Silver Crane Award Nominations

The Lithuanian national film awards, the Silver Cranes, will be announced on June 4. The nominations have been announced. Yesterday English version via FilmNewEurope. I took a look at the list of nominated documentaries, that includes the following:

Antanas Sutkus. Scenes from Photographer’s Life / Antanas Sutkus. Scenos Iš Fotografo Gyvenimo (Lithuania)
Directed by Vytautas V. Landsbergis
Produced by Studija APropos

Decadent Nr. 2419 / Dekadentas NR. 2419 (Lithuania)
Directed by Saimir Bajo
Produced by Ketvirtaversija

Burial / Kapinynas (Lithuania, Norway)
Directed by Emilija Škarnulytė
Produced by Just a moment
Coproduced by Mer Film

Mariupolis 2 (Lithuania, France, Germany)
Directed by Mantas Kvedaravičius, co-directed by Hanna Bilobrova
Produced by Studio Uljana Kim, Extimacy film
Coproduced by Easy Riders films, Twenty Twenty Vision Filmproduktion

Back from New York / Sugrįę iš Niujorko (Lithuania)
Directed by Ramunė Rakauskaité

I have seen the two last ones on the list – for the Danes: “Mariupolis 2” will be shown at Cinemateket tomorrow, whereas “Back from New York”, produced by Studio Nominum, is a wonderful one hour homage to Life and Art. Here is the description of the film from the website of the production company: “Back from New York” is a film about two unique and appreciated artists, close friends, whose lives were greatly influenced by emigration. It is not only a story about the discoveries of these wanderers, but also about the true joys of life, coming back and creating a new life in their homeland. By choice, they decided to return to Lithuania after many years spent in the rattling and enchanting New York. Photo-artist Arūnas Kulikauskas has settled in a monocot in Ukmergė district, painter Eugenijus Varkulevičius-Varkalis – in his hometown Kaunas… The film has great material with Jonas Mekas, whose influence on the two is strongly in focus. 

Ramunė Rakauskaité is also nominated in the Best Director category and also the editor Audinga Kučinskaitė is appreciated for a work that perfectly has found the rythm to answer the bohemian life in New York and at home. 

Mantas Kvedaravicius Mariupolis 2

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

Stonys & Briede: Bridges of Time

This is a text I wrote for the premiere of the film, 30th of June 2018:

Wow, it’s tomorrow at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival that Bridges of Time has its premiere. The film, a co-production between the three Baltic countries, is introduced like this by the festival: “Kristīne Briede and Audrius Stonys’s meditative documentary essay portrays the less-remembered generation of cinema poets of the Baltic New Wave. With finesse, they push beyond the barriers of the common historiographic investigation in order to achieve a consummate poetic treatment of the ontology of documentary creation.”

A fine intro, however, I would make it a bit longer with these words: “This is a film for all cinema lovers. It tells about the Baltic poetic documentary cinema that was created during the Soviet Union. In opposition to the USSR propaganda films. It was a wave of a personal free visual language that celebrated life and humanity. Together with Latvian Kristine Briede, Lithuanian director Audrius Stonys, who in his own work continues the tradition for a poetic look at reality, has picked magical moments from unique long and short documentaries to let them meet the old masters as they look today or when they were in front of the camera decades ago. The directors in the film about this special artistic phenomenon in film history are Herz Frank, Uldis Brauns, Ivars Seleckis, Andres Sööt, Robertas Verba, Henrikas Sablevicius, Arvis Freimanis, Mark Soosaar.”

I have been invited to come for the premiere in Karlovy Vary, which I do with great pleasure as someone whose professional life changed completely in the 1990’es, where I discovered the Baltic documentary on the island of Bornholm where a festival, Balticum Film & TV Festival took place until 2000. Today it is my joy to go to Riga every year to take part in the Baltic Sea Docs that is a continuation of the adventure on Bornholm, as is the collaboration of the three Baltic countries cinema-wise with this celebration os something very special – the film will be followed by a superb retrospective of the primarily short documentaries made by the masters in the documentary. 

Arunas Matelis: Wonderful Losers

This is a text that I wrote in October 2017 when Arunas Matelis film had its world premiere:

… with the subtitle ”A Different World”, a film that many of us, who think Lithuanian Arunas Matelis is a great artistic documentary film director, have been waiting for – will have its premiere at the Warsaw International Film Festival that takes place October 13-22, a festival for fiction, shorts and documentaries. Arunas and his wife Alge, from their Studio Nominum in Vilnius, have produced a film of high quality (I have seen it just before final cut) that deserves to travel the world because of its cinematic qualities and its invitation to us viewers to look into – as the subtitle says- a different world. It’s (also) a film on professional cycling that touches upon existential questions. Here is the synopsis from the site of the film, link below:

”For spectators, cyclists in the back of the race are simply the losers. They are called water carriers, domestics, gregarios, and Sancho Panzas of professional cycling. Moreover, they have no right to personal victories – these sportsmen sacrifice their careers to help their teammates. We follow the magnificent world of the race from the point of view of the doctors’ team situated in a claustrophobically small medical car surrounded with wounded cyclists. The life of the medical team in race reminds one on the frontline of war. Cyclists crash, rise and race again. And amongst this fight, many magnificent things happen. This film-odyssey reveals the untold world of the wonderful losers, true warriors, knights and monks of professional cycling.”

From a production point of view the credits show an amazing list of co-producers (with 10 cinematographers!) – let me mention them from the credits: Stefilm Italy, Dok Mobile Switzerland, Associate Directors Belgium, VFS Films Latvia, Dearcan Media N.Ireland/UK, Planet Korda Ireland, SUICA Films Spain, Arturas Jevdokimovas for Kino Kontora.

Normally you say that too many cooks spoil the meal – having known Arunas Matelis and his work for more than 25 years I can assure you that this is a film that has his signature.

Wish you good luck with the premiere!

http://www.wonderfullosers.com

DocuDays UA Civil Pitch at Hot Docs

Copy paste from the FB page of DocuDays:

“We received 150 applications for the Civil Pitch 2.0 programme. The jury selected 4 projects that received not only grants for film production, but also mentoring support at all stages of their work. Please welcome the world premiere of the winning films at the 30th anniversary Hot Docs Film Festival in Canada!

All four short documentary projects tell stories about war and people from a unique perspective. “..Pavlo Dorohoi’s 89 Days takes us into a Kharkiv subway-station-turned-bomb-shelter-turned-back-into-a-subway-station; in Under the Wing of a Night, director Lesia Diak immerses herself in 11-year-old Olesia’s new life in Belgium as she waits for her father’s nightly call from back home; Halyna Lavrynets’s Guests from Kharkiv watches activist Nelia try to resettle city-dwellers into rural Ukrainian life; and Anastasiia Tykha’s Our Robo Family celebrates the children’s robotics and programming group Roboclub Vuhledar. Enjoy the freshest Ukrainian documentary talent of 2023!” comments Myrocia Watamaniuk, the Hot Docs Film Festival programmer.

Find the screening schedule, tickets, and other necessary details here. And in June, expect the Ukrainian premiere of the films at the anniversary Docudays UA.

“Civil Pitch 2.0 started at the end of 2021. We actively planned the workshops, took care of the applications, and were in constant contact with foreign tutors. A few days before the full-scale invasion, we were still planning the workshop programme and even hoped to bring our tutors to Kyiv. The very existence of us, of this workshop, and ultimately of this four films, seems like a miracle now, given everything that has happened and is happening. I am grateful to everyone who has supported us along the way: the programme team, tutors, donors, and, of course, the filmmakers and their crews who have worked hard on their projects. 

When we resumed our activities under Civil Pitch 2.0 after the start of the full-scale invasion, we changed the project’s slogan to “Cinema that brings victory closer.” That was more than six months ago. Today, I don’t know if cinema can really bring victory closer, but I do know that cinema can help us survive the most difficult events and make sense of them. I hope that Civil Pitch 2.0 films will allow both foreign and Ukrainian audiences to understand what is happening to us,” adds Darya Bassel, the director of the DOCU/PRO Industry Platform.

CPH:DOX 2023 Scores Biggest Audience Ever

The 20th anniversary of CPH:DOX became a record breaking year for Denmark’s largest film festival. During the festival, the audience number reached 125,680 – in total. Audiences flocked to the cinemas – both in Copenhagen and in the 28 municipalities that were part of the festival this year.

With an audience of 125,680, CPH:DOX 2023 became the most visited edition of the festival ever. Over the past 20 years, CPH:DOX has grown from a small Copenhagen event with just under 12,000 visiting guests to one of the world’s leading documentary film festivals with a large and engaged audience, both in the cinemas and online on the festival’s new streaming platform PARA:DOX.

Niklas Engstrøm, Artistic Director of CPH:DOX, said:
“With this year’s edition of CPH:DOX, we have finally stepped out of the shadow of the Covid-19 pandemic which has left its mark on the festival and its ability to reach a live audience every year since 2020. The 20th anniversary of CPH:DOX was really a celebration – of documentary cinema and of the film festival as a social event. The most wonderful thing is that the massive interest by our local crowd goes hand in hand with rising international attention, and I’m happy to see how so many of the films premiering at CPH:DOX are now continuing their journey in the international festival circuit and market”.

The most popular film in the cinemas during CPH:DOX 2023 was ‘A Storm Foretold’, Christoffer Guldbrandsen’s long-awaited film about Donald Trump’s former adviser Roger Stone, while ‘After Work’ by Erik Gandini became the most streamed film at the festival’s online platform, PARA:DOX. Both films were screened in the festival’s world premieres-only main competition DOX:AWARD.

International attention on the raise
CPH:DOX 2023 not only offered a strong film program with +100 world premieres. The festival also offered a wide range of activities for professionals, including the ever more popular pitching forum for the international film industry, which moved to a bigger venue to accommodate the demand. This part of the festival has made headlines and received praise in a large number of leading international media, including Variety, Screen International and Deadline among others.

Katrine Kiilgaard, Managing Director of CPH:DOX, said:
“Since 2017, CPH:DOX has worked purposefully to develop the industry activities, and we are very happy to see that it is really bearing fruit. We have presented more projects, welcomed more professionals, conducted more individual meetings and given out more awards than ever before. But more importantly, CPH:DOX has attracted a critical mass of the most important players in the industry to meet the most talented filmmakers, making Copenhagen a hub for the further development of the documentary genre and a place not to be missed by the industry”.

Facts about audience interest in CPH:DOX
Overall, the film program at CPH:DOX 2023 was seen by an audience of 125,682.
The first edition of CPH:DOX in 2003 attracted a total of 11,706 visitors to the cinemas, but since then interest has been steadily increasing to 51,800 in 2012 up to the previous audience record of 117.720 in 2020. During the corona pandemic in 2020, CPH:DOX was quickly transformed into a digital festival – in a time of crisis when large parts of Denmark were shut down. In 2021 and 2022, CPH:DOX continued as a hybrid festival with film screening in cinemas and online as well.

6 pens.

Anna Dziapsh-ipa: Self-Portrait Along the Borderl

I’am in that weird situation that I have not seen the final version of a film that has its premiere tomorrow in Nyon in Switzerland in the presence of the director, a dear friend of me – and my wife – Anna, who we met the first time in Tbilisi way back in 2009 and since then have kept contact with. She presents herself as a filmmaker and visual artist, indeed she is, and she has done so much for Georgian documentary through the company Sakdoc that she runs together with Salomé Jashi. BUT back to her film that I will write more about when I have seen the final version. Here is the intro from the festival’s website:

“Anna Dziapsh-ipa was born of the union between an Abkhazian man and a Georgian woman. In Self-Portrait Along the Borderline, she skilfully weaves together unique archives and fragments to offer a personal and political biography of Georgia-Abkhazia relations. This vibrant exploration foregrounds a divided identity caught between the margins…”

After no success with festivals like IDFA and DOKLeipzig this fine autobiographical documentary essay finds its premiere at Visions du Réel in Nyon in Switzerland, where it will be shown tomorrow monday April 24, world premiere, and the director will be present.

I saw a rough cut long time ago and wrote to Anna: “Love it. It has humour, it has sadness, it is original in shape and has magic images taken by you, plus all the archive including those of yourself, I especially love the one where you look at the camera for a long time and then comes the smile…The spider methaphor, yes, I think it works, happy to have your grandfather so present, the man with the surname you carry (he was a famous football player!)… and your wedding, wow that was big, you use it perfectly… 

If you are not in Nyon to watch the film, click below and watch the trailer, that is wonderful:

https://www.visionsdureel.ch/film/2023/self-portrait-along-the-borderline/ 

Circle Women Doc Accelerator to Cannes

Copy paste from (part of) article of today’s Cineuropa, written by Vladan Petkovic: 

CIRCLE Women Doc Accelerator, an exclusive training programme for female-identifying documentary filmmakers, has selected the four projects that will take part in its showcase as part of the Cannes Docs programme of the Marché du Film(16-24 May) for the fourth consecutive year. Previous winners include Lin Alluna‘s Twice Colonized [+], Ágnes Horváth-Szabó and Anna Nemet’s Beauty of the Beast, and Maja Prelog‘s Cent’anni….

Ever Since I Knew Myself by Maka Gogaladze follows Maka, the daughter of a strict Maths teacher and high-maintenance mother, on her journey around post-Soviet Georgia to observe children in the process of education. Gogaladze is producing through Georgia’s Formo Production, with Anke Petersen and Lilian Tietjen serving as co-producers for Germany’s Jyoti Film.

Rebeladas by Andrea Gautier and Tabatta Salinas centres on the “Cine Mujer”, a group of women filmmakers who gathered 40 years ago to make films dealing with taboo subjects, such as gender violence, rape, femicide, clandestine abortion and labour discrimination. It is a co-production between Dafne Espinosa and Julio Fernández for Perro Rojo Films (Mexico), and Manuel Diaz, Juan Gautier and Andrea Gautier for Smiz and Pixel (Spain).

In 72 Hours by Anna Savchenko, a woman’s life has been incomplete ever since her son was wrongfully accused, sentenced to death and executed within a year. From a grieving mother, she transforms into a symbol of the struggle against the death penalty. It is being produced by Isabel de la Serna for Playtime Films in Belgium and Jean-Marie Gigon for Sanosi Films in France, in co-production with Volia Chajkouskaya for Volia Films (Estonia).

Tata, written and directed by Lina Vdovîi and Radu Ciorniciuc (Acasă – My Home [+]), tells the story of a journalist who discovers that her long-estranged father, who was violent to her as a child, is now the person being abused. Tata is being produced by Monica Lazurean Gorgan for Manifest Film (Romania), Erik Winker for Corso Film (Germany) and Olivia Sophie van Leeuwen for HALAL (Netherlands).

Photo:  Vladan Petkovic

Khaled Jarrar: Notes on Displacement

I have written 13 blogposts about Khaled Jarrar on this site – since I met him in Ramallah and in Corfu in the Storydoc workshops organized by Greek Kostas Spiropoulos more than a decade ago. I have talked with him for hours about the Israeli occupation, about his own family and its fate, about his period as bodyguard for Arafat, about his film “Infiltrators” and about his humanistic work as an artist doing happenings around the world – you can read more about this by writing his name in “search” on this site.

No surprise for me that he with his newest film, “Notes on Displacement”, involves himself as the director and cameraman, who goes with a group of Syrian Palestinians on their journey that ends in Germany after troubles at borders in Europe. Troubles to say the least. Humiliation after humiliation. No food or non-eatable food, children and old people, father and mothers, grandparents. It’s chaotic and the film conveys this chaos. There are many night scenes, where you can´t see what happens but you hear voices crying out for help or rough answers from the authorities including the one of Jarrar, who often speaks on behalf of the refugees. And with the refugees with all the warmth and compassion you can come up with in the turbulent situations.

Content as described by Jarrar: “Nadira, an elderly Palestinian, has been a refugee since the age of 12. Now she has to evacuate Damascus, too. She and her daughter Mona feared for their lives there, but the idea of a safe existence elsewhere is a distant dream. (I) filmmaker Khaled Jarrar received unsettling videos and voice messages as they cross to the Greek island of Lesbos. I join them there, on the long road to a new life…

My grandmother Shafiqa was forced to leave her home in Haifa, her Jasmine tree, her cup of tea on her balcony and her view forced me back in time. Nadira’s plea brought me to the front lines; creating new memories by walking this new exodus together. We were real time inside the frame capturing the present to battle the past – creating a communication between the two. As the director from behind the camera I was driven to offer images of our own making, outside the never-ending western paparazzi image onslaught of displaced refugees. This film is for us, our values, our knowledge, our experiences…”

Do I need to say that the film includes images of boats on the water full of people in need, crying for help – of tents where people are together waiting waiting waiting – of clashes with police and guards at borders, especially the Hungarian one is hard to watch and tolerate for its lack of humanity… It’s hard to watch.

Happy that there are artists like Khaled Jarrar, who has the personal courage to get involved and communicate, this time through film.

Palestine, Germany, Qatar, 74 mins., 2022

6 pens.

photo credit: Tamra Habash

Honorary Award to Helena Třeštíková

DocsBarcelona will pay tribute to 73-year-old filmmaker Helena Třeštíková, one of Europe’s leading contemporary documentary filmmakers. Her extraordinary career of more than fifty titles will be recognised with the Honorary DocsBarcelona Award 2023, an award that celebrates “a prodigious production strongly linked to her homeland, the Czech Republic. Today, her films are already a legacy and a first hand document of the last half-century of the country’s history. Třeštíková will receive the award at the opening of the event, which will celebrate its twenty-sixth edition from 18th to 28th May and will bring more than thirty documentaries to the CCCB and the Aribau Cinemas.

Helena Třeštíková briefly held the post of Minister of Culture of her country in 2007 and delved into the life and work of fellow Czech director Milos Forman with Forman vs. Forman, a film premiered in 2019 at DocsBarcelona and the Cannes Film Festival. With a powerful focus on human relationships and social issues, Třeštíková has built an extensive filmography where time-lapse shines, a resource often used by the filmmaker to follow her characters through decades of their lives.

DocsBarcelona recognition will be completed with a retrospective at the Filmoteca de Catalunya, which will include three of her most celebrated titles: *Katka(2010), a portrait filmed over fourteen years of a drug-dependent teenager struggling to overcome her addiction; Private Universe (2012), in which Třeštíková films a Czech family over nearly four decades against the backdrop of the fall of Stalinist socialism and the entry into the European Union, and the recent René – The Prisoner of Freedom (2021), the sequel to René (2008), in which the filmmaker reunites with her protagonist, a young man she filmed for twenty years in a juvenile prison. The film is a portrait of an outsider who is highly critical of society and the system in which he does not fit in.

Třeštíková will also offer a masterclass with an intimate and carefully chosen selection of the sequences from her filmography that have most influenced her. The session will be hosted by Marga Almirall, from Barcelona Women’s Film Festival, coorganizer of the envent.

Copy-paste from DocsBarcelona website.

6 pens.