Golden Apricot

You arrive in Yerevan, Armenia early morning. The taxi is taking you to the hotel, you enter the lobby and the music that meets you sounds familiar. Yes, Charles Aznavour sings La Boheme, wonderful, and a reminder of the singer and film actor’s Armenian origin. I am told that Aznavour was there the day before my arrival to open the festival, of which he is an honorary president, and I dare say that the Armenians are proud of him. Outside the Moscow Cinema (yes, Armenia was part of the Soviet Union) you find the Charles Aznavour Square, in the impressive Ararat brandy factory, there is a Charles Aznavour Alley of barrels etc. etc., and at this tenth edition of the festival the opening film was ”Tirez sur le Pianiste” (1960) by Truffaut, featuring Aznavour in the leading role.

The festival offers a huge programme. Feature films are in focus, competitions, retrospectives, Armenian panorama – but also a documentary competition section with films like the Georgian ”The Machine Which Makes Everything Disappear” by Tinatin Gurchiani, ”Leviathan” by Véréna Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor, Lithuanian Linas Mikuta’s ”Dzukija’s Bull” and Bulgarian ”The Last Black Sea Pirates” by Svetoslav Stoyanov.

I was there for two workshops, the ATCP (Armenian Turkish Cultural Programme) that included 10 short fiction and documentary projects to be discussed and pitched – two of them received awards for further development and production. The winners were the Armenian documentary project ”Our Atlantis” by Arthur Sukiasyan, who got 10.000$ to develop his film about a (now abandoned) camp for Armenians in Istanbul, and the short fiction ”The Woman in the Window” by Turkish director Doğan Baran Kurtoğlu and the producer Cenk Ozer. The latter, 8 mins. long, including animation scenes, is ready for shooting.

For Caucadoc, a great training and promotion initiative organised by Czech People in Need (that also arranges the One World Festival in Prague), Sakdoc from Georgia and Internews, I had the pleasure to have individual consultations with 6 Armenian documentarians, a fine mix of talent and experience plus to do a lecture entitled ”Documentary, the art form of the 21st Century?”

The festival takes good care of its guests offering a huge hospitality (excursion) programme and an endless list of dinners and receptions. Personally I profited from the generosity of the filmmakers at Bars Media Studio, who I have known for several years through their presence in European documentary workshops. The studio has produced – let me mention just two titles – ”The Last Tightrope Dancer in Armenia” (Inna Sahakyan and Arman Yeritsyan) and ”A Story of People in War and Peace” (Vardan Hovhannisyan). They gave me food and culture.

http://www.gaiff.am/

http://caucadoc.com/en/

http://www.barsmedia.am/team.html

Per Kirkeby: Ekspeditionen

Jeg fortsætter mine gensyn med Per Kirkebys film, som så lykkeligt er dukket op på Filmstriben. Nu altså Ekspeditionen (1988), som vist nok aldrig har været i distribution, men som jeg sært kender alligevel. Noget af materialet er optaget, da Kirkeby og Teit Jørgensen lavede Geologi – er det egentlig videnskab? (1980)

”Det er om Eigil og mig og Pearyland”, siger stemmen, om det handler den varde, som blev rejst af dem i landskabet der. Forstår jeg, da jeg ser den senere. Det var sommeren 1963 han var med på Eigils ekspedition, og det fortæller fortællestemmen sådan lige ud ad vejen, og stemmen er Per Kirkeby, det kan jeg jo høre, og Eigil er Eigil Knuth, det ved jeg. Billederne er fotografier, stills, som det siges i filmsproget, og de er sært slørede og gamle, det er arkivstof, ja, men helt umanipuleret, upoleret og ikke på nogen måde strammet op. Så fortæller fortællestemmen, altså Kirkeby, at han nu, han er i gang med den her film, må han erklære, at han har mistet lysten til det filmiske, at han vil fortælle om denne personligt skelsættende begivenhed, ekspeditionen i sit liv, som i hans sind vokser som drøm og forestilling og gennemtænkning til hele mytologien om ekspeditionerne i dette grønlandske landskab, hvor døden får sin ikke fortrængte plads, så livet bliver til fylde, det vil han fortælle om i en lysbilledserie. Og jeg forstår, at Teit Jørgensen er sat til at filme lysbillederne, mens Kirkeby viser dem med sit lysbilledapparat på lærredet og ind imellem med sin finger peger på en bestemt linje i det viste landskab, noget, han vil pointeret, som han derefter i sit store værk, akvarellerne og malerierne atter og atter har pointeret.

Og så med ét forsvinder stemmen, og der bliver stille, ikke klodset stille som et lydhul, nej hensynsfuldt stille som ønsket: se nu på de her billeder! Og jeg ser og ser og tror, jeg forstår det ufortællelige og bliver rørt over, at han ved, jeg også har det i mig, indtænker alt det, han ved, jeg ved, alt det, jeg har set og læst. Og netop som det er klart for mig, hvad det er, får jeg belønningen, Hans Andersen (ved jeg senere fra et tekstskilt) spiller tuba, det er filmmusik. Af Henning Christiansen, kan jeg gå ud fra som selvfølge.

Det kan godt være, at det er en forudsætning for, at jeg opfatter den intense skønhed i Kirkebys film (ikke kun den, mange af dem, måske dem alle), at jeg ved lidt om baggrunden for eksempel billedsidens radikalitet. Manden er jo maler og han mener noget med billederne, de er ikke tilfældige eller sjuskede, som jeg først kunne mene, så de kan selvfølgelig ikke uden videre afvises. Men det er for mig nødvendigt at studere deres forudsætninger, som er en helt anden æstetik end den, jeg er vænnet til og til dels skolet i. Det har hjulpet mig meget at læse, hvad han skriver om det. Som nu her om Teit Jørgensens fotografi (i det hele taget), som han beundrer: Tilbage i december 1976 skriver Per Kirkeby om kvaliteten af de mere nøgterne kompositioner, der afspejler en accept af ”procesessens almindelighed”:

”… Forstår fotografen dette, bliver hans billeder hverken platte eller demonstrativt tilbydende (…). Billederne får den klare redegørelse for udstrækninger og rum, figurer og størrelser, den rolige klarhed som bliver erindringens og stedernes magi. (…) Meget få fotografer når denne indsigt i simpelheden, de fleste frygter den faktisk og står på hovedet. (…) Men ud af den fotografiske dokumentation, denne simpelhed, vokser stemninger uden ord. Tænk det lader sig se. Teit Jørgensen er en dansk fotograf der har disse kvaliteter. Hans billeder er ikke demonstrative, men de viser at dette lader sig se. Hans billeder har denne rolige udstråling”

Danmark 1988, 31 min. Manuskript: Per Kirkeby, fotografi: Teit Jørgensen, klip: Grete Møldrup, musik: Henning Christiansen, fortællerstemme: Per Kirkeby, produktion: Vibeke Windeløv / Kraka Film, distribution: Filmstriben. Litt.: Per Kirkeby: Ekspeditionerne i Fisters klumme, 1995. Per Kirkeby citatet er fra teksten Fotografen i Victor B. Andersen’s Maskinfabrik, december 1976, side 86. Her citeret via en hjemmeside (uden årstal) om Teit Jørgensens separatudstilling ”Snapshots & Stills” i Galleri Tom Christoffersen.

Golden Apricot/ Ulrich Seidl

The festival presented the Paradise-trilogy of Ulrich Seidl: Love, Hope and Faith. And the fine Golden Apricot Daily brought an interview with the director (online, see link below), from where I have taken the following:

Seidl told the Daily that his first idea was to make one film about the desires of three different women and show them in parallel stories. But he ended up with 90 hours of material, which could have been made into a 6 hour long film… ”but because the three stories felt so intense, I thought that making three films was the only right solution”.

”My films are documentary-like in style and atmosphere, with actors performing as authentic as possible. Yet, my images can be very artificial. Think about the scene in Love where the rich sugar mamas are in their beach chairs, while a rope separates them from the Kenyan beach boys on the other side. The idea of that image was totally mine…”

You ask a lot from your actors, the interviewer asks Seidl, you direct a lot of attention towards their bodies. Was it hard to cast them?

”Definitely. While casting the Teresa-part (the sugar mama in Love) I knew I wanted a professional actress. She had to be overweight and able to improvise in front of the camera. Finding an actress who’s able to improvise in front of the camera is difficult enough: You’re stuck with only twenty percent of the German-speaking actresses who can do that. Moreover she needed to perform in intimate scenes, exposing her body. Realising this actress has children, a husband, family; it was difficult to find the right one. After the casting I travelled with three actresses to Kenya to discover how they would respond to the shooting location. Only then I could know how they would feel wearing a bikini in the heat and how they would interact with the beach boys”.

Photo: Danish distributor: Øst for Paradis

http://www.gaiff.am/

Golden Apricot/ Pelesjian

So there he was in Moscow Cinema Big Hall on a thursday evening, and it was totally packed. Artavazd Pelesjian, the Armenian director of all times. I was about to write documentary director, but has been told that he does not accept this categorisation… even if I can not imagine a better observer than Pelesjian – and his cameraman of the two last films he made in Armenia: ”Verj” (The End, 1994) and ”Kyank” (The Life, 1993). The name of the cameraman is Vahagn Ter-Hakobyan. What a documentary eye, and what an editor, superb Pelesjian himself.

The master himself was there to receive several prizes for his work. One after the other, film people and a minister of culture climbed the stage to express their (boring) hommage to the 75 year old director, who brought some humour into the ceremony.

The two films above were shown plus ”Tarva Yeghanakner” (Seasons, 1975) and ”Inhabitants” (1970). In total 55 minutes.

I have (some of) the films at home on vhs and dvd, but nothing compares to watching them on a big screen as in Yerevan. Let me highlight this time ”The End” that is shot in a train, 10 mins. long, observations of travellers who look out the window, sleeping or falling asleep, are close to each other and yet so separated, profiles, heads from behind or en face, with the sound of a train as the music of the film, edited in a rythm that seems so right, when you sit and wait for the moment where you see the train from the camera-out-of-the-window perspective, and then you go back inside again. And of course it is not ”just” a film about passengers in a train, you could say – as with Herz Frank’s ”Ten Minutes Older” – that ”this is the story of our lives”.

And yes, I find it difficult, if not impossible to properly verbalise the emotional experience you get, when meeting the works of Pelesjian. ”Seasons” again, a film I often show to emphasize the endless beauty in the human being’s constant fight for survival, here set in the mountains of Armenia, where shepherds gently take care of the sheep in all kind of weather situations, intercut with a wedding ceremony in the small village. Unforgettable sequences.

Several standing ovations to Artavazd Pelesjian in Yerevan that night.

Important PS – the film ”Il Silenzio di Pelesjian” by Pietro Marcello was also shown at Golden Apricot, you should definitely add this non-conventional, personal and also introductory documentary to your Pelesjian retrospective, whenever or whereever you get it.

http://www.gaiff.am/

Golden Apricot/Parajanov

Sergey Parajanov (1924-1990) experienced that a museum was being built in his honour. ”I must be the only one who is alive when a museum is set up”, he is said to have joked.

The museum is there, in Yerevan, you enter a courtyard, from where you go to a two-floor house full of the artist’s wonderful collages, where he is using all kind of available material, which he actually had to as he spent 10 years of his life in Soviet prisons. (He critised the regime and ”they” did not like his homosexuality! Scrubbers and brooms, he was regularly given the cleaning job in these locations, are among others requisites often seen.

There is no end to the stories that Parajanov gives the visitor with his collages and assemblages (his leather suitcases transformed into the sculpture of an elephant!, dolls, drawings, (ladies) hats – all very unsentimental as are the photos (with funny comments) of his family. Joyful. Playful.

There are reconstructions of a couple of rooms from his home in Tbilisi Georgia, with walls full of art works, colourful they are as his work as a filmmaker – at the museum there are clips from his films and costumes and drafts for scenography.

I bought three of his films, hopefully good quality, to substitute the old vhs copies in poor condition. First in line: The Colour of Pomegranates (1968) (Photo).

www.parajanovmuseum.am

Per Kirkeby: Geologi er det egentlig videnskab?

Titlens provokation har siddet fast i mig siden jeg så filmen ved dens fremkomst. Det er for mig at gribe tilbage i mit liv og se begyndelsen til den kunstopfattelse, den videnskabsforståelse, som jeg orienterer mig med nu. Per Kirkeby er geolog med istiden som speciale tror jeg nok, og så er det da en udfordring, når han et sted i filmen, stilfærdigt siger, at istiden er en antagelse, en omvæltning for en skolelærer og nybegyndt museumsmand, som kom lige fra geografilokalet og Axel Schous Danske Atlas, et vidunderligt værk, som i imponerende kort og smukke rekonstruktionstegninger forklarer sammenhængen mellem isrande, tunneldale og hovedstilstandslinje og det danske landskab med bakkeøer, moræner og tunneldale. Og jeg troede at dette alt sammen var fakta og bare skulle læres. En antagelse siger han så, kvartærgeologen! Jorden gyngede, måske var der helt andre forklaringer, geologi var ikke længere noget, der var dernede eller dengang, men inde i hovedet på en videnskabsmand, en tanker, muligheder blandt flere, måtte jeg tro. Jeg var dog forberedt. Det begyndte for mig med Flyvende Blade, som jeg nok læste fire-fem år tidligere. Jeg havde først været forundret, blev så fascineret og hurtigt optaget af denne særegne meget personlige blanding af dagbog, notater, breve, biografiske studier, erindringsfragmenter. En essayistik ud over alle de litterære grænser, jeg til da havde mødt. Sådan var også filmene, grænseløse, ustyrlige og skarptskårne med en fast hånd.

Per Kirkeby skriver om nogle af dem i 1995 i en tekst om kunstnere på film, han har lavet film om Asger Jorn og Wilhelm Freddie, dem skriver han om, Jornfilmen er fiktion i instruktørens liv, og Freddiefilmen er en film med den medvirkende malers egen fiktion, og så om den her film: ”… ’Geologi – er det egentlig videnskab?’ er en stump selvbiografi. Det kan man naturligvis i en vis forstand sige om alle en kunstners film, men i denne film er det et direkte motiv. Filmen opsøger et landskab og forsøger at genskabe et miljø i videste forstand, som var afgørende for kunstneren som ungt menneske. Men fiktionen er jo at det drejer sig om en undervisningsfilm. Og hvad så?” Jeg prøver at læse ”opdigtet” i stedet for ”fiktion” og tror, jeg forstår det lidt bedre.

Hurra, Per Kirkebys filmarbejde kan nu delvist, efterhånden vel komplet, ses på Filmstriben. Herefter kan jeg vende tilbage til basis, her til én af søjlefødderne for min langsomme forståelse af, hvad film egentlig er for noget.

Danmark 1980, 41 min. Manuskript: Per Kirkeby, fotografi: Teit Jørgensen, klip: Grete Møldrup, musik: Henning Christiansen, fortællerstemme: Per Kirkeby, produktion: Vibeke Windeløv / Kraka Film, distribution: Filmstriben. Litt.: Per Kirkeby: Hvad skal man egentlig med kunstnere på film? i Fisters klumme, 1995 og Flyvende Blade, 1974.

Magnificent7 Summer Screenings

The tireless organisers of the Belgrade European Feature Documentary Film Festival, Magnificent7, Svetlana and Zoran Popovic, and their many helpers, all of them filmmakers themselves, have put together a summer programme, 3 directors, who have already visited the festival (10th edition in 2014), represented with each two films: To be screened July 10, 11 and 12.

This is a clip from the announcement: Selection for this year`s Belef is a great opportunity to acknowledge the constant presence of these authors, and to create special authors’ nights with the goal of familiarizing ourselves with their themed circles and sensibilities. We have selected three representatives from leading documentary fields – Thomas Riedelsheimer from Germany (Breathing Earth and Touch the Sound (PHOTO)), Mika Ronkainen from Finland (Screaming Men and Finnish Blood Swedish Heart), and Marc Isaacs from Great Britain (All White in Barking and The Road-A Story of Life and Death). They are, before all, linked by the fact that with their films they created modern European documentary filmmaking, and some of the works we will see have earned cult status and marked their further development. 

Thomas Riedelsheimer is dedicated to the phenomenon of art and the rhythms of creation, creative pulsating of the artist’s breathing in conjunction with the work and space in which it is conceived. Mika Ronkainen reexamines the rhythms of silence, and of communication throughout different, surprising forms, from articulated to unarticulated. Marc Isaacs is, from a psycho-social standpoint, focused on the pulsating of people in England’s urban environments, rhythms of their presence and absence, acceptance and rejection. Finally, these authors` nights give us an opportunity to personally experience the rhythms of the authors’ evolvement from one film to the other. 


The Popovics say: BELEF is Belgrade Summer Art Festival with a concept, developed last year, to be the festival of (Belgrade) festivals. So, this is actually special promotion of M7 within BELEF. As a summer festival they insist on outdoor events and we love the idea because it’s a rare possibility to create ad hoc open air cinema in the very center of the town. There will be special, quite big screen and we’ll use big and mighty video projector to get high quality picture, full HD.

We asked producers,, distributors and authors to send us the best quality screening prints as digital files. Exclusively for this summer edition Thomas Riedelsheimer made for the first time special HD master (to be used for Blue-Ray) of his legendary “Touch the Sound”, since it is originally made on 35mm and only DVD was produced until now.

This is the second year that we promote M7 in the summer and documentary fans are eagerly waiting for new excitments.

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

Manski gets Main Documentary Award in Karlovy Vary

Veteran documentary director Vitaly Mansky won the main documentary prize at the festival in Karlovy Vary. This is the catalogue description of the film that had its international premiere at the festival:

According to a claim made by Vladimir Putin, half of Russia’s state budget comes from the oil and gas industry. In the case of natural gas, construction of the Trans-Siberian pipeline became a fundamental milestone when, in 1983, it connected supplies of natural gas in Western Siberia with European consumers. Renowned Ukrainian documentarist Vitaly Manskiy sets off along the route of the pipeline to find out what it’s like for ordinary people living in its vicinity. The catch from a frozen Siberian river full of dead fish, a wedding in a dilapidated prefab building in Khabarovsk, an Orthodox mass in a disused train car, a discarded washing machine used as a doghouse, and the invocation of communist ideals due to dissatisfaction with contemporary conditions and the fear of an uncertain future – all this eloquently illustrates the often absurd banality of contemporary Russia. This visually refined road movie is an unsettling portrait of the legendary Trans-Siberian gas pipeline on which most of Europe is still reliant.

The film (116 mins.) is coproduced with Saxonia Entertainment (Simone Baumann) (Germany), Hypermarket Film (Filip Remunda) (Czech Republic) and Czech Television. Deckert Distribution handles sales.

Best documentary film under 30 minutes was “Beach Boy” by Emil Langballe, 27 mins., a film from the National Film School in England.

The FEDEORA Award of the Federation of Film Critics of Europe and the Mediterranean of Film went to a film screened in the East of the West Section, the Slovak-Czech-Croatian “Velvet Terrorist “ for an innovative approach to portraying communist past with humor and creative balance between the film’s scripted scenes and documentary sections.

http://www.kviff.com/en/films/film-detail/4135-pipeline/

http://www.kviff.com/en/news/2543-first-award-winners-announced-/

Diana Groó’s New Film Shown in Jerusalem

Hungarian director Diana Groó is in Jerusalem these days presenting her new film, called ”Regina” (63 mins). I have followed the talented director for years, and saw a rough cut, that impressed me. How to make a film about a woman, where there is only one existing photo…

The now finished film is taken for screening at the Jerusalem Film Festival that runs until July 13 including (apart from feature films) two documentary sections (one of them competitive) and a section named Jewish Experience, where ”Regina” is placed.

Here comes the fine description of the film in the catalogue of the festival in Jerusalem:

”Diana Groó’s documentary tells the story of Regina Jonas (1902-1944), a strong woman who made history by becoming the first properly ordained woman rabbi in the world. The daughter of an Orthodox Jewish peddler, Jonas grew up in Berlin’s Scheunenviertel, studied at the liberal Hochschule für die Wissenschaft des Judentums (College for the Scientific Study of Judaism) beginning in 1924, and was ordained in 1935. During the Nazi era and the War, her sermons and her unparalleled dedication brought encouragement to the persecuted German Jews. Regina Jonas was murdered in Auschwitz in 1944. The only surviving photo of Jonas serves as a leitmotif for the film, showing a determined young woman gazing at the camera with self-confidence.

Through graceful and poetic use of archival footage, Diana Groo brings us a

story of a person whose image is known though one photograph alone. Scenes from Jewish life in Berlin during the early twentieth century come to life: synagogues, Jewish schools, parks, streets, and newsreels permeate the film, while a gentle voiceover handled expertly by Dánel Böhm and Daniel Kardos tell us this unique story. What may have seemed a challenge for a filmmaker, turns into the film’s greatest creative trait.”

An excellent interview with Diana Groó is to be found at the online magazine “Midnight East”, Ayelet Dekel is the writer. In the interview Groó talks about the difficulties in getting funding for the film in Hungary, “a Nazi country”, she calls it. “So it was very difficult to find producers,” Groó recalled, “then, like a miracle, a friend of mine appeared from London – George Weisz, he’s actually the father of Rachel Weisz the actress. George has Hungarian roots, he left Hungary in 1938,  luckily, they left for London, so they survived. He’s a good friend of mine and he liked my previous films. He liked this topic and this story, and he supported the film with his foundation, and later German co-producers also joined the production.”

http://www.midnighteast.com/mag/?p=26893

http://www.jff.org.il/?CategoryID=1085

https://www.facebook.com/ReginaTheStoryOfTheWorldsFirstWomanRabbi

Impressions from Sheffield Doc Fest

Dagnė Vildiūnaitė is the producer behind the Lithuanian production company Just a Moment. She has for years had an international focus, and her films have had both national and international success. “Father” by Marat Sargsyan were this year awarded in the festivals in Nyon and Krakow, “How the Revolution Played” by Giedrė ickytė got the award as the best film at the 9th Vilnius International Documentary of 2012, whereas ”Igrushki” by Lina Luzyte still waits for the international breakthrough, it deserves. Wake up festival people, here is a creative documentary film shot in Belarus that does NOT take the usual ”easy” path with Lukashenko in picture in every other moment!

Dagne sent me a mail a couple of days ago after travels to Moscow and Sheffield. It is always a pleasure to read what she has to tell, she has opinions that go way beyond, what more mainstream producers come up with in the numerous workshops of marketplaces for documentaires around the year. She gave me an ok to post her impressions from the visit to the Sheffield Doc Fest:

… and, yes, before that I was in Sheffield. I thought a lot about what made me feel so “not in place” there. And I made certain conclusions. Almost the entire festival program is consisting of the films talking about our “bad and unfair our world is, full of social problems and heroes who give their lives to change it”. I’m totally ok with it and I like many human rights documentaries.

But just next door they are organizing the market that has a strong focus on cross-media, online platforms, teaching that the audience has to be able to choose the content that they want and even influence the story of the film… and of course we also have to make our documentaries shorter and easier for the audience to “swallow”, while they are googling the entire world on their computers. And then my question comes – isn’t it our job to try to capture the audience that has less and less interest in the world around them? And isn’t it that audience that we are making our films about/for in the end? So why not challenge them and bring them back to cinemas to watch films that make them think. Instead of teaching them to push button “stop”, when they are not comfortable with the image they see?

But I’m so happy that I have attended one the best lectures in recent years – the masterclass by Walter Murch (it made my trip worth it). After it I suddenly realized one simple thing. There has always been a real interaction between audience and filmmakers. But it was on an intellectual level where the filmmaker raises the question, and an audience leaves the cinema with a gift – a new question, a new understanding, a new inspiration… Now it seems they talk about interactive elements in a purely physical way – audience pushes the button and feels satisfaction of being part of a creative process. We support a lazy audience locked in their rooms by their own choice, not willing to know smth more. And after that we talk with serious faces how bad it is that people end up living in the streets and vote for populists to become their presidents?…

I left Sheffield really scared. The town itself is full of people living in supermarkets and people living on social security payments (or what you call it). So the market and festival in this surrounding was even more symbolic.. But maybe I’m digging too deep?

http://www.justamoment.lt/en/