Sergio Tréfaut: Alentejo, Alentejo

An old man stands at his kitchen sink. He is being addressed by his daughter. Cut. He sits down at a table, cleans his glasses, puts them on, takes a piece of paper, looks into the camera, looks at us and starts reading from the paper(s). I wrote a poem, he says, about ”cante”, about how it came into existence. He reads the lines about the Alentejo people being mute, but listening to the voices of birds and cicades, they got inspired to express Life through singing. Words were scarce, carefully treated. ”Cante” was born. The old man smiles, he has given his interpretation with humour and pride of being part of the Alentejo community, a region that although abandoned and far away from Lisbon, a region with unemployment and poverty, has its own rich culture and history that is being nurtured not only by the old generation but also by the youngsters and the kids in schools.

In this –to warn you: I will not be short of praising adjectives in this review – wonderful emotional journey into the history of ”cante”, its roots, its connection to the farming and cooking culture (you see how a bread soup is made, and how bread is baked and red wine is enjoyed) you are invited to enjoy the ”cante” singing by primarily male choirs constituted by Men with furrowed faces and well-fed stomachs, who make the most beautiful performances. You may close your eyes and enjoy, but it would be wrong as the camera catches superbly the faces and the English subtitles, as good as subtitles can be, give you the content of the songs.

What you discover is that the texts are story – telling themselves. Love songs from the countryside, in the beginning a tribute song to

Mother, a song about Death, powerful and sad, about the eternal crisis of Alentejo, and the crisis of today, and the longing to come back to Home, when you have left the culture and its deeply rooted ”cante”. Crisis of today: the film also lets children in a classroom tell their teacher that the parents work abroad, there is nothing for them here. The film ends on a song that includes lyrics like ”abandoned” and ”always been forgotten” and in this way the film is also a political message to the authorities of a Portugal in Lisbon and Porto, the big cities.

The cinematograpy – the dop is Joao Ribeiro – is unique. The singing with the choirs takes place on a black background or in taverns where the singers and the moments where the individuals come into the song are perfectly (= naturally) arranged. Look at the still accompanying this review, of course it is the man to the furthest left, who is the lead singer, whereafter others take over in the a capella performance. The light is set right in this scene from a tavern as many others from similar locations, complemented by the set-ups where you have the choir out-of-location and in the dresses they use for performance. Ribeiro demonstrates a fantastic eye for composition. When you have a person talking to the camera, like the old woman in the beginning of the film, who tells fascinatingly about her childhood, the framing is done through lot of stories told ”around” the woman at the table. Or when you have an old man, also in the beginning, who remembers songs, is emotionally affected and sings one song, waits some moments – the camera stays on him – and sings one more… it is magnificently conveyed.

And thanks for letting the scenes unfold, for being slow = respectful, for letting the characters express themselves!

There is a song ”to every situation” says a young man, who studies ”cante”, and you feel happy when you hear and see three young men in a kitchen where they make the bread soup, eats a bit, salutes each other with a glass of wine and start to sing, and afterwards talk about ”cante”. It’s not about understanding, it’s about ”feeling the lyrics”. He says.

I have followed Sergio Tréfaut’s documentary work for many years. I saw his Portuguese revolution film ”Outro Pais” (1999), his warm film with his mother ”Fleurette” (2002), his ”Lisboners” (2005), the Egypt work ”City of the Dead”. They are all good, however, the new ”Alentejo, Alentejo” seems to me to be the most mature and rich informational and emotional documentary from his hands.

Portugal, 2014, 97 mins.

http://alentejoalentejo.com/en/

http://www.sergiotrefaut.com/alentejo/

 

Alan Berliner: First Cousin Once Removed

Lucky film enthusiasts in Copenhagen: The award-winning documentary by Alan Berliner has been chosen to be “Documentary of the Month” at the Cinematheque in the Film House of the Danish capital. It will have five screenings. A fine Danish language intro is to be found via the link below. Here is a repeat of my review from 2012:

Famous for his film about his father, ”Nobody’s Business”, clever and funny with an excellent, playful montage, it was simply great to watch the newest documentary by Alan Berliner, also with a family member as main protagonist, also with a playful montage and also a tribute to Life even if it deals with Edward Honig, who has Alzheimer’s disease, sits in his chair through the whole film, with family archive material flasbacks here and there and everywhere, shot over five years, a wonderful experience, because Edward Honig was wonderful to meet, a poet and a translator of poetry, among others Portuguese Pessao, a man on his way away from the Life he had been praising again and again, sitting in this room full of books and papers not knowing why and where and what and who.

Berliner asks and asks and gets moments out of Honig, at the same time as he tells the story about him, twice married, haunted his whole life by feeling guilty for the death of his brother when a child, and treating his sons of second marriage really bad. He gets the second wife and the two children into the film as well as other key witnesses to the life of Honig. As well as the director’s own son in musical sequences with the old man. When Honig answers Berliner, he does it normally with a humourous reaction to his own situation, that makes Berliner make excellent associative sequences (often with trains through tunnels) that loosens up tension and gives us viewers a bit of free time to reflect… well it could be on ”la condition humaine” to use a kliché. There are many films about Alzheimer’s disease, and it is indeed hard to watch what used to be a strong, well formulated man get to the point where he expresses himself with sounds, that Berliner refers to as an inspiration coming from outside the window of the room where he sits. From the birds. ”Remember How to Forget”, Honig says, ”little boy, I like you, take me for a ride in your story”, which is what Berliner has done with respect and a storytelling that is non-chronological with an elegance, that makes you think what a wonderful thing FILM is.

USA, 2012, 78 mins.

http://www.alanberliner.com/#

http://www.idfa.nl/industry/tags/project.aspx?id=F840443F-1331-482A-A23D-5C21E854D304&tab=-

http://www.dfi.dk/Filmhuset/Cinemateket/Billetter-og-program/Film.aspx?filmID=f29219

Appalling New Laws for Russian Film people

I got a letter from a friend from the Russian Documentary Guild with a link (see below) to an article that starts like this: ” Two amendments about distribution certificates and prohibition of offensive language in movies entered into force in Russian legislation on cinematography on the 1st of July, 2014. These amendments have fundamentally changed the system of production, film screening and distribution of Russian documentary film industry…”

And it continues like this, “So, from the 1st of July every right holder have to get the certificate even for a single screening of his film in public space wheter it’s a movie club, festival or any other form of sreening or rental. Getting distribution certificate becomes complicated because of the second amendment – prohibition of offensive language in movies. This law contains not only prohibition of some offensive words, but also scenes of smoking, appeals to overthrow the government, extremism, etc. The list of prohibited words doesn’t exist, an independent commission of experts will regard every project and make its own decision. What do the drafters of the law mean by extremism and appeals to overthrow the government isn’t clear either. Mechanism of the expertise is incomprehensible too: who will participate in this evaluation expertise and how this process will be held is explained nowhere…”

And it costs… “Getting a distribution certificate costs about 18-20 thousand rubles (from about $510-$570) for one film (this sum doesn’t include cost of the trip from other cities, and only right holders can get the certificate by themselves in Moscow). Directors who make films without support of the

Ministry of Culture of the Russian Federation but using their own budget, small movie companies and educational institutions won’t be able to afford this sum of money. However, even if some right holders have money, they have no guarantee that they get the distribution certificate quickly. Firstly, the film may not pass the expertise, and secondly, the new law anyway suspends the life of the movie at least for 2-3 months, during which directors can manage to gather all the necessary documents and submit the relevant papers…”

”Various organizations, in particular, Documentary Film Guild and the X International Short and Animation Film Festival Open Cinema wrote open letters about the law of distribution certificates. Marina Razbezhkina, director of the School of documentary film and theater announced that the films of her students and graduates, created without the financial support of the state, wouldn’t participate in festivals and film screenings where the certificates are needed. This law, according to Razbezhkina, introduces censorship in movie industry that violates freedom of speech and expression (Article 29, the Constitution of the Russian Federation).”

Wahnsinn… in 2015, censorship for sure. The Documentary Guild that is doing important work to improve the conditions for documentarians in the big country, deserves support from international organisations and festivals even if – quite a sarchasttic tone – the Guild writes: “…dear foreign colleagues, don’t worry! This law won’t concern you! You can continue to show your movies at international film festivals in Russia with offensive language and without distribution certificates! Come to Russia, we are waiting for you!

http://rgdoc.ru/en/news/

My Greatest Docs Ever

So this is my choice for the Sight & Sound “The Greatest Docs Ever”. I have chosen films that I have used in my work as a teacher and consultant, films that I have come back to because they have meant something to me. I have been influenced by meetings with the directors – Herz Frank, Lozinski, Kossakovsky, Apted, Glawogger, Matelis – and by reading about and listening to clever words by Leacock and Pelichian, not to forget Lanzmann. What the films all have in common, I think, are a belief in the values of Life how hard and unfair it may be to you. A humanistic fundament, can you say so? 6 of the films are from the Eastern part of Europe where I have been working quite a lot and from where most of the original, artistic documentaries come.

Those which are multi-layered, philosophical, essayistic in a Chris Marker-way, sketchy and close to the term “camera comme stylo”. To be stressed: This is a personal choice, if I had gone through film history decade after decade it would have been different.

1.Ten Minutes Older

Herz Frank (photo)

1978

It’s all there. The story of our lives. To be read in the face of a boy. An intellectual, concepedy documentary with Juris Podnieks as cameraman, “the story of good and evil” as the subtitle goes. I have shown it wherever I go to introduce that documentaries must be reflective and philosophical.

2. Shoah

Claude Lanzmann

1985

No words necessary, an obvious choice and Lanzmann’s follow-up “The Last of the Unjust” is an appendix that shows that the director/journalist is still able to add quality to documentary film history.

3. Anything Can Happen

Marcel Lozinski

1995

Playful and clever interpretation of what Life and Death, Joy and Sorrow is – the director’s charming son runs around in a park, where he meets old people

and ask them all kind of questions in a direct way that we grown-ups would never dare. The result is touching and great fun at the same time.

4. The Belovs

Viktor Kossakovsky

1994

I could have taken the director’s last masterpiece, Vivan las Antipodas, as well but this film from the countryside of Russia  brilliantly depicts the Russian soul as we have experienced it in works of Dostoyevsky and Thechov.

5. Man With a Movie Camera

Dziga Vertov

1929

When you get bored of formatted documentaries, this is the one to make you trust the power of the documentary language, the joy of Life, the enthusiasm of what the new medium is able to achieve, innovative and playful, pure pleasure, to watch without music, please!

6. 7UP

Michael Apted

1964 –

It’s like watching yourself… wonderful hymn to human lives… you follow the characters with so much interest and empathy, you cry and laugh with them, it’s a magnificent series, and it also – in its style – is a look at how film and television language has changed through 50 years.

7. Megacities

Michael Glawogger

1998

Few directors have as Glawogger been travelling the world to tell stories about how people live and think and work. This is one of the works from his trilogy (the others are “Workingman’s Death” and “Whore’s Glory”), with a superb cinematography of Wolfgang Thaler, “la condition humaine” is the theme so far away from reportage as one can be.

8. Before Flying Back to the Earth

Arunas Matelis

2005

He comes from the Lithuanian school of poetic documentary, he made several beautiful b/w enigmatic short documentaries but when his daughter got leukemia and was at hospital for months, the director decided to make a film about children in a similar situation and he came up with his magnificent visual poetic homage to how children fight against their serious illness with all they got of courage and humour!

9. Seasons

Artavadz Pelichian

1975

I have never understood Pelichian’s montage theory but this his masterpiece will always attract an audience to see the power of the single image, at the same time as the film is anthropological, have totally abstract, non-figurative sequences, no words, Vivaldi “only”. You are speechless when you have been with peasants and sheep up and down the hills. If you look carefully there are small human stories, happiness and grief.

10. Jazz Dance

Richard Leacock

1954

I had to have Leacock on board… his filmography is extraordinary, his work with Flaherty is unique, his work with the other direct cinema people (Pennebaker, Maysles, Drew) likewise, but I have chosen this one that he himself has talked so well about, where he went bananas in a night club, filmed from the table, a jamming with the camera, a true FREE film.

The Greatest Documentaries of All Times

The international film magazine Sight & Sound has ”polled 340 critics, programmers and filmmakers in the search for authoritative answers”, which are now published in two parts (click on link below) – ”the top 50 documentaries as nominated by 237 critics, curators and academics” and ”the greatest documentaries ever made, as voted by 103 directors”.

Why… they give the answer themselves: ”The new Sight & Sound documentary poll is the result of a “why didn’t we think of that before” moment. In the light of the amazing recent success and cultural impact of several nonfiction films, a group of curators, myself included, were chewing over what the BFI might do specifically for documentary films and television. It soon became obvious that we were not sure exactly what it was that we were trying to discuss.”

And the result: “What’s remarkable about the Top 50 documentaries list is that it feels so fresh. One in five of the films chosen were made since the millennium, and to have a silent film from 1929 at the top of the list is an absolute joy. That allusive essay films feature so strongly throughout demonstrates that nonfiction cinema is not a narrow discipline but a wide open country full of explorers. The current print edition of S&S contains only the highlights of our results; the real explorers among you will want to browse the full results and commentaries which goes live online on the 14th August.”

Let me reveal the top three of the critics etc.: 1. Man with a Movie Camera, Dziga Vertov, USSR 1929. 2. Shoah, Claude Lanzmann, France, 1985. 3. Sans Soleil, Chris Marker, France, 1982 – and the top three of the filmmakers:  1. Man with a Movie Camera, Dziga Vertov, USSR, 1929. 2. Sans Soleil, Chris Marker, France, 1982. 3. The Thin Blue Line, Errol Morris, USA, 1989.

Not that surprising – the freshness that is mentioned above comes in when you examine the list more detailed and find films like “The Act of Killing” and “Leviathan”.

I was asked to participate in the voting as critic/programmer. Tomorrow I will bother you with my list.

http://www.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/sight-sound-magazine/polls-surveys/greatest-documentaries-all-time-poll

http://www.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/sight-sound-magazine/polls-surveys/documentary-poll-acknowledgements

Robert Drew 1924-2014

Richard Leacock died 2011 and yesterday one more from the Direct Cinema movement of the 1960’es that changed the documentary history, passed away: Robert Drew. As USA Today puts it in their factual obituary:

Drew formed Drew Associates in 1960 with the goal of applying his magazine experience to films. Among those joining him were such future directors as Pennebaker (Don’t Look Back, The War Room), Maysles (who with brother David made Gimme Shelter and Grey Gardens) and Richard Leacock (Happy Mother’s Day).

“I wondered why documentaries on television were dull,” he told The New York Times in 2013. “I had no doubt we could make a lighter camera, and I started with that premise and started finding people who could do that.” Referring to the creative trio above, where – seen retrospectively – Drew was maybe the perfect executive producer.

The trade magazine Realscreen (link below) calls Drew a “documentary pioneer” and highlights the masterpiece “Primary” (1960), where Drew ”convinced” JFK to take part in a film about his campaign. JFK became in many ways the character of Drew’s films – in 2008 ”he released A President to Remember, which used footage from several of his Kennedy films, and at the time of his passing today (July 30), his entire collection of films is in the process of being preserved by the archives of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences, of which he was a member.”

Sooo much of today´s observational documentary filming (create “the feeling of being there” as Leacock said) owes to the pioneers of Direct Cinema, whose films are available on dvd’s today. You just do a little googling to see where. And check the vod’s and YouTube.

www.realscreen.com

Europe Créative MEDIA Doc Results

Every thursday I receive the French newsletter@mediafrance.eu called e-MEDIA, last week number 387. It gives for the professional sector useful and precise information about upcoming deadlines for applications to get support from the (now) Creative Europe – Media, as well as paragraphs on festivals and results of supported projects. The angle is of course French but there are always links that give the whole picture – below you have one that will take you to the list of the companies that have received 25.000€ to develop their documentary.  

87 projects in development were supported, 36 of them documentaries in the so-called single-project scheme. (There is also a scheme for slate-funding).

Being the first round under the new Creative Europe-Media and having heard the usual rumours about (one more) centralisation to be performed from the offices in Brussels, I studied the list and was happy to see the diversity of countries, and that the smaller and weaker countries were there. Let me mention three projects that I was happy to eye:

”River Tales” by Activist38 in Bulgaria ( = Mina Mileva and Vesela Kazakova), ”Next Stop: Utopia” from Greece (= Marco Gastine as producer and Apostolos Karakasis as director) (photo from previous film of Karakasis, “National Garden”) and ”Dangerous Liaisons, Russia’s Soft Power” from strong Latvian company Mistrus Media (= Gints Grube). And there are Czech projects, Italian, Belgian – whereas the big countries France and Germany are not at all ”eating it all”. 

A new ”appel à projects” will be published this autumn.

If you click the link of the newsletter – above – you can get in contact with the Media France and get on the list to receive the information.

http://www.mediafrance.eu/

Docs at Venezia International Film Festival

August 27 until September 6 it’s time for the 71st edition of the festival in Venice, a festival that in its selection increases its interest in showing documentaries – remember that the winner last year was ”Sacro Gra” by Gianfranco Rosi.

The Line-Up, as it is called on the website of the festival, has an Official Selection and Autonomous Sections. In the main competition you find ”The Look of Silence” by Joshua Oppenheimer, 98 minutes, by the team behind ”The Act of Killing”.

Here is a quote from the newsletter from The Danish Film Institute announcing the film’s Venice participation: “The Look of Silence” revisits the Indonesian genocide, this time telling the story from the victims’ perspective. “The Look of Silence” follows a family whose son was killed in the Indonesian genocide, accused of being a communist. The youngest son in the family, now grown up, vows to confront the people who killed his brother. It is these encounters that make up the core of the film…” (Photo: Lars Skree)

In the “Out of Competition” you find Gabriele Salvatores “Italy in a Day” and Ulrich Seidl’a “Im Keller”, in the International Critics Week I am happy to find Ivan Gergolet’s “Dancing with Maria” that has been pitched at several sessions, I have attended, now an Italian, Argentinian, Slovenian coproduction.

… and then the long awaited film “Messi” by Alex de la Iglesia.

… and a well deserved life achievement to Frederick Wiseman.

http://www.labiennale.org/en/cinema/

News from Paris in Sarajevo: WARM Festival 2014

The First World WARM Festival took place in Sarajevo June 28 to July 4, concurrent with 100th anniversary of the beginning of the First World War. This new festival focuses on contemporary conflicts through exhibitions, film screenings and conferences. Behind the festival lies the Warm Foundation, a project that grew out of the reunion of reporters and photographers in Sarajevo in 2012, regathering twenty years after the beginning of the siege of the city during the Bosnian war (1992-95). WARM is dedicated to war reporting and war art, as well as history and memories of war, and dedicated to the promotion of emerging talents and to education as well as bringing together people with a common passion for “telling the story with excellence and integrity”. This interesting initiative is headed by Rémy Ourdan, long-time war correspondent at Le Monde, and works out of Sarajevo, Paris, London and New York. The plan is to open a center in Sarajevo hosting research, archives, co-production and -publishing, a residence and the development of an educational program.

The festival offered a vast program this year. Five intense days with brutal, overwhelming and important insights into contemporary conflicts and into how stories about war can be told through different medias. It all being set in the city of Sarajevo only adds to the impressive atmosphere. Here’s a short account of what I saw.

The festival opened with an outdoor exhibition Every State of War, an excellent selection of cartoons from around the world, notably Syria and Iran, curated by Plantu, cartoonist for Le Monde and founder of Cartooning for Peace (an association created to promote tolerance and mutual understanding between cultures as a reaction to the Mohammed cartoons). Another exhibition, Chris Hondros Testament, showed the work, photographs and writing, of the American photojournalist Chris Hondros who died in Libya in 2011. And now to the film program…

 

Two evenings were dedicated to Syria. The Syrian filmmaker collective Abounaddara presented Snapshots of History in the Making, a montage of short films made from anonymous filmmakers throughout Syria, preceded by the slideshow The Way to the Frontline, photographs by Laurent Van der Stockt from Jobar, Damascus. And next, a screening of the documentary Silvered Water, Syria Self-Portrait by Ossama Mohammed and Wiam Simav Bedirxan, the first screening since the premiere at Cannes this year. I will try to write more about these two films later.

French filmmaker Florent Marcie screened a long version (over 4 ½ hours!) of his film Tomorrow Tripoli – The Revolution of the Rats, a world premiere. Marcie arrived at Zintan, a small city in northwestern Libya, in February 2011 and followed a group of local rebels from the beginning of the insurrection until their arrival at Tripoli and the death of Gaddafi in October the same year. Marcie participated in this epic voyage filming the frontline of the revolution and it’s men, literally in between bullets and heavy shelling. This is cinema engagé, engaged cinema with a capital E! Marcie, a truly independent, always works alone and does everything, including editing and postproduction, by him self. Working outside the traditional film production, funding and distribution circles, the film is made with and for the participants, the rebels of Zintan, who also has been participating in the financing of the production. This quite radical manner of working was reflected even at the festival, where over a hundred of zintanais flew in from Tripoli to Sarajevo to discover the film for the first time!

All screenings took place at the cinema Meeting point, which also hosts the upcoming Sarajevo Film Festival. A great place with a nice bar and terrace where you can have the much-needed drink and talk after the heavy screenings.

Much more was going on at the festival, I’ll mention a last event: #Dystyrb is a group of photographers that uses urban space as a media to expose photographic stories. At night, large format posters are plastered up on walls throughout the city, a way to reach a public without depending on the traditional publishing medias. During the festival, the group exposed the work of French photographer Camille Lepage, recently killed in the Central African Republic.

Abounaddara, Tomorrow Tripoli and #Dystyrb are all WARM partner projects. The festival finely reflected the purpose of the WARM Foundation: creating a forum for different actors to meet and work together. People from the field, journalists, photographers, filmmakers, writers, artists, ngo’s, historians, archivists, associations and institutions such as the international festival of photojournalism in Perpignan Visa pour l’Image, The Bayeux-Calvados Award for War Correspondents, The Imperial War Museum, The Red Cross Museum, la Bibliothèque de documentation international contemporaine, amongst others.

Sarajevo is a wonderful place to visit, so why not combine it with checking out this festival that takes place in the city every year at the end of June. All events at the festival are public and free.

Read more:

http://www.warmfoundation.org/

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kj-wetherholt/the-warm-foundation_b_3857148.html

http://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/120-libyan-rebels-fly-to-bosnia-to-watch-a-movie/2014/07/03/b060f4fe-02b8-11e4-866e-94226a02bc8d_story.html

http://www.cartooningforpeace.org/?lang=en

DokuFest XIII Announces Full Slate!

At the same time as Sarajevo has its festival with a documentary competition programme, the Prizren, Kosovo based DokuFest takes place, August 16-24 with quite an extensive selection – quote from press release, ” Culled from a record number of nearly 2.400 submissions, the festival will showcase a fine selection of 237 films from 56 countries across 6 competitive sections and more than a dozen specially curated programs.”

That the festival aims at a wider audience is obvious, it opens with ”Everyday Rebellion” by the Arash brothers from Austria and closes with the Oscar winner ”Twenty Feet from Stardom”. There is a focus in USA with classics shown as ”Hoop Dreams” by Steve James and ”Hearts and Minds” by Peter Davis. There is tribute to Michael Glawogger and ” films about music, technology, and recent conflicts in Middle East, environmental issues and human rights are all part of the program..”.

The festival is super-professionally presented, documentaries all over, long and short, there are new films like James work on the critic Roger Ebert, “Life itself” and “Silvered Water, Syria Self-Portrait” by Ossama Mohammed and Wiam Simav Bedirxan.

Let me give the floor to the charismaric festival director: “This year DokuFest is full with films that show us that there is no other art form capable of moving us to tears, bringing us joy, taking us to places of horror and making us stand and want to change the world we’re living in, all at the same time.” said Veton Nurkollari, Artistic Director of DokuFest. “From the work of emerging filmmakers to the masters of the craft, and from filmmakers who are first timers to the ones who are returning, we are delighted to present an outstanding selection of films for this year’s edition.”

http://dokufest.com/2014/dokufest-xiii-announces-competition-titles/