Magdalena Szymków: My House Without Me

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

Tülin Özdemir: Beyond the Ararat

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.

Ignacio Agüero: The Other Day

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

Errol Morris on Donald Rumsfeld

Realscreen, the trade magazine on non-fiction programmes and documentaries, focused July 22nd, in its newsletter, on the TIFF (Toronto International Film Festival, September 5-15) 2013 documentary highlights. With no confirmation from the festival itself, the new film by Errol Morris, ” The Unknown Known: The Life and Times of Donald Rumsfeld” is said to have its premiere at the prestige filled Canadian festival, 10 years after the director made his film on Robert McNamara, “The Fog of War”. For those who have forgotten: Rumsfeld was Secretary of Defence under George W. Bush from 2001 to 2006.

Another big name American documentarian, Alex Gibney, will present an up-dated version of “Lance Armstrong: The Road Back”, with the words of realscreen, “the titular disgraced cyclist”, and the French veterans Claude Lanzmann and Marcel Ophüls are also “possibilities”, as it is put, at the festival with “The Last of the Unjust”, the 220 mins. long film featuring Benjamin Murmelstein, the last president of the Jewish Council in the Terezin ghetto – and Ophüls with his autobiographical “Ain’t Misbehavin (Un Voyageur).

Photo: Morris left, Rumsfeld right – from:

http://realscreen.com/2013/07/22/exclusive-tiff-2013-to-host-morris-gibney-baichwal/#ixzz2ZrU9oblL

Sarajevo Film Festival – Documentaries

The festival in Sarajevo is first and foremost a festival for feature films. Big names – actors and directors – have during the years visited the city’s festival that this year can celebrate its 19th edition. However, due to hard work from Rada Sesic, well-known director, programmer, critic and tutor, the festival now also, since 2006, includes a competitive documentary programme.

The 2013 programme (August 16-24) has been announced. Around 20 films have been selected by Sesic, of course from Bosnia-Hercegovina, but also from Macedonia (by the Greek called F.Y.R.O.M), Montenegro, Croatia, Serbia, Greece, Azerbaijan, Romania and Hungary.

From the many premieres, I have seen two of the films, which the festival audience can look forward to watch:

”Here… I mean there” by Laura Capatana, 73 mins., a touching story from a Romanian town about two sisters, whose parents work in Spain. Over years the director has followed the girls and their development and struggles with themselves. In the house where they live with their sweet granny.

”Regina” by Diana Groo, 63 mins. about the first female rabbi Regina Jonas, a great achievement from the side of the director, who had one photo of her main character to work from – the one you see.

Lots to look forward to, also for this blogger who has been invited to be a tutor at the so-called rough-cut-boutique, an industry event for documentary makers.

http://www.sff.ba/content.php/news/show/id/1262/culture/en

Yamagata 2013

There is something fascinating about the Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival, YIDFF. It takes place every second year (this year October 10-17), it has several sections like ”New Asian Currents”, ”Japanese Panorama”, a retrospective of Chris Marker, a series called ”Another Side of the ”Arab Spring”” with no further details so far, and a section that puts a focus on Ethics.

Take a look at the website, old-fashioned and pretty boringly designed many would say, but with a serious focus on Documentaries with facts and links, and with a reference to an archive with interviews and a text about the film library that is open the whole year round.

The information about the ”15 outstanding films selected from 1152 films from 117 countries and areas” is already there:

”The Act of Killing” (Joshua Oppenheimer et al.) is there, ”Stories We Tell” (Sarah Polley), ”The Punk Syndrome” (Jukka Kärkkäinen, J-P Passi), “Once I entered a Garden” (Avi Mograbi) to mention films that have all been written about on this blog, the latter not yet watched and reviewed as “Motherland or Death” by Vitaly Mansky (photo) and ”The Other Day” by Chilean Ignacio Agüero, a film that won the main award at Chilean Fidocs festival this summer.

There are also films from the hosting country, and from Korea, Taiwan, India and Thailand.

The Japanese festival has its own profile with no industry activities. It is all about documentaries as an art form. Respect!

http://www.yidff.jp/2013/program/13p1-e.html

The Art of the Essay Film

… is a very well programmed and introduced film series that takes place in London at the BFI (British Film Institute) Southbank. Yes, what is the essay film that we talk about and often connect to films that we don’t know where to categorize… This is the intro text written by Kieron Corless, taken from the site, link below:

“Sitting somewhere between documentary and fiction, the ‘essay film’ signals and probes, like no other form of cinema, the filmmaker’s personal relationship to the images on screen. Grappling with urgent political and philosophical issues of the day, the essay film is cinema at its most engaged and liberated… He continues: Nowadays most commentators agree that the essay film is neither documentary nor fiction but sits somewhere on its own, evincing characteristics of both through its staging of an encounter between a self, filmed images and the world. Could we label it a genre?…”

Anyway, it is a brilliant and very inviting programme that BFI has put together – with lectures at the end of August after all films have been screened. Film history it is, to offer the audience “A Propos de Nice” (Jean Vigo, 1930,), A Valparaiso (Joris Ivens, 1965), Madrid (Patricio Guzman, 2002), not to talk about the name always mentioned when essay films are screened – Chris Marker with his “Sans Soleil” (1983), Alain Resnais “Toute la Mémoire du Monde” (1966) and Humphrey Jennings masterpiece “Diary for Timothy” (1945) (photo).

What pleases me is to see John Burgan’s Berlin-film listed. I saw this film many years ago (the film is from 1998, title “Memory of Berlin”), it was impressive and wonderfully off-mainstream. We have met and corresponded

since then, and I know numerous young filmmakers, who have praised his teaching, when he was at The European Film College in Ebeltoft in Denmark. The film is “an autobiographical, made-for-German-TV essay film was much admired by none other than Chris Marker, but remains too little known despite that. Using the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 as his point of departure, Burgan recalls his life as an adopted child, linking his poignant awareness of his own split identity and his search for his biological mother to the historical trauma of the city’s divided state.”

A film that I have never heard about is “La Morte Rouge” from 2006, 35 mins., description like this: Víctor Erice’s elegic short essay takes as its starting point his first trip to the cinema as a young boy in post-Civil War Spain, but spins off to explore the theatre, now disappeared, in which he saw the film, childhood horrors, and the suffering of a people traumatised by the war’s losses. Erice skilfully weaves diverse elements – archive, newly shot footage, Arvo Pärt’s music – into an allusive meditation on history, memory and time’s corrosive impact.

Where can I get hold of this – not being able to come to London?

https://whatson.bfi.org.uk/Online/essay-films

DocAlliance: Laila Pakalnina

Readers might think that I am paid to promote the vod that is run by DocAlliance – I am not, the simple reason it has so many posts on this blog is very simple: It has high quality and is edited with competence and sense for both new upcoming directors and veterans that can give you the possibility to catch up your documentary film history.

So here we go again with Latvian director Laila Pakalnina: 20 films are offered for free until July 28. It is an amazing offer to film students, film directors who look for inspiration and film buffs – to set up your own retrospective with a director, who started her carreer with documentary shorts shot on 35mm, for cinema, most often without dialog: The Ferry (1994), The Mail (1995), The Oak (1997) – going to the playful ”Papa Gena” (2001) and the fantastic nature and man masterpiece ”Dreamland”, not to forget a long documentary from her hand from 2011, ”33 Animals of Santa Claus”. 7 fiction films are on the list for you.

I have just watched two new films by Pakalnina, not in the list, ”Marathon” (photo of director who films with a camera fastened on her head) and ”Chimney”, both of them on their way to festivals around the world, showing that she is still surprising her audience with new precise, atmosphere-filled documentaries.

http://dafilms.com/news/2013/7/15/laila_pakalnina

Errol Morris on The Act of Killing

New York Times brings a long article about “The Act of Killing”. Errol Morris, credited, as Werner Herzog, as executive producer, has these words about the film, when asked if it is a documentary:

““Of course it’s a documentary,” he said. “Documentary is not about form, a set of rules that are either followed or not, it’s an investigation into the nature of the real world, into what people thought and why they thought what they thought.”

But Mr. Oppenheimer (Joshua O. directed the film) offered a more nuanced view. He distinguishes between the observational style of the film’s first half and what comes after it pivots to the re-enactments.

“I think it almost stops being a documentary altogether,” he said. “It becomes a kind of hallucinatory aria, a kind of fever dream.” At that point, he added, the film “transcends documentary” and becomes a strange hybrid creation.

But no matter what you call it, Mr. Morris said “The Act of Killing” was a work of art. Prefacing his remarks by saying, “I think I can speak independently of my role as executive producer, because I have no financial interest in this film,” he continued: “The most you can ask from art, really good art, maybe great art, is that it makes you think, it makes you ask questions, makes you wonder about how we know things, how we experience history and know who we are. And there are so many amazing moments like that here.” “

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/14/movies/the-act-of-killing-and-indonesian-death-squads.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

Rainova & Stoyanov: The Last Black Sea Pirates

It was the Bulgarian documentary, produced by the active, renowned with several award winning documentaries on its filmography, Agitprop, that took the main prize in Jerevan’s Golde Apricot festival, documentary competition.

I have not yet seen the final film but have followed the development of the great script by Vanya Rainova as well as material that was promising. This prize confirms the quality. Here is the description from the catalogue of the festival:

“For 20 years, Captain Jack the Whale and his crew have been drinking, dreaming and hunting for a treasure buried in the gully of Karadere, the pristine beach they call home.  But someone else has got wind of Karadere’s treasures. When news of imminent change begins to find its way to this remote oasis, the pirates’ world begins to unravel. Doubts erode the foundations of trust, conflicts brew and tensions are on the rise. In this crisis, emerges a contemporary fairy tale about the treasures we hunt and those that we find.”

On the producer’s site it is written that the film is already selected for 10 festivals, this is the third award it has received.

http://www.gaiff.am/

https://www.facebook.com/TheLastBlackSeaPirates

http://www.agitprop.bg/#/info/home