CPH:DOX åbner med Twice Colonized

Niklas Engstrøm, kunstnerisk direktør for CPH:DOX, siger:

“‘Twice Colonized’ er en af årets absolut vigtigste dokumentarfilm. Filmen sætter fingeren på kolonialismens personlige konsekvenser og giver os et tiltrængt nyt perspektiv på vores egen historie. Den er båret af en dyb vrede og en vilje til at kæmpe for en mere retfærdig verden, men uden at miste fornemmelsen for virkelighedens nuancer og kompleksitet. På den måde kan ‘Twice Colonized’ forhåbentlig være med til at starte nye samtaler op her i Danmark om koloniseringen af Grønland og om, hvordan afkoloniseringsprocessen kun kan lykkes, hvis vi alle – både grønlændere og danskere – engagerer os i den.”…

Filmen er udvalgt som åbningsfilm på dokumentarfilmfestivalen CPH:DOX. Festivalens store åbningsgalla finder sted d. 15. marts i København i DRs Koncerthus, hvor instruktør Lin Alluna og filmens hovedperson og forfatter Aaju Peter – den karismatiske, grønlandske menneskerettighedsaktivist – også vil være til stede.

Filmen er desuden udtaget til festivalens NEXT:WAVE konkurrence, der er dedikeret til debuterende og fremadstormende filmskabere fra hele verden.

‘Twice Colonized’ fortæller historien om den grønlandske menneskerettighedsaktivist Aaju Peter, som har dedikeret sit liv til kampen for Inuit. Da en tragedie rammer Aajus nærmeste familie, begiver hun sig ud på en rejse for at konfrontere sin egen fortid og samtidig sikre de oprindelige folks demokratiske ret og uafhængighed.

Lin Aluna skriver: “Jeg mødte Aaju ved en tilfældighed for syv år siden og det har været en livsændrende oplevelse for mig. På vores første møde afslørede hun skjulte sandheder om mig selv og Danmarks historie, som jeg vidste jeg måtte finde en måde at dele. To år senere begyndte vi at filme ‘Twice Colonized’ sammen. Aaju er et inspirerende og generøst menneske, som vælger at dele sin personlige kamp med os for at vi kan lære noget nyt om os selv, samtidig med at hun peger os mod en bedre fremtid. Hun viser os, at der er håb, og jeg  håber, hun vil inspirere publikum, som hun har inspireret alle os, der har lavet filmen med hende,” siger filminstruktør Lin Alluna, der får sin debut med denne film, som er skabt i tæt samarbejde med Aaju Peter, der også er filmens medskaber.‘Twice Colonized’ vil kunne opleves i flere biografer under årets CPH:DOX. CPH:DOX’ samlede festivalprogram vil blive offentliggjort den 21. februar 2023 på cphdox.dk.

Filmen er produceret af Emile Hertling Péronard fra det grønlandsk-danske selskab Ánorâk Film i co-produktion med Alethea Arnaquq-Baril og Stacey Aglok MacDonald fra det canadiske Inuit-selskab Red Marrow Media og med Bob Moore fra det canadiske EyeSteelFilm. Filmen er endvidere støttet af Det Danske Filminstitut, Grønlands Selvstyre, DR, KNR TV, CBC, Canada Media Fund, Nunavut Film Development Corporation, Eurimages m.fl.

Photo: Aaju Peter, left and Lin Alluna, right (Cineuropa, Jonathan Wong)

Doug Aubrey: Legacy of an Invisible Bullet

First some introductory words:

A filmmaker, Doug Aubrey, who has had a camera in his hands since he was a teenager, gets thyroid cancer. More than five years ago. He decides to turn the camera towards himself, he who his whole life has been filming social and political conflicts, been at many war zones, makes “an attempt to make sense out of my life, love, death, war and peace.” He makes 170 short films (!), altogether 10h30mins, which are made into a feature (117 mins.) and chaptered into 16 films or videos. I have seen the feature and two of the chapters, both around 45 mins. This text makes a focus on the feature:

Doug Aubrey comes from Glasgow and lives now in Copenhagen with his partner, producer Marie Schmidt Olesen. Aubrey says this about his choice of storytelling: “Writing directly with a camera, rather than with words, I wanted to tell a story, in such a way that captured decisive moments in time – much as I have done in my observational filmmaking over decades. This has resulted in the completion of 170 short films. Pretty much from the outset, I collaborated and worked intimately with (Danish actress) Charlotte Munck, who became not just the voice of a subconscious but also a physical presence in some of the films: An Avatar if you like – expressing things I don’t or can’t. 

And then secondly what I saw. What made me think “this is extraordinary, unique, have not seen a film like that for ages”. Fresh and energetic in style, personal and rich in content, there is so much you can take from it. Strong scenes as well, where Aubrey invites you to get close to his operation wound.

It starts in a place where Aubrey’s archive is stored up. In Glasgow. You hear the voice of Marie Olesen being amazed about all the diaries, the videos, his personal things: Are you not interested in what’s in there. No, he says a bit irritated, “ it’s the past, the moment is what happens”. Words to that effect. 

And then the visual and sound bombardment starts. Of images, words, fantastic illustrations by Halfdan Pisket and a strong and varied sound score by T.S. Høeg (Dane TS Hawk). It’s fast motion, it’s slow long shots, often close-ups of the director and/or the avatar, it’s surfing, it is in Glasgow, it is in Copenhagen at the Lakes, from the open window. Hectic you could call it, it is expressionistic, no better: the reflections on “my life, love, death, war and peace”. Meant in the good way: One Long Selfie. By a filmmaker who thinks about death and go back to his punk period, to someone with the name Dawn, to be with his son Danny, who took him to surfing – there are nice scenes where the two look at photos of Danny as a child… Father Doug was not present very often, he was in some war zone, Danny says. And a filmmaker who thinks about where it could come from, the cancer. Many possibilities. 

And there are clips from his films shot in the Middle East and in the Balkans. For me who has visited Belgrade for almost 20 years, images and conversations with (disillusioned) males and females, who were part of the opposition around 1990 associated to the B92, are very interesting and touching.

I was hiding behind the camera says Doug Aubrey. It was my armour. The film is indeed very much about filmmaking. In a couple of clips football coach Scotty Lee (“kids, don´t play with mines, play football”), with whom Doug has filmed in the Balkans, makes the filmmaker express what it is to have a camera in hand, to be a filmmaker, to observe as a true documentarian. To get the right shot! 

This is not a “real” documentary, does that exist?, it is a hybrid. And the avatar Charlotte Munck takes the viewer around formulating – sometimes it is pure poetry – the film director’s stream of thoughts going through his mind. Full of hopes, full of doubts, full of moments that also witness the sense of humor of Doug Aubrey. It is so well put in the press material:

“Making use of an existential surf analogy of the wipe out, hold down and surfacing to tell its story, LEGACY unfolds as a stream of short films exploring a real as well as an “inland geography” that is populated by fear, hopes, traumas, dreams and a creative imagination that’s potentially facing the end of life.”

I watched two of the chapters of “Legacy” as mentioned in the beginning of this text. In them you get more about Aubrey’s family – there are wonderful scenes with his niece Dagmar, more with his son and with his brother and in one of them he decides to write a letter to Peter Watkins, the filmmaker who made “War Game”, which was banned by the BBC in 1966. If anyone Watkins stands for the independent non-commercial non-conform cinema as does Doug Aubrey, who has made a film that is both very personal and very universal and for a film lover like me full of story-telling surprises, layers, humor and sensitivity.

One bullet, one pill…

Legacy… is an Autonomi production in collaboration with House of Real and Northern Souls.

Contact: Marie Schmidt Olesen marie@autonomimedia.com

Sarvnik Kaur: Against the Tide

One more documentary film from which I learned – this time about the koli fishing community in India close to Bombay. And one more documentary film where beautiful friendship is conveyed and forms the foreground of extremely difficult life conditions with a struggle to have a family life. Built around scenes in the families, celebrations, fishing, selling the fish, visits to the city and doctors and first of all conversations between the two male protagonists with drinks on the table, the film brings the viewer into understanding how hard Life can be and yet: Remember you are a Koli, you fear nothing. The Sundance catalogue text is precise when it comes to content, so here it is: 

”Rakesh and Ganesh are so close, they consider themselves brothers. Both are fishermen of Bombay’s Indigenous Koli community, but they’ve taken contrasting paths. Rakesh uses his inheritance — his father’s boat and the knowledge passed down by generations of Koli fisherman — to fish in the traditional ways, while Ganesh — who was educated abroad — has instead embraced modern, technology-driven, and environmentally destructive methods of deep-sea fishing, causing increasing friction between the friends. But with declining fish populations caused by pollution and invasive species, neither man is finding much success, adding to the burdens facing their young families, and testing the bonds of their brotherhood.”

India, 94 mins., 2023

Photo: Sarvnik Kaur, director

Fipadoc 2023

It’s a beautiful and elegant website to enter, the one from FipaDoc in Biarritz that introduces itself like this:

“We believe in true stories. Stories from here and there, of laughter and tears, stories simple but extraordinary, brave and surprising. Stories that open our eyes to those around us, that change the world, that inspire and stay with us forever. We believe in documentary films.”

Voila, and looking into the program, there is a strong film line divided into categories and an industry section with pitching and meetings. With a lot of festival categories being competitive. So there are juries with well known names like Nordisk Panorama’s Anita Reher, producer Iikka Vehkalahti, director Salomé Jashi, producer Uldis Cekulis, director Rachel Leah Jones, producer Alexandre Cornu, director Marta Prus and festival director from Ukraine’s DocuDays Vika Leshchenko…

Just to mention a couple of titles – in the Musical Documentary section Jørgen Leth and Andreas Koefoed are represented with beautiful “Music for Magic Pigeons”, in the International section there is Davide Ferrario’s “Umberto Eco – a Library of the World” that I would love to watch, in the Impact section there is Nikolaus Geyrhalter’s impressive “Matter out of Place” and in the French “Godard. Seul le Cinéma” by Cyril Leuthy. When you surf on the website you can watch the trailers and the one about Godard looks great.

Industry Days: There is a special focus on the Baltic countries and Finland, “Dive into the Baltic Sea” (hmm…), with Latvian Zane Balcus as moderator, there are pitching days organized by my old colleague from EDN Ove Rishøj Jensen and of course Ukraine is the guest of Honor under the headline “Visions of Ukraine”. 9 films have been selected and there is a Ukrainian panel present for a discussion: Viktoria LESHCHENKO,Docudays UA, Olga GIBELINDA, director, Ivanna KHITSINSKA, producer, Roman BLAZHAN, director, Andrii LYSETSKYI, director, OLHA BESKHMELNYTSINA, producer. Lysetskyi’s fine “Liturgy of Anti-Tank Obstacles” (2022) is shown in Biarritz as is “Ukrainian Sheriffs” by Roman Bondarchuk, produced by Latvian Uldis Cekulis. With whom, allow me a small flashback, I was in Biarritz years ago, with Archidoc, where Cekulis made a case study on his wonderful “Klucis. The Deconstruction”.

And there is much much more to experience, put together by producer Christine Camdessus and her team. Wish you a good festival, starting today.

https://fipadoc.com/en

 Still: Umberto Eco Library

J.Leth & A. Koefoed: Music for Black Pigeons

Lee Konitz er på vej ud til en bil i Sisimiut. Han peger til højre og spørger kvinden, der følger ham ud, om der er et barn i barnevognen derhenne? Svaret er ja, faren er lige inde og hente noget. Babyen sover og snorker, siger hun. Konitz går hen og lytter, vender sig om og ønsker barnet et langt godt liv. Mageløst. På dette tidspunkt i filmen er vi som tilskuere bekendt med Konitz, alt saxofonisten med den lange karriere og kolossale karisma. Vi har mødt ham i hans lejlighed i New York, set ham trisse rundt samme sted, hvor han leder efter mundstykke til sit instrument. Han er heldigvis til stede hele filmen igennem.

Thomas Morgan står ud af sengen i sin lille lejlighed i Brooklyn, tænder for noget musik, gør morgengymnastik. Han er bassist og øver aldrig hjemme. Han forsøger at undgå det automatiske, når han spiller, siger han til kameraet i et af de mange typiske Jørgen Leth’ske tableauer, som vi kender helt tilbage fra ”66 Scener fra Amerika”. Det tænker jeg på, da Morgan af Leth bag kameraet bliver spurgt, hvad han føler, når han spiller. Laaang pause, længere end Andy Warhol i nævnte film, afbrudt af Leth, som for at hjælpe spørger den stakkels bassist på andre måder før Morgan endelig kommer med bud på et svar. Mageløst.

Sådanne scener er der mange af i filmen, som springer i tid og sted og introducerer en række skønne musikere, de fleste ældre – som danske Jakob Bro har arbejdet med. Som komponist og guitarist, i studier i New York og i Danmark og Berlin og… Optagelserne i studierne er vidunderlige, der krammes og smiles og improviseres, Bro ser ud til at være den, der skaber den gode stemning, kameraet bevæger sig til musikken, man får lyst til at lukke øjnene, men det ville være dumt for studieindspilningerne – for det meste af Bro’s kompositioner – afløses ofte af korte udsagn fra musikerne. Om deres métier. Deres passion, deres liv i og med musikken. Danske Palle Mikkelborg siger, at han med musikken ”søger efter mening”, amerikanske guitarist Bill Frisell er lutter smil og kærlig udstråling, japanske percussionist og komponist Midori Takada taler om meditation og der er fremragende optagelser fra hendes optræden med Bro i København i 2022, hvor Bro afslører japanske sprogkundskaber!

Jeg citerer fra pressematerialet: ”Vores film udspringer af en dyb kærlighed til musik. For Jørgens vedkommende går den tilbage til 1960’erne, hvor han som jazzskribent blandt andre fulgte Lee Konitz og skrev om ham. Han var Jørgens store helt. Kærligheden blev vakt til live igen fire årtier senere i New York i 2008, hvor Andreas inviterede Jørgen ind i Avatar studiet i New York, hvor Jakob Bro indspillede en plade med blandt andre Lee Konitz og hvor Andreas og Sune Blicher var igang med optagelserne til filmen Weightless. Det var her Jørgen og Jakob Bro mødtes for første gang og her at kimen til samarbejdet mellem os blev lagt.”

Citat for at understrege den tidsmæssige rigdom filmen indeholder. Der er mange flere personligheder end de nævnte, Manfred Eicher er en af dem, tysk musikproducer, som selv siger at han har arbejdet 50 år med musik. Den fine mand bragte Jakob Bro sammen med polske trompetist Tomasz Stanko, et frugtbart samarbejde, som Bro i filmen kvitterer for ved at komponere et stykke ”For Stanko”, som høres og ses i Eichers ansigt. Mageløst smukt. Eicher bliver bedt om at sige noget om musikkens væsen, begynder men må give op – ord duer ikke i denne kunstart. Det er i det hele taget filmen igennem tydeligt at musikerne har svært ved at tale om, hvad musik egentlig er for en størrelse.

Til slut i New York i sin lejlighed sidder den ældre mand Lee Konitz – der lidt tidligere har bandet over, i en taxa, at han ikke kan huske, hvor han skal hen, til hvilket studio, hvor i New York – i en stol og lytter til ”music for black pigeons”. Ingen ord er nødvendige, kun disse fra en ikke-jazzkyndig beundrer af en mageløst smuk skildring af professionelle kunstneres varme og respekt for hinanden og det liv vi har sammen.

PS. Og så er det lige – som vi har gjort mange gange på denne side – hatten skal løftes for klipper Adam Nielsen, som på eminent vis har fået styr på de mange medvirkende personer og de mange spring i tid og sted. Det samme gælder for lyd designeren Peter Albrechtsen. 

 Photo: Lee Konitz (1927-2020)

Mantas Kvedaravicius

In 2011 I attended a Summer School in Neringa Lithuania for film students. A film by Mantas Kvedaravicius was shown, his first.

”Stasys Baltakis, teacher at the Lithuanian Academy of Music and Theatre, the film school of the Country, introduced the film and its director. ”He is not a film director, he is a thinker”, he said about the debutant Kvedaravicius, who made the film over a period of years, now completing his PhD (and a book) on the affects of pain. And the film is about pain, about people in Chechnya, families whose members disappear or have undergone torture. Shot illegally, and with one year in the editing, the film expresses pure love and respect for the characters without turning to sentimentalism…

The camera catches magical moments inside the houses, the characters tell their stories of pain and torture, mainly off the picture, car trips give the narrative a flow and information about how a devastated city looks, at the same time as the Russian authorities have done a lot to lighten up mosques and other buildings. Pure facade for the invisible violence, it seems. While watching the film you sense a growing anger and sadness witnessing the life of people, who wait and hope…” (from the review of Barzach, 2011)

”Kvedaravicius, whose last film (his first) ”Barzakh”, a masterpiece, took place in Chechnya, has again created a tense work of a beauty that lies in the aesthetic choices he has made with the camera, that he and two others have operated. You enjoy frame by frame, scene after scene, sequence after sequence the way he has placed the camera and the naturalness with which the editing takes you around.

How shall I leave this praise of a film that develops and towards the end brings images of exploded cars and destroyed buildings, and has scenes where the population is taught how to put out fire… I want to and will remember the shoemaker repairing shoes and having conversations with clients and family. A location that comes back, with peace, a statement of survival of humanism, as this great director has delivered with what is only his second film…” (from the review of Mariupolis, 2016)

And now Mariupolis 2, shot by Kvedaravicius, shown at festivals and awarded as the best European documentary at the EFA ceremony in Reykjavik in December. The film was before that shown at IDFA where it was introduced like this: “In 2022, Mantas Kvedaravičius returned to the ruined city of Mariupol in Ukraine to film the people he met for his 2016 documentary Mariupolis. There, he was killed in early April by Russian troops while documenting the Russian invasion of Ukraine. His fiancée managed to escape with the footage. After his death, producers and crew gave their all to edit his final, unfinished film and show it to the world.”

Watching the film I can only echo what was written about the two previous films. Mantas Kvedaravicius shows his respectful approach to human beings in need, he stays with them, no sensationalism, he follows them when they clean the ground after the Russian bombings, when they gather to eat in the cellar, where they pray and sleep, when they prepare a soup outside, where two men transport a generator at a place, where two corpses lie on the ground, accompanied by the sounds of bombings around all the time, “let’s go to the mass grave” someone says referring to the airstrike in March of the Theatre of Mariupol, where civilians had found shelter.

The great director Mantas Kvedaravicius created with this film what one of the legends in documentary history called “the sense of being there”, with love and respect. RIP.

Photo: Mantas Kvedaravicius (Cineuropa)

Lucie Králová: Kapr Code

Love that film! Because of its surprising, fresh approach to its protagonist Jan Kapr (1914-1988), a composer unknown to me. Until now, at least I know a lot about him, as a text in the beginning of the film indicates: “Sometimes, we can follow only traces full of dissonance and missing pieces”. Which is what Lucie Králová does in her “Documentary Opera”, that is full of life and storytelling twists as Jan Kapr’s life was full of surprising changes from being a loyal communist composing for the state to being – after the Soviet invasion in 1968 – a persona non grata, when he left the Party. He, Laureate of the Stalin and Smetana Award. 

Opera… it is an amazing scoop to follow a choir in a studio interpreting and performing Kapr’s compositions in a playful way with an original libretto written by Jiří Adámek. Full of humour it is, an obvious choice as Kapr was a man who loved to play and experiment. He wanted to be an elite gymnast but had a severe accident that crippled him, so he turned to music.

Again and again Králová returns to footage of Kapr falling from a sled in the snow and again and again Kapr is seen swimming in a lake surrounded by beautiful mountains and a cottage, where he apparently spent a lot of time with friends and family.

Because Kapr was a filmmaker as well. Králová combines cleverly the studio recordings with his home video’s (super 8mm digitized), refraining from making another conventional biographical film. And yet the needed and very interesting information about his life is conveyed brilliantly with a twinkle in the eye. Like the stats given, what Kapr left: 12 kilos of letters (!), 7 mins of Fall (in the snow) footage, 112 minutes of material with Libuska…

Libuska was his second wife with whom he had Magda, who appears briefly in the film looking at footage of Vlasta, his first wife and Alenka their daughter, the sister with whom Magda had connection, whereas she (Magda) never heard about her brother Milos, who was placed in an institution by Vlasta and Jan – the footage shows that there was something wrong with him.

Kadr’s films show happy moments and meetings. With Dvorsky, a Czekoslovak musician, who Kadr helped to get out of the hands of the communist regime, and Pavel Ludikar, a world famous opera singer, who came to visit.

Anyway, the film keeps on coming back to the face of Kadr: The smiling man, posing for the camera, head over water with daffodils in his mouth… everyone must have loved this man. The filmmaker does and she found her way to tell us, innovative and full of joy. Result: Excellent film!

Czech Republic, Slovakia, 91 mins.

Overture IDFA Forum 30 Years

Memories… Names, film projects, episodes. 30 years of IDFA Forum! Actually I don’t remember the first time I was there. Was it the first edition? At the time I worked at the National Film Board of Denmark and had a seat in the Board of the EU Documentary office. But I remember that Dane Thomas Stenderup, representing the EU office based in Copenhagen traveled a lot to Amsterdam to meet with Adriek van Nieuwenhuijzen and Ally Derks and other team members…

… to talk about how to set up, what has now become the most important documentary meeting place in the world. Documentarians in the world unite. 

An event that many came love and many came to hate: Is there really money to pick up, many said? Is it a financial market? A meeting place? Many thought, what even is this pitching? It is absurd to think you can present your film idea in 7 minutes. You have been working on it for years! But it turned out that the pitching itself was followed by conversations, discussions, networking. It became obvious that you had made yourself visible, inspired, and engaged, a lot of work waited for you.

I have talked with many veteran documentary filmmakers, who remember the first time as a scary one, a kind of exam; at the same time as it was a good start for gaining the knowledge they needed to build their international careers. And again and again I have heard, even among the skeptical, comments like: “You have to go to the Forum every year”, “You have to show your face otherwise people will think that you are not in the business any longer”! It became the meeting point and being sentimental, I sat there as an observer for the plenary pitch session thinking: “Wow all these people are involved with documentaries! What a show of solidarity!

A few words about the projects: I was part of the selection team for the Forum projects several times when EDN (European Documentary Network) existed as a partner for the Forum. It was always great fun, and a challenge, to find a balance between the more creative films and those that had television as a clear target for their presentation. You knew to expect strong journalistic BBC documentaries in the run for a pitch seat and that they would get it, whereas a personal poetic documentary from Serbia would have difficulties getting a place at the table. Fair enough for commercial thinking but let me at this point stress that Adriek and the team have been great in their continous flexible search for changing the original model – shifting from one huge plenary session to smaller group meetings with the chance to go deeper with each project. Here is a quote from an IDFA article from 2019: “…the Forum is adjusting to changing financing structures, while opening up to also include films with less clear-cut narratives and new ways of storytelling.” Meaning less boring formatted projects, more surprises, more experiments – that’s how I see it.

The editors and pitchers: The Forum must also be entertaining – we observers sit there expecting some show elements from both sides of the table. When Viktor Kossakovsky was pitching you had someone, who knew how to catch attention with a globus for “!Vivan las Antipodas!”. There have been people “dancing” their project – and honestly I miss the at times tough dialogues between Arte’s Thierry Garrel and BBC Storyville’s Nick Fraser. Representing the auteur tradition and the investigative journalistic/historical. Later on, Iikka Vehkalahti from YLE joined the table with competent and humorous support, when appropriate, for the artistic documentary. Not to forget wonderful Diane Weyermann, always pleasant to listen to hear. RIP. Who has taken over from these docu-stars? Far too often you hear “thank you for the pitch” and/or “we have a meeting later today!” Boring and incompetent.

As I write this (August 2022) I am sitting in Skopje at the MakeDox festival and there is a Forum taking place for Southeast Europe. In the beginning of September, there is the Baltic Sea Docs and later the same month there is the Nordisk Panorama… and so on and so forth. These are many regional alternatives to the IDFA Forum and many represent first steps for filmmakers before being selected for the Forum in Amsterdam.

The IDFA Forum of today: It’s the full package. You arrive. You can be trained for pitching. You can have your trailer checked and improved. You can have all kinds of information on the market. You are invited to sessions and receptions to meet colleagues and funders…the “only” thing the Forum does not deliver… you don’t learn how to make films…but it can give tools and inspiration.

Tue Steen Müller

August 2022

Leth & Koefoed: Music for Black Pigeons

De to instruktørers tanker og motivation iflg. pressematerialet:

”Vores film udspringer af en dyb kærlighed til musik. 

For Jørgens vedkommende går den tilbage til 1960’erne, hvor han som jazzskribent blandt andre fulgte Lee Konitz og skrev om ham. Han var Jørgens store helt. Kærligheden blev vakt til live igen fire årtier senere i New York i 2008, hvor Andreas inviterede Jørgen ind i Avatar studiet i New York, hvor Jakob Bro indspillede en plade med blandt andre Lee Konitz og hvor Andreas og Sune Blicher var igang med optagelserne til filmen Weightless. Det var her Jørgen og Jakob Bro mødtes for første gang og her at kimen til samarbejdet mellem os blev lagt.

 

Filmen bygger på venskab. Årelange venskaber, både mellem musikerne, mellem os indbyrdes og mellem musikerne og os.

 

Filmen er som et stykke musik. Den er improviseret frem, bygget op af forskellige stemmer, der krydser hinanden, sætter sig spor, kontraster, der mødes og skaber nye sammenhænge.

 

Glimt af livshistorier, venskaber, åndelige fællesskaber, der skabes og udvikler sig over tid og sted. 

Filmen er blevet til i en organisk proces. Der var aldrig en plan. Den har udviklet sig organisk og forgrenet sig, har haft sit eget liv med os som katalysatorer.

 

Filmen er en dokumentation af en række stilskabende musikere. Flere af dem er her ikke længere. Flere af dem er aldrig blevet portrætteret før trods deres ikoniske status i musikhistorien. Filmen vil leve som et dokument for eftertiden og folk vil kunne opleve, at sådan var fx Lee Konitz. Sådan boede han og der købte han suppe. Sådan gik han og fløjtede på gaden. Sådan sad han alene i sin lejlighed og lyttede til musik, mens mørket faldt på.

 

Filmen er drevet af nysgerrighed. Hvordan kan man beskrive musikkens væsen? Hvordan opleves musik hos dem, der selv udøver den og lever med den? Hvor finder de inspirationen?

 

Filmen er et møde mellem generationer. Både foran og bagved kameraet. Hvad opstår der, når man åbner sig for en åndsfælde fra en helt anden generation? Hvad giver man til hinanden? Arven lever videre i den nye generation.   

 

Filmen er ikke kun en film om musik, det er en film om livet, om at skabe, om at knytte venskaber, om at elske, ældes, miste og drømme.

 

Filmen søger en mening, men ved også at den er flygtig. Vi søger de smukke øjeblikke. Der hvor ord kommer til kort.”

 Fotografi: Jørgen Leth, Andreas Kofoed og Alberto Barbera

dok.incubator 2023

dok.incubator is a think-tank founded in 2010 by experienced training providers to help documentary filmmaking survive the current media crisis. We strongly believe only the productions with high quality development, which can take advantage of new opportunities and master new market strategies will strive to succeed. The NGO is based in Prague and aims to strengthen the creative documentary industry with events and workshops bringing new impulses and top-class know-how including the use of the new media and internet platforms to the international community of filmmakers.

In 2012 we established dok.incubator workshop focused on creative development of films in post-production. Thanks to its immediate success we started organizing independent sessions with IDFA, Documentary Campus, Emerging Producers and Co-Pro Days. Thanks to Media Mundus program we established an overseas exchange of participants and tutors with IFP (US) and a year later we added a four-day DOK.Restart distribution workshop in Poland to our activities. We also collaborated with Nordisk Panorama and founded dok.elevator focused on Nordic producers together. Besides the successful international workshop we started with regional long term projects in 2015 to support Czech filmmakers – dok.incubator CZ and Slovak filmmakers – dok.incubator SK. Since 2019 we have been organizing the Move It Onworkshop focusing on digital marketing for films.

During the past 10 years dok.incubator worked with more than 150 films, many of them premiering at A-list festivals. 12 films were selected for Sundance competitions, 2 were nominated for Emmy, 5 for European Film Award and almost 30 of them were screened at IDFA. Films from dok.incubator workshops are also regularly selected for CPH:DOX, HotDocs, Visions du Réel, or Krakow Film Festival.

https://dokincubator.net/