Dimitri Eipides, founder and director of the Thessaloniki Documentary Festival, had made the obvious choice to present two tributes at the festival, one for the late Peter Wintonick, who came to the festival so many times to pass his wisdom and inspiration, and a retrospective with Nicolas Philibert, with whom there was an interesting press conference, here is the intro, if you click “press conference” below you get it all:

“I apologize for not speaking Greek. My father, however, did study ancient Greek and this always impressed me about him,” Nicolas Philibert, the French director said in the opening remarks of his press conference that took place in the context of the 16th Thessaloniki Documentary Festival, which is paying tribute to his work. Talking about the elements that link his documentaries, he said: “The first one is that I always try to “infiltrate” a group of people. My films are about working people, but I believe that at a deeper level they revolve around language, speech, voice. I am interested in sound, in noise, in language; these are the things that all my films have in common. There is also an underlying political theme in all my work, a moral theme if you will, which could be epitomized by the question: “What on earth am I doing here?”

The festival ends tomorrow, March 23rd.

6 3D documentaries by Wim Wenders, Michael Glawogger, Michael Madsen, Robert Redford, Margreth Olin and Karim Ainouz. Executive producer: Wim Wenders. Each film is 26 mins. long.

Subtitle: ”If Buildings Could Talk” and this is where the overall problem lies if the idea is that they have to be watched as one film with six locations… I saw it like that at the press screening tuesday and this is how the 6 are to be screened at the Copenhagen Architecture Festival x Film, with one small break.

So for you festival people out there or television buyers – show them one by one, or maybe in pairs, there is a couple of excellent works to be enjoyed. If you – literally – sit and watch buildings talk in first person to you (”I am a building”) film after film, you get exhausted, even more, simply fed up by a constructed verbal concept that almost makes you want to shout ”shut up”, let me watch!

Having said so, of course you can not put all under one roof, the films are different in quality as I will try to phrase in the following mini-reviews that follow the viewing order of my screening:

Wim Wenders: The Berlin Philharmonic

… is so wonderful to watch, and listen to, and the fatigue around the ”I am a building” first person is not there, yet – maybe that’s why Wenders as ex. producer put himself first!? Anyway, you get a beautiful tour in the concert hall, you get information about how the building was constructed, you get the historical background, there is a fine use of archive material, there is a sense

for the detail, Wenders lets the architect Hans Scharoun come alive with his idea of an equal society conveyed in the concert hall. It’s joyful and Simon Rattle as the artistic director and conductor is a great character. The 3D is perfect for that film. Objections: Some characters are introduced in an artificial way like the little boy running to the technical room, the old man who was in the first orchestra, the woman reparing the floor…  (4 sharp nibs !!!!) 

Michael Glawogger: The National Library of Russia

… is close to my heart as educated librarian (in the last century), and because this is magic St. Petersburg, where you have this fantastic building in the middle of the city, on Nevski Prospekt, where you with Glawogger in a few seconds leave modern times and enter a place full of people and books and index cards and kilometers of bookshelves and students at their small study tables and old ladies sitting in their small booths writing on their cards or taking books out to be transported to the reader in the reading room. Glawogger avoids the ”I am a building”. Instead he lets voices and texts come out from the images – Dostojevski of course, Bunin, Brodsky and many others – unfortunately difficult to understand it all as there are Russian voices in the background with an English voice in the foreground that only gives some of the texts, if I got it right. Visually this film is excellent, there is a flow, a constant movement, great close-ups, small stories within the overall story, Glawogger and his cameraman Wolfgang Thaler succeed to convey their fascination fully. A great visit! (5 sharp nibs !!!!!)

Michael Madsen: Halden Prison (photo)

… is with Glawogger’s film absolutely the best in the collection. His choice of a prison as a cultural cathedral is original, his first person building text is good and balanced – even if I here at the third film in a row started to ask myself if it could have been done in another way than ”what would they say the buildings…” – he has found a tone for the film, and a very simple structure: a man is taken to the prison, he is filmed from behind in a car, he gets out, is checked and taken to his cell.

From there the film goes to the prison’s many locations, in what is called the world’s most human prison. His cameraman (also Thaler) films inmates, who are posing for the film, we see the lovely surroundings, the architectual details and the small house within the prison meant for family visits, and the isolation cell where human shit is being washed from walls and floor… there is also a social element in this film that again shows Madsen’s unique visual talent. (4 sharp nibs !!!!)

Robert Redford: Salk Institute

… is the most conventional, tv-like and boring of the 6 films. Again and again we are invited to watch the same building, again and again Redford lets the same people walk in and out of the building, pose thoughtfully, cross the square etc. I have seen films with architect Kahn before, also images from the Institute, and it would have been much better to tell the story of Salk and Kahn in a non 3D format, that adds nothing to a film that basically is built on the dialogue between the two. (2 sharp nibs !!)

Margreth Olin: The Oslo Opera House

… is the most disappointing for me as I have always admired Olin for her social documentaries and had the hope she could cope with a new theme and a different narrative challenge. What went wrong? The text – ”I am a building” – is very weak, banalities, images drown in clichés – dancers in movements, then stop and freeze the movements into b/w stills, a little bit from that performance, a little bit from another, centered around love and pain, I think, I have to confess that I don’t get the basic idea of the cinematic construction. I am sure there is one. Would have loved to see more of the architecture of a House, that seems magic. (3 sharp nibs !!!)

Karim Ainouz: Centre Pompidou

… is, alas, a film without any atmosphere about a place that this reviewer has enthusiastically visited yearly since it opened. An observational method with some characters to be followed, faces maybe, a process maybe, like Nicolas Philibert did when he was in Louvre, would have helped to create a film. Now it’s just a little bit of everything wrapped in a text about the ”I” = the building that was controversial once, shamed upon as looking as an oil refinery, now having ”the nostalgic charm of a steam engine”. There is no red thread as there are in the works of Glawogger and Madsen, and yes Wenders, who set the whole thing up and thanks for that – with a final result that he can only be partly happy with. (2 sharp nibs !!)

… is a yearly seminar day dedicated to the documentary film, open for participation by Danish filmmakers, producers, film school students, television people with a relationship to the genre, consultants etc. from the Danish Film Institute (DFI), that is the organiser and programmer of the event that takes place in the Film House in the middle of Copenhagen.

I have participated several times and also this year it was well organised with informative and inspiring sessions… and you get to meet old friends and have a chat.

Claus Ladegaard, head of production at DFI, opened the day’s programme with a short speech that outlined the situation for the Danish documentary seen from the DFI point of view. Three points are essential for us, he said: Quality, Diversity and Volumen. He found it difficult to be worried about the Quality of Danish documentaries that travel the world and are screened on television nationally and abroad. Nevertheless, he quoted editor Niels Pagh who at a previous seminar had asked his colleagues: ”are we tooo good in storytelling…” pointing to the fact that many Danish documentaries have adopted the classical Hollywood dramaturgy and make smooth, predictable films accordingly. In the upcoming political agreement for the next 4 years, said Ladegaard, the DFI is thus calling for more experimentation, hybrid forms, interactive documentaries etc. And for financing models that do not necessarily include television. DFI is soon

publishing a research on the financial status of Danish documentary companies and it looks like (the few) companies that live primarily from producing documentaries, live longer – still, as he concluded: the financing is fragile, the results impressive. He also mentioned that the % of financing from DFI, for the individual project, has gone up to 50. Producer’s job to raise the rest! By the way, the DFI has spent 220 mio. DKK (a bit less than 30 mio.€) on documentaries in the past four years.

I attended a fine informative ”interactive documentary” session, inspiring it was, especially when it came to a discussion about form and content, what comes first, whereas (no surprise) there was a general understanding that technique must not be the decisive element – and yet there was of course technical problems at the session. I learned a lot so no question about the value of the theme brought forward.

The highlight for me, however, was a session with the three filmmakers Anders Østergaard (Burma vj), Jakob Thuesen (director and editor of many documentaries, among them the masterpiece ”Haïti Untitled” by Jørgen Leth) and Laurits Munch-Petersen. The latter is the grandchild of Gustaf Munch-Petersen (photo), poet and painter, who was shot in 1938, 26 years old, in the Spanish Civil War, that he joined to become a Republican volunteer. He left Denmark and, without notice, his pregnant wife. The daughter Ursula, mother of Laurits, never saw her father.

Munch-Petersen had plans to do a fiction film on the life of his famous grandfather (whose poetry became natural reading in the gymnasium for my generation) but dropped it and is now finishing his documentary with the help of Østergaard and Thuesen. The three of them showed clips that looked very promising and Østergaard explained how the collaboration between the two had been. It was the intention of Østergaard to push Munch-Petersen into the film, to become a character. In the clips shown, you see how convincingly that works and you see how lucky the directors were suddenly to be able to include in the film a reconstruction of the battle of Ebro, which are performed every year by amateurs. Munch-Petersen puts on a uniform and takes part. A unique chance to make the direct parallel between Gustaf in 1938 and Laurits today. The wonderful wildness of editor Thuesen came out totally in clips where he integrates quotes from ”Le Chien Andalou” and other surrealistic (Gustaf was part of that -ism) films as well as many other archive bits to give atmosphere. Looking fwd to that film!

Later in the afternoon director Joshua Oppenheimer and producer Signe Byrge Sørensen told about ”The Act of Collaboration”, giving an overview of the production story of ”The Act of Killing”. I had never experienced the two together – it was fine to notice how beautiful the director talked about the Danish producer and her commitment and competence.

As always the Dok Day ended with a screening of a new film. This was the Swedish/Danish coproduction ”Freak Out!” by Carl Javér, which ”tells the untold story of the birth of the alternative movement and unfold the uncanny similarities between our time and what they revolted against in the early 1900s”, in the way that it ”mixes interviews, archive and animation in a beautiful combination
bringing you straight back to the early 1900 as seen through the eyes of theese young radicals.” Quotes from the website of the film:

http://www.freakoutmovie.org/