes for this wonderful short documentary that left me smiling for half an hour.

The title refers both to the three mentioned cows AND to the lovely three ladies, who rescued the cows from the slaughterhouse. To have a free life in the forest, to be caressed and talked to, to answer with moo’s or roaring of pure pleasure. You see how they jump happily and you see the ladies and their happiness. And sorrow when one of the three passed away followed by a beautiful speech – and the arrival of a new one to be spoiled by the fabulous cow ladies. Great cinematography and sound work.

Finland, 2024, 29 mins

This text is written by Emanuele Vernillo, who is Head of the Three – Years Training in Documentary Filmmaking at ZeLIG The words we most often use in times of change speak of necessity: the need to renew, to make space for what is new, to set ourselves in motion and move forward. At ZeLIG we have chosen to embrace this change by taking up the legacy of a thirty-year journey that remains unique in the landscape of European film education. We recognize and hold fast to the original intuition: to dedicate ourselves to documentary in its most varied and unexpected forms, where it becomes cinema, art. That intuition still lights our path today. Documentary, in its freest forms—even when it merges with other genres or ventures into non-linear storytelling—offers a rare possibility: to imagine a cinema that is open, flexible, ever-regenerating. A cinema that constantly reinvents its languages, as every true art form and every living industry must. It is no coincidence that series, fiction films, animation, virtual reality, even gaming, draw on the creative force of documentary in order to evolve and move forward. The change we are experiencing is not a rupture but a continuation, a red thread running through our history. It is the same thread that has always tied us to the world of cinema and its industry: observing, engaging, and at the same time staying rooted in the real—rooted in people, in communities, in the stories around us. We want to keep this spirit alive and project it into the future with renewed energy. Today, documentary is above all a hybrid form. It is the crossing of boundaries. It is the possibility of new combinations. To walk this path is to embrace an artistic vision that is also political and social. As members of a human community made of different languages, colors, smells, and embraces, we believe that becoming hybrid is a necessary response to the identitarian drifts of these dark times. For us, documentary, auteur cinema, and hybrid forms—linear or non-linear—are resistance, sometimes even of civil resistance, in a world where those in power would rather see us reduced to a single face, a single voice, a flattened identity. We, on the other hand, affirm that we can only save ourselves by mixing. This is the most valuable lesson we have learned in recent years, at ZeLIG and in the world.

From press release of yesterday: IDFA is proud to present Portuguese filmmaker, curator, and academic Susana de Sousa Dias as the festival’s Guest of Honor, with a Retrospective and Top 10 selection. Known for her singular approach to archival images and cinematic form, de Sousa Dias has built an internationally acclaimed body of work that interrogates dictatorship, colonial legacies, and the fragile terrain of memory.

The director has had the attention of this site for decades. Colleague Allan Berg set up “a collection of posts about the early films of Susana de Sousa Dias. Here follows some quotes:

“Still Life. Faces of a Dictatorship (2005) the traumatic past of Portugal under Salazar. The film is 77 mins. long without any narration, built on archive from the 48 years between 1926 and till 1974, when the carnation revolution happened. The archive includes news, war footage from the colonies, propaganda films and photos of political prisoners. The musical score for this film, by António de Sousa Dias, is exceptional, first you wonder why but then you see what it does to the images, making a reflective distance and opens for a new both intellectual and emotional interpretation.”

And words of Allan Berg, translated and edited from Danish: “The portraits of the Secret Police appear calm and clarified for a long time on the screen. The ugly operation has lent the beauty, dignity and authenticity of the models… the images are carefully worked on so their aura become visible. The naked sound of the voices from the conversations are treated like was it delicate music. So it becomes delicate music. It is about the political crime of the Portuguese dictatorship… it is so horrifying and wild, and it is conveyed with such a beautiful and calm clarification”. (Posting from Cinéma du réel, March 26 2010).

Bravo IDFA!

Text from festival directors Svetlana and Zoran Popovic, Magnificent 7 festival in Belgrade:

The Magnificent Seven festival, created as a cinema holiday for numerous devotees of modern European documentary film, has successfully presented top achievements and the most significant authors of the contemporary European documentary scene for the past 20 years. This year, certainly one of the most turbulent in the last few decades in Serbia, the entire culture suffered unexpected blows from the institutions that are in charge of nurturing, encouraging and developing it, and thus the festival found itself under the attack of those illegal and undeclared measures of repression, discrimination and elimination. First of all, the elimination of superb culture as too subversive and dangerous for the dark order now nakedly based on brutality and primitivism.

Since its first edition, The Magnificent Seven festival has been  dedicated to the mission of presenting high-quality cinema documentaries that helped us to discover the world from which we were exiled during the nineties, to recognize our true place at the beginning of the XXI century, to understand better ourselves and to be enriched by unforgettable new experiences. But an equally important mission was to present the real Belgrade, the spirit of this area and our culture to eminent European guests, together with the magnificent festival audience. Genuinely impressed prominent documentarians are still spreading the word throughout Europe and the world about what they found to be an amazing festival and a bright city always open to new trends and ideas, which has been enchanting them year after year with its warm atmosphere and people. In this dramatic year, in addition to fantastic historical ups and downs, to the horror and despair of many of us Belgrade has suffered drastic destruction. One of the darkest points is the triangle between the festival’s  venue, the Serbian Parliament and the Assembly of the City of Belgrade, an area where the festival atmosphere has been intensively spreading in previous years.

In addition to all that, threats, brutal violence in the streets, people being taken away as in the times of notorious military junta dictatorships, led the festival to the most difficult but inevitable decision – this year’s edition of  The Magnificent Seven will not take place in the planned September date. If the basic meaning of the word festival is a celebration, then for the expected celebration of a modern documentary film, we beleive that at this moment we have neither the opportunity, nor the reason, nor the right. Still, despite everything, we hope to meet again in the near future.

Photo from 2019, Zoran Popovic and Tue Steen Müller with the Parliament in the background, where a demonstration took place. Today it looks different: https://orf.at/stories/3404233/

Memories… Audrius Stonys was at the Balticum Film & TV Festival in the beginning of the 1990’es. He and Arunas Matelis were the young talents, who showed short documentaries in the Kino Gudhjem on Bornholm. Films like “Antigravitation” and “Earth of the Blind”. Later came “Uku Ukai”, “Alone”, “Countdown”… and together with Kristine Briede “Bridges of Time” that gives us the story of the poetic Baltic documentary cinema with Herz Frank and Uldis Brauns and Ivars Seleckis and…

Audrius is here in Riga with a project, “Bride of the Invisible” that in a beautiful way follows up on the short films mentioned above.

He is now a veteran, he is a grandfather, his daughter is here with her husband – Marija Stonyté is the producer of her father´s film-to-be (!), his son by the way, Paulius, is a cinematographer, very much in demand, yes it is a film family – Audrius is also making tv portraits together with his father and sister, Aiste Stonyté.

In 2013 my late colleague Allan Berg made “Audrius Stonys, Collected Posts on his Works”, you can google it, Allan admired Audrius, met him year after year on Bornholm and wrote beautiful texts about his films. In Danish. RIP Allan.

And – photo – here we are, Audrius and me, in a room where the pitching training takes place. Lovely moment, thank you for your films and the many times we have met in Vilnius and around the world!