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

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