Dox Box Impressions/3

Three projects were given a financial support at the end of the presentation day at Dox Box Campus 2011:

”Brakes” by Bassel Shehade received the ”Best Syrian Project Grant” of 6000$ (previous title: Female Wheels).

”My Uncle. ”The Terrorist”” by Elias Moubarak from Lebanon received the ”Dubai Film Market Development Grant” of 5000$.

”Woman With a Camera” by Karima Zoubir (photo) from Morocco received ”Best Arab Project Grant” of 3000$.

More information on the winning projects can be achieved by contacting the Dox Box festival and Campus staff. Or me!

www.dox-box.org

Dox Box Impressions/2

I am listening to Cara Mertes from the Sundance Institute, she has a power point presentation. Behind her is a quote by Robert Redford: Because audiences are starved for new ideas, voices and visions… as a motivation to set up the festival and the Sundance Documentary Film Program. It is film culture and not television we are focusing on, she says.

The room is full of young upcoming filmmakers from this region, where history happens every day. Yesterday the demonstrators were attacked at the Tahrir Square in Cairo, Libya is burning, in Saudi demonstrations are banned… The filmmakers from Egypt go online several times during the day to check the news.

Women, young women are here and they might not have professionally developed projects yet, but they have strong proposals and treatments:

A Moroccan filmmaker wants to make a film about a woman, who makes wedding videos in a male society. A Syrian filmmaker wants to make a film about three different women, one, in her fifties, who is totally open to talk about her sexuality, one who is raised in a strict religious environment and the filmmaker herself, who takes experience from her own hard upbringing. A Jordanian filmmaker who wants to make a film about a girl, who was brought up in orphanages and has fought her way out of misery, and is very much helped by the filmmaker herself. Who by the way used to play in the Jordanian national football tema for women… yes, you get surprised in this training Campus at the Dox Box Festival, you learn a lot from the participants, you get alternative information and is told not to trust BBC and other Western media, or the Al Jazeera. This is why documentaries are so important, is it not?

Robert Redford talks from the screen, it is about bringing people together – as they are doing here in Damascus.

http://www.sundance.org/

www.dox-box.org

Photo: There are still demonstrators at the Tahrir Square (Ekstra Bladet, Copenhagen some days ago)

Dox Box Impressions/1

There is no revolution in Damascus – small demonstrations in front of the Egyptian and Libyan embassy were stopped immediately by the authorities – but there are many revolutionaries among the participants at the Dox Box Campus that runs parallel and as an integrated part of the Dox Box documentary film festival. The Egyptian young filmmakers were all on the Tahrir Square in February when freedom was in the air. ”They all want to make documentaries now”, says one of the participants with a smile. A former stewardess she is here to promote a film project about a young woman with a hearing problem – who expresses herself through paintings, as the director does through her film. Both come from a background with mothers who protect them in a way that is also caging them. A soul-sister documentary.

Smoke is in the air in Damascus, must be the most smoking city in the world!, but ideas are also floating in the rooms of the Dox Box festival, where filmmakers meet mentors and funders. A young Lebanese male director has an exciting film project called ”My Uncle the Terrorist” – Fouad Chemali was one of the main figures behind the Black September movement, a poet, a lawyer and a political activist. He died in 1972 before the happenings at the Olympics in Munich. The director – through his mother and the brother of Fouad, and several other people who knew Fouad – wants to make a film ”from inside” wanting to understand who he was and why he decided to go for the planning of the Munich massacre on Israeli sportsmen.

And what about a film from Saudi Arabia about entertainers… in a country where there are no cinemas, public concerts do not happen. A flamboyant director presents the film here in Damascus – characters so far in the film are a stand-up comedian and a magicien, in will come, probably, a musician and a filmmaker. 

What can you do as a mentor… inspire, encourage, inform, I would say… Among the mentors is cinematographer Kirsten Johnson, who shot ”The Oath” (PHOTO)together with Laura Poitras, and who is very generously sharing her advice to the Middle East participants hungry for inspiration. It is indeed a scoop for the festival to have her present, one thing is to be a good cinematographer, another is to have the pedagogical skills to convey what you are doing.

www.dox-box.org

News from Paris: Richard Leacock: The Feeling…

Documentary pioneer Richard Leacock will be celebrating his 90th birthday June 18th of this year. He has been working on his memoirs for several years and now the book is finally ready to be published.

The Feeling of Being There – a filmmaker’s memoir is not only the story of Leacock’s own life; it is also a journey through almost the entire history of documentary cinema seen from the inside. Richard Leacock made his first film, Canary Bananas, in 1935 at the age of 14 and finishished his last film, A Musical adventure in Siberia, in 2000.

Leacock was the first person ever to film the Galapagos Islands; participated in the second world war and filmed the battle for Burma and the Japanese surrender at Nanking; he was a cinematographer for Flaherty (Louisiana Story); a pioneer of Direct cinema; made together with Drew Associates (Drew, Pennebaker, Maysles…) the first document following a campaign filming the primary elections opposing J. F. Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey in Primary (1960) and again, following closely the confrontation of Alabama governor George Wallace versus John F. and Robert Kennedy, caught a key moment of the implementation of civil rights in America in Crisis (1963); he has made amazing portraits of musical geniuses (Stravinsky, Bernstein…); Leacock-Pennebaker produced Happy Mother’s Day, Monterey Pop and Don’t Look Back and had a chaotic collaboration with Godard (1 A.M., to become 1 P.M.); Leacock developed and taught at the documentary film department at M.I.T. from 1968 to 1989 and made highly innovative projects with the M.I.T. Media Lab; had an intimate encounter with Louise Brooks resulting in Lulu in Berlin (1984) and so much more…

It is fascinating to read and as Leacock has always been on the forefront of innovative media, his book is not just to read, it includes over a hundred film quotes functioning as visual footnotes, because, as he states in the introduction, “writing about film has much in common with writing about wine: you can’t taste the wine by reading. Well, I think you have a similar problem when you write about films: you can’t see the movies on the printed page. So it occurred to me that if I embed excerpts, and often entire films, within the book, then you, the reader, could actually experience what I am talking about” (excerpt from the introduction).

Leacock lives in France with Valerie Lalonde with whom he has made films with since 1989. The Feeling of Being There – a filmmakers memoir will be published this summer by the non-profit association Canary Banana Films and the French publisher Semeïon Editions.

You can read more about the book and how to contribute to the project here:

http://www.canarybananafilms.com/memoir.html

More about Richard Leacock here:

http://www.richardleacock.com/#14862/About-Richard-Leacock

Dox Box 2011

Fourth edition of a festival – without Omar Amarilay, see below – that deserves a lot of respect for its ambition to show creative documentaries from all over the world to an audience that normally has no chance at all to get to watch them. For a bit more than a week Diana El Jeiroudi and Orwa Nyrabia, the founders and leaders of the festival, together with their team, offer the Damascus audience diversity and quality – at the same time as they develop their so-called industry section that includes a week of project development of documentary projects from countries like Syria, Jordan, Morocco, Lebanon, Egypt and Algeria. Danish Mikael Opstrup from EDN (European Documentary Network), American cinematographer Kirsten Jonsen, American editor Amanda Laws, Dutch/Croatian director and teacher Rada Sesic and this blogger are the tutors for a programme that also involves a pitching session to a panel of funds and tv channels, as well as a retrospective and a masterclass with documentary world star Kim Longinotto.

These films in the programme – I will write about the Syrian and Middle East films when I get to watch them – have been reviewed or noted on filmkommentaren.dk:

Last Train Home, The Arrivals, Chemo (photo), Steam of Life, Katka, Nenette, Village Without Women, Armadillo, Warsaw Available and Men Who Swim.

Boxing Gym by Frederick Wiseman opens at this festival before it goes to cinemas in Paris… just to make you understand the sense for actuality that also characterises the festival in Damascus.

www.dox-box.org

Omar Amiralay

It can only be a very sad opening of the fourth edition of the Syrian documentary film festival Dox Box, that runs from March 2nd to 10th in Damascus. The reason is that the festival will be without THE Syrian documentary filmmaker, Omar Amiralay, who passed away in the beginning of February. Omar was always at the festival, he supported it and he was a leading figure, when initiatives were to be taken to better the documentary environment in the region. He was several times in Denmark, he was often used a juror at international festivals, last time at idfa in Amsterdam, and his own films were shown all over the world. An important name in modern documentary history, a dedicated author, and a mild and generous gentleman, who made films that were and are still not publicly available in his own country. The organisers of Dox Box write this about him:

On the fifth of February, 2011, we missed a friend, a mentor and a partner. Omar Amiralay was the pioneer who planted the seed we are cherishing today. A seed of appreciation and respect to the great art of documentary cinema.

Omar made more than 20 films between 1970 and 2004, he made films in Syria, Lebanon, France, Egypt, Pakistan, Yemen and Kuwait. His films constitute an outstanding record of life in Syria and the Lebanese civil war, among other vital topics.

Omar’s role in developing the documentary industry in the Arab world was exceptional, he was a co-founder and the president of the Arab Institute of Film, he closely advised and supported countless young filmmakers around the region, and he was a close and important advisor to DOX BOX since its very beginning. 

With his absence, we miss him, and we continue the journey. 

“Three Films by Amiralay” are in the program of DOX BOX 2011.

www.dox-box.org

Henry Miller – An Observer

Place Clichy, Paris. Montmartre. Where Truffaut shot ”Les Quatre Cents Coups” and Bertrand Blier ”Préparez vos Mouchoirs”. And where Henry Miller found his inspiration for ”Quiet Days in Clichy”, a scandalous success novel. At the restaurant Wepler, to be recommended for its sea food, the menu gives the floor to Miller, for our French readers:

”Je m´y suis assis à la terrasse et à l’intérieur, par tous les temps et à toutes les heures du jour et de la nuit. C’était pour moi un livre ouvert. Tous les visages des garcons, des gérants, des caissières, des putains, de la clientèle et même des dames de lavabos sont gravés dans ma mémoire comme les images dùn livre que j’aurais feuilleté tous les jours”.

Henry Miller, literary documentarian!

Café Wepler, Paris

Gainsbourg Forever

Tomorrow, 2nd of March, it is twenty years ago that the French artist icon, Serge Gainsbourg, died. This is being celebrated by the French. Yesterday the daily newspaper ”Libération” brought a black & white poster photo with ”Gainsbourg nu”, at least almost naked, staging himself in a position in his bed, smoking a cigarette. The eternal cigarette of the singer, who also brought it to the stage when performing.

The French-German European cultural channel, Arte, of course, dedicated a whole theme evening to Gainsbourg, entitled ”Gainsbourg Forever”, including a quite well done documentary voiced by Jane Birkin, based on the holiday films and videos she made when the two of them lived together. You see the singer being a clown in front of the camera, with his dog, and playing with the daughter of Jane Birkin, Kate, and later with their child Charlotte, destined to be an actress herself. It sounds banal and the images are private from the places they went, always to Venice by the way, but Jane Birkin gives it emotions with her voice-off, full of reactions to what she remembers from when they were together. Unsnobbish, loveable.

Mes images privées de Serge, 2011, 40 mins.

http://www.arte.tv/fr/Echappees-culturelles/Gainsbourg-forever/3712996.html

Archidoc in Paris

The EU MEDIA programme supported training programme Archidoc, organised by the French film school la fémis had its third and final session February 22-25. At this session the 9 participants, who had been tutored by a team led by Israeli director and editor Erez Laufer, pitched their archive based, creative documentaries to a panel of 16 commissioning editors, distributors and international producers. Contrary to other training programmes, Archidoc takes a focus on the directorial development of projects to be ready to meet the demands of a market.

Archidoc has since 2004 been involved in several strong documentaries that have made their way to festivals and a broader audience in the television landscape. Let me mention the recent huge success of Mila Tutajlic, ”Cinema Komunisto” (photo), which is superbly using archive material from Yugoslav feature films, Latvian Peteris Krilovs ”Gustav Klucis. A Deconstruction of an Artist”, which has been shown all over Europe, Catalan Edmond Roch’s entertaining docufiction ”Garbo, the Spy” and ”Metrobranding” by Romanian Ana Vlad and Adi Voicu.

Filmmakers with projects that need a creative development to reach an international audience should check out the programme that will advertise its 2011/2012 edition on the site of la fémis:

www.lafemis.fr

Archidoc. Romain Gary, Walter Benjamin and Fedya

Romain Gary (photo, long after Sofia), also known as Emila Ajar, a legendary French writer, right now subject of a photo exhibition in Paris, was in 1946 sent to Sofia in Bulgaria as a member of the French diplomacy delegation. He was there for two years with his wife Lesley Blanch, had several female relations like one with his Bulgarian secretary, who might have been a spy or just wanted to get help to get out of the country. ”The Bookseller” was the pseudonym given to Gary by the Bulgarian secret service which was following Gary’s life in the Bulgarian capital. The film, to be produced and directed by Assen Vladimirov, veteran in Bulgarian cinema, will be based on the files of the Service, on the memories of Gary, who as a writer was characterised as ”mediocre” by the Service! Vladimirov presented the project in a very entertaining way that fits to the ”funny yet serious” story about a meeting between West and East just after WW2.

Before the war another well known writer and philosopher, Walter Benjamin, was forced into exile in 1933 because of the start of the Nazi hunt on Jews. Benjamin goes to Ibiza, where he stays for one year. While hard times pass in Berlin, Benjamin thinks back on his childhood in the metropol, and starts writing about it. His life on Ibiza and his retro-thinking will be the basis of a film by Andreas Strasser, German director, who has been living in Spain, and who seeks to make the film on the basis of Benjamin’s prose, archive material from the island and from Berlin, as well as archive material made by the director to make Benjamin come alive.

Latvian director Kristine Zelve, however, intends to make a film about a totally unknown Finnish director, Teuvo Tulio, who was born in Latvia and had the nickname Fedya, that will also be the name of the film. Tulio’s name is on a stone monument in his native village, where the inhabitants do not know who he was. A master of melodramatic films, Tulio made his last film in 1972, ”Sensuela”, which was censored as being too erotic, for which reason Tulio withdrew from public life, never made any more films or interviews. In these years he is being taken back to have the recognition he, in the view of many film people, deserves.

Here is only space to mention 3 of the nine projects that were pitched in Paris at the final session of Archidoc. A catalogue can be acquired through:

www.lafemis.fr