FILMCENTRALEN 4 /Uyarra og Christoffersen

Filmcentralen / For alle kan jo gå hen og blive en samling som der trygt kan refereres til og hvorfra filmværkerne til enhver tid langt ud i fremtiden kan hentes frem og bruges af mig, af lånerne, af offentligheden ligesom de litterære værker i de store biblioteker, i dem af dem, som ikke har opgivet at være samlinger. Som da jeg forleden dag via et opslag på Facebook fra Sara Thelle om to artikler af diplomatimedarbejderen Julian Borger i The Guardian om de dramatiske og omhyggelige forberedelser til en retssag mod Bashar al-Assad læste om en af mine dokumentarfilmhelte, den canadiske ekspert i international ret Bill Wiley (FOTO) i Esteban Uyarras og Michael Christoffersens Saving Saddam fra 2008, som netop nu er dybt involveret i den sag. Jeg må jo i denne nye sammenhæng se den film igen. Dengang skrev jeg dette om den:

… Det måtte slutte der på forhøjningen med trappen op. Har nogen mon talt trinene? Bødlen med sort hætte lægger et sort tørklæde om Saddams hals, og derefter løkken, som netop ser sådan ud. Man ser det alt sammen på mobiltelefon-optagelsen. Det er ikke noget smukt billede. Det er forfærdende som den grimme videooptagelse fra retssagen mod Elena og Nicolae Ceausescu. Billedet af dem i overtøj. De sidder i den kolde skolestue, hvor standretten finder sted. Summarisk rettergang.

Denne films hovedperson, Bill Wilay vil forhindre, at noget sådant gentages. Han vil en retfærdig rettergang efter internationalt anerkendte regler, han vil, at drabene hører op, vil afskaffe dødsstraffen som første skridt… (Læs videre) 

In English from FILM Magazine 1 November 2008:

THE CRIME OF CRIMES

by Allan Berg Nielsen

In Saving Saddam, Bill Wiley, a Canadian lawyer, wants to abolish the death penalty. The film is produced by Mette Heide and Michael Christoffersen for Team Productions, the company that produced Milosevic on Trial, about The Hague Tribunal.

There it inevitably ended, on the podium, with the steps leading up to it. Did anyone count the steps? The black-hooded executioner ties a black kerchief around Saddam’s neck, next the noose, which looks just so. The mobile phone video shows all, and it’s not pretty. It’s every bit as horrifying as the ghastly video of the trial against Elena and Nicolae Ceausescu with its unshakable image of the two of them wearing their overcoats in the chilly schoolroom where a military court was hastily convened. The protagonist of Saving Saddam, Bill Wiley, a Canadian lawyer, wants to prevent the same thing from happening again… 

He wants a fair trial according to internationally recognised rules. He wants the killing to stop. As an initial step, he wants to abolish the death penalty. Esteban Uyarra and Michael Christoffersen’s film looks at this lost opportunity.

The film opens by saying what we already know, that he failed. The phone rings. Picking it up, he says he’s been in Baghdad for 19 months, trying to save Saddam Hussein. When the film opens, we know that the project it describes won’t succeed. The film then closes with the same scene of the phone call.

In the meantime, Wiley’s experiences over those 19 months have made us much the wiser. They trace the film’s storyline – ambition, hope, hard work, resistance, persuasion, stubbornness, a victory of sorts just before the final defeat and disappointment. Saddam may hang, but in a way he still wins. Deboarding a plane in Canada, Wiley exclaims, “I’m alive!” But of course, he lost. The film tells us how and why.

As Wiley first saw his role as advisor, he would fight for Saddam Hussein getting a fair trial. But the new Iraqi government wants revenge. As do the demonstrators in the streets, the politicians and the prosecutors. Even the judges want it all along, a lot would indicate. What Saddam and his defence team want is less certain.

INTERNATIONAL CRIMINAL LAW

Wiley is grounded in international criminal law. “My job, my moral duty,” he says, “is to try and save any man whose life is in peril without respect to his goodness or lack thereof. So if it turns out in the judgement that I’ve succeeded, at least in this one case, I will be very, very satisfied.”

Wiley is a lawyer from Canada with years of experience in international criminal law. He comes to Iraq from Congo, where he worked as an investigator for the UN’s International Criminal Court, a relatively new permanent tribunal. Wiley quit because of poor security, after several UN officers were killed. Now in Iraq, the UN has assigned him to monitor the trials against Saddam Hussein and his cohorts to make sure they get due process. Thus, he is a UN observer when the Iraq Special Tribunal opens the trial against Saddam. As a foreign attorney, he can’t actually appear in the trial, though he can serve as an advisor outside the courtroom.

The trial was set up and funded by the American government through an entity known as the Regime Crimes Liaison Office (RCLO), with the Americans providing funding and logistics. Soon realising that Saddam’s defence is a shambles, RCLO, i.e., the Americans, hires Wiley to step in as an advisor to the defence team, though without the defence’s consent. Wiley eventually manages to establish a rapport with them and lends his assistance, though that side story gradually descends into chaos. Our protagonist, then, comes to Iraq as a neutral observer for the UN, but then switches roles when the Americans employ him to ensure that the trial meets international standards. As a climax, he writes Saddam Hussein’s closing document, the final statement by the defence, thought it fails to avert the death penalty. As he says at one point, “Maybe we were naive ….”

GROWING AWARENESS

As the story unfolds, we realise it’s about this strange naivety. How certain Western political institutions have a hard time putting themselves in someone else’s place, understanding that others don’t automatically accept the Western concept of democracy or the Western view of law. Wiley is divided. He has his long legal education, his broad base of knowledge, yet he somehow understands Saddam’s reluctance to accept him on his defence team.

His growing awareness, expressed as mounting frustration, is edited as an inevitable development for the protagonist. Wiley is constantly thrown into conflict between his idealism and his sense of reality. Meanwhile, he is falling under the influence of Najeeb Al-Naumi, the utterly disillusioned head of the defence team and his intellectual equal. The film’s other focal point, Najeeb is a profoundly fascinating character, and the film effectively pits him against Wiley. Ironic disillusion versus naive idealism.

In principle, no foreigners are allowed in the actual courtroom. Nonetheless, when the time comes for Saddam and his daughter to pick their defendants, their choices include Najeeb of Qatar and Ramsey Clark, a former United States Attorney General on his own political mission (he once defended Slobodan Milosevic), as well as an Egyptian and some Iraqi attorneys. Bending the rules, the tribunal allowed the foreign attorneys in.

The defence attorneys are a motley crew. Sometimes they’re in Baghdad, at other times they meet in Amman, where Saddam’s daughter is staying, or in Damascus. Mainly working out of his Qatar office, Najeeb increasingly isolates himself, when he begins to sense that the others have a totally different agenda. This is the context of a key scene, a confidential call between Najeeb and Wiley, outlining the trial’s complicated standoffs: Saddam versus vengeance, a concept he essentially recognises, and Saddam versus a new, flimsy international court he does not recognise.

THREE FILMS, ONE EXPERIENCE

Christoffersen co-directed “Saving Saddam” with Estaban Uyarra, who made his name as a daring documentarian with his 2004 film about the invasion of Iraq, “War Feels Like War”. Christoffersen had already made two films about international war crimes tribunals: “Milosevic on Trial” (2007) and “Genocide: The Judgement” (1999) – respectively about the tribunal in The Hague, 2002-2006, and the tribunal in Arusha, Tanzania, 1994, that convicted the mayor of Taba, Rwanda, for a number of serious crimes relating to the massacres in his town. “Genocide’s” main character, the Swedish judge Lennart Aspegren, characterises the UN tribunal as the first human rights trial since Nuremberg, an experiment with the potential of international law to prosecute the crime of crimes – murders of civilians, genocide and other crimes against humanity.

All three films centre on the crime of crimes and the historically still quite young international justice system prosecuting such cases. Each film fuses the story and a charismatic central character with an understanding of the law and ethics – as effectively embodied in gentle, thoughtful Aspegren in “Genocide”, tough and efficient Geoffrey Nice in “Milosevic on Trial” and frustrated Wiley in “Saving Saddam”. The three works, as a whole, constitute a collective journalistic and documentary experience of international law. Filmed on location, Christoffersen’s films uniquely document the ambition for a comprehensive legal system during its early formative years.

After his third experience with the subject, Christoffersen says, “Say what you want about the tribunal and the trial of Saddam, but it was, and still is, a real attempt to have a judicial process according to international principles, a first in the region. But of course, such cases always have a political dimension, this one more than most, and ultimately that was a decisive factor. Writing off the trial as an unfair political charade is way too simplistic, to the best of my opinion.”

Danmark 2008, 51 min.

Streaming Filmcentralen / For alle:

http://filmcentralen.dk/alle/film/manden-der-ville-redde-saddam

Filmens side på DFI: 

http://www.dfi.dk/faktaomfilm/film/en/58609.aspx?id=58609

John F. Burns i The New York Times 2008:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/25/world/middleeast/25trial.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

Julian Borger i The Guardian 2015:

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/may/12/smuggled-syrian-documents-indict-assad-investigators?CMP=share_btn_fb

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/may/12/syria-truth-smugglers-bashar-al-assad-war-crimes

Allan Berg Nielsen i FILM Magazine 2008:

http://www.dfi.dk/Service/English/News-and-publications/FILM-Magazine/Artikler-fra-tidsskriftet-FILM/64/The-Crime-of-Crimes.aspx

Cannes Festival Goes for Documentaries – does it?

Interesting article in Nonfics yesterday by Daniel Walber, a clever comment and reflection on the fact that the Cannes Film Festival has introduced a ”Oeil d’Or” (Golden Eye) award of €5000 with 14 films competing and with a jury that includes fine names as Rithy Panh, Nicolas Philibert and Diana el Jeiroudi.

The problem, however, according to Walber, well to anyone who is in for the artistic, creative documentary, is that 10 of the films are films about legendary film directors and actors – a quote:

“There are two 50-minute films on Orson Welles, one of which was produced by Turner Classic Movies. There’s one about actor Steve McQueen‘s love of auto racing, another about pioneering African filmmaker Ousmane Sembène, and a profile of Gérard Depardieu. There’s even a documentary about the history of the Palme d’Or itself. Kent Jones‘s Hitchcock/Truffaut is an inevitable highlight, as well as Stig Björkman‘s Ingrid Bergman, in Her Own Words. Daniel Raim, Oscar-nominated for his short profile of art director Robert Doyle, is back with Harold and Lillian: A Hollywood Love Story. Finally, the one I’m most looking forward to is By Sidney Lumet, a new American Masters film from Afternoon of a Faun director Nancy Buirski.”

I am sure that several of these films are full of creativity (long to see Björkman’s on Ingrid Bergman and the one on Hitchcock/Truffaut) but they “smell” of well crafted television documentaries, where the main subject is commented on by colleagues, experts, whatever. So the competition is in no way reflecting the strong position of author-driven documentaries worldwide today as the feature categories go for the “auteur”.

To be fair Asi Kapadia’s film on Amy Winehouse, Amy (photo), that has received enormously positive reviews after its screening at the festival, is also in this first competition at the Cannes festival. Let’s wait and see what the jury decides.

http://nonfics.com/cannes-documentary-prize/

FILMCENTRALEN 3 /Vibe Mogensen

Jeg vælger denne gang Min fars sind, den er fra 2005, jeg havde haft lidt med den at gøre. Dette er hvad jeg skrev kort efter premieren til en visning i Randers:

Det er en meget smuk titel Vibe Mogensen har givet sin film. Den dækker fuldstændig filmens overvejelse og indhold. Jeg har fulgt den fra de første skitseagtige optagelser for nogle år siden – den var længe undervejs, men den har ikke ændret retning, den var og blev denne uro: min fars sind. Filmen har to medvirkende, Vibe Mogensen selv og hendes sindssyge far. Og den handler om dette sind og tanken i titlen. Arven. Er det sådan i en familie, at alt arves? Og er det så også sådan, at vi må vedgå denne arv?

Instruktøren besøger med sit kamera faderen, som bor alene i Randers. Og de bruger samværet til at dykke ned i familiehistorien. De har fotografierne og de mange film, som skyldes faderens store produktivitet altid. Som datteren anerkendende noterer – nu kan hun bruge dem i sit arbejde, i sin undersøgelse og fremlæggelse af historien, hvor faderens og moderens forhold er centralt. Moderen er borte nu. Hvorfor er hun det?

Faderen malede også dengang, og de leder i kælderrummet og i loftsrummet efter et bestemt billede. En fremstilling af en mand og en kvinde som et tohovedet væsen, som siamesiske tvillinger. Og siamesiske tvillinger kan ikke skilles uden, den ene dør, har han læst. Hun kunne ikke leve uden dig, konkluderer datteren om sin mor, men hun kunne heller ikke leve med dig. Du har ret siger faderen sagtmodigt.

Og sådan går deres samvær og deres samtaler videre, datterens og faderens. Kameraet er stadigvæk deres medium, selv om han ikke vil filme mere. Han vil gerne medvirke. Også vise sine følelser, sin sorg, da hun fortæller, at hun skal skilles. Åh, nej – siger han, men han havde anet det. Arven går videre, Sådan også med kærligheden til børnene – som Vibe Mogensen er sikker på hun har, ja, du er god mod dine børn, fastslår faderen, og hun nikker: jeg må jo have lært det et sted.

SYNOPSIS

… ”As an editor I’m trying to find the soul/the spirit of the film”, she (Nanna Frank Møller) said and continued to show material from the masterpiece of Vibe Mogensen, Min fars sind (The Mind of my Father): A grown-up man one day starts to cry, he does not know why, it gets worse, turns into a mental illness bringing him on strong medicine to survive. The daughter, the director, visits him, films him, as he has been filming her on holidays way back before he got ill. I have seen the film several times, every time it moves me immensely. (Tue Steen Müller on The Mind of my father)

Min fars sind, 2005. 59 min. Instruktion og manuskript: Vibe Mogensen. Fotografi: Vibe Mogensen. Klip: Nanna Frank Møller. Smalfilm: Familien Mogensen. Producere: Anne Regitze Wivel og Vibeke Vogel. Produktion og distribution: Barok Film. Streaming: Filmcentralen / For alle.

FILMOGRAFI

Vibe Mogensen (f. 1964) debuterede med Borte i 1992. Vibe Mogensens afgangsfilm Veninder fra 1994 blev sendt på DR1. Hun lavede dernæst Pigerne i 4. B  og Rideskolen begge for DR1. I 1998 kom Salsapiger søger og året efter Mit barn som stjerne, der begge sendt på DR2. I 2002 kom 100 % Greve, som blev vist som tv-serie på TV2. I 2004 fulgte 110 % Greve, der blev vist i biograferne. I 2006 lavede Vibe Mogensen Mit Danmark – film 8 i en serie med ti medvirkende instruktører.

Streaming ”Min fars sind”: http://filmcentralen.dk/alle/film/min-fars-sind

Om filmen: http://www.dfi.dk/faktaomfilm/film/da/43059.aspx?id=43059

Vibe Mogensen: http://filmcentralen.dk/alle/film?field_director=%22Vibe%20Mogensen%22  http://www.dfi.dk/faktaomfilm/person/da/146201.aspx?id=146201 

Franz Grabner 1955-2015

Kind and sweet and warm and knowledgeable Franz Grabner has died. I had the privilege to work with him for many years during my years at the EDN. He was many times at the Ex Oriente workshop and pitching in Jihlava and he found it important to come to ZagrebDox when training and pitching was introduced there. And it was only natural for Mikael Opstrup and me to ask him to join us in September 2011 for the DOCMeeting in Buenos Aires. I wrote the following report on this site:

”Franz Grabner from ORF in Austria, on the contrary to the power point the previous speaker used, opened his textbook and looked down at his handwritten notes. For him the development of a film project is the most important, he wants to create a relationship with the director. We should not lose the audience, he said, and continued to express his concern about the tv audience – no young people watch television – ”sometimes I think that I am producing more for the past than for the future”. But let’s make films for the audience and not for the ratings. Grabner referred to the strong film tradition in Austria after the world war 2, with names like Haneke, Glawogger, Geyerhalter and Ulrich Seidl, and showed a clip from the Bosnian director Begovic wonderful and original ”Totally Personal”.”

Yes, Franz was for the original and personal documentary, the artistic and he was aware that the good days for that kind of films on television were over. He wanted to have a post-ORF life to make his skills available for filmmakers as a consultant after his long hospital stay. Indeed he knew his film history.

Many warm thoughts go through my head when I think of Franz, who was also the one who introduced me to wonderful Austrian red wine. My condolences to his family.  

Iiris Härmä: Leaving Africa

A bit into the beginning of the film I said to myself: OMG, is this a film where they are going to talk the whole way through! Of course I understood that the filmmakers had to make the viewer agree to ”where” and ”why” and ”who”. Who the characters are, their relationship, their mission in Uganda – in other words to give information necessary for the further development of a story that grows smoothly and slowly as the rythm of life does in the country where it takes place. But that much talking?

I have often thought about openings of a creative non-journalistic documentary film like this as a take-off in a flight. Sometimes you feel it takes ages before you are up there, where there is a flow,  waiting for the turbulences (the conflicts) to come, where you can move on.

The turbulences arrive in ”Leaving Africa”, the talking goes on and I arrive to love what I see and hear from two lovely women, Riitta Kujala from Finland and Catherine Othieno, called Kata, from Uganda. And I get to love to stay with them at the main location of the film, their veranda outside the house, where they talk and where Kata dances while Riitta smokes her cigarettes, coughs and reads. And where they have been living together since 1993.

Riitta is about to retire and return to Finland after 27 years on mission in Uganda. Ugandan Catherine is the executive director of the Finnish ngo supported organisation Cofcawe that does family planning for grown ups and health and sex education for children. She is the one to carry on with the work. If she is allowed to do so – problems appear from the authorities: the two are accused of promoting lesbianism and homosexuality and their permission to go on with Cofcawe is taken away.

But before that happens you have seen them in action in classes where both women and men take part. You hear comments from some of the students and you meet wonderful Catholic Daizy, who is 34 years old and has 8 children! (She is the one on the photo together with Catherine in a radio programme, where she tells that she has started to use birth control thanks to Cofcawe).

Our aim is ”to help women come out of poverty”, says Riitta, who also nails the problems of fertile and ressource rich Uganda down to be a ”gender based poverty”.

Built up in a classic way the conflict is introduced, the efforts are made to get back the permission to operate in moments that are – as they express it – of ”constant uncertainty” and ”emotional stress”. They get it back and Riitta can prepare to leave for her retirement in snowy Finland.

The relationship between the two is beautifully described through the many situational scenes around the house and when they work ”on location”. The story of Catherine who was abused as a child and later on raped, told through her voice-off, a bit heavy and especially in the beginning used solution, probably the only one possible, is very strong as is her emotional gratitude towards Riitta, who got to know her back in 1986.

Riitta, well, I have met so many of these no-bullshit Finnish women, she is one of them, clear in speech, chain-smoking and totally committed to what she is doing in a homophobic country. You can only love her!

Objections? Could there have been more with fabulous looking Daizy, the mother of 8, who in a scene teaches her daughters what it is to have periods? Could the filmmakers have used less music, which sometimes works well but also in some sequences are what I normally characterise as ”putting too much sugar on” – a desease in modern documentary. There are so much emotional power in many scenes between the two that music is not needed. And there is one small tear too much for me in the film, whereas the emotional outburst of Kata in the office after the permission to carry on has been given is astonishing and unique describing her reaction so much different to the Nordic usual hugging of Riitta. Cultural differences and yet a beautiful friendship full of love and understanding. 

Finland, 2015, 84 mins.

www.guerillafilms.fi

Frederick Wiseman: 11 Doc Lessons

 Realscreen is a useful source for information on what is going on in – that’s what they call it – non-fiction. Normally it is short news, sometimes however longer articles of fine quality like the one from May 1st by Kevin Ritchie that I would recommend you to read because it conveyes an old master’s wise words – Frederick Wiseman being interviewed at Hot Docs by CBC journalist Piya Chattopadhyay, to the left on the photo with his producer and distributor Karen Konicek to the right. Lessons on how to stay independent, quite an inspiration.

Here are the headlines of what the reporter calls ”11 Doc Lessons”, read them all, link below:

1. A good idea can come anytime, anyplace.

2. In Jackson Heights is about the “new face of America.” (In Jackson Heights is a new film project that Wiseman pitched at the Hot Docs).

3. Wiseman gets permission by asking for it.

4. Raising money is the most “demeaning” part of making a movie. 5. His shoots generally last four to six weeks.

6. Half of documentary filmmaking has nothing to do with filmmaking.

7. The filmmaker’s point of view exists between literal and abstract levels.

8. He never does research.

9. He never cuts a film to meet the needs of a broadcaster.

10. Self-distributing his films on DVDs has been successful.

11. The key to longevity in film is a good producer.

Words to all of us, who run around teaching what to do and what not to do, and how to pitch and how not to pitch from the man who has given us ”the other side of America”.

http://realscreen.com/2015/05/01/hot-docs-15-11-doc-lessons-from-frederick-wiseman/

DOKer Moscow Int. Documentary Film Festival

Respect! All right, we can get no official support due to the economical crisis, but we will make the festival anyway. We will finance it out of own pocket. This was the thought of a group of independent Russian filmmakers, who stand behind the MIDFF DOKer that starts May 22 and runs until May 26. 16 features will take part in the Main Competition and 19 films in the Shorts Competition. 10 films have been selected for this year’s Special programme Cinema in Cinema.

Some background taken from the site: DOKer is a project of screening independent documentaries, it was created in the beginning of 2011 by a group of enthusiasts to promote contemporary art documentaries in Moscow and other Russian cities. It has enjoyed 9 seasons in 6 cities. Altogether, 300 screenings have been staged for more than 20,000 viewers

The project doesn’t limit itself to screenings, it also organizes discussions with the filmmakers, master classes, closed screenings before the world premieres, regular social and cultural surveys of the audiences, campaigns to attract media attention to new Russian films, lengthy partnerships with various film festivals and organizations, assistance and support of local theatrical releases and many other activities…

The filmmakers who organize the festival have been working on selection since autumn. They received 1325 submissions from 97 countries and have selected films from 5 continents and 31 countries. All foreign films are Russian premieres, some being world/international as well.

Criteria for selection: “1) In a word combination “documentary movie” stress falls on a “movie”. 2) There are millions ways to make a documentary, but one thing should stay permanent: it should be dramatic and interesting. 3) An image and a sound are important for docs as much as for fiction. A language of cinema consists of sounds and images, just this language tell us stories. If it is poor, no one will appreciate it.”

Cultural aim: The Festival organizers are convinced that films about real characters from all over the world can break down old stereotypes and bring together people of polar mentalities. Finely-told documentary stories can help find ways of understanding another culture and establish common ground when realities clash. Such films can also help bring closer aspirations and hopes of other people and even find the meaning of life..

I e-mailed Irina Shatalova, one of the initiators, who explained what the further plan is:

… We’ve decided to launch a crowdfunding campaign in Russia, which will last before, during and all the summer after the Festival with the aim of organizing a special Festival-weekend in September, to present once again the winner-films of the Festival and bring all their authors for discussions after the screenings and to arrange once again some kind of the special solemn ceremony. 🙂

This is another non-standard step, but it’ll give us the opportunity to support this initiative for a longer time and to focus on it the attention of the public, the media and possible future partners. We believe that this event in autumn can be a beautiful point, signifying a preparation for the next Festival’s edition.

The DOKer Team, besides me is (I’m sure you are familiar with most of these people))): director Nastia Tarasova (Shatalova and Tarasova made “Linar”, director Sergei Kachkin (“On the Way Home”), director Igor Morozov, super high level linguist Aliona Cheporova, director Tatiana Soboleva (“The Floating Hospital”). Producer Maria Chuprinskaya, journalist Giuliano Vivaldi and several other people also greatly help us with the organization of the Festival.

I also hasten to inform you that all members of the jury finally confirmed their participation. Here they are: film director Victor Kossakovsky, cinematographer from Poland Mateusz Skalski (his work on ‘A Dream in the Making’ won him best cinematography award on 53rd Krakow Film Festiwal) and film critic from Greece Vassilis Economou, and you Tue…

The jury, which works from their homes and discuss via online, is to give the following awards:

– Best Documentary Feature

– Best Directing

– Best Cinematography

– Best Editing

– Best Sound

To award these professional achievements is very important for us as for organisers, because these skills are not often stand out as a separate professional merits. So we decided that it is fair…

Indeed it is and far too often forgotten are the cameramen, the editors, the sound engineers.

Russian filmmakers with a global vision and repertory, a passion for the documentary genre as an art form and what it can do, and a respect for the audience.

http://www.midff.com/#!home/mainPage

trailer: https://vimeo.com/126994575

Giedre Zickyte: Master and Tatyana

So, there it is, the film about the Lithuanian photographer Vitas Luckus (1943-1987), his life, his art and first of all his love story with muse and wife, Tatyana. It is made by Giedre Zickyte, who has been working on it for years. I heard about it five (maybe more) years ago, when she was pitching the film at the Baltic Sea Forum, and since then I have had the pleasure to watch sequences and rough versions. Yes, pleasure, because Giedre Zickyte has kept the passion for her film the whole way through, and pleasure because you can see Quality, high Quality in the final film. For me it’s brilliant, nothing less.

As I don’t come ”innocent” to the film, I can not give it marks, others will do so, and lucky Krakow Film Festival that they will have the international premiere at the end of this month.

”A man of exceptional gentleness” says one of the handful of friends, who met and worked with Luckus. The friends are all clearly emotional, when they talk about him and the time, where they were together in a bohemian life, a small group of independent artists, who tried to be independent to make art in the USSR, where censorship was normal and Luckus artistic photos were rarely exhibited.

His photos, shown generously in the film, are wide-ranging, black & white, social, (almost) always with people as the motive, many from travels are presented in many different ways narratively. Through a magnifying glass on contact sheets in a fine visual flow or photo by photo on the screen fading in and out with time to watch and discover. Or through camera movements from photo to photo…. Has to be said that Luckus, together with Tatyana, made good money on making advertisement campaigns.

But – as the title indicates – the film is first of all a love story told primarily through the photos of Vitas and Tatyana, a love story that is so obvious, when you watch how he composes the portraits of Tatyana, how the camera is constantly caressing the beautiful woman, with or without clothes. Her face is so full of expressions and you can see that he has caught her in true observational documentarian style as well as in arranged situations.

Their relationship was not always easy. Luckus was a classical bohemian artist, who had (as one of the friends says) alcohol as his demon, who was away from home in periods – another friend said that they were on the edge of divorce several times, but found out that ”we could not live without each other”, as Tatyana says from her home in the USA, where she has been living since she felt she had to leave Vilnius after Luckus took his own life after having taken another person’s life.

These tragic events frame the story of the life of Vitas Luckus but – in his spirit – with gentleness, reflecting what you can see in his world class photos – sensuality. Luckus jumped out of the window – ”our whole life went out of that window”, says Tatyana. One of the friends pick a photo taken by Luckus: A photo of their sitting room with footprints on the ceiling leading to an open window… Magic!

Tatyana, who has kept his archive with her all the time, returns to Vilnius in an epilogue in the film to open an exhibition with his works, including some large series of close-ups of faces. Magnificent! She carries the love story in a non-sentimental way, saying little in the film but enough, charisma!

For me this must give an international carreer for a film that has Audrius Kezemys to give amazing cinematography that corresponds to the photographer, Danielius Kokanauskis and the director herselt to give the intensity and the flow of narration and Dagnė Vildiūnaitė and her company Just a Moment to produce.

Yes, I love that film.

Lithuania, 84 mins., 2014

Flying Film Festival/ 3

… and the winner is, was the headline of the e-mail I received from Francesca Scalisi today. She sums up the experience with the Flying Film Festival, that she was initiating, like this: It went so well that probably we will do it again next year. We had smg like 6000 visualizations!!!

”Nos jours absolument doivent etre illuminés” by Jean Gabriel Périot was the film among the 9 films that flying passengers and grounded jury members picked as the winner

“A simple and beautiful film carrying strong emotions. It shows how much can be communicated without even saying one word”, were the official jury motivation, very right characteristic – in a previous post I wrote about the film:

..an intelligent and touching film where you hear inmates from behind the prison wall give a concert, while you see faces outside experience the music emotionally, close-ups of family to the one in prison.”

Fine Flying Film Festival – please come back and export the idea to other airlines than Swiss.

http://www.flying-filmfestival.com

– also on FB.

Ostap Kostyuk: The Living Fire

I have to go to words from literature, as we normally do when writing about films. This Ukrainian documentary is prose and poetry and essay at the same time. It is informative and emotional. You learn from it as you always do, when a skilled film crew takes you to a place, where you have not been before and that you know nothing about – and it does not limit itself to an anthropological or etnographic approach but succeeds in conveying an amazingly beautiful (in image, sound and characters) artistic interpretation of a tradition that is disappearing. And it invites you to reflect as does an essay.

The location is the Ukrainian Carphatian Mountains and as for content, here is a quote from a text brought on screen in the beginning of the film: … (they) leave their villages for 4 months to graze their flocks on highland pastures… only a few remain to carry on the craft of their ancestors…

That’s actually what it is about, past and present, and what you need to know before you are taken into the lives of the three protagonists, who push the narrative ahead. They are from three generations: Ivan the 9 year old boy, Vasyl 39 years old and Ivan 82 year old, the trio who are step by step characterised through words and wordless sequences, via cuts from one to the other, to end up having all three of them together in a shack in the mountains, in one of many memorable moments.

Mostly thanks to the old Ivan, who is the one who can tell about how it was before, what he remembers from the sheep herding tradition, at the same time as the film gives us his sadness and grief. His wife died a couple of years ago and now he is preparing for his own departure from the earth: He has built his own coffin, he shows to the camera what he will wear when in the coffin and he regrets having been away for so long from his wife, when working in the mountains. So does the wife of Vasyl in a short sequence, with tears in her eyes, she says: I’ve been alone for 15 summers now.

Ivan, the boy, goes to school, you see him sleepy and grumpy in cold weather outside a shack, you see him as a shepherd caring about a sheep with a bad leg, you see him lying in the grass laughing. The latter in a scene that has no explanation as such, typical for the film that includes several scenes of moments that can express emotions (here maybe freedom and innocence of childhood) and has no informational or structural importance. Thus ”Living Fire” goes wonderfully beyond traditional narrative to become visual poetry. Equally there are some stunningly wonderful sequences of Cinema Pur mixing the sound of lambs being born and music in a congenial montage.

The camerawork (Oleksandr Pozdnyakov, Mykyta Kuzmenko) contributes strongly to create the spiritual dimension of the film as does the music score composed by Alla Zahaikevych. It is much more than a support to the image, it has its own life and beauty bringing the story to a reflective level.

A piece of reference and guidance: I was thinking of Pelechian and his ”Seasons” when watching, as well as Latvian Viesturs Kairiss film ”Pelican in the Desert”. Two other great works, like this of a superb lyrical quality.

The film was given a Special Jury Prize at the recent Hot Docs Festival in Toronto.

Ukraine, 2014, 77 mins.

www.zhyvavatra.com.ua