Arte Focus on Greece

OBS – In one week, August 15, the French-German cultural channel arte dedicates a whole day of programming to Greece! The thematic day on arte is initiated and organised by the Strasbourg based arte commissioning editor Madeleine Avramoussis with the Greek journalist Dimitra Kouzi as the presentator. In documentary circles Avramoussis needs no further introduction and I have personally enjoyed her competence and energy in numerous workshops, and not only in Greece. Dimitra Kouzi has been one of the strong fighters for the good, creative documentary in Greece, through CineDoc, an initiative to show foreign documentaries, through her (former, well there are many great Greek tv people who are former) position at the national television ERT, and through her blog, see link below.

17 documentaries and 2 features with 10 premieres will be broadcast, made (mostly) by local independent companies and directors, productions often supported through co-production deals between arte and ERT.

As presentator Dimitra Kouzi takes the viewer through the day. She will introduce films and subjects, like geography (the islands of course), like the ”Food for Love” made by renowned director Marianna Economou about Greek mothers, who send packages of good food to their grown-up children abroad. I have seen material from this film and if it keeps what is promised, it will be great fun to watch – as well as giving Greek family culture information.

There will be a programme on Alexandre the Great and a premiere of a film by another ”international” Greek documentarian Kimon Tsakiris, who has made a road movie from the Wild West of Greece to lead us into the current life of the Greek. Yiannis Boutaris (photo) is the main character of a long, very well made documentary by Dimitris Athiridis, who followed the controversial, former wine merchant and his candidature to become mayor of Thessaloniki. He succeeds.

Just to mention some of the films offered in this lovely initiative to put focus on a country that has been given a lot of attention in these years of crisis. Here the people, the culture and not the economy and the riots in the streets of Athens are on the agenda. Those films on the crisis, and on politics will hopefully find their tv slots on another occasion.

Madeleine Avramoussis wrote to me: I hope that this Theme day comes at the right time to show how important the coproductions are! Especially now,  when the Greek government is shaping the future public channel.

Link to: dimitrakouzi.files.wordpress.com

http://download.pro.arte.tv/uploads/Journee-Grece-OK.pdf

Lars Movin: Jeg ville først finde sandheden

.. med undertitlen ”Rejser med Jon Bang Carlsen”. Læserne af denne tekst skal til start vide, at såvel Jon Bang Carlsen som Lars Movin i årtier/årevis har haft en høj stjerne hos undertegnede blogger. Jeg har i de 20 år, jeg  var ansat i Statens Filmcentral skrevet og talt om Jon, jeg har givet grønt lys til de mange filmpjecer og –plakater, som blev lavet til hans film og jeg har indstillet flere af hans film til økonomisk støtte. Jeg har rejst med Jon til festivaler og vist hans film på filmskoler og seminarer. Alt sammen med glæde for Jon er sin generations vigtigste dokumentarist og har et velfortjent solidt internationalt ry.

Når det kommer til Lars Movin, har jeg altid betragtet ham som en fremragende kulturjournalist, som fornemt i og udenfor dagbladet Informations spalter er fulgt i Erik Thygesens fodspor med sin enorme viden om amerikansk underground. Han har skrevet om beatgenerationens kunstnere, han har nedfældet sine rejseindtryk – og han har været den danske filmkritiker og – skribent, som bedst har fulgt og beskrevet den nyere danske dokumentarfilm. Og han har selv lavet film. Hvilken energi og flid, har jeg tit tænkt om Lars Movin.

Og nu har de to rejst sammen til de steder, hvor Jons film er optaget for gennem samtaler at komme tættere på instruktørens måde at arbejde på og finde ud af sammenhængen mellem ”liv og værk, mellem biografi og fortælling”, som Lars formulerer det i sit forord.

Resultatet er blændende, den bedste filmbog jeg har læst i årevis – og lad den bibliotekaruddannede blogger med det samme også rose bogen som bog: 560 sider, velillustreret, med et detaljeret noteapparat, et navneregister og en kommenteret filmografi. Det er et imponerende arbejde, som her lægges frem af Lars Movin og bogen kan læses fra start til slut, eller man kan  hoppe rundt i den og bruge den som opslagsværk.

”Rejsen til Amerika” hedder det første kapitel og her er de to på hjemmebane. Det bliver til afsnit om mesterværkerne ”En rig mand” og ”Hotel of the Stars”,

om spillefilmen ”Time Out”, der blev et nederlag for instruktøren med en af flere fejlcastings, som han efter eget udsagn har lavet i sin karriere. Samtidig taler de to om ”Just the Right Amount of Violence”, filmen som endnu ikke har haft dansk eller international premiere. Jon Bang Carlsen formulerer sig igen og igen, så man har lyst til at citere ham, og det er Movins fortjeneste at sætte de mange sprogblomster ind på de rette steder og trække tråde fra det ene udsagn til det næste.

Men måske er det kapitlet ”Sjælens grundlandskaber”, som er det mest centrale for forståelsen af, hvorfra Jon Bang Carlsens stof stammer. Det tætte og komplicerede forhold til moren, som han voksede op hos, skilsmissen, hendes selvmordsforsøg og det uafklarede forhold til faren. Familierne Bang og Carlsen og deres tilhørsforhold, Kyndeløse – ”i erindringen et mentalt landskab for Cubakrise, postskilsmisse og teenage-spleen”, som en billedtekst lyder (side 150). ”Livet vil leves – breve fra en mor” er vel den film, der kommer tættest på moren, jeg husker, hvor forbavsede vi blev i Statens Filmcentral, da morens breve blev læst af Bodil Kjer. Denne gang en perfekt casting!

Og så kapitlerne om de ”danske” film, ”Jenny” først og fremmest, men også ”En fisker i Hanstholm”, hvor tilblivelseshistorien i bogen giver bevis for Jons herlige evne for den sproglige anekdote. Jo, humor er der i bogen – og i ”How to Invent Reality” fra den irske periode, som i øvrigt er lidt tyndt beskrevet i forhold til de andre rejser, inklusiv sidste kapitel, hvor de to rejsende er i Sydafrika, som instruktøren har opholdt sig i gennem mange år og lavet mesterlige film som ”Addicted to Solitude”. Her finder de hovedpersonen fra denne film, Brenda, som i 1999 ikke vidste, hvor hendes mand var blevet af og i 2012 er blevet gift og har børn. I de sydafrikanske afsnit folder Lars Movin sig ud som den nøjagtigt observerende, smukt formulerende rejseforfatter, han er.

Jeg har ikke skrevet meget om Jon Bang Carlsens metode, den iscenesatte dokumentarisme, som det rejsende makkerpar vender tilbage til igen og igen. Det er godt formidlet, hvordan metoden er anvendt, hvordan instruktøren hele tiden prøver noget nyt og udfordrer sig selv: ”For mig handler det om at nulstille sig selv hver gang, man skal starte på et nyt projekt, og så pejle sig ind på, hvilken form der vil være brugbar denne gang” (side 188).

Der er masser af stof at blive klog på for den, der vil vide mere om at lave film og vil møde en instruktør, der har været ærligt tvivlende overfor hver ny opgave, har været (og er) stærkt produktiv, en visuel begavelse, et menneske der med en genert kejtethed altid har været i stand til at komme tæt på sine personer, der på den ene eller anden måde har indeholdt noget af ham selv. Men bogen kan også læses som en selvbiografisk rejsebog  af den, der ikke er specielt interesseret i iscenesat dokumentarisme eller kender nøje til instruktørens værker.

Informations Forlag, 2012, vejledende pris: 349 kroner.

Kollega Allan Berg har skrevet flere tekster om Jon Bang Carlsens film: “Addicted to Solitude“, boksen “Trilogi+1“, “Jenny“, “Time Out“, “Carmen & Babyface“, “Purity Beats Everything” (skrevet af Tue Steen Müller), “Fugl Fønix“, “Jeg ville først finde sandheden“, “En fisker i Hanstholm“, “Livet vil leves“, “Baby Doll“, “Ofelia kommer til byen“.

Puljiz & Sans: Mekas

Yesterday at midnight the great Swedish cultural strand K-Special of SVT showed (third run) a French production from 2012 with Jonas Mekas, who declares that ”I’m not a filmmaker, I don’t really make films, I only keep filming, I am a filmer, not a filmmaker”.

To be in company with Mekas is always a pleasure. In this case he sits there with a beer in his hand, it’s from his native country Lithuania, talking to French art curator Jérôme Sans (who in 2000 made a book on/with Mekas, published by Steidl, title ”Just like a Shadow”).

Of course there is a lot of looking back in this film and talk about Andy (Warhol), Cassavetes (when Mekas came to New York he was a film critic), Robert Frank, Jacqueline (Kennedy) but the main concern/talk of Mekas in this film is the survival of the independent film and his ”baby”, the Anthology Film Archive. His film political achievement, transforming the building which is now the Archive from a prison. His making a collection that is second to none.

There are clips from his works, there is a mention of his escape from occupied Lithuania, but there is first of all this kind and generous old man, who says that only the very very personal films are universal. And blows the trumpet in between.

France, 2012, 52 mins.

http://jonasmekas.com/diary/

Nastia Tarasova: Linar

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

DokuFest Prizren

The festival in Kosovo (starts August 17) has announced its impressive programme. The artistic director Veton Nurkollari welcomes the audience in this way:

“We are thrilled to present an expanded slate of competitions at DokuFest this year, with films that paint a picture of contemporary world in such a brave, provocative and honest way. Films about bees, ships, the cat name Baby, Black Sea pirates, Balkan matchmakers, punk girls in balaclavas or mass exodus are only part of eclectic selection of films in competitions and we are looking forward to share these and other films with our audience in August”.

In the international competition for long docs (10 films) you will find films like “Elena” (Petra Costa, Brazil), “The Last Station” (Christian Soto & Catalina Vergara, Chile), “Stories We Tell” (Sarah Polley,Canada, the opening film, Photo), and the new film by Polish Bartek Konopka and Piotr Rosolowski “The Art of Disappearing”, whereas another Polish film “My House Without Me” (Magdalena Szymków) is to be found in the short doc section. There are also films under the caption “human rights”, including “Salma” (Kim Longinotto, UK), and a Balkan Docs Competition with “Dragan Wende” (Lena Müller and Dragan von Petrovic, Germany/Serbia), “One Step Ahead” (Dimitris Athiridis, Greece) and “The Last Black Sea Pirates” (Stoyanov, Bulgaria)… not to forget an hommage to Chris Marker and a retrospective of films by Jay Rosenblatt.

… and many other inviting sections and workshops.

http://dokufest.com/2013/

Luke Moody on Hybrid Documentary

Have to confess that I have been using the term “hybrid”, whenever I have been talking about the new tendencies in the documentary genre. Without really being able to get closer to what it is, where it comes from, what ethical questions that are linked to it, the relationship between viewer and maker, the “self” in the film and so on so forth.

Therefore it is great that English filmmaker Luke Moody, who also works for Britdoc, has written an informative analysis of “hybrid tendencies in documentary film”. Moody takes us by the hand and gives us food for thought. He exemplifies – his starting point is “The Act of Killing” – and sets up some categories. His text and approach could be a very welcomed theme for a whole seminar on documentary filmmaking of today. We could easily skip a pitching session or two, not to forget one of the technically based transmedia gatherings.

Here are two small quotes from the long article by Moody, but please read it all (link below):

Recognition of new waves and emergent trends tend to overlook the specific ideas and patterns of filmmaking. The ‘hybrid documentary’ is not a subgenre, it is a mode of tactical filmmaking. To come to terms with these modus operandi, rather than looking upon them as a singular movement, there’s a need to trace each trajectory of complex, rich methodology…

How do we assess the ethical and aesthetic merits of a film that does not attempt to be more factual than fictional? On a spectrum of honesty-manipulation? Form-function? Responsible-irresponsible? How are the filmmakers assessing their own codes of operation? Paradoxically, the audience awareness of fact production and manipulation allows the filmmaker to negotiate a new level of trust through shared transparency: “This is how I shall produce the story, come with me on this journey.”…

The increase of audience trust permits a shift in ethical contracts between filmmaker and subject, a shared ground of risk and experiment…

Photo from Bombay Beach (Alma Har’el, 2011), one of the films mentioned.

http://11polaroids.wordpress.com/2013/07/02/act-normal-hybrid-tendencies-in-documentary-film/

DocAlliance’s Summer Gift

… to its loyal documentary lovers, hope there are many, who use this exceptional vod library that now has more than 800 titles, which can be overwhelming, where to start and where to end… which is the reason why ” our film selectors updated the Recommended section highlighting the best world documentaries by filmmakers such as Petr Kerekes, Zuzana Piussi, Nicolas Philibert, Agnes Varda, Bert Haanstra, Nikolaus Geyrhalter or Jorgen Leth.

In the newsletter from DocAlliance it is written that masterpieces from these directors and many others can be watched for free starting from today until August 4!

I tested it, clicked “recommended”, clicked “New Scenes from America” (photo) by Jørgen Leth, and there it was on my computer, so easy, such a fine initiative, modern documentary film history right there for you.

http://dafilms.com/?nl=iNSUirQm1t-2

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