Vesi Vuković won the award endowed with prize money amounting to 10,000 euros for the story “The Hero from Arena”

As part of the special edition of the “Dealing with the Past” programme held in Sarajevo and online at Ondemand.kinomeetingpoint.ba, the Sarajevo Film Festival’s “True Stories Market” award was presented in Sarajevo. The winner of the “True Stories Market” award for 2023 is film theorist VesiVuković from Bosnia and Herzegovina, who received the award for the story “The Hero from Arena”.

The award endowed with prize money in the amount of 10,000 euros is awarded by Sarajevo Film Festival, Obala Art Centar and Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung (FES) Dialogue Southeast Europe…

The award is presented for the development of a story into a film – the story was presented at the 28th Sarajevo Film Festival, at the “True Stories Market” as part of the “Dealing the Past” programme, by Jovana Blanuša on behalf of the Next Game organization from Belgrade. Sarajevo Film Festival’s “True Stories Market” is a unique event that connects filmmakers with organizations that research and document events in the former Yugoslavia from recent wars. “True Stories Market” provides non-governmental organizations with a unique opportunity to present stories and materials (personal testimonies) they have collected, preserved and made available to the entire public. At last year’s 28th Sarajevo Film Festival, the seventh edition of the “True Story Market” programme took place, where, among other things, the award-winning story “The Hero from Arena” was presented.

“The Hero from Arena” is a story about those whose loved ones were killed or disappeared during the Second World War in Yugoslavia and whose war wounds did not end in 1945. In that less visible war after the war, in the struggle to find the missing and reunite families, Marino Zurli, a discreet hero of great deeds, also participated. This Croatian writer and journalist of “Arena” has been publishing stories and photos about the missing for ten years, reuniting separated families, finding lost people and restoring joy to the hearts of those who believed that their loved ones would never appear again. In his lifetime, Marino Zurli managed to reunite 150 families. “The Hero from Arena” is a story about him.

About this year’s “True Stories Market” award winner:

Vesi Vuković obtained her Ph.D. in the field of film studies and visual culture. She defended her doctoral thesis at the University of Antwerp in Belgium. She is a member of ViDi (Visual and Digital Cultures Research Center), as well as A* (Antwerp Gender and Sexuality Studies Network), University of Antwerp. She received her master’s degree from Kyoto University of the Art and Design in Japan. Her scientific works have been published in international academic journals, such as Studies in Eastern European Cinema, Apparatus: Film, Media and Digital Cultures of Central and Eastern Europe, Images: The International Journal of European Film, Performing Arts and Audiovisual Communication, as well as in the book Balkan Cinema and the Great Wars: Our Story, for which she received a special mention in 2021 at the competition for the award for the best academic article of the American Society for Cinema and Media Studies Central/East/South European Cinemas (SCMS). Her artistic portfolio consists of short films directed and written by her. In 2011, she participated in the Berlinale talent campus (Berlinale Talents) at the Berlin festival and the Sarajevo Talents programme of the Sarajevo Film Festival, with the film Shikaku, made in Japan. In 2010, the film was awarded the Special Award for the balanced use of European and Japanese sensibility in building the image of love at the Dukafest International Student Film Festival, held in Banja Luka, Bosnia and Herzegovina. In the same year, Shikaku was shown at the “Spurt” exhibition, at the Aube Gallery in Kyoto, Japan, as well as at the “Gion Festival Projection”, also in Kyoto. In addition, Vuković had the “Ki-sho-ten-ketsu” photo exhibition as part of the “Sonzaikan” exhibition, held in 2009 at Artzone, in Kyoto, Japan.

Photo: Vesi Vuković (Berlin Talents) 

The following are quotes from an interview I made for the IDF in December 2021, with Alisa Kovalenko and Stéphane Siophan, producer of the film:

What do you learn about yourself from filmmaking?

A: We learn to know ourselves through the world around us. We see the reflection of the world in ourselves. Coming into contact with something new, with a new experience, with a new world, always opens something in you, expands your inner space, and opens doors to new rooms. You watch and feel others, but through them you begin to better feel yourself. You learn to listen to others and, at the same time, listen to yourself. Because documentary filmmaking develops in you a unique ability to listen and see more, a capacity for supersensitive perception, it fills and opens up new meanings. We reveal ourselves through the world. The world does not exist without an observer. And it’s incredible how you can be an observer of two worlds in documentary films, the outside-world and inside-world, at the same time. While learning about the world, you always learn about yourself. That’s why documentary filmmaking is the best way to meet and have such an important dialogue with yourself.

Beautifully said… Let’s go back to Expedition 49. Where are you? Finished shooting?
A: I have just returned from Nepal, where I have finally filmed the incredible expedition of the five teenagers I have been following for two years for Expedition 49. It was a tough travel. We climbed up to the Annapurna basecamp, but we were also stuck in Kathmandu in the middle of the Covid-19 lockdown. In any case, in the end it was a wonderful journey that changed us all. We have started editing with my editor Marina Maykovskaya, and I feel a bit overwhelmed because I realize that I’ve been filming five different personalities. Now I have to assemble different lifelines and narrative lines into one, but it’s a good challenge! I will keep filming a bit in Donbas while I’m editing, to show how this expedition has affected my characters and which turns their lives take. The expedition itself is only a small part of this teenage adventure documentary, which takes place mainly on the Donbas steppe, in these dying frontline coal-mining settlements. It’s not a mountain film or a typical coming-of-age movie, but a multi-layered story touching upon a generation of children who have spent half of their lives in a war. It’s the story of working-class kids, which I also consider myself to be.

Photo: Alisa Kovalenko

The second edition of CHANGE is now ready to reveal its 2022/2023 lineup. CHANGE is a collaboration between CPH:DOX, EAVE, European Audiovisual Entrepreneurs, Europe’s leading training, development, and networking organisation for producers, and IMS, International Media Support, promoting journalism and documentary film to strengthen the capacity of media to reduce conflict, strengthen democracy and facilitate dialogue.

The partners’ goal being to increase equality and access to the international film market, the programme aims to stimulate inter-regional co-production and to connect projects, filmmakers and producers from the European Eastern Partnership countries (EaP) with international film professionals gathered annually at CPH:DOX.

The line-up of selected projects covers a wide variety of current topics spanning from the historical nuclear disarmament of Ukraine and its consequences, Abkhazian and Ukrainian refugees in Georgia, the ongoing non-violent resistance in Belarus, a female filmmaker’s gaze in the patriarchal Azerbaijani society on the gradual disappearance of the Caspian Sea, and a year of the current war in the life of four generations of women from Mariupol.

The selected projects are:

• A Bit of a Stranger, prod. Anna Kapustina, dir. Svitlana Lishchynska, Ukraine
• Boxes from Georgia, prod. Tiko Nadirashvili, dir. Gvantsa Meparishvili, Georgia
• How Long is the Echo, prod. Vahan Khachatryan, dir. Merri Mkrtchyan, Armenia
• Kartli, prod. Ketevan Kipiani, dir. Tamar Kalandadze and Julien Pebrel, Georgia
• Keepers of Heritage, prod. Irina Gleashvili, dir. Keti Machavariani, Georgia
• Nuclear-free Ukraine | Nuclear-freeworld, prod. Anna Palenchuk, dir. Kornii Hrytsiuk, Ukraine
• Strange Sea, prod. Aysel Akhundova, dir. Lala Aliyeva, Azerbaijan
• Voices.Streams by Belarusian filmmakers DocWave

Photo: Svitlana Lishchynska (Deutsche Filmakademi)

First some introductory words:

A filmmaker, Doug Aubrey, who has had a camera in his hands since he was a teenager, gets thyroid cancer. More than five years ago. He decides to turn the camera towards himself, he who his whole life has been filming social and political conflicts, been at many war zones, makes “an attempt to make sense out of my life, love, death, war and peace.” He makes 170 short films (!), altogether 10h30mins, which are made into a feature (117 mins.) and chaptered into 16 films or videos. I have seen the feature and two of the chapters, both around 45 mins. This text makes a focus on the feature:

Doug Aubrey comes from Glasgow and lives now in Copenhagen with his partner, producer Marie Schmidt Olesen. Aubrey says this about his choice of storytelling: “Writing directly with a camera, rather than with words, I wanted to tell a story, in such a way that captured decisive moments in time – much as I have done in my observational filmmaking over decades. This has resulted in the completion of 170 short films. Pretty much from the outset, I collaborated and worked intimately with (Danish actress) Charlotte Munck, who became not just the voice of a subconscious but also a physical presence in some of the films: An Avatar if you like – expressing things I don’t or can’t. 

And then secondly what I saw. What made me think “this is extraordinary, unique, have not seen a film like that for ages”. Fresh and energetic in style, personal and rich in content, there is so much you can take from it. Strong scenes as well, where Aubrey invites you to get close to his operation wound.

It starts in a place where Aubrey’s archive is stored up. In Glasgow. You hear the voice of Marie Olesen being amazed about all the diaries, the videos, his personal things: Are you not interested in what’s in there. No, he says a bit irritated, “ it’s the past, the moment is what happens”. Words to that effect. 

And then the visual and sound bombardment starts. Of images, words, fantastic illustrations by Halfdan Pisket and a strong and varied sound score by T.S. Høeg (Dane TS Hawk). It’s fast motion, it’s slow long shots, often close-ups of the director and/or the avatar, it’s surfing, it is in Glasgow, it is in Copenhagen at the Lakes, from the open window. Hectic you could call it, it is expressionistic, no better: the reflections on “my life, love, death, war and peace”. Meant in the good way: One Long Selfie. By a filmmaker who thinks about death and go back to his punk period, to someone with the name Dawn, to be with his son Danny, who took him to surfing – there are nice scenes where the two look at photos of Danny as a child… Father Doug was not present very often, he was in some war zone, Danny says. And a filmmaker who thinks about where it could come from, the cancer. Many possibilities. 

And there are clips from his films shot in the Middle East and in the Balkans. For me who has visited Belgrade for almost 20 years, images and conversations with (disillusioned) males and females, who were part of the opposition around 1990 associated to the B92, are very interesting and touching.

I was hiding behind the camera says Doug Aubrey. It was my armour. The film is indeed very much about filmmaking. In a couple of clips football coach Scotty Lee (“kids, don´t play with mines, play football”), with whom Doug has filmed in the Balkans, makes the filmmaker express what it is to have a camera in hand, to be a filmmaker, to observe as a true documentarian. To get the right shot! 

This is not a “real” documentary, does that exist?, it is a hybrid. And the avatar Charlotte Munck takes the viewer around formulating – sometimes it is pure poetry – the film director’s stream of thoughts going through his mind. Full of hopes, full of doubts, full of moments that also witness the sense of humor of Doug Aubrey. It is so well put in the press material:

“Making use of an existential surf analogy of the wipe out, hold down and surfacing to tell its story, LEGACY unfolds as a stream of short films exploring a real as well as an “inland geography” that is populated by fear, hopes, traumas, dreams and a creative imagination that’s potentially facing the end of life.”

I watched two of the chapters of “Legacy” as mentioned in the beginning of this text. In them you get more about Aubrey’s family – there are wonderful scenes with his niece Dagmar, more with his son and with his brother and in one of them he decides to write a letter to Peter Watkins, the filmmaker who made “War Game”, which was banned by the BBC in 1966. If anyone Watkins stands for the independent non-commercial non-conform cinema as does Doug Aubrey, who has made a film that is both very personal and very universal and for a film lover like me full of story-telling surprises, layers, humor and sensitivity.

One bullet, one pill…

Legacy… is an Autonomi production in collaboration with House of Real and Northern Souls.

One more documentary film from which I learned – this time about the koli fishing community in India close to Bombay. And one more documentary film where beautiful friendship is conveyed and forms the foreground of extremely difficult life conditions with a struggle to have a family life. Built around scenes in the families, celebrations, fishing, selling the fish, visits to the city and doctors and first of all conversations between the two male protagonists with drinks on the table, the film brings the viewer into understanding how hard Life can be and yet: Remember you are a Koli, you fear nothing. The Sundance catalogue text is precise when it comes to content, so here it is: 

”Rakesh and Ganesh are so close, they consider themselves brothers. Both are fishermen of Bombay’s Indigenous Koli community, but they’ve taken contrasting paths. Rakesh uses his inheritance — his father’s boat and the knowledge passed down by generations of Koli fisherman — to fish in the traditional ways, while Ganesh — who was educated abroad — has instead embraced modern, technology-driven, and environmentally destructive methods of deep-sea fishing, causing increasing friction between the friends. But with declining fish populations caused by pollution and invasive species, neither man is finding much success, adding to the burdens facing their young families, and testing the bonds of their brotherhood.”

India, 94 mins., 2023

Photo: Sarvnik Kaur, director

It’s a beautiful and elegant website to enter, the one from FipaDoc in Biarritz that introduces itself like this:

“We believe in true stories. Stories from here and there, of laughter and tears, stories simple but extraordinary, brave and surprising. Stories that open our eyes to those around us, that change the world, that inspire and stay with us forever. We believe in documentary films.”

Voila, and looking into the program, there is a strong film line divided into categories and an industry section with pitching and meetings. With a lot of festival categories being competitive. So there are juries with well known names like Nordisk Panorama’s Anita Reher, producer Iikka Vehkalahti, director Salomé Jashi, producer Uldis Cekulis, director Rachel Leah Jones, producer Alexandre Cornu, director Marta Prus and festival director from Ukraine’s DocuDays Vika Leshchenko…

Just to mention a couple of titles – in the Musical Documentary section Jørgen Leth and Andreas Koefoed are represented with beautiful “Music for Magic Pigeons”, in the International section there is Davide Ferrario’s “Umberto Eco – a Library of the World” that I would love to watch, in the Impact section there is Nikolaus Geyrhalter’s impressive “Matter out of Place” and in the French “Godard. Seul le Cinéma” by Cyril Leuthy. When you surf on the website you can watch the trailers and the one about Godard looks great.

Industry Days: There is a special focus on the Baltic countries and Finland, “Dive into the Baltic Sea” (hmm…), with Latvian Zane Balcus as moderator, there are pitching days organized by my old colleague from EDN Ove Rishøj Jensen and of course Ukraine is the guest of Honor under the headline “Visions of Ukraine”. 9 films have been selected and there is a Ukrainian panel present for a discussion: Viktoria LESHCHENKO,Docudays UA, Olga GIBELINDA, director, Ivanna KHITSINSKA, producer, Roman BLAZHAN, director, Andrii LYSETSKYI, director, OLHA BESKHMELNYTSINA, producer. Lysetskyi’s fine “Liturgy of Anti-Tank Obstacles” (2022) is shown in Biarritz as is “Ukrainian Sheriffs” by Roman Bondarchuk, produced by Latvian Uldis Cekulis. With whom, allow me a small flashback, I was in Biarritz years ago, with Archidoc, where Cekulis made a case study on his wonderful “Klucis. The Deconstruction”.

And there is much much more to experience, put together by producer Christine Camdessus and her team. Wish you a good festival, starting today.

https://fipadoc.com/en

 Still: Umberto Eco Library