It was a proud festival director Joan Gonzalez, who welcomed the audience to the final evening of the DocsBarcelona 2015 with the screening of Ivan Gergolet’s fine film about the 93 year old Maria Fux, ”Dancing With Maria”, followed by the award ceremony. He could mention that the audience attendance had grown with 17% from last year – ”more than 6000 viewers have enjoyed more than 40 documentaries…” – that the industry section had more than 600 guests introducing a speed meeting pitch format, where 40 projects had an average of 15 meetings scheduled. 15 minutes per meeting. Plus information meetings like ”what am I looking for” and Latin Pitch and rough cut screenings. I am sure I have forgotten something.

Anyway ”Tea Time” by Chilean Maite Alberdi got the TV3 Award for the best documentary while Joshua Oppenheimer’s ”The Look of Silence” took a speciel mention AND the Audience Award AND the Amnesty International Award! Again Signe Byrge Sørensen from Danish company Final Cut for Real played a main role at the Catalan festival, as she did two years ago with ”The Act of Killing”. By the way – the Spanish title of the film is beautiful, ”La Mirada del Silencio”.

The new talent Award went to local ”Game Over” by Alba Sotorra and the Docs & Teens Award to ”Mirant Amunt” (Glance Up) by Oriol Martinez and Enric Ribes.

The whole list, please consult:  

http://stat3.infoserv.dk/cgi-bin/awstats.pl?config=www.filmkommentaren.dk

It was a happy producer, Signe Byrge Sørensen, who checked messages on her i-phone here in Barcelona to find out that Chilean/German Estephan Wagner’s beautiful documentary ”Last Dreams”, produced by Final Cut for Real, had got the Audience Award at the new DOKer festival in Moscow, a festival that attracted a big audience. This will hopefully mean that the film will travel to many other festivals and be picked up by tv stations. Here is the content description of ”Last Dreams”:

Last Dreams confronts us with the probably most engrained taboo in our society: dying. An intimate and delicate exploration of the last months of the lives, loves and regrets of three women, from the moment they arrive at a hospice until they draw their last breath.

The film intimately follows 3 women during their last month of life, from the moment they arrive at their hospice until they are gone. Through them we explore what it really means to get to the end of life in our culture; we are with them when they deal with the most important remaining issues in their life; we are present when they find words to say ‘Sorry’ or ‘I love you’.

http://www.midff.com/#!last-dreams/c2yd  

All right, a Dane writes about Danes, forgive me please – the photo is taken inside La Pedrera, one of Gaudi’s masterpieces in Barcelona where Signe Byrge Sørensen friday night held her masterclass giving around 40 people a personal insight to how she came to film from a strong political engagement and studies of life conditions in the developing countries. She showed clips from films shot in Africa, from the huge impressive work she co-directed with Danish master editor Janus Billeskov Jansen about disappearing languages of the world and from the two masterpieces “The Act of Killing” and “The Look of Silence”, that later the same evening was shown at the festival with a Q&A session that ended after midnight. Only natural that one of the filmmakers present called Signe Byrge Sørensen a super-woman!

… and the two gentlemen on the photo, producer Mikkel Stolt to the left and director Jens Loftager were at the speed pitch meetings with what is going to be the third film in a trilogy that started with “Words” followed by “War” – and now “Faith”. The film project was chosen to be presented at the prestigious East European Forum in Prague next year in March.

To the right Martina Rogers, the young woman who stood behind all the industry activities at DocsBarcelona, indeed one more superwoman!

http://www.fenrisfilm.dk/news.html

www.docsbarcelona.com

He came into the cinema after the screening, the audience stood up and gave him a standing ovation after they had seen German Marcus Vetter’s portrait of him, ”The Forecaster”, alias Martin Armstrong or Marty as they call him in the film and as the audience called him at the 35 minutes long Question and Answer session in the Aribau Club cinema thursday night at DocsBarcelona.

”I am happy you are alive” was the first remark from a spectator among the around 100 people attending the screening, the first of two for a film that demonstrates a very fine cinematography and skills to tell the story about a man, who sat in jail for 12 years because of his fight against the bankers, to put it in a simple way. Another comment from a spectator: ”You are a hero, and I mean it!”. Marty did not act as a hero in the cinema, his appearance was that of a modest man, a fighter and now a man wanted by everyone to talk and advice. A couple of spectators brought up private economical questions – and got answers from Marty, who – according to his website – sees himself as one who offers public service to all of us, who have difficulties in understanding economy. After the screening people queued with their smartphones to have photos taken with ”el visionari”. 

Let me quote what the film is about through the precise text of the distributor Autlook Films: The story of finance whiz Martin Armstrong reads like a movie script: a man designs a model that can predict the future. He calculates developments in the world economy with eerie accuracy and even the outbreak of wars. Until the FBI is on his doorstep and he is sent to prison. A free man again, he shares his views on the financial crisis and offers his solutions to governments.

www.docsbarcelona.com

It’s wonderful when the ever perfect DocsBarcelona team makes a small mistake like the one on the photo announcing that the panelists of the Rough Cut Screenings that took place tuesday and wednesday were… yes, read for yourself. No, your moderator can assure you that a civilised and polite and constructive and critical tone was there all the time!

For some years I have had the pleasure to host an exclusivity at DocsBarcelona: Rough Cut screenings. And it is rough cuts that are being screened in their full duration to a panel of hand-picked documentary professionals in a relaxed sitting room setting, see photo, at the CCCB, one of the venues of the festival, for the professional events and with evening screenings.

3 rough cuts were presented – Colombian Clare Weiskopf and Nicolás van Hemelryck came with ”To the Amazon”, a project that was pitched at DocsBarcelona 2014 – Polish Wiktoria Szymanska launched ”Artur”, another title is ”Happiness on the Pavement” – American Christina Antonakos-Wallace put ”With Wings and Roots” on the screen. The sessions went on for around two hours, it was forbidden to talk money, these sessions are not for pitching but for getting creative input and constructive comments from the panel, and the filmmakers got that from
Jose Rodriguez from Tribeca Film Institute (USA). Louise Rosen from Louise Rosen Ltd. (USA), Charlotte Gry Madsen from SVT (Sweden), Gitte Hansen from First Hand Films (Switzerland), Joan Salvat from TV3 (Spain), Àlex Navarro from Europa Creativa Desk-MEDIA Catalunya  (Spain), Àngela Martínez Head of Audiovisual Department from CCCB (Spain) and Oscar Perez, director (Spain). A pleasure it was to moderate these sessions, and the filmmakers expressed that they liked it a lot.

www.docsbarcelona.com

The winners of the MIDFFl Doker 2015 have been announced. The jury members (I was part of the one for feature duration documentaries) was working from their homes, the discussion, led by chairman Victor Kossakovsky, who demonstrated that he not only is a great filmmaker but also has diplomatic skills (!), went on via emails. Congratulations to the organisers for doing a new documentary film festival with a global vision – and a lot of people in the audience – see the photo. If you click on the titles below, you will get the descriptions of the film and get to the website of the festival: 

FEATURE DOCUMENTARY COMPETITION

The Gleaners by Ye Zuyi (China, 94 min) – Best Feature

Documentary


Fish’R’Us by Maciej Glowinski (Poland, 58 min) – Best Director


The Silence of the Flies by Eliezer Arias (Venezuela, 90 min) – Best Cinematography


I Still Being by Javier Corcuera (Peru, 120 min) – Best Editing


Waves by Ahmed Nur (Egypt, 70 min) – Best Sound


Glance Up by Enric Ribes & Oriol Martinez (Spain, 60 min) – Special Mention

JURY:

Victor Kossakovsky (Russia, Head of Jury)

Tue Steen Muller (Denmark)

Mateusz Skalski (Poland)

Vassilis Economou (Greece)

SHORT DOCUMENTARY COMPETITION

Scars of Cambodia by Alexandre Liebert (France – Cambodia, 30 min) – Best Short Documentary 

A hole in the sky by Álex Lora & Antonio Tibaldi (France – Somalia, 10 min) – Special Mention

Black Sheep by Christian Cerami (United Kingdom, 16 min) – Special Mention

JURY:

Peter Kerekes (Slovakia, Head of Jury)

Pedro Fernandes Duarte (Portugal)

Aleksei Vakhrushev (Russia)

Anna Nieman (US)

I am in Barcelona, it’s summer, there is an outdoor pool outside my hotel window, and it is crowded. I am not here for holidays, DocsBarcelona has started with some events for professionals and tomorrow is the opening of the festival for the audience – opening film “Falciani’s Tax Bomb”, a German/Spanish coproduction with an English director Ben Lewis. But in my mind I have been in Barcelona for some days. Saturday at Camp Nou the ceremony was held to celebrate that FCBarcelona won the Spanish League in football AND it was the farewell to Xavi Hernandez, who has been in the club sinde he was 11 years old and has played (from 1998-2015) more than 500 matches. 35 years old he has decided to end his carreer in Qatar, where other ex-Barca players spend their life and earn…including Michael Laudrup as a coach.

Anyway, I was thinking about how squeeze in a text about this wonderful gentleman of the game, a man I have adored for the whole time – and is he not the perfect dramaturg? Has he not been the one who has mastered to find the rythm, the one who has been able to see when the descriptive, the informative should be there, playing the ball around in small circles for suddenly to feel that now is the time to poetry, to surprise the audience making a peak in the narrative and send a player a pass that makes it easy for him to score. A director, an editing director who knows when to set more pace. Always available with an enormous overview, a man with a big generosity to his audience.

Photo taken by friend and colleague Joan Gonzalez, who was there with his son Marti.