Agnès Varda on Arte

Tomorrow – and the rest of the week – French/German channel arte invites documentary lovers on what seems to be a wonderful lighthearted journey with Agnès Varda, entitled ”Agnès de ci, de là Varda”. On the site of arte, see address below, there are clips from the series, which according to ”le monde” (18-19. December) is ”subjective, fantaisiste, érudite et émouvante… un très beau cadeau”. In the same article Varda says that she has filmed almost as if she was thinking with no other intention than ”to show my curiosity”. Sounds like ”caméra comme stylo”, as the French new wave was saying they were aiming for.

She meets colleagues on her way, like the 103 year old Portuguese director Manoel de Oliveira and Chris Marker, a close friend, who does not want to be seen in the film, but ”he looks like Bruce Willis”, Varda says!

If you have the chance, go and peep into the windows of Agnès Varda, who has her shop in rue Daguerre (she made a film a bout the street in 1976, Daguerreotypies) or enter the shop and buy one of her many great films.

For French viewers – remember that you can watch programmes of arte seven days after they have been broadcast.

Link to arte.tv

2012 Documentary Preview/ 1

One day when she was travelling in Belarus, Lithuanian film director Lina Luzyte woke up in her train, that had stopped at a station in the town of Zhlobin. She looked out the window and saw a lot of people lined up to sell  plush toys to the passengers…

It became a film, that will premiere in 2012 – and will have a strong festival presence. I can say so as I have seen rough cuts of the film, which is more than promising, and is the first feature documentary of Lina Luzyte, whose producer is Dagne Vildziunaite, company: Just a Moment.

Look out for the film (working title: Belarussian Toys) when it comes near you. Here is a quote from the IDF website (see below) interview by Hana Rezkova. Luzyte says:

… When I was passing the town, what caught my sight was an image – a face of a man holding a crocodile next to his head. Both faces next to each other. The man’s face was really sad and the crocodile was very beautiful. At that moment I understood that the toys will be the key element, not only visually but also on the level of meaning. The process was actually the opposite. While I was there I stopped distinguishing them from the rest of the reality. They were not standing out anymore. And in the editing room I realized that they have very sad eyes. One of my protagonists told me that there are Polish eyes, German eyes, Russian eyes, and Belarusian eyes. All the eyes have eyelashes leaning towards both left and right. Only the Belarusian eyes have eyelashes directed to one side only.

http://www.dokweb.net/en/

DOKWeb from Institute of Documentary Film

Among the many websites of documentary organisations (EDN, Documentary Campus, Eurodoc etc.) the one provided by the Prague based Institute of Documentary Film (IDF) stands out, when it comes to deal withfilmmaking.

Apart from the information that the active organisation gives on its activities like the East European Forum, Ex Oriente, East Silver market as well as a guide to funding possibilities, a survey over professionals, the DOKWeb publishes articles about and interviews with important filmmakers from the region it deals with: Eastern Europe.

To mention a few: Katerina Surmanová writes about Lithuanian master director Audrius Stonys, who has been making his lyrical documentaries for over 20 years (Photo: Ramin by Audrius Stonys). The same writer takes the reader into the world of Polish director and cameraman, Cracow based Marcin Koszalka. Hana Rezkova, for years a key person at IDF, talks with Russian Vitaly Mansky about his new Cuba film and with Lithuanian director Lina Luzyte about her Belarussian Toys, which will be released in 2012, see above.

Read for yourself, the articles are all high class introductions to important filmmakers. And the website is the place to get knowledge about East European documentaries.

http://www.dokweb.net/en/

Czech Documentaries in Cinemas

A total of 44 Czech films have been released in cinemas this year, including 19 documentaries. The number of theatrical releases has been steadily rising in recent years. This positive trend is both due to the technical and financial availability of digital technologies that make cinema release viable even for low-budget films, as well as various projects, such as Czech Joy in Czech Cinemas that helped release 5 documentary films in a joint campaign.

Seventeen of this year’s documentary releases will compete for the Czech Lion Awards organized by the Czech Film and Television Academy (CFTA), that will be announced in March 2012. In sheer number of films, the documentary category comes close to the feature category (24 films). In mid-January, Czech film critics will also announce best films of the past year. Their competition features all films distributed in cinemas, short films as well as films making use of alternative distribution channels. On top of the CFTA eligible films, the Czech Film Critics Awards include, for instance, Andrea Slováková’s documentary In Sight released on VoD.

Photo: Matej Minac’s film “Nickys Family”, the third film about Sir Nicholas Winton, who saved 699 children from nazi deportation to concentration camps.

http://www.dokweb.net/cs/

Best Documentaries 2011

Playing the-best-of list game, here is what I consider as the best documentaries of 2011. This time I have not mentioned the countries of origin as the documentary film language is not bound to borders. Nevertheless, contrary to the American and English 2011 lists, I hope you will appreciate to find films with a multitude of different languages and cultural links. Alphabetical order:

Asif Kapadia: Senna, 106 mins.

Danfung Dennis: Hell and Back Again, 88 mins.

Fernand Melgar: Vol Special, 99 mins.

Pietro Marcello: The Silence of Pelesjan, 52 mins.

Mantas Kvedaravicius: Barzakh, 57 mins. (Photo)

Michael Glawogger: Whore´s Glory, 110 mins.

Patricio Guzman: Nostalgia for the Light, 90 mins.

Shatz & Barash: The Collaborator and his Family, 84 mins.

Viktor Kossakovsky: Vivan las Antipodas, 104 mins.

Wim Wenders: Pina, 100 mins.

Documentary Talents 2011

Whatever talk there is about financial crisis and difficulties in getting funding for creative, non-formatted documentaries, new talents enter the scene with their stories, visions and original and/or personal way of expressing themselves. Many others could have been mentioned, the 10 are films and people I have met in 2011. Except for one they are all from Europe but after having been in South America a couple of times, I have high expectations in films from that part of the world in 2012.

I will also draw your attention to the big international festival success of the diploma films 2010 from the documentary film school Zelig in Bolzano, that has sent out talented people, who now try to raise funding for the next work.

But here we go in alphabetical order, great films all of them:

Alina Rudnitskaya: This Day I will Forget, Russia, 25 mins.

Andrea Deaglio: Il Futuro del Mondo Passa da Qui, Italy, 63 mins.

Bram van Paesschen: Empire of Dust, Belgium, 77 mins.

Lou McLoughlan: Caring for Calum, Scotland, 24 mins.

Maria Fernanda Restrepo: With My Heart in Yambo. Ecuador, 135 mins.

Mila Turajlic: Cinema Komunisto, Serbia, 101 mins.

Mindaugas Survila: Field of Magic, Lithuania, 62 mins.

Pawel Kloc: Phnom Penh Lullaby, Poland, 98 mins.

Salome Jashi: Bahkmaro, Georgia, 58 mins. (photo)

Thierry Paladino: La Machina, France/Poland, 52/100 mins.

The Syrian Revolution/ 10

It goes on and on, when will it stop or be stopped, the brutality in Syria? Today is friday, the day where many will be killed, as we know it from many weeks and months. And people opposed to the regime are arrested. It is the menu of the day and of course you notice it even more when it is someone you know

Like this time Guevara Namer, photographer and part of the staff behind the Dox Box festival in Damascus. We met her again in Amsterdam this year at the idfa festival – her first travel abroad after the regime had given her and others of Kurdish origin an identity card and a passport. At an age of 27! On her way to the next festival, the one that goes on in Dubai, she was then, at the airport, taken away from her colleagues.

As before when others have been arrested, friends have immediately put up a site for her, address below. The Syrian Center for Media and Freedom and Expression writes the following, edited version:

The immigration authorities at Damascus International Airport at four oclock this afternoon 8/12/2011 arrested the photographer and film producer Guevara Namer while she was traveling to the United Arab Emirates to attend the Film Festival of Dubai where she was among a group of Syrian artists and journalists who have been invited to attend the festival…

Guevara was born in 1984, she is a graduate of the Institute of Photography in Damascus and a fourth-year student at the Higher Institute of Dramatic Art Studies Department. She was one of the Syrian Kurdish citizens deprived of their citizenship and has her passport only for a short time.

The Syrian Center for Media and Freedom of Expression expresses its strong condemnation of the arrest of photographer and film producer Guevara and demands her release and strongly condemns the way and the place where they arrested her – as if it were an ambush focus of the Syrian citizen when she goes to the border ports.

http://www.scm.bz/?page=show_det&category_id=94&id=803&lang=en

http://www.facebook.com/free.gefara

Peter Bradshaw: Best Documentaries 2011

The film critic of The Guardian has made his contribution to the yearly stupid, popular and funny tradition of making your favourite list of films from the year that goes towards its end. Here it is, tomorrow I will make my list and I promise it will be less anglosaxon. To excuse Bradshaw I guess I have seen more documentaries than he has:

Senna (dir. Asif Kapadia)

George Harrison: Living in the Material World (dir. Martin Scorsese)

Cave of Forgotten Dreams (dir. Werner Herzog)

Pina (dir. Wim Wenders)

Inside Job (dir. Charles Ferguson)

Dreams of a Life (dir. Carol Morley)

Bobby Fischer Against the World (dir. Liz Garbus)

Waste Land (dir. Lucy Walker) (Photo)

TT3D: Closer to the Edge (dir. Richard de Araques)

Project Nim (dir. James Marsh)

http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2011/dec/04/best-film-2011-peter-bradshaw

– where you will also find his lists of fiction films.

Documentaries in Paris

That Paris is the best cinema city in Europe is known by every film buff. Not only do all important new films arrive to the screen, but there are also ”reprises” and ”festivals”, so you can always enjoy Fritz Lang, Vincente Minelli and early works by Polanski, at the same time as you see new films from the Middle East or from Poland.

If you buy your weekly Pariscope, you may want to count how many documentaries that run at the Parisian cinemas in the coming week: 30: From obvious titles like Frederick Wiseman’s Crazy Horse to the strong German film by Cyril Tuschi about Khodorkovski (photo). From the German music film ”Kinshasa Symphony” to ”Pina” by Wim Wenders. To Swedish Göran Olsson’s masterly archive documentary ”The Black Power Mixtape” to the French ”Territoire Perdy” by Pierre-Yves Vandeweerd. Many of the documentaries have only one screening per day or per week but they are available due to the good system that art cinemas like the MK2 chain run, where films are kept for a long time on the screens.

PS. Not a documentary, not at all, but if you get near a cinema in Paris or elsewhere and like British acting when it is best, go and see ”Shame” by Steve McQueen with Michael Fassbender in the main role. It premiered here in Paris today.

http://www.mk2.com/

Storydoc in Athens Greece

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