Sean McAllister: Japan: A Story of Love and Hate

The British filmmaker Sean McAllister took part in the East European Platform event in Prague organised by IDF (Institute of Documentary Film). He ran a masterclass, where he showed clips from his many films shot in troubled areas (Iraq, Israel, Palestine, Syria and Yemen, where his last film ”The Reluctant Revolutionary” was shot, it had its premiere at the Berlinale 2012). For a night screening McAllister had chosen to show his 2008 work from Japan, ”Japan: A Story of Love and Hate”, a film shot in a non-war-non-conflict area, and a film that he appreciated a lot himself.

As did I, for good reasons, as the film is an excellent conveyed story from a Japan that we know so little about, a film that simply takes us to meet Japanese people, who are open-minded when it comes to their private life, and a film that shows McAllister’s unique talent for getting close to people, have their trust and treat them with respect. The director is involved, his voice is heard, he arranges and pushes the story, and he sets an atmosphere of serious fun. It is a film made with and not about.

It works thanks to Naoki, his 56 year old English speaking protagonist, divorced several times, once a businessman on top of the world and now a postman with a tiny salary. His luck is that Yoshie, 29, takes care of him, she has several jobs including a night one, where she leaves home to entertain men at bars. They live in a very small flat and this is where most of the film takes place. Where most of the conversations between McAllister and Naoki take place as well, and they are pretty intimate. Naoki has a kind of fatalistic approach to his situation, laughs at it and defines it to be all because of capitalism pointing at the director with a laugh – ”that you Westerners brought to us”.

I have never seen a film like that from Japan, about poverty and family trouble and love life crisis. You are never bored, on the contrary, you are in the film from start to end, and – gosh – I have never seen a filmmaker bring a viagra pill as a gift to a character, as does McAllister does on his second vsit to the father of Yoshie, who has the same age and problem as Naoki, who with this visit, after several years of being with his daughter, sees her father for the first time.

UK, Channel4, 2008, 70 mins.

http://www.seanmcallister.com/

http://www.tenfootfilms.co.uk/

Broomfield & Churchill: Sarah Palin. You Betcha

The style of British director Broomfield is well known from many of his films. He is in the picture, he is a character himself, the journalist looking for characters, and the truth, walking in and out of doors, very often as the upper class, well dressed British gentleman asking questions, very often without revealing his critical mission. It worked perfectly with ”The Leader, the Driver and the Driver’s Wife” from apartheid South Africa and with other films, where he is trying to get an interview with politicians and celebreties.

This is also the case with his newest film, on Sarah Palin, but he fails to get the interview, he wants, and the film fails for the same reason, as he has to use archive (mostly tv) material from her career that brings nothing new to the screen. Well, he gets talks with Palin’s father and with all the people that she has been using and betraying, but as you all the way through the film waits for the clever Broomfield to get close to Palin, you end up being disappointed and bored seeing scene after scene with the director about to fall on his ass up there on the icy roads of Alaska.

I saw the film on Danish Dokumania, a rerun yesterday morning, in a version where the image pretty often had a text coming up saying ”only for preview”. Ooooops! Embarrassing for DR2, Danish public broadcaster not to have checked copy before transmission!

www.dokumania.dk

http://www.nickbroomfield.com/

Egle Vertelyte: UB Lama

In this sympathetic documentary, that can be watched by kids as well, Galaa, who is a twelve years old boy from Mongolia, is attracted to hip hop music, is not really fond of going to school, makes problems for his mother, sometimes small sometimes bigger. His father is dead, he tells about the dramatic circumstances, and the mother thinks he should go to a lama school: When you become a lama the grief and pain of poverty will disappear.

The film crew follows Galaa and his family closely, has caught many fine situations and moments, inluding those where the kid’s world is falling apart because the lama school can not accept his admission to the school before the next year. At that point Galaa has peeped into the class room where boys of same age as him are having the experience, and the fun, that he really had hoped for.

A fine non-exotic and fresh insight to the life of a poor family in a culture that we know so little about. That also makes you think how seldom it is to find good documentaries that will work for children as well as for grown-ups.

Lithuania, 2011, 51 mins., Prod.: Studio Nominum, Editor: Francesca Scalisi

http://www.scanorama.lt/en/ub-lama

Liga Gaisa: The End Game

A Latvian film team makes a film about a group of Danish, who suffer from sclerosis in different stages. The group is followed while they are rehearsing for the set-up of ”End Game” by Samuel Beckett, accompanied by their thoughts and reflections on their life situation and why Beckett is the right author to play. They are all pretty well of in terms of help to get around with their handicap, they have jobs – well in this film the Danish welfare system shows itself from a postive side, writes this Danish blogger.

Back to the film, which is held in a non-sentimental tone. The filmmakers succeed to give the individual characters space to develop, they are all interesting, at the same time as you follow the play being developed. ”Beckett deals with human limitations – he sees it as a strength”, says one of the actors, and right he is, it is, as said as well, about life’s basic conditions, and with this film about physical handicapped people, ”End Game” is given an extra dimension.

The film, that has professional, fine camera work and a natural rythm in editing, has been to a couple of festivals, more will follow, and that Danish television is not in the film already, can be corrected very easily through a buy.

Latvia, 2011, 52 mins.

Link to dokweb.net 

ZagrebDox Awards 2012

The international jury as well as the jury for the regional competition both selected short documentaries, when the members awarded their favourites. Ignoring the long documentaries the Big Stamp for the best film in the international section went to the 7 minutes long Polish ”Returns” (photo) by Krzysztof Kadlubowski. The Regional recognition as best film was given to 17 minutes long ”A Day on the Drina” by Bosnian Ines Tanovic. The latter is what the Germans would call ”eine Dokumentation” on the sad compilation of remains of Bosniaks killed by the army of Republika Srpska in the period between 1992-95. The skeletons were discovered in 2010. The Polish film ”Returns” deals with the aftermath of the flight tragedy on the 10th of April of 2010, where 96 people, including the President and other officials, died on their way to commemorate the 70th year of the Katyn massacre performed by the Soviet army on Polish officers. In the airport soldiers train for the ceremony to be held when the corpses return. Accompanied by Chopin the soldiers exercise how to carry the coffins, how to stand, how to walk, how to salute, how to place the coffins. It is all very absurd and takes you by the heart.

Mentions were among others given to ”Family Meals”, see below, ”Ramin” by Audrius Stonys and two other Polish shorts, ”Decrescendo” by Marta Minorowicz and ”Paparazzi” by Piotr Bernas. Both are from Andrzej Wajda Master School in Warsaw, both have excellent cinematography, a trade mark for Polish documentary, but both also suffer a bit from a lack of ”breathing”. Especially ”Decrescendo” would have profited from having some of the beautiful scenes stand longer to develop, as the characters are so interesting.

A prize for best director under 35 minutes was given to ”The Will” by Danish Christian Sønderby Jepsen, and a ”Movies that Matter” award was handed to Tatiana Huezo for her ”The Tiniest Place”.

The award ceremony at this international festival was surprisingly led by Nenad Puhovski in Croatian language! That can be done much better, more professional and festive! Like the festival was during the whole week.

www.zagrebdox.net

Dana Budisavljević: Family Meals

Full cinema, festive atmosphere, premiere of the long awaited film by Dana Budisavljević, Croatian director and producer, and one of the founders of ZagrebDox at the time where she was working with Nenad Puhovski at Factum that stands behind the festival.

Yes, there was a family feeling to frame a film that totally lived up to the expectations that we were many who had. It was fun, it had wonderful characters, Dana’s mother, father and brother, and it had a structure where the film was growing in strength and perspective. From, in the beginning. conveying a sometimes a bit embarrassing conversation piece, where Dana is asking her parents why they reacted like they did many years ago, when she told them that she was gay. To a much broader picture of a family that was split up, with members who all had their secrets that they kept for themselves. Which were slowly being revealed, at least some of them as the film goes along. The character of the brother, shy, introvert and a bit enigmatic in the beginning, becomes more and more significant as you as spectator discovers the gap that has been, and probably still is, between him and the sister Dana. And for someone who is 60+ it is also a film about generations. He does not say so directly but I have no difficulties in understanding the father, who seems to not understand why everything has to be discussed, as the daughter communicates. All on the table, but why?

It is not a Bergmanian film, it comes from a different cultural background, it has humour and it stays at the dinner and lunch tables, and in the kitchen, offering its audience loads of identification points, making you leave the cinema with a smile and pretty hungry after all that food for thought!

Croatia, 2012, 50 mins.

www.zagrebdox.net

http://hulahop.hr/en/home

One Year After Fukushima

This came to Filmkommentaren and adresses all over the world, to us from Danish production company Magic Hour. A global online event. Respect!:

Saturday March 3rd at 7.32 am (CET) GREENPEACE marks the nuclear disaster by opening a free on-line streaming window, where the documentary INTO ETERNITY can be watched for 150 837 seconds – one second per individual who is – perhaps permanently – displaced from the Fukushima.

The multi-award winning Danish documentary INTO ETERNITY focuses on the long-term safety issues linked to nuclear energy.  The film invites its audience down into what is to become the world’s first permanent storage for nuclear waste, ONKALO, which is being hewn out of solid rock in Finland. Here nuclear waste is destined to be stored for the next 100,000 years, which is the time span it remains hazardous, and consequently the time span the storage facility must function. The meltdown in Fukushima’s reactors has made it extremely difficult to remove all the nuclear fuel, and there is a risk, that Japan will end up with its own Onkalo on the surface, which will need security measures for millennia on end. These unfathomable timespans are perhaps one of the biggest problems of nuclear energy – yet hardly ever part of the debate.  Our actions today have consequences far into a future, we cannot even imagine.  Nuclear energy is often termed ‘the morally correct’ energy choice because it is CO₂ neutral, but the long-term ethical and existential issues are ignored. Are we in the present committing crimes against humanity in the future?

‘Fukushima was not a natural disaster, but a result of human error and mental meltdown!’ Michael Madsen says.  ‘The disaster is a result of human error – or even worse – of conscious human negligence.  Everybody knew, that there would be earthquakes and tsunamis in the area, and security measures had been taken – except not adequate measures.’  

INTO ETERNITY has received numerous awards on festivals all over the world. In 2011 it was screened to UN ambassadors in New York leading up to the nuclear summit, and many experts have deemed the film a unique contribution to the debate about nuclear energy.  

www.intoeternitythemovie.com

Photo: From Le Monde’s article February 28 on the planned evacuation of Tokyo.

ZagrebDox 2012

A wise festival person once said that it takes 8 years to build a festival. A look at the 8th edition of ZagrebDox confirms this assumption. This international documentary film festival has found itself. It is professionally organised, communicates very well its programme profile online and in book print, there are posters and banners all over the city inviting people to watch documentaries, and the programme itself is well structured with competition programmes, retrospectives, ”happy dox”, ”controversial dox”, ”teen dox”, industry activities etc.

And as a visitor the growth of the festival is very visible. For three years the festival, moving from the university area, has had Centar Kaptol as its venue. It is a big shopping centre that includes a Movieplex with five cinemas that for this week all run documentaries, surrounded by cafés in- and outside, plus restaurants, and a ten minute walk down the pedestrian street to the main square of Zagreb. Of course it is ambitious to have five parallel screenings, and some films suffer audience-wise, where other halls are full, especially for the night screenings.

Atmosphere is fine and friendly, and festival director and founder Nenad Puhovski walks around greeting people in his own jovial manner. His luck is also, he will probably claim that he organised that as well, that spring slowly is coming to a city that a week ago was full of snow.

www.zagrebdox.net

ZagrebDox Pro

Of course ZagrebDox also has an industry section including a training workshop for 12 projects and a connected, public pitching session with 9 panelists. It took place March 1 in one of the cinemas in the Movieplex and attracted a good number of observers in the audience. To make a pitching session in a cinema is good for the trailers that are shown on a big screen, but problematic for the audience and the participants, as the pitchers were standing in half darkness, the same goes for the panelists seated in front of the screen, they were easy to hear, difficult to see.

The panel consisted of representatives from RTV Slovenia, MDR Germany, Al Jazeera Balkan, FTV BiH (Bosnia), YLE Finland, HRT Croatia, Croatian Audiovisual Centre, Taskovski Films, NOVA TV Croatia.

The 12 projects that came up for discussion were from the region, 5 of them from the hosting country. Two of the projects had been pitched at ZagrebDox before – Macedonian ”I’m Looking for a Bride” by Marja Dzidzeva and ”Vitic Dances” by Boris Bakal, about a famous house in Zagreb (built by Vitic) and its inhabitants and their fight to keep the house in good shape, and their fight with each other. Having this second chance shows either that the films have huge problems in getting funding and/or that the filmmakers have developed their stories and are stubborn and passionate people, as documentarians should be.

Two projects stood out, the rest being a bit mainstream or still weak in development. ”Birthday” (photo), however, came out of necessity. The producer Mina Vidakovic, a journalist, who works in den Haag reporting on the war tribunals, is also one of the two characters in the film. In 1992 she was celebrating her birthday 300 kilometer away from the house, where a kid survived while the rest of his family was killed by a paramilitary group. In the clip that was shown you see her meet the man at the place of the massacre. The idea is to show him and his son, and her life today after 20 years. Estimated duration is 28 mins. ”A story that needs to be told, where the inspiration comes to you, and not the other way around”, said Namik Kabil from Bosnian television. Kabil was by far the most remarkable panelist with his constructive and intelligent comments to the filmmakers.

The local production company Fade in, celebrated through a retrospective at the festival, pitched ”Sick”, a 52 mins. extremely strong and complex story that has been filmed over a period of years – about Ana, who was placed at a mental institution to be treated for her homosexuality (!), and who is now obsessed by the wish for revenge. 75% of the film is shot, I sense an important film coming up in a region where homophobia is very much present.

www.zagrebdox.net

ZagrebDox Films/1

Modern Times! Two films to reflect upon, both shot with a cell phone: Bosnian director Nedzad Begovic has made ”A Cell Phone Movie” (photo), and ”People I Could have Been and Maybe am” by Dutch Boris Gerrets.

The latter has been awarded at several festivals worldwide and is a nervous, in style, journey that takes the director and his camera, or should I write cell phone, to meet different characters, who live on the edge of society. He gets close to them, falls in love with one, a Brazilian woman, leaves them, comes back, all in a chaptered narrative with texts that update the situations and the development for the persons involved. It is all very pretentious and egocentered and constructed.

Whereas Begovic, who also made ”Totally Personal”, presents a wonderful playful personal essay about himself, a man in his fifties who starts to get health problems and uses his cell phone to communicate with family and friends, well to the whole world, in this film that shows what you can shoot with your cell phone, and what not. The film surprises its audience, it has a lot of these small moments that life is full of, Begovic has filmed grafitti sentences on walls that he has met on his way – like ”go and fuck your mother’s slippers”!!! – there are sequences that perform as a kind of video art, it is in other words a fresh piece of entertainment, sometimes crazy, sometimes dealing with serious problems, humorous. It must have a long festival life!

www.zagrebdox.net