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.

EDN Terminates DOX/ 3

Emanuele Vernillo, didactic tutor at Zelig School for Documentary, Television and New Media in Bolzano calls the decision “absurd”. Here is his text:

I am reading with big interest the discussions about the closing of DOX on paper. I want to add to these also my and our (ZeLIG) concern… If you think that the ‘circulation of our concern’ may help a discussion about this absurd decision, please feel free to publish it on your blog and wherever it would be useful.

As you know, we are a trilingual documentary film school, a very special institution where students from all over the world join together and attend seminars in german, italian and english. As you know and as anybody can easily understand, english becomes suddenly the main spoken language: inside this context DOX ‘was’ the only magazine which can strongly support the circulation of ideas, comments, critics about the documentary film scene all over the world. It is such an enormous loss for all the film-makers and particularly for our school. Which magazine can serve as substitute to it? We have made a subscription to ‘Sight and Sound’, but what DOX has been for the documentary film scene is not substitutable. 

In these days I have taken in my hands the issue nr. 100, ‘DOX in Dialogue’: it was simply marvellous, the conversations between Luciano Barisone and Nicholas Philibert, Joshua Oppenheimer and Werner Herzog. Who is going to tell to our future students that this won’t be published anymore?

Yes, there will be probably the digital editions… But I have the impression that we are not yet in an era where digital magazines are easily usable… 

I can understand the financial situation worldwide, from which EDN is probably suffering like many other institutions… But a bigger effort not to renounce to such a big resource would be very welcomed!!

Mikala Krogh: Ekstra Bladet uden for citat

Landmanden i sin mark, maleren i sit atelier, journalisten ved tastaturet. Poul Madsen her ved sit skrivebord, han var altid min helt i tv-virkeligheden, når jeg så Presselogen og han var med. Det var ham jeg glædede mig til. Hvor herligt at se en film, hvor han er helten i en gedigen filmisk virkelighed. En helt, som bare er nærværende og beslutningsdygtig i hver scene, han er med i. Også når han lytter, han lytter nemlig meget aktiv. Og filmen viser hvordan og derefter hvorfor. Så enkelt og selvfølgeligt. Og jeg kan være til stede ved siden af ham på Ekstra Bladets redaktion en lang afgørende periode i avisens liv. Jeg er der bare og glemmer, at jeg ser en film, også når jeg i filmens smukt opdelte og blidt klippede grundinterview og rammefortælling (er det jo, selv om det ikke ligner) sidder i hans bil til og fra arbejde, og han fortæller mig om avisens væsen og farerne, som lige nu skal undviges. Så godt skjult er filmholdets arbejdsindsats, og det er fordi, det simpelthen er en god film, de har lavet, Mikala Krogh (manuskript, fotografi og instruktion), Kasper Leick (klip), Rasmus Winther (lyddesign), Jonas Struck (musik), Torsten Høgh Rasussen (grafik) og Sigrid Dyekjær (produktion), alle håndværkere i hver deres værksted i virkelighedens tjeneste. Filmens virkelighed.

Det er en dobbeltbundet titel, Mikala Krogh har givet filmen. Uden for citat betyder jo sagt i fortrolighed og til baggrund. Det er altså en hemmelighed, som røbes. Men uden for citat betyder også, og det bekræfter slutskiltet næsten overflødigt, at når den usynlige forfatter / fotograf / instruktør flytter ind med sit kamera, så skildres virkeligheden der, som den er, som denne ene kvinde med kamera opfatter den. Som hun har tænkt den i direkte kamera og cinéma vérité. Og så er det selvfølgelig ikke nødvendigt at citere, ikke nødvendigt med vidner og interviews. Det er selve udsagnet, de medvirkendes og stedets, som ender i biografen. Dette forehavende gennemføres forrygende. Jeg tabte pusten og genvandt den kun kort et par steder, og det var så kortvarigt, at jeg bare noterede et intentisitetsfald ved 30 min. (det kan være farligt, men ikke her), og igen ved 60 min.

Men heller ikke her nåede jeg at begynde at kede mig ved de små og større sager i avishusets dagligdag, bestemt ikke. Jeg fulgte jo, var af klippet umærkeligt tvunget til at følge, de fire parallelhandlinger, der er lagt ud, klippet i lange scener, som er fuldstændigt naturligt dagligdags forbundne i friktionsfri overgange: avisens katastofale økonomi og oplagstal, kampen mellem papirudgave og net, senere tv og efterhånden også smerten ved reduktion af medarbejdergruppen ved såkaldt frivillig afgang. Endelig den langvarige og nu minderige sag om sømændene Søren fra Ærø og hans kollega Eddy, som de mange, mange dage var gidsler hos pirater i Somalia. Den fortælling indeholder filmens dramahøjdepunkt, de 30 minutter, hvor søfolkene var alene på den afrikanske strand, piraterne havde trukket sig tilbage, de danske tropper var i syne og på vej, redaktionen var i telefonforbindelse med deres mand på stedet og samtidig i kapløb med TV2 News om breaking news: ”… gidslerne bliver netop nu frigivet”. Men fortællingen indeholder også Poul Madsens håndtering af sin interessanteste krise, offentlighedens og senere pressenævnets alvorlige kritik og især Eddys klagesag. Det sidste er det værste for ham, og den vigtigste detalje i en vigtig og meget seværdig film.

Danmark 2014, 95 min.

Filmen har i et samarbejde med DOXBIO premiere i en række biografer 1. oktober: http://www.doxbio.dk/?page_id=23

EDN Terminates DOX/ 2

PeÅ Holmquist, director and producer of documentary films, first President of EDN has written a letter about DOX:

In EDN Newsletter, week 37, I get the news about our magazine DOX:Doesn’t exist anymore!  DOX has been there nearly from when we started EDN – quite a long time ago. In EDN Weekly, 37, I read “with deep regret I have to announce that I had to decide to terminate the publishing of Dox Magazine.?”

I think the EDN-director Paul Pauwels is making a big mistake. And as one of the founders of EDN I find it strange that this decision comes with a very low-key way and with an “I had to decide”.

I think/thought  this kind of a decision would be much more profound and I think it’s not enough that this is a “one man decision”. About the reason to stop DOX we just get a few sentences from PP about the loss of money from Creative Europe. No discussion from the EDN Executive committee, no exact calculations are shown to us! It’s also typical that I myself didn’t find this news with the EDN newsletter? I missed it. I found it on filmkommentaren.dk and a very concerned note from Emma Davie, also one of EDN:s old members.

I think one problem lately with EDN is that the Business behind documentary film has taken more and more place. Less and less about the culture behind our genre. Why are we making these films? It’s certainly not because of the money. I spent 35 years of my filmmaking in the Middle East (10 of them also teaching Palestinian filmmakers) – this was also not because of money! We need to discuss our films and the reasons behind, and what kind of reactions we and our film get , etc ?

That’s why we need something like DOX . We have enough of Pitching Forums already.

I sincerely hope and I urge the EDN executive committee to initiate a discussion about Dox or a new DOX at the General Assembly in Amsterdam in November this year.

PeÅ Holmquist, documentary filmmaker. First chairman for EDN

pea.holmquist@comhem.se

Michael Moore:Filmmakers not Documentarians

Last week Michael Moore, at the Toronto International Film Festival Doc Conference, 25 years after his “Roger and me” (photo) was released, presented 13 rules for making documentary films. A manifesto. He stressed that documentary filmmakers should not be called documentarians but filmmakers, and ”Also, I don’t want people leaving the theater depressed after my movies. I want them angry. Depressed is a passive emotion. Anger is active. Anger will mean that maybe 5 percent, 10 percent of that audience will get up and say, “I gotta do something. I’m going to tell others about this. I’m going to go look up more about this on the Internet. I’m gonna join a group and fight this!””

His full speech is to be found on Indiewire, link below, where you will also find colleague, documentarian, sorry filmmaker Jo Berlinger’s response to Moore, as thoughtful and analytical as Moore’s contribution is entertaining and provocative. Other filmmakers are also asked to comment in the fine IndieWire articles. A long quote from Berlinger:

“Not calling ourselves “documentarians” is a very old argument that ignores the amazing expansion of the form and the pushing of boundaries that

Michael himself was huge part of ushering in. When we launched “Brother’s Keeper” at Sundance in 1992, we made it part of our press strategy to call it a “nonfiction feature film” and to avoid the word “documentary” because of the “castor oil” baggage of the word — we certainly weren’t the first and obviously not the last to make a conscious effort to not only avoid the “D” word, but to make an issue of how we were different from traditional (i.e., “boring”) documentaries… that was 23 years ago.

But, since the late 1980’s through the 1990’s generally beginning with with “The Thin Blue Line” (by using highly stylized re-creations), “Roger & Me” (by using humor and making the filmmaker an on-screen personality) and “Paris is Burning” (taking us into a world documentaries didn’t normally dare to go) and throughout the 1990’s and beyond, there has been an amazing explosion in the volume and creativity of the form, pushing the documentary into new places of cinematic expression and techniques, from artfully shot re-creations, to using documentary not just to “educate,” but also ambiguous human character portraits to, yes, the modern day advocacy film…”

http://www.indiewire.com/article/joe-berlinger-on-michael-moore-and-the-changing-market-for-documentaries-20140915

Gerber, Pozdorovkin: The Notorious Mr. Bout

DR2 Dokumania inviterer i dag i god tid til kulturnat 10. oktober og skriver: ”Mød folkene bag DR2 Dokumania, når vi inviterer indenfor til Dokumania LIVE. Hør, hvordan vi spotter de bedste historier, og se tre af de vildeste dokumentarfilm.” Det er jo en klar udmelding: De bedste historier og de vildeste dokumentarfilm. Det er så med det klart, at det er underholdning, som prioriteres der i huset, og inden for underholdning er det følgelig underholdningskvalitet. Herefter gælder det om at folde de brede begreber ”bedst” og ”vildest” ud i nuancer. Det er der generøs lejlighed til hver tirsdag aften.

Altså for eksempel i aften ved at åbne for den på sin måde bestemt interessante historie og vilde dokumentar om den internationale købmand / forretningsmand / fragtmand Viktor Bout, hvis historie gennem nu godt to årtiers karriere skildres i en omhyggelig researched, effektivt klippet og elegant produceret filmbiografi i den konventionelle amerikansk-britiske tv-stil, som ser ud til at være en Dokumania specialitet. Man vil bestemt blive trygt og godt underholdt i aften på DR2 Dokumania 20:45!

På fotografiet sidder Viktor Bout i cockpittet i et af sine transportfly. Han kan godt lide at have fingrene på grebene direkte i materialet, ude på stederne, hvor det foregår. Han bliver hele tiden beskyldt for at være international våbenhandler uden skrupler, selv hævder han at være en fragtmand, som ikke blander sig i kassernes indhold. Han sørger blot for, de kommer sikkert fra og sikkert frem til bestemmelsesstedet, som kunden har angivet. Og det er alle på hver sin måde vilde, eksotiske steder som Angola, De arabiske emirater, Bulgarien, Sydafrika, Den demokratiske republik Congo, Rwanda og endelig hans skæbnes Bangkok, Thailand, og tidsmæssigt repeterer filmen begivenheder og forløb af verdenshistorien fra 1991 til 2011. Ja, det er underholdning, men jeg tror også Dokumaniaholdet blandt de bedste og vildeste filmhistorier vælger de belærende. Det sidste er måske det mest interessante, se selv efter i aften…

UK 2014, 90 min.

EDN Terminates DOX Magazine

A ”EDN Weekly” newsletter came out. In a subordinate clause there was shocking news: ”… I had to decide to terminate the publishing…” of DOX Magazine. Just like that. Voilà. A big big mistake! After more than 100 issues the magazine that has been a key element in the profile of EDN, the death of the magazine was declared by Paul Pauwels (PP), the director of EDN. An online issue is under discussion, coming from the office, probably more a member´s magazine than what DOX was – the international documentary FILM magazine. PP, the terminator, who always communicates on behalf of EDN in first person, had made the decision after consultation with the executive committee of the association. The reason: first of all due to financial reasons.

A mistake. Yes, a wrong priority from PP. When EDN way back took over the publishing of the magazine, we did so because there was a need for a documentary FILM magazine and because we thought this was the right way to tell our members that EDN is not “only” about money, where to find them, workshops, pitching etc. but also about the art of documentary. Side by side of Sight & Sound, that comes out on paper and online, like several other national film magazines, DOX, published by EDN but always independent editorially to avoid it being a mere communication tool for EDN, the magazine has had EDN members as main readers but it has also been spread around to non-members as it was this last week in Riga where Eastern European documentarians were offered a free copy – a service to filmmakers who can not afford to be members of EDN.

In Riga Emma Davie, always a true supporter of EDN, and I, former director

and one of the initiators of the magazine, discussed what went wrong. Emma was in contact with PP and wrote to him:

“But as part of this documentary family (EDN, ed.) – I have to say very clearly and strongly that I disagree.  If EDN focuses just on the business of documentary and not the culture behind it, it runs the risk of forgetting to feed the creativity which the market needs to thrive on.  Films like “The Act of Killing” do well not because they have listened to a market but because they come from a passion, an enquiry into form, an awareness of a tradition behind it. This enquiry is fed so little in any magazine. DOX is unique  for providing us with inspiration in this way. We need this as film makers to survive in this business as much as any strategies for dealing with dwindling tv sales…” 

What could have been done to keep DOX alive…

Another priority of course – cutting down in other activities.

Asking the members to help financially? Crowdfunding?

Finding a new publisher – or someone to collaborate with? Did you ask the festivals, PP, the DocAlliance, the DFI to increase their contribution together with other film institutes, or direct you where to go, private film buff sponsors…

Publish the magazine twice a year…?

And so on so forth. Dear Paul, dear friend, we all make mistakes, you made a wrong decision, it is never too late to change it. Become the innovator and not the terminator!