Doucet: Afghanistan-The Unknown Country

Two weeks ago after reviewing the documentary on Afghanistan by Murphy and MediaStorm, I came across a film on the subject matter, which exposes yet another face of this wonderful country. Therefore this review:

For over a decade, Afghanistan has been a frequent guest of the global news coverage. But what do we really know about this country? In the 1-hour BBC documentary “Afghanistan: The Unknown Country” Lyse Doucet takes us on a journey through the parts of the vast Afghan land and its diverse culture to reveal another face of the country beyond the war – the country of ancient traditions and its beautiful people, who despite all its hardship and heartache, are still proud to call it home.

“Afghanistan: The Unknown Country” is neither artistic nor political. More than anything, it falls well under the format of a travel documentary. Unlike a typical protagonist of the classic travel documentary, however, Doucet, does not come in the shoes of a mere curious observer or a world traveller who likes to take a peek into the exotic or the foreign. BBC’s chief international correspondent, Doucet invites us to join her on the

journey through the country she has learned over the decades and has grown to love through its darkest times.

In the country where much has been lost, the sense of hope is found by holding on to the traditions. Starting off from the far north, Doucet onsets her journey in Mazar-e Sharif by welcoming Nawroz, a pre-Islamic festival. An Islamic banner Janda lifted by strong local men symbolically heralds the beginning of spring and the start of the new year. If lifted in one smooth motion, it is considered to be a good omen for a new year to come.

By stepping back in time, Afghans seem to find a path for inner peace and hope for a brighter future. Across the ancient Afghan city of Herat, Doucet discovered “the oldest of human desires to rise above daily cares to see what is beautiful and sweet and to celebrate what it means to be Afghan.” In the western city of Herat, the pearl of Afghan culture, poetry is cherished as a vital element of Afghan life. Afghan stories are told in verse and accompanied by the traditional herati music. Every Thursday, no matter age and gender – men, women, children, and elderly gather to share the verse, listen to music, and enjoy the sweet tea deep into the night.

Doucet too finds a sense of shared humanity in the small village Paicotal, which will never make the news. It is hard to fathom for a Westerner what a life under the poverty line looks like and how one could endure such arduous conditions – no running water, no electricity, and no roads. Nevertheless, for all the distance between the lives of local women and the one of Doucet, there still seems to be space for them to share moments of laugh and joy.

Courteous and ebullient, it was a pleasure to witness the journey of Doucet through the fascinating land of Afghanistan, a crossroad of cultures where East met West for thousands of years.

2011, BBC, 60 mins.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b012g0dl

Best Nordic Documentary?

Guest writer at filmkommentaren, Danish Mikkel Stolt watched Finnish Mika Ronkainen’s latest work ”Finnish Blood, Swedish Heart” (photo) at the Nordisk Panorama in September. The original, non-mainstream hybrid documentary made a big impression on Stolt, who concluded – referring to a John Cage sentence – ”I will have to give it full six pens – simply because it made such a profound impression by moving me and not pushing me.”

The film got no award at the Nordisk Panorama but has now the chance to win the ”Dragon Award Best Nordic Documentary” at the Gothenburg International Film Festival that runs now, and until February 4. The winner will be presented on February 2, 8 films are nominated, apart from Ronkainen, you find strong names like Margreth Olin from Norway, Stefan Jarl and Mia Engberg from Sweden as well as talented Danish Camilla Magid with ”Black White Boy”

http://www.giff.se/se/start/festivalen/dragon-awards/best-nordic-documentary.html

Dragan Wende West Berlin

Two important prizes for a film by Lena Müller and Dragan von Petrovic, co-directed and filmed by Vuk Maksimovic, whose uncle is the protagonist of a film that the team itself – on the site of the film – calls tragicomical. A quote from the synopsis: … the young cameraman Vuk from Belgrade embarks on the trail of his eccentric uncle Dragan Wende who, 30 years earlier, became the street king of West-Berlin’s 1970s hedonistic disco scene. Earning easy money in Berlin’s most famous nightclubs, work and play went hand in hand… 20 years later, Vuk’s uncle is an aged alcoholic who lives off social welfare and memories of his youth…

The film has other charismatic characters, is playful and entertaining, with “absurd and sit-comic situations”.

The film was appreciated on two occasions during the last few days. It got the prestigious Max Ophüls Prize and it received first prize for best documentary at the Trieste Film Festival. The motivation from the German prize looks like this:

“Ein Stück irrwitzige Weltgeschichte, erzählt aus der Küche eines abgehalfterten Bordell-Türstehers. Ein Stück berührende Familiengeschichte, erzählt in der historischen Dimension des kalten Krieges. Ein Stück derbe Männergeschichte, erzählt mit Pfiff und Ironie dank sicherer Montage – halbseiden, blockfrei und humorvoll. Das hat die Jury begeistert und darum vergibt sie den Dokumentarfilmpreis Max Ophüls an den Film„Dragan Wende – West Berlin“.”

OBS. The producer Lena Müller has made an excellent website for the film that goes far beyond normal mainstrem promotion, check it and watch trailer and teaser and listen to the soundtrack.

88 mins., 2012, Serbia/Germany

http://www.von-muller-film.com/home.html

http://www.triestefilmfestival.it/en/comunicati/si-chiude-la-24a-edizione-i-vincitori/

Op-Docs

The New York Times runs a series of short documentaries that are quite interesting. OP stands for Opinion and here is how the newspaper (you can get a monthly online subscription for 1$) presents its strand:

”Op-Docs is The New York Times editorial department’s forum for short, opinionated documentaries, produced with wide creative latitude and a range of artistic styles, covering current affairs, contemporary life and historical subjects.

Op-Docs videos are produced by both renowned and emerging filmmakers who express their views in the first person, through their subjects or more subtly through an artistic approach to a topic. Each is accompanied by a director’s statement.

In December 2012, we started a new Op-Docs feature: Scenes. This is a platform for very short work — snippets of street life, brief observations and interviews, clips from experimental and artistic nonfiction videos — that follow less traditional documentary narrative conventions.”

Highly recommended to be seen is the 9 minute long, very tense, touching, cinematic piece by Laura Poitras,

called ”Death of a Prisoner” (photo). It starts with Obama and his promises about closing the Guantanamo camp, continues by, four years later, following a coffin on a truck driving in mountain landscapes, you know that inside is the corpse of a man, whose identity is revealed in the next sequence, where an American lawyer years before talks to the brother of the Adnan Lafti, who by that time had started a hunger strike. He is now, in December 2012, Poitras was there, being brought home to his family in Yeman, including his son, a boy. In-between texts convey information about his imprisonment and the non-evidence against him. The film ends with the text that 166 are still at the prison in Guantanamo, most of them without any charges against them.

Op-doc also has a fine, small observational short from Times Square N.Y., ”The Public Square”, where a man talks about the dangereous and evil muslims, being met with youngsters who sing ”All You Need is Love”. As well as another observation of a piano in a street, just standing where people pass by trying to play a bit.

Errol Morris is also to be found on Op-doc, one film is about a man, who competes in food consuming contests, the other one is the enigmatic ”Umbrella Man”, who was present in Dallas on the sunny day where JFK was shot. With his umbrella unfolded.

Keep an eye on this fine newspaper quality initiative. For free it is. And short docs is a genre coming back with the help of the internet. Laura Poitras film gets 6 pens for a very strong and well told tragic story with a point of view – in 9 mins. Must be an inspiration for many filmmakers: Yes, you can say a lot in few minutes.

http://www.nytimes.com/ref/opinion/about-op-docs.html

Sundance Shows Living Room Documentaries

A very interesting critique of (some of) the selected documentaries for the Sundance Film Festival comes from Anthony Kaufmann, who has written for NY Times, Village Voice, Variety among others.

I dare to make a long quote from the beginning of his article that can be read in full length by clicking the link below:

This year the Sundance Film Festival captured the zeitgeist. Films that premiered this past week in Park City investigated, explored and exposed the biggest issues of the day, from abortion (After Tiller) to immigration (Who is Dayani Crystal?), from economic unfairness (99%, Citizen Koch, Inequality for All) to information in the digital age (We Steal Secrets: The Story of Wikileaks, Google and the World Brain), from covert wars (Dirty Wars, Manhunt) to other political and social injustices (Pussy Riot: A Punk Prayer, God Loves Uganda, Blackfish, etc).

But no matter how incisive, exhaustive, convincingly argued or shrewdly structured, most of the films employed tried-and-true formal elements. As far as I saw, there was no Catfish or Exit Through the Gift Shop (photo), no Imposter or Man on Wire, no radical mixes of documentary and fiction—in short, very little stylistic experimentation. Watching the docs at Sundance was like being holed up in your living room and held captive by HBO, besieged by hours upon hours of solid reportage.

Not all of Sundance’s docs were created equally, but they were made in mostly the same mold: some TV-ready combination of first-person interviews, verité observations, archival footage and informational text. Whether it’s the tyranny of broadcast television executives or the conventional training of most documentary filmmakers, Sundance was awash in issues, not artistry…

Link to blog.sundancenow.com

Nicolas Philibert with Film on Radio France

For this blogger Nicolas Philibert is one of the most important documentary directors of out time. Filmkommentaren has written about his films frequently, below you have a link that will take you to ”collected posts” about the French director, who in the 5th edition of the Damascus DoxBox festival in 2009 was reported to have said the following at a master class:

”Constantly looking for beauty… my work consists of creating the conditions for something to happen, he said, this great filmmaker, who masters the art of listnening to the other. I am a documentarian and not a fiction filmmaker, I do not want people to play roles. Maybe I ask them to repeat something or ask if I can be present on a special occasion but they are themselves.”

There is a new film by Philibert at the Berlinale Panorama section. It is presented like this:

”La maison de la radio by Nicolas Philibert, France/Japan.
Creator of images Nicolas Philibert has always been fascinated by the “blind” medium of radio and its ability to fire the imagination. Millions share this passion. For many, radio lends life a rhythm and structure, bringing – between kitchen and bathroom – the world to their homes. With this work, Philibert pays tribute to its diligent makers by bringing the invisible to the screen. And so achieves what every filmmaker seeks.”

The film will be released in April in France. Below also a link to an interview (in French) with the director.

http://www.filmkommentaren.dk/blog/blogpost/1931/

http://www.filmsdulosange.fr/en/film/13/la-maison-de-la-radio

http://www.telerama.fr/cinema/nicolas-philibert-realise-un-documentaire-sur-la-maison-de-la-radio,71515.php

Godard, Pennebaker & Leacock

… and 7 wonderful minutes with Jefferson Airplane performing from a roof in New York Midtown in 1968. Yes, it is film and music history at its best as Richard Brody, cinema editor at The New Yorker, wrote yesterday urging the locals to run to the Film Forum to get acquainted with ”One P.M.”, shot in the revolutionary year, but never completed.

The article is a must-read for all lovers of Godard AND legendary documentarians D.A. Pennebaker (photo) and Richard Leacock. An excerpt from the article by Brody (who wrote ”Everything is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard):

… a rare, obscure, and fragmentary—yet exemplary, fascinating, and even intermittently iconic—film, “One P.M.,” … It was, in the event, edited by the great documentary filmmaker D. A. Pennebaker… Pennebaker and another great documentary filmmaker, Richard Leacock, were the film’s producers and its principal cinematographers. Godard had intended to call it “One A.M.” (“One American Movie”); Pennebaker called his cut of the footage “One Parallel Movie,” but the initials, as Godard noted, could also stand for “One Pennebaker Movie.” And, in this form, it’s one of the most extraordinary time capsules of the era…

Yes, it is politics, as you will see in the clip with Grace Slick and her band but it also reminds you about what the nervous always present direct cinema camera work was. Great.

Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/movies/2013/01/one-pm-all-day.html#ixzz2ImqAxHVu

Magnificent7 2013/2

On Wednesday January 30 at 7pm the opening of the 9th edition of the European
Feature Documentary Film Festival, Magnificent7 will be announced
by the lady, who represents the festival venue, the biggest theatre in the region, the Sava Center in Belgrade. Ms Nevena Djonlic will be followed by Mr Popovic and Mr Müller, who will introduce the selection of films for the 9th edition of the European Feature Documentary Film Festival, Magnificent7. The festival runs until February the 3rd.

The opening film is the international hit, nominated for an Oscar, Searching for Sugar Man (photo) by Malik Bendjelloul. The 6 other films in the programme have equally received awards and been world wide honoured for their quality. That goes for Tea or Electricity by Jérôme le Maire, Ilian Metev’s Sofia’s Last Ambulance, Kimmo Koskela’s Soundbreaker, Helena Trestikova’s Private Universe and Manuel von Stürler’s Winter Nomads.

Tonight the 7th film in the festival, Swedish Palme, directed by Kristina Lindström and Maud Nycander, is nominated in three categories at the Swedish award ceremony Guldbaggen.

The audience will be spoilt with good films in the evening with an additional workshop programme during day time for, quoted from the website: “young film authors and film students as well as students in related art disciplines, but also towards all those who feel the need for a different kind of “film food”; film professionals and professional amateurs are also the suitable candidates for our workshop.”

http://www.magnificent7festival.org/home.html

Magnificent7 2013/1

This text is written for the catalogue of Magnificent7 2013: I am writing this from New York, a metropole of mainstream entertainment cinema, but also the place to be for two veterans of independent cinema, the 86 years old Albert Maysles and the 90 year old Jonas Mekas. Maysles, part of the classical direct cinema movement once said that “the eye of the cameraman should be the eye of the poet”. Mekas is, if anyone, the father of the personal cinema, never compromising in his way of putting together his diaries from all over the world.

One should go for innovation but also honour roots and tradition – this is what we do in Belgrade year after year with a festival that carries the name of a mainstream American movie but has its focus on poetry and independent, personal storytelling.

And which, like the old people mentioned, insists that documentary films should be shown on a big screen for a big audience. In cinema halls.

Actually all the films selected for the 2013 edition of Magnificent7 have been shown theatrically in their countries of origin, some of them also in theatres abroad. It can be interpreted as one more sign of the golden times, we experience for the popular documentary genre, but it also proves that the filmmakers who come to Belgrade with their films have thought of the big screen when making their works.

We promise you poetry and personally made documentaries. With a diversity in themes and “handwriting”. From the minimalistic and original interpretation of an urban social reality in “Sofia’s Last Ambulance” to the beautiful and respectful meeting with people, who do very seldom appear in the media: “Tea or Electricity” and “Winter Nomads”. From the portrait of a great humanist, Olof “Palme”, who was shot down, when he chose to walk home after a visit to the cinema, a rich film in its time depiction of a society asis the Czech “Private Universe”, a family film in the wonderful epic tradition.

Magnificent7 is a tribute to the art of cinema, but it is also a tribute to the power of art itself. Two films point directly in that direction. “Searching for Sugar Man”, internationally the most succesful documentary of 2012, is (also) about the fact that important art will always survive, whereas “Soundbreaker” (photo) is, as the title indicates, about an artist who seeks to break all rules to give us viewers and listeners an experience, we will never forget.

Do come to the 7 films we hope you will enjoy and never forget.

Tue Steen Müller

IDFA Statistics and Info

It is a good idea to get on the mailing list for the idfa newsletter. The one from January 18 includes statistics on the 25th edition of the festival last November and communicates deadlines for the IDFA Bertha Fund (before Jan Vrijman Fund), the Docs for Sale, the festival and the Academy Summer School. How to it, quote from the newsletter:

If you would like to stay in tune with IDFA and all our industry deadlines and events, then subscribe now to IDFA’s monthly Industry Newsletter. Subscribing is easy and can be done via your MyIDFA account.

… and for the news: the 25th edition of the festival in 2012 had 2700 festival guests and 200.000 tickets sold. Twohundredthousand tickets!!!

Furthermore IDFA, the European Film Market and EDN runs a documentary newtworking platform at the upcoming Berlinale (February 7-15), where 16 documentaries from the idfa festival are screened – among them are “The Gatekeepers”, “Elena” (photo) and “Beware of Mr. Baker”.

Link to idfa.nl

Link to efm-berlinale.de