OK, this film represents everything that I dislike about a certain kind of documentaries: It is – to quote the description in the site of the festival here in Zagreb – ”eye-popping”, ”stunning” and I could add sentimental over-the-limit of decency and what is worst: hypocritical.

The film shows how a young really good snow boarder, Kevin Pearce, crashes dramatically (you are invited ”to enjoy” the accident again and again), recovers his brain injury, wants to get back to the sport, mum and dad and brothers (one of them with down’s syndrom) don’t like the idea, the doctors warn him as his brain is not as it was, and at the end he gives up and starts a fund/social movement it is called called ”Love your Brain”. Halleluja!

The hyprocrisy comes in through the storytelling that the director has chosen. She paints a super glamorous picture of the sport and its young fit practitioners. Fantastic images of their acrobatic jumps and movements in the air, all wrapped in music from wall to wall, and of course a hurrah for an artificial world that is full of money and commercials. She points at the competitive point between Kevin and Shaun White, another snow boarder, it’s all very good and healthy. Accompanied by visits to the house of the understanding family Pearce, who sits down at the dinner table and talks about Kevin and what he wants with his sport and life – brother David with the down’s syndrom is the one who says that he suffers from Kevin’s playing with life and death. And mother crying again and again as she goes around with her son to doctors and psychiatrists… It’s just too much…

And then at the end of the film, after another injury where a young female snow boarder dies (of course we see the deadly crash), the film tries to raise just a bit of discussion about the sport… and we hear a panel of the young colleagues of Kevin express that they have also broken this and that in their bodies many times but… why bother, is the impression of the message you get after having been through the visual hymn to a sport that is dangerous but produces superb and entertaining and sensational images!   

USA, 2013, 109 mins.

www.zagrebdox.net

http://www.kevinpearce.com/

We have very often been informed about the terrible conditions for the inmates in Russian prisons. The released Pussy Riot members were the last ones to point out that something needs to be changed… to use an understatement.

This film, produced by the film school VGIK, adds excellently to the information that we have, not by showing but by having an ex-inmate tell her story from a point of view that (literally) is placed just opposite the prison building that is surrounded by barbed wire. Sometimes there is no water available. Sometimes the light is kept on during nights to prevent the inmates to fall asleep. The inmates (it is a prison for women) are not allowed to communicate from one cell to the other. If that happens, sounds of sirens are put on so nothing can be heard. And so on so forth, a flow of examples of physical and mental torture.

The film crew is inside the prison as well. They have filmed rehearsals and performances of songs and sketches, melancholic Russian love songs conveyed from a stage. But they have also caught faces and situations of tenderness between the women inside. Love grows between the women, not allowed of course, but families are created in the prison, as says the chain-smoking woman who is our storyteller, and who also painfully tells us her own story of relationship(s) that broke. 76 out ot 100 go back to prison – no freedom outside, better suffer inside… You could argue that the camerawork could be better but (also) in this case the content is so strong that it takes you by the heart. Good choice by ZagrebDox!

Russia, 2012, 43 mins.

http://zagrebdox.net/en

This Oscar-nominated documentary is very entertaining because of its interesting characters, who are full of life and memories about their lives as back-up singers – and about their attempt to get to the foreground as lead singers. People like Sting and Bruce Springfield talk well and supporting about the unique voices they have used to help them perform, there are great archive with the two and the singers and with Ray Charles, as well as interviews with Stevie Wonder and Mick Jagger, fine anecdotes, yes for sure an entertaining film, which is also about the tough commercial music industry fighting each other, and about the roots in the gospel music.

And then – surprise, surprise – comes the critic’s BUT the film is not so well put together, it feels a bit messy in structure, and too long, maybe because, with all respect, the women are not all sooo interesting, but they get equal film time. Here they are: Darlene Love, Merry Clayton, Claudia Lennear, Táta Vega, the Waters. The photo shows three more: Jo Lawry, Judith Hill and Lisa Fischer. Especially the latter shows her extraordinary talent in the film. She came to the forefront, got awards, released record(s) but did not make it further.

And we would have loved more music, would we not… here enters the question of rights and money to buy clips.

Anyway, I was humming on my way back to the hotel after the late night screening at ZagrebDox, cinema 5, full house.

USA, 2013, 90 mins.

http://zagrebdox.net/en/2014/home

ZagrebDox places the film in the ”Happy Dox” category. Here is some background on theme and on story from the idfa catalogue synopsis 2013: Bhutan is one of the least developed countries in the world. There is barely any industry, and electricity was not commonplace until very recently. This meant that people led their lives without TV, let alone Internet. But both arrived at last in 1999, following an official announcement by King Jigme Singye Wangchuk. The advent of electricity was revolutionary for the tiny mountainside villages in this Himalayan kingdom. Peyangki is a dreamy and solitary eight-year-old monk who lives in the last village to get hooked up. In anticipation of this big event, Peyangki’s uncle decides to buy a TV set, which will take a three-day journey to Bhutan’s capital of Thimpu. Peyangki will go along on the trip, his first foray into the big city. “Do you expect TV to make you happy?” asks the lama of the last five monks at Peyangki’s monestery. The answer is a resounding “Yes.”…

“Happiness” is beautifully shot, the boy is brilliant and convincing as is his mother, with whom he has many wonderful scenes, it is here that the film lives, whereas the story about the tv, that breaks so the uncle has to go to the city to buy a new one, feels fake and too arranged, and does thus not really work in this scripted documentary, that makes you smile, think of Sergey Dvortsevoy without Balmés having his rough poetic touch, it is much more smooth in style, and the ending of the film with a sequence of faces looking at us viewers/Westeners is far too much in its “moralistic” message: What are we doing to the people, who had a natural and harmonious life far away from “our” world. This is how I read it. What a pity for a film that could live without such finger-pointing… respect the audience, please.

France/Finland, 2013, 80 mins.

http://www.idfa.nl/industry/tags/project.aspx?id=d40497b2-f646-4a70-9a1d-330bbce58e06#sthash.5G0KOVKN.dpuf

http://zagrebdox.net/en/2014/home

Croatian director (b.1972) Damir Cucic “opened” my 2014 ZagrebDox screening schedule, and thanks for that. The festival had very rightly arranged a small retrospective of the work of a director, who deserves much more international attention that he gets at the moment, for his original approach and personal documentary film language. Let me highlight two of the films in the four-titled programme: “La Strada” (2004) (photo) and “The Forgotten” (2002). 

Vodnjan is the location of the 29 mins. long observation of people and life in a town close to the sea and Italy. The film is episodic, it conveys the impressions of its director in a beautiful rythmic way. You are taken to a Southern European mood, where children are playing in the looong street (“La Strada”), men are hanging out with a beer in hand, old people sit in their plastic chairs looking at the young women passing by, it is all very summerly and inviting, many languages, old couples discussing what was good in the past and today, faces, small situations – great great camerawork, unconventional editing.

“The Forgotten” (35 mins.) takes you to the countryside, to a village, Zumberak, which is at the border of Croatia and Slovenia. Again the cameraman Boris Poljak and the composer Goran Strbac (as in “La Strada”) together with the director/editor Cucic break the rules of dramaturgy, taking the viewer away from the main circling structure around people and the environment, stopping at other moments, where snow is melting into drops of water from the trees, a small symphony one could say, a film “within” the film,

true poetry. And sometimes, with the music/the sound design, you sense a kind of “jamming”, putting the images together with the sound into a composition that stresses that here is a filmmaker, who goes from description to interpretation in exceptional sequences. What a beauty, I wrote in the dark of the cinema, and I wrote “a Croatian Audrius Stonys”, a master, who, he told me afterwards, is (like Lithuanian Stonys) influenced by Artavadz Pelisjan (“Seasons”). And I repeat myself – there are too few poets in documentary cinema. Damir Cucic is one.

And then back to the festival and its message on the internet:  “On Monday, 24 February, in the evening, we received a letter from producer Siniša Juričić, notifying us that under the threat of a lawsuit he is forced to withdraw the film “Mitch – The Diary of a Schizophrenic” directed by Damir Čučić. From the very beginning, ZagrebDox has been strongly focused on the wish to initiate dialogues, be a platform for the screening of diverse documentaries, confronting ideas, aesthetics and ideologies, a place of encounter for filmmakers, protagonists, audience and critics. Therefore, without entering the (legal) nature, the festival management express their regret that these acclaimed and multiple award-winning filmmakers – Damir Čučić and Siniša Juričić – were denied this chance.”

http://zagrebdox.net/en/2014/home

ZagrebDox 2014 is running. I have watched several films, reviews and reports will follow. Here are some memories which are published in the catalogue of the festival. A look back to the first edition of ZagrebDox Pro:

In 2005 ZagrebDox started. And today it is a very well established and functioning documentary event, respected among professionals all over Europe and (most important) with quite a strong audience attendance. It has a regional Competition, an international competition, side programmes, retrospectives, debates, you name it…

The man in the middle, the founder of it all, Nenad Puhovski, asked me for advice and help, when he started the festival. He wanted to establish a pitching forum like the ones we had been organising for almost a decade at the EDN (European Documentary Network), where I was the director and Nenad member of the Executive Committee. The first year, 2005, it was more a kind of workshop, where 14 projects were brought for development discussions with knowledgeable people like Sabine Bubeck from ZDF/arte, the distributor and producer Heino Deckert, Rada Sesic from the idfa Jan Vrijman Fund – and Nenad, Cecilia Lidin, my colleague from EDN and me.Among the 14 filmmakers were names like Macedonian Atanas Georgiev, Sinisa Juricic from Croatia, the Serbians Zeljko Mirkovic and Boris Mitic, Assen Vladimirov from Bulgaria. All of them now well known names internationally, who have pitched their way to co-productions and/or support from broadcasters and funds.

The 2005 opening of the festival was great for me, not only because of the workshop but also because Nenad had asked me to a member of the jury – that has to watch all international AND regional films. I was with idfa’s Adriek van Nieuwenhuyzen and local master Krsto Papić. We did not have time to watch all the films in the theatre, so Adriek and I were running down the corridor of our hotel to exchange vhs tapes of the films. Pioneer times!

Pitching… I asked Nenad to refresh my memory for this introduction…

article to the retrospective of pitched projects that became films after Zagreb and many other pitching events, and he sent me an article from the catalogue, where he describes the times, when he started his career ” when “getting” a documentary film was relatively easy”, through conversations and the result was that these “humane, relaxed and creative contact with an editor or a dramatist resulted in some of the best Croatian documentaries of that time…”

Nenad and I are from same great (!) generation, now grandfathers, and I remember the same situation from the other side of the table, as film consultant at the Film Board of Denmark. Yes, it was conversations, coffee and cigarettes, some paper work (from half apage to let’s say 10), ok here is the money, full financing, and good films were made.

So, the question comes up: Do all the pitching sessions, the trailers/pilots, the paper work, the financing plans, the rough cut showings etc. – do they produce better films at the end of the day?

And now you get a real Danish answer: Maybe! Honestly, I think that with the pitching itself (the 7 minutes including visuals + the 7 minutes discussion) it is impossible to convey what you want to do, BUT you can raise interest for further coffe conversations (no tobacco, smoking is disappearing, I am afraid), contacts, budget strategies so you get money from the MEDIA Programme etc. AND in many cases you see good films being produced with a director from one country, a cameraman from another, an editor from a third…Creativity has no borders. And through pitching sessions and other market events a new generation of producers, who know how to move internationally, has come up. And first of all, it is for bigger budget films a necessity to go and sell your film project.

Look at the titles of films that passed by ZagrebDox to be discussed as projects and pitched. There are more that could have been picked, but the 7 chosen are films with high quality, some with strong international support, some with local/regional.

“Cash and Marry” (photo), I was at ZagrebDox for the premiere, there was a crazy and wonderful atmosphere in the hall at the University Campus. “The Caviar Connection”, I remember my nervousness on their behalf when Dragan and Jovana Nikolic pitched at idfa Amsterdam, they became the stars of that year. “Cinema Komunisto”, well the film runs in cinema in Paris… I have brilliant memories from many good years at the festival and I am happy to see that ZagrebDoxPro still exists, in a much bigger version now, and well handled by two other EDN persons: Leena Pasanen and Stefano Tealdi.

 

There you sit in your comfortable armchair. You watch, you listen, you read about Ukraine, feeling shocked and hopeless… December seems far away, at that time I posted a text about the Docudays festival people taking active part in the events on Maidan in Kiev (photo). This is what they wrote before a screening took place in the square:

”Docudays UA is an apolitical festival. But it is about human rights and the choice each one of us always has: to accept the dictatorship regime or to fight for the victory of democracy. The future of Ukraine depends on the choice each one of us has to make. That is why Docudays UA is with Maidan!”.

To say the least the events in Maidan have taken quite a different direction. More than 80 protesters have been killed. Nervously about the DocuDays people, I wrote and got an email answer from one of the dear friends from the festival yesterday: ”It’s tragic time here: we can’t believe how many beautiful people died for new country. And it’s happy time here: we feel, that now we are absolutely new nation: strong and brave…”

The festival people have their office close to Maidan. It serves as a shelter for friends, foreign journalists, film-makers, activists – and for preparing the upcoming DocuDays March 21-28. What an energy and dedication! Respect and hugs, wishing them all the best!

To read about the latest developments, the DocuDays people recommend

http://en.pravda.com.ua/

http://www.docudays.org.ua/eng/

http://www.filmkommentaren.dk/blog/blogpost/2576/