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

The festival in Leipzig also hosts several workshops, where documentary projects are being developed. Andrea Prenghyova, one of the founders of the IDF (Institute of Documentary Film) in Prague, presented for the second year, in collaboration with the festival, projects that were at rough cut stage, or at rough rough cut stage as one said to me, or finished. The session with the presentation of the projects were very well received, and it seems that the DOK.Incubator has come to stay.

Also the Mediterranean focused Storydoc programme had its final session in Leipzig. The workshop that include film proposals from Palestine, Algeria, Greece and other countries, is organised by the Greeks in collaboration with the EDN (European Documentary Network).

A film that came out of a workshop connected to Dox Box festival in Damascus had its world premiere in Leipzig. Lina Alabed, of Palestinian/Egyptian origin, presented her ”Damascus, My First Kiss”, shot in Damascus (where she no longer lives) with herself as the leading character in a courageously open and well told story about three women and their growing up in a culture where talking about your body and sexuality is a taboo.

http://dokincubator.net/

www.dok-leipzig.de

www.dox-box.org

http://www.proactionfilm.com/pkg09/index.php?page=show&dir=docs&ex=2&lang=2&ser=1&cat=168

Any films that we must see, film students and others who enter the festival centre ask me. Many, I answer, because there are many that have high quality. The problem in my answering is that many of the films I have not seen yet, as they are world or European or National premieres, but after three days at the video library, see below, I have tips to pass on. Some of these will later on have a review on this site, some will not.

A film that I keep on recommending is the masterly done ”Sofia’s Last Ambulance” (photo) by Ilian Metev, as well as ”The End of Time” that I have not seen yet, but Peter Mettler is a unique film essayist, so for that it is a must. As is the opening film of the festival that I also screened in the video library, ”Are You Listening” by Kamar Ahmad Simon from Bangla Desh, a classic humanistic, cinematically brilliant work that character-wise brings back memories of the Apu-trilogy of Satayit Ray when it comes to the film’s boy and his parents.

The Latvian ”Documentarian” by Inese Klava and Ivars Zviedris is of course a must for all who work with documentaries, it has humour and a fantastic character, who loves and hates to be filmed at the same time as she is building a friendship with the cameraman/ director who comes to see her.

Another character who is charismaric in his old, grumpy age is Pablo, a pensioned miner, whose daily life is followed by director Chico Pereira in ”Pablo’s Winter”, a warm film that perfectly catches the rythm of moving slowly around, having time to argue with the wife and teach a kid how to bicycle.

Finally, ”Tea or Electricity” by Jerome le Maire, from a village in the mountains of Morocco, just nominated for the European Award as best documentary, is a film to be enjoyed for its way of treating the theme of, yes, do we really need electricity?

www.dok-leipzig.de

Time for a small report after three days at a festival that it is always pleasant to visit in a city, that it is always pleasant to visit. Eine Kulturstadt, that has developed immensely since the days around 1990 where I attended the festival for the first time nach der Wende. Now the festival centre is in the Museum der Bildenden Künste, in the new building from 2004. This is where the very well functioning digitalised video library is situated and where your blogging correspondent for a couple of festivals have passed hours in front of the computer picking films from the big catalogue. With good image and sound. Professional it is, as most of the elements of a festival that is well visited and visible in the streets where accredited professionals and documentary film buffs walk from one place to the other with their red bags, heading for not only cinemas bul also places where discussions take place within the industry section of the festival. I counted that today thursday there are 10 seminars/workshops taking place during daytime and evening, from ”outreach and campaigning in focus” to ”cross media case studies” – to, networking is important, the daily get-together with a couple of non-hearable speeches and glasses of wine being carried around.

Food is important and the festival centre has a fine café with fine food mastered by the same people who stand behind Hotel (and restaurant) Michaëlis, where I usually stay. This year I am at Motel One, two minutes from everything, a big machine that is ok and where most of the festival guests are staying.

Photo from the best film I saw today: Thomas Riedelsheimer’s beautiful work on the Japanese artist Susumu Shingu, “a journey through the world as he follows his life-long dream-project and explores the energy of wind and water.” Title: Breathing Earth, Germany, 2012, 93 mins.

http://www.mdbk.de/

http://filmpunkt.com/projects_WInd_eng.html

www.dok-leipzig.de

The headline of the interview in Realscreen is “Mixing the real and the surreal” and the first lines go like this:

“In time for its presentation as the cph:dox (Copenhagen International Documentary Film Festival)’s opening film, filmmaker Joshua Oppenheimer tells realscreen about his “observational documentary of the imagination.”

The film opened the festival today tuesday evening with several screenings during the festival of the 115 mins. version as well as the 159 mins. version.

Read more: http://realscreen.com/#ixzz2ApBt0M48