The Jury Mention at the 1^st Cinedoc Tbilisi festival went to Julia Panasenko for her “Outro”. The motivation of the Jury of the International Competition:

A DOCUMENTARY THAT HITS THE VIEWER LIKE A ROCK: PUNK DOCUMENARY FILMMAKING! ONE OF THE JURY-MEMBERS CALLED IT.

WITHOUT MAKING ANY CONCESSIONS AND IN A VERY DIRECT STYLE, THE FILM THROWS THE VIEWER INTO THE LAST WEEKS OF THE LIFE OF THE CHARMING BUT ALSO TRAGIC MAIN CHARACTER.

AS AN AUDIENCE WE CAN ONLY BE GRATEFUL THAT THE YOUNG WOMAN WHO’S AT THE CORE OF THIS FILM ALLOWED THE FILMMAKER TO FOLLOW HER ON HER VOYAGE TO THE VERY END. THE RESULT IS A MOVING DOCUMENTARY THAT SHOULD MAKE ALL OF US THINK ABOUT THE WAY WE LIVE OUR LIVES.

http://www.cinedoc-tbilisi.com/

It was too much, something had to be done so I asked one of the staff members of Cinedoc here in Tbilisi to ask the audience to refrain from talking on their phone and send text messages during the screening. She did – saying that it disturbed the members of the jury…! Maybe not the rest of the audience…! My juror colleague Paul Pauwels and I were laughing our asses off.

Otherwise, it has been very stimulating to sit in very often full cinema halls at the very first edition of a festival that has been very well received by the audience. As in many other documentary festivals it looks like the audience has an average age around 25, indeed promising for the future of the event.

On top of that the festival must be praised for the initiative of showing films for a young audience followed by ” discussions after the screenings… moderated by children psychologists, teachers and young civil society activists.” Let me mention two neo-classic films from that section: “Please Vote for Me” (2007) (Photo) by Wiejun Chen and Claire Simon’s “Recreations” (1993).

Awards will be given tonight at The Rustaveli Cinema – in the category “Focus Caucasus”, in the International Competition, and there is an audience award. Will be back with that information tomorrow morning.

http://www.cinedoc-tbilisi.com

http://www.clairesimon.fr/recreations.html

It’s one festival after the other publishing its programme. Lisbon, Leipzig, Amsterdam and today there is a programme party in Copenhagen for cph:dox…

Idfa programme yesterday, the biggest festival in audience numbers and considered to be the most important – this is where all documentary filmmakers wish to have their films shown, and where all professionals have to be for the industry activities, first of all the forum. If you are not there, colleagues might think that you have stopped making documentaries or your company has closed…

It is amazing and overwhelming – take a look at the second link below, 7 competition programmes and 15 (fifteen!) side programmes. Rithy Panh makes the Top Ten according to his personal choice, great films like ”Don’t Look Back” (Pennebaker), Joris Ivens ”A Tale of the Wind”, Pedro Costa’s ”In Vanda’s Room” and a pearl, forgotten by most people: ”Farrebique – the Four Seasons” from1946 by Georges Rouquier.

For historical interested there is this gift: “Next year is the 100th anniversary of the outbreak of World War I. To mark this occasion, eight documentaries dealing with World War I will screen at the upcoming IDFA. These are films made between 1917 and 1928 and come from the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany and the UK. The selection was made with researcher David Barnouw of the NIOD, media historian Bert Hogenkamp of the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision and silent film conservator at EYE Elif Rongen-Kaynakci. The films will be introduced by experts and after the screening, discussions will take place with the audience on the meaning of the films in a historical context.”

Competition for feature length documentaries, 15 films, let me mention 3 of them that I know about: “Life Almost Wonderful” by Bulgarian Svetoslav Draganov, “Return to Homs” by Talal Derki and “The Wild Years” by Ventura Durall (PHOTO).

http://www.idfa.nl/industry/festival.aspx

http://www.idfa.nl/industry/festival/program-sections.aspx

Big numbers in the press release of DOK Leipzig, sent out yesterday with an announcement of the so-called official programme. 56th edition, ” a total of 88 films from 34 countries will compete in the five competition categories. While there is a particularly strong presence of traditional film production countries like Poland, France, and Great Britain, the line-up also includes countries like Bolivia, Myanmar, Nepal, or Syria. 2,240 films from 114 countries were submitted, a total of well over 3,000 films were previewed.”

And it goes on with more facts in the press release, “overall, 346 films will be screened in the various sections and Special Programmes: 187 documentaries, 116 animations, and 43 Animadoc productions. 24 among the 109 films in the official documentary film programme of the 56th edition of DOK Leipzig will be world premieres, 24 international premieres, 7 European premieres and 47 German premieres. The large percentage of prestigious names and former award winners whose films enrich the programme is a particularly positive development.”

Prestigious names… yes, there is a good spread from a classical documentary approach from Volker Koepp, who brings a new title, “In Sarmatia”, to the two Russian documentarians Vitaly Mansky and Marina Razbezhkina and to Danish master Jon Bang Carlsen’s “Just the Right Amount of Violence”, a film that has not yet had its Danish cinema release, as usual with Carlsen on his way to find new ways of exploration and introspection. Bravo also for taking Robert Kirchhoff’s “Normalization” (PHOTO) to the competititon, whereas it is a surprise that “Hilton – Here for Life” by Finnish Virpi Suutari has been chosen.

In the Young Cinema Competititon it is great, for a former Zelig Film School teacher, to find the graduation film of Yuri Mazumdar, a beautiful work from India, “Kalyug”, as well as “The Last Black Sea Pirates” by Bulgarian Svetoslav Stoyanov and “Sickfuckpeople” by Juri Rechinsky.

For me DOK Leipzig is for social and political documentaries, with films from all over the world, with a strong thematic focus, maybe more for the brain than for the heart? I will go there for some days, with pleasure, to a festival that is always very well organised in cosy Leipzig.

Side programmes, of course, take a look at the website, there are focus on Brazil, retro of Peter Liechti and much more. Let the festival director have the last word: “Documentary film today displays an extraordinary wealth of themes and amazing stylistic devices,” says Claas Danielsen. “The genre has long since left its niche to win over a wide audience.” Right he is!

http://www.dok-leipzig.de/

The programme of the 11th edition of the DocLisboa, that starts October 24 and ends November 3, was made public yesterday. Again you just have to say Respect! For the quality of the selection and for side programmes like ”Research”, ”New Visions” (curated by charismatic critic Augusto M. Deabra) and first of all the section ”Moving Stills – Photography, Photographers and Documentary Films”.

Under that (the latter) caption you will find excellently composed 80-90 compilations of short and longer documentaries grouped as ”self-portraits” (Robert Frank, Man Ray…), ”family albums” (Ingmar Bergman), ”Questioning the Image” (Godard, Farocki…), ”Surviving Images” (Agnès Varda…) or ”The Point of View of the Photographer” (Johan van der Keuken’s ”To Sang Fotostudio”, photo).

The festival includes several competiton sections: feature duration (with Avi Mograbi’s ”Once I entered a Garden” and films by Wang Bing, Anand Patwardhan and many others I have never heard about), a Portuguese section, international and short film competitions and much much more.

With a big retrospective of films by French master Alain Cavalier – do you remember ”Thérèse”, his wonderful film from 1986?

http://www.doclisboa.org/2013/en/

It is not only in Colombia – see below – that festival organisers play with the word closeness between docs and dogs, when a new fest is to be launched. Look at the logo for a festival that starts today (and runs for a week) in the capital of Bulgaria and introduces itself like this:

”SOFIA BITING DOCS presents a selection of high quality documentary films representing human rights topics, environmental problems, integration of diversity groups into the society and other controversial topics raising discussions and arguments.

The festival crew is planning to organize different accompanying events within its frames such as discussions, workshops and lectures, giving popularity of many interesting, but inconvenient issues.

The event is organized by Pozor Company with the support of One World Film Festival in Prague, Czech Centre – Sofia and Kino Iztok Foundation.”

Yes, documentaries are being used in a festival context to create debate about important issues. Among the films are Vitaly Manski Cuba-film ”Motherland or Death” and Lauren Greenfield’s ”Queen of Versailles”… One World-films can also be humorous and some of them bite.

http://www.sofiabitingdocs.com/welcome.html