First year student at Zelig Documentary film school, Anke Riester, watched this neo-classic for the first time. Here is the review:

For 40 years, Mr. Vig, a 82-year old bachelor from Denmark had a dream: to transform his run-down castle in the heart of the Danish countryside into a Orthodox Russian monastery. Finally his dream seems to come true as the Moscow Patriarchate sends 3 nuns, headed by Sister Ambrosija, to Denmark to get the castle into shape for the final goal. After a lot of renovation works they move in and the castle is approved by the Patriarchate. From now on the nuns share the life of the old man who used to live alone for decades.

The filmmaker follows Mr. Vig in a very intimate way through all the ups and downs that are caused by these new arrangements. The well-educated elderly man is a character every filmmaker is after. He carries the whole film so intensely that as soon as he leaves the frame it becomes hard for the viewer to stay focused. These pauses are filled with images of landscapes which are all mostly similar and too long for “taking a breath”.

The close relationship between Mr. Vig and the filmmaker makes the viewer feel as if he lives next door and this makes it easy to sympathize with this very special old man and his century-old dream. Mr. Vig often forgets the camera and just sees and talks to the person behind it. This gives the movie a very authentic and natural feel as well as a deep insight into the world of his protagonist.

The editing style is very obvious. The cuts are clearly visible, jumping bravely from one situation to another within the interviews with Mr. Vig, combining different parts of his sentences. This technique gives the viewer a feeling of honesty instead of interrupting the flow of the film.

The only problem is that the theme of realising a dream didn´t seem to be enough for the director. She is very determined to try to create a forced love story between Mr. Vig and Sister Ambrosija. This would not would have been necessary because the main story works well enough.The film is even ending with Vig´s death and a citation of a letter that Sister Ambrosija wrote to him after his passing away. In my opinion it would have been a perfect ending to see which dimension Vig´s dream of monastery had finally reached. The end leaves the viewer alone with this unfulfilled expectation. Still it´s a unique story and definitely worth watching.

Denmark, 2006, 84 mins.

PS. “The Monastery” has been reviewed and reported upon several times on this blog.

Livia Romano, first year student at the Zelig Documentary Film School in Bolzano has written this review:

“One, two, three …. MARCH FORWARD!”
Straight at attention, with polished shoes, well-ironed pants and belt buckles shining, young cadets are marching in perfect ordered lines, during the parade of the opening day of a Russian military school. The summer is over and it’s time to return to school desks with order and discipline. Small soldiers are almost drowning in the uncomfortable, stiff uniforms that hide innocent eyes, fresh young faces and childhood dreams.

Three stories, three different ages, three growth processes take us into the world of an adolescence which is in some ways already too grown-up: a seven-year-old boy who talks about the impending separation of his parents, a boy who speaks about the economical crisis during his lunch break, another one who asks a marshal if he has never been afraid to shoot or even a child who should note down everything his comrades do. However, fantasy and game will not succumb under the weight of arms: the mini-cars, piano, first loves, bike rides, games on the bank of a river, yet possible to dream of a childhood devoid of color. The main storyline of the boys is intercut with images of the city, characterized by shades of grey and desaturated colours, underlining well the anxiety and fear of growing up.

Private thoughts and diary entries blend into the tune of an ethereal soundtrack that seems  from one hand to give a breath to the dreams of the cadets, on the other to accentuate the coldness and rigidity of the school where everything must be perfectly in order. This intimate approach is emphasized by delicate camerawork that seems to lightly slide from one story to another as the last tracking shot from one face to another shows.

This is a portrait with special stories that could lead each of us back into our own childhood to the dreams buried there.

Poland, 2010, 34 mins.

http://centralafilm.pl/the-last-day-of-summer

Lucia Alessi, first year student at the Zelig Documentary School in Bolzano, Italy writes this review:

In the extreme north of Russian Federation, along the twelve thousand kilometres who divide the country from the Arctic Sea, there are twelve military bases, which were set up in the fifties to defend the borders of the Soviet Union. There, in “The edge of Russia”, Aleksey, a 19 year old new rookie, has to learn how to face such a hostile nature, gain the respect of his superiors,and be prepared for a foreign attack, which actually will never arrive. The Polish director Michal Marczak carefully moves between the opposites of life, the extremes which make people face themselves.

In a place where going abroad just takes one step, a breath, maybe the same breath that Aleksey learns to hold when his body is freezing, all that is left is just some small black completely isolated spots in the white of the north, uniforms which lost their souls in vodka fumes and the melancholy of old songs, which have nothing but their own past, their previous lives, that can never be shared in that senseless, dehumanizing base. Where a man doesn’t manage to trust his own wife, but is ready to keep his hand under the axe of his mate. Where the only connection to the real world is a Putin portrait on a wall and the celebrations of the Victory day.

An amazing camera brings us into the deep of their daily life, the small details which build up the days, where nothing happens and everything repeats, in a suspended waiting-for-nothing atmosphere, worthy of the most famous of Beckett’s plays.

Alone in front of themselves, these men are all “boiling in the same pot”, in a symbiothic relation, which will develop their psychical and physical strength. Forced to live a complete faked life, they will learn day by day how to face the unreality to live in a place where no blade of grass grows, to be prepared for an attack that, up to now, has never been, keeping on with a paranoia of the most scary power of the twentieth century, which does not exist any longer.

Poland, 2009, 72 mins.