Sundance Film Festival

When I finally got to Park City it was sunny, white and very cold. It was the 22nd of January, Sunday and I suddenly realized that I came too late.

But let’s begin where it all started. Along with the Sundance Film Festival arriving in Park City so did a snowstorm. After many cars got stuck on a highway, roads were finally closed and many people were forced to head back to Salt Lake City and overnight there.

However, the stormy weather did not seem to bother them that much. Broadway theaters in Salt Lake City were full; people had to wait at least one hour to get their tickets but still were very enthusiastic.

Waiting

I have heard about long queues at Sundance before, but reality hit me when I finally got to the Box office in Park City. Ticket packages were sold out way before festival started and open tickets to films were already taken during the first days of the festival. The only way to see films were to go to the venues 2 hours before the screening, pick up a waiting ticket and then come back no later than 30 minutes before the screening hoping to be lucky to get in.

There are a lot of interesting hidden things behind this whole Waiting list idea. First of all, theaters are highly spread in the Park City, so the distances from one theater to another can be up to 30 minutes walking or even more. There were shuttle buses but you never knew how long it would take you to leave the theater and come back. Therefore most of people would come to a theater 2 hours prior to the screening and would stay there.

Theater venues are far away from the ones in Europe. For example Theater MARC stands for Municipal Athletic & Recreation Center. What I am trying to say is that for 2 hours you were stuck not in a nice waiting lounge with small tables drinking café latte, but in a huge tennis cord sitting on the floor and watching people on the first floor running laps.

Pass holders would be the ones to come last and get in first. Then it was the turn of the ticket holders and only when everybody would be seated, people with waiting tickets had a possibility to buy a ticket to the film. Sometimes 10 people would get lucky, sometimes 55… you could never know. The only thing you could do, was to wait.

During the week people started talking and more or less everybody knew which films had better chances to win. That meant that if you wanted to see one of the ‘better’ movies you had to come to a venue 3 hours before the screening, because there would be already around 50 people waiting in a line when staff members would start giving out the waiting tickets 2 hours prior to the screening.

I must admit that it was rather tiring experience but very funny at the same time. People were extremely friendly, talkative and helpful. I would talk and discuss movies all the time, but I guess majority had a slightly different agenda.

Networking

When I looked again in my binder where I saved all the papers from Sundance, I was amazed how many business cards I have had collected in one week. I have no idea who Scott, John or Andrew is and it is not because I wouldn’t be interested in people when I met them. On the contrary, I am very curious in general. It just looks like that many people came to Sundance to give away as many business cards as possible. After the magical sentence: ‘I am from Europe’ almost in all cases a person would start looking for their business card immediately. Please don’t get me wrong; I don’t have anything against networking. I just noticed that during the Sundance it was so important that when I would start discussing one or another particular film, people would start looking for another ‘victim’ to introduce him/ or herself.

Superstars and Goodie Bags

Park City has only one Main Street. This street is full of shops, restaurants, bars, cafes etc. I met many people who said that they came to Park city not to watch movies, but to walk around, meet some famous people and to shop. However, ‘to shop’ is not the right word to use in this case. People were keener on getting things for free. Main Street offered everything: free coffee, free lunch, free mugs, free water bottles, free ice cream, free drinks- you name it. Parties began at 10 in the morning and ended late after midnight. During these parties I met filmmakers, producers, actors and other celebrities and could finally talk about films!

By getting up every morning no later than 7 o’clock and going to sleep around 3 o’clock in the night I managed to see a lot of documentaries and I will share my personal opinion about them as well as info Behind the Scenes with pleasure.

Photo: Juste at Sundance (Abra Cohen)

Juste Eigminaite Writes for Filmkommentaren

A gift to filmkommentaren and its readers! Juste Eigminaite from Lithuania contacted us to offer texts from her US documentary festival tour that started at Sundance and will go on until end of June. Below you can see the lists of festivals that she will visit.

Juste Eigminaite has a bachelor at Roskilde University, Denmark in Communication and Cultural Encounters, and a master at Copenhagen University in Cognition and Communication. She is 28 years old and came to Denmark when she was 20.

She ”is interested in documentaries for many years and I am deeply in love with people in general. I praise Danish documentaries for very distinctive storyline and Eastern European films for the poetic film nature. I love films that have both: a poetic film with a strong storyline. The best recent example would be ”How to pick berries” by Finnish director Elina Talvensaari”.

The link is here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NQNo-06pEg0

Photo: Juste Eigminaite

Juste about Documentary Films Con Amore

I have quit my job, suspended my studies at KU, left my apartment in Copenhagen and moved away to USA for 8 months to do what I enjoy the most – to watch documentary films.

I learned that watching film is only a little part of the whole experience what can be obtained if you actually go to a film festival and meet filmmakers and producers, participate in Q and A sessions, go to the after parties etc.

My task is to visit at least 10 Documentary film festivals in USA and Canada and to present you a bunch of movies that are selected for festivals’ main competitions.

I will offer you film reviews, pictures, external links and ‘Behind the Scenes’ articles that will be based on Q and A sessions, filmmakers’ / producers’ interviews and more. Furthermore, I have already been to Sundance and it is amazing how much this film festival differs from the ones in Europe. Therefore I also decided to write about each film festival as such.

Lastly, I am a long-winded supporter of a two-way communication. Therefore I kindly ask you to participate in my journey. Do not hesitate to contact me with requests of all kinds, comment on my articles and please criticize me if you feel so.

Here is the list of Film Festivals I will cover:

1. Sundance Film Festival (January 19-29)

http://www.sundance.org/festival/

2. The Thin Line Film Festival (February 10-20)

http://2012.thinlinefilmfest.com/

3. True False Film Festival (March 1-4)

http://truefalse.org/

4. SXSW Film Festival (March 9-18)

http://sxsw.com/

5. American Documentary Film Festival (March 29-April 5)

http://americandocumentaryfilmfestival.com/

6. Full Frame Film Festival (April 12-15)

http://www.fullframefest.org/

7. Tribeca Film Festival (April 18-29)

http://www.tribecafilm.com/festival/

8. Hot Docs Film Festival (April 26- May 6)

http://www.hotdocs.ca/

9. Doxa Film Festival (May 4- 13)

http://www.doxafestival.ca/

10. Los Angeles Film Festival (June 14-24)

http://www.lafilmfest.com/

11. Silverdocs Film Festival (June 18-24)

http://silverdocs.com/event/about-silverdocs/

I hope that you will follow my adventures and that you are excited at least half as much as I am.

Photo: Geneve Animation Festival, October 2011, ready for the audience (Juste)

Magnificent7 2012/5

The festival is over. The closing film sunday night January 29 was Whores’ Glory by Michael Glawogger, one of the most important documentarians of our time. There was almost a full house in the Sava Centre Cinema Hall, which means around 1500 people, who gave the director a warm applause for his, in own words, reflective representation of ”la condition humaine” as he put it in the 90 minutes Q&A after the film.

Glawogger can be strongly recommended to any kind of workshop or masterclass. He is not only a fine filmmaker in a classical way, he is also very articulated in his way of expressing, what he does. I am a filmmaker, not someone who is supposed to tell you whether I think prostitution is good or not, he said in Belgrade, stressing his non-moralistic approach. What I am offering you is a work of art, a unique insight to a world that few of us knows about. He brought up the topic that has been discussed in connection with other of his films – yes, I pay the people for what they are doing, and of course it is even more obvious to do so, when you deal with prostitutes for whom an interview should be paid for just as you pay for a blowjob.

How do you collaborate with your cameraman? We look for a story. The place we shoot must have a story in itself. We must give the room a clear definition and then develop a visual line.

I start filming when I sense that nothing is exotic any longer. But common. Not before.

Just a few examples of interesting pieces of food for thought from one of the directors who visited Magnificent7 in Belgrade 2012. When I left this morning the festival directors told me that the audience attendance had gone up again, as it has every year! Magnificent!

www.magnificent7festival.org

www.whoresglory.com

Magnificent7/4

Fernand Melgar, director and Elise Schuss, assistant director and executive producer, represented ”Vol Spécial”, and hosted an extremely interesting session about how their strong social documentary came to life. And after-life: 1 year of editing, 160 hours of material, more than 400 articles about the film and its issue in Swiss newspapers, succesful cinema release, after some fight with authorities screenings for students in schools, in a couple of months synchronised broadcast of the film on arte and Swiss tv channels followed by debate, the set-up of a webdocumentary version, also for arte, with interviews and texts AND the couple is right now following several of those characters, who were put on a direct flight back to their homeland because of the swiss law of them being illegal workers. That is to be a sequel to ”Vol Spécial”. Respect for that work and that commitment!

”I am a witness”, said Melgar, who also called himself ”a silent collaborator”. The film crew established a strong connection of trust to both the staff and the inmates at the detention centre. They actually got the keys to what is a prison so they could go in and out as they wanted. They had to stay neutral, of course, with their observational style, which for instance meant that they knew the day before who would be taken for the special flight. An information they were not able to pass on to those who had to leave. But they knew who was to be filmed. Every day, after the shooting, the crew sent the recorded material back to the editor, who watched it and gave feedback.

Does a film like this change something? Of course a difficult question to answer but ”Vol Spécial” has raised debate and in one case, where you see a man in the film being released, the filmmakers were sure that this was because of the filming of an interview performed by a policeman. The released man is now going with the filmmakers to screenings to put even more focus on this not-only-Swiss-situation where people, who have committed no crime, but work illegally,sometimes for years, are locked up in a detention centre (the filmmakers mentioned there were 350 camps in Europe, with 40.000 detainees).

Now it’s time for some sports, says the nice sympathetic guard whenever there are emotional outbursts among the detainees…

http://www.magnificent7festival.org/home.html

www.volspecial.ch

Magnificent7 2012/3

The festival in Belgrade with 7 feature documentaries from Europe makes the invited directors work! All of them are obliged to lead a workshop, that has its 7 sessions of two hours. The session takes place the day after their respective films have been shown. The workshoppers are primarily young filmmakers, some from film schools, others with one or two completed works. But also people connected to other art forms or journalism take part. The workshop language is English.

Two other obligations are to be fulfilled. The directors meet with audience for Q & A sessions that can run from half an hour to one and a half hour.

Furthermore no director leaves Belgrade without having made a 1-3 minute visual statement (not necessarily a talking face, a lot of originality has been put into these small films) that answers the question: What is a documentary for me? Including the ones that have been shot during the last days, the collection of doc statements will rise to more than 50. Quite an achievement!

http://www.magnificent7festival.org/home.html

Magnificent7 2012/2

Your batteries get charged at these workshops. You get to know how the filmmakers perform their craft. It is as simple as that. Some filmmakers have pedagogical skills, others need help, and indeed they receive that through Zoran Popovic, who is together with his wife director of the festival and teachers at their own film school Kvadrat in Belgrade. Popovic is a master in interviewing the filmmakers about their work and – when needed – he is a perfect interpreter who brings the English language into Serbian word-by-word.

It is the choice of the directors to find the focus for their workshop session. Gary Tarn, ”The Prophet”, had brought his camera and talked about how he looks like a tourist, walking around with his plastic bag with a camera looking to catch moments that he could use in ”the Prophet” or in his previous work ”Black Sun”, shown at the festival in 2006. Tarn, who composes the music for his films himself, explained how he found the right rythm for the voice of Thandie Newton, who reads the Khalil Gibran text. ”Her voice is scored”.

Audrius Stonys, Lithuanian film poet, took the workshoppers on a filmographic journey of his own work. He showed clips from ”Antigravitation”, ”Flying over Blue Fields” and ”Alone” as a prologue to a talk about ”Ramin” (photo), a talk that had an interesting production story added by the producer of the film, Latvian Uldis Cekulis.

Gereon Wetzel, director of ”El Bulli” brought along film openings for discussion, among them he made a comparison between the opening of the film version (108 mins) and of the tv version (90 mins.). Wetzel mentioned that he and his crew used to be ”hanging around creativity”, waiting for the right moments and filming according to the American ”direct cinema” rules: never ask anyone to do anything.

http://www.magnificent7festival.org/home.html

Magnificent7 2012/1

Edition 8 of the Belgrade based feature length European documentary festival. The opening was last night and the audience was there again, hundreds, maybe almost 1000 spectators for each of the two films that were screened in the big hall of the Sava Centre. Zoran Popovic, who is the mastermind behind the festival together with his wife Svetlana, the two people with whom I since the beginning of the festival have been working on the selection of the 7, and it is only 7, magnificent films, made a beautiful speech including the mention of the sad news about the tragic death of Greek and European director Theo Angelopoulos, a source of inspiration for all filmmakers and art film lovers.

British director Gary Tarn was back in Belgrade with his ”The Prophet” that includes material that he shot when he was in Belgrade in 2007 to show ”Black Sun”. Again he puts you as a spectator in a wonderful meditative mood with his flow of images that you can dive into and that juxtaposes with the text, that he has chosen from cult author Khalil Gibran (1883-1931), whose classic ”The Prophet” he wrote in 1923.

The second film at the opening evening was Portuguese director Miguel Mendes ”José and Pilar” (photo), featuring nobel prize winner José Saramago and his wife, journalist Pilar del Rio. The film has many layers. It is a love story. It is a story about an old man, an extremely charming old man and his fight against Time. It is a story about a journalist who dedicates all her time to her husband, managing his legacy in a very efficient and caring manner. It is a light film, with a lot of humour, and it works so well because of the details Mendes has caught during the four years that he was following the couple. They ”adopted” me, said the director in the Q&A after the film.

Today, thursday, there is one film on the agenda: ”Ramin” by Audrius Stonys from Lithuania. Stonys is here as is his Latvian producer Uldis Cekulis.

From a Belgrade full of snow, and handball fans and supporters. Why are sport journalists so fat, said my wife this morning at Hotel Continental, at the breakfast the morning after Denmark qualified for the semifinals against all odds after the first matches.    

http://www.magnificent7festival.org/home.html

Magnus Gertten: Håbets Havn

Den svenske instruktør Magnus Gerttens mesterstykke “Håbets Havn“, som er anmeldt på engelsk på filmkommentaren, bliver vist på DR2 på onsdag den 25 kl. 20.30 i en én-times udgave. Og på SVT2 dagen efter, den 26, kl.20 med flere genudsendelser.

Her er et klip fra den begejstrede anmeldelse af en film, som er ganske enestående: It is brilliant. With a classical approach and with a fine balance between conveying information and creating emotions, the film lets three holocaust survivors tell their story, starting from the time point where they arrive with the Red Cross buses from the camps to Malmö – going, in a fine montage, back in time to what happened before and afterwards.

Farewell Comrades! TV, Webdoc, Book/ 2

The first tv-documentary episode of the arte (German-French) crossmedia event, presented on this site a couple of weeks ago, is online for a free preview, also for viewers outside France and Germany. The 52 mins. documentary, to be broadcast on arte this coming tuesday, directed by Andrei Nekrasov, covers the period 1975-1979 in the series that in its 6 parts goes up to 1991.

It is too early to make a review of the tv series – I will wait until the whole series is out on dvd – announced to be on February 8 – also to be able to watch a version without dubbed voices as here in French or in German. Nevertheless, having watched the German version expectations are met by the work of Nekrasov, who instead of a tv-normal-boring third person commentary has chosen what is called a father-daughter dialogue. The young woman in the film is the daughter of Nekrasov, Tatjana, in the film carrying the name Gagarina! In the introduction at the site of arte it is said:

“Ein Dialog zwischen Vater und Tochter bildet den roten Faden der Serie: Der Vater, geboren in den 50er Jahren, wurde nach sowjetischen Ideal erzogen, während die Tochter, eine moderne junge Europäerin auf der Suche nach ihren Wurzeln, in den 80er Jahren im Westen aufwuchs…”

In other words, the father has lived it, the daughter wants to understand what went wrong with socialism and is the one who gives the viewer the background verbally accompanied by archive material from documentary and fiction films as well as interviews with people like the interpreter of Ceaucescu, the close advisor to Brezhnev, the man who blew the statue of Czekoslovak communist leader Klement Gottwald into pieces.

http://www.arte.tv/fr/Adieu-Camarades-_21-1975-1991/4314104.html

http://www.farewellcomrades.com/en/