As advisor for the festival (that starts on monday the 29th), when it comes to films from the Baltic countries I was happy this morning to see that the festival on their site put a focus on 9 films with two of them being from the region that I know and like much:

The Documentarian (photo) by Ivars Zviedris and Inese Klava from Latvia and Ub Lama by Egle Vertelyte from Lithuania. Here follows the description of the film from the site, signed by members of the festival’s selection committee:

The Documentarian: Dziga Vertov himself regarded “life caught in the act”, “life as it is” as the ultimate goal of the documentary. He and his kinoki used every means, even hidden cameras, and no one got mad because the cinematograph was a sensation people wanted to be part of. Almost 100 years later, the two young directors Ivars Zviedris and Inese Kļava take their camera to the moorlands of Kemeri near Riga to explore the life of a hillbilly named Inta. This rustic eccentric with the impressive voice may not own a TV set, but she knows the rules of mass media (including the nuances separating docu-soap and reality show) only too well, especially concerning her worth and rights with regard to the “paparazzi”. She takes command from the start, showering directors, cameramen and producers with curses whose violence makes ordinary mortals blush. Inta says things like “You’re shitting into my soul, you fucking bastard, with your damned camera!” and is not averse to taking up a metal stick to “smash Ivar’s head” or hand him to the “pederasts”. She won’t accept money, but those who “get rich on her poverty” ought to pay nonetheless. Later she’ll cry… while the film has long since become a tragicomic relationship movie, like a meta-commentary about the “documentarian’s” existence in the age of radical moral abandonment. (aka: authenticity).
– Barbara Wurm

UB Lama: A boy like many others of his age: Galaa (12) is a smart, pudgy little rascal who’s not overly fond of school. He prefers to hang out with his little brother (6), listen to hip hop music, watch wrestling on television or eat junk food and play at online dating. The latter is only a fantasy, though, for Galaa lives with his mother and little brother in a yurt settlement on the edge of Ulan Bator (without a computer, of course). For the family – his father died in an accident a few years ago – every new day is a balancing act of survival, for what they earn as ambulant petty traders on the market is barely enough to buy food. So enrolling the boy in a Buddhist monastery school is less a matter of vocation than of existential self-defence. It would be a relief for the family if he was accepted and Galaa himself would be offered a real future perspective. The boy soon realises that this thing would not be bad for him at all and acquires a taste for the whole ceremonial order of Buddhist monasticism with its drums, prayer mills, colourful clothes and bags. A charmingly light and fascinatingly profound documentary coming-of-age story deftly balanced between materialism and spiritualism and – last but not least –fuelled by a heart-rending sense of humour.
– Ralph Eue

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

Signe Byrge Sørensen is CEO and producer at Final Cut for Real, which is located in Copenhagen, Denmark. She has been a producer for 14 years…

This is how an extended interview with the producer of the opening film of cph:dox starts, done by EDN (European Documentary Network) and to be found in its full length on the website of the organisation.

And it is indeed very good reading. Not only because it gives the background to the collaboration between Signe Byrge Sørensen and the director of the film, Joshua Oppenheimer, but also, actually first of all, because it gives a fine story about how a young Danish prodcer made her way from politically engaged, social documentary production in the financially good climate for documentary funding in Denmark, to now stand behind a film about which the director of dph:dox Tine Fishcer says:

“The Act of Killing’ is like nothing else I have seen. It is radical in its political analysis and criticism, it is progressive in its combination of genres; gangster drama, glossy musical and surreal psychotic drama. And it sits with you in a way that is inescapable. It will become a film which will receive a prominent place in film history, and a film that everyone should see. Not only those with a particular interest in political documentary, but everyone who has the courage to face ‘the heart of darkness’. It never becomes black and white because even the most hardened executioner can be confronted with his own lies.”

“The Act of Killing” opens cph:dox in some days.

www.edn.dk

www.cphdox.dk

I met Hungarian Klara Trencsenyi at the Astra Film Festival, where her newest work “Corvin Variations” was screened. Two years ago Trencsenyi organised a project development workshop for creative documentaries in Budapest that I took part in. Since then the political situation in Hungary, also called ORBANistan, has worsened drastically, which also has influenced the film funding climate that as in many other areas is said to be suffering heavily from corruption… Back to the film, here is the description taken from the festival catalogue:

“The so-called Corvin Project initiated in 2003 was the largest and most awarded Central European city development project. It envisioned the full transformation of cca. 22 acres in Budapest’s 8th district, which implied the demolition of all buildings in that area. Both the local government and the investor wanted to get rid of the “slums” by relocating more than one thousand families – among them many Roma people – who could not afford buying property in the old-new area. The protagonists of Corvin Variations are all local residents who have been relocated in the course of the project – and who recall, with nostalgia and criticism, the life in the old neighbourhood and community. They no longer see each other – they meet only in the reconstructed space created by the filmmakers…”

Out of this theme the director, who already showed her excellence in camerawork in her previous film ”Bird’s Way”, has created a light-toned stylistically playful documentary about memories that disappear as the houses are being demolished, about a neighbourhood where people helped each other, whereas now ”people are closed”, as one of the characters say in the film that is very much based on cleverly interviews and monologues with the inhabitants, who now, in general, live in the new flats they had to take when they were re-housed. Almost all Romas are out, as are most of the old people, as the flats are too expensive for them.

Hungary, 2011, 39 mins.

What is the future of hybrid films?… is one of many interesting debates that are to take place during the upcoming cph:dox in Copenhagen, November 1-11. It is the tenth edition of the festival with five international competition programmes, more than 200 films, 16 concerts, seminars, a forum, debates, events, ”and a birthday party, of course” – all can be checked on the website of the festival.

Back to hybrid films, this is the text that introduces the interesting seminar:

Over the past five years, the borderland between fiction and non-fiction has experienced a true creative boom. The field includes many different films, for example‘The Ambassador’, ‘R’, ‘The Arbour’, ‘Quattro Volte’, ‘Exit Through the Gift Shop’ (photo) and not least films made by the godfather of the whole movement, the Austrian Ulrich Seidl. The number of documentaries that can be found in this hybrid field is growing, and so is their artistic success. Hybrid films have the potential to deliver complex stories with a strong basis in reality, but with a fundamentally cinematic interpretation of it. But it is also a difficult field – financially speaking. For how do you support a film you don’t know for sure if it is a documentary or a feature. Are the traditional genre definitions experiencing a paradigm shift, and what does this mean for how films are developed and supported? We have invited a number of film experts, whose professions all involve working with and supporting the new hybrid film forms. Meet, among others, Channel 4’s Tabitha Jackson, the woman behind some of the most successful hybrid films, such as The Arbor. Lucas Smith from ZDF, who supports both fiction, non-fiction and new hybrid formats, Thomas Robsahm from the Norwegian Film Institute and Martin Schweighofer, the director of the Austrian Film Commission, which has a particularly strong tradition of supporting the new hybrid wave.

Date November 7.

http://www.cphdox.dk/d/index.lasso?e=1

The festival in Sibiu ended last night with a very professional international orientated prize ceremony, held in Romanian and English languages. The Grand Prix went to ”Phnom Penh Lullaby” by Polish director Pawel Kloc, who with this film has made one of the most noticed works from the last couple of years. The director told me that this was his 6th award (plus several honorary mentions) and that the film had participated in around 70 festivals. The jury, headed by Luciano Barisone, director of the festival Visions du Réel in Nyon, Switzerland formulated the following motivation for the Grand Prix winner:

”The film captures the conflict in a strange couple’s private existence and draws a portrait of a complex man who is caught between realism and naivety and whose genuine desire for love clashes with a society corrupted by mass prostitution. The filmmaker shares with his protagonists an uncomfortable situation, keeping just the right distance from them and leaving the audience with the sad sense of life’s disappointing truth. The Jury was really impressed by this intense and painful journey to the end of the night.”

In the category ”Romanian Realities” the award was given to Artchil Khetagouri and Ileana Stanculescu for ”Noosfera”. With this motivation from the jury:

”Any debate on love is subjected to controversy. It has been the case of the jury members, who have expressed diverse feelings for one or another of the films in this competition. However, since love cannot be trapped between walls, or since some walls enclose three simultaneous  love stories, for the intrinsical humour of the approach, and for a universal reality, even if the story happens in Romania, for the subtle portraying of the characters, and in appreciation of a well-done  work, the jury gives the “ROMANIAN REALITIES” AWARD to NOOSFERA.

Khetagouri and Stanculescu were in Sibiu not only to show their film but also to conduct the workshop DocStories Black Sea. For this they deserve an award as well.

Dan Curean got the Ecocinematograff prize for ”Gone Wild”, a film on wild horses that this blogger met four years ago at the Discovery Campus as a promising project. The director gave me a dvd, the film will be reviewed on filmkommentaren.dk later. Swedish Maria Kuhlberg’s ”He thinks He´s Best” was best international documentary.

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

The Serbian director held an inspiring and entertaining masterclass after the screening of his film at the Astra Film Festival in Sibiu in Romania. Radovanovic was one of the tutors at the DocStories Black Sea workshop session that includes filmmakers from Azerbadjan, Armenia, Georgia, Russia, Romania, Turkey and Ukraine.

The film, shot in 8 days, has a fine tone tied to a dramaturgical, authored construction of scenes, that the director lets develop in a pace that suits the rythm of life in the countryside in Cuba. An old man with his motorcycle that has problems in starting and in climbing the streets. Three big men on bicycles, filmed from behind. A young man going by bus to a far away village, he is a dentist. A couple in their house taking care of a public phone where private conversations can be heard. And a megaphone to be used on the first of May celebration day – ”with Fidel whatever happens”. Glimpses of life in Cuba put together in a poetic language.

I need reality to recreate, the director said, inviting the audience to understand his working method. I have staged everything, I was working with actors and I paid them. But the man with the motorbike is a man with a motorbike, the dentist is a dentist and so on so forth. This is my manipulation. But I am not lying at any moment. I am a director, not a social worker, but I never invent, I take from reality when I make documentaries.

The film that ends with a beautifully performed version of ”Lagrimas Negras”, also presents a woman in white who approaches the camera to sing Russian songs, and to serve as one, who chapters the filmic narration.

Serbia, 2011, 47 mins.

http://www.goranradovanovic.com/confidel.html

The first session of the DocStories Black Sea was held in Tbilisi, Georgia, the second one here in sunny Sibiu in Transylvania, Romania within the framework of the 19th edition of the Astra International Documentary Film Festival. Which has a good audience for its programme, three halls with parallel screenings with whatever is needed to surround the screenings: a bar, an exhibition hall, video screens, and some hotels where guests are taking their sleep.

The workshop included several open sessions for others than the filmmakers taking part with their projects, that were more or less developed since the first session. Petr Lom showed and talked about his film from Egypt, ”Back to the Square”, lots of people and questions related to (mostly) ethical questions connected to the clips he showed  in his masterclass from previous films like ”Bride Kidnapping in Kyrgyzstan” (2004) and ”On a Tightrope” (2007) about the Uighur minority in China. The latter includes an old teacher of tightrope, who says ”A person without Love is like a tree without leaves”. Voila!

The animators of the masterly done animation doc, ”Crulic” (photo) (director Anca Damian), Raluca Popa and Dan Panaitescu gave a fascinating insight to how they made a fantastically creative work out of a, from a first glance, rather banal story about a Romanian man, who was wrongly detained in Poland, went on a hungerstrike and died from that, while noone was trying to make an investigation into his case, that created a scandal in both countries. The director made the right decision, when she decided to include animators/visual artists in telling the story that has so many great stylistical elements. Small budget but much more interesting to look at than ”Waltz With Bashir”!

The same (many elements in storytelling) goes for the personal film of American Rick Minnich, who presented his (and co-director Matt Sweetwood) ”Forgetting Dad”, which (text taken from the website of the film, link below) ”tells the bizarre (2008) story of Rick’s father’s sudden and incomprehensible amnesia, which began one week after a seemingly harmless car accident in Sacramento, California, in 1990. After the onset of his amnesia, Rick’s father re-christened himself “New Richard” and began a completely new life, leaving his family feeling abandoned and baffled at where “Old Richard” went.”

Minnich took the audience on a well prepared, honest and open tour into his (and the co-director’s) fight to make a film that was interesting universally – and he succeeded brilliantly to have us viewers follow the story from A to Z. For this blogger because he is constantly surprising us with new elements in a film that has the essay character but is also what he himself calls ”a psychological detective story”. Which is good keeping some distance to the obvious very sentimental sequences, where family members talk about losing a father, who is still there but who is he?

http://lomfilms.com/FILMS.html

http://www.forgettingdad.com/

http://www.astrafilm.ro/news.aspx

http://www.docstories-blacksea.com/ 

This is the press release from the upcomoing DOK Leipzig. Of course there is a lot of publicity words in this but figures are impressive and interesting, and the quotes of he director document that the political engagement, and the openness to the so-called third world are intact elements of the prestigious old festival:

84 documentaries and 114 short animated films will make up the official programme of this year‘s DOK Leipzig. Among the documentaries are 27 world premieres and 14 international premieres, a record number for the film festival. The 198 selected films were chosen from 2,847 entries submitted from 113 countries. The number of countries also marks a new high. The 55th International Leipzig Festival for Documentary and Animated Film will also feature numerous special programmes, so that a total of 360 films from 62 countries will be shown during the festival from 29 October to 4 November.

Festival director Claas Danielsen praised the depth and scope of the festival’s official programme: “This year’s films paint a very exciting and varied picture of a world in transition. In that way, the festival serves as a barometer of fundamental political, social and cultural change.” The themes of protest, resistance and globalization recur throughout the programme. “Told through the stories of individual human beings, the work of the filmmakers provides an emotional window on how the world is changing.” This year, DOK Leipzig is proud to be showing films from five continents. The opening film ARE YOU LISTENING! comes from Bangladesh, a first in the history of the festival. The 13 films in the prestigious International Competition come from renowned directors as well as from impressive new talents in Europe, Asia and Latin America. “The maturity and determination of these young talented filmmakers is absolutely extraordinary,” says festival director Claas Danielsen.

Danielsen is equally impressed with the German competition: “This year’s group is perhaps the strongest since we introduced the section eight years ago. The quality of documentary film production in our country can absolutely hold its own on the international stage.” Also among the five competition categories in which the Golden and Silver Doves and many other prizes will be awarded are the International Competition Animated Film, the International Short Documentary Competition and the Young Cinema Competition (formerly Generation DOK). In addition to the competitions, DOK Leipzig will be presenting attractive special programmes such as the “The Spirit of Freedom” focus on Latin America, the “Utopias and Realities – The Red Dream Factory” retrospective and four filmmaker tributes. Those honored will be Barbara Hammer, Peter Nestler, Mariola Brillowska and Boris von Borresholm. New this year is an extensive children’s and youth program with contemporary animated and documentary films. More Information: www.dok-leipzig.de

Photo: UB Lama by Lithuanian Eglė Vertelytė is in the competition for young cinema.