The second seminar of the Athens based documentary project development Storydoc took place during the last three days of November 2011. After a prologue in Ramallah, which was a training session for around 20 Palestinian filmmakers, the first session with four selected Palestinian projects plus another 20 projects coming from Greece, Lebanon, Egypt, Algeria, Spain, Croatia, Scotland and the UK, was organised in Corfu, Greece in July

4 months later most of the project holders met again having done progress in terms of writing and visualisation through trailers on the basis of research and putting (some) financing together. As in the first session the programme is a mix of inspirational lectures, project work, lots of screenings of full films and clips, meetings with distributors and broadcasters, presentations.

The idea is very simple – Storydoc invites Mediterranean documentary projects and -makers and filmmakers from other countries with stories from the region. Networking, project development, eventual (but gosh how big the crisis is everywhere (also) for documentary financing) financing.

A seminar in Greece, in November 2011, after a lot of turbulence around the Greek economy, a new government, the EU leaders meeting constantly to find a way! In Greece where – I met a daughter of one of them – politicians do not walk out alone in the evenings and where most of them have bodyguards around them. It is not easy and there is much frustration, hate, aggression, anger and little hope and optimism. The situation for the Greek film people? Well the Greek Film Centre, I understood, has been out of operation for a long time, and the representative from Greek television ERT told her colleagues that she could not tell anything as everything, slots for documentaries, funding, whatever, was up for discussion and change. That Storydoc continues is only due to the commitment and fundraising skills of its founder, Kostas Spiropoulos, and his Mama Storydoc, Chara Lampidou, who never give up and try to stimulate the sector wherever possible. Storydoc has a ”subtitle”: The Educational Institute for Documentaries. Indeed it is.

www.storydoc.gr

Below you will find texts about some of the presentations at the Storydoc in Athens. But there was much more to take from the seminar

It was only natural to have Syrian Diana el Jeiroudi make a follow-up of her presentation of the Syrian situation as she delivered it at the first session in Corfu four months earlier. What she focused on was the fact that people want to see themselves, contrary to before, when they were hiding. The documentarians in her country are moving towards a tradition that has been very long present in Palestine – the collectiveness of filmmaking. She had found a similar situation reflected in the television situation in Tunisia, where al Jazeera before the revolution had had the lead, now taken over by the Tunisian public broadcaster that brings local stories and aims for freedom of expression. What concerns the continuation of the DoxBox festival in Damascus, she and her team have ideas to substitute a festival and a campus that right now seem to be impossible to take place in Damascus.

A veteran in Storydoc Athens is Danish editor Niels Pagh Andersen, who again took the audience by the heart with his inspirational lecture on how to tell stories. He showed the film of Iranian/Swedish director Nahid Persson, ”Prostitution Behind the Veil”, and deconstructed the film’s dramaturgy. Andersen had meetings with all filmmakers looking at material, asking questions and giving feedback.

His words were many times echoed by ardent Madeleine Avramoussis from arte, a regular visitot to Greece, the contact to Greek filmmakers when it comes to coproductions (like ”Sayomé” by Anemon Productions, see below, will be broadcasted December 27 in a theme evening that also includes ”Lost in Translation”) and a strong advocate for the character driven documentary where you sense ”the progression of a character”. As is Wim van Rompaey from Lichtpunt, who (as the only one?) was optimistic and found that the decreasing budgets in public television could help the much more cheap documentary to become stronger on the schedule. Van Rompaey gave a precise picture of the situation in Belgium for documentaries and showed clips from his channel, classic intelligent television.

PS. A very sad piece of information opened the seminar: The Egyptian filmmaker Jasmina Metwaly had cancelled her participation as her friend, a filmmaker as well, had been shot at on Tahrir Square and was hospitalised as a patient in coma.

www.storydoc.gr

How to interpret and convey the Greek crisis in a documentary? How to go from the reportage and the news clip to an understanding of how the population sees and feels the dramatic development in the country where stood the craddle of civilisation…?

Dimitris Athiridis had followed the kharismatic, 68 year old Yiannis Boutrasis (photo) during his campaign to become mayor of Thessaloniki. The man is fantastic and the film captures him in his private sphere, an alcoholic who stopped drinking decades ago, a man with controversial plans like naming a street in his city ”Kemal Atatyrk”, a man who is another kind of politician than all the others, who are not trusted by the population. There is potential for a strong film that can travel, no doubt about that.

Another Demetri, with the last name Sofianopoulos, had chosen to have a dog as storyteller in a project that also has potential internationally. Sofianopoulos and ”Thanassis alias Bruno”, the dog, and the working title of the film, goes from a safe home in the rich area, where the good life was there for man and dog, to the suburbs where food is to be found among garbage and to central Athens where riots are unfolded. To take a look a look on the crisis through a DogUmentary is very cleverly thought.

Thirdly a project that was not specifically meant to be a description of the crisis was presented by Nina Maria Paschalidou and Nikos Katsaounis. Titled The Prism GR2011 this no-funding completed multimedia initiative also indirectly deals with the crisis. The two filmmakers took part in the idfa doclab this year. This is the intro text from that site:

The Prism Greece 2011 is an online platform containing 27 multimedial films which gauge the mood in Greece in the midst of a financial and social meltdown during the winter of 2010-2011.

Starting from stormy Athens, 14 journalists went around the country, from the border with Turkey to the highest mountain in central Greece to the inhospitable mountains of southern Crete. The result is a colorful mosaic of mini-documentaries that can be clicked on by theme, filmmaker or geographic location on the simple, accessible site. The somewhat inconsistent quality of the films can be explained by the fact that the initiators and financiers, Nikos Katsaounis and Nina Paschalidou, chose to retrain photojournalists as “multimedial storytellers”. Experienced or not, their films reveal everything traditional media ignore. For instance, Riders on the Storm follows a group that ventures around Athens on a sophisticated bicycle and offers an alternative for the future in the process. And Radical Youth documents the rise of radical left-wing youngsters who take the law into their own hands with Molotov cocktails. Strikingly enough, this last film wasn’t made by a Greek, but rather a young Spaniard who joined in on the project shortly after his arrival.

http://www.doclab.org/2011/the-prism/

www.storydoc.gr

With the support of the Culture Programme of the European Union and the European Commission the documentary production company that is most active internationally in Greece, Anemon, led by Rea Apostolides and Yuri Averof, presented at Storydoc what they are working on: two exciting cross-media projects, which for me combine perfectly what is the original core of the documentary genre, Information, with the use of many media AND distribution and activities.

The company has just finished a fine single documentary, Sayome (financed by ERT, arte and GFC (Greek Film Centre)) directed by Nikos Dayndas, describes on their site the two projects like this:

Twice a Stranger: A cross-media project about the most significant population exchanges of the 20th century and the experience of being “twice a stranger”. Comprising of a multi-media exhibition, documentary screenings and educational programmes, it will is hosted in Athens, Nicosia and Istanbul in 2012.

A Balkan Tale: A cross-media project about the cultural legacy of the Ottoman era in the Balkans. Comprising of a photography exhibition, documentary screenings & educational programmes, it will be hosted in Athens, Belgrade, Pristina, Tirana and Skopje in 2012.

http://www.anemon.gr/other_projects.html

This is what was written after I attended the Storydoc session in Ramallah, Palestine in March 2011: Nahed Awwad (PHOTO) showed us unique material from her 28 minutes long, scene divided disc. She presented what is to be an observational film entitled ”The Mail” that gives us both knowledge and emotion. Knowledge when it comes to the documentation of the transport of ID application papers in a cardboard box from the Palestinian authorities in the West Bank to Israeli authorities, that has its office in a settlement! Emotion, to mention just one scene, when a mother and her daughters watch a clip with the son/brother, who lives in Gaza and can not get a travel permit to see the family unless strong illness in the family is proved! Division, humiliation, what else would you call it – but here shown in a non-aggressive manner with big effect. She dares the pauses in her filming, what a relief in a stressed film environment where the idea seems to be to get as much as possible out to the audience as quick as possible.

Now – 8 months later – in Athens at the Storydoc session, the director generously invited her colleagues, the invited tutors and the broadcasters to watch her 110 minutes long rough cut of the film, that now carries the title “Gaza Calling”. The approach is the same, the characters are now developed – Samer who returns to Gaza from Ramallah on the West Bank, to his parents and to see his small sister for the first time and Hekhmat, the mother who with her daughters skype with her son in Gaza, walking along the beloved Sea. They can not meet.

The film is not finished, it will be cut down in the coming months, to be finished spring 2012. The impression is the same as when I first saw material in Ramallah in March – a strong film is on its way, told in a low tone it is a heartbreaking story about the Israeli apartheid policy that divides families from meeting each other. Civilisation 2011!

www.storydoc.gr

The American (LA) based member organisation IDA, International Documentary Association, holds its annual ”IDA Documentary Awards 11” December 2nd with a big show – the American way with sponsors, of course. The IDA has definitely an international perspective, as it can be seen by a look at the nomination list of films below. Experience how the IDA writes about its event on its site, click on the list of nominations and you will see great films like Patricio Guzman’s Nostalgia for the Light (photo), Strauss & Anastasion’s The Redemption of General Butt Naked, as well as a nomination of the quality documentary strand POV run by Simon Kilmurry. Personally, as a teacher at the Zelig – School for Documentary in Bolzano – it is wonderful to see two of the five Student Documentary Awards coming from there: Janos Richter and Jakob Stark’s ”Guanape Sur” and Mark Olexa’s ”Heart-Quake”:

Read the full 2011 IDA Awards Press Release.

http://www.documentary.org/awards2011

http://www.documentary.org/awards2011#nominees