As someone close to the philosophy of Eurimages (the cultural support fund of the Council of Europe. Established in 1989, currently numbers 36 of 47 member states), that is not the EU, I am happy to bring this message from yesterday’s award ceremony:

For the second year running the Eurimages Co-Production Development Award of €15,000 was awarded for the best project pitched at CPH:FORUM – CPH:DOX’s international financing and co-production event.

The winner is ‘On Screen Off Record’ by Rami Farah (photo) and Lyana Saleh produced by Signe Byrge Sørensen of Final Cut For Real. The project is a reflective film about the Syrian conflict in a media-conscious manner. It focuses on how we act and interact with media in current time, especially in a conflict that was over mediatized and little comprehended.

The jury has chosen ’On Screen Off Record’ for the following reasons:

”For the way familiar footage was presented, allowing deeper understanding of the complexities of the conflict that affects us on so many levels, for the quality of the project and the team, the organic co-production structure the Eurimages Co-production Development Award goes to ‘On Screen Off Record.’”

The film has been developed with support of IMS, Danida and Timbuktuprisen and it is produced by Final Cut for Real, in partnership with the Birmingham Centre for Media and Cultural Research at Birmingham City University.

Eurimages is a support fund for the co-production, distribution and exhibition of European cinematographic works, established by the Council of Europe in 1988. Since then, Eurimages has supported 1488 European co-productions for a total amount of approximately 451 million EUROS.

Press release from the Copenhagen festival “that has yet again experienced a severe demand from the audience and a great number of films has guaranteed full theaters during the festival – now CPH:DOX sets up even more screenings of the most popular films like ‘Foodies’, ‘Nas’, ‘Me and Dad – No Expectations of Applause’, ‘In the Basement’ and ‘Little People Big Dreams’ – and not least ‘Citizenfour’ with up to 7 extra screenings!

Documentary films are popular. And especially one film in particular has been popular at this year’s CPH:DOX. Laura Poitras’ film about Edward Snowden, ‘Citizenfour’, is the fastest selling film at CPH:DOX ever and the film’s premiere was sold out even several weeks before the festival.

To cater the enormous demand to watch the film, it has now gotten no less than seven extra screenings from Saturday the 15th of November up to Wednesday the 19th of November – the highest number of screenings a film has ever gotten at the festival.  

CPH:DOX’s festival director Tine Fischer is extremely enthusiastic about both the film, which she regards as one of the most important documentaries recently – and the fantastic reception it has had:

“We are pleased and overwhelmed by the huge interest for Laura Poitras’ splendid film. The film is without comparison one of the most important historic testimonials about/of NSA’s mass-surveillance of all of us, and we have chosen to offer seven extra screenings because we as a festival recognise the need to tell the story about the attack on democracy that that mass-surveillance is an expression of, which is both captivating and has a political aspect”.  

The extra screenings of ‘Citizenfour’ already starts this Saturday – the other screenings start from this Monday. You can see the entire list below or here

DEMOCRATS

Af

Camilla Nielsson

Jeg havde egentlig tænkt mig at anmelde Camilla Nielssons ”Democrats” på engelsk, men da jeg så Kim Skottes slappe afvisning af filmen, på ti linier i dag i Politiken, skiftede jeg mening og skriver dette som en stærk anbefaling til alle dokumentar-fans: Se filmen i morgen i Cinemateket eller lørdag i Grand Teatret. Den er et mesterstykke.

For filmen placerer sig ind i den trio af fremragende nye danske dokumentarfilm, som har haft sin premiere i forbindelse med cph:dox: ”The Look of Silence”, ”1989” og så nu ”Democrats”. Den er et smukt opbygget stykke klassisk dokumentarisme, som nænsomt introducerer to vidt forskellige karakterer, i temperament og udtryk, to mænd som får til opgave at skrive en ny forfatning for Zimbabwe i den periode, hvor landet lededes af en koalition mellem Mugabes parti og oppositionens leder Tsvangirai. Camilla Nielsson og hendes fotograf Henrik Bohn Ipsen har sensationelt fået adgang til de to hovedaktører Paul Mangwana and Douglas Mwonzora og det er tydeligt, at de har haft tillid til filmholdet, som skildrer hvordan de to modstandere, Mangwana fra Mugabes parti og Mwonzora fra oppositionen nærmer sig hinanden. I et interview som jeg har lavet med instruktøren for Det danske Filminstituts blad, der udkommer i forbindelse med idfa festivalen I Amsterdam, hvor filmen naturligt nok er udvalgt til hovedkonkurrencen, siger instruktøren: you’ve got to have love for your characters and do everything you can to give them confidence in the job you’ve been assigned.

Der er masser af varme og kærlighed i filmen, som skildrer hvordan en forfatning i et diktatur bliver til under store anstrengelser og med stor modstand, men den bliver til og blot det må give håb for landet. Når der er en sådan energi og så kloge mennesker I det politiske system, så må der da ske noget, når den onde mand, som Mwonzora kalder Mugabe, stiller træskoene.

Som de bedste observerende dokumentarister har Nielsson og Ipsen fanget detaljerne, de små dramaer med og omkring de to forhandlere, de har læst ansigternes udtryk, fanget hviskende samtaler – ind imellem tager man sig selv i at overvære en komedie samtidig med at man kniber en tåre, da de to når til vejs ende og står med den trykte forfatning, som skal til afstemning hos befolkningen. Konklusion: denne film er simpelthen en bedrift og den vil få et langt international liv.  

Danmark og mange andre lande, 2014, 109 mins.

http://www.dfi-film.dk/democrats-4

http://cphdox.dk/en/screening/democrats

Wim Wenders, Juliano Ribeiro Salgado:

THE SALT OF THE EARTH

Arrogant as I am, films about still photography (or paintings) are not something I usually pay much attention to. The relationship between the timeless photography and the time-dependent moving image is something film directors only rarely find a way to transmit in a truly satisfying manner.

Ever so more, there’s reason to be satisfied with this portrait of photographer Sebastião Salgado. The film’s sense of time and space turns out to be the perfect conveyor of Salgado’s pictures and words. The horror and the beauty in the protagonist’s work are presented to us in a way that reveals how great interpreters of reality both the still photographer and the directors are.

And horror there is: killings in Rwanda, burning oil fields in Kuwait, countless refugees and victims. It’s too appalling, too much – in the end also for Salgado himself – and you want something pretty and uplifting. And, thank god, you get that too. The pictures of the horrific are also too beautiful to some but that dilemma is part of taking the decision of snapping pictures of real horror to begin with. It’s not fiction, mind you, and you don’t need to make things up to show what the hell man is doing to himself and others and the world.

Nor does Wenders and his co-director (Salgado’s son) make stuff up. They lend their ears and their time to the protagonist and they arrange the material and write a voice-over that weaves their film and Salgado’s life together. Because they all want us to see – really see – the world and what’s in it.

http://cphdox.dk/screening/salt-earth

IS THE MAN WHO IS TALL HAPPY? by Michel Gondry

Wow, the theatre is almost packed. Average age is around or even under 30 and several hipster beards are in sight. I suspect these are fans of either Gondry or Noam Chomsky or both… or linguistic students at least. This film is namely basically a dialogue between the two – filmed over three visits, it seems – but you only see Chomsky (or Gondry) in little vignettes or inserts in the almost entirely animated pictures.

Certainly Gondry is a fan of Chomsky and he sets out to make a film about some of his theories and thoughts. He wants to make an entertaining film on epistemology and philosophy which is a highly appreciative idea, but I’m not quite sure he succeeds completely.

Let me see if I can explain why to myself. Can I see if I can explain why to myself?

The title refers to a linguistic puzzle which apparently shows that even a child can change the sentenceo “The man who is tall is happy” into a question by picking the right “is” (the second, not the first) and put it in the beginning of the sentence. This is actually very interesting but like most of the theories and ideas that are covered, the amount of words and animations are so overwhelming that we hardly get a chance to think for ourselves. It becomes almost like a lecture, which I am pretty sure was not Gondry’s idea.

He does manage to bring us to understand his project in an almost pedagogical (yet also self-ironical and amusing) way and there are also traces of a structure. For instance, his first question to Chomsky is what his first memory of his life is and towards the end they talk about (to the extent Chomsky wants to talk about it) his life as a widower. A lot of the interpretative illustrations of the words – which is to a large degree what the film’s pictures are – are indeed very clever, but there is just too much of it and too little time for reflection or thinking about your own first memories. So even though the entire form doesn’t suggest it, maybe the director’s respect of his main character and his words is too big after all?

The reviewer who is confused is somewhat happy, but is the spectator who is confused also happy? I saw nobody leaving the theatre during the screening but afterwards there was a lot of perplexed mumbling going on around me. But go see it yourself – it will do you good somehow.

http://cphdox.dk/screening/man-who-tall-happy

ESCAPING RIGA by Davis Simanis

One of those screenings where everything worked out as it should. Young Latvian director Davis Simanis (looking at you from above on this page) travels to Copenhagen, where he has never been before. He walks from the hotel through the city together with the one, who has posted this text, they have a glass of wine in one of the autumn dressed squares in the centre of the city. The director – and I – are a bit worried that there will be nobody at the screening of ”Escaping Riga”, a film in b/w, shot on super 8, about two local heroes, who both left the Latvian capital: the passionate and wild artist Sergei Mikhailovich Eisenstein and Isaiah Berlin, philosopher, historian and essayist. Not an obvious attraction for a festival audience, one should think…

But we were wrong. More than 100 were in the cinema to a screening that was introduced by Karsten Fledelius, Danish university professor, a man who seems to know all about the Balkan countries, who is a tour guide to Turkey and other countries, and who in an elegant way gave the audience basic knowledge about the two in the film. After that a fine projection quality, good reactions from the audience and a warm welcome to Davis Simanis at the Q&A that he managed so well with a competent festival moderator next to him.

At the end Fledelius asked a question to Simanis – you have a personal intro in the film, having worked on the film for such a long time, who are you closest to? Simanis answered that he had always aimed to be like Eisenstein, involved and controversial, but “I always end up as Berlin”, the reflecting observer. Bravo, thank you cph:dox for bringing the film, that has one more screening at the festival, see link below.

http://cphdox.dk/screening/escaping-riga

Cph:dox fills our columns these days – reviews, reports etc. BUT the second largest city in Denmark, Aarhus, has its own festival, Aarhus Filmfestival that includes shorts and docs, the latter with themes like ”fights”, ”life”, ”female”, ”ex-Soviet” and titles like ”The Look of Silence”, ”Once I Dreamt of Life”, ”Happiness” and ”Maidan”.

Of special interest is a programme section of Middle Eastern films with directors and producers visiting. It is curated by H.C. Korsholm Nielsen, former director of The Danish Institute in Damascus, at that time a strong supporter of the Syrian documentary makers – and from January 1st 2015 director of ”Dansk-Egyptiske Dialog Institut i Cairo (DEDI)”.

The days include the visit of Mohamad Malas with the film “Ladder to Damascus” (photo), Amir Ramses with “Jews of Egypt”, the producers and festival directors of DoxBox Diana el Jeiroudi and Orwa Nyrabia – and their productions “Return to Homs” and “Silvered Water” Wiam Simav Bedirxan and Ossama Mohammed. The latter will attend the screening.

Sara Thelle, scroll down, reviewed ”Silvered Water” today. A must-see film!

Visit also the FB page ”Middle Eastern Film Days”.

Aathus Film Festival runs from November 11-16.

http://www.aarhusfilmfestival.dk/