Yes, that film blew me away. Actually, it did already around one and a half year ago, when its producer (and camerawoman) Irina Shatalova contacted me asking for general advice on financing and distribution, giving me a pretty dark image of the situation for the creative documentary in Russia. She told me about the film that Nastia Tarasova and she was making about Linar, the wee Russian boy who had undergone a heart transplantation in Italy – after he for almost a year ”had been living with an enormous apparatus on wheels, that constantly piped his blood” (website of the fim). I saw a rough cut and now a couple of months ago Shatalova sent me the finished film.

Which is magnificent, so well made, daring to go the whole way of passion, bombarding the viewer’s emotions while watching a Film that is constantly dramatic in tone, helped by a unique music composition made by Dimitry Selipanov. There are dream sequences, sometimes nightmarish, that you can attach to the situation for the boy, who has to suffer a lot to reach the goal: to get a new heart. But the scenes that for this viewer are most affective are those that catch the daily life for Linar, close to nurses and to ”uncles” = the Russian surgeons, who are with him in Italy. The filmmakers have succeeded in building up a fantastic image of (especially) the young Marcel Tagaev, who (photo) is the one who plays and eats with Linar, and communicates with the mother, who is back home in Russia with two other children. The lovely relationship between the two of them, and the warm but anxious facial expressions of ”uncle Marcel”, whose relationship to Linar is much more than one of patient/doctor, makes the film talk directly (sorry) to your heart! Not to talk about Grandpa Konstantin, the doctor, who comes to Italy after Marcel Tagaev – he picks up Linar from school and walks with him in the streets of Bergamo, where Linar learns to bike, and to count in Italian, which he does upon arrival in airport in Russia. Great scenes are there many of, and you can sense that the filmmakers have been close to Linar and his ”family”. Otherwise you could no achieve such an authenticity.

If any justice exists in the jungle of festivals, this film will have a long and important life all over the world. No surprise that the film got the audience award at a new festival in Omsk, Siberia. It is a film with a huge audience potential.

Russia, 82 mins, 2013.

http://www.linarmovie.com/

http://reflexionfilms.com/index.php?option=com_k2&view=item&id=115:linar&Itemid=568

Sometimes, and maybe it happens more often with Polish short documentaries than with films from other countries, you sit after a fine film experience and say to yourself, ahhh it could have been longer, which is maybe the best compliment you can give a film, as the common sentence after a film is the opposite: too long, I was bored!

With Magdalena Szymków’s story – taken from the precise description on the site of the English producer – about two women, one house, an intimate story about a Pole and a German placed by war on enemy sides and their parallel lives accidentally brought together – I would have loved to have more, maybe a bigger film could be developed from this extraordinarily important theme of post-war Europe. We knew about the move of the border of Poland due to cynical big power´s politics, but it is the first time I have seen such an intelligent treatment of the subject as this one seen through the eyes of old women, whose memories are both informative and emotional.

Back to Polish short documentaries – and many of them come from the Wajda School – that often have this wonderful precise language with few words and a great impact on the visual interpretation. It’s all there in this film that also plays with double exposure of archive material to give support to the film’s memory flow.

For subscribers of the DOX Magazine – the film came with Number 96 on a dvd that also included Marcel Lozinski’s “Tonia and Her Children”.

http://www.vezfilm.org/storage/MyHouseWithoutMe_ENG_2.pdf

www.wajdastudio.pl/pl/filmografia/moj-dom

Poland, 2012, 28mins., Wajda School

When I visited the Golden Apricot Festival in Yeravan a couple of weeks ago its was obvious that every second film project launched in the so-called industry section was meant to compete for the money that is reserved by many for 2015, 100 years after the Armenian Genocide, 1 to 1,5 million people are estimated to have been killed by order of the Ottoman government.

Armenians will do films, so will Turks, and Turks and Armenians together and all public broadcasters are expected to broadcast on the theme. Some maybe through thematic evenings? There will be a lot of journalism and debates about the official Turkish current denial to call what happened a genocide.

Well, there are other approaches and tv people could start by watching young Tülin Özdemir’s fine ”Beyond the Ararat”. It is a personal film, told by the director with a beautiful text and with her as the one who takes the spectator on a journey from her home in Brussels to Istanbul and from there to the Anatolia of her family – to end up in Yerevan, Armenia. Even if the film goes beyond the theme of the genocide, it has in its focus the young director’s painful search for identity, and wish to know more about what has apparently been a silenced taboo in her family.

On her way she meets women of same age as herself, she meets a grandmother in Anatolia who grieves her Osnan, and she listens to the words of the tragic legend about Tamara and Ali, who could not have each other due to their different origin, the Christian and the Muslim. It is a film that has its own sad tone and formidable images accompanied sometimes by quotes from Zabel Essayan’s ”Dans les ruines – le massacre d’Adana 1909”.  

http://stenola.eu/en/

http://denisdonikian.blog.lemonde.fr/2011/05/05/350-%C2%AB-dans-les-ruines-%C2%BB-de-zabel-essayan/

Belgium, 2013, 55 mins. Stenola Production, coprod. Associate Directors.

Shown at Cinema du Réel in Paris this year, awarded at Chilean Fidocs festival, selected for Yamagata at the coming October, and strongly recommended by my former EDN colleague, now at the NY based Flaherty Seminar, Anita Reher, the expectations were high, when I got the chance to watch El Otro Dia (The Other Day). I was not disappointed. Ignacio Agüero is a true auteur, who with a safe hand takes you into his film, well literally into his house, where his fascination with objects are cinematically conveyed so their beauty stands out in a constant play with light and shadow. Pure nature morte motives. Memories are around him, the past is present, the focus is on a photo of his father and mother embracing each other in 1945. A brilliant personal speak includes again and again questions regarding the father, who died without experiencing the consequences of the Pinochet dictatorship. What would he have said if he had seen that his sailor mates in the marine joined forces with the dictator?

Agüero films from inside to outside insisting on sequences that follow a cat climbing the tree or a bird taking a bath – he interrupts the interior scenes with wordless archive scenes from the Arctic – and he lets himself be interrupted by people ringing the doorbell. He opens the door, films the person outside and says that he is making ”a film about people who knock on my door” with the continuation, ”may I come and film you at your place”. In a completely different conversation-based documentary language he then goes to the drug addict, to the beggar, to the cleaning lady, to the postman… – all of them live in other parts of Santiago in poorer conditions than those of the director, who carefully puts in their home addresses on the map in his house. He leaves the house to come back again for the next doorbell ringing. It’s like being waken up by reality…

The film has many layers, it is rich, it is slow and goes for details, it has a sketchy form but is a totally controlled first person story that profits from Cinema’s possibility to jump in time, to go from out to in, and from in to out, from one style to another without losing the spectator’s interest and fascination.

Chile, 2 hours. 2 mins., 2013.

http://icarusfilms.com/filmmakers/ague.html