Sarajevo FF Documentary Competition

1. DIARY OF A BRIDE OF CHRIST / TSCHODENNYK NARECHENOI CHRISTA, Marta Smerechynska (Ukraine, 2021, 90 min.) – World premiere

2. LIGHTS OF SARAJEVO / SVJETLA SARAJEVA, Srđan Perkić (Bosnia and Herzegovina, 2022, 68 min.) – World premiere

3. LITURGY OF ANTI-TANK OBSTACLES, Dmytro Sukholytkyy-Sobchuk (Ukraine, USA, 2022, 12 min.) – World premiere

4. PAYING A VISIT TO FORTUNA / FORTUNA VENDÉGEI, Mátyás Kálmán (Hungary, Croatia, 2022, 74 min.) – World premiere

5. SHADOWED BY THE PLANE TREE / ÇINAR AĞACININ KÖLGƏSINDƏ, Aynur Elgunesh (Azerbaijan, 2022, 18 min.) – World premiere

6. THE CHALICE. OF SONS AND DAUGHTERS / O TAHTAI. SAVENDAR TAI SEIANDAR, Cătălina Tesăr, Dana Bunescu (Romania, 2022, 83 min.) – World premiere

7. THE FILM FACTORY / TVORNICA FILMOVA, Silvestar Kolbas (Croatia, 2022, 15 min.) – World premiere

8. TOO CLOSE, Botond Püsök (Romania, Hungary, 2022, 85 min.) – World premiere

9. BABAJANJA, Ante Zlatko Stolica (Croatia, 2022, 14 min.) – International premiere

10. RETREAT, Anabela Angelovska (North Macedonia, Germany, 2022, 30 min.) – International premiere

11. WE, … COMPOSITION / WIR, … KOMPOSITION, Visar Jusufi (Kosovo, Germany, 2022, 15 min.) – International premiere

12. BIGGER THAN TRAUMA / VEĆE OD TRAUME, Vedrana Pribačić (Croatia, 2022, 91 min.) – European premiere

13. ANOTHER SPRING / JOŠ JEDNO PROLEĆE, Mladen Kovačević (Serbia, France, Qatar, 2022, 90 min.) – Regional premiere

14. A PROVINCIAL HOSPITAL / EDNA PROVINTSIALNA BOLNITSA, Ilian Metev, Ivan Chertov, Zlatina Teneva (Bulgaria, Germany, 2022, 107 min.) – Regional premiere

15. ATONAL GLOW / ATONALURI GABRZKINEBA, Alexander Koridze (Georgia, 2022, 67 min.) – Regional premiere

16. BEAUTY OF THE BEAST, Anna Eszter Nemes (Hungary, Serbia, 2022, 47 min.) – Regional premiere

17. FRAGILE MEMORY, Igor Ivanjko (Ukraine, 2022, 85 min.) – Regional premiere

18. LIVING TOGETHER / ZUSAMMENLEBEN, Thomas Fürhapter (Austria, 2022, 90 min.) – Regional premiere

19. MICROBIOME, Stavros Petropoulos (Greece, 2021, 27 min.) – Regional premiere

20. NO PLACE FOR YOU IN OUR TOWN / NIAMASH MIASTO V NASHIA GRAD, Nikolay Stefanov (Bulgaria, 2022, 81 min.) – Regional premiere

21. RIBS / REBRA, Farah Hasanbegović (Bosnia and Herzegovina, Hungary, Belgium, Portugal, 2022, 9 min.) – Regional premiere

22. MUSEUM OF THE REVOLUTION / MUZEJ REVOLUCIJE, Srđan Keča (Serbia, Croatia, Czech Republic, 2021, 91 min.) – B&H premiere

Robert Kirchhoff: Dubcek

This is a copy paste of an article at FNE from yesterday:

Slovak director Robert Kirchhoff is currently in postproduction with his creative documentary All Men Become Brothers / Všetci ľudia budú bratia. The film is produced by Kirchhoff´s atelier.doc and coproduced by the Radio and Television Slovakia, endorfilm (Czech Republic) and the Czech Television.

The production took place from 2018 to 2021 on locations in Kyrgyzstan, Italy, Czech Republic, Germany, Turkey and Slovakia. Personalities of domestic and foreign politics and culture, such as Romano Prodi, Umberto Eco, Pavel Kohout, Karel Vachek, Jáchym Topol, Petr Pithart, Eugen Gindl, and many orhers will appear in the film.

The figure of the Slovak politician Alexander Dubcek (1921-1992) is followed throughout the 20th century in situational circumstances revealing the internal conflicts of the personality of the politician, as well as of the society.

„The filming and organisation of the film were extremely demanding. They concerned an extensive collection of material including work with archival sources and protagonists from different parts of the world, where Dubcek left his mark. It also involved hundreds of hours of material in the range of 60 terabytes,“ director and producer Robert Kirchhoff told FNE.

The estimated budget of 372,864 EUR is supported by the Slovak Audiovisual Fund, the Ministry of Culture of the Slovak Republic, Creative Europe and the Czech Film Fund.

The international release is planned for November 2022, while the domestic premiere in Slovakia and the Czech Republic is scheduled for the spring of 2023.

DANISH DOC FILM HERITAGE

The Danish Film Institute is launching another large-scale effort to make the Danish film heritage widely available, this time focusing on the key period of documentaries from 1960-1990. 

Danish documentaries are on a roll, both at home and abroad. Real life told in film is compelling.

But while Danes in their twenties and thirties have an abundance of images of their lives right at hand, most of the population is cut off from watching documentaries from the time they came of age. Most Danish documentaries from 1960-1990 currently exist only as hard-to-access analogue material.

That’s about to change. Over the next four years, 700 of the best works from the period will be digitised and disseminated in Denmark and the Nordic region. This extraordinary effort will ensure the distribution of film narratives from a watershed era in the history of Danish documentaries that would otherwise be lost and forgotten.

‘Denmark on Film’ in a Nordic perspective

Since the establishment in 2015 of the Danish Film Institute’s streaming site for historical documentaries, ‘Denmark on Film’, more than 2000 films have been made available online, drawing a steadily growing number of viewers.

Greenland and Iceland are already on board. Now, the new project will help turn the site into a ‘Nordic Nations on Film’, where Swedish and Norwegian film archives can also make their documentary film heritage available, contributing to a stronger shared understanding of Nordic culture. 

Danish Film Institute CEO Claus Ladegaard says, 

“As sources of diverse, easily communicated experiences and understanding of how society has developed over the last half century, documentaries are unrivalled. Documentaries provide a vivid introduction to who we were, what moved people in the past, how we built our society and what shapes us today. This project is uniquely relevant as a platform for the Danish Film Institute’s ambitions in film dissemination. It’s about raising awareness of history, stimulating dialogue and debate, and creating a shared horizon of interpretation.”

Explore the historical streaming site Denmark on Film, which includes a section of English-language films, Welcome to Denmark.

About the project

The project is made possible by grants from the Aage and Johanne Louis-Hansen Foundation and the Augustinus Foundation, which are each contributing 5 million kroner (approx. 675,000 euros) to the digitisation and dissemination of the selected films. 

In addition, the A.P. Møller Foundation is donating 3.5 million kroner (approx. 470,000 euros) to the establishment of a new Nordic web portal for Danish, Swedish and Norwegian documentaries to promote cohesion in the Nordic Nations and bring international exposure. The Danish Film Institute itself is putting 6.1 million kroner (approx. 820,000 euros) into the project.

The project, which will begin in January 2023, will be operated in partnership with the National Library of Norway in Oslo and the Swedish Film Archive in Stockholm.

Rue du Premier Film

Lyon. June 2022. Rue du Premier Film… a visit I had been looking fwd. to, the museum of the Lumière Brothers in the villa of their family, the Cinema on the same side of the street, the café on the other side and the library. Lovely to be there with the museum as the highlight with the possibility of watching the film again at the right place, the place where the workers were leaving the factory in 1895. Three versions. A documentary, yes, but also a fiction as the employees of the Lumière factories were directed to leave the factory, which is no longer there but the museum includes a model of how the usines looked like and where exactly was the exit of the film. Documentary? Fiction? How stupid of us that we still have this discussion with current films. Yes, FILMS they were, made the brothers Louis and Auguste all over the world and fantastic to be reminded of the audience reaction, when The Arrival of a Train at la Ciotat was shown. The train was “targeting” the spectators, who fled the cinema in fear!

The museum is very well organised in the rich villa with chandeliers, paintings by the father Antoine, his bedroom is shown, and there is a video library where you can study loads of the one minute films shot on 35mm by photographers working for the brothers. And for those who are interested in cameras and the development of them, it’s all there. I am sure Danish documentary father Jørgen Roos has visited the museum and enjoyed the camera collection.

It was first of all a pleasant stay in this holy place for the cinema, you get the impression of how entertaining it must have been to discover he possibilities of Cinema. A treasure it is, well kept and welcoming at the same time as it is non-commercial. 

Alexandru Solomon: Cold Waves

The Romanian director – and cinematographer – and producer – and festival organizer of One World Romania – Alexandru Solomon is being celebrated at the Transilvania International Film Festival in Cluj that runs now and until the 26th of June. I discovered that through FB where a fascinating clip is shown of his 2007 masterpiece “Cold Waves”, one of the three films at the festival. I know how good a filmmaker Solomon is but had forgotten if I had seen this cold war film. Luckily it is available on https://dafilms.com, the excellent platform for quality documentary films, praised on this site again and again.

155 minutes, divided into three parts that take you to Radio Free Europe’s fantastic achievement bringing radio broadcasts to Romanians, who were fed with the daily propaganda of Ceausescu. The RFE people were in constant danger of being caught and brought to silence by the regime’s Securitate. RFE operated from abroad – Germany and Czech Republic – and Solomon includes the protagonists in his film, both those who were outside and those who stayed in the country, and those who remember what RFE meant to them. Here is the synopsis from DocAlliance site:

”During the 80’s, Radio Free Europe was the secret relief and confidant of its Romanian listeners. The Radio was Ceausescu’s most important enemy; he even hired Carlos the Jackal to close it down. All the protagonists of this story confront themselves once more in COLD WAVES: speakers of the radio, along with terrorists, listeners as well as party and Securitate officials, Romanians, Germans, Americans and French alltogether.”

“…The world has changed, there are different wars now. But if you listen to the voices, you may get a better picture.

The film played for 12 weeks in Romanian theatres. It deals with the love and hate story between Radio Free Europe, the Romanian audiences and the communist regime.”

The film? Totally fresh, full of fine cinematic solutions, I was never bored, I met some charismatic people, who fought for freedom from communism, but I also met a man who worked for Securitate and denies that the service did anything wrong and had nothing to do with the deaths of three of the RFE leaders. He is now (in 2007) in the Romanian parliament! In other words: Great film!

Romania, 155 mins., 2007 

DOK Leipzig News

DOK Leipzig will host its 65th edition in local cinemas and venues once again — a decision that signals the festival’s continued commitment to bringing back cinema culture and shared festival experiences.

From 17 to 23 October, DOK Leipzig will screen new documentary and animated films from around the world, along with creative XR works and thematic film programmes. The team looks forward to welcoming numerous international filmmakers and guests to Leipzig, where works will be explored with audiences at film talks and master classes. Turning the focus back to on-site events is the festival’s response to the need for direct exchanges among visitors and industry professionals — which were missing in the last two years due to pandemic adjustments.

However, some of the online features will continue in a reduced format, including recorded film talks. Selected films will again be available on demand throughout Germany via “DOK Stream” following the festival, with this year’s lineup focusing on the award winners.

DOK Industry is also prioritising a return to physical attendance at events for film professionals. Some areas will still be accessible online, such as livestreams of project presentations and talks, along with two days of post-festival digital networking for participants.

As in previous years, this year’s festival poster design was created by Leipzig graphic artist Stefan Ibrahim. It features the key to an old East German-style lock, which many audience members may still recognise. Further key imagery will be sprinkled throughout the festival’s in-person and online offerings for audiences to discover.

“We deliberately allowed for many interpretations with our design,” festival director Christoph Terhechte says. “The films and works in our programme are united by their curiosity about the world. They open up new perspectives and previously unknown worlds, so to speak. But the key is also always a symbol of home — people who have to leave their homes often keep their apartment key as a symbol of connection to their home, their origins and past. As a festival with an East German history, we opted for a key style from the German Democratic Republic.”

A number of festival themes have already been selected. DOK Leipzig will emphasise its long-standing connection to Eastern Europe with a programme of current feature-length films that offer insights into life in the region’s countries. The festival will also increase support for networking among documentary and animation filmmakers through new formats. Additionally, four of the programmes will explore the different artistic styles of animated film.

This year’s Retrospective will focus on documentary works by female filmmakers from the GDR. The Homage is dedicated to renowned Serbian documentary filmmaker Mila Turajlić, whose work explores the historical significance of moving images. Two other programmes feature films that address the climate crisis, resource scarcity and environmental activism.

From today through 15 July, festival fans can secure Early Dove accreditation at a discounted rate for access to film screenings, talks with inspiring guests and industry events.

Free tickets for film screenings are available to anyone who takes part in DOK Leipzig’s audience survey. The festival wants to get to know viewers better by gathering feedback from past and future visitors. The English version of the survey is available from 20 June via dok-leipzig.de.

Films and XR works can still be submitted until 1 July. The deadline for the DOK Co-Pro Market is 21 July.

AWARDS of the 62st Krakow Film Festival

DRAGON OF DRAGONS AWARD for the contribution into development of the world animated film

JARMO JÄÄSKELÄINEN (Finland)

KFF RECOMMENDATION to the European Film Award in a documentary category 

BOYLESQUE, dir. Bogna Kowalczyk (Poland)

INTERNATIONAL DOCUMENTARY COMPETITION 

Having watched all the competitive films the International Documentary Jury of the 62st Krakow Film Festival consisting of: Till Brockmann – chairman (Switzerland), Christine Camdessus (France), Ohad Milstein (Israel), Petrula Veljanovska (North Macedonia), Agnieszka Zwiefka (Poland) has decided to award the following prizes:

THE GOLDEN HORN for the director of the best film – Denis Dobrovoda for The Cathedral (Slovakia)

THE SILVER HORN for the director of the film with high artistic values – Shaunak Sen for All That Breathes (USA, United Kingdom, India)

THE SILVER HORN for the director of the film on social issues – Laura Sistero for Tolyatti Adrift (Spain)

SPECIAL MENTION for The Hamlet Syndrome directed by Elwira Niewiera and Piotr Rosołowski (Poland, Germany)

SPECIAL MENTION for Fragile Memory directed by Igor Ivanko (Ukraine, Slovakia)

The FIPRESCI (International Federation of Film Critics) Jury consisting of: Nino Kovačić (Croatia),  Yun-Hua Chen (Taiwan), Giuseppe Sedia (Italy) has decided to award the International Film Critics Prize to Hirotoshi Takeoka  for Adamiani (Japan, The Netherlands)

INTERNATIONAL SHORT FILM COMPETITION

Having watched all the competition films, the International Short Film Jury consisting of: Juliusz Machulski – chairman (Poland), Olga Lucovnicova (Moldova), Andrea Martignoni (Italy), Anita Reher (Denmark) and Amer Salmeen Al Murry (United Arab Emirates), has decided to award the following prizes:

GOLDEN DRAGON for the director of the best film – Jay Rosenblatt for How Do You Measure A Year? (USA)

SILVER DRAGON for the director of the best documentary film – Raúl de la Fuente Calle and Amaia Ramirez for Maldita. A Love Song to Sarajevo (Spain)

SPECIAL MENTION for Hardcore directed by Adán Aliaga (Spain)

SILVER DRAGON for the director of the best animated film – Diana Cam Van Nguyen for Love, Dad (Czech Republic, Slovakia)

SPECIAL MENTION for A Goat’s Spell directed by Gerhard Funk (Germany)

SILVER DRAGON for the director of the best short fiction film – Karolina Porcari for Victoria (Poland)

SPECIAL MENTION for The Swarmers directed by Alison Kuhn (Germany)

Jury Award for the Best European Film (Krakow Candidate to the European Film Award 2022 in the short film category) – Diana Cam Van Nguyen for Love, Dad (Czech Republic, Slovakia)

The International Federation of Film Societies (FICC) Jury consisting of: Eugene Dugan-Brause (United Kingdom), Ritesh Basak (Indie), Karolina Nowacka (Polska) has decided to grant the Don Quixote Award to the film Parizad directed by Mehdi Imani Shahmiri (Iran) and the Special Mention to the film: Love, Dad directed by Diana Cam Van Nguyen (Czech Republic, Slovakia)

INTERNATIONAL DOCFILMMUSIC COMPETITION

Having watched all the competition films, the International DocFilmMusic Competition Jury consisting of: Włodek Pawlik – chairman (Polska), Roman Gutek (Polska) and Robert Kirchhoff (Slovakia) has decided to award the following prizes:

GOLDEN HEYNAL for the director of the best film – Lucie Králová for Kapr Code (Czech Republic, Slovakia)

SPECIAL MENTION for Cesária Évora directed by Ana Sofia Fonseca (Portugal)

NATIONAL COMPETITION

Having watched all the competition films, the National Competition Jury consisting of: Piotr Stasik – chairman, Daria Kopiec, Kuba Mikurda, Anna Sienkiewicz-Rogowska, Małgorzata Szyła has decided to award the following prizes:

GOLDEN HOBBY-HORSE for the director of the best film funded by the President of the Polish Filmmakers Association – Elwira Niewiera and Piotr Rosołowski for The Hamlet Syndrome (Poland, Germany)

SILVER HOBBY-HORSE for the director of the best documentary film over 30 minutes – Bogna Kowalczyk for Boylesque (Poland)

SILVER HOBBY-HORSE for the director of the best documentary film under 30 minutes – Marcin Lesisz for The Rocking Horses (Poland)

SILVER HOBBY-HORSE for the director of the best animated film – Marta Pajek for Impossible Figures and Other Stories I (Poland, Canada)

SILVER HOBBY-HORSE for the director of the best short fiction film – Michał Toczek for A Dead Marriage(Poland)

The Award of the President of the Polish Filmmakers Association for the best film editing – Milenia Fiedlerfor The Voice (Poland)

Maciej Szumowski Award for remarkable social awareness patronized by ZAIKS– Bartłomiej Żmuda for God and Lunaparks’ Warriors (Poland)

The Award for the best short and documentary films producer in Poland funded by the Polish Producers Alliance (KIPA) and FDR Studio –Magdalena Kamińska and Agata Szymańska (Balapolis) for the film The Hamlet Syndrome (Poland, Germany)

Best Cinematography Award under the patronage of The Polish Society of Cinematographers funded by Black Photon – Wojciech Staroń for the film The Voice (Poland)

THE AUDIENCE AWARD

Boylesque directed by Bogna Kowalczyk (Poland)

Pere Puigbert: El Vent Que Ens Mou

The google translate of the Catalan title goes like this: “The Wind that Moves Us” for the film, that won the first prize in the DocsBarcelona Latitud category. And I don’t hesitate to say that this was so well deserved, actually I think it is the best film I saw at DocsBarcelona 2022, the 25thedition. Far from the journalistic tradition of Catalan documentary, much closer to the Baltic tradition of poetic documentary that I have praised so many times on this site: Few words, images that carry the film, slow film, excellent camera work, a tribute to the world we live in, to the small things in daily life that we often forget about, to the connection between man and nature, the wind that moves us. Filmed in the Empordá region in Catalonia, the Girona area.

Landscapes manipulated by the wind, trees, sheep, apple orchards. An old woman who cries when she thinks about her beloved, late husband, she is now alone, lonely?; no she has her children and grandchildren, and the small blond boy plays a role in her life. “Get the broom”, she says, and he does and he also tries to help her when she frees the walnuts from the shells with a hammer. Otherwise he tumbles around being observed by the camera of his father, director and cameraman, who makes films (from his website) “inspired by nature”. So often his images makes me think of paintings, nature morte or surrealistic landscapes à lá Yves Tanguy or Salvador Dali.

What is a story, it is often discussed at pitching sessions. Here “a pregnant woman eating an apple in the shade of a tree” is a story in all its calmness and insisting on the image. The action? The woman caresses her stomach and it is beautiful because the director-cameraman has put the camera in the right caressing place. The film is full of sequences like this. It is Cinema.

Catalonia, 78 mins., 2021

DocsBarcelona – Films

There is quite a distance from “The Territory” by Alex Pritz to “Maija Isola” by Leena Kilpeläinen. Both are films that have seen selected for the Official Panorama competition program of this year’s DocsBarcelona. “The Territory” is a product made according to the standards of National Geographic, “Maija Isola” is a classic creative documentary on the life of the Finnish artist, whose name is connected to the world famous brand of Marimekko. “The Territory” comes with awards from the Sundance festival, “Maija Isola” has been to design and architecture festivals. “The Territory” is full of music and sound effects, no second you are left alone as a viewer, the sound tells you what to think and feel of the important topic: the Amazon being deforested and the fight to survive for the Indigenous Uru-eu-wau-wau people of Brazil. For me a complete over-kill sound-wise, whereas the makers of “Maija Isola” chose to ask the brilliant composer Finnish Sanna Salmenkallio to guide us through the fascinating life of Maija Isola. 

To be honest I had never heard of Maija Isola before so I thought, why the film had been chosen. Watching yesterday, the answer was given. What a life (1927-2001) she had as an artist, a traveller, many men, constantly in the process of creating, with the connection to Marimekko as the backbone. She tells the story herself via her diaries and via her daughter, who lives in a house full of the mother’s creations, it’s a chronologically told adventurous film with lovely archive footage from the places, she went to, Paris being number one, but also Algeria, New York and sometimes back to – mostly – snowy Finland. It is simply a pleasure to be with clever, reflective Maija Isola in her search for what is the meaning of it all. And despite the many love stories her happy moments being alone. It’s a film with many layers and a huge respect for the audience. “Master of Colour and Form” is the subtitles to the film, indeed, we see that!

Diversity has always been what the DocsBarcelona festival has been seeking, I can say so having been involved in the selection until this year. I have written about the fine “Fire of Love”, I liked “Dreaming Walls” about Chelsea Hotel in NY, there were great moments in the French “Penelope My Love” on autistic Penelope and her mother, the director of the film, “A Thousand Fires”, “President” and “Nelly and Nadine” are masterpieces written about on this site before, the same goes for “Myanmar Diaries”, whereas “Aya” is too much staged and made up to be at a documentary film festival.

There are still some films to be seen and some I have forgotten about. That’s how it is at a festival. Awards will be announced tomorrow.

 

Sara Dosa: Fire of Love

Katia and Maurice. Volcanologists. Scientists and Filmmakers. A couple. Married in 1970. Decided not to have children. That would have prevented them to do their work or with a better phrase: to Live their Passion. The dangerous passion that killed them. A quote from Wikipedia:

”In June 1991, while filming eruptions at Mount Unzen in Japan, they were caught in a pyroclastic flow, which unexpectedly swept out of the channel that previous smaller flows had been following and onto the ridge they were standing on. They were killed instantly along with 41 other people…”

Click above and you will know what a pyroclastic flow is.

Which you actually don’t need to know, it’s enough to watch the unique footage they shot during their work, Katia getting closer and closer to the lava, challenging nature, taking photographs, documenting – with Maurice filming. When they were not rushing from one volcano to the next, they wrote books and made films from their 16mm footage. To earn their living.

I have been to 23 eruptions, Maurice says, so no problem if I die tomorrow…They lived to be 49 and 50. But they live on thanks to this fascinating love story narrated by American Miranda July, whose mesmerizing voice puts it all together information-wise and creates atmosphere.

Love story – the film also includes lovely, charming tv interview clips where the flirt is obvious. He, the performer, she always smiling, what a charisma. Away from the volcanos there was burning love. 

Canada, USA, 2021, 93 mins.