They know how to remember and honour their artists in Lithuania, including the documentary filmmakers, I was reminded again today at the Vilnius Documentary Film Festival. Talking to directors Giedre Beinoriute and Audrius Stonys, they told me that a film club had been established in the name of Henrikas Sablevicius, a wonderful teacher and a fine documentary director, a father figure, for many the main creator of the Lithuanian documentary tradition, based on the image, always with many layers, lyrical in tone, like the city Vilnius often filled with an atmosphere of spirituality.

Henrikas Sablevicius (1930-2004) came to the Balticum Film & TV Festival on the Danish island of Bornholm in all 10 years of the festival’s existence. He was the proud leader of the delegation, he was the one who stood forward and made speeches and introductions, he invited the audience to retrospectives of Lithuanian documentaries, including some of his own, and he was a generous party organiser after the screenings at the Kino Gudhjem on Bornholm. He was also the one, who received us, the Danish selection team, when we came to Vilnius to watch films. He organised the screenings at the Film Studio in the city (torn down, what a shame!) and he served us tea and 999, the secret code that later became the way that I and director Arunas Matelis for years adressed each other.

I got a book on Sablevicius today, published last year, edited by Ramune Rakauskaite, entitled ”Soble” (his nickname), with contributions from colleague filmmakers and students like the three names I have mentioned. I can not read it, but just browsing through the book looking at the photos of the charismatic man with the wild beard, brings me back to our meetings on Bornholm, always with conversations that included an interpreter… Sobles Kino Klubas is the name and it has a facebook page!

http://www.facebook.com/sobles.kino.klubas

http://mubi.com/films/didnt-come

http://www.documentary.lt/?Lang=EN

Sunny and peaceful Vilnius hosts for the 8th time a documentary festival, full of fine international documentaries, as well as a competitive Baltic section with 12 films. I am here for the latter to be a juror together with filmmaker and actress Nino Kirtadzé from Georgia and Bosnian Irena Taskovski, owner of the international distribution company Taskovski Film.

The festival (September 22 – October 2) opened with the newest film by local master Audrius Stonys, ”Ramin”, produced by Vides Film Studio in Riga, Latvia. The fllm (not in the Baltic competition) is a both touching and amusing portrait of an old man (Ramin), who has been a fighter (wrestler) his whole life and now (as the catalogue says) fights the old age loneliness. Magnificent camera work and the courage to let scenes grow reminds us how important a film poet Stonys is.

The Lithuanian audience will also have the chance to enjoy films like Position Among the Stars (Leonard Helmrich), Katka (Helena Trestikova), My Reincarnation (Jennifer Fox) and Boxing Gym by Frederick Wiseman.

A retrospective of films by Bulgarian Andrey Paounov (The Mosquito Problem and Other Stories) includes his brand new, The Boy Who was a King.

www.vdff.lt

It was the fifth edition of DOC Meeting Argentina that took place this last week. A workshop for pitch preparation of 24 projects was arranged September 19-21, the pitching forum took place the two following days, September 22 & 23, parallel to ”conferencias” where broadcasters presented their profile or talked according to specific themes. Today, September 24, meetings are held between filmmakers and potential financiers, who have had busy days, as they have also had meetings with producers and directors, who were not in the public pitching. There is a hunger to get financing, and it seems that at the same time as European broadcasters lose financing for creative documentaries, the Latin American conveyed much more optimism with public funding attached as well, in Argentina through the INCAA.

Around 150 people were registered participants for the event that was hosted by the Art Institute of the university UADE on the Avenida 9th of July in Buenos Aires. I was tutoring the workshop and moderating the pitching sessions together with Mikael Opstrup from EDN.

The projects came from Argentina, Colombia, Italy, Spain, Uruguay, Germany, Mexico, Venezuela, Brasil, Canada, Australia and Kenya (!). They were at different stages – early development, in production or in postproduction. The panelists came from ZDF/arte, arte France, ORF Austria, YLE Finland, LIC China, History Channel, Canal Encuentro Argentina, TV3 Catalunya, Chellomulticanal, GNT O´Globo and Futura Brasil, Hispan TV (an Iranian Spanish language channel to start in November), History Channel Latin America and RTVC Colombia.

The atmosphere… well as there is quite a different ambiance at the Camp Nou football stadium in Barcelona and the home ground of Boca Juniors in Buenos Aires, there was passion, solidarity and strong applauses in the room far away from a pitch session in a North European country.

www.docmeeting.com.ar

In the ”conferencias”, three broadcasters in a row: History Channel Latin America, ORF Austria, ZDF/arte. Three different profiles. And three different ways of presentation. Miguel Brailovsky from History Channel Latin America used power point as the presentation tool, when he told the audience that ”tv is entertainment”, ”factual entertainment” and proclaimed that next year will be 100 years after Titanic, and that will be strongly marked in the programming of his channel. His clips were purely American commercial style, his presentation effective.

Frans Grabner from ORF in Austria, on the contrary to the power point, opened his textbook and looked down at his handwritten notes. For him the development of a film project is the most important, he wants to create a relationship with the director. We should not lose the audience, he said, and continued to express his concern about the tv audience – no young people watch television – ”sometimes I think that I am producing more for the past than for the future”. But let’s make films for the audience and not for the ratings. Grabner referred to the strong film tradition in Austria after the world war 2, with names like Haneka, Glawogger, Geyerhalter and Ulrich Seidl, and showed a clip from the Bosnian director Begovic wonderful and original ”Totally Personal”.

Reinhart Lohmann from ZDF/arte’s theme evening department placed his 10 handwritten A4 pages on the table, started to read, but dropped the link to the paper, put the pages away, expressed his pleasure to work in arte from the very beginning – same picture in two countries, two languages – at the same time as he was worried about the influence of the internet on the future of arte. Lohmann showed a 9 minute long compilation clip with quotes from arte programming the last year on Latin America. Quite impressive with reference to great films like ”El Olvido” (photo) by Heddy Honigmann and ”Sins of My Father” by Nicilas Entel.

www.docmeeting.com.ar

Stories, stories, stories… a pitching forum like this in Argentina is in a way one long learning process for someone from the North, who has some, but still a pretty limited knowledge about Latin American history, art and culture, religion, social and political conditions. This learning process goes of course also for the panelists from Europe, who for themselves and their audience asked about a context or a universal perspective when responding to the pitches. There are films that have a universal appeal and there are films that are local – and if you say ”local” about Latin America… there is a huge market potential.

There were projects about tango, carnival in Brasil and salsa in Colombia – projects that subject-wise had some fine starting points, but then on the other side had to struggle with the many other films made about the same themes. They had to stress the difference in approach, and they did. While a very fine film clip about the recently deseased Argentinian writer Ernesto Sábato (photo), based on material shot by the director Juan Pablo Lacroze in 1995, was discussed in the panel. Austrian Frans Grabner from ORF asked the director for an introduction of the author, in the film, while Jordi Ambros from TV3 expressed that the great material should keep its strong cinematic structure. To be added – Sábato is translated into many languages, and of course he is more known in Spain than in Austria.

The same looking for a European link was the case for a film about the charismatic bishop Jerónimo Podestá. The director Miguel Mato and his script writer Eduardo Spagnuolo showed amazing archive material with Podestá, who was part of the liberation theology movement and with him and his Clelia, ”his love and guide”. How to put the story about the controversial bishop into a context that works for a European audience?

Easier with the beautiful story about Inés, presented by Colombian Luisa Sossa, a film about her great grandmother, who had 20 children (!) and a violent husband. Ines wrote her diaries in a textbook and the director wants to let her fine words lead the story about a woman and her family.

In many cases it was obvious that projects divided the panel into a Latin American relevance and a European – with the supplement of a Chinese tv investor.

Having said so there were definitely stories that appealed to both sides of the ocean – see below.

www.docmeeting.com.ar

The most applauded film projects were connected to blindness. The young director Argimiro Wanadi Siso Saldivia (what a name!) from Venezuela presented ”The Labyrinth of the Possible”, which seems to become a strong documentary about the charismatic Sonia Soberats, a blind photographer, who lost her two sons and had her ”lifestyle changing drastically… developing in Sonia techniques of no-visual photography, as a therapy in a way but also as a recreational activity”.

The most moving presentation was done by experienced director and editor, Chilean/Canadian María Teresa Larrain, who has a low vision and wants to tell her story, which is ”her fight to keep her dignity and her voice as an artist”. Larrain did a presentation that was precisely full of dignity with a clip that had a lyrical tone. From her synopsis: In a small editing room in Toronto, a filmmaker suddenly goes blind. This documentary follows her walk into darkness… an autobiography about overcoming loss and rising from the ashes”. Can’t wait to see that film that will travel all over, no doubt.

DOC Meeting was full of talent and interesting, promising stories. Personally I am looking forward to see the film by Argentinian Federico Aletta, who as many others joined as a volunteer after the earthquake in Japan, on March 11, and filmed the physical and  mental reconstruction in Ishinomaki (photo) – rock & roll city, he called it. It is told in first person – the filmmaker wants the film to be completed for the one year commemoration of the earthquake.

Likewise – another earthquake, Chile, February 2010 – there was an amazing stylistical touch in the material that was shown by young Australian/Iranian Nora Niasari, who wants to ”uncover the human face in the wreckage of the alarming (6500 homes were destroyed) statistics… Three characters with conflicting social pressures are bound together by the transformations of one devastating event in the neighborhood of Seminario”.

www.docmeeting.com.ar

A film festival is threatened, Punto de Vista in Spain, an important fest for the artistic  documentary. A petition has been established, see below. And here are some texts taken from the website of the prestigious festival:

The International Documentary Film Festival of Navarre, Punto de Vista, is a meeting place on several different levels. Firstly, it is a space for audiences, filmmakers and theorists to relate and interact around the documentary genre and all trans-frontier manifestations and heterodoxies of non-fiction. Secondly, it is a spatial and temporal meeting space. Punto de Vista aims increasingly to become a place where documentary film from all around the world can converge. But it also strives to offer a space for dialogue between the past and future of documentary film. A space where the most diverse traditions in non-fictional film can embrace the most daring and innovative proposals. Punto de Vista, therefore, sees itself as a dialogic space where all these encounters can occur with an ambitious and innovative determination.

One of the fundamental aims of the Festival is to attend to audiovisual creators who turn their work into a daring proposal, a kind of search or quest; those who conceive their work as a process of knowing and understanding human beings and their living conditions in specific social contexts; authors who, through their work, reflect on reality and the ethical relationship formed with both the subjects of their formal proposals and their audiences. The Festival aims to be a stopover for filmmakers that will broaden their perception of reality and the ways in which they express it and conceive it through the audiovisual medium. Ultimately, the Festival is open to all documentary films that represent a reflection and an endeavour to understand reality

http://puntodevistafestival.com/indexEN.asp 

http://actuable.es/peticiones/carta-apoyo-al-festival-cine-punto-vista-pamplona

Press release from DOK Leipzig: In its focus on the Arab world, DOK Leipzig features films from Tunisia and Egypt. The upheaval in the Arab world is far from over, yet the 54th DOK Leipzig will be presenting the first documentary films from Tunisia and Egypt. Six films will be shown in the Focus on the Arab Spring which is part of the Official Programme. Most of the films will come to Leipzig straight out of the cutting room.

Some of the film makers were swept up into the chaos of the events – they show the reality that fired the revolution and caused it to spread so rapidly. Others used the opportunity to film Tahrir Square for several weeks. With their pictures these directors and film makers became not just observers, but an important part of the societal transformation.

The directors will be present at all screenings and available for discussion. In addition, the current situation in the Arab countries will be discussed by film makers and experts at a panel discussion.

In this way a tradition that stretches back decades will continue, as since the 1960s Arab film makers have been meeting at the DOK festival, which has even been called the “home of Arab documentary film”. As recently as 2006 there was an extensive special programme on Arab documentary films. Some film experts are even drawing parallels between the events in Leipzig in the autumn of 1989 and the Arab Spring of 2011.

The programme for this year’s festival with 341 documentary and animated films will be available online on 29 September.

www.dok-leipzig.de