Storydoc Session in Corfu/ 2

Two key tutors were given the floor on the first day of the workshop. Danish Mikael Opstrup from EDN (European Documentary Network) introduced some presentation tricks to the participants before they were to communicate the content and form to their colleagues and to the tutors. And Scottish filmmaker and teacher Emma Davie brought clips from documentaries that one way or the other had a creative element that she wanted to highlight.

First one was ”Gallivant” (1996) by English Andrew Koting, a ”dada filmmaker”, that is how he has introduced himself, she said. The clip reminded the participants about the importance of keeping the playfulness in what they are doing. Emma Davie continued with two danish films, ”Swenkas” (2004) by Jeppe Rønde and ”Burma vj” by Anders Østergaard (2008), both quoted because of their use of techniques that stem from fiction. For the latter, from the Burmese dictatorship, ”it let the limitation to be part of the storytelling”. Emma Davie concluded with a clip from ”The Eye of the Day” (2001) by Leonard Helmrich (idfa winner 2010 with the third part of this trilogy from Indonesia), and ”Wednesday” (1997) (photo) by Viktor Kossakovsky, the flm where the Russian director went to find people who were born on the same day and in the same year as himself. In St. Petersburg. Great clip with a train station controller followed on his way in the opposite direction of the arriving travellers, AND a scene with a man who eats his ice cream.

www.storydoc.gr

Still: Kossakovsky: Wednesday (From mubi.com)

Storydoc Session in Corfu/ 3

Stan Neumann inspired on the second morning at the Storydoc session in Corfu. The French editor and director, born in Czekoslovakia, had been given the task to urge the filmmakers to think about form and not only content. Form, he said, is ”the face of the film”, the way the content appears to the viewer. Make it skrink, have big things become small, you are creating an imaginary object, said Neumann, who was a master with his formulations and who showed pedagogically what he meant  with examples from own work, first of all from the debut as a director, (after decades as an editor), ”Paris, Roman d’un ville” (1989). Form is always about taking some things away, explore reality and find your own place in it. With his masterpiece, ”A House in Prague”, he found out that there was no formal key to the film, he had to find other solutions. The point of making films… to make people remember a little longer than a tv programme.

It is easy to understand why Thierry Garrel, former head of arte france documentary unit, always mentioned Neumann as a very important documentary director. And a very good tutor, one could add. In Corfu he shared his competence in a strong team with Greek director Eva Stefani, a master in short, personally formed documentaries. It was said by both of them that their tutoring had been one long creative battle in words.

www.storydoc.gr

Storydoc Session in Corfu/ 4

With Mediterranean projects in focus it was a natural programme choice to have a session on the situation for documentarians in the countries that have experienced or are experiencing changes that have been named ”revolution” or the ”Arab Uprising” or the ”Arab Spring”.

The organisers had invited Jasminah Metwaly from Egypt and Diana El Jeiroudi (photo, taken by Orwa Nyrabia) from Syria to be the speakers in a session that evoked many interesting comments from the colleagues seated in the auditorium of the Ionian University.

Metwaly showed the three films from the Egyptian revolution that this blog have brought links to previously. They are direct cinema when it is direct, Leacock would have loved it, stating ”yes, it is about being there”, and we were brought to Egypt in the months where it all happened. ”Where is the FILMmaking”, a participant asked having watched the material. This remark brought many viewpoints forward. Some stated that Metwaly used tv language, which she might have done, she said that she did not think about form, when it all broke out, others said that form is not important in this situation, the documentation is what matters. Metwaly brought a project to the workshop, ”Land Without”, that showed another side of her obvious film talent – she had been one day to the countryside filming farmers, who suffer from no water supply, politics, and what she showed was a clip shot in one day with farmers, who are used to be visited by media people and know how to respond to tv news, screaming their despair into the camera, at the same time as they are asking: why are you filming here!? An intelligent film including the filmmaking could come out of this. The filmmaker goes from Corfu back to the farmers.

For Diana El Jeiroudi, who together with her partner Orwa Nyrabia are the couple behind the Dox Box festival in Damascus, the uprising/revolution had been ”cooking” for the last decade – to be manifested/started on March 16. El Jeiroudi, who during the workshop days, together with Nyrabia, reported that two of their staff members had been arrested (they were released again after a couple of days), told the seminar attendants about the tv station al Jazeera being silent for three weeks, about doing filming ”from behind” so the demonstrators can not be recognised if the tapes are confiscated by the authorities, about her asking a documentary maker about the situation right now for filmmaking… the answer was: we make only bad films, we are only documenting. She showed clips from films by Omar Amiralay, and told that the authorities now have approved of the showing of three of his films, until now they have been banned by the regime. Everyone has become a journalist in Syria now, El Jeiroudi said, reporting is done on mobile phones, homemade cameras are being used… but whatever happens, Syria is another country today, said El Jeiroudi, who was also a tutor at the Storydoc session in Corfu.

www.storydoc.gr

Storydoc Session in Corfu/ 5

21 projects took part in the workshop in Corfu. I have previously written about the 4 selected Palestinian projects which were selected at the Storydoc prologue session in Ramallah, Palestine. The selected projects proved their quality as did the filmmakers who attended: Wafa Jamail (”Coffee for All Nations”), Ahmad al Bakri (”The Neighborhood’s Old Men”), both projects at pre-production stage, AND Nahed Awwad (”The Mail”) and Khaled Jarrar (”The Infiltrators”), both projects close to rough cut stage. (More about Jarrar will follow). It is my wish and hope that these filmmakers will make it to big important markets like DOKLeipzig, idfa and Sheffield DocFest. Not only are their stories important but they have also ideas on how to find the right storytelling solutions.

The hosting country Greece had fine film projects to offer as well thanks to the strong and enthusiastic research done by the founder and chair of Storydoc, Kostas Spiropoulos. For sure we will soon see an interesting, well made observational documentary from the hands of Thessaloniki based director Dimitris Athiritis. ”One Step Ahead” is the working title of a portrait of super-energetic, charismatic Yiannis Boutaris, who describes himself as an alchoholic ”who stopped drinking 21 years ago”, and who got elected mayor in Thessaloniki in November 2010. There is also potential for a great film on the Greek artist Lucas Samaras, who lives in the US and has been a strong part of the American experimental, could one say ”fluxus” movement. Producer Lena Anastasiadou (re)presented the project with the working title ”I Spend Time Wtih Making”.

From Scotland came Finlay Pretsell with clips showing Scottish racer David Millar in his fight in Tour de France. It is the idea of Pretsell to make a film about this complicated, well formulated, interesting sportsman, who was out of the game because of doping, came back and has just published a book about his life and career. Working title: Road to Redemption. Intention: the inner struggle of David Millar.

I could mention many more projects, space makes a limit, so let me stick to one more, the one by Spanish brothers Jorge and Miguel Yetano, ”On the shore”, a visual essay to be, a reflection on tourism, on what we do when we go to places to relax, in this case the Spanish coast where environmentalists have a different opinion on the building activities than have those who construct the appartment buildings. A film to be full of interesting characters, an open film with no finger-pointing on the development.

Photo: Khaled Jarrar in his white t-shirt with the text “The State of Palestine”, ready to stamp passports with the same text. Today (July 18) and tomorrow the Palestinian artist and filmmaker will stand at Checkpoint Charlie in Berlin to express his political statement!

www.storydoc.gr

Asif Kapadia: Senna

In a report from the Moscow International Film Festival the following I wrote the following about the film about legendary Ayrton Senna: (the film) has a classical straight forward narrative, simple it is, and should be, with its focus on the career of the formula 1 driver, Brasilian Ayrton Senna, his fight with French Alain Prost, a love-hate relationship, his importance for his poor nation, his charming appearence. It is all built on archive, not a talking face, all comments come off the image, an excellent solution for a film that appeals to a broad audience.

In an interview in the Guardian, Saturday July 9, done by Stuart Feffries, the information is given on a film “that quietly (has) broken box office records to become the surprise hit of the summer. Now the picture is poised for a US release that might well put it in the frame for an Oscar.”

Continued by the following: “The 39-year-old Hackney-born director’s film powered away from an unpromising position on the starting grid. It grossed £375,000 on its first weekend, three times more than Kevin Macdonald’s 2005 documentary about two British mountaineers’ near-death experience in the Andes, Touching the Void. After that impressive start, Kapadia’s film looks set to become one of the most successful documentary films ever released in the UK. “At the moment, we’re in third and chasing down second,” laughs Kapadia. His film has accelerated past Justin Bieber’s concert film, Never Say Never. It’s now grossed more than £3m and is bearing down on the 2005 nature documentary March of the Penguins. “There’s only one documentary we’ll never overtake – Fahrenheit 9/11.” Michael Moore’s 2004 documentary has, like Ayrton Senna in the 1993 Brazilian grand prix, an unassailable lead in this race.”

The interview gives an  excellent background to a film that was also very well received at the festival in Moscow.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian/2011/jul/09/asif-kapadia-interview-ayrton-senna

Summer Filmmaking in Lithuania

It is quite an experiment… you bring together 50 young film students from all over Europe, having grouped them in beforehand as directors, cameramen, editors, sound recorders and producers – let the directors pitch their stories and pick their collaborators, let them have some lectures from and meetings with invited tutors, 8 of them, directors and editors, have them focus, and then send them off to some few days of shooting in the area (the beautiful island Neringa at the Baltic coast in Lithuania) to end up with 10 short documentaries in very different styles and with a diversity of themes…. but it seems to work. I left the summer workshop this friday but look forward to seeing the final results once they are visible in around a week. Subjects: Dune guards near Nida on Neringa, Lithuanian spiritual life inspired by the many gods and goddesses the country have as legends, wild horses if they can be found, fishermen, a small boy at the beach, a bigger boy who declares his love to the director, surfing and waves, weathervanes, ordinary people who turn out to be extraordinary, jumping from an airplane (!). For sure with many other twists than the ones I mention here.

One of the tutors was Danish director and editor Nanna Frank Møller (photo) (Let’s be Together, Someone like You, De nøgne fra Skt. Petersborg (director Ada Søbye), Min fars sind (director Vibe Mogensen)), who made a very fine lecture on editing, stressing how important it is during the shooting ”to listen to the moment”, which is the ”most precious”. The students had seen ”Let’s be Together” and Nanna Frank Møller re-showed, and talked about, the confrontational scene, shot by herself, between the Brasilian father and his son, who is attracted to femininity. A scene that brilliantly gives an example on the importance of catching what happens outside the image instead of trying to follow the movements of the characters. ”As an editor I’m trying to find the soul/the spirit of the film”, she said and continued to show material from the masterpiece of Vibe Mogensen, ”Min fars sind” (The Mind of my Father): A grown-up man one day starts to cry, he does not know why, it gets worse, turns into a mental illness bringing him on strong medicine to survive. The daughter, the director, visits him, films him, as he has been filming her on holidays way back before he got ill. I have seen the film several times, every time it moves me immensely.

The Danish editor is a fine teacher, as is Rafi Spivak, Israeli-Canadian director and editor, who in his lecture took us back to wonderful direct cinema clips – ”High School” by Frederick Wiseman, ”Salesman” by Albert Maysles – as well as a clip from ”Crumb” by Terry Zwigoff, and other examples of American documentary storytelling.

The workshop goes on, it is of course on facebook, what a lot of wonderful energy!

http://www.summermediastudio.com/

Mantas Kvedaravicius: Barzakh

At the Summer Media Studio in Neringa Lithuania, a European Film Student Workshop, that goes on until July 17, with editing as the theme, ending up with 10 short documentaries, it was very appropiate to show the awarded Lithuanian documentary from Chechnya, ”Barzakh”. Lithuania, small country with around 3 million inhabitants, has a tradition for making films that have been characterised as ”poetic realism”, with Arunas Matelis and Audrius Stonys as well known names in the international documentary circle. The film by Mantas Kvedaravicius is no exception from that label, and after two very well deserved awards at the Berlinale, ”Barzakh” is now travelling the world of festivals.

Stasys Baltakis, teacher at the Lithuanian Academy of Music and Theatre, the film school of the Country, introduced the film and its director. ”He is not a film director, he is a thinker”, he said about the debutant Kvedaravicius, who made the film over a period of years, now completing his PhD (and a book) on the affects of pain. And the film is about pain, about people in Chechnya, families whose members disappear or have undergone torture. Shot illegally, and with one year in the editing, the film expresses pure love and respect for the characters without turning to sentimentalism. ”Our life stands still” says the mother of Hamdan, who disappeared 6 years ago without any sign given to the family, and with loads of papers written to the authorities with no result. In a very slow and tense rythm the film makes the audience experience how life goes on. It has to. The camera catches magical moments inside the houses, the characters tell their stories of pain and torture, mainly off the picture, car trips give the narrative a flow and information about how a devastated city looks, at the same time as the Russian authorities have done a lot to lighten up mosques and other buildings. Pure facade for the invisible violence, it seems. While watching the film you sense a growing anger and sadness witnessing the life of people, who wait and hope.

Barzakh is a metaphor used in the film visually. This is how the director – on the film’s website – describes the phenomenon: Barzakh is a theological concept that comes from the Quran and has been elaborated by Sufi scholars. It loosely defines, through the metaphor of water, the space between life and death. At the same time the term is not merely a metaphor, but rather a paradigm on which the film is built. That is, it does not simply indicate that life in Chechnya is like Barzakh, or that because of its relation to Sufism, which is the predominant religious practice in Chechnya, it is a widely used local concept. Rather its main purpose is as a guiding principle, to distinguish the peculiarities of life there and to show how they link together and connect us into other spaces and temporalities. 

Lithuania, 2011, 57 mins. PS. The film has, as many other important documentaries in these years, been supported by the Finns, the company of Aki Kaurismäki and YLE and Finnish Film Foundation.

http://www.barzakhfilm.com/

http://www.summermediastudio.com/

Documentary in Europe Workshop

The 15th edition of Documentary in Europe in Bardonecchia, Italy starts tomorrow. It includes training, project development, pitching to a panel of commissioning editors, matchmaking between directors, producers and distributors – and screenings. (By the way, the organisers are making an exemplarily good promotion with their site and newsletter, see below)

And what a pleasure to see that a film that has been mentioned numerous times on this blog, Cinema Komunisto by Mila Turajlic, is the opening film in the nice local Cinema Sabrina. The afterlife of this film, that premiered nationally in a full Sava Centre at the Magnificent 7 festival in Belgrade in late January this year, has been one long success story for the director and her team.

Let me quote from the newsletter i received today from the organisers of Documentary in Europe: In February 2011, Cinema Komunisto became the first Serbian documentary film to gain distribution in multiplex cinemas in Serbia. This marked the beginning of an incredible festival run, from IDFA to Tribeca, during which the film collected 7 awards and counting. Amongst these the FOCAL International Award for Best Use of Archival Footage in an Arts Production! Four years in the making, with clips from over 330 feature films, and exclusive archive gathered from all over Europe, Cinema

Komunisto is a complex collage of Yugoslav history told through its cinema.

The director is in Bardonecchia for the screening and to do a masterclass on how to dive into the complicated world of archive material clearance.

Let me also quote the fine text delivered by the director about herself in the  same newsletter: … BA in Film and TV Production, Faculty of Dramatics Arts in Belgrade. MSc in Media and Communications at the London School of Economics. Took the long road to being a documentary filmmaker. On the run from political activism and mind-numbing academia. Converted to filmmaking in the belief that art will always be more subversive than politics. Seduced by ‘cinema as art’ preaching of French cineastes during studies of documentary cinema in Paris. Sobered by pitching forums, slots, re-versioning and the documentary industry in general. Spoiled by a one-year stint working on Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto in Mexico. Inspired on an annual basis by the films and auteurs who come to the “Magnificent 7 Festival” in Belgrade that I helped give birth to and organize. Challenged and fulfilled daily by the obsession to make documentary films.

The name for that is commitment!

http://www.cinemakomunisto.com/

http://www.docineurope.org/home.php?l=eng

MIFF Documentary Competititon/ 2

In this text I can only speak for myself as one of three jurors at the first documentary competition at the 33st Moscow International Film festival stating that there was a clear agreement in the jury for the winner, Hell and Back Again, see below.

For the other 6 films it was obvious that ”Abendland” by Austrian Nikolaus Geyrhalter was visually a strong film essay with a very relevant critique of our civilisation with beautifully composed (but badly projected in the imax cinema) images of surveillance cameras, immigrant interviews, a refugee camp, Oktober fest in Munich… it is methaphoric, it has magnificent moments but it also suffers (maybe a matter of taste) from its distant intellectualism.

Audrius Stonys deserves much praise for his ”Ramin”, a film about an old man in Georgia, his daily life, his attachment to his late mother, his looking for a woman he knew in his youth… the story is told in stunningly beautiful images by Audrius Kemezys, the story construction is complicated, but there are magical moments (like in most of Stonys films) that you will never forget, and original ideas. In this one it is a cross-cut from a loong celebration of Ramin’s birthday to a cat crying outside the house with a nice warm hen to lean on!

Whereas ”Senna” (photo) by Asif Kapadia, running more than succesfully in English theatres at the moment, has a classical straight forward narrative, simple it is, and should be, with its focus on the career of the formula 1 driver, Brasilian Ayrton Senna, his fight with French Alain Prost, a love-hate relationship, his importance for his poor nation, his charming appearence. It is all built on archive, not a talking face, all comments come off the image, an excellent solution for a film that appeals to a broad audience.

”Marathon Boy” by Gemma Atwal was a tabloid film with a constant noisy sound track attack, a story about a small boy being exploited by the media and his mother and his coach – no director point of view, as i saw it. And it was a mistake that ”Czech Peace” by Filip Remunda and Vit Klusak was shown in a one hour version with an introduction by Michael Moore (”watch this film”!) – I have seen a fine long version of the film in beforehand. Also a wrong choice it was to show ”Happy People: A year in the Taiga” by Dmitry Vasyukov and Werner Herzog in a disrespectful version where the voices of the Russian characters were dubbed into American, and where Herzog’s voice, which I normally like a lot, in this case was far too much sounding like the world was about to go under!

http://www.moscowfilmfestival.ru/eng/

Danfung Dennis: Hell and Back Again

”I love my pistol”, says Sergeant Nathan Harris, the protagonist of the film about an American soldier, who gets seriously wounded in combat in Afghanistan, is taken back to the US and to his wife Ashley, who helps him recover; at least she helps him getting through the day, the trauma he has from his time in Afghanistan, he does not seem to be able to fight on his own as the film tells the audience.

Many films have come out and is coming out from and about the war in Afghanistan and its consequences on heart and mind, especially on those going there as soldiers to secure changes in the country. This one is one of the best so far in its superb camera work from the battlefield, in its description, with a lot of dignity, of the Afghans who are victims of the constant search for Talibans by the Americans. They are told to leave their houses, their houses are searched, they are searched and controlled. The desperation comes from the Afghans, who don’t want to be ruled by the Talibans, but you soldiers do not really make the situation easier!

The emotional side of the film, however, lies where Nathan Harris is back home, suffering enormously from his pain, constantly taking strong medicin and – this is how the film is built – thinks back on Afghanistan where he definitely wants to be again as a killer, the word used by the doctor who examines him. As a spectator you look, with empathy, thanks to the approach of the director, at a man brought up in a society of violence, a young man sitting in a sofa at the end of the film playing with his guns… ”I love my pistol”.

US/UK, 2011, 88 mins.

Winner of 1st Documentary Competition at Moscow International Film festival 2011.

http://hellandbackagain.com/