St. Petersburg Diary/ 3

But why don’t we know about it, one of the Russian directors said on the second and last day of the Conference in Hotel Vedensky in St. Petersburg, DoxPro, on financing of international creative documentaries. He referred to the ”Farewell Comrades”, a film series and an interactive website of high quality, developed and produced by German Gebrüder Beetz, and briefly presented by the company’s Tanja Schmoller. There is a link below for those who missed it. filmkommentaren did a presentation in January 2012, a quote: ”Well-done and well conveyed information, anecdotes and personal it is, sometimes fun, sometimes tough to hear and see.”

But Tanja Schmoller was at the conference to present one of the ”Cultural Files” by the company, ”The Wagner Files”, an exciting cross-media project promoted like this at the site of the company:  ”“The Wagner Files” is an innovative and dynamic fusion of music documentary, fictional film and animated cartoon.” Equally dynamic and informative was the presentation by young Schmoller, who showed how to use the graphic novel app of the work on Wagner, and explained the financing structure of the project and how content/idea/creativity lies within the company, whereas the technical solutions are made outside. Schmoller inspired many of the conference participants, including Olga Kravets who with two colleagues are working on the webdocumentary, “Grozny.Nine Cities” that was met with both support and political remarks. They have applied to the idfa forum to get necessary funding, it would surprise me if their talented project do not get accepted.

The last day also brought a speech by Icelandic theatre person and art and environment politician Kolbrun Halldorsdottir, who talked enthusiastically about green documentaries and their potential to change – a couple of Russian conference participants stood up and advocated for their “green” festivals. Maria Fuglevaag Warsinska-Varsi, who lives in Norway, film director and former film consultant at the Norwegian Film Institute, took the floor to give a brief on the Norwegian support system as well as on the Sami film situation, where she now holds a position as mentor. Warsinska-Varsi gave a lot of advice to the Russian filmmakers present, as did veteran producer and MIFF (Moscow International Film Festival) documentary selector Grigory Libergal, who said that he had missed analysis and basic information on the Russian documentary, which consequently was what he came up with. There is a loong way to go, was the impression you got from Libergal’s speech that provoked a lot of discussion and optimism and will to change in the direction of collaboration and skills development of especially a young generation of producers, who speak English and wish to travel and take part in workshops in Western Europe.

Co-organiser of the conference, EDN (European Documentary Network), represented by Mikael Opstrup and Ove Rishøj Jensen (photo) welcomed Russian filmmakers to take part in seminars and workshops – there are many possibilities. Standing applause to the two organisers of the conference, Ludmila Nazaruk and Viktor Skubey, who will put everything online in due time for others to enjoy and learn from… and then off to see wonderful St. Petersburg, Hermitage, boat trip, Erarta Museum, Marynskii…

www.doxpro.org

www.edn.dk

http://www.farewellcomrades.com/en/

http://www.gebrueder-beetz.de/en/productions/the-wagner-files-tv

St. Petersburg Diary/ 2

First day of the Conference in Vedensky Hotel in St. Petersburg running parallel to the Message to Man festival. Theme of the meeting: Financing of International Creative Documentary Projects in the Northern Dimension Area: Cutting Edge and Trends.

The opening speech, he was given 15 minutes, he took 18, was delivered by legendary YLE commissioner Iikka Vehkalahti (photo), who came up with a sentence that was repeated several times during the day: I am now commissioning into the air, referring to the fact that many documentaries nowadays start their distribution life on the internet, eventually go to the cinema, get reviews, go to television, are made as transmedia projects…

… which was the theme of a very informative and enthusiastic speech by Swedish Annika Gustafson, who reminded the audience that interactivity is nothing new – Dickens wrote a chapter of the Pickwick Papers, let people read it, got feed back and went home to write the next chapter.

Equally informative, with a mention of four succesful crowdfunded documentary projects, was the presentation by veteran EDN staff member Ove Rishøj Jensen, who like his Swedish colleague , went back in history to point at Danish artist Asger Jorn, who in the 1930’es collected funding for a travel to Paris through the selling of works for a small prize.

Both Gustafson and Jensen came up with several links where information and inspiration can be found. AND, the organisers of the conference, Ludmila Nazaruk and Viktor Skubey, DoxPro, stated that all links and presentations will be put online after the end of the two days here in St. Petersburg. Keep an eye on this, dear readers.

Back to content. Jaak Kilmi from Estonia talked about his lost transmedia chances with films he had already done, example ”The Art of Selling”, his breakthrough film – transmedia expert Gustafson brainstormed on what he could have done… A very optimistic and energetic Sofia Gudkova talked about the Documentary Film Centre in Moscow, screenings, debates, international presentations, and Evgeny Grigoriev from the Documentary Guild, the new and young President of the filmmaker organisation, rolled out a whole list of upcoming activities that will help the filmmakers nationally and internationally. These were very promising speeches from the two young Russians, whereas Vera Obolonkina’s speech about the 24Dok was influenced by technical problems, when she was speaking online from Moscow. Gints Grube from Latvia and Rolandas Kvietkauskas from Lithuania informed about the ambition to make Latvian television more open for the independent sector of producers, respectively about the organisation of the new Lithuanian Film Centre and its – primarily – eduational activities to give a place for cross media productions.

Apart from the around 50 participants as audience in the Vedenmsky Hotel, another 40 people followed the conference online – and asked questions to the speakers – with some technical problems in the afternoon.

… and then many of us went to ”Idiot” Café…

www.doxpro.org

St. Petersburg Diary/ 1

It took 90 minutes to fly from Copenhagen to St. Petersburg and another 90 minutes to reach the hotel from the airport. Moskva Prospekt is veery long but I had good company in Viktor Skubey, producer and together with Ludmila Nazaruk organiser of the DoxPro Conference in Hotel Vedensky, where these lines are written. The two of them showed me the new venue of the Message to Man festival, the Velican Centre, which is, as Skubey put it – a new building in old style. The Centre has three cinema halls and is situated in a park, where you also find a miniature exposition of the city with its landmarks like the Winter Palace, Peter and Paul Fortress, the Isaac Cathedral etc. At the side a sculpture of the (Italian) architects who built St. Petersburg.

Wednesday I held a class at the University. 200 film students were present. I wanted them to experience the state of the (documentary) art and showed a clip from Michael Glawogger’s ”Megacities” (photo), the sequence from New York called ”The Hustler”, followed by Timo Novotny’s New York remix in ”Life in Loops”. Both clips are word-filled so to make the students remember the importance of the image, next clip was from Wojtiech Staron’s ”Argentinian Lesson” where no words are said in the first 6 minutes but where images tell it all in terms of information and emotion of the boy.

Finally the first 10 minutes of ”Act of Killing”, director’s cut – (also) as a promotion for the film that runs in the competitive section of Message to Man. This morning the start of the Conference:

“The organiser is DoxPro, the International Program for Documentary Professionals based in St. Petersburg Russia. DoxPro works “to facilitate economic and cultural cooperation between Russian and European documentary professionals, to create a wholesome environment for development of documentary as a creative industry in Russia.”

www.doxpro.org

http://message2man.com/eng/news/id/599/

The Act of Killing Wins at Nordisk Panorama

No surprise in Malmø where the The Best Nordic Documentary Award was given last night to ”The Act of Killing”. Here is the motivation of the jury (Christian Bonke (director), Cara Cusumano (Tribeca Film Festival), and Kate Townsend (BBC Storyville)):

The jury would like to thank Nordisk Panorama for inviting us to be part of your fantastic event this year, and to experience the quality and range of work on display from all the Nordic countries. The films consistently impressed us with their powerful messages and intimate access.
At one moment we were transported by the bittersweet memories of a failed romance in Paris, and the next found ourselves surprised by the unexpected humor and vitality in a women’s prison in Afghanistan. Also we met the young boys from warzones around the world trying to get a bit of shelter in our western welfare. Congratulations to all the filmmakers on these great works, and thank you for sharing with us.

For the 2013 Best Nordic Documentary Award, the jury has chosen to recognize a unique achievement in the landscape of non-fiction filmmaking, a crucial work which shines a light where there had been only darkness and deceit, at the same time as it forges a new path in documentary for future filmmakers to explore. For its groundbreaking approach to the documentary form, and its unflinching confrontation with atrocity, mendacity, and the human face of evil, the jury awards the 2013 prize to Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing.

http://www.nordiskpanorama.com/WELCOME%20to%20Nordisk%20Panorama-100/

Nordisk Panorama Documentary Competition

Voilà, there you are in Malmø so close to Copenhagen, the home city of your correspondent, who after a good half hour of train trip took the escalators up from the deep Triangle Station to be at a square named after the local director icon, wonderful Bo Widerberg. Respect, Malmø, for this tribute, we don’t honour our artists like that on the other side of Øresund!

5 minutes walk from the station and your are at the Scandic Hotel to get your accreditation for the Nordisk Panorama that celebrates its 24th edition, a festival that from this year on will be situated in Malmø. For a Copenhagener a good close-by solution but for the Finns and the Norwegians?

Anyway, up to the third floor of the glass house, to the market of the festival where I – representing filmkommentaren.dk – spent some hours to watch some of the films in the documentary competition. Did not have time for, would have loved to see more.

There are 15 films in the documentary competition, the most prestigious of the sections of the festival with an award of 11.000€ for the director of the chosen film… who will win? Main favourite must be ”The Act of Killing”, already awarded at many festivals around the globe and for sure a milestone in modern documentary. I sat down at the marketplace to watch if there could be anyone to compete with Oppenheimer’s film that has (many festivals have done the same) given the still photo of its opening surreallistic dancing scene to be the cover of the fine catalogue that the festival has published.

I did not see all the films but of those I did manage to watch, or had watched before the festival, I found that Finnish Virpi Suutari’s social ”Hilton-Here for Life!” had a lot of commitment but became a bit ”and then we have this

character, and then this youngster and that one…”, predictable and with a noisy soundtrack that does not let the images get a life – but kill them. Which they do, get a life, in Susanna Helke’s ”American Vagabond” that i saw half of via a dvd given to me by the editor Niels Pagh – I felt it was very distant to the homosexual couple in the film and got irritated that the images on my computer were so dark that I gave up watching. As for the Danish ”My Love – the Story of Poul and Mai” it is very sweet and loyal to the Danish fisherman and his Thai partner, but the film of Iben Haahr Andersen is a tv-documentary with interview after interview, banality after banality in scenes, that raises the question, whether it belongs to a film festival.

Margreth Olin from Norway has as always made a very strong, open and honest documentation of young people in Europe, ”Nowhere Home”, in casu Norway, filmed in a detention centre, where kids wait to become 18 years old, the age where they will be sent back to their homes. It is very touching and Olin is involving herself in the narrative in and outside her rich country.

However, the only film, from what I had time to see, that could be the winner of Nordisk Panorama 2013, if the jury decides to ”take out” ”The Act of Killing”, as it has got so much attention already, of course a discutable argument, is Swedish Mia Engberg’s beautiful ”Belleville Baby”.

Why, because it has a feeling, an atmosphere, a personal tone (the director’s own voice and her text is excellent) and a well told story from the past, where the director fell in love in Paris, lived with him for some time, experienced him becoming a criminal, because of his immigrant background, an honest film that also includes reflections on the fimmaker wanting to convey the good story, whatever the subject of the story thinks… it is so well made with a mix af material – super 8 blurred images, photos, newsreels and tv-reports from riots in France, home video from the director with her small son, all framed by the myth of Orpheus and Eurydike. An essay film on remembering, and remembering different moments and events, maybe they never took place. Impressive work by Mia Engberg.

Tuesday (tomorrow) night, awards will be announced, and not only for this competition section that I had the chance to dig just a bit into.

http://www.nordiskpanorama.com/

Message to Man Saint-Petersburg/3

I asked film director Mikhail Zheleznikov to explain to me what lies behind the section In Silico at the festival, for which he works. He answered like this:

About In Silico. It’s the newest competition at Message to Man, and it’s going to be the third edition this year. It’s a laboratory of new (and well-forgotten old, but in the new interpretation) ideas, in which the authors are not limited by anything except the maximum length of 15 minutes and the technical capabilities of traditional film or video projection. 

In this contest we present some purely experimental works, as well as more or less narrative documentary, animation or fiction shorts, which were too “avant-garde” for a more conventional international competition. 

Experimental short film competition In Silico works well in the context of the whole festival program, and draws the audience. Besides, it really expands our options – now we can show almost all the crazy shorts that we like and easily get away with it.

This blogger’s comment: Bravo!

Go to the website to check out the crazy films to be shown.

Photo from one of them, “Pillar Cloud” by Maya Geller, Germany, 2013, 6 mins.

http://message2man.com/eng/program_english/id/11/

Walter Woodman and Patrick Cederberg: Noah

Noah is a 17-min. long student film which was showed in the Short Cuts-program at this year’s Toronto Film Festival. Since it is entirely taking place on a teenage guy’s computer screen, it has lately – and logically – been spread on the internet through social networks.

Through a very clever and fast-paced “editing” with zooms and pans plus dialogue, video, pictures and text on-screen, we follow him and his online-behavior. He is Facebooking, Skyping with his girlfriend while surfing and then putting his relationship with her in peril by some quite questionable actions. After a series of events (or non-events, if you’re older than 25) he ends up on Chatroulette.com where he chats with different people at random.

Of course, this is not a documentary but it sure – at times – feels like one with its attention to detail and its pace. The speed really mimics the feeling you get when you’re trying to follow your 15 year old son or your teenage niece trying to show you something on a computer. But it is well worth it, because it is a glimpse of how our means of communications affect our social behavior.

You can argue that the main character is a scatterbrain and has the attention span of a common housefly. And you can say that this is brought on by the computer industry and when WE were young, we certainly had better things to do. But in my and my avatar’s opinion, the real message is that no matter how and through which apparatus or software we as humans interact with each other, we will always bring in our human emotions; our fears, joys, needs and hang-ups. And the film shows it in a way that I so far haven’t seen any well-meaning documentary about the subject do quite as engaging.

Canada, 2013.

The film can be seen here: http://www.fastcocreate.com/3017108/you-need-to-see-this-17-minute-film-set-entirely-on-a-teens-computer-screen

Message to Man Saint-Petersburg /2

Scroll down some days of this blog and you will find a general presentation of the film programme at the festival in St. Petersburg that starts this coming Saturday. The festival has a fresh look, as you can see on their website, new festival centre and interesting events like this one:

“Animated films and dynamic video graffiti on the facades of buildings, light shows on the streets of the city, audiovisual presentations, and also a master class in video graffiti open to all-comers — from 21 to 27 September at the Message to Man Film Festival, Petersburgers can become the spectators and participants of an amazing creative improvisation from VjSuave, a pair of Latin American video artists. As is fitting for a public art performance, entrance to the VjSuave events will be free of charge…

Or this one: “On 21 September, the Velikan Film Centre will host the Russian premiere of a film made by homeless people. This is one of the special screenings in the programme of the Message to Man International Film Festival, organised in collaboration with Nochlezhka, a local organisation which helps the homeless. All proceeds from the sale of tickets will go towards helping the city’s homeless survive the coming winter.

The residents of St. Petersburg will be the first Russian viewers to see this film. Special gratitude is due to the director of the film, Agnieszka Zwiefka, for granting the right to screen her film in St. Petersburg. The film Albert Cinema, (Poland, 2012) (PHOTO) is the story of three homeless Poles, shot by the men themselves. Leszek, Heniek and Walus, who have been living on the street for over 15 years, have problems with alcohol and criminal pasts. Now film has changed their lives forever, becoming a kind of therapy and a vital part of the process of escaping from homelessness.

Viewers can observe the protagonists and authors of the film as they make plans for their future lives and establish contacts with their families. However, the film’s most powerful element remains the dialogues between the three men – joking, making fun of each other, quarrelling, but, above all, sharing among themselves their passion for film and discovering for themselves the magical power of art.

http://message2man.com/eng/

Adam Larsen: Neurotypical

A review by Sevara Pan: “There was a cartoon, when I was young called Jungle Book,” recounts Wolf, one of the characters in the film Neurotypical. “Now, at the end, Mowgli goes off with the man, with the fire. And he leaves the jungle. And I remember watching it and crying my eyes out. […] ‘No, don’t leave,’ I howled. ‘Don’t go with the men! Trust me, I know how horrible it is.’ I had been abused and hurt so much by people trying to make me normal. […] Everybody else saw that as a good thing, I saw it as the saddest movie I had ever seen,” divulges Wolf as we see an image of a four-year-old Violet crossing the wooden bridge.

Neurotypical is a first feature documentary by an aspiring American filmmaker Adam Larsen. In short, Neurotypical is about life from the perspective of the autistic people. The film forges three chapters, which symbolically represent an arch of a day. It sets out in the morning with an untarnished innocence of Violet, a young girl of four, who is starting off in life and is guided by her parents with every step she takes in her journey exploring the world with the diagnosis. “I think, she just wants to keep going, keep exploring forever,” says Violet’s father. “We can’t figure it out, you know, we just can’t […]. She is a mystery. That’s like the whole point.” Nicholas is another protagonist of the film. A fourteen-year-old teenager represents the afternoon. He has more freedom because he is not with his parents all the time. His parents help him overcome the roadblocks but mostly he is coming to terms with his identity on his own. He has social challenges and he has to navigate the world of friends and dating. And there is Paula, an adult, who is caring for others and who has truly embraced the diagnosis. She represents the evening. According to Larsen, besides the symbolic meaning, this deftly crafted structure of the film, also helped his editing process.

Through the eyes of a four-year-old Violet happily swinging in her backyard hammock, teenager Nicholas, and middle-aged wife and mother Paula, Neurotypical explores the

broad spectrum of neurodiversity, rendering ‘normal’ people as ‘the other,’ which brings an interesting tension into play. Now, we are ‘the other.’ “I look at neurotypical life and I am sorry but I don’t really want to be one of you […],” one of the autistics confesses. I am not particularly impressed that it is a better way of life. It’s a different way of life and I celebrate the difference […]. But I don’t want to be neurotypical – I am happy being what I am […].”

The film does a marvelous job at pushing back the cliches, eschewing to represent autism solely as a severe debilitating disease that needs a cure – the flat image oftentimes spoonfed by the media. Instead, the documentary unveils different facets of the autistic life. Parents of little Violet weigh the pros and cons of putting their daughter on medication, which might act as a ‘chemical straitjacket’ for the girl. Self-taught Southern old-time fiddler talks about the oddness that often results in a cultural content. Student Maddi discusses the possibility of being involved in romantic relationships being an autistic, “Just because Temple Grandin doesn’t do it, doesn’t mean it never happens,” she says. John and working artist Katie enlighten us on creative adaptations and ways to pick up social cues to ‘pass’ in the ‘normal’ world. “You can actually convince them that you are listening if all you do is just repeat the last three to four words of what they are saying. It works like magic,” John shares with a tad of sarcasm.

Neurotypical is a remarkable film that transpires the human need to belong. It is a lot about trying to fit in once you are at the other end of the spectrum. In order to put the rest at ease, some, like Wolf, create a pseudotypical, a fake typical, thus coming as close to being Joe Normal as possible without losing their identities. “My child is a ‘red’ child in a ‘blue’ world,” a mother of an autistic fifteen-year-old expressed at the online screening of the film on POV, “and my job is to teach him how to exist in the ‘blue’ world but not to make him ‘blue.'”

In quintessence, Neurotypical calls to accept the difference and celebrate diversity. Unconventional ways of thinking is what makes us find the beauty when we fail to see. As one of the film’s subjects expounds, “I realized that there is only one sense, not five, and the one is touch.” When you see, you get light hitting the backs of your eyes. When you hear, sound is hitting your eardrums. And when you taste, you’ve got taste receptors that are engaging in actual molecules. So everything is a form of touch. I decided that a tag game could be way more subtle than it was ever played in grade school. Like if I say ‘tag,’ I just hit your eardrums and you are IT. Or if I write ‘tag’ on a piece of paper and I hold it up and you read it, I just hit the backs of your eyeballs and you are IT. So that made it more fun in my mind. [After all], you don’t tag somebody to make them IT, you ‘tag’ somebody to remind them that they are IT.

USA, 2013, 52 min.

“Teaching Documentary” Symposium

It is my impression that many readers of filmkommentaren.dk are filmmakers or – consultants or academics, who teach documentaries at various places. This is the reason why I with pleasure forward this text to you from John Burgan, who together with Heidi Gronauer stand behind an interesting symposium to take place in Cardiff April 9-11 2014:

Crowdsourcing, High Definition, YouTube: the universe has changed massively since the most recent GEECT (The Groupement Européen des Ecoles de Cinéma et de Télévision / European Grouping of Film and Television Schools (GEECT) is the association of CILECT’s European members, and schools in Israel and Lebanon., ed.) conference on documentary back in 2000. Twitter, Facebook, smartphones: our students certainly inhabit a very different world to the one we grew up in. But at the end of the day, isnʼt it all still down to the two core elements that should be at the heart of every film school: storytelling and ideas?

The aim of this two and a half day symposium is to take a snapshot of the current state of documentary and documentary teaching.

The draft programme is still being finalised, but here are some highlights:

• Masterclass (for students) with high-profile documentary filmmaker

• State of the Doc Nation – current directions in doc teaching

• Brave New World: how do we teach interactive, web, mobile?

• Best Kept Secrets I: classic doc exercises – old ideas, new contexts

• Best Kept Secrets II: teaching new platforms – think audience

• Creating creative producers – how to bring crowdfunding,

crowdsourcing, collaborative distribution into the curriculum

• “Back to Basics” panel discussion – itʼs still about story & ideas

Bearing in mind the limited time available, we welcome additional proposals for the sessions above, particularly for the ever-popular “Best Kept Secrets”

Seed funding is already in place from GEECT and the National Film & TV School (UK), with additional support being negotiated with other institutions.

Weʼll be based at the University of South Wales right in the centre of Cardiff, only minutes from hotels, restaurants and with easy transport links to London and Bristol. As the financial side is still being sorted out, we will announce registration details shortly, but the symposium will be open to all CILECT members. There will be a social event each evening and preferential hotel rates for those that wish to stay on in the Welsh capital over the weekend. Check out the symposium blog at teachingdocumentary.com for updates.

Please contact us directly (emails below) to add your name to the list of participants – this promises to be a memorable gathering of the documentary family!

Photo, Herz Frank (1926-2013), who taught this blogger about documentary. A still from the shooting of his and Maria Kravchenko’s coming film “The Edge of Fear”.

John Burgan

Newport Film School television and new media

University of South Wales

Wales / United Kingdom

+ 44 1633 43 5370 (office)

+ 44 7906 051 476 (cell)

john.burgan@southwales.ac.uk

Heidi Gronauer

Documentary Film & TV ZeLIG school for documentary,

Bozen / Bolzano

Italy

39 0471 977 930 (office)

39 347 966 1272 (cell)

heidi.gronauer@zeligfilm.it

http://teachingdocumentary.com/2013/09/14/teaching-documentary-april-9-11-2014-update/