Punto de Vista Festival

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

Alexis Spraic: Shadow Billionaire

Den amerikanske titel spiller måske sprogligt på en berømt succes. Den blæser sig op, og det holder den slet ikke til. Det er bestemt ikke et værk, der sætter foden i døren. “Den forsvundne millionær” hedder dokumentaren stilfærdigt scherfigsk i sin danske version. Det giver også falske associationer. Der er desværre ingen underfundigheder i den film. Det er derimod ganske ligetil – og dødkedelig – dokumentar mainstream. Sådan interviewbåren så det mærkes autentisk, på den måde skærer vi den historie, forekommer det mig Spraic og hans hold har tænkt. Sådan vil de derude have det. Og her sad jeg så og ville have noget helt andet, først og fremmest et bud fra en sikker fortællerposition på dette usædvanlige menneskes særprægede biografi. Et klogt og dybt og tænkende bud.

Det drejer sig om den mystiske rigmand Larry Hillblom, grundlæggeren af DHL, hans forsvinden ved en flyulykke et sted i Stillehavet, og så det efterfølgende opgør om arven. Det viser sig, at han har børn, adskillige faktisk. Så forskningsinstitutionen, som havde troet den skulle have det hele, kommer i økonomisk knibe og måske i moralsk dilemma. Advokaterne slås og nupper deres del af pengene.

Spraic gør det til en kulørt historie, til en uskøn historie, til en banal ugebladshistorie, overfladisk og småsnerpet og smagende faktisk. En historie som dem i Rapport i gamle dage. Og det var jo ikke, hvad jeg ventede i Dokumania, så jeg er skuffet. 

Dokumania viser den kommende måned filmen på sin hjemmeside. Se selv filmen efter i sømmene, det kan være jeg tager helt fejl.

http://www.dr.dk/DR2/Dokumania#/18569 

DOKLeipzig Focus on Arab Spring

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

The End of Pitching Sessions/ 2

Lithuanian producer Dagne Vildziunaite writes after the Baltic Sea Forum in Riga – a perfect follow-up to the doc-discussion on this site:

I usually say it was nice to meet you again. But this time I want to say a bit more. During five hours trip home (from Riga to Vilnius, ed.) I got into melancholic mood and realized it is exactly 4 years after the first time I “came on the international documentary stage”. It was also in Riga I was pitching ANTIS by Giedre Z, the project I sometimes thought we would never be able to finish…

All I remember from that time was me shaking in front of Nick Fraser from BBC.

This year I came back with an almost finished film, with two beautiful new projects (“Toys” and “Father”, ed.), with more hopes than fears and with much better understanding what documentary filmmaking means to me. I think I have found the way and I am 100% sure I would never had done it without the support by the wonderful tutors I have. Let me be a bit emotional and confess how happy I was to see your proud faces while us making confident speeches. I felt like delivering final words after getting university diploma and feeling inspiring smiling eyes of my two professors (hmmm, Mikael Opstrup and Tue Steen Müller, ed.). I feel a constant deep need to make you feel proud of us, to feel how worthy your work and support for me and for many others is.

I may sound like a small girl waiting for confirmation that she is nice and good. But the reality is I’m travelling, pitching for quite a long time, still have not received any CEs’ support but every day I wake up with a stronger and stronger believe about what I’m doing.

And even more – this time after the meetings with all the CEs, after talking and looking in their eyes, I really understood they are not simple ” free travellers”.

They are people who do care (no matter if they have money or not)  and I think this is something exceptional that makes our documentary community alive under any conditions. We are like a small country that suffers the most during any crisis but at the same time is the most united and resistant.

We have our strong inside discussions, arguments and disappointments about each other, but we all together are searching for the way how to survive. I guess it is because we all  – filmmakers, funders, CEs –  all are in love with our babies “documentaries” and we simple can not imagine we could live without them. I am sure we’ll meet very soon again!

dagne@justamoment.lt

http://www.dokweb.net/en/ex-oriente-film/upcoming-films/-toys-4905/?off=45

http://www.mediadesklatvia.eu/baltic-sea-forum-for-documentaries-2011/

News from Paris: Goodbye Mubarak!

This blog has followed with great interest the popular uprising in the Arab world, the good news and the bad news. Coming home to Paris after the vacation, the first results of how the situation translates into films are starting to come out. Here are two of them, both regarding Egypt, surely there are others and much more will come, hopefully many Arab voices too.

Goodbye, Moubarak!, written and directed by Katia Jarjoura, was filmed before and during the elections in Egypt in November and December last year. The crew worked under very difficult circumstances, filming without official authorization in a dictatorship, that nobody knew at the time where about to take its last breaths. We get to meet the heroic hardworking opposition, hear the hair-raising, nearly hilarious discourse of the official political power and get a rare insight of the Egyptian society just before it all cracks up; the repression, the exasperation, the fear and the courage. As Katia Jarjoura mentioned at the preview of the film at la Scam Tuesday night, this film was thought to be visionary, instead it became a historical document! The story of the film is of course told through this new perspective and gives an instructive view of the background of the revolution and its different protagonists and stakes. I highly recommend that you take a look at Arte on Wednesday night September 21 if you have the possibility.

And to follow up on the story of Egypt, I very much look forward to see Tahrir Liberation Square by Stefano Savona, screened at the Locarno Film Festival this year. The film will now be shown on Monday September 19th for the first time in Paris in the always-interesting bar, Le 61, a convivial meeting-place for…

journalism, photography and cinema, in presence of the director and with film critic Jean-Michel Frodon running the debate afterwards.

Stefano Savona (who won the Cinéma du Réel Grand Prize 2011 for his film Palazzo delle Aquile) filmed alone at the Tahrir square in Cairo from January 30th to February 12th and the fall of Mubarak using his Canon 5D Mark II camera. I quote Frodon from his blog Projection Publique at Slate.fr: Neither journalistic, nor historian, his truly artistic gesture is exemplary of the possibilities to think the present through the specific resources of cinema. These possibilities are so rarely realized: we have film archives of the great events of the century, but only very few cinematographic works has been elaborated in the very moment of their occurrence (my translation).

 

Goodbye, Moubarak! (France, 2011, 72 min.) by Katia Jarjoura, prod. AMIP/Arte France. On Arte, Wednesday September 21, 20h40 (also September 22, 10 a.m. and October 3, 2h30 a.m.):

Goodbye, Moubarak! (France, 2011, 72 min.) by Katia Jarjoura, prod. AMIP/Arte France. On Arte, Wednesday September 21, 20h40 (also September 22, 10 a.m. and October 3, 2h30 a.m.): Link to arte.tv

Tahrir Liberation Square (France/Italy, 2011, 93 min.) by Stefano Savona, prod. Picofilms and Dugong Productions in association with Rai 3.

Trailer: http://www.tahrir-liberationsquare.com/trailer.html

Review by Jean-Michel Frodon (in French):

http://blog.slate.fr/projection-publique/2011/08/10/tahrir-locarno-ce-que-voit-le-cinema/

Screened Monday September 19th, 20h, in Bar Le 61, 3 rue de l’Oise, 75019 Paris:

http://www.61paris.fr/2011/09/11/stefano-savona-tahrir-liberation-square/

Ulla Boje Rasmussen: Thors saga /3

Den store fortælling om den magtfulde islandske familie Thors i fire generationer og med vægt på to biografier, den danske udvandrer Thor Jensens og hans oldebarn, finansmanden Björgólfur Thor Björgólfssons vævet ind i Islands politiske og økonomiske historie gennem mere end hundrede år bliver vist på DR K den 18. september 21:00.

http://www.upfrontfilms.dk/

Jeg har på Det Danske Filminstituts FILMupdate skrevet tilbageskuende om nogle af Ulla Boje Rasmussens tidligere film, som på mange måder leder frem til hendes nye filmværk, som jeg opfatter som et meget modigt forsøg på at forene en poetisk observerende dokumentarstil med en speakbåret analyserende, illustreret fremsstilling.

The Syrian Revolution/ 7

Facebook is a very important tool for us to achieve information about what happens in Syria. Filmmaking friends are bloggers, who constantly convey the hard facts about the daily atrocities – while other media give space for analyses connected to realpolitik. Unfortunately for us most of the texts and links posted on facebook appear in Arab language. But there are exceptions. I picked 3 for you

1.

Syria: Security Forces Remove Wounded From Hospital | Human Rights Watch

www.hrw.org

‎(New York) – Syrian security forces forcibly removed 18 wounded people from al-Barr hospital in the central city of Homs on September 7, 2011, including five from the operating room, Human Rights Watch said today, based on reports from witnesses, including doctors.

2.

Dr. Rafah Nashed, 66y, Syria’s leading Psycho-analyst and a prominent psychoanalysis promoter and teacher, a Sorbonne-educated analyst, she’s been abducted today at the Damascus Int’l Airport. Her husband’s inquiry about her was answered with denying she was there. Nashed founded the ‘Damascus School of Psychoanalysis’, teaching, publishing & defending psychoanalysis & its necessity in Syria, she’s been dedicated to helping many reach a better sense of themselves & of the atrocities around them

3.

In this video, dated June 2011, you can see Abdullatif Alwa, from Inkhel, Syria, and his great non-violent attitude, minutes before Security Forces murdered him. Almost four months after that, Syrians are still defending pacifism… and are still being killed. If some violent reactions erupted at some point, in some place, the world has to understand… I will understand while I keep on defending pacifism.

كلنا شهداء حوران: الشهيد البطل محمد عبداللطيف العلوه…

www.youtube.com

‫و الشخص الظاهر في الفيديو هو الشهيد محمد عبد اللطيف العلوه ( الزعبي )ا من مدينة إنخل و قد غناها بعد استشهاد الشهيد ضياء ماجد الشمري بتاريخ 1‬

-4-2011 حيث ظل مع…

http://www.lccsyria.org/1639

The End of Pitching Sessions?

So, no more pitching sessions, the young distributor said to me during the Baltic Sea Forum for Documentaries in Riga? She had followed the Doc Discussion on this blog, and had read the many skeptical texts from filmmakers, who saw the pitching sessions as a kind of show without any content (= money).

What to answer? It is true, and should not be hidden behind halleluja marketing language like ”come to our pitching session and get your film financed”, that the financial situation is pretty weak when it comes to contributions from public broadcasters, and that many leave frustrated with unfulfilled expectations.

On the other hand it was again, having just been to Riga, very encouraging to meet experienced producers bring new talents to the table. There was a focus on their projects for several days, they were discussed, criticised and developed, coalitions were made that can endure and make the films better. A Lithuanian producer, who had been to other pitch events before, is now working on two projects with a German and Belgian editor. An Estonian producer matched with a Georgian director, which made the representative from Estonian Film Foundation say that the door could be open for further funding. And several projects made such a strong promotion that the filmmakers can come back at a later stage. A Swedish director/producer felt that the positive reactions she got in Riga could help her chances at the national film fund. And so on, so forth.

The sessions should definitely continue. And in a realistic workshop-like frame – we meet to bring forward and develop new projects and new talented directors, we meet to create new contacts and strengthen the already existing ones, to sum up, we meet to keep the creative documentary alive!

Not only young talents pitched in Riga – 85 years old Herz Frank (photo from themovingarts.com) went on stage with his exciting story about Larissa, who has married the murderer of Rabin, and have a child with him.

Baltic Sea Forum for Documentaries

It was the 15th edition of the Baltic Sea Forum for Documentaries that ended in Riga yesterday with the presentation of a new project by Herz Frank, ”Without Fear”, to be co-directed by the master himself and Maria Kravchenko, with Guntis Trekteris, Ego Media, as the producer. The catalogue annotation goes like this: ”In 2004 Larissa Trembovler, philosophy professor and mother of four, leaves her husband and marries Yigal Amir – the assasin of Yitzhak Rabin. Three years later she gives birth to their son.” The film is in its early production stage and will definitely receive international support when more material is watchable.

Apart from this presentation from the man, who has inspired generations of filmmakers with his impressive work, the Forum also this time formed the first step for new young talents, in many cases accompanied by experienced producers like Estonian Peeter Urbla, Latvian Antra Cilinska and Lithuanian Rasa Miskinyte.

But there were also filmmakers who came on their own. Gunilla Bresky from Sweden presented ”I Stop Time”, a film that is ”a unique testimony” from the war photographer during the Second World War, Vladislav Mikosha, based on his photos and footage. As well as Georgian Alex Kvatashidze who showed amazing material shot by war reporters, and interviews with some of them reflecting the personal consequences of the profession.

Lithuanian producer Dagne Vildziunaite took part with two very promising projects. One is ”Toys” about people in a small Belorussian city. The young director Lina Luzyte showed me a rough cut  (around 70 minutes) of the film – very promising it was, a new talent from a strong documentary country. The other film project brought by Vildziunaite was ”Father” that is being edited right now, a former criminal, 20 years in jail, 13 children, ”an insatiable lust for life”. Director Marat Sargyan.

Russian producer Vlad Ketkovich also brought two projects to the table, ”Heralds from the Big World” by Tatyana Soboleva, a story about a floating hospital, the people working there and the patients boarding the ship, and ”Men’s Choice” by Elena Demidova, about men going to the North to do shift work. The energetic producer deserves credit for bringing Russian talented directors to the international documentary community.

Photo from the production of Ego Media, “Chronicles from the Last Temple” about the Latvian National Library, the coming city monument of Riga, director: Davis Simanis.

http://www.mediadesklatvia.eu/baltic-sea-forum-for-documentaries-2011/

Doc Discussion/ 11

Mikael Opstrup writes: Dear Louise, Thanks a lot for your thoughts on the future for documentary. I think you are pointing out the right issues, I will try to address a few of them.

For me this debate started with the question about independent feature film docs and the decreasing TV financing that the filmmakers meet when pitching at the many sessions around Europe and abroad.

It’s been easy to see that over the last 5 years it has become much more difficult and this of course causes frustration. Frustration can be very negative but it can also be the starting point of new ideas and necessary changes. I think this is key issue. Think back, the technical changes have always changed art and the production conditions. And that’s where we are, digitalization and the web is changing almost everything: TV, production, distribution etc.

What is hasn’t changed is storytelling, the need for strong stories is eternal. So – still focusing on documentary and TV – I think we need to see it like this:

Storytelling, no problem. The technical development offers a variety of newshooting and distribution formats, in fact it’s much richer than the existing slot-length tyranny. TV programming, where the film is available online, needs no length limitations. The web, mobiles, VOD etc. opens to all kinds of formats. Where it will take us is extremely difficult to predict and I think we will have to live with the financing-limbo for some years but at a longer perspective I think the development offers more opportunities than restrictions.

Feature length ‘creative documentary’, the format we know today, will have a smaller place in the television of tomorrow. So in terms of financing I think we need to think differently. Of course the national or regional funding will have to

be strengthened. Whether it’s realistic (I’m not thinking of the current financial crisis but beyond this) I’m not sure but it’s for sure necessary. But also other ‘non-media’ funding is important and I could imagine that the sales agent will play a bigger role here – the professionals who know the increasingly fragmented market. We see more and more players who are mediators in finding funding that relates to the subject or the format and I think that today’s sales agents need to go down this road as well.

And again I would like to raise the question of future cinema, which will be totally digital. The cinema is THE place for many creative documentaries but audience wise it’s always been for fiction. Of course the cost reduction from 35mm to bits is one thing but it will probably also open the cinema to sports events, concerts etc, and this could break down the fiction-tradition of this temple and pave the way for documentary.

Enough for now, it’s getting dark in Riga, Latvia where the Baltic Sea Forum in its 15th year one again holds a variety of wonderful projects that will be pitched in 2 days – and for quite a few of they face some financial difficulties! Yesterday I saw the strong film “Give up Tomorrow” (photo) by Michael Collins and Marty Syjuco – stresses the importance of the documentary genre go and see it!

Let’s keep up discussion …

Mikael Opstrup was a producer of international documentaries since the 90’s. He worked as production Adviser at The Danish Film Institute 1998-2002 and was from 2002 – 2008 co-owner of Final Cut Productions in Copenhagen. He is currently Head of Studies at EDN (European Documentary Network).