Sunny Side of the Doc 2012

June 26-29, la Rochelle, the 23rd edition of an event that used to be in Marseilles but now has moved to the Bay of the Bascay on the Atlantic Coast. Among professionals it has been stated that the Sheffield DocFest has put the Sunny Side into the shadow but if you look at the programme and the attendance, there is no sign of crisis for the classic international market in France.

There are introductions to broadcasters, a welcome to and presentation of Chinese documentarians, project presentations, 3D, sessions on webdoc and crowd funding, screenings, docu-games, ”arte france transmedia projects”, a case study of ”Senna” called ”How to make a Documentary Without a Camera”, many screenings most of them linked to the Chinese focus – and a 25 year celebration of the Marseilles-based production company Les Films du Tambour de Soie, congratulations to Alexandre Cornu and his team! Photo from new film project from the company: Tokyo Blue, pitched at the Edinburgh Pitch 2012.

And of course a video library for the many buyers who go to find documentaries for their tv stations. Attendance? Well, it is significant that EDN (European Documentary Network) which has been at the Sunny Side since it (the EDN) started its work in 1996, this year hosts a stand for 50 companies from all over Europe, the biggest number ever. 

http://www.sunnysideofthedoc.com/en/

MIFF 2012

Miff stands for Moscow International Film Festival that started its 34th edition last night, again with a strong documentary element. For the second year the MIFF has a documentary competition programme with 7 films plus a section with 18 long and shorter documentaries, most of them known for festival goers, including this traveller, who on that background can only praise the selection for its high quality.

In the competition programme you find Danish ”The Ambassador” (photo) by Mads Brügger, ”Searching for Sugarman” by Malik Bendjelloul, Swedish production directed by a first time feature director, ”Colors of Math” by Russian Ekaterina Eremenko with Pavel Kostomarov on camera, and the fascinating Czech ”Theatre Svoboda” about legendary stage designer Josef Svoboda, directed by Jakub Hejna.

In the ”Free Thought” programme of 18 films there are great films like ”Argentinean Lesson” by Polish Staron, Scorcese’s George Harrison-film, ”5 Broken Cameras”, ”Give Up Tomorrow”, ”Planet of Snail” and ”Vivan las Antipodas”.

http://www.moscowfilmfestival.ru/miff34/eng/programs/?id=4157

The Edinburgh Pitch 2012/2

A small afterthought to the fine pitching session in Edinburgh, see below, related to comments to one of the films presented on this occasion. Comments from a panel with good people from good tv stations and  distribution companies.  But also comments that reflect the limitations of the simplification that is always called upon when film projects are put forward at one of the wide range of pitching sessions all over the world.

The example was ”Cause of Death: Unknown” presented by Manifesto Film. Here is an edited version of the synopsis:

”Norway 2005 – Renate Hoel, sister of filmmaker Anniken Hoel, dies suddenly and inexplicably while being treated with antipsychotic drugs. Her autopsy concludes that the cause of death is unknown. Anniken begins working on a film about Renate, and of growing up with a sister who was schizophrenic. But the circumstances around her death remain a mystery, and Anniken starts investigating the medical treatment her sister received prior to her death…

What begins as a simple investigation into the inexplicable death of a sister soon becomes an issue of global concern. Cause of death: Unknown questions and reveals the practices of the pharmaceutical industry, and exposes how multinational corporations dictate the rules and regulations of our democracies, with one goal: maximize profits at any cost.”

A well made trailer included these two elements – a personal story combined with an investigation by the director. Professionally presented by director and producer, but with the instant reaction from the panel: you have to decide which film you want to make, the personal human story or the more current affair investigation. You can not have both in your film. The comment was echoed by several other at the table.

Understandable if you think about the way television slots are constructed – slots for creative personal stories and slots for the investigative more journalistic documentaries – but totally unfair if you think in artistic storytelling and content terms where emotion and information of course can go together. (Read below the review of the new Danish film ”Free the Mind”, a masterly done example of this). In the case from Edinburgh you have a rich, personal starting point that can catch the interest of us viewers and make us learn about the medical industry. Please let us keep the richness in the proposals and avoid (too much) simplification in the pitches themselves, in the trailers, in the communication between pitchers and panelists, in the training we make! Even if we have lost the battle of having generous documentary slots in television.

http://www.manifestofilm.com/

The Edinburgh Pitch 2012

”Make Docs Happen” on the catalogue and on the posters surrounding the theatre where the pitch of 11 projects from all over Europe – to a panel of 11 broadcasters and distributors – took place. And make docs happen is what the Scottish Documentary Institute (SDI) has done for years now, with enthusiasm and competence. The SDI introduces itself as a ”documentary research centre at Edinburgh College of Art specialised in documentary training, production and distribution, running annual programmes such as ”Bridging the Gap” (short documentaries) and Interdoc (feature documentaries) helping filmmakers and producers to develop their projects”.

Among the pitched projects were ”Borrowed Memories” by Maria Clara Escobar from Brazil, a promising personal story where the director wants her father to tell her what happened to him during the dictatorship, where he – a poet and playwright – was jailed and tortured for his political work. Also a film about father and daughter is ”Fatherland” by Sara Ishaq (photo), who has a Scottish mother and a yemenite father, who at a very early stage wanted to find a man for her (old, fat and bald according to the daughter’s memory), which he does not remember… The daughter goes to Yemen and other serious matters comes up, the revolution, that brings father and daughter to the streets and closer to each other. Easy to see that this film will be strong and with an international potential. The director has an Egyptian and a Syrian coproducer. An award for the best pitch was given to ”Chuck Norris vs Communism” by Ilinca Calugareanu, who brought a charming story to the panel about the illegal distribution of Western films, translated by Irina Nistor ”whose husky, high-pitched voice became known throughout Romania”.

The SDI also arranged a session with ”Docs in Progress” and has a premiere tonight of a film coproduced with Sweden, ”Future My Love”, directed by Maja Borg. This happens within the frames of the Edinburgh International Film Festival.

www.futuremylove.com

www.scottishdocinstitute.com

MakeDox 2012

It is the third edition, it takes place in Skopje, it goes on until June 22nd, it is a festival with its own, original profile and a special communication strategy – subscribe to its free newsletter, from where the following text is taken:

“This Friday the Old Bazaar in Skopje smelled differently. Apart from the smell of barbecue, baklava and other delicious pastry, one could feel the strong odor of onion. Kurshumli an opened its archway and welcomed the audience at the third edition of the Creative Documentary Film Festival “MakeDox”.

It was only the first of the many nights to come that are celebrating the documentary film under the starry sky among impressive and historically significant stone walls. Starting from yesterday, Skopje will smell like onion. Because the onion stands for MakeDox. It is a structure without center but with an objective. And the objective is the new onion: the new life justifies the existence of the onion.”

“Under” this very inviting text the festival includes a high class programme, divided into categories like “Multilayered Onion” (main programme), “Spring Onion” (newcomers), “Balkan Onion”, “Kids on planet Onion”, “Sliced Onion” (short films) and a special focus on the work of Serbian director Zelimir Zilnik. To exemplify: In the main programme you will find “The Interrupters” by Steve James, “The Cell Phone” by Nedzat Begovic, “The Ambassador” by Mads Brugger, “Nostalgia for the Light” by Patricio Guzman and “Argentinian Lesson” (photo) by Wojciek Staron.

http://makedox.mk/en/

Marcel Lozinski

The work of the Polish master of documentary (born 1940) is being very well introduced in an article by Katerina Surmanová on the website of IDF (Institute of Documentary Film). And for newcomers to the impressive filmography of Lozinski it is good to know that his films are published on a 2-set dvd box published by the Polish Film Institute – and available through Amazon as well.

At the Kracow film festival this year Marcel and his son Pawel told about their upcoming common film project, named by them as a psychological-movie experiment, a „Psycho Van” road movie. The father is quoted to have said the following:

“Father and son” (title of the film) decided to take a camper van trip to Paris, where 24 years ago in Luxemburg Gardens, Marcel Łoziński illegaly scattered his mother ashes. Both of them have a video camera, they can ask each other any question they want to. Two week trip was meant to be a remedy to „father and son” relationship. This film has the chance to become clear and universal story about hard and complicated family problems and relationships for all of us. „I needed this time (movie trip), to understand that I wasn’t the father that I thought I was. It’s possible that after our trip Paweł learns how to aviod mistakes I made. I feel that our story goes far beyond ourselves, it touches every family.  I think it will be a very universal movie”

Judging from the clip on the IDF site, there is something great to look forward to. Photo from Marcel Lozinski’s last film “Tonia and her Children”.

http://www.dokweb.net/en/

http://www.dokweb.net/en/doc-launch/upcoming-films/-father-and-son-4854

Doc à Tunis

Emanuela Macchniz, student at Zelig School for Documentary, Television and New Media, placed in Bolzano Italy sent this report to filmkommentaren.dk:

Last April (25 – 30) the Association Ness El Fen organized for the seventh year the new documentary film festival “Doc à Tunis”. The festival offers every year the opportunity to discover the Tunisian documentary films, showing the life and the current problems of the country. The president of the association, Syhem Belkhodja, opened the screening with “Militantes …” directed by the Tunisian director Sonia Chamkhi, who brings us into a post-revolutionary Tunisia in full democratic transition, where Tunisian women are candidates for the Assembly Constituency facing the political arena for the first time.” The screening was attended by the women protagonists who expressed their reflections about their electoral defeat. It was a very emotional moment.

After the opening day many other Tunisian films were in the list: “Himen National” (photo) by Jamel Mokni which treats the delicate subject of hymen reconstruction surgery, a practice increasingly common in Tunisia. Another powerful film was showed “Separation” directed by Felthi Saidi. Her story is about a Tunisian father of a family of four children. He sailed from Libya towards Lampedusa, risking his life, but convinced that Europe has the means to realize his dreams. This film is a double vision of two realities, one of the immigrant in France, and one of the family in Tunisia.

There were many exciting moments during the festival. One was when the rapper Mohamed Amine Bouhrizi commonly called “Madou”, came into the theatre to attend the screening of a short film about himself, “Golden Man” made by Hsan Abdelghani, showing the district where he was born “la Kabbariyya”, a place of both pride and with an intimate environment, but also the cause of his rebellion and his desire to leave the country .

The festival presented also international films: 6 from Lebanon including “Sector Zero” directed by Nadim Mishlawi present after the screening, “5 Broken Cameras” by Emrad Burnat e Guy Davidi from Palestine and Israel, “Letters from Iran” by Manoun Loizeau, Iran, “Indignados” by Tony Gatlif, “Good bye Moubarak!” by Katia Jarjoura, “Tous brulés” by Leila Chaibi, “Le Thé ou l’élèctricité” by Jérome Le Maire, “Arabe et fier de l’etre” by Lila Salimi and many other. “Vivan las antipodas” by Victor Kossakovski ended the festival. There were free admission to the screenings, and the theaters were full every day.

With me I carry the memory of a theater full of women and men, who participated with such interest, taking with them also their children.

Emanuela Macchniz, student of documentary at Zelig, Bolzano.

The Guardian: Destination Docs

The British newspaper, always strong on cinema, has launched a series of (sponsored) articles named “Destination Docs”, published in connection with the Sheffield DocFest. The headline goes like this, “Despite new documentary formats, traditional fact-based films still attract impressive audiences – and offer value for money”. The series reminds you of the constant documentary dominance in the UK of the broadcasting companies, contrary to the rest of Europe, it is good reading, even more so when the floor is given to one of the best documentarians of today, Molly Dineen:

“Bafta-winning documentary maker Molly Dineen believes Channel 4 has shown bravery in the past with its factual shows, but has a word of caution to all the broadcasters. “Channel 4 is still very cool for factual, but it needs to be stretched by the subject matter. There’s a risk that all channels are suffering an unhealthy pressure for docs to become more light, sexy, cheap and overly dramatic.

“The adventure has got to be in tackling issues that need to be tackled, that could be expensive and unpopular. Filming real-life is expensive; structured reality is not,” warns Dineen.

Channel 4 also risks losing out to competition from the web, she says. “There needs to be collusion between the mainstream and what young filmmakers are shooting [for the web] and their motivation.” Dineen adds: “If C4 let too much of the genuine political underbelly of documentary move to the web, then they could be sunk because telly will then just be advertising and titillation, and the serious look at life will end up on the web.”

Molly Dineen’s documentaries will be out on dvd thanks to the British Film Institute: a three-volume collection. The first volume, out on 25 April, contains Home from the Hill, My African Farm, Heart of the Angel and In the Company of Men, her three-part examination of Welsh Guardsmen on a final tour of duty in pre-ceasefire Belfast.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2012/jun/11/factuals-big-fat-viewing-figures

Moscow Exhibition of Film and Art

As part of the upcoming MIFF (Moscow International Film Festival) that runs from June 21 – 30 and again this year includes a competiton programme of documentaries as well as Panorama documentary section, you can go to Moscow to attend a Media Forum that looks quite interesting and intriguing.

The curator and founder of the programme, Olga Shishko, explains: “The Media Forum is a programme at the Moscow Film Festival which has been created especially to expand the familiar borders of cinema and to show that it can vary not only both in content and artistic construction of the text, but also from the formal point of view, the technology of its making and the viewing situation. The language that Media Forum uses to talk to its audience belongs to both cinematic and artistic principles, enriching them both equally…”

At the Ekaterina Cultural Foundation (June 22 – August 19) this is what is going on, a text taken from the site of the Forum:

Exhibition “The Immersions. Towards the Tactile Cinema” consists of several sections each belonging to a certain type of director’s approach to working with screen and viewer. The first section, Pure Cinema, is a reaction to art for art’ sake. Here screen is used as a canvas, actually presenting cinema as an apotheosis of painting. Works by Kazimir Malevich, Mikhail Matyushin, Nam June Paik, Ken Jacobs, Paul Clipson, Hans Richter, Konstantin Adzher, Oleg and Olda Ponomarev are presented.

Attractions’ Montage, the second section, is based on the “4D cinema” concept invented initially by Sergei Eisenstein and presents his followers: Pia Tikka, Herz Frank (photo from “10 Minutes Older, 1968, camera Juris Podnieks), Alexei Isaev and Elena Gorbacheva.

The third section, Tactile Cinema, is about films that can be “watched with hands”, starting with Salvador Dali’s ideas. While working with Luis Bunuel, Dali had quite another vision of the Chien Andalou realization. This is followed by Peter Weibel’s and VALIE EXPORT’s “gripping watching” (beside which works by the TOT-ART group, Valery Ayzenberg, Ekaterina Pavlova and Constantin Semin are presented).

The forth section explores the Machine vision idea by Woody and Steina Vasulkas — a device that can replace both the film director and the viewer, supplanting individual and inaccurate human vision by an objective gaze of the camera itself. Here Ken Jacobs, Dina Karaman and Alexandra Kuznetsova are also presented.

The Interactive Cinema that unfolds with viewers’ participation is the fifth section comprised of works by Zbigniew Rybczyński, Chris Hales, Boris Debackere, Perry Bard, Mark Amerika and Olga Kisseleva.

http://mediaforum.mediaartlab.ru/en/about/

http://moscowfilmfestival.ru/miff34/eng

Photography and Photographers

Copenhagen Photo Festival runs until June 17 with exhibitions all around the city. The Danish Film Institute joins the event with an offer to access 6 fine films online – if you are living in Denmark. Therefore this change to Danish language:

Og det er en flot lille samling som DFI tilbyder københavnerne at se gratis i Filmhusets videotek (åbent tirsdag og torsdag 12-19, onsdag og fredag 12-16) eller via filmstriben (spørg om dette på dit lokale bibliotek, hvis du ikke kender ordningen):

DFI kalder serien for ”Nærvær/ om fotografer og fotografi” med brug af titlen, ”Nærvær”, på svenske Jan Troells smukke film om sin ven og kollega Georg Oddner, en film som allle dokumentarister bør se, dels på grund af dens kvalitet, dels fordi Oddner siger så mange vigtige og inspirerende ting om sin métier.

Steen Møller Rasmussen, selv en fremragende fotograf, serverer 33 intense minutter med sin ”Fotografi” (2006), hvor han lader publikum møde Keld Helmer Petersen, Per Bak Jensen, Krass Clement og Kirsten Klein. Det er så stramt og præcist, som kun Møller Rasmussen kan gøre det. Uden ligegyldige omsvøb.

Omsvøb, i form af veloplagte og velfortalte anekdoter, er der til gengæld i Jørgen Roos 13 minutter lange kortfilmklassiker om hans elskede H.C. Andersen, en film der baserer sig på ca. 160 forskellige billeder taget af digteren fra han var 45 år.  

Robert Fox ”Flash of a Dream” (2002) giver os historien om Jacob A. Riis, Kai Michelsen lavede sammen med Ole Brage fra DR ”Et andet København 1870-1910” (1980), en uvurderlig ikonografisk dokumentar bygget på fotografier fra Københavns bymuseum, og som endnu en gave til et fotointeresseret publikum kan man se Troells spillefilm ”Maria Larssons evige øjeblik”, hvor Jesper Christensen spiller fotograf Pedersen. Herligt!

Foto af Georg Oddner fra Jan Troells film “Nærvær”.

http://www.dfi.dk/FaktaOmFilm/Film-til-biblioteker/Filmtemaer/Naervaer.aspx