News taken from the website of the IDF (Institute of Documentary Films): For the sixth time at Jihlava International Film Festival, Institute of Documentary Film announced Silver Eye winners at the Closing Ceremony. The holders of the awards are three extraordinary documentaries from East Silver Market, selected in three categories, as well as three Special Mentions.

The aim of the Silver Eye award is to introduce the new talents to the international audience and to bring the attention of industry professionals to the new interesting films from Central and Eastern Europe, and to help the nominated films to find sales agents, broadcasters and festival releases. All Silver Eye winners receive the trophy designed by Czech artist Tereza Durdilova, as well as 1 500 EUR prize money. On top of that, the awarded films are about to enjoy the year-long distribution support within East Silver Caravan festival service, shipping them to more than 108 international film festivals.The awards are supported by MEDIA programme.

Silver Eye winners 2014:

Category: Short

Silver Eye Award:  The Visit (Matej Bobrik, Poland, 2013)

Special Mention: 1973 (r. Stefan Ivancic, Serbia, 2014)

Category: Mid-length

Silver Eye Award:  Blood (Alina Rudnitskaya, Russia, 2013)

Special Mention: Euromaidan. Rough Cut (Various Artists, Ukraine, 2014) (photo)

Category: Feature

Silver Eye: Toto and His Sisters (Alexander Nanau, Romania, 2014)

Special Mention: Gottland (Viera Čákanyová, Petr Hátle, Lukáš Kokeš, Klára Tasovská, Rozálie Kohoutová, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland, 2014)

Jury statements:

Category: Short

A Special Mention is first given to a film whose beautiful cinematography poetically captures the essence of a community stuck in time, longing for an era that is long gone: 1973 by Stefan Ivancic.

The best documentary category is awarded to a film that succeeds in its form to parallel the emotions of its protagonists, and a film whose choreography touches delicately on a universal theme that relates to modern society: The Visit by Matej Bobrik.

Category: Mid-length

As jury members we think that this is important material to see. It’s a material that’s making the history of new countries. The special mention goes to Euromaidan: Rough Cut

This film ticked all the boxes. For us, it was topically, cinematically and from arts point of view the best film from all of the 11 nominated films. The Silver Eye Award goes to Blood by Alina Rudnitskaya.

Category: Feature

The jury unanimously decided to give a special mention to a film that impressed us for its daring approach to collective filmmaking where each director give to the film a singular vision that blends into one unique universe. The special mention goes to Gottland by Lukáš Kokeš, Petr Hátle, Rozálie Kohoutová and Viera Čákanyová.

The Silver Eye Award goes to a film that give a just portrait of the struggle of three children finding a secure place in a hostile environment. An unintrusive yet intimate eye on the daily life of the characters that builds a very compelling coming of age story. The Silver Eye Award goes to Toto and His Sisters by Alexander Nanau.

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

Take a look at the photo. It’s about Love, isn’t it? It comes from the film of Polish Wojciech Staron, ”Siberian Lesson”, that he made in 1998. On film stock. Here is the Jihlava catalogue description of the film: In an attempt at renewing the national identity of emigrants, after the fall of communism, Poland began to send teachers to areas, where Poles had settled. The director’s wife was one such “missionary”, and her commentary recounts her experiences of living on the remote Siberian plains.

Indeed it does recount and you get a fine impression of people and life in tough living conditions, but the film is also a declaration of Love from film director and cameraman Wojciech Staron to his girlfriend Malgosia. Caught by a caressing camera of the young Wojciech, who more than a decade later has established himself as one of the most prominent European documentarians with a unique ability to ”follow through emotions”. One of many quotable

sentences from Staron yesterday in Jihlava in a totally packed Dukla Edison cinema, where his two lesson films were screened followed by a question and answer session.

I asked him what he had learnt professionally in the time between 1998 and 2011. To trust the image, he said, to understand that the image carries information. And making feature fiction films has taught me a lot. You can see that, was my reply, there is ”a story” in ”Argentinian Lesson”, a ”love story” that develops between his son Janek and Marcia, the Argentinian girl with Polish origins, whose family background (ill mother, father working elsewhere) is tragic.

Staron talked a lot about film and video. The two lesson films are shot on film stock with a pretty small ratio: He brought home 4 hours from Siberia and 9 hours from Argentina. The huge different is the way of working, he said. With film you don’t see what you have filmed before the material is developed (he had material developed every third month when in Argentina), with video you have it and can watch it immediately. Staron stressed that he wants to be involved in the situations with his camera and told the filmmakers present that you have to be aware of the important tools you have: 1) What distance do you want to have from the characters, 2) Consequently, what lens do you choose, 3) What camera movements do you choose. Interesting it was to hear about his relationship to Janek in Argentina, that he characterised as ”we were playing together”, me with the camera and all the technical problems you  always have, he in front of the camera. We came very close to each other, in a different way than as a father and son.

I saw ”Siberian Lesson” at Cinema du Réel way back at the end of the 1990’es. To watch it again was a wonderful experience. You can’t help falling in love with Malgosia, as Wojciech did, and you have tears of joy in your eyes when they get married in Siberia. Romantic, yes, Staron is a filmmaker who follows the emotional line, wherever he goes. New lessons, he was asked, I would love to but my son does not want to leave Poland. Polish Lesson, one suggested…

Siberian Lesson, 1998, 58 mins.

Argentinian Lesson, 2011, 59 mins.

http://www.dokument-festival.com  

Gustav Mahler was in Jihlava. His face is looking at me from the wall in the breakfast room of Grand Hotel, which was grand once, an art nouveau building from the outside but how could they put that terrible furniture into the lobby! Tasteless. Anyway, service is fine and kind. Back to business, well actually pleasure:

After having three one hour meetings with filmmakers participating at the training programme Ex Oriente, a masterclass was held by Peter Kerekes and it lived up, to what I had expected. Kerekes showed clips from the three films that have given him the well deserved reputation as a documentary auteur with his own style, ”66 Seasons”, ”Cooking History” and ”Velvet Terrorists”.

The Slovak told the audience why he is not able to make observational documentaries, he feels uncomfortable by being there and telling his characters that ”just don’t notice that I am here”! Reality is not in front of the camera, it’s in my head. For the ”66 Seasons” I did a deep research to make sure that they would talk about the past, what happened way back around the swimming pool in Kosice. I wrote everything down when having filmed, a good

exercise and then I could go back and make my characters do something unexpected to get away from the tone of being official, when a camera is there. If they trust you there are no borders.

The scenes Kerekes showed from ”66 Seasons” (photo) were hilarious – the man coming up from the water looking like Adolf, because one of the old women had a boyfriend, who had that little moustache. People love to play their own life and I was positively surprised that a film so local could sell to almost all tv stations in Europe. I think I succeeded in bringing energy into the scenes of the film. As for ”Cooking History” the situation was different as I had to make a very precise script for this film which was more a ”documentary theatre” than a ”documentary film”. He showed the ”epilogue” of the film in which the former u-boat cook is preparing the meal standing in the sea… the idea of the cook himself! Finally some words about ”Velvet Terrorists”… where it was difficult to make one of the terrorists perform. One of the co-directors, Ivan Ostrochovsky, whispered to Kerekes, ”give him a girl”, which turned out to be a great idea – in the film you see how ”the terrorist” teaches a young girl how to use weapons, how to lie to a lie detector (!) and many other tricks. Where the two first films were shot on film, ”Velvet Terrorists” was made on video and the team ended up with a lot of material. A brilliant 90 minutes masterclass, Kerekes is an original documentary humorist.

At night world premiere of Miroslav Janek’s ”The World According to Brabenec”, full house in the big cinema, wonderful atmosphere because of the charismatic old man. One more remarkable film from the hands of Janek, here is the catalogue description:

“Journalist Renata Kalenská’s book of interviews with member of the Plastic People Vratislav Brabenec recorded not only his memories of the underground years, but also the author’s experiences with this highly distinctive individual. This cinematic sequel builds on those experiences as it captures her additional interviews with Brabenec – improvised talks at places that hold some meaning for Brabenec or Kalenská. The result is several scenes of irrelevant philosophising, self-deprecating humor, and commentary on the life of birds and on nature in general. The conversations, recorded mostly by hand-held camera, are interspersed with poetic citations. “Do you ever feel happy?” “I don’t like the word happy at all. I equate happy with stupid.” “I’m unhappy with you. So I guess I’m un-stupid.””

Several films of Kerekes and Janek can be found on DocAlliance, Kerekes films can be bought via his website.

http://www.dokument-festival.com

http://kerekesfilm.com/?lang=en

http://dafilms.com/

Click below and you get the local organisers of the pan-European screenings of ”1989”, and in many cases also the location of the screening that takes place on November 5th. What a great effort that lies behind this initiative. The click also gives you access to watch the trailer of the film.

http://cphdox.dk/en/node/8391

SECOND CHANCE / THE ETERNAL LIGHT / AUDITIONING FOR PARENTHOOD

I am back in Jihlava after 5 years. I stopped working for the training programme Ex Oriente in 2009, where the final session with pitching took place in this cosy provincial town, where time seems to stand still. But where a documentary film festival is taking place for the 18th time. From the start under the leadership of energetic Marek Hovorka, who is always going for the different films and have established interesting sections for his programme. The festival has a huge industry programme, the excellent DocAlliance is here, the Silver Market, loads of masterclasses with directors like Godfrey Reggio, Peter Kerekes and Nicolas Philibert.

I went to the Silver Market and watched some short documentaries. Peter Kerekes came up – again – with a surprise, entertaining and thought-provoking. Title ”Second Chance” (photo, 12 minutes, he visits an old lady, whose birthday is October 28, the independence day of Slovakia (1918). To ask for her advice. His plan is to fight the corrupted policy of current Slovakia and his idea is to ask a country to invade Slovakia to establish better conditions – as communist leader in Czekoslovakia Bilak did in 1968, when he and others in the top of the communist party asked Brezhnev to help! Kerekes goes to Finland for help! It’s excellent!

More observational is Vitaly Mansky’s ”The Eternal Light”, shot in Ukraine on Victory Day, May 9, where the war veterans join around the memorial statue and the eternal flame that unfortunately has gone out. He meets a veteran in his home, stories from the war are told. 15 minutes, whereas Laila Pakalnina has made a two minutes piece, that in her classical search for weird situations has one shot on football players lined up side by side waiting for the result of a penalty shoot… for football freaks like me funny, will others understand.

At night a walk through the quiet and softly lighted town, following the white lines that take you from cinema to cinema, a fantastic idea that the festival has performed year after year. To a three hour opening of the festival, a show for more than one hour and a film about families adopting children, ”Auditioning for Parenthood” by Alica Nellis. For me a mainstream tv documentary full of talking generalities, have to talk to Marek Hovorka why a festival that advocates for film Art starts like that.

http://www.dokument-festival.com/

http://www.wff.pl/en/filmy/second-chance-slovakia-2-0/

1989 by Anders Østergaard & Erzsébet Rácz 

Of course the film had to start with 1956 and it does so with very fine and moving archive footage of people searching for the remains of Imre Nagy, whose government was not accepted when the Russians invaded the country. Nagy was executed in 1958. That historical reference is important to include as the re-burial of Nagy, the rehabilitation of him, happened in the years around 1989, and with the support of Miklós Neméth, who served as prime minister 1988-1990 and is the main character of ”1989”, an intelligent, informative, entertaining and provoking documentary.

Yes, it deserves all these superlatives for its fresh look at what happened 25 years ago, when the wall went down as did the Soviet Union. Neméth, economist, coming into power, looked at a country close to bankruptcy and found the border control mechanisms extremely expensive – so he decided to have the borders opened, to tear down the iron curtain. He did so and had strong opposition from the hard-liners in his communist party, his rooms were bugged, and his manouvres were looked upon with more than skepticism from the GDR leader Erich Honecker, as the result was that thousands of Eastern Germans flew to the West through Hungary, before the wall went down in their own country.

They are all there in the film – Gorbachev, Helmuth Kohl, Honecker – and

they talk, well maybe not always with their own voices, but with their own words, researched, found and checked in the archives by the filmmakers. Who have put together archive images of these big-name players, or have reconstructed archive images of them – the meetings behind closed doors are brought into daylight. It is wonderful to watch a storytelling that breaks some rules of the mainstream television historical documentary. Call it hybrid or not, what the filmmakers seek is authenticity.

Parallel to the greater political story runs a personal – a Hungarian is being shot at the border at a time, when it was closed after being open. His widow talks about how it was to enter a freedom that her husband did not get to enjoy. This element in the film stands a bit weaker than the playful political interpretation and the moving images that relates to Hungary 1956. Neméth stands out as a brilliant and sympathetic man, who joined the communist party and went to its top, a decision he took even if his father told him ”remember where you come from” and did not talk to him for six months!

Clever, very clever film that has its premiere at cph:dox festival on November 5 and is being simultaneously screened in many European cities – in the press material is mentioned Oslo, Prague, Brussels, Dublin, Kiev, Helsinki, St. Petersburg, Vladivostok,Porto, Belgrade… check your local media for where the screenings take place.

Denmark, 2014, 90 mins.

http://cphdox.dk