Helena Trestikova Free Online Retrospective

Yes, she is a documentary superstar, Helena Trestikova. Filmkommentaren has had many posts about her films, which are shot over decades, always with a warm heart for its protagonists, and a social perspective. Now the DocAlliance gives you an offer you can not refuse:

From September 22 to October 5, 2014, the DAFilms.com documentary portal presents (FOR FREE) the first world online retrospective of unique Czech director Helena Třeštíková under the telling title “A Long Journey”. The works by the popular documentarist who has won a whole range of international awards, including Europe’s highest film award Prix Arte, are introduced on the portal in the form of more than 25 films made since the mid-1970s. Moreover, Czech viewers can vote for their favourite film by the filmmaker at www.dafilms.com and win an invitation to an exclusive film meeting with Helena Třeštíková… A quote from what we have written about Trestikova:

About Helena Trestikova at the Magnificent7 Festival 2013: …a masterclass with a very well prepared presentation with 11 scenes from her films, through her work of long-time observation. She showed us clips from ”Marcela”, ”Katka” and ”René” (Best European Documentary in 2008) and talked about the ethical questions connected to being so close to her characters, helping them ”outside” the film as well, to get on the right track in their lives. Trestikova said that she did not really consider herself as a filmmaker, more as a chronicler, who has new films coming up this year and has plans to continue to film René and maybe also the family in ”Private Universe”. Deep respect for Trestikova for a constant non-tabloid humanistic focus on people outside the celebrity spotlight.

http://dafilms.com/event/182-retrospective_helena_trestikova/

Russian Censorship Debate

Well, I was definitely away from my comfort zone… Around the table were Russian critics, journalists, a writer of a book on the banning of films in Soviet Union – and some younger filmmakers, who were there to say something about censorship today. They did not deliver many words, the old boys took the floor and kept the word for long, arguing with each other, quite dramatic sometimes. I was the last one to speak, told the story that I had heard a couple of weeks ago from Uldis Brauns, whose ”235.000.000” was censored and re-cut after a meeting between him and Goskino in Moscow in 1967. Otherwise I could talk about self-censorship and advertise films in the Danish series at Message2Man, a couple of the films deals with suppression of the free expression like ”Ai Wei Wei” and ”Burma vj”.

I have the feeling that the rest of the table did not understand what I said – the interpreter was not a professional – or were not really interested or were exhausted after the long arguments.

Andrei Smirnov (photo), film director and actor, was the first to speak. He did so passionately, arguing that hundreds of films, in Soviet time, were taken away from public screenings in most cases without any explanation. And if there was any, it was mostly pretty absurd why they were censored. Some photocopies of historical official letters banning films and film directors were distributed – they dealt with the fate of Klimov and Parajanov and were sent by the ”Committee for the State Security of the Council of Ministers of the USSR”. Critic Victor Matizev linked to the current situation saying that we ”are close to the formal installment of censorship”. Another critic, Andrei Shemayakin, pointed out that the censorship today was mostly of an economic nature, there is little money for documentaries which was confirmed by the couple of young filmmakers at the table, one of them made a film about gay and lesbians through crowdfunding.

Towards the end of the two-hour session a journalist started to talk politics, Smirnov got angry and left. Have to confess that I did not really get what the journalist said – but he was pointing at Russia being more advanced than France and Germany, where censorship is more in practice…

The Future of DOX Magazine?

My wise advisor asks me to de-personalise the important debate about whether DOX has a future or not. I will do my best to suppress my frustration. Starting with a concrete, constructive proposal: Don’t stop DOX and – inspired by what they do at the Danish Film Institute – make a print issue to come out when the festival idfa is on and one when there the festivals/markets Sheffield/Sunny Side take place. That can attract advertising and you can have ad hoc editors/writers (and not a full-time employed editor) to contribute. Publication costs are not high in several countries. The paper editions are for longer, deeper texts, the online activity can include shorter contributions.

But does EDN want to continue DOX? Director Paul Pauwels is not clear in his communication. In the last printed issue of the magazine, that just came out, he writes:

“EDN will spend a lot of energy on defending the documentary genre in the ultra competitive (but often under-financed) media landscape and on becoming an advocate of its members and their interests. This added objective – approved by the EDN Executive Committee – calls for a new strategy and adapted tools, and in all honesty I had to conclude that DOX Magazine doesn’t fit with this new objective..”

… and in EDN Weekly 37, he says that the future of DOX will be discussed internally. One of his staff members has expressed that there will be an online DOX, an EC (Executive member) of EDN told me some days ago that this is doubtful.

Anyway, above is a proposal, there are probably many others. I will ask EDN to put this text on their Facebook page. This is where a letter to the members from Paul has been published stating that he does not want to respond to “a facebook campaign”. He refers to the debate on filmkommentaren.dk and the connected comments on FB that I use to bring readers to the blog. All debate on DOX should take place on EDN territory according to Paul. Which should not prevent you readers to contribute on this blog, all are welcome – EDN members and lovers of DOX – and come up with other proposals to continue the magazine.

Message2Man St. Petersburg /2

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.

Færøske Biodage

 

Ludo (2014)

Festivalen Færøske Biodage i København (25. september til 2. oktober) begynder på Nordatlantens Brygge med premiere på Katrin Ottarsdóttirs helt nye “Ludo” og skifter 30. september om aftenen til Cinemateket, hvor ”Ludo” vises samtidig med, at en ældre, interessant tysk filmatisering af ”Barbara” præsenteres på Nordatlantens Brygge. Den tyske instruktør Frank Wisbar lavede den i 1961 med Harriet Anderson i titelrollen. (Denne overlapning skal man lige være opmærksom på, ellers er det sådan en rar lille festval, hvor man kan nå det hele.) Programmet byder på en sjældenhed mere, en norsk film optaget på Færøerne i 1953, Leif Sindings ”Selkvinden”, som introduceres af filmhistorikeren Jan Erik Holst. Programmet omfatter i øvrigt blandt andet Ulla Boje Rasmussens ”1700 meter fra fremtiden”, som er velkendt fra bibliotekernes distribution, men som i denne anledning kan ses på det store lærred, hvad dokumentarfilm som den fortjener. Festivalen har en kortfilmaften den anden dag, og den slutter med en kortfilmaften, begge gange introduceret af instruktører og festivalarrangørerne.

1700 meter fra fremtiden (1990)

Programinformationer og billetsalg på

http://www.nordatlantens.dk/da/arrangementer/2014/f%C3%A6r%C3%B8ske-biodage/ og www.cinemateket.dk

http://www.dfi.dk/Filmhuset/Cinemateket/Billetter-og-program/Serie.aspx?serieID=10052 

Om Ulla Boje Rasmussens film

Jeg er dokumentarist af Allan Berg Nielsen

Om nogle af Katrin Ottarsdóttirs film

http://www.filmkommentaren.dk/blog/blogpost/808/

http://www.filmkommentaren.dk/blog/blogpost/1058/

http://www.filmkommentaren.dk/blog/blogpost/1069/

Joe Berlinger: Whitey

Fotografiet viser instruktøren Joe Berlinger i en samtale med Aljazeera America en dag i april i år, hvor han i Q & A form gør rede for, hvad han gerne vil med sit filmarbejde, som nu er blevet til en tv-serie, som Aljazeera sender for tiden, og han slutter med den her sammenfatning: ”… I also have a film about the Whitey Bulger case that’s being released theatrically in June, and that film is about alleged government corruption at the highest level. So it’s in keeping with my desire to shine a light on injustice whereever it exists.” (link nedenfor) Jeg synes, at denne film, som er den, DR2 Dokumania sender i aften tirsdag 20.45, først og fremmest er et vigtigt møde med ham og hele hans store filmværk om injustice i det hele taget, men mest belyst i amerikanske retssager. For kun med enkelte afstikkere i det samlede værk samler det sig omhyggeligt dokumenteret i konkret praksis om amerikansk selvbesindelse i sin retspleje. Aftenens film er således det seneste storværk i dette forehavende, dens undertitel er ”United States of Amerika v. James J. Bulger”, og det er egentlig den rigtige titel, for hovedpersonen i denne fremragende og ufattelige journalistiske analyse er faktisk Joe Berlinger, og filmen er hans yderst komplicerede, men imponerende redegørelse for retssagen mod gangsterchefen fra Boston, Whitey, som levede skjult i Californien igennem 16 år. Det er imidlertid ikke Whitey, der skildres, det er retsssagen. Og Berlinger er detektiven og hovedpersonen. Synes jeg altså. Det er i aften et kvarter i ni, og det bliver to timer låst i lænestolen.

Joe Berlinger har været hovedperson i amerikansk dokumentarfilm og tv gennem nu to årtier. Det begyndte for alvor med “Brother’s Keeper”(1992), om en tvivlsom retslig indgriben efter et dødsfald i tre landmænds fælles husstand, “Paradise Lost”, en trilogi (1993, 2000 og 2011), som omsider medvirkede til løsladelse af tre fejlagtigt dømte i en drabssag i West Memphis. I et tv-interview i forbindelse med premieren på ”Whitey” fortalte Berlinger også causerende om af den arbejdet for Albert Maysles, som blev hans opdagelse af dokumentarfilmens cinematografi og specielt om, hvordan han i begyndelsen af 1990’erne, hvor det bestemt ikke var almindeligt med dokumentarfilm i biografen, ved den indflydelsesrige Roger Eberts begejstrede anmeldelser pludselig kunne fylde biograferne, når de viste ”Brothers Keeper og ”Paradise Lost” (link til dette tv-klip nedenfor). Andre værker er ”Crude”(2009) om et retssalsopgør med oliselskabet Chevron, ”…the story behind the world’s largest oil-related environmental lawsuit comes to screen as Joe Berlinger investigates the facts in the case of the so-called Amazon Chemobyl a disaster that occured deep in the forests of Ecuador.” Musik-afstikkere fra kriminalretten er “Metallica: Some Kind of Monster” (2004), en film, som det er sagt ”re-defined the rockumentary genre” og ”Under African Skies” (2012) med Paul Simon, som Mikkel Stolt anmeldte her, da den for ikke længe siden blev vist i Cinemateket i København.

USA 2014, 125 min.

http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2014/4/18/joe-berlinger-thesystemcriminaljustice.html  (Berlinger i Q & A på America.Aljazeera.com)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_-56YArb9fg  (Berlinger i tv-klip om blandt andre Maysles og Ebert) 

2nd Edition of AegeanDocs /2

We already told that for the second time the AegeanDocs festival is running, it opened on the 20th of September (and runs until the 28th) 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

Message2Man St. Petersburg /1

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/

Nordisk Panorama 25 Year

I attended the opening of the 25th edition of Nordisk Panorama friday night in Malmö, Sweden. It was a grand event because the organisers had picked the right film to start the festival. Below is the website description of Garden Lovers by Virpi Suutari, a film that is about love and full of love towards the characters, the many old couples, whose warm relationships still flourish, in beautiful garden surroundings. The film has a unique flow going from couple to couple, from situation to situation, some of them very ”Finnish” meaning wonderfully weird, always surprising, supported by constant wonderful camera movements (dop: Heikki Färm) and an amazing music score composed by Sanna Salmenkallio, who you will know from (among others) ”3 Rooms of Melancholia” by Pirjo Honkasalo.

The site description: …a documentary love story about Finnish couples who have a passion for gardening. The film with comic undertones looks at their stories behind the hedges. The garden provides a framework for tales of relationship conflicts and joys; it depicts the many ways in which life can flourish; it gives strength and unites, but it also becomes a meeting place for farewells. There is an invisible bond that grows between the couples in the film; they comment and comfort each other with their own stories.The film’s gardening stories celebrate fertility, play and love.

25 years of Nordisk Panorama. As one who was there at the first edition in Grimstad, Norway in 1990, I was asked to make a presentation of films from the 25 years that I liked, I called it ”from ”1700 Metres from the Future” till ”Belleville Baby” by Ulla Boje Rasmussen – and Mia Engberg. I ended the talk by showing a clip from ”3 Rooms of Melancholia”, for me the best Nordic documentary in the last 25 years.

http://made.fi/gardenloversmovie/

http://nordiskpanorama.com/en/industry/

 

Documentary Talents

There is no photo attached to this post, you have to look up to the right, where you get three of them. Co-editor of filmkommentaren.dk, Allan Berg, suggested that I chose three obvious talents, who have made films which travel and are awarded, and who will – hopefully – give us more great works in decades to come. Here they are:

To the left Sara Ishaq, two films of hers have been on filmkommentaren.dk, both dealing with Yemen: ”Kamara has No Walls”, nominated for an Oscar 2013 and ”The Mulberry House” from 2013, a quote from the review of the latter: A family film? Yes. Private? No. Personal? Yes, as it is a film about a daughter, who returns to her roots… oops, now the words start to be klichés. Roots, yes but conveyed in a way so we non-yemenites easily can identify with the family, the three generations and its situation, in a film that captures the warmth and passes it on to us in a light tone that is broken when reality knocks on the door.

In the middle Salome Jashi, who after the short films ”Their Helicopter” and ”Speechless” made the middle length ”The Leader is always Right” an ” observational documentary from one of the patriotic youth camps in Georgia” before turning to what is her international breakthrough, ”Bahkmaro”, that gave her the main award in Jihlava 2011. The jury motivation was precise: “With an attentive and personal approach the filmmaker transforms an ordinary microcosm into a unique narrative and playful visual experience. Through an effective and assured cinematic language this film reveals the mood and the spirit of a society struggling with its internal hopes and contradictions. For its respect, artistry and quest for surprise the award for the Best film of “The Between the Seas” Competition goes to Bakhmaro by Salome Jashi.”

To the right Davis Simanis, Latvian documentary director and editor, whose film about the new national library in Riga won the Baltic award at the festival in Vilnius in 2013: ” ”Chronicles of the Last Temple”, a superb interpretation of the new and much discussed National Library of Riga, a film that shows Simanis ability to capture the grandeur of a building and its details in a super aesthetic form. His newest work ”Escaping Riga” presents in an original cinematic form two world-class 20th century geniuses, the British philosopher Sir Isaiah Berlin and the Russian film director Sergei Eisenstein.