It was almost ”business as usual”, when the DFI (Danish Film Institute) proudly could announce that 15 Danish documentaries were selected to be screened at IDFA, for most documentarians the festival for films that have been categorized to be a ”documentary”, today the name is a quality mark for a genre that is in constant development enlarging its own narrative potential at the same time (”hybrid” is a buzz word) as the classical observational documentary is very much still alive and doing well. IDFA likes Danish documentaries, as does the cph:dox, of course…

I had 3 Danish documentaries on my ”2014 – Best of…” – Joshua Oppenheimer’s ”The look of Silence”, Anders Østergaard and Erzsebet Racz ”1989” and Camilla Nielsson’s ”Democrats”, all of them films that deal with themes that are not Danish. All three have managed to get international financing for films that travel the world to festivals, win awards and – sorry for the cliché – make a difference. ”The Look of Silence” and ”Act of Killing” are being shown in Indonesia and have broken the public silence about the atrocities. ”1989” puts new light on the year, 25 years ago, where the world changed totally. ”Democrats” brings hope that something will change in Zimbabwe…

The two first films have been to Danish cinemas – superb reviews but no success at all (1368 and 1559 tickets sold). Let us not forget that the golden days of Danish documentaries do not include that they make an audience go to the cinema. The films are watched at festivals world wide and on television world wide. And online via vod’s.

And yet two Danish documentaries did – for documentaries – ok in cinemas with 12.356 tickets sold for ”Ekstra Bladet uden for citat” by Mikala Krogh (Engl. Title: ”The Newsroom – off the Record”) (praised here by colleague Allan Berg) and ”Så meget godt i vente” (Engl. Title: ”Good Things Await”) with 11.309 tickets sold. The latter made me think back on my work at Statens Filmcentral (National Film Board of Denmark), where high-quality documentaries due to their subject were often screened all over Denmark in connection with debate arrangements. Phie Ambo’s film has done and is doing the same.

As does ”Mission Rape – A Tool of War” by Katia Forbert Petersen and Annette Mari Olsen, a film that takes a closer look at a dilemma in international law – how the healing process is affected when rapists are not prosecuted and convicted for the crimes they have committed – instead they have been punished for Crime against Humanity or other serious war crimes.

Another Danish documentary that takes place in Denmark is ”Cirkusdynastiet” (Engl. title: ”The Circus Dynasty”) by Anders Riis-Hansen, a warm & fine insight to a circus environment where two families, the Casselly and the Berdino, hope that young Merrylou and Patrick will get together and run Circus Arena. It does not go that way. The drama between the two youngsters did not really keep my attention, whereas the parent’s generation and their stories and charisma and their caravans, and the many great scenes from the performances, the acrobats, the elephants etc. make a film that must appeal to an audience, who wants adventure.

And then the film that won the IDFA Jury’s Prize, ”Something Better to Come” by Hanna Polak, who has been following homeless children in Moscow for 14 years. Is the film Danish or Polish? Well, the director is Polish, but (bravo!) Danish producer Sigrid Dyekjær met Polak, raised the money to have the film completed and there it is, absolutely moving, a humanistic document and yet I ask myself having seen material by Hanna Polak during the years: Should the film have been longer, could it (also) have been made into a mini-series, have there been too many cooks in the editing process. Sorry to say so but there is a disturbing abruptness in the way the film has been structured.

That’s all about Danish documentaries 2014. Many films have not been mentioned, I have focused on the so-called ”creative documentaries”, I have not digged into documentaries for children and youngsters. As well as the many more tv-orientated documentaries.

http://www.dfi.dk/service/english/news-and-publications/news/october-2014/idfa-lineup.aspx

http://www.dfi.dk/Tal-og-fakta/Billetsalg/Aktuelt-billetsalg-for-danske-film.aspx

Here we go again. A year has passed. I have seen films at festivals and in cinemas around Europe and in the US. I have seen films at home via links sent to me, thanks to many for their generosity. 2014 was a great year for the creative documentary, the one where there is an artistic ambition and a personal interpretation of the world we live in. I know it is “normal” in games like this to go by 10 or 25, but when I had my list of 16 I found it impossible to cut away, so you get 16 from me, below in alphabetical order, and in most cases you can click and get to a review. Photos have been chosen from films that I have not written about – here 20,000 Days on Earth by Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard, UK.

Alphabetical order:

1989 by Anders Østergaard and Erzsebet Racz, Denmark/Hungary

20,000 Days on Earth by Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard, UK

Alentejo Alentejo by Sergio Tréfaut, Portugal

Citizen Four by Laura Poitras, Germany/US

Democrats by Camilla Nielsson, Denmark

Garden Lovers by Virpi Suutari, Finland

Judgement in Hungary by Eszter Hajdu, Hungary

Les Règles du Jeu by Claudine Bories and Patrick Chagnard, France

Mitch by Damir Cucic & Misel Skoric, Croatia

Of Men and War by Laurent Bécue-Renard, France

Olga by Miroslav Janek, Czech Republic

Pelican in the Desert by Viesturs Kairiss, Latvia

Silvered Water, Syria Self-Portrait by Wiam Simav Bedirxan & Ossama Mohammed, Syria

Teatime by Maite Alberti, Chile (photo)

The Look of Silence by Joshua Oppenheimer, Denmark

The Salt of the Earth by Wim Wenders & Juliano Ribeiro Salgado, France

Shame on me that I in my turbulence after the screening did not remember the beautiful review that Sara Thelle wrote when she had watched the film in connection with cph:dox. I repeat two paragraphs here:

… I (Sara Thelle) wish I had never seen Silvered Water. Images will haunt me for the rest of my life, scenes in my head will never go away. Horror. Hell. And yet I strongly recommend you to go see the film… First, because it is Syria, there is so little access to information about life there and, of course, we have to see what the two directors Ossama Mohammed and Wiam Simav Bedirxan want to show us. But also because this is an exceptional film, I wouldn’t hesitate to call it a masterpiece. It is poetry, in the dialogues, in the images, in the editing.

You get to understand the pain and the guilt of the exiled. Mohammed expresses his agony in a strong cinematographic language of metaphors, he is the one who has lost his freedom, his life has stopped. In the first part of the film, we see horrible scenes of torture and executions that are unbearable to watch. Raw images captured with mobile phones by the torturers, the security forces of the regime, and put out on the Internet. You can only try to imagine what pain Mohammed have inflicted on himself in working with these images, seeing them over and over again when doing the editing. And we understand that, strangely enough, the besieged Bedirxan is the one who is the most free and alive. The courageous woman, who has turned cinematographer to survive the in the midst of the civil war, becomes his eyes and his hope. The title, Silvered Water, is the signification of her Kurdish name Simav.

The original music, beautiful and devastating, is composed and performed by Mohammed’s wife, the renowned Syrian singer Noma Omran, originally from Homs…

Sara Thelle had the courage and skills to put words on what she saw.

by Wiam Simav Bedirxan & Ossama Mohammed.

It premiered at the Cannes Film Festival and has been to major festivals like Toronto, cph:dox and idfa. Two days ago it had a theatrical release in 30 cinemas in France, where the exiled Syrian director Ossama Mohammed lives. The reception in France… le Monde writes ”chef d’oeuvre”, masterpiece.

And what could I write but the same, after for months having hesitated to watch because I knew what horrifying images were waiting for me. I do not recall, when was the last time I have been so strongly affected by a film. To an extent that I find it meaningless to line up words to describe what I saw and felt. It would be reviewer clichés after clichés. I can not do so. So you get three brief comments followed by more laconic synopses:

Wiam Simav Bedirxan’s filming in Syria is courageous and heroic. Ossama Mohammed has treated the unique material in an outstanding and personal way. The two have made true Cinema!

“In Syria, everyday, civilians film and are killed while others kill and then film. Safe in Paris, but driven by his inexhaustible love for Syria, Ossama Mohammed finds that he can only film the sky and edit footage posted on YouTube. A chance encounter seems to offer a kind of resolution to the tension between Ossama’s estrangement from his country and the revolution that is raging without him. A young Kurdish woman from Homs sends him an email, asking: ‘If your camera were here, in Homs, what would you be filming?”. Silvered Water is the story of that encounter.” (Proaction Site)

“While in political exile in Paris, the Syrian filmmaker Ossama Mohammed received an extraordinary Facebook message from the Kurdish teacher and activist Wiam Simav Bedirxan from Homs. “If you were here with your camera, what would you film?” Mohammed edited the material Simav shot herself in the besieged city together with excerpts from “1001” cell phone videos of heavy shelling and aerial bombardments. Blood flows – a great deal of blood. Citizens are tortured and executed, and no one can turn a blind eye any longer. But this is more than just a devastating documentary about the tribulations of ordinary Syrians. The reflective commentary also demonstrates what cinema can mean in the face of war. No matter how oppressive the atmosphere, it doesn’t affect Simav’s enthusiasm as she films. The film is dedicated to a little boy named Omar whom she also follows with her camera: a symbol for the future of the country. He skips through the shot, dodging snipers to lay a flower at his father’s grave. “Mom, take a look at how deep this one is,” he exclaims in wonder upon seeing a freshly excavated grave. Meanwhile, back in Paris, Mohammed is struggling with his impotent position as an outsider – yet another reason that these images must be shown.” (idfa site)

There is a great text by Ossama Mohammed on the site of the distributor Doc and Film International, link below. Here is a taster:

“All my life I’ve tried to protect and defend cinema, according to my notion of the medium. For me, it is a particular language, where images and sound can come up with a new take on life, on art and on language. Since the beginning of the Syrian revolution, it’s been a revolution of images. I’ve seen thousands and thousands of images. And it’s like the dailies of one big film.

I believed that the images sent by Simav could tell a story. When she appeared in my life, I thought she was the embodiment of a new generation of filmmakers. What I like is when there are different levels of narratives, story upon story. I wanted to respect the people who shot those images as filmmakers, and that’s why it’s a film made by “thousands of Syrians”. The moment I realized that their images were telling a story, I thought I was on the right track.

At the beginning, I rejected the use of voiceover. But as I became a part of this undertaking, of this community of dead poets that are behind the footage, I started accepting the notion of voiceover because it became a multi-layered story, and because I felt it was not explanatory.”

Go also to the facebook page of the film, you will find links to interviews, reviews etc. Previous review on Filmkommentaren.dk by Sara Thelle.

http://www.proactionfilm.com/category/films/

4B09-87A4-3B930E6109BE&tab=-http://www.idfa.nl/industry/tags/project.aspx?id=4B54A279-CD20-

http://www.docandfilm.com/pdf_press/2014_05_SilveredWaterDPforInternet.pdf

Syria, 2014, 92 mins.

Stephen Smith, one of the directors of “Vanishing Point”, wrote to me a couple of months ago. He asked if I would care to watch his film, produced by the National Film Board of Canada. Apart from a very fine recommendation by late Peter Wintonick, there had been no real attention, he wrote, even if the film – see website, link below – has been going around to mostly Canadian festivals. I got the dvd and started to watch and was immediately brought back down memory lane – Greenland and the many Danish documentaries made from there, especially by Jørgen Roos (1922-1998), who for decades returned to adventurous Greenland to film the hunting culture and the conflicts between traditional way of living and what we Danes has taken with us to Greenland. If anyone Roos has visualised inuit in Greenland. My vision of the island comes from him.

Roos would have loved “Vanishing Point” that is a very well told and beautifully filmed story, non-sensational in a calm rhythm and with a charismatic leading Navarana K’Avigak Sørensen – more Danish can a surname not be! Navarana is the one who tells the story in first person tracking her own family roots back to Qitdlarssuaq, a shaman, who in the 1860’es migrated with a small community of Inuits from Baffin Island to the North of Greenland. Navarana is the descendant, who takes the viewer by the hand to show and reflect on the Inuit culture of today up there near Uummannaq, where her family used to live until they were displaced due to the building of the American Thule base (Jørgen Roos has made a film about this Danish-American scandal).

Naduk is the daughter of Navarana or did I get that wrong… doesn’t matter, Navarana goes with her family (Naduk’s husband is Ole… again more Danish

can a first name not be) out hunting, it’s in May and the ice used to be thick, but now there is danger that the dogsled will sink into the water. The camera catches the beauty of the nature and the equally beauty of the faces of three generations on hunting. One sequence is amazing: No words behind the images of the auk seabirds, who in hundreds (thousands?) fill the sky going to and fro or rather trying to escape the nets brought to catch the birds. Totally non-dramatic you watch the catch, the strangling and the putting the dead birds into sealskin bags that are to rest some month under rocks – and then the delicious kiviaq dish can be served, Navarana and her family say.

The last long part of the film takes Navarana to where Qitdlarssuaq came from, the Bassin Island. She discovers that the culture there has developed in quite another direction – “here life runs on gasoline and and sugar”. She goes hunting a narwhal, that is shot from a motor boat, whereas – to be seen later when she is back in Greenland – where she comes from the whale is first harpooned from a kayak and then shot. Mattak is a delicatesse and Navarana enjoys.

The text of Navarana that is conveyed voice-off, or to the camera is good – like when she is to sum up the situation of the inuits of today: “The World is Melting Under Our Feet” – but maybe also too demonstratively pointing at the theme, letting her repeat sentences like “what do we get when we go to our places” and “what do we lose when we leave”. On the other hand you trust Navarana’s unsentimental approach, an inuit elder she is described being in the synopsis of the film, well she is definitely not old in mind, perfect as a film character. “Qitdlarssuaq is in my blood”. Thanks for updating my vision of inuit culture in Greenland seen (also) on the background of the culture in Canada.

Canada, 2012, 82 mins.

http://www.meltwatermedia.ca/site/Vanishing-Point-movie.html

https://www.nfb.ca/film/vanishing_point/