A scoop for DOKLeipzig. Read the festival’s press release: The 57th International Leipzig Festival for Documentary and Animated Film will open on 27 October 2014 with the long-awaited film “CITIZENFOUR” by Laura Poitras. In the last instalment of her 9/11 trilogy, the multiple award-winning director shows how the United States’ so called “War on Terror” is directed against their own citizens.

In January 2013, Poitras received a number of encrypted e-mails from an anonymous sender who identified himself as “citizen four” and claimed to have evidence of massive covert surveillance operations of the NSA and other intelligence services. In June 2013, she flew to Hong Kong with journalists Glenn Greenwald and Ewen MacAskill for the first of many meetings with the man who turned out to be Edward Snowden. She brought her camera. The resulting film is a documentary thriller in which events unfold minute by minute before our eyes.

“CITIZENFOUR is a film that leaves a lasting impression”, says festival director Claas Danielsen. “Laura Poitras succeeds in making us feel the totality of modern surveillance almost physically. At the same time, she gives

us the psychological profile of a man who lives civic courage without compromise. CITIZENFOUR is one of those rare documentaries that are not only politically explosive but also deeply impressive works of art.”

CITIZENFOUR will see its world premiere on 10 October at the New York Film Festival. After a stop at the BFI London Film Festival, the film will open the 57th DOK Leipzig Festival, where it will compete in the International Competition Documentary Film section. CITIZENFOUR will compete for the Golden Dove as well as the “Leipziger Ring”, an award donated by the Stiftung Friedliche Revolution (Peaceful Revolution Foundation) to honour civic commitment to democracy and human rights in documentary film. On 6 November, Piffl Medien will release the film in Germany. The film was produced by Laura Poitras, Mathilde Bonnefoy and Dirk Wilutzky (Praxis Films, Berlin).

Laura Poitras’ previous films were screened to great acclaim at festivals across the world. “My Country, My Country” (2007) was nominated for numerous awards, including an Academy Award and an Emmy Award. “The Oath” (2010) won the Sundance Cinematography Award and the Edinburgh Film Festival Documentary Jury Award. She was distinguished, amongst others, with a Peabody Award and received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2012 for her work. Her first solo exhibition will be presented at the New York Whitney Museum in 2016.

Second day in St. Petersburg started with a lovely tour to Russian Museum downtown at the square where a statue of Pushkin stands, always with birds resting on his stretched-out arm. The newly renovated rooms with the Russian avant-garde I had not seen before – what a pleasure to revisit masterpieces of Malevich, Filonov, Kandinsky and Tatlin.

After that off to Velican theatre where we watched young Danish Emil Langballe’s graduation film from the National Film School in England, ”Beach Boy”, a well balanced, cinematic non-moralistic portrait of a young black man and his relationship to a middle-aged British woman in Kenya. The young man makes a phone call to his girl friend, who is pregnant but is aware of his profession. The film is light and pretty much less demonstrative than the feature of Ulrich Seidl.

And then to Gare du Nord in Paris guided by veteran director Claire Simon, whose ”Human Geography” (104 minutes) appealed strongly to me, both because it is a very well made film but also because Gare du Nord is very familar to me. I have arrived there several times at 8am in the morning after 12 hours in train from Copenhagen, I have welcomed my mother when she visited us on vacation in ”la ville des villes”, and – alas – in November last year this was the place where co-editor of filmkommentaren.dk, Allan Berg, had his computer stolen, when we got out of a taxi…

Claire Simon is behind the camera, her friend Simon, of Algerian origin, is there with her to help her ask questions to people passing by. Small stories with people before they enter a train, observations, and talks with people working on the station. It becomes a film on Life and Love, superficial, what else could it be, but small stories placed in the heads of the audience for us to work more on. The focus is on people who ended up in France coming from all over the world, happy or not happy, with fine educations from back home, but apparently useless in the European country they have arrived to. IN that way the film is also a portrait of Europe of today.

We already told that for the second time the AegeanDocs festival is running, it opened on the 20^th of September (and runs until the 28^th) with a screening of “The Act of Killing”. Producer of the festival Chara Lampidou sent me yesterday information about the festival programme and this welcoming text of festival director Kostas Spiropoulos:

If someone was trying to describe in two words the content of ΑgeanDocs2014, I would suggest: Looking straight into reality. Face to face, with no ifs and buts, eloquent blandishments or rounding offs. 70 Greek and foreign directors face reality. They see, or more correctly, they read the world and the people. It’s a composition of problems, situations, adventures, in which people are involved either as part of collective subjects or as characters.

How useful is the sight – or more correctly: the different glances – of the artists?

The first seventh part of our century heralds a future dominated by the asymmetry. The inability to understand and predict. It is not only the inequalities and the contradictions that spawn, aggravate or rekindle.  It is, in particular, the inability of the political and scientific elite to understand, to interpret, let alone to deal with a complex universal reality. At such times the

human spirit turns to the art and, in particular, the art of arts and the cinema.

Painting meets literature, architecture, music, dancing in the cinema of reality: the documentary. Films from Peru, India, China, Argentina, Korea, the Balkans, Yemen, Palestine, Algeria, Malta, Israel, Canada are screened along with American, German, French, Italian, Spanish, Scandinavian productions in the second AegeanDocs festival creating a panorama of the contemporary world.

It will be a big celebration of culture and entertainment with acclaimed quality films, absolutely free for the public. The program of the festival is organized in thematic sections on the history of Greece, the nazi and the neo-Nazi phenomenon, the human rights, the environment and ecology, but also on love, sex, marriage and flirt, the anxiety of death and the love of life, the humor and the blues, the dance, the music, the passions and the hobbies with motorcycles, bicycles and skate.

Photo from the opening.

http://www.aegeandocs.gr

Do you know the situation for Russian artists, was the first question that came from the audience at the Q&A after Danish Andreas Johnsen’s ”Ai Wei Wei” screening last night at the St. Petersburg documentary festival. The film about the Chinese artist was the first to be shown out of 8 Danish films picked for a programme called GlobalDoK = the Danes go abroad to find stories that can work globally.

No, I do not, the Danish director honestly answered – and the artist in the audience confirmed that there were pretty many similarities between the situation of Wei Wei and the one experienced here in Russia – censorship, aggression from the authorities etc… this is what a director wants to happen, isn’t it, that audiences can transfer what they see to their own life.

The opening was attended by around 40 people. Director of the Danish Cultural Institute in St. Petersburg, Finn Andersen, expressed his gratitude to be able to help the film festival to have the retrospective happen. The same thank you was adressed to the Danish Film Institute.

Message2Man is a huge festival. The main screening venue is Velikan Centre in a beautiful park, where families were having their sunday walk yesterday. The Centre has multiple screening halls and there are also cinemas in other parts of the city that show films from all over the world. To give you an impression of today’s programme: There is Michael Obert’s ”Song from the Forest”, Estonian humorous ”The Gold Spinners” by Kiur Aarma and Hardi Volmer, ”Ukraine is not a Brothel” by Kitty Green, ”Blood” by Alina Rudnitskay, ”Shado’man” by Boris Gerrets, ”Human Geography” by Claire Simon and ”The Will” by Christian Sønderby Jepsen. I check in for the last three mentioned. And there are many, many other films screened from mid afternoon to late evening.

http://message2man.com/en/about/