Idfa Sends Sad News

The Jan Vrijman Fund, part of the many actitivities run by idfa (International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam), has supported lots of important films from countries with limited means for the creative documentary genre. For that reason it is rather sad news that was sent to many hopeful upcoming applicants the other day:

“The Jan Vrijman Fund has decided to cancel its second selection round of 2012, which was planned for May. This is due to the fact that as of 2013, the Fund will no longer be receiving government subsidies, which means that it will be forced to find alternative forms of financing. For projects that already have contracts with the Fund, there will be no change.

We expect to hold the next selection round in 2013. Details will follow later this year. We regret this situation but see no alternative, except to focus on the future of the Fund. At the 25th IDFA, which will take place from November 14-25, 2012, the Fund will have a new crop of films in celebration of its 15th anniversary.

For information about other financing opportunities, please see Other Funds & Resources.”

Photo: On the Way to School by Özgür Dogan & Orhan Eskikoy, Turkey, 2008, one of many strong films helped by JVF. Reviewed on this site.

http://www.idfa.nl/industry/markets-funding/vrijman-fund/Submit-your-project.aspx

Mat Hodgson: QPR: The Four Year Plan

A classical story, and a wonderful tv documentary for football freaks like this blogger. This is the text that gives the background, taken from the BBC’s programme site:

”In 2007 Queens Park Rangers Football Club, facing relegation and bankruptcy, was rescued by four high-profile billionaires. Their vision: to take a community of reluctant fans, semi-talented players and a roster of ever-changing managers to Premiership glory. The new owners, risking ridicule and commercial failure, allowed cameras unprecedented access to record the roller-coaster ride. Though they paid for much of the filming they did not control where the cameras pointed or what ended up in the film.”

QPR succeeded but after years of struggling on the pitch and mostly backstage, where the film stays with the protagonists, where – luckily, as they live up to all the clichés about Italians – the Italian owner and the Italian sports manager express their strong emotions according to the results, which in the first years were terrible and where the coaches are changed whenever there is a slate of defeats… ”he is an idiot”, is being said about the men who were saluted just months ago as the savour of Queens Park Rangers, the London club with the address Loftus Road.

It is a well-made observational documentary, it lives through the details, and through the long time it has been filming, with the right warm and humourous touch, with a lot of f… words, but also hugs and vanity – if they dont stop booing me, I will leave, says Flavio, one of the moneymen behind the club, the mafia-looking guy on the photo. And the films includes great lines to pick up like ”this season we don’t scream at the players”.

PS. QPR is now fighting to avoid the relegation to Championship again, the coach is no longer Neil Warnock but Mark Hughes. Hoping the best for the club!

UK, 2012, 90 mins.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01d7kd7

Michel Wenzer: At Night I Fly

New Folsom prison in California. A film made over several years. Literally an inside insight to a world we have no idea about existed, even if we have seen loads of prison films, most of them fiction, and many of them very good as (to put on the domestic Danish glasses) the recent ones by Thomas Vinterberg and Tobias Lindholm. Yet this film by Swedish Michel Wenzer goes so much closer in his cinematic interpretation of a life in a totally tough environment with armed guards, ”isolation, closure, loneliness” to ”keep us contained” as one of the inmates say.

The film has a sketchy, fragmentaric structure, but the impressionistic approach slowly adds up sequence by sequence, and you get some characters, who are reflective when it comes to their own situation and to the actions they take to fill their days to make it all bearable, or you could say to make sense of it all. The focus is on ”the arts in correction programme” in the prison, arts as a lifeline to sanity, and there are great scenes from this room where (some) inmates meet with people from other races, as they say, in a world where the white normally do not meet with the black, or the black with the latinos, or… Music, poem reading, writing, religious meetings, they are well articulated.

There are footage from riots, there are scenes where the brutality of the environment is evident, but the goal of the director is to show the strength of the inmates, who have chosen to express their life and pain in a creative manner.

The sound and music design is marvellous. In times where so much music is wall-to-wall ”this is what we want you to feel”, the work of Wenzer is respectful to the characters situation and to the equally strong visual circling around the isolated mini-world. 

Sweden, 86 mins., 2012

http://www.story.se/films/at-night-i-fly

http://www.filmstriben.dk/fjernleje/       

Visions du Réel 2012/ 2

Another edition, the 18th, of the exclusive Visions du Réel in Nyon, Swizerland, a small festival in terms of audience, around 25.000, but important for the professionals, especially, it is being said, for the directors, is over and awards have been given. The competent jury of the long documentary competition section chose Dutch documentary ”Matthews Laws” by Marc Schmidt for the Grand Prix (CHF 20.000) (so far unknown for this blogger) and the Special Prix for the Finnish upcoming festival-hit, the warm and entertaining ”The Punk Syndrome” by J-P Passi and Jukka Kärkkäinen (CHF 10.000).

Two other films were awarded which I am looking forward to see: ”900 Days” by Dutch Jessica Gorter that takes its story from the sige of Leningrad during the ww2, and ”Snake Dance” by Belgian excellent director Manu Riche and the writer Patrick Marnham. Here is a quote from a description of the film:

”Snake Dance” (photo), the new film by the Belgian documentary-maker Manu Riche and the English-Irish writer and scenarist Patrick Marnham, is about the genesis of the atomic bomb. The journey leading up to this story was a long one.
  
We plunge into the jungle of the Congo in the footsteps of Leopold II in search of the place where uranium is mined. We cross the ocean to Los Alamos, the base in New Mexico where Robert J. Oppenheimer developed the atom bomb assisted by the best physicists in the world. We follow the bomb to Japan, where it destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.

http://www.visionsdureel.ch/festival/palmares/2012.html

Dokville

… is the name of a ”Branchentreff Dokumentarfilm” in Ludwigsburg, taking place in Ludwigsburg the coming week, May 3-4. Organised by Haus des Dokumentarfilm the event, that has the title ”vom Dokumentarfilm leben”, among other issues has its focus on webdocumentaries with the intervention of producer Christian Beetz, who will give the story about the multimedia project ”Farewell, Comrades” (Photo), entitled ”Crossmedia – Chance für den Dokumentarfilm?”.

On the subject of webdocs – Thomas Schneider writes on the site of Dokville (read the rest as well): Bei Arte – aber nicht nur dort – wird schon seit einer ganzen Weile mit diesem neuen Medienkonzept gearbeitet. Entstanden sind so in den letzten Jahren gut ein Dutzend Webdokus – die besten von ihnen zum Beispiel über »Prison Valley«, eine Gegend in den USA, die nur für den Strafvollzug genutzt wird oder über den arabischen Frühling im Jahre 2011. Sie sind alle über die Website www.arte.tv abrufbar – in der Navigationsleiste haben die Webdokus einen eigenen, prominenten Bereich spendiert bekommen. Auch beim MDR hat man geschichtliche Dokumentarthemen mit Webdokus begleitet: zum Mauerbau und zur Geschichte des Trabis zum Beispiel.

Pepe Danquart, German director and producer, is invited to make the introductory keynot speech. The director of a recent film on Joshka Fischer, and the coproducer of Michael Glawogger’s ”Whores’ Glory”, will for sure make a both entertaining and critical kick to the present situation of the documentary, here in special in Germany.

And there are many other issues on the agenda of the two day event. Sometimes it is good to stop the flow of festivals and discuss the state of the art. Which is what the Germans do here.

http://www.dokville2012.de/

Doc à Tunis 2012

Not bad for documentary interested people to be in the capital of Tunisia these days, where the yearly festival takes place, for the seventh time organised by the the Ness El Fen association with the support of arte France, CMCA, Institut Francais and Mairie de Paris (!). The festival opened yesterday and runs until Sunday the 29th of April.

In the programme there are many unknown titles, new films I suppose, from Palestine, Tunisia (9 films), Lebanon, Palestine (including 5 Broken Cameras) and Algeria. Ness El Fen is also a organiser of dance events and has chosen to show Frederick Wiseman’s fílm from the Opera in Paris.

Closing film, with the director present, Vivan las Antopodas! (photo) by Viktor Kossakovsky. Bravo!

http://docatunis.nesselfen.org/

Marathon Dok 2012

… or you could call it a mini-festival, is what the EDN (European Documentary Network) arranges every year in collaboration with and at the Danish Film School. This year it takes place May 12, from 14.00 to 22.00. This is how the event is introduced by the organiser:

“Marathon Dok is a looooong day full of funny, fascinating and fantastic documentaries. This one-day screening program brings new international high quality documentaries to the big screen in the beautiful cinema of the Danish Film School… Of course this is mostly relevant for the Danish EDN members and other professionals close to Copenhagen, but the model could be exported to other destinations, right? (ed.)”

In Danish: Programmet I år indeholder to af de mest spændende nye film, som er mere end anbefalelsesværdige, jeg ville kalde dem “musts” for dokumentarinteresserede:

Planet of Snail (2011, color, 87 min, South Korea, Japan) by Seung-Jun Yi. Vinder ved idfa 2011,

og

Five Broken Cameras (2011, Palestine/France color/b&w, 90 min) by Emad Burnat & Guy Davidi, vinder ved Sundance, bl.a.

Det koster 120 kr. at deltage i Marathon Dok, som du betaler kontant når du kommer til arrangementet.

Mere om filmene:

http://www.edn.dk/activities/edn-activity-texts/edn-activities-2012/marathon-dok-2012/

Ilian Metev: Sofia’s Last Ambulance

Croatian producer Sinisa Juricic mailed me yesterday with the happy news about a film that he has been co-producing. It has been been selected for the Semaine de la Critique in the upcoming Cannes Film Festival. I post you the French description of the documentary, that you for sure will meet in many festivals, and hopefully tv channels in the coming year. AND my spontaneous comment when I saw a rough cut of the film some times ago. Watch out for it:

Dans une ville qui ne possède que 13 ambulances pour deux millions d’habitants, Krassi, Mila et Plamen sont nos héros improbables : gros fumeurs, bourrés d’humour et sans cesse en train de sauver la vie à autrui, malgré le grand nombre d’obstacles. Cependant, le système brisé les met à rude épreuve. Combien de temps vont-ils encore tenir à sauver les écorchés de la société jusqu’à ce qu’ils perdent leur empathie?

TSM: I write to tell you that I saw Sofia’s Last Ambulance this morning and it is an impressively strong work, masterly done simply. I was with the film the whole way through, and with these brilliant characters. I am looking forward to hearing more about the technical solutions, the placement and operation of the cameras and much more. It is a reading-faces-film.

Bulgaria, 2012, 80 mins.

http://www.semainedelacritique.com/EN/films/2012/2012_selection.php

Helena Třeštíková

The strength of the time consuming observational documentary, in times where many stylistically move in the area between documentary and fiction (example Glawogger, see below), is one of the most obvious thoughts that comes to one’s mind watching the films of Czech director Helena Třeštíková, whose newest work, shot over a period of 37 years, Private Universe is the title, is going around the world, with a world premiere at HotDocs in Toronto very soon.

According to the website that carries the name ”film new europe” Trestikova is to be awarded in Krakow at the upcoming festival:

Czech documentary filmmaker Helena Trestikova will receive the Dragon of Dragons honorary award at the 52nd Krakow Film Festival (www.krakowfilmfestival.pl), 28 May-3 June 2012.

Třeštíková won the European Film award for her documentary René.

A graduate of FAMU Prague Film School (www.famu.cz) in 1974, she specializes in long-form documentaries using the time gathered method, filming her subjects for years and even decades. Since 2002, she has been a professor at FAMU. Her latest film, Private Universe (www.negativ.cz) gathered over the course of 37 years, will have its international premiere at Hot Docs in Toronto.

Třeštíková will be awarded the Dragon of Dragons on 30 May Festival. The festival will present a retrospective of her films accompanied by the meeting of the director with the public. She will also conduct a Master Class as part of the festival’s Industry Zone. Photo from “Katka”.

http://www.filmneweurope.com/news/poland/festivals-krakow-laurels-for-trestikova

Michael Glawogger Retrospective in N.Y.

The IDF (Institute of Documentary Film) website informs that the first retrospective of the Austrian documentarian is taking place in New York at the Museum of Moving Images until April 29. The website of the Museum includes interesting text excerpts from a soon to be published book on Glawogger. Here comes the series intro by the museum:

One of the most versatile and original talents in contemporary world cinema, the Austrian filmmaker Michael Glawogger has made an art of crossing boundaries, both geographic and formal. He spans diverse, far-flung locations within a single film, often dealing with ambiguous notions of home and foreignness, and moves back and forth between fiction and documentary, sometimes combining and subverting both modes. Glawogger’s career resists classification at every turn, but whether set on the margins of the developing world or in precincts of privilege, his surprising, beautifully photographed films are testaments to his own boundless curiosity and to the endless complexity of the human condition. This retrospective, his first in the United States, includes his widely acclaimed and much debated documentary trilogy on harsh working environments, as well as a selection of fiction features and experimental short films. Photo from Whore’s Glory.

http://www.dokweb.net/en/documentary-network/articles/michael-glawogger-retrospective-in-nyc-2083/?

http://www.movingimage.us/