DocAlliance Offer Films by Peter Liechti

The vod that calls itself “your online documentary cinema”, and very right so, always high quality has this time chosen to present 11 films by a real auteur, Peter Liechti, for free until February16. The text that introduces the director follows below and on the site you will also find the interview that Sevara Pan has made with Liechti for the spring2014 issue that just came out. Pan made earlier a review on filmkommentaren of Liechti’s “Father’s Garden – the Love of my Parents”, which is not part of the retrospective. If you have time for only one film, choose “Sound of Insects”.

DocAlliance: What forms can documentary film take? Really extraordinary ones, as far as films by internationally renowned Swiss director Peter Liechti are concerned. To Liechti, the film medium is an open field entered by other art elements such as music and literary text. Under his directing guidance, plastic documentary images emerge, dominated by a common trait; that of a stream of imagination. Learn more about the power of Liechti’s visual language in a unique online retrospective from February 10 to 16 at DAFilms.com for free!

The online selection of Liechti’s works represents a summary of his films made in more than 20 years. During this time, Peter Liechti, who had originally studied visual arts, has created a specific film language with an emphasis on the powerful combination of long takes, macroscopic details and literary means of expression. In case of Liechti’s films, the label “documentary essay“ is more than fitting. The unique compilation, with its accord of narrative and visually powerful images, is perhaps best represented by the highly suggestive documentary The Sound of Insects: Report of a Mummy, which has received the Prix Arte of the European Film Academy in 2009. The voluntary death of the protagonist, accompanied by a philosophical reflection on the birth and death of life, is captured by means of the miniature movement of individual natural elements.

However, the rest of Liechti’s works deserve attention as well. A specific combination of electronic music and film characterizes Liechti’s debut Kick That Habit. Music has also been the main theme of the appreciated film Namibia Crossings capturing an ethnically diverse group of musicians on tour in the South African state. Whereas music is a strong linking element between the individual protagonists, their cultural differences and bias lead to many a misunderstanding. The director’s personal testimony about the search for his own roots, integrated in the story of his attempt to get rid of his nicotine addiction, is given during the contemplative journey to the director’s native city in Lucky Jack.

http://dafilms.com/event/156-the-power-of-imagination-a-retrospective-of-peter-liechti/

Michael Madsen m. fl.: Cathedrals of Culture

Var jeg i Berlin, ville jeg finde en visning af det store 3-D projekt om arkitektur, seks filmessays, som Final Cut for Real har produceret med Michael Madsen som den danske bidragyder. De øvrige instruktører er Karim Aïnouz , Margreth Olin, Wim Wenders, Michael Glawogger og Robert Redford.

Berlinale kataloget beskriver filmene således: ”If buildings could talk, what would they say about us? ”Cathedrals of Culture” offers six startling responses to this question. This 3D film project about the soul of buildings allows six iconic and very different buildings to speak for themselves, examining human life from the unblinking perspective of a manmade structure. Six acclaimed filmmakers bring their own visual style and artistic approach to the project. Buildings, they show us, are material manifestations of human thought and action: the Berlin Philharmonic, an icon of modernity; the National Library of Russia, a kingdom of thoughts; Halden Prison, the world’s most humane prison; the Salk Institute, a scientific monastery on the California coast; the Oslo Opera House, a futuristic symbiosis of art and life; and the Centre Pompidou, a modern culture machine. ”Cathedrals of Culture” explores how each of these landmarks reflects our culture and guards our collective memory.”

Det lyder jo noget pompøst og internationalt samarbejde agtigt som en ambassadørs åbningstale. Men jeg har helt andre personlige grunde til at opsøge dette tre timers værk. Jeg har endnu smerten fra ”Into Eternity” i mig, overvejelsen af at bygge for evigheden og glemslen, filmens gribende slutning i vemodets værdighed med Edgard Varèse musik til Paul Verlaines digt fra Sagesse III: ”Un grand Sommeil noir / Tombe sur ma vie: / Dormez, tout espoir, / Dormez, toute envie! ” Det er hvad, jeg venter af Madsen. Og jeg lever stadigvæk med biblioteksscenerne i ”Himlen over Berlin” i sindet, englene Bruno Ganz og Otto Sander uhørligt tydelige samtale med de mange dybt optagne i læsesalen i Staatsbibliothek. Det er hvad, jeg håber på hos Wenders. Og så er der fire kloge og følsomme instruktører mere. Det bliver stort stort. Så 3D delen er jeg ligeglad med, jeg lægger de klodsede briller væk, essayenes billeder, lyd og klip er nok for mig.

Link: www.berlinale.de/en/programm

Link: www.dfi.dk/Nyheder/FILMupdate

Still: Fra Michael Glawoggers del af “Cathedrals of Culture”, som skildrer Naionalbiblioteket i Skt. Petersborg. 

Bakker & van Koevorden: Ne Me Quitte Pas

Shit happens… Det var min hensigt at anmelde, og anmelde positivt om denne fine film, produceret af Hollands fremragende dokumentarproducent Pieter van Huystee. Jeg så den i Amsterdam, hvor den var nomineret til den store pris, men ikke vandt, men det kunne den sådan set godt have gjort for sin indlevende og kærlige beskrivelse af to herlige alkoholiske, lommefilosoferende skæbner, der ligeså godt kunne være bænket i Ørstedsparken om sommeren. Vejrbidte mænd med flaskerne indenfor rækkevidde.

Jeg nåede ikke at skrive før afrejsen til Beograd, så nu nøjes jeg med at gøre opmærksom på filmen, som to dage efter sin premiere via DoxBio stadig er til at se i 10 biografer landet over, se link nedenfor. OG for dem, der som mig oprindeligt troede, at Jacques Brel’s sang er med i filmen – nej, det er den ikke, men derfor kan I godt nynne den efter filmen, som fra starten kalder på melankolien. Her er en beskrivelse fra idfa festivalen:

The Flemish Bob and the Walloon Marcel have come together in the lonely woods and empty fields of Wallonia, the French-speaking part of Belgium. At first everything is bleak, bare and gray, just like the two men feel inside. Both have seen their lives slip through their fingers, and they have come together to share sorrow and drink-sodden nights. Bob, who looks like a weather-beaten explorer, hardly ever sees his grown-up children. He has lost his girlfriend and drinks rum like water. Marcel is a broken man caught up in divorce proceedings who drowns his sorrows in liters of beer, but at least they have one another. Together they visit the dentist, celebrate carnival in the village pub and go to Marcel’s intake at a rehab clinic. But usually they meet at one of their kitchen tables, where drink and conversation flow freely. Although the pair is able to bring a sense of humor to bear on their gloomy lives, they always end up discussing a suicide pact. The camera follows this couple thrown together by fate over several seasons in Direct Cinema style. This exceptional, character-driven story delivers heartwarming and sad, hilarious and very painful moments in provincial Belgium, which, like the two main characters, also seems to be in decay.

Holland/Belgien, 2013, 107 mins.

http://www.doxbio.dk/?page_id=23

Göran Olsson: Concerning Violence

Hun læser Fanon-tekster i filmen, har jeg forstået på foromtalen, og det er uomgængeligt. Hvis jeg var i Berlin ville jeg først og fremmest gå hen og se Göran Olssons ”Concerning Violence”, og det er kun fordi oplysningen om, at denne musiker, som jeg ikke vil lade, som om jeg kender, men som jeg fornemmer er berømt i andre verdener end min, læser et tekstlag, som bygger på filosoffen Franz Fanon, kun fordi netop den oplysning rammer mig, og jeg forundret tager ”Fordømte her på jorden” (Rhodos 1968) ud af reolen. Og jeg tænker på den ikke gerne rejsende Per Højholt som (i Lars Johanssons filmportræt af ham) sagde, at man da sagtens kan sidde i Hørbylunde (hvor han boede) og læse franske filosoffer. Altså kan jeg bare gå i gang med at finde en streaming mulighed og høre Lauryn Hill læse disse gribende et snart halvt århundrede gamle bibliotekstekster til skandinaviske dokumentaristers arkivbilleder i Göran Olssons filmessay i ni afsnit om frihedsbevægelsernes historie i Afrika og den øvrige tredje verden. Men først altså tager jeg Michael Mallings elegant slanke orange bog fra dette særlige år i også min historie og læser efter denne lange tid igen Sartres forord og Simone de Beauvoirs efterskrift, hans Fanon-analyse hendes Fanon-portræt. Og så er jeg klar til at lede efter filmen med filosoffens tekster. Det kan jeg sagtens gøre på min computer her i Randers, men meget hellere gik jeg naturligvis i biografen i Festivalens Berlin.

Sverige / Danmark, 2013, 85 min.

Link: dfi.dk/fakta om film 

Link: berlinale.de/en/programm  

Link: filmguide.sundance.org/film 

Magnificent7 Diary/ 8

Take a look at the photo. It is taken at the oldest Belgrade kafana that has the name ? It is situated next to Saboma Church (The Cathedral) where the four of us always go. From left Zoran Popovic, then Tue Steen Müller and Svetlana Popovic, camera held by Ellen Fonnesbech-Sandberg. Wednesday morning there was time for a classical small tour that we have done during many years of Magnificent7: cakes at Hotel Moscow, candles at the church and this year also a small rakija kruska (pear brandy) at ?

Later that day we had lunch at the residence of the Finnish ambassador, who had invited due to the presence of the Finnish director Petri Luukkainen and his cameraman Jesse Jokinen, who back at headquarter, the Sava Center, gave a fine masterclass on their film. Luukkainen talked about the filming and the editing (they had 200 hours!) for this (the director’s word) self-reflecting film, where Luukkainen more and more felt that his presence was a kind of performative play.

EDN (European Documentary Network) director Paul Pauwels gave a motivating speech to the 30 young filmmakers present on this last day of the workshop: the media situation is changing, we need to share to survive, to make a good documentary you need a sustainable compay behind… PP responded to brief pitches give by a handful of the participants, and then we were all off to the closing ceremony in the big hall of Sava Center where the loyal audience knew how to praise Zoran and Svetlana Popovic and their team. The closing film ”Faith Connection” is magnificent – a fantastic documentation of Kumbh Mela, ”a fresco” as the Popovic’s write below, and a film where you fall in love with the kids that the director Pan Nalin so cleverly portrays – the small Babu, touching to follow the love he gets from his Baba, the Yogi who gets stoned several times per day. Not to forget Kishan Tiwari, the runaway kid who wants to be a sadhu.

Magnificent7 2014 is over. Time to go back to Copenhagen later today.

faithconnections.in

http://www.magnificent7festival.org/pages/Program_eng.html 

Magnificent7 Diary/ 7

Director and main character Petri Luukkainen accompanied by cinematographer Jesse Jokinen came to the stage after the screening of their film ”My Stuff” to receive a diploma and 1000€ from local BelMedic Clinic as a recognition of a ”healthy” film, healthy for your soul, an experiment into seeing what we really need.

The discussion in the VIP room, again full house as there was a full house in the big hall in the Sava Centre – it’s been like that all six first nights – took off in a very good atmosphere with two very nicely dressed Finnish filmmakers, who took us with charm with stories from the shooting over a year. Petri said that he was sick in the beginning of the film, minus 30 degrees it was in Finland at that time where he lies on the floor in an empty flat using his overcoat as duvet! And he had a crisis in the middle of the shooting and ”thanks God that I met Maia”, who comes in as a character and is there after the 365 days, when the storage room is opened.

To be the director and the main character… he felt a bit skizofrenic sometimes… but the one and only lovely grandmother was on many occasions the one to visit and get advice from. She stands out with her mildness and wisdom and it was easy to film the scenes with her, Jesse Jokinen added.

Conclusions? What did you get out of it? Were questions asked to Petri Luukkainen. I learned that ”All you Need is Love”, he said and added that without grandmother and Maia, it would have been a real boring movie. It is not, its is sweet and charming.

The film has had a fine run in cinemas in Finland and theatrical releases are planned in the UK, Germany, Sweden and Japan!

The last film of the 2014 Magnificent7 festival runs tonight, ”Faith Connections” by French/Indian director Pan Nalin, see below.

http://www.magnificent7festival.org/pages/Program_eng.html 

http://mystuffmovie.com/

Pan Nalin: Faith Connections

The Magnificent 7 directors Svetlana and Zoran Popovic write about the film: A grand cinematic spectacle! A documentary that takes us into the world of religious cults of India – the place where the rivers Ganges and Yamuna join with the invisible river Saraswati. Here every twelve years the world’s largest faith gathering – Kumbh Mela, takes place.

Tens of millions of people from all part of India come together over fifty-five days to bathe in the holy river and wash off their sins, thus ending the karmic wheel of reincarnation. Director Pan Nalin captures this massive human anthill in fascinating scenes conveying the eruption of colors and events, representing the vast space and the heaving human mass. Building on the frenetic activity, the filmmaker’s precise direction delineates the various groups of different sects, and among them the Sadhu – holy men. In contrast to their deep inner peace are the swarming thousands of ordinary people, confused and anxious, whom the power of faith has brought to this place where the earthly and heavenly meet.

During Kumbh Mela several thousand people get lost, and the filmmaker chooses to frame the film around lost children, three boys thrown into the crowd of people and abandoned to the twists of fate. Led by the notion that “faith is not faith until it is all that you have left to hold on to” Pan Nalin develops a majestic composition in search for the deep and powerful connections being woven around the boys and all they come in contact with.

“Faith Connections” are another triumph of the heights of documentary cinema. Pan Nalin, an international star of the cinematic skies, both in fiction and documentary, chooses one of the most important of subjects in India – man facing destiny, and gives it a European documentary treatment, to create an exciting, lavish fresco pulsing with frenetic inner rhythms.

faithconnections.in

France/India, 2013, 115 mins.

http://www.magnificent7festival.org/pages/Program_eng.html 

Magnificent7 Diary/ 6

The Riahi Brothers had visited the festival before. Arash presented his ”Exile Family Movie” in 2007 in which his younger brother Arman is an important character as the film (the title says it all) deals with a family that meets in Saudi Arabia after 20 years of separation and without the possibility to get to the Iran most of the family left. Now the two works out of Vienna, Austria.

The inspiration to ”Everyday Rebellion”, that was last night’s screening in Belgrade at the Magnificent7 festival, came naturally from the Iranian Green Movement in 2009 that demonstrated against Ahmadinejad. The actions of the movement, as Arash said it, was violently cracked down but the brothers saw other movements coming up that had no leaders, were non-violent – they saw a pattern and decided to make a film. ”We wanted to make our contribution” and ”help the movements spread through a film that will go in cinemas, on dvd’s, with a website (link below) and an upcoming mobile application”. They saw several movements being connected, when they started filming the Occupy movement in the US, they met with Srdja Popovic, who was part of the Otpor that went against Milosevic, and who is a central character in the film describing the tactics of non-violent movements all over the world.

In the Q&A that I report from in this report – full house, around 70 of the almost 2000 spectators took part – Popovic formulated that ”those movements are the only way to change the world… it’s not facebook. It’s step-by-step actions with a will to change”, he said, and complimented the Riahi Brothers for ”a beautiful and inspirational film”.

Who are financing these actions, was the question that came up in the VIP room of the Sava Centre. And why is this not in the film? ”Our film is about the tactics, we did not look for answers”, and added his frustration that there are always someone that looks for ”the ones behind”.

… and then it became all Serbian in the room with no discussion about the film itself and pretty difficult for me to follow as the moderator Zoran Popovic stopped moderating to have looong interventions related to the subject of the film…as I see it missing the point that this is an informative film with a message and deep respect for young people all over world, who take action in different ways that are outlined in the film…well you can’t have it all.

The film of tonight is ”My Stuff” by Petri Luukkainen. See below.

http://www.everydayrebellion.net/the-project/

http://www.magnificent7festival.org/pages/Program_eng.html 

http://www.magnificent7festival.org/pages/2007_eng.php?film=1

 

Petri Luukkainen: My Stuff

The Magnificent 7 directors Svetlana and Zoran Popovic write about the film:

What do we really need in life?

How much do the things we are surrounded by fulfill us, and how much do they enslave us?

In a moment of emotional crisis, a young Finn decides to draw on the wisdom of philosophers of antiquity, making a radical move in his life. Discarding everything around and even on him, in a brave and uncompromising step he put himself in an entirely new existential situation, one that sets him at a considerable, and sobering, distance from the modern world.

Petri Luukkainen signs and stars in this daring and unusual manifesto. Following a set of simple and strict rules the filmmaker documents his own experiment, examining modern culture and the perpetual dynamic of need-creation in a world swamped with consumerism. Are we still capable of understanding ourselves and recognising the true needs of our own beings, emotions and thoughts? This is a provocative adventure of the soul and body from the moment of stripping down to one’s freedom, in a metaphoric re-birth, to a world shaped and transformed by our own actions.

In equal measure intelligent, entertaining and moving, this film is a surprising study of universal and immutable values. Virtuoso photography, a masterfully playful and dynamic montage, and a strikingly effective narration rank “My Stuff” at the very top of contemporary documentary cinema.

Finland, 2013, 80 minutes.

http://www.magnificent7festival.org/pages/Program_eng.html 

http://mystuffmovie.com/

Magnificent7 Diary/ 5

Last night was the screening of Nicolas Philibert’s ”La Maison de la Radio”. The director went on stage with festival director Zoran Popovic, for the second time in the history of the 10 year old festival. In 2011 he presented ”Nénette”, the orangutang, who, by the way, Philibert told us at a lunch, is still alive, gets up in the morning when the zoo opens and goes to bed when the zoo closes. A real performer!

We had expected that a film about a radio station would not attract the young part of the audience, we were wrong, the hall was full, as was the vip room afterwards, where the q&a sessions take place, around 30 people were there to listen and ask questions. Philibert talks so good about his view on documentaries and about his method, that you just sit down and write down some of the sentences from him:

”What I like about radio is the absence of images”. My challenge was ”how to make a film about radio without shattering the mystery”. ”I love their (the workers) continuous demanding – their trying to do their best”. He has a very positive approach to radio. ”Here you find authors and philosophers, who never appear on television.”

Philibert filmed in Radio France for ten weeks spread over 6 months. The station has 5000 people employed and 70 studios. It is a public service institution, and is thus, for the director, a small mirror of the society. He did not want to make a film that was ”trop daté” and refrained to give the Arab Spring and Fukushima too much space even if those were the hot issues during his time of filming.

About documentaries in general, Philibert pointed at the danger for normalization of the genre, ”it has to constantly renew form and shape”, he said in a visual clip, made when he was in Belgrade with ”Nénette”. A clip that answers the question ”what is a documentary for you”, put to all directors who in the ten years have visited the Magnificent7 Festival.

Tonight follows ”Everyday Rebellion” by Austrian Riahi Brothers.

http://www.magnificent7festival.org/pages/Program_eng.html