DocAlliance Excellent Online Offers

Even today, with the existing online possibilities, many come up with the usual comment and ask the eternal question: Yes, I love documentaries but where can I see them. And those who go to festivals with hundreds of films to choose from, often come back saying – I missed this or that masterpiece.

If you subscribe to the newsletter of the best vod for creative documentaries, the Doc Alliance, you will be helped to make your choices. Today the ”Events of the Months” was published and it shows perfectly the editorial skills of the Doc Alliance people.

From May 7 – 13 the theme is ”True Stories from Russia” including a slate of quality films like ”Mother” by Antoine Cattin and Pavel Kostomarov, and Nino Kirtadze’s “Durakovo – the Village of Fools”. The week after (May 14 – 20) the distributor Taskovski Films generously offers three masterpieces for free: Bulgarian Andrey Paounov’s ”The Mosquito Problems and Other Stories”, ”Bahrtalo!” by Robert Lakatos and Serbian Aleksander Manic ”The Shutka Book of Records”. The headline is ”Trip to the Balkans” and there is wonderful humour in these storytellingwise original, non-mainstream documentaries.

The highlight, however, is that DocAlliance gives us the chance to watch, in the right order and in one two or three days, as you like, the Indonesian trilogy of Leonard Retel Helmrich, a strong humanistic work to be compared to Satayit Ray’s Pather Panchali work from India. ”The Eye of the Day” (2001), followed by ”Shape of the Moon” (2004) (photo) and ”Position Among the Stars” (2010) are the titles of Helmrich’s so-called ”Single Shot Cinema”. Watch it!

Again, I can only repeat a Bravo to what DocAlliance does for the artistic documentary!

http://dafilms.com/newsletter/view/6Fb7ayvHIY/

Helle Hansen: Ordet fanger

Det begynder med et citat af Victor Klemperer: ”Ord kan virke som bitte små doser arsenik. De sluges ubemærket, de synes ikke at have nogen virkning, men efter nogen tid viser giftens virkning sig alligevel.”

Måske skulle der være gjort lidt mere rede for Klemperers metode og teori, være diskuteret, hvordan han gennemførte sin undersøgelse af intolerancens skrevne sprog i 1930-erne, at mediet dengang var aviser og bøger, mens Helle Hansens film tager sig på at undersøge politikernes talte sprog et halvt århundrede senere, og finder sine eksempler i tv. Det gør en forskel. Der er en tøven, når der skrives, også når en politiker skriver, en eftertankens tøven. Og det er denne skriftens langsomhed, som gør det langt alvorligere og modbydeligere, det er jo omhyggeligt og skjult anbragte giftportioner. Det er det da næsten aldrig, når politikerne diskuterer i tv, her er fortalelser tilgivelige, troede jeg måske. Og filmen er for en stor del en montage af forbløffende politikerformuleringer netop fra ophidsede tv-debatter, hvor det ene ord tager det andet. Men Helle Hansen har imidlertid den pointe, at en stor del af sine belæg finder hun i skrevne taler, mange i Pia Kjærsgaards og Mogens Camres taler, som – skal vi sige – er de tydeligste. Og det er rystende, hvad vi genhører, hvad vi ligesom har vænnet vort øre til. De sagde det! Og de havde på forhånd skrevet det, langsomt måske, men uden tøven. Men langsomt har arsenikken virket, Villy Søvndal, viser det sig, er angrebet, og jeg tænker, at vi alle må undersøge vort sprog for forgiftede ord.

I begyndelsen af filmen er der en smuk fortællerstemme, Helle Hansens egen, som i et yderst velskrevet og venligt dansk begynder en reflekteret fortælling om den fremmedfjendske sprogbrug i de danske politikeres debat de seneste 25 år. Den stemme er en tryghed tænkte jeg, jeg kan godt lide fortællerstemmer i film, og den kunne fint have fortsat og uddybet det essay, som Anders Villadsens filmiske citatmontage etablerer. Men stemmen bliver væk, man har måske været bange for, at fremstillingen skulle blive litterær. Jeg synes det er ærgerligt, det var lige på nippet til at blive en klog, litterær og eftertænksom film, men det skulle altså være en såkaldt debatfilm, eller som det hedder i folkeoplysningen, debatskabende, og filminstituttet har da også som led i færdiggørelsen udarbejdet et undervisningsmateriale til Ordet fanger. Godt nok, den har altså været tænkt som skolefilm, er lavet som skolefilm, så kan den ikke samtidig være filmessay på højt plan. Eller kunne den ikke? Helle Hansens fortællerstemme lover det til at begynde med ret overbevisende, men holder det ligesom ikke.

Helle Hansen: Ordet fanger, Danmark 2012, 38 min. Manuskript: Helle Hansen, foto: Henrik Bohn Ipsen, klip: Anders Villadsen, producer: Søren Steen Jespersen, produktion: Monday Reporter og Bastard Film for DR2, distribution: DR2 og filmstriben.dk samt dvd-salg. Filmografi, Helle Hansen: Børn under jorden, 1977, Børnehuset 1997, BZ, 2006. Medvirkende i Dola Bonfils’ Billeder til tiden, 1994.

Signe Markvard: Asger

Den lille ufuldendte skitse af en udsat tilstand skildret i en bevidst valgt kunstnerisk form er mere et anslag end det er et forløb eller en udvikling. Manden Asger taler om sig selv og den verden af fotografisk iagttagelse og fastholdelse, seksuel erkendelse og valg inde i en mulig psykose, som han siger er diagnosticeret som udefineret skizofreni. Fortællingen består af beskrivelse af en særegen sindstilstand, af erindring og af tanker og ideer om ved billeder og musik at nå det dækkende udtryk, ordet og sætningerne ikke magter. I konsekvens af dette er monologen akkompagneret af Trentemøllers musik og Signe Markvards filmfotografi. Musikalske og billedlige landskaber, som loyalt lægger sig blidt og forstående omkring mandens sarte, let skræmte betroelser og spinkle filosofi. Et enkelt sted manipuleres monologens lyd med en ekko- eller forsinkelseseffekt, som søger at være eller illustrere den drømmeagtige tilstand af uvirkelighed, som talen skildrer.

For mig understreges netop derved, at Asger ikke har ret, hans sprog skildrer faktisk allerede dækkende det, lyddesignet søger at nå eller illustrere. Hans monolog er gribende forståelig i sig selv, men den klæder og fortolker nydelsesfuldt Trentemøllers musik og Markvards billeder i en kammermusikalsk sats, som ikke fuldendes endsige efterfølges af yderligere satsers videre forløb og konklusion. Vi efterlades svævende i et menneskes sørgmodige resignation.

Men det er opløftende, at filmen har kunnet laves, at sådant kan blive til i et samarbejde mellem en medvirkende og en kunstner, som både kan og gør det hele selv: instruerer, interviewer, fotograferer, klipper og færdigproducerer samt via vimeo distribuerer en helstøbt dokumentarfilm. Nu er den også tilgængelig på filmstriben.dk efter den på filmfestivalen i Odense sidste år modtog publikumsprisen.

Signe Markvard: Asger, Danmark 2010, 10 min. Instruktion, kamera, klip og alt andet: Signe Markvard, musik: Trentemøller. Distribution: vimeo og filmstriben.dk

 

The Syrian Revolution/ 11

It goes on and on… this is what I copied from BBC this afternoon:

“At least four people have been killed as security forces and militiamen raided student accommodation in Syria’s second city, Aleppo, activists say. Live ammunition was reportedly used to disperse an anti-government protest outside dormitories adjacent to Aleppo University’s campus late on Wednesday. As many as 200 students are thought to have been arrested during the raid. The university has announced it is suspending all classes for the rest of the current academic year. Aleppo has so far not experienced the violence and large-scale protests seen in other cities during the uprising. But there have been almost daily demonstrations by its students.” (Read the rest of the article, link below).

On Facebook there are texts and photos and drawings and cartoons from Syrians, who express their emotions and points of views and informs about what we do not get in the big printed and electronic media. Here is a wise pov from Orwa Nyrabia, who frequently writes in his “Syria and Me” FB page:

”Minorities, just like the west, the EU and the US, are afraid of an Islamist Jihadist Syria, they are skeptic and they withdraw, thinking they need to be sure. They are forgetting that every minute of withdrawal from their side is a great support to that jihadist potential they are afraid of. It is only by taking an active part, contributing in a proactive manner, that such tendencies can be minimzed.”

The photo speaks for itself: Homs…

http://www.facebook.com/syrian.revolution.photos

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Syria-and-Me-The-Revolution-Chronicles/318536521531396

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-17937448

DOX for Short Docs

The Summer 2012 issue of the European Documentary Film Magazine DOX (number 94!) is out. The editor-in-chief Truls Lie uses his editorial to point at the values of the short documentary, which is forgotten by many. His starting point is his position as a juror at ZagrebDox, where the first prize was given to the Polish 7 minutes long “Returns” (photo) by Krzysztof Kadlubowski. In the same competition category with films with a duration around and over an hour. A good decision and a fine way of pointing at a film genre that was born with the Lumière Brothers and had its prime period when short films were screened in cinemas before the feature film. All big names in film history have made short films and many also short documentaries – Alain Resnais, Luis Bunuel, Antonioni etc. – not to mention the stars of the genre itself like Richard Leacock, Johan van der Keuken, Wolf Koenig and Roman Kroitor, Colin Low etc.

Today you can watch short documentaries in festivals, many of them are excellent works from film schools, and in very few tv stations. The latter is very difficult to understand as the short film has an immediate appeal to a young audience, which is the target of the public broadcasters, who complain that the average audience is 50+ or 60+. Is it too optimistic to believe that the commitment that the most innovative broadcasters make to include short films in their repertoire (like POV, arte) could spread to others for online distribution? The Latvian 15YoungByYoung, that includes 15 short documentaries from the former Soviet republics, as well as the upcoming series of shorts to be produced by the Why Poverty initiative are just two examples of subject orientated “packages” of short films, where also a creative element is sought.

Back to the editor and his editorial in DOX, where Truls Lie expresses his fatigue of long films – 8 out of 10 feature-length could be shorter, less than an hour, he states… well, maybe that is a bit exagerrated, of course it is, and less than an hour means tv-duration, 52-58 mins. Which for me is the most stupid decision on duration taken by the broadcasting companies, dictated solely by schedule thinking. Anyway, DOX deserves praise for this approach that also means that the buyers and subscribers receive a dvd with the magazine, this time with 7 short documentaries chosen by the editor. Bravo! In the magazine there are two articles about short documentaries, so yes, DOX is an edited magazine. Next time, to tease the editor a bit, the list in the back of “noteworthy film” could maybe also include shorts. This time there is more than 30 feature length documentaries mentioned.

http://whypoverty.net/

http://www.15youngbyyoung.com/

www.edn.dk

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/