Bigert/Bergström: Engaged Cool Duo from Stockholm

DocAlliance and its excellent vod initiative has for years been promoted on this website and here is (a bit late, sorry, but it’s weekend and maybe you have time…) one more copy-paste of a fine offer from “your online documentary cinema” – to watch FOR FREE works by a duo of artists from Sweden until September 20. Go for it:

Mats Bigert (1965) and Lars Bergström (1962) have formed an artistic duo since their studies at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm. Besides documentaries, their work also includes exhibitions, conceptual art and installations in public space. In 1993, they participated in the Venice Biennale with their installation Adrenaline Dream and have exhibited their work across the world ever since. They often deal with current social and climatic issues. Discover the Swedish duo through their films for free!

During their successful career, Bigert & Bergström’s have produced a large

number of artworks. Their sculptures and installations are often based on digital technologies and intended for interaction, changing their shape or colour after being touched or according to the weather. By placing unexpected objects in public space, the artists change the context of places where people pass every day. For instance, they have placed their artwork Tomorrow’s Weather at the Stockholm Central Station. They hung giant molecules of H2O, C2 and N2 which change their colour according to the weather forecast for the following day. Another transformation of the public space called Ecco Humor consisted in placing a large curved mirror in the underground parking lot of Dunkers Culture House in Helsingborg, Sweden. The fifty-metre-wide and six-metre-high wall of super reflective stainless steel is the largest of its kind in the world.

Their latest film from the past year is entitled MOMENTS OF SILENCE. It captures moments in which the world stops and falls silent for a minute or two. The film is compiled of archive footage of minutes of silence honouring the victims of conflicts or natural disasters.

In 2002–2012, the duo made a loose trilogy about the human obsession with control. The first film entitled LIFE EXTENDED  (PHOTO) follows the desire to live forever, introducing a gerontologist who believes that humanity will be immortal soon, a monk who prepares his soul for its posthumous journey by long marathons and architects who construct spaces that slow down ageing. The middle part of the trilogy, THE MOUSE, deals with the ancient relationship between men and mice. It presents the fields in which we meet these small rodents and shows that we would have zero knowledge of genetics without laboratory texts. The third part follows climatic change and its impact. In THE WEATHER WAR, the directors travel to the US with a special machine-sculpture called Tornado Diverter whose goal is to stop tornados. The film deals with the theme of climate change and human influence on it in general.

LAST SUPPER captures the tradition of a final meal before an execution, ironically alluding to the original biblical dimension of the phrase. The protagonist is a former prison chef who used to prepare the last meal for the convicts. The film combines documentary scenes, interviews and animated sequences.

http://dafilms.com/event/223-bigert-bergstrom/ 

European Documentary Awards

A warm welcome to a new procedure from EFA (European Film Academy) that has published a shortlist of 15 European documentaries from which 5 will be nominated for the award to be given at the EFA ceremony in Berlin in December. The shortlist has been put together from lists of three films given by 10 important European documentary festivals.

I am happy to see Phie Ambo’s ”Good Things Await”, Camilla Nielsson’s ”Democrats”, Sean McAllister’s ”A Syrian Love Story”, Ivan Gergolet’s ”Dancing with Maria”, Oleksandr Techynskyi, Aleksey Solodunov and Dmitry Stoykov’s ”All Things Ablaze” (photo), Oppenheimer’s ”The Look of Silence”, Asif Kapadia’s ”Amy”, Gábor Hörcher’s ”Drifter” and ”Toto and his Sisters” by Alexander Nanau on the list, all films that I have seen and appreciate – in different levels and ways… and looking forward to watch the remaining 6, use the link below to get the titles.

And a quote from the same website:

”It is with great pleasure that the European Film Academy and EFA Productions announce the first ever EFA Documentary Selection, a list of 15 European documentaries recommended for a nomination for this year’s European Film Awards. 

The change follows a decision by the EFA Board to “acknowledge the growing importance of European documentary cinema,” says Israeli producer Marek Rozenbaum, EFA Board Member on the documentary committee, “there is a growing number of excellent documentaries which have to be seen by the members…”  

http://www.europeanfilmacademy.org/News-detail.155.0.html?&tx_ttnews[tt_news]=332&cHash=b7c7e85bfca0fa9f7bc36041d88e9e9a

Message2Man 2015/ 2

” She is nine years old, lives with her grandmother, her mother is ill and her father, she does not see a lot. This is the background that you pick up gradually as this sensitive, well-made and cleverly thought film goes along with father and daughter on a tour towards the park of Pippi Langstrømpe (Longstocking) in Sweden, a wish for the girl who wants to be strong and independent…”

The beginning of a review I made in March this year of Russian Denis Shabaev’s ”Together” that won one of the main awards at DocuDays in Kiev.

Now it is on the list of the around 25 films competing at the National Competition of Documentary Films at the upcoming Message2Man in St. Petersburg that starts September 26 and goes on until October 3.

The good thing for me, who visits the festival for the fourth time in a row, is that apart from this film and one more, it’s all new land for me – a good chance to get an idea of what happens in Russian documentary. Yes, stories from Russia of today, please.

The ”one more” is by Tatyana Soboleva, who I have met in diffferent festivals and who asked for my opinion on a rough cut of ”Siberian Floating Hospital”. A quote from a FB message I sent to her last December:

… You have made a very very fine film, that has atmosphere of warmth, wonderful people and the right rhythm that fits the waiting to get to people and for people to get on board (for medical help, ed.)… is it going to disappear, from my ignorant pov, influenced of course by your film, they are doing a great job really… Fine music, beautiful images, poetry sometimes, your film will travel! Congratulations!..

And now I am to watch the final film, which is distributed by Deckert Distribution that gives the following neutral description on their website:

When the Siberian winter releases its grip every year in May, twenty doctors, mostly women, board a special ship – a floating hospital, leaving their families behind. The ship crisscrosses the Siberian North, bringing medical care to the remotest rural outposts. Locals wait for this ship, and for the doctors it’s an adventure that alters them and that many of them have become addicted to.

http://www.message2man.com/en/

http://deckert-distribution.com/film-catalogue/siberian-floating-hospital/

In the Editing Room

It’s such a great photo, this one, taken by Latvian producer Uldis Cekulis. I stole it from his FB page, where he had this accompanying line:

“There always is The Moment when analog and digital film cut meets…”

Roman Bondarchuk is the contemplating director in the editing room, the film to finish is “Ukranian Sheriffs”, that Cekulis produces and that Bondarchuk makes with his spouse and scriptwriter Dar´ya Avershenko, a talented film couple who is part of the team behind the festival DocuDays in Kiev, who was part of the team behind “Euromaidan Rough Cut” and made one part of the “15 Young by Young” series, produced by Ilona Bicevska.

Precisely that part of the series, about kids playing jazz music and the relationship to their teacher, has been made into a feature documentary, named ”Dixieland”, that premieres in Riga tonight. I have seen a more than rough cut of the work and there is no justice if it is does not travel to festivals all over!

… back to the photo, yes, the moment of reflection, not touching the buttons, not touching the yellow note papers, thinking thinking: did I find my film, the one I wanted to make, the one I had in my head for so long, he is not the only one who has experienced that crucial moment. 

Megacities in Copenhagen

Copenhageners – it’s already tonight, sorry that i did not see it before, that Michael Glawogger’s masterpiece from 1998, ”Megacities” (photo) is shown as part of a programme called ”The Urban Planet”, organised by the active Copenhagen Architecture Festival “that has, in collaboration with curator Jacob Lillemose created four events whose starting point is to look at the consequences of cities to the World today and especially to the future. Through films, lectures and discussions the events will point attention to the urban landscape as a sensual and intellectually overwhelming totality, created in a complex and intensive interaction between people, politics and architecture.”

Click below if you want to attend, ticket reservation needed.

Sooo… Glawogger is not here any longer but his films are. When I was asked to make my “Best Documentaries Ever” by Sight & Sound, “Megacities” was an obvious choice because “Few directors have as Glawogger been travelling the world to tell stories about how people live and think and work. This is one of the works from his trilogy (the others are “Workingman’s Death” and “Whore’s Glory”), with a superb cinematography of Wolfgang Thaler, “la condition humaine” is the theme so far away from reportage as one can be.”

The same goes for the film on the programme tomorrow, “Babeldom” by Paul Bush, I don’t know the film but the first description line is inviting: “Based on Breugel’s painting the Tower of Babel from 1593, Paul Bush made a meditative, but also quite insane abstraction over the idea of a fictional future city…”

Finally, this coming thursday, Jennifer Baichwal’s “Manufactured Landscapes” from 2006 introducing the work of photographer Edward Burtynsky, will be screened.

About that Georg Boch, Zelig film school student at that time, wrote:

”It’s the most impressive dolly shot I have ever seen. Why is it so great?

Because it shows the conflict between our expectations for fictional representation of reality and the representation in documentaries/reportage.

The usual standard-pan inside the hall we would have seen in a TV-reportage would have made it easy for the viewer to swallow the image, to sort it intohis/her categories. It is through this dolly shot that we experience the full dimensions of the hall and the nature of the labour in it.

The sense of a motivated travel of the eye that the dolly usually promises is turned into a nightmarish caricature as we only see the ever-repeating landscape of people at machines.  Strangely it is the use of means from fiction-films that makes this reality more real for us again. I think this is one of the paradox documentary makers have to live with today.”

http://rising-architecture.com/event/megacities-movie-debate/

http://rising-architecture.com/event/babeldom-2012-movie-debate/

http://rising-architecture.com/event/manufactured-landscapes-2006-movie-debate/

Vilnius Documentary Film Festival 2015

September 17 until 27 it’s again documentary fest time in the capital of Lithuania, Vilnius, a fine event to visit; I was there in 2011 as a juror, with Lithuanian ”Barzakh” by Mantas Kvedaravicius as the winner.

Apart from a retrospective of the Maysles Brothers films and a Special Programme with Claude Lanzmann’s ”Shoah” and a couple of other films related to the Nazi time – I saw ”The Decent One” by Vanessa Lapa on Himmler – there is a so-called Main Programme with ”Amy” by Asif Kapadia and ”Suddenly My Thoughts Halt” by Portuguese Jorge Pelicano (presented this year at Magnificent7 in Belgrade) and a Competition Programme, for me the most interesting as it features new Baltic documentaries and indirectly is a witness of the high quality of films from the three countries.

12 films compete and it is a strong list that comes out of the website of the festival. Let me mention those that I have seen:

”The Amateurs” by Audrius Antanavicius (Lithuania), ”The Invisible City” by Viesturs Kairiss (Latvia), ”Anthill” by Vladimir Loginov (Estonia), ”Beyond the Fear” by Herz Frank and Maria Kravchenko (Latvia), ”Master and Tatyana” by Giedre Zickyté (Lithuania), ”Escaping Riga” by Davis Simanis (Latvia) and ”Gates of the Lamb” (PHOTO) by Audrius Stonys.

The latter, whose film career I have followed since we met at the Balticum Film & TV Festival on Bornholm in the beginning of the 1990’es, when he – together with Arunas Matelis – were the young talents of Lithuanian documentary, asked me some time ago what I thought of ”Gates of the Lamb” and its festival potential. These were my words:

This film, which is visual, have very few words, uses music, has no “story” as such but lets us enjoy Faces Faces Faces, mostly in profile at the right part of the image – great cinematography – and music and a solemn atmosphere with fine small humoristic sequences with children with open faces not really understanding, and yet… what is going on. You are back to a world that you master to convey.

I have no information if “Gates of the Lamb” has been to other festivals so far, but to have it here in the hometown of the director is an obvious choice.

I mentioned 7 films, among the 5 that I have not seen, are new works by Lithuanian veteran Rimantas Gruodis and Latvian Laila Pakalnina, who seems to do a couple of films per year!

http://vdff.lt/en

Message2Man 2015

The festival in St. Petersburg, that has existed for a quarter of a century, starts September 25 and runs until October 3. The selection has been announced but first some quotes from the News of the website:

”… Over 3,400 films from 83 countries entered the qualifying round of the Anniversary… 90 films from 45 countries were selected:

International Competition will present 43 pictures from 25 countries: 10 feature documentary films and 12 documentary short  films, 11 short films and 10 animated films. The largest number of applications came from France, Poland, Germany and the USA. Also directors from Bahrain, Qatar, Morocco, Taiwan, Singapore, Africa and South America sent their works. There were many interesting applications from Russia and post-Soviet countries.

For the National Competition of Documentary Films were selected 22 films, 11 of them are debuts… Russian regional film studios are reviving: the Competition includes films not only from the two capitals, but also from Novosibirsk, Irkutsk, Kazan and other cities.

Finally the (my words) exciting and audience-wise popular Competition of Experimental Films ”In Silico”, which this year also celebrates its 5th anniversary, will present 25 films from 19 countries. At this section there will be three showtimes of original and unexpected copyright short films, most of which will be shown in Russia for the first time.”

I will be there for a week and look forward to watch the new Russian documentaries. That list is not available yet but at the list of long documentaries for the intl. competition I find ”Strange Particles” by Russian Denis Klebeev, that has already been (Joris Ivens Award) at Cinema du Réel in Paris and at Hot Docs in Toronto as well as Polish Krakow festival winner ”Call Me Marianna” by Karolina Bielawska. Have seen both. Otherwise I look forward to watch Daniel Sivan’s “A Hightech Soap Opera”, “Those Who Feel the Fire Burning” by Morgan Knibbe about which critic Neil Young wrote in Hollywood Reporter: Nominally a documentary, Morgan Knibbe‘s attention-grabbing if overly ambitious debut ”Those Who Feel the Fire Burning” is really a poetic boundary-blurrer that seeks to obliterate the fiction/nonfiction frontier. Not to forget ”Censored Voices” by Mor Loushy that has this description: One week after the 1967 ‘Six-Day War’, a group of young kibbutzniks, led by renowned author Amos Oz and Editor Avraham Shapira, recorded intimate conversations with soldiers returning from the battlefield. The Israeli army censored the recordings, allowing only a fragment of the conversations to be published. Censored Voices reveals these original recordings for the first time.

In the short documentary competition there is a film by Viktor Kossakovsky, ”Chicken Pox”, 26 minutes… of course not to be missed!

http://www.message2man.com/en/

Baltic Sea Docs 2015/ 4

A small PS on the audience numbers in Riga, the cinema part of the event that took place in the capital and 7 provincial towns in Latvia, let me give you the names: Cesis, Ventspils, Valmiera, Jekabpils, Rezekne, Liepaja, Roja. 9 fims were screened in Riga, three of them were selected to go to the towns:

Hubert Sauper’s ”We Come as Friends”, ”All of Me” by Arturo González Villaseñor and ”Chuck Norris vs Communism” by Ilinca Calugareanu.

The organiser of the screenings, Elina Cire, wrote this to me today:

“The total number of BalticSeaDocs2015 audience (Riga+regions) is about 3200. (Most of them (2780) attended the screenings with free tickets (pupils, students, pensioners, cinema professionals, BalticSeaDocs participants), the rest paid 3-1 euro  ticket (3 in Riga, less in regions))…. Many screenings Riga were sold out.

The most “popular” films in Riga were “A Syrian Love Story” (photo by Agnese Zeltina: Director Sean MacAllister on stage in Riga)  & “We Come As Friends”, top 1 in regions was “We Come As Friends.””

Not big numbers if you compare to big festivals but a true sign of great interest for documentaries and a cultural film policy from the side of the organisers of

http://balticseadocs.lv

A Riga Meeting with Ivars Seleckis

Riga. The day after the Baltic Sea Docs, Edition 19. Producer Uldis Cekulis is developing a film project initiated by Kristine Briede. Theme: The poetic tradition in the Baltic cinema. They have been so kind to involve me in the research, which has given me the opportunity last year to meet Estonian master Mark Soosaar on his island in Estonia and legendary director Uldis Brauns, who lives in the countryside in Latvia. Brauns is the man behind ”235.000.000”, the classic masterpiece in Latvian and world documentary history. That the made together with Herz Frank in 1967.

And now Ivars Seleckis, 81 years old, fresh in head and legs, as always shooting a film, if anyone the Latvian documentarian, who has described people and culture and places and history of his motherland, and who has taken a place in world documentary with his trilogy from Skersiela, a street in Riga – three films: ”Crossroad Street” (1988), ”New Times at Crossroad Street” (1999) and ”Capitalism at Crossroad Street” (2012). As you can see from the photo (director Kristine Briede to the left doing sound and translation)

we went to the harbour area and had a nice time on board a ship that sails no longer and is now turned into offices – and flats! In this area Seleckis, director and cameraman, a classical documentarian, who called ”reenactment” ”disgusting”, when I asked him, has made several films. My relationship with Seleckis goes back to 10 years (1990-2000) of Balticum Film & TV Festival on the island of Bornholm in Denmark. He was there almost every year with a new film.

We spent a nice long afternoon together on the ship and in the Miera district of Riga – Miera means Peace, the district is full of nice cafés, old and new houses, shops – has been called the Hipster Capital of Riga! Seleckis talked about how he started his filmmaking, how the poetic documentary cinema was born, the absurd relationship to the authorities in Moscow during Soviet times, his concern about the privatisation of the Riga Film Studios. A man in good mood and a man who demonstrated that he is a specialist in Latvian food and drinks.

Photo taken by Uldis Cekulis, the man behind the fine excursion, a producer who has always a lot of interesting projects on his plate, a father of two small kids, super-active and generous. You can see how he looks like in the post below.

PS. At the hotel in last night my wife and I watched the Riga part of the arte series on food markets, directed by Uldis Cekulis and the man behind the series, Italian Stefano Tealdi from Stefilm in Turin. It was a fine, in terms of cinematography beautifully executed work with visits to the homes and working places of (as an example) the producers of the wonderful bread that we have carried home each year from Riga for 20 years now! The market in Riga is indeed a must for all visitors! We saw an English voiced version of the tv-documentary and although we – as Danes grown up in a different culture with subtitles where you can hear the original language – I have to say that the visual professionalism of the formatted one-hour programme was excellent, and we enjoyed to hear beautiful English spoken! 

Baltic Sea Docs 2015/ 3

A place for new talent, definitely, is Baltic Sea Docs, demonstrated again at this 2015 edition. The first step for many – ”here we are, we have an interesting project, what do you think of it?” Does it have an international potential? Is it for cinema and/or television? Or for some new platforms?

And the networking aspect – can we co-produce? For someone who has been part of the event since it started on the island of Bornholm in Denmark in the last century (!), it is a great pleasure to see how the Baltic countries have created structures to develop the art of cinema, including the documentary. In the hosting country Latvia you have the National Film Centre to give development, research and production money, the same goes for the newer Lithuanian Film Centre set up in 2012 and the Estonian Film Institute. So the future of the creative documentary, or call it the artistic, is very much linked to well functioning state support mechanisms – and internationally knowledgeable production companies with producers who can take care of both the established and the new talents. This year you also saw several projects being financially supported up-front by two of or even all three Baltic countries.

Like the co-production between Latvian Uldis Cekulis (VFS Films) and Estonian Marianna Kaat (Baltic Film Production) with Kaat as

the director of ”!4 Cases”, a very timely film on the cultural problems that come from the fact that many non-Estonian speaking families ”consider Estonia their motherland, but nevertheless feel that they are not qualified to be full members of Estonian society because of some cultural disconnect and a lack of language”. A film with a focus on the children who grow up in this ”Babylon of Identities” – it was well received at the Forum.

As Kaat, Alina Rudnitskaya has a strong international track record. The director from St. Petersburg is to direct a film with the title ”Fatei and the Sea” backed by the company that produces films with Aleksander Sokurov, Proline Film. The location is Rikord Island, situated at the South-East coast of Russia, the protagonist is a sea farmer, whose profession after the fall of USSR is threatened as he has no support from the state any longer at the same time as poachers are harvesting on his territory. Rudnitskaya is to film there next year from May to October, she has not yet been there and the trailer did not reflect the style of the director. So the pitch was one of those where you ”pitch the director” – trusting that she can do something good again.

The same, ”pitching the director”, was meant to be the case with the well known producer Guntis Trekteris and talented Davis Simanis, whose ”Escaping Riga” and ”Chronicle of the Last Temple” (about the new National Library in Riga, a masterpiece in architecture) are some of the most remarkable films in newer Latvian documentary – to be added that Simanis has been an editor and editing consultant for a long range of films. It was more or less how I introduced the two of them, praising also Trekteris for his producing work of Herz Frank’s last film ”Beyond Fear”. It was the last film at the forum, ”D is for Division” with this synopsis text in the catalogue: ”Four terrifying historical photos mark four places of crime. Four places still have to live with its horrid past. A documentary exploring how some of the darkest moments of the 20th century manifest themselves through particular people and places caught on film, and how these “crime moments” strangely but still intensely affect the life in these places today”.

It did not work, not at all, was it because I overestimated the knowledge of the panelists, probably most of them had never heard of Simanis, or was it because the people around the table did not understand what Simanis – with his trailer – wants to do. Or was it because the project was pitched too early, as it was suggested by Russian Grigory Libergal in the panel. Anyway, the reactions were filled with question marks and even some doses of aggression to “what is the purpose of this project”. Conclusion, the two got some spanking, which of course sometimes can be good and encouraging for filmmakers!

On the website of the forum: www.balticseadocs.lv you will find wonderful photos from the days of pitching and from the cinema, taken by Agnese Zeltina. The one on this post is with Uldis Cekulis and Marianna Kaat, Latvia and Estonia, project “14 Cases”.