Heilbuth og Goetz: Snowdens store flugt

Kvinden på dette still hedder Sarah Harrison. Hun var uden afbrydelse modig lige ved siden af Snowden under hele flugten, sad ved siden af ham i det flere gange dramatisk forsinkede fly fra Hongkong til Moskva. En flue var sluppet ind i kabinen, inden dørene blev lukket, og på et tidspunkt blev den specielt interesseret i Snowden, som nervøs, som han var, efterhånden irriteredes. Med et snuptag i én lynhurtig bevægelse fangede og dræbte Sarah Harrison fluen. ”Du er virkelig en Ninja”, udbrød Snowden med et smil, fortæller John Goetz og Hans Leyendecker i en stor og grundig og velskreven artikel i Süddeutsche Zeitung 10./11. januar i år på baggrund af omfattende og nye interviews med blandt andre, men selvfølgelig vigtigst, de to:

”Er fragt sie: ’Warum hast du alles riskiert, um mir zu helfen?’ Sie antwortet: ’Du wolltest doch Hilfe haben.’ Er: ’Ich habe doch nicht erwartet, dass Wikileaks eine Ninja schicken würde, um mich rauszuholen.’ Beide lachen. Ein paar Minuten später sumt eine Fliege an Harrison vorbei, und sie fängt sie einfach so aus der Luft. ’Du bist wirklich eine Ninja’, ruft er. Scherzen als Ventil.”

Jeg så tv-dokumentaren i forgårs, og jeg havde glædet mig meget, for jeg havde jo læst John Goetzs artikel, hvor han omhyggeligt fortæller hele historien og i sin og Heilbuths tv-dokumentar, ”Jagd auf Snowden”, som filmen hedder på tysk, stiller interviews med alle dramaets hovedpersoner i udsigt: Edward Snowden, Sarah Harrison, Julian Assange, Wikileakschefen og Michael Hayden, den tidligere NSA-chef. Med hensyn til selve handlingsgangen var der således for mig intet nyt, men der var jo disse interviews. Der var mødet med disse mennesker.

Åh, hvor blev jeg skuffet over behandlingen af dette enestående materiale. Det var klippet i stumper og stykker og bliver i filmen næsten kun brugt som replikker i forbindelse med en speak, som polstret med for mig at se helt uinteressante dækbilleder har omdannet hændelsesforløbet til et forsøg på en dokumentarisk thriller, som jeg fra foromtalen som sagt kendte såvel plotpunkter til som slutning på. Jeg har nu kun muligheden at se filmen igen og igen (jeg har anbragt et link nedenfor) og selv i hovedet stykke stumperne sammen til de lange uforstyrrede filmscener, som denne vældige research- og optagelsesindsats og resultatet, interview-skildringerne af disse ganske særlige medvirkende og vidner  fortjener.

Poul-Erik Heilbuth og John Goetz: “Snowdens store flugt” (”Jagd auf Snowden”), Danmark 2014, 58 min. Heilbuth har tidligere lavet “De faldne“(2010) og “Manden som løj verden i krig” (2010)

“Snowdens store flugt” kan ses her, vel nogle dage endnu:

http://www.dr.dk/tv/se/dr1-dokumentaren/dr1-dokumentaren-snowdons-store-flugt

Oscar Nominations for Documentaries

… and for the rest of course, but  let’s focus on the nominees in the documentary feauture, the first mentioned is/are directors, the names that follow are producers: The favourite unique document ”Citizen Four” (photo) (Laura Poitras (dir.), Mathilde Bonnefoy and Dirk Wilutzky), the nice and charming ”Finding Vivian Maier” (John Maloof and Charlie Siskel), the beautiful cinematic ”The Salt of the Earth” (Wim Wenders, Juliano Ribeiro Salgado and David Rosier), the powerful activist ”Virunga” (Orlando von Einsiedel and Joanna Natasegara) and one I have not seen, ”Last Days in Vietnam” (Rory Kennedy and Keven McAlester). The audience in Belgrade will have the chance to watch ”Virunga” during the Magnificent7 festival that starts in two weeks.

This came out today, discussions will follow, they already are, especially because the film by Steve James on late film critic Rogert Ebert, ”Life Itself” was not nominated. ”Citizen Four” Laura Poitras – according to Variety – said: “Steve James should have been on this list”. “I’m in shock” .“When his name wasn’t up there, I thought, ‘how is that possible?’ He’s a legend in our field with an incredible body of work. I assumed his film would be nominated, so it’s a bit of a heartbreak.”

For the short documentary nomination – I have only seen one – ”Joanna” by Aneta Kopacz. In October 2013 I wrote this: I watched the film – if you can put it like that – with pleasure and emotionally touched, to say the least, well what else can I say but BEAUTIFUL. As a film and as a hymn to Life and Love, whatever might happen… I cross my fingers for this film February 22nd.

http://oscar.go.com/nominees

Documentaries in Trieste

Trieste – the city of Claudio Magris – still miss a creative documentary on this magnificent author – hosts a fine festival that starts tomorrow January 16th and runs until January 22nd. The documentary programme has quality and is also daring taking off with Romanian ”The Second Game”, a full football game. Here is the description given by the director C. Porumboiu: “This film is a football match, a derby between two Bucharest teams, Steaua and Dinamo, which took place on the 3rd of December, 1988. My father was the referee. We re-watched the match together, some 25 years later.” Writing history in an original way!

This is one of the 12 documentaries in competition. Others are Croatian Tiha K. Gudac’s “Naked Island“, “Euromaidan. Rough Cuts” by the team behind the DocuDays festival in Kiev, “Velvet Terrorists” by Slovak trio Ostrochovsky, Pekarcik and Kerekes, Hanna Polak’s “Something Better to Come” and Alina Rudnitskaya’s “Victory Day”.

All fine films with an international appeal. On top of that there is a rough cut session for documentaries and a pitching event for new projects. It’s all very professional and competent. Take a look at

http://www.triestefilmfestival.it/?page_id=7657&lang=en

Chile Doc on DocAlliance

For those of us travelling to festivals like DOKLeipzig and idfa it has been obvious that something good is happening with documentaries in Chile. Good fims are made and delegations arrive to the festivals to launch films through the ChileDoc, whose executive director Flor Rubina is interviewed for the site of DocAlliance. She says that ”information is ”power”, we an amplify it”. Later on in the fine interview, she says that ”Something that we have definitely improved in the last decade is the cinematography of the films. Visual approach, sound design, and the search for new languages to tell stories are very important to our filmmakers. As I mentioned before, diversity and eclecticism are characteristic of current Chilean documentary production. As any filmmaker, Chilean directors are looking for ways to reach global audiences through small stories that connect them with issues that any human being cares about…”

BUT check it out for yourself on DocAlliance, eight films are free for all until January 18, including the great “The Last Station”. by Cristian Soto and Catalina Vergara.

ChiChiChi – LeLeLe!

http://dafilms.com/news/2015/1/12/ChileDoc_Interview

http://dafilms.com/event/196-chiledoc/

Hommage Documentaire à ”Charlie Hebdo”

The excellent French language ”Le blog documentaire” posted today a text with the headline above. The editor C.Mal has listed (some with links to clips/trailers) films made on some of killed cartoonists (like Cabu, photo) or on the satirical cartoon genre in general. Here is his introduction text:

“Après la sidération, après la consternation et les mots qui manquent, Le Blog documentaire se raccroche aux images. Images en forme d’hommage à Charlie Hebdo. Voici quelques propositions de films sur l’hebdomadaire satirique, et sur ces dessinateurs qui nous sont si chers. Certains d’entre eux viennent d’être rediffusés sur les chaînes du service public français.”

https://cinemadocumentaire.wordpress.com/2015/01/10/hommage-documentaire-a-charlie-hebdo/

Big Award for Best Nordic Documentary

From the website of Göteborg Film Festival (January 23 – February 2): French sadomasochism, Canadian social workers and an American free zone for convicted pedophiles are all found in the eight films nominated for the Dragon Award Best Nordic Documentary 2015. The prize sum of 100,000 SEK makes this one of the Nordic countries’ largest festival award for a documentary film…

I am curious to watch Swedish Magnus Gertten’s “Every face has a Name”, a follow-up to the excellent “Harbour of Hope”. The director is “tracking down several of the people who appear in the pictures” taken in 1945, when prisoners of war and holocaust survivors arrived in Malmö, “asking them to tell their story”.

To be mentioned is also the Swedish/Danish “Pervert Park” by Frida and Lasse Barkfors, a strong and touching documentary shot in Florida Justice Transitions, “a trailer park that serves as a free zone for” convicted sex offenders.

Among the eight nominated are also Camilla Nielsson’s “Democrats” from Zimbabwe and Joshua Oppenheimer’s “The Look of Silence”, no further introduction needed – and as on many other festival occasions Oppenheimer will hold a Master Class during the festival.

The photo is a still collage of the nominated films made by the festival.

http://www.giff.se/en/artikel/nominees-best-nordic-documentary

East Beats West

I know it looks stupid and tabloid, but I have been using that headline so many times and I do believe that there is a lot of documentary talent and originality to be found in the Eastern European countries. More than in the West where many filmmakers play according to television format requirements. And there is an interest in getting together as the news from IDF (Institute of Documentary Film) in Prague demonstrates:

… We are happy to announce the final selection of projects picked for the upcoming 15th edition of East European Forum, held in Prague within the fourth East Doc Platform. The board of experts went through more than 200 applicants and eventually picked 10 projects. These will be joined by 12 more projects that took part in 2014  Ex Oriente Film workshop. Together all the filmmakers will take part in a five-day-long preparatory workshop and get ready for their public presentations. After the weekend of public project pitching they will all eventually get to the round tables as well as individual meetings, where they will face the industry professionals (TV, funds, festivals and distribution and production companies representatives) from the whole Europe and North America and negotiate support for their documentaries…

10 from 200… and I am happy to see some projects presented by people I know so well and appreciate. Like Vesela Kazakova and Mina Mileva with ”The Beast is Still Alive”, a project the two have been working on for a long time and have come back to after ”Uncle Tony, Three Fools and the Secret Service”. Equally Salomé Jashi (if you want to see how she looks – take a look at the top of this page, she is the one in the middle) presents ”The Station” after her international success with ”Bahkmaro”. Estonian Jaak Kilmi is there with a project to be produced by Latvian company Mistrus Media, it’s called ”People from Nowhere”. And of course Vitaly Manski (photo) will be there with his personal Ukranian story to be produced by Guntis Trekteris, Ego Media, Latvia.

”Sometimes it turns out that borders of political events in your country come so close to the borders of your own creative work that you have no other chose but to step over and participate. That is what happened to Oleg Sentsov, Ukrainian film director from the Crimea who is now in Russian jail. The secret services of the Russian Federation are trying to prove that Sentsov has been preparing a series of terrorist acts on the territory of the Crimea, such as explosion of the Lenin monument and the “Eternal flame”… A quote from the description of the film project by Askold Kurov, ”Release Oleg Sentsov” that will be presented in Prague as well.

http://www.dokweb.net/en/

 

 

News from Paris: René Vautier 1928-2015

Grand old man and enfant terrible of French militant cinema René Vautier died Sunday January 4th in his home in Cancale, Brittany, at the age of 86. Originally from Brittany, René Vautier fought the Germans as a very young member of the French Resistance during the Second World War, at 16 he was decorated with the Croix de Guerre and honoured by de Gaulle. After the war he wanted to pursue the combat but not with arms and his friends then encourage him to take up a new weapon: the camera. His battle was to last a life long.

Vautier graduated in 1948 from the film school IDHEC in Paris. In 1949 he gets a command to make a film for the Ligue de l’enseignement about the benefits of the French educational mission in the West African colonies. The result, Afrique 50, became, on the contrary, a violent critique of the French colonial system. Vautier’s first film was also the first anticolonial film ever to be made in France and the reaction was violent in return: Vautier was faced with 13 charges and sentenced to one year of prison!

The film has an incredible story. To escape the limitations of the 1934 decree of the Minister of the Colonies Pierre Laval (forbidding any filming in the colonies without the presence of a an administration official) Vautier went on to film in secret. He almost got his film rolls confiscated for destruction in Africa but managed to get his work back to France where he finally had to illegally retrieve the reels kept under seizure by the board of censors (he got 17 of 50 reels). The film was finished in secret and stayed censured in France for over 40 years though it was awarded as one of the best documentaries of the year at the World Festival of Youth and Students in Warsaw in 1955 (with Joris Ivens as president of the jury). In 1996, a copy of the film was finally handed over to Vautier by the Foreign Ministry during the first official screening in France and only in 2003 the film was broadcasted on French television. The Cinémathèque française has recently made new copies of the film as part of their effort to safeguard the entire oeuvre of René Vautier initiated in 2007.

Afrique 50 is a short powerful outburst, a rhythmic pamphlet, swiftly edited with an attacking voice-over. Playing with the genre of educational state propaganda documentary but turning it against the government, the film pinpoints, with humour and great seriousness, the link between capitalism and racism. Film historian Nicole Brenez, specialist of avant-garde cinema at la Cinémathèque française, has called it the greatest film in the history of cinema. Go see it, it’s on YouTube!

Vautier got out of prison in 1952 and moved on to make films about Algeria. The first one Une nation, l’Algerie (1956) about the French invasion in 1830 doesn’t exist anymore, of the two copies, one was lost, the other destroyed. In 1956 he joined the Algerian maquis and filmed the National Liberation Front, the Algerian freedom fighters fighting for independence in the Algerian War 1954-62. He was wounded and spent the rest of his life with a piece of camera stuck in his skull and did a total of 25 months in prison. Amongst his films are Algérie en flammes (Algeria in flames, 1958, 20 min.) and Peuple en marche (People marching, 1963, 50 min.) and later the feature film Avoir vingt ans dans les Aurès (To be Twenty in the Aures, 1972, 100 min.) that won the Prix international de la critique in Cannes in 1972. After the independence of Algeria, he initiated the creation of the Centre Audiovisuel d’Alger where he was the director 1962-65 and he is considered as one of the fathers of Algerian cinema.

After having been living in exile for years, partly in Tunisia, due the fact that he was considered a danger to the national security, Vautier, granted amnesty, returns to France in 1967. He was a member of the militant cinema group Medvedkine from the beginning along with Chris Marker, engaged in making cinema a tool for the workers struggle. Settling down in Brittany, he founded the production and distribution company UPCB (Unité de Production Cinématographique de Bretagne) in 1970, in an effort to create a vital forum for cinema outside of Paris.

In 1973 Vautier did a 31 days hunger strike and ended up in hospital in order to obtain authorisation from the Ministry of Culture to distribute the film Octobre à Paris made by Jacques Panijel about the 1961 massacre of Algerian demonstrators by the police forces in Paris (probably more that 200 killed though the official number is still much lower, it took 40 years for the French state to even begin to admit the crime), a documentary banned since 1962. Supported by a great number of film makers (Agnès Varda, Jacques Rivette, Godard, Resnais, Claude Sautet) Vautier finally achieved nothing less than the end of film censorship for political reasons in France (interview in le Monde 14.10.2011).

Thus the story of René Vautier is also the less glorious story of the history of French film censorship and of the amount of control exercised by the authorities under the Fourth and Fifth Republic.

Trouble was not over though. In 1985 Vautier made the documentary À propos de l’autre detail (1985, 40 min.), testimonies of the use of torture during the Algerian War and in particular of an Algerian tortured under the orders of a certain lieutenant Jean Marie Le Pen. The film was a reaction to the fact that Le Pen, the leader of the extreme right party Front National, sued the satiric newspaper Le Canard enchainé for defamation after they had accused him of having used torture while serving the French army. In spite of a 1963 amnesty law forbidding the use of images that could be harmful to the honor of those who had served under the Algerian War, the film was shown in court. When Vautier returned home to Brittany after the trial, he found his archives vandalized: 60 km of film cut in to pieces and drenched with petroleum, totally destroyed …

Vautier also made films about South Africa, racism in France, women joining the workers struggle, immigration, poetry, oil spill and nuclear tests. He was a radical cinematographer, a very important “maker of historical documents”, and an inspiration in terms of alternative ways of production and distribution. He should be a hero to any young filmmaker with a political conscience.

Vautier sums up his cinematographic imperative transforming a quotation from the poet Paul Éluard: “Je filme ce que je vois, ce que je sais, ce qui est vrai” (“I film what I see, what I know, what is true”). He elaborated his thoughts on militant cinema in his memoirs Caméra Citoyenne from 1998.

A brave and remarkable man, and a very important figure of French cinema, is gone. We are lucky to still have most of his films…

Afrique 50 (1950, 17 min.), with English subtitles:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vb3DkggPtaQ

Just recently Les Mutins de Pangée released a DVD-box with the Algerian films (only with French subtitles) in addition to the nice edition of Afrique 50 that comes with a booklet:

http://www.lesmutins.org/coffret-avoir-20-ans-dans-les

For a more detailed and theoretic introduction read Nicole Brenez and Oriane Brun-Moschetti in La Furia Umana (in French):

http://www.lafuriaumana.it/index.php/archives/41-lfu-14/121-nicole-brenez-rene-vautier-devoirs-droits-et-passion-des-images

http://www.lafuriaumana.it/index.php/archives/41-lfu-14/315-oriane-brun-moschetti-l-oeuvre-filmique-de-rene-vautier-un-corpus-etat-des-lieux

Herzog møder Oppenheimer

Det er et besøg af fineste slags, meddeler Grand Teatret i København, når Werner Herzog og Joshua Oppenheimer gæster biografen fredag den 9. januar, hvor de i forlængelse af en særvisning af Oppenheimers seneste mesterstykke “The Look of Silence” kl. 19 vil diskutere dokumentarfilm, metode, moral og meget mere, hvad de jo på Den Danske Filmskole har været i gang med fredag og fortsætter med lørdag.

Billetter: http://www.grandteatret.dk/nyheder/nyhed/?newsid=4&newsid=444

Filmskolen: http://efu.filmskolen.dk/kurser/werner-herzog-and-joshua-oppenheimer-in-a-2-days-conversation-about-life-humanity-and

Fotomontage: http://www.doxmagazine.com/a-film-like-this/  

Miroslav Janek’s ”Olga” on DocAlliance

DocAlliance starts its new year with a present to its (hopefully) many viewers:

”Olga” by Miroslav Janek is available for free viewing until January 11.

It is a film that was on my Best of 2014 – here is a quote from the review:

Many words are taken from her memoirs and Janek found a woman, who knew Olga, and had the kind of voice she had to read pages about her upbringing in communist Czechoslovakia. Editor Tonicka Jankova and director Miroslav Janek have done a great work to make this archive film fresh to watch. The montage is brilliant. Janek has said that he – in ”Citizen Havel” – could feel ”her persona”. Director and editor has succeeded to offer the audience the same. You never get really close to Olga, she wanted to keep her integrity and dignity, the filmmakers respect that dignity, her unsentimentality and humour – it is a film full of admiration for the protagonist, playful, informative, what more could you ask for…?

http://dafilms.com/event/195-olga/