The programme of the 44th (!) edition of the documentary festival (April 19 to 26) in Nyon, Switzerland has been published. The festival includes ” a total of 110 films in competition from 45 countries, including 24 Swiss films. For almost all of the films the festival screenings will be world or international premieres; the fruit of a record number of nearly 3 500 films submitted to Nyon or discovered in festivals around the world by Luciano Barisone and his selection committee. This record number of films screened underscores the growing reputation of the Festival nationally and internationally and enables the organisers to apply particularly stringent criteria in the selection process, Claude Ruey (president of the festival, ed.) proudly announces.”

About the selection, the director Luciano Barisone says, quite interestingly: ”In the face of the contradictions of a globalised system, the world is seeking a possible future. After the social unrest which in recent years has affected the West, the East, as well as the Arab world, filmmakers everywhere are reflecting on the current situation, exploring new ways of life, and imaging the future.” Adding that ”the  respect of the spectators and of the persons filmed, the filmmakers’ commitment to their projects, as well as the originality and aesthetics of the films are among the key selection criteria.”

Two strong international names present retrospectives of their works: Israeli Eyal Sivan (Jaffa-The Orange’s Clockwork, Route 181-Fragments of a Journey in Palestine-Israel, The Specialist-Portrait of a Modern Criminal (Eichmann) among others) and Latvian Laila Pakalnina (Dream Land, The Oak, Papa Gena, Three Men and a Fish Pond, The Mail, The Ferry.. among others). There is a series of Lebanese documentaries. There is a film with and about Brazilian icon Gilberto Gil, new films by Israeli Yoav Shamir, Finnish Susanna Helke, as well as international premieres of ”Father” by Lithuanian Marat Sargsyan and Belgian Tülin Ozdenir’s ”Beyond the Ararat”.

A rich programme. Take a look:

http://www.visionsdureel.ch/

Sevara Pan writes about the DoxBox initiative called Global Day for Syria 2013:

In times when representations of the Orient lends itself to increasing misinterpretations, knowledge of languages and history does not suffice as much as the mechanical gathering of facts does not constitute an adequate method for grasping what is it all about. In such times comes art, which as the renowned poet and human rights activist Cesar Cruz put it, comforts the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.

The Global Day for Syria, which took place two weeks ago, is a project initiated by the Syrian documentary film festival Dox Box in support of Syrian filmmakers and in high regard to its people who struggle for their vision of what they are and want to be. In March of last year the management of the Syrian documentary film festival Dox Box decided to cancel the festival due to the upheavals in the country. Instead, they called for documentary film festivals around the world to participate in the project Global Day for Syria.

The second edition of Syria Global Day put in spotlight a few short documentaries by filmmakers from Syria, including Salma Aldairy, Roula Ladqani, and Lina Alabed, among others. Yet, most importantly, it brought forth films made by Syrian citizens themselves in a program called “A Citizen with a Movie Camera” (in 6 compilations: Dialogue, In the Searching for Truth, The Leak, Letters, Moments, and Stories). Beautiful, unsettling, and at last insightful and thoughtprovoking the films were selected from over 300,000 videos from and about Syria that had been uploaded on Youtube. From this enormous amount

of footage, the programmers of Dox Box chose the best films to shed light on the situation in Syria, a picture somewhat different from that given by the mainstream media.

By bringing forth films of its own people who are excluded from the society’s established structures of representation and hegemonic power, Global Day for Syria, I believe, ensued the question the Indian theorist Gayatri C. Spivak once posed — can the subaltern speak? In the age of numerous technological possibilities, fast internet connection and light mobile cameras, citizens of Syria seem to have found voice or at least an outlet for their fervor to speak. Global Day for Syria let its people speak louder, hence bestowing to remapping of the the sheer “history told from below.”

I reckon that more than anything, one of the programme’s thematic compilations “Dialogue” explores the dichotomy of the Self and the Other in “here and now” of Syria. “In the tiny space left for “dialogue”, a dialogue between partisans, between voices and bullets , […] between two hiding snipers, everything can happen, but as we fall into the illusion of cinema, some voice brings us back: it is the real.” At times turning futile, the compilation “Dialogue” continuously attempts to juxtapose the Self to the Other in the present-day Syria. Other is part of what defines and even constitutes the Self, as Edward Said, the proponent of the Orientalism theory would say. But as image of the Other is inescapably colored, distorted, and eventually reduced by the “lense” of the Self, the dialogue seems to be hampered.

As for the stylistic approach and dramaturgy of the film compilation, shaky amateur handheld camera work innate in the very essence of citizen journalism does not seem to bother. In fact, I appreciate this piece of filmmaking to remain unpolished. The intertitles of the descriptive narrative material edited between the disparate video clips in both English and Arabic help orientate yet do not aim at predefining the meanings of each. Devoid of clear cut dramaturgy, the austere poetry of each scene ripens, raptures, and eventually draws us into the audacious undertakings of the involved. Part of what makes the films so compelling to me is that for most of their running time you cannot predict where they are going to. The reality is not scripted — it is witnessed only.

In one of the scenes we observe the dialogue between two snipers, one standing at the vantage point of the balcony, whereas the other hides below. Amidst urban ruins, the two venture to converse on weather and barbeque, which, within my conception, comes at first as jaded cynicism taken out of place.Yet somehow it leaves us with a tad of sadness caused by a yearning of two young men for a peaceful life. Devoured by the heartfelt dialogue between two men, we hear the sound of every footstep they take at naked unease. What each of them is fighting for is Islam, Assad, or their homeland — the dialogue is riveting and provocative.

The film compilation “Dialogue” exposes the interdependence of human life that can neither be reduced to a formula nor brushed aside as irrelevant. “Perhaps through realizing human nature in a shape distant and foreign to us, we shall have some light shed on our own.” Sailing in the highest spheres of delirium, running amok, we have a right to wonder. Because oddly enough in this tale of war, it is as personal as it gets.

http://www.dox-box.org/index.php?lang=2

TSM, ed.: The films mentioned in the text of Sevare Pan are available on

http://www.arteeast.org/pages/events/2324/

 

 

 

 

 

I dare the risk of being called a grumpy old man, but why the f… does the audience, quite a good part of it, here in Kiev, at the Docu Days festival, behave so disrespectful to the films being screened, and to those of us, who sit down from the beginning of the screening to concentrate and have a cinematic experience. For days I have been disturbed by members of the audience, who arrive in the middle of the film and insist to have a seat in the middle of the row with the consequence that many have to stand up, blocking the view of others, or the other way around, people leaving the film before the end making a lot of noise.

I know the screenings are for free, it is very good cultural policy, and I love the atmosphere here, professional introductions and q & a’s, big audience, many behave excellently, and it is a good selection of films including the seven in the Docu/Life competition where I am in the jury, more about that later.

Very simple: You produce a sign to put on the doors into the cinemas saying ”no entrance during the screenings”, and you put some doormen/women to talk loud if the sign is not respected. The cell phones being used during the screenings, texts messages being sent – well, that is all over, that battle is lost, I am afraid.

Photo: Monk from “Burma vj” appealing for Respect for the films!

http://www.docudays.org.ua/

In June 2012 the football championship UEFA Euro took place in Poland and Ukraine. And of course some films came out of that. An Ukranian premiere was arranged at the Docu Days festival. 10 films were collected as a Youth Documentary Almanac, the directors, many of them film students or newly graduated documentarians, who had made films about policemen learning basic phrases of English to be used when meeting the invasion of football fans, or a young poet on his own, or people collecting metal to be sold or one who had a grandfather who built the old stadium, now to be rebuilt etc. – social, about persons, fresh, but in general with no focus and with big editing problems. One of those where you say to most of the films – ah, what a pity, go back to editing and find your film.

A small revelation for me, however, was the screening of the programme ”A Farewell to Cinema”, 5 films from 1987-1992, supported by the state. The times were for social critical films as I knew from Latvian Juris Podnieks and his groundbreaking ”Is it Easy to be Young?”. All films with an artistic quality. First of all demonstrated by (now) veteran director Sergey Bukovsky, who had made two of the five, ”Tomorrow is a Holiday” (1987) (photo) from a poultry factory where the women expressed deep dis-satisfaction about their life conditions, and ”The Roof” (1989) from a shelter for disabled people in a local monastery. The title of the programme comes from the last film in the programme (a dvd is being made by the national film centre), it has the following description, taken from the festival site:

Recently documentary filmmakers have been filming mass protests (end of 80’es, ed.) in the streets of Ukrainian cities, and now they themselves have to organize demonstrations in order to receive an opportunity to film. During the first years of Ukrainian independence, the production of chronicle and documentary films was cut to a minimum. The lack of financing or any state support whatsoever drove the veteran of Ukrainian documentary film, Israel Goldstein, to state: “The authorities are preventing us from filming because they are afraid that in several decades, the viewers of our films might ask: who was in power back then? Who put the people in such a state?” Today, the ‘authorities’ are well-known to everybody, but there is almost no film evidence of the consequences of their work. A Farewell to Cinema demonstrates why it happened this way: the filmmakers had to work as doormen, the studios were closed down, film financing was stopped. This film is one of the most radical in the genre ‘cinema about cinema: this is a film about the way that cinema ceased to exist.

http://www.docudays.org.ua/

Through reliable sources filmkommentaren.dk has succeeded to get hold of a translated version of the official document read from the stage at the opening of Docudays festival here in Kiev. As earlier announced negociations were held immediately that secured that the festival could start and so it did entering today into its third day... festival openings are normally full of loooong official speeches, the organisers of DocuDays deserve big Bravo for a spectacular alternative:

March 22, 2013 No. 826/3299/13-a

District Administrative Court of Kyiv City comprised of the presiding judge Pomidorov O. P. having considered under the written submission proceedings the administrative case claimed by the Kyiv City State Administration versus Human Rights Film Festival Docudays

RESOLVED:

In order to ensure the operational functioning of the government authorities of Ukraine, public safety, safety of government officials and facilities, Kyiv City State Administration appeals to the court with the claim for restriction on the right to peaceful assembly by means of prohibiting representatives of Human Rights Film Festival Docudays and other initiators to conduct any film screenings, meetings and assemblies starting with 22.03.2013 and through 31.12.2013 in Kyiv.

Court deems the claim subject to satisfaction in view of the fact that reported total number of potential participants in the referred to event is very substantial, which could provoke clashes and public disorders.

Resolution shall be enforced immediately.

Judge O.P. Pomidorov