U2 Documentary to Toronto

Documentaries appear more and more on the programme schedule of big international film festivals. This summer the Moscow International Film Festival opened a competitive section for documentaries (reported on filmkommentaren.dk), below you can find the news about the premiere of the new Kossakovsky at the festival in Venice and now realscreen breaks the news that Davis Guggenheim (An Inconvenient Truth and Waiting for “Superman”) will have his “From the Sky Down” as the opening film in the upcoming Toronto International Film Festival (starting September 8). The film, according to realscreen, captures legendary rock band U2 on stage and in the studio, and delves deep into the recording of their seminal 1991 album Achtung Baby… Guggenheim reportedly accompanied the Irish rock band to rehearsals in Winnipeg mounted during its current 360 Tour that focused on performances of tracks from the 1991 album.

Photo: Realscreen.

http://realscreen.com/2011/07/26/u2-doc-to-open-tiff-2011/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=u2-doc-to-open-tiff-2011

Viktor Kossakovsky: Vivan las Antipodas!

Breaking news in the world of documentary films. The long awaited world premiere of Victor Kossakovsky’s Vivan la Antipodas! will take place at the 68th Venice Film Festival. The organisers announced friday that the film will be the second opening film on August 31 – George Clooney is the director of the first…

Hollywood Reporter writes that ”the documentary, which explores the notion of Antipodes – the relatively rare instances in which a land mass is directly opposite the world from another landmass – was conceived when Kossakovsky discovered that directly opposite a lonely Argentinean fisherman he came across while traveling, was the bustling Chinese city of Shanghai. Kossakovsky, who started work on the film years ago, called it “a poem about a multi-polar world.” Kossakovsky juxtaposes the events happing on opposite sides of the globe: Argentina and China, Chile and Russia, Hawaii and Botswana, and New Zealand and Spain.

Producer and distributor of the film, Heino Deckert, puts it in this way on his site: With this film Victor Kossakovsky grants himself a childhood wish. Haven’t we all asked ourselves as children where we would come out if we dug a tunnel right through the centre of the earth? Haven’t we all wondered at some point what was happening just at this moment beneath our very feet at the other side of the planet? In this film those reveries turn into reality. In breathtaking images and a stunning montage we go on a trip to the world’s rare inhabited land-to-land antipodes. We discover the wonders and contradictions of nature and people around the globe. With unprecedented camera movements and exhilarating new perspectives our conventional view of the world is challenged. On the evocative title follows a revolutionary film, that gives three cheers to our planet and its people in all their antagonisms and commonalities: Vivan las Antipodas!

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/victor-kossakovsky-s-vivan-la-214475

http://deckert-distribution.com/film-catalogue/vivan-las-antipodas/

Theresa Traore Dahlberg: Taxi Sister

Produced at the Swedish film school, Dramatiska Högskolan in Stockholm, this short documentary is a warm, straightforward portrait of a strong woman, who must be a role model for the Senegalese woman in her fight for equality in a male society with many traditions. She, Boury Mbaye, drives taxi in Dakar, she has children, she is the head of a big family, she is the one the family gets advice from, she wants to be the first woman to have her own taxi company in the country, with many employees.

The story is told through voice over narration and situational sequences where Boury talks to a younger female colleague, or argues with a sceptic male who – she says – give the kind of simple chauvinistic insults that she gets all the time, or, of course, in brief conversations with passengers in the taxi.

An unpretentious, well made simple documentary reminder to us that a lot needs to be changed in countries like Senegal, where many men still have many wives, and where a woman like Boury Mbaye is one of those who can make changes happen.

http://africanwomenincinema.blogspot.com/2011/06/theresa-traore-dahlberg-and-taxi-sister.html

City Documentaries in Belgrade

The film school (Kvadrat) and Magnificent7 film festival owners and managers, Svetlana and Zoran Popovic, offer a summer pleasure to Belgrade citizens and visitors. Starting from monday July 25, Megalopolisi na filmu, great films on cities are being screened within the programme of the festival ”Belef – Audiovisuals in the 21st Century”. Free entrance, read more about it on the colourful Serbian language site that has clips and trailers from the films. Here comes the selection, quite inspiring for other film festival organisers, right?

Megacities (Michael Glawogger), Austria 1998, 90 mins.

Tokyo Noise (Pauser, Petri, Röed, Söderberg), Sweden/Denmark 2002, 80 mins.

Berlin. Sinfonie einer Grosstadt. (Thomas Schadt) Germany 2002, 77 mins.

Shanghai Space (photo) (Nanna Frank Møller) Denmark 2009, 60 mins.

El Olvido (Heddy Honigmann) The Netherlands 2008, 93 mins.

Nomadak tx (Raul de la Fuente) Spain 2006, 91 mins.

Photo from mubi.com

http://www.belef.org/webtv/rez.htm

http://www.magnificent7festival.org/home.html

http://www.kvadrat-film.com/indexEng.html

Ina Holmquist & Emelie Wallgren: Kiss Bill

There is 50 years between me and the two teenage girls; I have never heard about a German pop star called Bill from a band called Tokio Hotel; I am not sure I want to hear him play or sing, but I have no problems in remembering how it was for me at that age to go to the Beatles concert in Copenhagen or to become more than happy when I got the autograph of the world’s greatest football player, Brasilian Pélé.

So it is not difficult to understand the instant heartbroken disappointment, when the two girls, Arina and Angela, arrive at the Madame Tussaud in Berlin to discover that the wax model of their hero Bill has been taken fo Amsterdam for some months!

This very charming short documentary, which has been to festivals, including idfa 2010 and Free Thought in Moscow, and which is produced at the Swedish film school, Dramatiska Högskolan, is a very promising work by the two female directors. They demonstrate first of all the talent for creating a space full of tension and humour for the two girls to move in, they catch and construct moments of truthfulness, they mark the generation gap between the girls and their parents… “for us it’s happiness, what do you have in your life”, is one of the great lines from the girls talking about their addiction to Bill. The special dreamerish world of teenage girls is conveyed brilliantly in this film that (also) has fine camera to be happy about. 

http://www.mycelium.se/

http://www.idfa.nl/industry/tags/project.aspx?id=BE664CA9-B8F3-47FA-8EC6-637581956B51

Sweden, 2010, 28 mins.

The Syrian Revolution

When in Corfu, we asked the Syrian documentary colleagues for a reliable information source to follow the revolution in the country. They referred to the site of LCCS, Local Coordination Committees of Syria. The site is updated daily and includes captions like ”crimes”, ”briefings”, ”eyewitnesses” – texts, photos, videos. Here is the link:

http://www.lccsyria.org/

Photo taken from the site.

Storydoc Session in Corfu/ 1

Documentary film projects from 11 countries, 21 of them, were developed during 5 days at the Ionian University in the city of Corfu. From morning till evening, July 11-15, the filmmakers, directors and producers, had meetings with invited tutors – filmmakers, broadcasters, distributors and all-round generalists. 14 tutors were there to give feed back, in group constellations, on what they saw and read from the filmmakers, who came with teasers and/or material to show. A very simple concept based on conversation and dialogue with the aim to give inspiration, convey knowledge and establish new alliances. Networking. A process that was very much helped by the fact that all participants at the workshop stayed at the same hotel that offered a swimming pool, a beach, a bar and a lobby, relatively cool, where emails could be checked and talks could be continued.

And very much stimulated by the generous and warm hospitality by the Storydoc daily management, the entrepreneur Kostas Spiropoulos and the organiser, often called Madame Storydoc, Chara Lampidou. It can not be easy to make a workshop in a country in deep economical crisis, but they do.

The five day workshop included so-called inspirational lectures and plenary presentations as well as a look at the Arab Spring and its consequences for documentary filmmaking in the involved countries. More about that below. Photo from a plenary session at the university.

www.storydoc.gr

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