For the 13th time the French launch their Month of Documentaries all over the country. More than 1700 films, new and old, are being screened in what can only be seen as the most effective promotional tool to create interest for documentaries.

The participants – as the organizers call them – are Médiathèques, salles de cinéma, associations, établissements culturels, éducatifs, sociaux, collectivités territoriales, conseils régionaux, conseils généraux, partenaires locaux, etc.

To give an example, an “Hommage à Chris Marker” is organised in Basse-Normandie at the Bibliotheque Jacques Prévert, in Limousin and at Institut francais d’Ukraine. Volker Koepp is shown in Paris, “Five Broken Cameras” in Lyon, Stan Neumann’s wonderful “La Langue ne Ment Pas” in Strasbourg, “La Nuit Elles Dansent” (photo) in Fort-de France in Martinique and so on so forth.

Film policy, ladies and gentlemen!

http://www.moisdudoc.com/

Behind the scenes, the making of.. a film. We have seen them lots of times, following how the actors prepare for their roles, how the shooting was done, how the director directed. This is exactly what ”The Act of Killing” does, with the big difference that the film being made is, to use a kliché, ”based on a true story”. A story about the mass murder of around 1 million people in Indonesia in the 1960’es, opponents of the military regime. Communists. Chinese. The killers were saluted, and still are, as the films shows, through the paramilitary fascist group, now a political party, as I understood it, Pancasila.

Werner Herzog asked the protagonist in his masterpiece ”Little Dieter Needs to Fly” to reenact the horror actions he experienced in Vietnam, the directors of ”The Act of Killing”, an absolute masterpiece as well, have done the same with their killers – please re-constitute what you did at that time. And how you did it, we will help you to make your vision as authentic as possible. The filmmakers – = the killers, they call themselves gangsters which they say mean ”free men” – choose different ways to convey their stories. They have found their inspiration in what they call ”sadistic movies” a la Scorcese and Tarantino, they have gorgeous more reportage style shooting from the streets, where extras are found, who can play communist family members, shot in observational style and with kids involved who break down as they do not know, whether this is for real or not and they make the most astonishing tableaux that make you think about Herzog and his Fitzcarraldo period.

But first of all the film has a fantastic main charismatic personality, the leader of the gang and the director of the film in the film, Anwar Kongo. A Shakespearean character, haunted as he is by what he did. ”When I sleep it comes back to me”, ”a communist ghost”, he says, and the film is constructed around his journey from, as the cph:dox catalogue puts it, ”arrogance to regret”. Accompanied first of all by the fat man, of course his name is Herman(!), who does and has done all the atrocities he is told to do, and by the way tries to get into the Indonesian parliament(!) with Pancasila, Anwar Kongo lets his hair become black and goes from showing the most effective (= less blood) killing method to play a victim in his film, to getting sick in the end scene. Still you sit with the feeling that Anwar Kongo, the charismatic grandfather, at any time would repeat the sentence ”all this talk about human rights pisses me off”, whatever the political situation in today’s Indonesia is.

The film premiered in 60 Danish cinemas yesterday via the DoxBio.

Denmark, 2012, 115 mins.

www.cphdox.dk

The 10th Copenhagen documentary film festival runs until sunday. Filmkommentaren will review some of the films and recommend  Copenhageners and festival guests, what should be watched.

A must of course is Oppenheimer’s ”The Act of Killing”. The film still has 4 screenings at the festival (two of the 159 mins. version and two of the 115 mins. version). The cinema distribution (the 115 mins. version) kicks off on the 7th (wednesday) through the brilliant DoxBio initiative. Equally you should not miss the Brothers Taviani and their ”Caesar Must Die”, Golden Bear in Berlin. Where ”The Act of Killing” is a grandiose Shakespearean story, ”Caesar Must Die” (photo) is literally the mise-en-scène of the play ”Julius Caesar”, magnificently performed by inmates in a prison in Rome. The word magnificent is the one and only to be used about the cinematography of a third film in the main competition of cph:dox, the one that did not win at DOK Leipzig, ”The Last Station” by Chilean Catalina Vergara and Christian Soto, the latter responsible for the camera work, which brings dignity and love to the old people at the nursery home, the last station.

… and if you want to experience how light and playful filmmaking (also) can be, watch Scottish Mark Cousins wee film, ”What is this Film called Love”, shot on a mobile phone in Mexico City during three days where the director had no agenda, did some push-ups in his hotel room but ended up going around in the city communicating with a photo of Eisenstein, who never finished his Mexico-film. 18 mins. of pure pleasure!

And here is quote from the review made of the new film by Timo Novotny, ”Trains of Thoughts”: Novotny is an aesthete and his fascination of lines and forms is brilliantly conveyed through the montage of images, words and the music of the Sofa Surfers. Music that flows the whole way through and is synergetic with the image in pulse and rythm, contrary to the mainstream use of music in documentaries today, where the music is poured on like sugar to hide lack of energy in the sequences.  

And another quote from the film of Namir Abdel Messeeh, ”The Virgin, the Copts and Me”, a doc comedy: This storytelling tool, including the making of the film in the narrative, a meta plan, works in this case as the film is about a young French filmmaker who, after 15 years, goes back to his Egyptian coptic roots in a village, against the will of the mother, who in the beginning says that ”no members of the family (should be) in the film”. But the help of mum gets the film to be finished, the family members all end up in the film, which adds to the film’s light-hearted entertaining qualities at the same time as it gives a beautiful hommage to people far away from Tahrir Square, in a small village where someone once saw the apparation of Virgin Mary.

http://www.cphdox.dk/d1/a1.lasso?e=1

To be honest, I did not have high expectations. I knew that Dan Curean had worked 4 years on his film about wild horses in the Romanian Danube delta, but I had no idea that he had done so to get it all and he had transferred the material into a multilayered documentary epic on man and nature, rich on poetic observations, and on conflicts and with a great camera work.

On top of that, Curean tells his story in first person with a brilliant text performed by a brilliant voice. You trust the ”I” from the very beginning when he takes you to the horses and to the boy, Ivan, who we follow on horseback, with the horses, with his horse Viktor, who gives him lice (!), sailing in the water of the marshes, right to the end of the film, where he, years older, seems to help those who have come to catch the horses to bring them to the slaughterhouse. Avoiding the eyes of the ”I”, Ivan is, the camera, Dan Curean. Many horses go, but a public protest campaign stops what is called a massacre.

Wild horses, stray horses – the background is that ”the abandoned horses of the communist time farms were slowly being turned into wild horses like in the old times”, and now they spoil the forest, it is being said.

Dan Curean puts the story into a human context. Apart from the boy Ivan and his relation to nature (reminding this viewer about ”Louisiana Story” by Robert Flaherty and Richard Leacock), he introduces Murgur, an older bearded, wise man, who knows all about horses and their behaviour, and is a teacher for Ivan. As well as old Dochia, a woman who is said to be mad, ”a good witch” she says about herself, happy that Mugur is there as he reminds her about her (dead or disappeared?) husband. She brings fine songs to the screen. Not to talk about Taras, who is in his nineties, he kept one horse until his death.

There is a beautiful balanced blend of fairy tale and documentation, even a cowboy film feel there is, in a film, that catches all seasons, and luckily has many wordless sequences. Including images of horses, who freezed to death during the harsh winter of 2010 as well as a visual demonstration of social life in almost deserted villages, where alcoholism reigns.

The film won an award at the festival in Sibiu in the category ecological films. No offense to this genre but ”Gone Wild” will, I hope, be placed in many festivals as what it is: an excellent, creative documentary!

http://www.astrafilm.ro/astra-film-festival-2012-awards-1.aspx?theme=1

http://tifftv.ro/interviu-dan-curea-gone-wild

Romania, 2012, 87 mins. 

DOK Leipzig winners have been announced to night. For this filmkommentaren correspondent it was a surprise (see post below) that the Swedish ”Colombianos” by Tora Mårtens got the first prize, the Golden Dove, whereas the Silver Dove to Ilian Metev for ”Sofia’s Last Ambulance” was an expected winner, as well as the honorary mention to the Chinese ”Cloudy Mountains” by Zhu Yu by the jury of the main competition.

Bravo also to the fine and warm ”Pablo’s Winter” (photo) by Chico Pereira, who received an honorary mention in the Talent category – and the award for the best film about the subject Work.

The MDR (the local broadcaster) Prize went to Helena Trestikova for her ”Private Universe”.

The many awards, and the motivations, at the DOK Leipzig are listed on the website below.  

http://www.dok-leipzig.de/festival/preistraeger_2012

http://www.stocktown.com/2012/03/colombianos/

Had an interesting conversation with Polish filmmakers last night at a dinner reception held by the good and always active people from Krakow Film Foundation and Festival. Two of their compatriots, members of juries, had to leave early for an evening screening with an audience. Is that right, we discussed, should juries watch the competing films with the audience or on their own, and should juries watch films in the evening after a long day – or should they do their work in the mornings. Of course there are a lot of practicalities involved, when festival people organise a time schedule for juries, but having been in loads of juries I can only say how pleasant it has been to watch films in the mornings and early afternoons with other jury members and to have the first discussions right after the screenings. With films on a big screen, of course.

So what does the DOK Leipzig international jury decides to communicate tomorrow night at the closing ceremony.

Let me try to come up with some ideas for films that could be candidates for the awards in the ”DOK Internationaler Wettbewerb”, the feature length international competition. I have seen most of the films – in the mornings at the market – some of them only in parts, to be fair.

”11 Images of a Human” by the couple Markku Lehmuskallio and Anastasia Lapsui was disappointing compared to what they have been doing before. Heavy and over-structured it is and not at all the ”poetic reflection on cave paintings and petroglyphs” that the catalogue text says. ”Another Night on Earth”, by Spanish David Munoz, is one of many current films that let people be driven and filmed in a taxi, this time in Cairo. Conversations, sometimes entertaining but most of the time boring. I already, below, wrote about the Bangla Desh film ”Are You Listening?”, it will get a prize for sure but maybe not the Golden Dove, whereas the Chinese ”Cloudy Mountain” by Zhu Yu might candidate because of its visual strength depicting people working in asbestos mines. Swedish ”Colombianos” by Tora Mårtens is weak, ”Documentarian” (see below) will not go for main prizes, and I doubt that Peter Mettler’s essayistic ”The End of Time” can unite a jury. Polish pedophile subject film, ”Entangled”, by Lidia Duda, demonstrates how difficult it is to make a film, where you are not allowed to show faces, and Damien Ounouri’s fine ”Fidaï” about the Algerian FLN fighter going back in time and place is probably not strong enough. German ”Der Kapitän und sein Pirat”, on the contrary, is a great piece of investigative and character driven documentary, raising so many moral and ethical questions about the ship piracy, this time off the Somalian coast. Swiss Olivier Zuchuat has visited Makronisos with ”Like Stone Lions at the Gateway Into Night”, several Greek filmmakers have done the same, much better than this documentary that suffers from too much perfume.

The Chilean ”Last Station” (photo) will get a prize, one of the Doves, is my guess for its beauty in approach and cinematography, rightly characterised in the catalogue as ”picturesque dark tableaux vivants, the rythm of slowness turns into poetry”, and another one will be given to ”Sofia’s Last Ambulance” by Bulgarian Ilian Metev.

… but I might be totally wrong! (And I have not talked to any jury members!)

www.dok-leipzig.de