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

ZagrebDox Films/2

ZagrebDox is also a place to catch up on films that you missed at idfa and Nenad Puhovski, the festival director and programmer, does not hide the fact that he does a good part of the film selection for his festival at the Amsterdam festival. And why should he, it is a mission in itself to bring the best of the best to the Croatian audience.

I saw ”Planet of Snail” by South Korean Seung-Jun Yi, who got the first prize at idfa, and it is a beautiful film, a love story about a deaf and blind man, and his woman, who helps him to navigate in this world. The film lets their daily life be depicted, but the story grows and we are invited to experience the man’s skills as a poet in words and action.

I had the chance to revisit the short film masterpiece of Russian Alina Rudnitskaya, ”I will forget this Day”, about women in a hospital waiting in a corridor to get in and have an abortion made, coming out later in a horizontal position. The stylistical competence of the director makes a film with few words emotionally extraordinarily strong.

You have to be careful using the word masterpiece, but this is the only way I can characterise the animation documentary by Romanian Anca Damian, ”Crulic – The Path to Beyond” (photo), which is artistically brilliant in its heartbreaking and anger provoking story about the Romanian man, who comes to Poland, is accused of stealing, put in prison, tries to explain that he could not have done this as he was on his way to Italy, but nobody listens, the bureaucracy ignores him, as does his country’s representative in Poland, he goes on hungerstrike, is not getting medical help and dies. A scandal that, if I got it right, made the Romanian minister of foreign affairs resign. The film is rich and attractive in its many animation effects, its many drawing styles, your hooked from the beginning, where his death is declared by himslef in first person. Wow for a film!

www.zagrebdox.net

Jeff Orlowski: Chasing Ice

This stunning film is a very appealing story about glaciers that are melting globally. A well-known photographer James Balog who has photographed nature (for National Geographic among others) for many years, had a deep concern of glaciers melting way faster than one could expect or even imagine. He created a team of photographers, filmmakers and technicians to start a project called Extreme Ice Survey. This team installed more than 50 cameras in Iceland, Greenland, Alaska and Montana in order to photograph glaciers that are constantly dissolving. Cameras were programmed to take a picture every hour throughout more than three years of time and time-lapses, in Chasing Ice coming together as horrifying, stunning footage.

The whole journey was portrayed in a very adventurous manner. Beautifully presented extreme changes that occurred during recent years helped to reveal the great damage that has been caused by us. Pictures ‘before’ and ‘after’ are nothing less but shocking. Moreover, James backed these pictures up with factual information. He is an activist and tries to visit as many conferences as possible that deal with climate change (one of them was COP15) in order to bring his study to masses as an eye opening experience.

The film is very convincing but must be seen on a big screen to strengthen its beautiful nature. Constantly changing landscape shapes, vivid colors and irrepressible power of melting glaciers in this wonderfully crafted film, must be seen and cannot impress the same way when retold.

USA, 2011, 75 mins. Seen at Sundance 2012

http://chasingice.com/

http://www.deadline.com/2012/01/national-geo-channel-buys-sundance-docu-chasing-ice/#more-221041

http://www.extremeicesurvey.org/

Baltic Documentaries at ZagrebDox

This is a text for the ZagrebDox catalogue 2012: The films that you are going to watch from Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania are the finest examples from a cinema that has, from country to country, its own individuality and its own individuals. You will meet films by young and old talents, some with quite a track record, nationally and internationally. Directors with a vision, both in terms of theme and aesthetics.

The selection for this retrospective programme of documentaries from the three Baltic countries have been done with a focus on the last 10 years, omitting not only films from the last century but also films from 2010 and 2011 – some from these years were already shown at ZagrebDox.

Allow me to be personal to say that the relation between me and the Baltic documentary is a pure love story, which started in the year 1990 when the Soviet empire was falling apart. In Denmark we started a film festival on the island of Bornholm where filmmakers from the countries surrounding the Baltic Sea came to present their works. The festival went on for 10 years and we travelled to Tallinn, Riga and Vilnius to select the film. In this century I have continued to visit the countries to scout for films other festivals and to take part in the Baltic Sea Forum, where new film projects are being pitched.

What we met way back in 1990, was of course a documentary tradition that was based on the Soviet tradition – and on its way to break with the very same. In Estonia the leading figure was Mark Soosaar (whose beautiful, personal film ”The Home for Butterflies” is part of the retrospective), in Latvia the names were Juris Podnieks, Ivars Seleckis and Herz Frank, in Lithuania

Henrikas Sablevicius was the grand inspirator and teacher for the young generation.

The films in the early 90’es dealt with the newly gained freedom and loads of film came out that had a historical focus on the brutalities of the Soviet occupation. Later on there was a change towards current issues, and a change of format, not to forget, leaving the short documentaries meant to be screened in cinemas to go for longer films, that eventually could appeal to European broadcast formats. Many filmmakers, who had been employed during Soviet times, had difficulties in adapting to the free market economy, at the same time as independent production companies were established making the job of a producer important.

When I first got acquainted with the Baltic documentaries, I imagined that the films were more or less the same in tone and aesthetics from country to country. They are not, as you will be able to experience in the programme.

Going from the North, Estonia has definitely a sense of humour that could resemble the neighbours in Finland. For sure the films of Manfred Vainokivi (”Jolly Old Farts”) and Maimik and Jaak Kilmi (”The Art of Selling”) will make you smile in their own original style, whereas Mark Soosaar and Kersti Uibo represent a personal auteur style.

In Latvia it was obvious to bring in a film by Laila Pakalnina, a master of the short documentary, always thinking in images more than in words, as demonstrated beautifully with multi-layered ”Dream Land”. Her younger colleagues, the cameraman Maris Maskalans and director Andis Miziss, made another visually brilliant man & nature film ”Roof on the Moonway”, and for two other films presented I chose to go for the theme of art and creation. Theatre and film director Viesturs Kairiss, reintroduces “Romeo and Juliet” and David Simanis, for me the most shining star in modern Latvian documentary, follows the same Kairiss in his work with Wagner, and gives his own interpretation in “Valkyrie Limited”.

Lithuania, the most Southern country of the three, is the most different in a form, that is very much implemented by the well known couple: Audrius Stonys and Arunas Matelis. It is only natural to start the Lithuanian retrospective with their common extravagant hymn to their own country, “Flight over Lithuania”, followed by two films by Stonys (“Alone” and “Uku Ukai” (PHOTO) and one by Matelis, the masterpiece “Before Flying Back the Earth”. Oksana Buraja brings the tradition of the two masters forward with “Diary”, whereas Giedre Beinoriute represents a new generation with her original film on “Grandma and Grandpa”.

Three small countries, suffering the economic crisis of course, but still with strong documentaries in themes and artistic quality. 

http://zagrebdox.net/en/2012/home

Personal Archive Documentaries

At the Archidoc training session at the la fémis film school in Paris yesterday, where ten projects were presented to a panel of producers, broadcasters and festival representatives, two so-called hybrid documentary projects stood out as upcoming films that are to be built on private archive footage of professional character.

Seb Farges has been filming his life with different girl friends for 20 years, in New York, with different technical equipment. An obsession he said at the pitching session about his project called ”Womanmanhattan”, an autobiographical story about a man who hides behind his camera, filming the girls and NY. But now, being 40 years old, it has to come to an end. I intend to go to Bratislava with Vladislava, a new girl friend, and she will, with her skills in docu-animation, help me find out what has happened with me, constructing a mental map. Serge Fabrege has for years put his footage on his vimeo website that has had more than 500.000 followers. Fabrege showed a trailer with material that due to the dialogue between him and Vladislava (photo presents the two of them, Seb and Vladislava) had a humourous distance-creating approach that was very much appreciated by the audience.

Portuguese José Fernandes has also been filming his life and love stories. Through six years. His film project, conveyed through an aesthetically attractive style, called ”Lily, Sachi and Me”, contains a story about the director travelling to Italy to fall in love with a Japanese popstar, going with her to Japan, leaving her again to seek freedom in California, where he falls in love with a girl from South Korea. He goes with her to her country, where he gets a call from the Japanese girl who wants him to come back to Japan. José Fernandes is obviously a great cinematic talent and I trust that he can make a film that follows in the footstep of other travellers, who are fascinated by Asian culture, Wim Wenders with his ”Tokyo-Ga” and Chris Marker with his masterpiece the essay ”Sans Soleil”.

Private stories made public, and in the hands of talented filmmakers, universal, why not, the interest to share every little thing from your private life is evident on facebook, and in these two upcoming films. Watch out for them!

http://vimeo.com/sebfarges