From the press release of IDFA today: The 24th International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA) will open on November 16 in Pathé Tuschinski with The Ambassador by Danish filmmaker and journalist Mads Brügger Cortzen. In this documentary, Brügger Cortzen exposes the trade in diplomatic passports in Africa – a trade in which Westerners play a major role. The film also competes in the IDFA Competition for Feature-Length Documentary.

Mads Brügger Cortzen (1972) previously made films such as The Red Chapel, with which he won a Jury Award at the Sundance film festival in 2010. He is also known in Denmark as a presenter of various television programmes.

The Ambassador, shot largely using a hidden camera, reveals another side of Africa: an underworld that cannot be recorded in any other way. Dressed in a neo-colonist style, director Mads Brügger Cortzen goes to the Central African Republic to become an ambassador for Liberia. Once there, he sets up a match factory, run by Pygmies, as a cover for his ambitions in the diamond trade. What Brügger is actually trying to do, however, is reveal the relations of power – and commerce – in that country.

The Ambassador is competing for the VPRO IDFA Award for Best Feature-Length Documentary. On Friday, 25 November, the winners of the various IDFA competition programmes will be announced at the closing ceremony in Tuschinski 1. IDFA will take place from 16 to 27 November on and around Amsterdam’s Rembrandtplein square.

www.idfa.nl

The small film festival with the fine programme of international documentaries ends today sunday October 2. The awards for the Baltic Documentary Competition were given out last night. 12 films were in the programme, three received awards – diplomas and money.

Latvian films took the second and third prize. Second was ”How are you doing, Rudolf Ming”, shown at many festivals internationally, directed by Roberts Rubins, who received the recognition for his fine portrait of a Latvian boy, who is crazy about making films. Especially films in the horror genre. He hates love stories and draws his stories on paper to be shown on a slide projector with his own voice providing the sound. The intelligent and sensitive boy develops a fine relation with the local priest, who asks him to make a film for the service. Which he does, with big success! The director told the audience at the prize ceremony that Rudolf Ming now has a real camera… an upcoming filmmaker!

”Family Instinct”, third prize, by Andris Gauja is travelling the world right now, to festivals first of all, winning awards for its intimate description of a totally devastated family of a mother of two, the father – the brother of the mother – being in jail for the incest. It is a shocking film to watch, there are constant violent conflicts combined with a constant alcohol consumption. We are visiting a Dostojevskian hell. Nevertheless, the director succeeds strongly in conveying empathy for the characters and their living conditions. The film has raised big debate in its home country, for its content of course, is this (also) Latvia of today, and among film people also ethical questions are raised, which are relevant. The main point, however, for this blogger, member of the jury together with Georgian Nino Kirtadze and Bosnian Irena Taskovski, was that the film comes out as an honest piece of observational documentary.

Outstanding was the winner, Barzakh (photo), by Lithuanian Mantas Kvedaravicius, a courageous film from Chechnya, superbly shot and edited, a touching visit to families, who have had members missing for years, searching for the answer – what happened, where are they, are they alive? The narrative also included the story of a man who has had his ear cut off. A longer text is to be found on this blog about this beautiful documentary made by a man over a period of three years, a man who is a researcher and is finishing a book on pain – the subject of the film.

www.vdff.lt

After the award ceremony of the 8th Vilnius Documentary Film Festival , a new Lithuanian documentary had its premiere in Vilnius. ”The Field of Magic” has been on its way for years and premieres in a version that is full of magnificent images and love for the characters in the film. The production company Monoklis, their director and the two producers Jurga  Gluskiniené and Giedrè Beinoriuté, call the film a docu-poem, it could also be labelled as a docu-adventure. It starts and closes with images of moose who live in the forest, where also the characters have settled outside the normal society close to the dump ground where they pick metal to be sold. To have sufficient income to survive the way they want, and do, with dignity.

I can not call this a review, I am biased, I have followed the film during the development process at the Ex Oriente training workshop, organised by IDF (Institute of Documentary Film), I have even been visiting the wonderful people in the film, taken there with Audrius Stonys and the director Mindaugas Survila. I have watched material and given advice.

Not a review, but I can say that the honesty and respect and warm generosity, shown by Mindaugas Survila during the whole process, his loyality to the characters and their trust in him – all that is in a stylistically balanced film that is universal in its theme and humanity. It would be natural that it travels around the world to festivals and – maybe – to tv stations that still dares to challenge its audience with something for the thought and heart.

http://www.dokweb.net/en/east-european-forum/upcoming-films/the-field-of-magic-1130/?off=15

http://www.monoklis.lt/en/projects/field-of-magic

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