Finnish Virpi Suutari visited the festival for a very short time. She had just left the national documentary celebration DocPoint on Finland where her ”Garden Lovers” got the Jussi award as the best Finnish documentary and composer Sanna Salmenkallio received the award for the best music for that film. Knowing the general high quality of Finnish documentaries, I can only say – tough competition but the right winner, the film is a poetic masterpiece and has a universal appeal. I see it as one long visit to a Garden of Love, an hommage to people, who have lived for a long time together and care about their garden and each other. Virpi Suutari has her own style, there is unique flow in her narrative supported by the music. ”Garden Lovers” got applause for minutes, was enormously appreciated by the Belgrade audience – I know I repeat myself: the best in Europe!

In her masterclass Suutari (photo) talked about and showed her inspiration that comes from her education as a photographer (never been to film school). ”It affects your aesthetics what you have experienced in your childhood”, she said and referred to Martin Parr , Billy Brandt, Hopper and Billingham. She showed clips from ”Sin”, that she made together with Susanne Helke, a true inspiration from Swedish master Roy Andersson, and from ”White Sky”, also together with Helke, from Northern Russia, before she showed clips from ”Hilton”, made at the same time as ”Garden Lovers” in a completely different style.

The last screening at Magnificent 7 was ”Rules of the Game” by Claudine Bories and Patrice Chagnard, who returned to Belgrade after their ”Les Arrivants”, another political-social documentary. Shown at Magnificent 7. As with that one, Bories and Chagnard invites the audience to a direct cinema, observational documentary, a ”cinema documentary” piece, as the situation in France is like this for auteurs”: ”television does not like us, we don’t like television” and after Thierry Garrel left arte also this channel pays little attention and support to the creative documentary. ”Cinema documentaire”, the couple told the participants of the workshop, because your application process to the CNC is equal to the fictions to be supported: you write a scenario, they did so after having been on research at the ”tour”, where the youngsters are trained tools to apply for jobs. Three weeks of research, back to write the scenario, that is actually what they imagine could happen – and before the final casting has been done. The final result looked very much like the scenario written. ”Anticiper le réel” as said Claudine Bories – oh, the French are so good in talking about films, their language is better fit for definition of the creative process, I think. Right? Chagnard told us how important the sound is, the sound brought us direct cinema in the 60’es, he said, and the sound engineer has to be a dancer, when he or she records dialogues.

The film about Lolita, Kevin, Hamid – who are trained to be ”employable” – is in Parisian cinemas right now (had its premiere the day where Charlie Hebdo was attacked!) and the two directors tour the country to discuss the film and its important theme with coaches and those, who could employ young people like the three and thousands of other young unemployed. Great film, call it what you like, Werner Herzog, but the observational documentary is very much alive and kicking!

Also this year local BelMedic awarded a film – “Rules of the Game”.

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Full house for the Q&A of Jorge Pelicano after the screening of his ”Suddenly My Thoughts Halt”, a film from a Portuguese hospital for mentally ill people, very well received by the Belgrade audience, again around 1000 spectators – to judge from the long applause that accompanied the end titles on the screen in the Sava Centre. Pelicano, with his third documentary film, that he directed, filmed and he also took care of the final editing process, invited the 50 people in the VIP room to know more about the difficult process of getting authorization to film, about several patients who did not want to take part or rather their guardians did not give the permission, about the 4-5 weeks of shooting, about him not sleeping there contrary to the actor Miguel, who installs himself to prepare for a theatre play with the patients – have to be said that the hospital uses theatre as a therapeutical tool several times per year.

I was there for three weeks without camera, Pelicano said, and after some time I/we became one(s) of them. We ended up having 250 hours of footage, we edited for 6 months. And we found our main characters – my comment: indeed he did, it will be impossible to forget Alberto, the laughing man with teeth only in the left side of his mouth, and Mr. Andreu, who walks with Alberto, looking like a English gentleman with an umbrella, intellectual, a perfect companion for Alberto, they get along. There is a brilliant scene that Pelicano told us about in his masterclass the next day, with young film students and filmmakers as participants in the

workshop, a scene where the two and Paulo have a conversation on their walk, and then suddenly Alberto bursts into a laughter and does not stop. Andreu signals to the man with the camera ”cut” but Pelicano luckily continues and from the shaky camera movements you can see that he is not able to stop laughing as well. Wonderful! As is the meeting we get with the couple (photo), who hold hands and declare their love to each other. The man is maybe the one, who is the best one to convey what it means to be schizofrenic. He is the one, to whom Miguel, the actor, asks the question – referring to the title of the film (see below) – whether he has tamed ”the wild horse” inside him… I have, is the answer, wow what a scene. Comes at the end of the film.

Pelicano made a superb masterclass. He had prepared a power point but the participants were so engaged that they just started to ask all kind of questions, which gave a great dynamic in the room. Anyway, a quote from the power point of the Portuguese director:

”(I want to)… find a subject with a creative and innovative perspective”. Pelicano comes from journalism, but that it is not at all visible, when you watch the film that works with (another quote) with ”perfectly balanced shots of unbalanced people”. He uses a lot of bird’s eye angles and he dares to introduce the actor and let him go the whole way in introducing/interpreting the poem of Angelo de Lima, a patient from the beginning of the 20^th century, whose poem has given the title to the film.

In a tough competition with his director colleagues of the Magnificent 7 11th edition 2015 in Belgrade, Jorge Pelicano delivered the best masterclass, with a focus on practicalities and details to be learnt from… including how to catalogue the visual and the sound material with an annotation, a commentary what was special, a mark in terms whether it could be used or not…analysis of the footage and of course technical information, camera, lenses, image composition, clips etc. On behalf of the organisers, a warm thank you, Mr. Pelicano! We will watch out for your next film!

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Maja Medic took these photos of two men on the stage at the Magnificent 7 Festival in Belgrade. It was on the night when the film on “Messi” was to be shown. From left the body language signals the mountain gorillas in the film “Virunga”, then how the local Novak Djokovic did that sunday, when he won the Australian Open tennis tournament and finally, yes, Leo Messi when he scores. To the right festival director Zoran Popovic. 

One day takes the other here in Belgrade that has the most changing weather I have experienced for a long time. Yesterday Portuguese director Jorge Pelicano, Danish director Camilla Nielsson and I, accompanied by two young students of painting and film, went on a tour to the House of Flowers, the burial place of Tito and his wife Jovanka. The weather was warm with spring in the air, so we moved from Tito to Zemun to enjoy the river with its boats, and the many people strolling on the boardwalk.

Today Belgrade is back to Nordic weather, grey with rain.

Flashback to monday night where ”Democrats” by Camilla Nielsson was shown. Again close to 1000 spectators, great atmosphere with the director asking the audience if she could take a photo! Could one imagine one thousand people watching a film on Zimbabwe in a cinema in Copenhagen… No.

Around 50 spectators attended the 90 minutes long Q&A session in the small VIP room that is full of photos from meetings held at the Sava Centre Hall during the years of Yugoslavia. Among them meetings of the non-aligned countries – and yes, Robert Mugabe, leader of the nation, was on the wall.

Camilla Nielsson shared generously her experience from the 12 production trips to Zimbabwe. How she got the full trust of the two leaders of the constitution process, Paul Mangwana from Mugabe’s party and Douglas Mwonzora from the opposition party of Tsvangirai. She told us how much energy she had to use to make the Zimbabweans understand the observational documentary method, in a country where communication to the press goes through meetings with prepared papers to be conveyed without any critical approach whatsoever.

We became public, she said, me and my cameraman were moving around during the press meetings and often we ended up on national television, filmed by the tv journalists.

I was actually invited to meet Mugabe as I brought along from Denmark some documents from his early revolutionary time, but I dared not to accept the invitation. He has such a strong aura and I was afraid that a meeting with him would make it difficult for me to make a film with Mangwana and Mwonzora.

Later on it became too sensitive, as we were surveilled, my phone was hacked, said Camilla Nielsson, who on her last tour was arrested and detained for some hours.

Asked about Zimbabweans, Nielsson talked warmly about ”the subtle gentleness” in a non-aggressive culture.

A local filmmaker could not have made this film, the director said, I think they saw me as a neutral witness to the process of making the constitution. It’s a brother story… indeed it is, giving hope for a nation when Mugabe is no longer present.

Photo: Camilla Nielsson.

Take a look at the photo. This man is the one that emotionally carries the Oscar-nominated ”Virunga” by Orlando von Einsiedel. Whenever André is in the picture with his mountain gorillas, you understand how important the message of the film is: We must protect the nature and animals of the Virunga National Park, ”one of the most biologically diverse places in the world… part of UNESCO’s world heritage”. The dramatic documentary tells its story (or stories) through powerful music and effects with undercover journalism as one important storytelling tool.

Around 2000 (yes, two thousand!) attended the screening Saturday night at the Sava Center in Belgrade!

Sunday morning was time for relaxation, at least for us non-Serbians. We were at the home of Nevena Đonlić, part of the festival team and a passionate connaisseur of tennis, the sport of Serbia thanks to Novak Djokovic, who played the final of Australian Open against Scottish Andy Murray – and won easily after four sets, the first two of them with some exciting moments. I had not seen a tennis match for years, enjoyed it due to the numerous interesting camera angles and superb close ups of feet and facial expressions of the players.

Last night back to the cinema, to the third film of the festival, “Messi” by Spanish Alex de la Iglesia. It gave me the chance to put on my Barcelona shirt and go on stage with Zoran Popovic to greet an audience that was different from the regular one: Hundreds of kids were in the hall accompanied by their parents. Wonderful!  I sat next to four boys around 12 years old. When there was talking on screen, they also talked to each other, when Messi was on the pitch their eyes were wide open adoring the little master’s movements. Film and football, what a cocktail!

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Press release from the upcoming film fest in Berlin:

The Berlin International Film Festival (February 5-15) has long been committed to documentaries in their diverse forms. This is reflected in the programmes of the Berlinale’s different sections and initiatives, as well in the European Film Market (EFM), NATIVe, and Berlinale Talents.

In 2015, a total of 87 documentaries will be screening in a variety of forms. In addition, discussion of a wide range of different aspects related to documentaries will be intensified – at workshops, panels and presentations…

At the European Film Market there is a “Meet the Docs” – organized together with EDN (European Documentary Network) – panel discussions are being held as well meetings with festival representatives and there is a ““Docs Spotlight” series by CPH:DOX, DOK Leipzig and IDFA that present a selection of the previous documentary festival programmes.” “Messi” by Alex de la Iglesia is there, “The Look of Silence” by Joshua Oppenheimer as well – the film just won awards as the best Nordic documentary at the festival in Gothenburg and the Danish Robert. Other titles – Hanna Polak’s “Something better to Come” and “Daniel’s World” (photo) by Veronika Liskova.

At “Berlinale Talents” ten projects are presented and “receive a week of assistance in developing”, quite a generous initiative.

What else? A world premiere “The Pearl Button” by Patricio Guzmán, “Fassbinder – To Love Without Demands” by Danish Christian Braad Thomsen, also a world premiere, and a new one from Laura Nix, Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno, “The Yes Men Are Revolting”.

But take a look at

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”I was asked to do that film”, Oeke Hoogendijk said at the Q&A session after the opening screening of ”The New Rijksmuseum – the Film” friday night January 30 at the Sava Centre in Belgrade. The hall was full, more than 1000 spectators, the reactions were positive during the film – the 130 minutes version was shown, director’s cut, she stressed in the small VIP room, where also the masterclass was held this morning with around 25 young filmmakers and students. ”At the beginning I wrote a script but I had to throw it away as we went along and things happened that could not be anticipated”. Nobody could imagine that the reconstruction of the museum could take more than a decade.

Oeke Hoogendijk ended up with 400 hours of material. She made a film out of the material already in 2008. She made a four part series for television and ”I learned a lot from making that film – go with the film, trust your intuition”.

You can ”enter” the film in many ways. There is the overall conflict between the cyclists, their union and the museum people, there is the latter’s internal affairs/meetings, there is the Spanish architects and their growing frustration with the “perversion of democracy” as one of them is calling the eternal discussions about how the entrance to the museum should be in order to satisfy the civil society, there are the art works themselves kept away in a storage and there are the characters as they come forward:

The first director and the second director, very different they are, the first aristocratic, the second one more a modern manager type finding it much easier to deal with the media. He loves the camera! The Spanish architects, very sympathetic. The cyclist lobby and the politicians falling for their arguments, not so sympathetic. The curators, first of all Menno Fitski, who comes out as the darling of the film with his shining passion for what he is doing to bring the Japanese statues alive in his Asian pavilion of the museum. The conservators struggling with Rembrandt and other masters. The caretaker and his love for his work. And so on so forth…

Hoogendijk’s film is about a lot but maybe first and foremost about Passion and Creativity. “Devotion”, the director said, who explained to the masterclass participants how she sometimes had to lie to get to the truth, creating scenes she had heard about from inside the museum, moments when she was not there and therefore constructed in the editing. Hoogendijk, originally educated in theatre, explained how the music was composed, she had the intention to create a kind of opera feeling – and she succeeded.

A grand opening of the Magnificent7 2015.

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