It’s a tradition that there are films screenings to accompany the professional training and pitching workshop of the Baltic Sea Docs. On FB the programme was anounced yesterday, introduced in the following way:

The 19th edition of the Baltic Sea Forum for Documentaries will take place in Riga, Latvia, September 2 – 6, 2015! Including a documentary film program “TO BE or TO BE” for the general public and professionals in Rīga and regional centres – Cēsis, Jēkabpils, Liepāja, Rēzekne, Roja, Valmiera and Ventspils.

The Danish “Ekstra Bladet – uden for citat” by Mikala Krogh (English title: The New Room-Off the Record) from 2014 is one the films, highly praised (in Danish) on this site. The beautiful Mexican film “All of Me” (Photo) by Arturo González Villaseñor (2014) is a human story about mothers/women helping migrants with food, when they pass by in thre train hoping to enter the US. “Chuck Norris vs Communism” by Romanian Ilinca Calugareanu is a film that has been on its way for years, succeeded to get to Sundance and win the Grand Jury Prize. I have seen material a couple of times and am truly looking forward to see the final result.

“Dreamcatcher” is a film by Kim Longinotto when she delivers her best with a former prostitute as the charismatic main character, a must-see! I have no idea of what is “Hip-Hop-eration” by Bryn Evans from New Zealand but the description is inviting: “Who said your Grandmother couldn’t be a Hip Hop star? A group of 30 senior citizens, the oldest of whom is 96, are preparing on a small island off the coast of New Zealand for the World Hip-Hop Dance Championship in Las Vegas…”

This one – in quite a different tone – will be even higher on my viewing list: “The Russian Woodpecker” by Chad Gracia, a UK/Ukraine/USA production that has this start of a description: “This harrowing film examines the lasting effects of the Chernobyl disaster through the eyes of Ukranian artist Fedor Alexandrovich, who was four years old on that fateful day. Risking their lives to gain unprecedented access to the site and get closer to the truth, Alexandrovich and the filmmakers uncover the mystery of the Duga, a Soviet radio antenna with frightening abilities, and reveal new layers of the revolution’s painful history…”

… and then of course “Something better to Come”, a hit everywhere, the film by Hanna Polak shot over more than a decade, awarded all over .

https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.1178102162205558.1073741849.294787800537003&type=3

I watched some of the mountain stages at the Tour de France this year, they were boring as nobody really tried anything. Froome was in total control. It was not like that when Marco Pantani was riding, when he reached the top of Alpe d’Huez, when he – ”Il Pirata” – said goodbye to the rest of the cyclists and rode on his own in his very special style, becoming the darling of not only fans from his own country but of all who loved Tour de France and Giro d’Italia and the stars of the show.

These magnificent performances are all well documented in this film that also has quite many interviews with Pantani (1970-2004) himself, with family, with Greg Lemond and Bradley Wiggins, former winners of the Tour, and others close to him. All to build the story of a great talent 10 years after his death, the man who became ”an instrument of a sporting system”, it is being said, part of an unhealthy culture.

The film digs into the scandals of the Festina Team and all that followed doping-wise, repeats again and again close-ups of needles, injections, blood and have reconstructed scenes of a doctor entering the door to Pantani’s hotel room to take those tests, that kicked him out of the Giro d’Italia in 1999, the year after he had won both this race and the Tour de France, still the only one to have done that.

This constant noisy hunt for effect and sensation ruins the film totally, cliché after cliché are presented, stupid split screens, are brought to the viewer with no respect for the  legend, who died so tragically.

I watched the film on Netflix.

UK, 2014, 94 mins.

http://www.pantanifilm.com

He is on his own, McAllister, alone with his camera, which is constantly moving to be able to catch what is going on. I have to confess that this shaky style with little aesthetic consideration irritated me in the beginning as did the director’s many words of introduction to make us (Western) viewers understand what to expect.

Having said so, there are few documentarians who like McAllister, goes from the journalistic point of view and the anynomous reportage, to be a true storyteller who captures your attention fully because of the closeness to the characters he can create, because he always involves himself – he is in this case an intruder into the lives and destinies of a refugee family that he met in 2009 and kept a close relation to until this year, 2015. His presence simply changed their lives: McAllister was caught by the regime’s people in 2011, he was put in prison for five days, and had his camera and tapes confiscated. For that reason Amer and Raghda and their four kids had to flee to Lebanon, not to be taken…

And it is in Lebanon the family starts to fall apart. Both Amer and Raghda had been in prison because of oppositional activities, they actually met there to move together to make a family in Yarmouk, the Palestinian camp near Damascus – where we meet them when Raghda is released from prison. The photo shows Amer and Bob talking to the mother – when do you come home, mother – that same Bob becomes the darling of the film and McAllister, he is the one who reacts most explicit to all the shit that happens.

For Raghda it provokes ”an empty feeling to be in Lebanon” and the move to France, where they can get political asylum because of her being on the list as a haunted political activist (or whatever way the regime phrases it) does not make that feeling disappear.

In France a conflict between the two evolves, Amer gets a girlfriend, Raghda gets more and more depressed, tries to take her own life, they shout at each other and drink too much, ”you don’t love me”, ”you never say you love me” – the atmosphere is violent, McAllister goes from one to the other, interfers, talks, discusses, tries to analyse the situation. ”I am a loser”, says Raghba.

These scenes from a marriage (yes, you can’t help think of Bergman) are terrible to watch, to say the least – you get a sense of how it must be to be away from your home, to experience the horrors going on there without being able to do anything but to open your computer and have the killings of friends documented! The kids grow up, Amer is the one taking care of them, the camera of McAllister stays very often on his face, lets the viewer try to read his face, whereas you do not have to go close to the vulnerable Raghda to see her changing moods and despair.

Happy Ending? Well, Amer stands in his garden/courtyard cutting leaves with chicken around him – the children have a future, he says, that is the most important. And Raghda, with a happy face, gets up from a chair to hug Sean somewhere in Turkey near the Syrian border, where she can again be active within the political opposition. She looks a completely different person to the one, we met in France.

Needless to say that this is an important film (completely different from the ones made by Syrians, ”Return to Homs” and ”Silvered Water”, both personal masterpieces) with a different angle: an outsider who comes to a war zone to find out what it could mean for those who live there in opposition, gets involved himself with his big heart and persistent non-sentimental compassion.

UK, 2015, 75 mins.

http://seanmcallister.com/

Portuguese film director Catarina Mouráo pitched the film as a project back in Prague March 2013 at the Archidoc workshop with a brilliant trailer. I was there to moderate the session. I knew Catarina from workshops in Lisbon, she was one of the founders of the Apordoc documentary association and I had watched several of her films (among them ”The Lady from Chandor” from 1999) that always had a fine sense of aesthetics, helped by the unique cinematographer Joáo Ribeiro.

The project started off from these lines from the Apordoc catalogue: ”In the 1950’es my grandfather was committed to a psychiatric hospital, my uncle became a prisoner, and my mother aged 11 was sent to a boarding school… Based on the background of Salazar’s dictatorship a true drama unfolds in a split family. Mouráo wants to ”unravel secrets and mysteries” 38 years after the 1974 revolution.” The film, I wrote back then, if it can keep the level of the teaser, has definitely a theatrical/festival potential. I saw it this morning and it keeps its promise.

Take a look at the photo – the director caressing a pipe pouche, a

bag for a pipe, in this case from the well known company Stanwell. From smoking experience I remember these bags, that the grandfather collected. As something special. In a clip from Portuguese television the grandfather, the writer Tomaz de Figueiredo (1902-1970) shows his collection, stating the limited possibilities of film compared to what the brain is able to do… the clip is b/w, you don’t see the colours and you are not able to smell the remains of the tobacco that has been in the pipe that has been in the bag.

These pipe pouches lie in the house in Casares of the grandfather, where his daughter is living protecting his legacy and letting no access allowed for the younger sister, the mother of the director, who tries to get access. Without success. On the television clip – quite moving – the author says that he hopes that one day one of his granddaughter or his great granddaughters, even if they have never met him, will find use of the pipe pouches… and remember him.

Catarina Mouráo has made a fascinating film using family archive of photos, tv clips with the grandfather, b/w film material to catch atmosphere of the time of the Salazar dictatorship – as she step by step with her own voice tells the story and reflects on why she wants to know about the grandfather and his hard destiny in the psychiatric hospital and is suffering, when his son is being imprisoned for being – as it is said – ”a contra”. Mouráo visits the archives of the secret police and of the hospital and she has many conversations with her mother. These scenes are very moving, you see how difficult it is for the mother, who had no real contact with her father but – a strong introductory sequence – has had dreams about him, holding his hand, and there is a photo with that motive.

It’s a very personal film, on the importance (so say it in a banal way) of finding out where you come from and do so while there are still someone around who can help you do so. But you need to be a good filmmaker to make it interesting for others. Mouráo has found a quiet, un-bombastic, subtle way to get us interested.

2015, Portugal, 102 mins.

http://www.scottishdocinstitute.com/films/the-wolfs-lair-a-toca-do-lobo/