IDFA Starts Today/1

The without any doubt biggest in audience and most important documentary film festival for the professional community kicks off today in Amsterdam and goes on until November 28. Edition number 23 it is, that will welcome an audience with more than 100.000 spectators in numbers, and around 2000 guests. A text clip from the site:

”Amsterdam will be home to the international documentary world until Sunday 28 November. As well as the more than 300 documentaries on the program, there will be 450 Q&As after the screenings and three debates… Around 2000 national and international guests will be attending IDFA over the coming week and a half. As well as being the place where documentary directors come together, IDFA’s FORUM and Docs for Sale marketplaces also make the festival a meeting place for film buyers, festival programmers, producers, commissioning editors and other documentary professionals from home and abroad.”

The opening galla screening is tonight, ”Position among the Stars” by Leonard Retel Helmrich, his third part of a trilogy on a family in Indonesia, but the audience can already from this morning go to the cinema and discover what is new and/or enjoy old masters. We have earlier on written about the selection of the Top 10 of Finnish director Pirjo Honkasalo to be screened at the festival – this is of course followed by a retrospective of the director’s masterpieces like ”Tanjuska and the 7 Devils”, ”Atman”, ”Mysterion” and ”3 Rooms of Melancholia” (PHOTO). A very well deserved hommage to a true auteur in world documentary film. She does not like films to be watched on small screens, dvd or online – but I dare to recommend that if you google her name and titles you will get many possibilities to get hold of them, including (for our Danish readers ”3 Rooms of Melancholia”) the public library lending system.

www.idfa.nl

http://bibliotek.kk.dk/ting/object/710100%3A25548388

IDFA Starts Today/2

Many of the 300 films at the festival in Amsterdam have been noticed or reviewed at filmkommentaren.dk. From the programme of today ”Armadillo”, ”Steam of Life”, ”Last Train Home” and ”Erotic Man” can be mentioned…

But if I were at idfa today I would choose to re-watch the film about Kongo Müller (PHOTO: Der Lachende Mann) by the GDR fillmmakers and journalists Heynowski and Scheumann. It is from 1966 (and should be available on dvd according to my google search). This is what it is about:

”Posing as West German journalists, East German documentary filmmakers Heynowski and Scheumann pay a visit to the notorious Nazi-turned-mercenary Siegfried “Kongo” Müller, pump him with booze, and get him to talk. Müller fought in Congo’s civil war in the 1960s, and the more Pernod he imbibes, the more fascinating this interview becomes. He asserts that blacks are no better than animals and shares his dream of enlisting in the U.S. Army to fight communism in Vietnam and beyond. He flaunts his military paraphernalia, including the Iron Cross he was awarded in Germany in 1945, and proceeds to deny his earlier statements about civil killings, the ethics of war, and the defense of Western libertarian values. This documentary tour de force is interspersed with pictures of Müller and his comrades proudly posing with severed skulls, and it touches on other Nazis who are active in Africa as well as American world dominance.”

For those who are not able to go to idfa, the generous festival offers you to follow the festival in daily reports. Go to the site below, to the ”IDFA TV, the online channel, streaming various complete documentaries free of charge, as well as trailers, festival reports, master classes and more”.

http://www.idfa.nl/industry/idfa-tv.aspx

IDFA Starts Today/3

… and is, as mentioned above, also the place to go for professionals who are looking for films for their tv channels, or for festival programmers. Around 500 films are available for the accredited guests, who are there to select films for us, the spectators in front of the tv screen and/or at festivals. It is all digitalized and to give you an impression of the activity, the figures of 2009 were as follows: 460 films had 9312 in 9 days.

On top of that: From 2008 Docs for Sale launched a new online platform where buyers and exhibitors ” can view documentaries whenever they want and wherever they are. Buyers and festival programmers who can’t make it to Amsterdam therefore still have the opportunity to catch up with the Docs for Sale selection.”

”The Docs for Sale catalogue of online films contains titles selected for IDFA festival, as well as important documentaries that don’t deserve to be shelved just yet. The catalogue is continuously updated throughout the year.”

I can confirm that this initiative is of a high quality both in terms of available films and quality of image and sound.

As is the professionalism of The Forum where filmmakers come with their film projects to pitch them (this year November 22-24) to commissioning editors and other financiers. If you want to see what films might be ready in the coming couple of years, visit the site below. I have often, in connection with other festivals, and especially when it comes to the North American market, complained about the ignorance of the originality of Eastern European documentaries – this is not the case at idfa, and I am happy to see 7 projects from that part of world on the list for presentation.

PHOTO: Katka by Helena Trestikova, Czech Republic, in competition at idfa 2010.

http://www.idfa.nl/industry/markets-funding/the_forum/forum-online-catalogue/forum-selection-2010.aspx

Ada Bligaard Søby: De nøgne fra Skt. Petersborg/2

På den nyligt afsluttede Cph:Dox festival modtog Ada Bligaard Søbys De nøgne fra Skt. Petersborg en delt pris Danish:Dox Award (sammen med Jakob Boeskovs Empire North), som bedste danske dokumentarfilm. 

Juryen begrundede valget af De nøgne fra Skt. Petersborg med instruktørens særligt kreative udtryk og evne til vedholdende at være i stand til at imponere sit publikum med et stærkt visuelt udtryk: “Scenerne er bundet sammen med et unikt blik og en meget personlig palet af farver, situationer, stemninger og følelser.”

Vi har også her på bloggen længe været glade for Bligaard Søbys arbejder, om De nøgne fra Skt. Petersborg skrev jeg blandt andet: ”Scene efter scene stilles i kø i disciplineret række og forbindes kontrapunktisk med interview- og dialogmateriale, dokumentariske beretninger i løsreven fastholdelse. Det er meningsfuldt i en ganske anden narration end den normale danske tradition; og det er befriende, så befriende.”

Ada Bligaard Søbys filmografi er flot, tegner en usædvanlig disciplin og vedholdenhed, og ser man filmene i række, opdager man en trofasthed over for temaernes fortsatte bearbejdning, de giver stadigt mere og nyt fra sig: Complaints Choir (2009), Black Heart (2008), Meet me in Berlin (2007) og American Losers (2006).

Camera, Laptop, Action: The New Golden Age of Docu

… is the headline of a long, interesting article in the Observer sunday November 7. It serves as a follow-up to the Sheffield Doc/Fest that has been covered excellently by the Guardian, see site address below.

The Observer article (written by Sean O’Hagan) examines how cheap technology is allowing film-makers to stretch the form as never before. To get wise words on that perspective, director and film critic/historian Kevin Macdonald is interviewed. Here is a bit of text from the article that is very much to be recommended:

“The form is certainly being stretched more than ever,” says the director Kevin MacDonald, who has made feature films (The Last King of Scotland), documentaries (One Day in September) and merged the two (Touching the Void). “But documentary is a generous basket that can hold a lot of different things. If you think about it, journalism, letter-writing, memoir, satire – they all qualify as non-fiction, so why can’t the same loose rules apply to documentary?”

To this end, MacDonald is currently working on the first feature-length documentary made entirely of user-generated content shot in a single day and then uploaded on to YouTube. Called Life In A Day, the impressionistic film is currently being edited down by MacDonald from 5,000 hours of footage from 190 countries. It will premiere as a three-hour documentary at next year’s Sundance festival. “It’s amateur film-making on a grand scale,” says MacDonald. “But, because the participants are often showing such incredibly intimate things that you could not get in a traditional documentary unless you spent months filming, it is also ground-breaking in ways that we did not expect.”

In the end, says MacDonald, it all comes down to great storytelling. “The irony is that, when I make a documentary, I always feel like I am taking all this real material and trying to tell a story almost as if it was a fictional narrative. When I make a fictional film, I do the opposite.”

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2010/nov/07/documentary-digital-revolution-sean-ohagan

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/sheffield-doc-fest

Godard Discussed Again Again…

We have posted several texts on the ever original and non-conventional 79 year old Jean-Luc Godard, especially in connection with his newest film ”Film Socialisme”. This sunday (November 14) Guardian has an interesting article that starts like this:

It should have been a typical acting love-in of the type the beautiful and rich elite of Hollywood do so well. At a lavish dinner last night, the acclaimed French director Jean-Luc Godard was given an honorary Oscar alongside other established greats such as Francis Ford Coppola and the actor Eli Wallach.

There was the usual banquet, mutual backslapping and enough air-kissing to inflate a zeppelin – but that was where the parallels with orthodox movie award ceremonies ended. For not only did the recipient of the gong fail to show up, but he was, in absentia, the subject of fierce debate over whether or not his long commitment to highlighting the plight of Palestinians has crossed over into antisemitism. The question on many people’s lips was: is Godard anti-Zionist or is he anti-Jewish?

… and later on: The reclusive 79-year-old certainly has a long history of supporting the Palestinians, including filming Until Victory, which told the story of the Palestinian struggle against Israel. He once admitted that his grandfather had “ferociously” disliked Jews. “He was anti-Jew; whereas I am anti-Zionist, he was antisemitic,” the director once said.

Read the whole article at:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2010/nov/14/jean-luc-godard-oscar-antisemitism

Memorimage 2010/1

In Reus, a city a bit more than one hour’s drive from Barcelona, there is a film festival called Memorimage. It is quite unique in its basic philosophy. It deals with ”today’s films with yesterday’s images”, as it is being formulated by one of the organisers of a documentary festival that offers its audience to watch films based on the creative use of archival footage.

Around 20 films in the programme, 6 awards, and a diversity of subjects that range from a found, unfinished nazi propaganda film from the Warsaw ghetto ( ”A Film Unfinished” (PHOTO) by Israeli Yael Hersonski) to a film (”All the Night Long” by Isaki Lacuesta) that evokes the memories of when Ava Gardner came to Costa Brava in 1960 to play in a film called ”Pandora”.

Audience? A nice number of people were entering the cinemas and great it was to see students from the local university in the dark. The organisers had done a lot to target their audience and got around 200 students to be involved. They had chosen to watch documentaries on a big screen as part of their studies and got curriculum credits for that. For many a new world to discover away from the online downloads of films or the dvd loans from the local videoshop. Film education in other words. The programme also included morning screenings for seniors, and for school children, who had conversations with the international directors present.

”Once again we are setting out down the memory lane”, another quote from the organisers. I was there for the second time to sit on the jury. Read more about it below and on the site.

www.memorimagefestival.org

Memorimage 2010/2

The main awards of the festival were given to the Israeli film ”Jaffa, the Orange’s Clockwork” by Eyal Sivan, and to ”La Isla – Archives from a tragedy” by German Uli Stelzner. Both of them are strong political films, rich in content and style. As is ”Hugo Pratt in Africa” (PHOTO) by Swiss-Italian director Alfredo Knuchel, who in a labyrinthic form describes the fascinating connection between the father of Corto Maltese and the Ethiopia, he grew up in during the fascist Italian occupation of the country. The film was given the Mémorimage prize as the best production. A film about Barcelona and its rich families, and their business and private lives, mostly the latter got the prize for the best research. The director, Mireia Ros, tells the story by using a lot of cinematic means to make the huge amount of family archive material come alive in an entertaining and playful way.

Mémorimage has a unique concept for a festival. In terms of number of titles, and audience, the festival is among the smaller festivals – in terms of a focus on how films can make a new, or a re-interpretation of our common history, based on private or official audiovisial material, the festival can – after these first five editions – become an international meeting point for filmmakers, historians, researchers and ordinary curious film buffs. And at the same time inspire a Catalan audience to look at their own history with critical eyes.

www.memorimagefestival.org

http://www.hugoenafrique.com/

Ditte Haarløv Johnsen: Hjemløs

Det har da vist ikke altid været sådan? At næsten hver ny film har mindst to historier, fortællinger, tekster, dagsordener? Der er filmen selv som værk, og så er der, ofte længe før filmen er fremme, historien om dens tilblivelse. Nogle instruktører lader de to historier vokse sammen, men det gør Ditte Haarløv Johnsen bestemt ikke, og det er måske filmens problem, at den skuffer forventningen, fordi meget af dens stof på forhånd er brugt op, så den må leve af fraklip så at sige. Skønt klipperen i dette tilfælde bestemt mener, at det som er tilbage, netop er essensen, hvad der fremgår af historien om tilblivelsen. Som Haarløv Johnsen fortæller det til Jesper Bo Petersen (Ekko, november 2010) mærkes det, at hun ikke selv er helt sikker, men hun var og er loyal over for klipperen: ”Det er først og fremmest takket være min klipper Jeppe Bødskov, at det er lykkedes at sortere fragmenterne. Med sit klare og usentimentale blik på materialet forstod han at skære ind til essensen, der hvor jeg selv var forblændet af at være så dybt begravet i alt det, der skete udenom.”

Det, der skete udenom, var vistnok først og fremmest en stor, dramatisk kærlighedshistorie, måske banal i det ydre, men i Ditte Haarløv Johnsens sind rigt facetteret og mærkelig og vanvittig. Interviewet løfter en flig af forhænget for den oprivende fortælling. I filmen er den slet ikke med. Hendes fascination af den elskede markeres af hans integrerede smykkebrug, hans anderledeshed, hans forankring i grønlandsk kultur og tilværelsesforståelse. Og sådan videre i interviewets dybt interessante fortælling om dagene med ”druk, joints, ballade og bræk”.

Stort set intet af dette er overført til filmen. I hvert fald kun antydningsvist. Det vigtigste er det med kysseafstanden, som det så smukt udtrykkes i interviewet, altså selve hengivelsen med kameraet. Billederne er gennemgående meget tætte og intense. Præcist nærværende. Men de forbliver øjeblikke, glimtvise markeringer, samles ikke til hele scener af filmpoesi. Sker det, føjes der totaler til og æstetikken svinger over i ren reportage med journalistikambitioner. Det skader fordybelsen og giver plads til en slags social indignation, som der bare ikke er belæg for. Som de tre venner, som filmhistorien koncentrerer sig om, opfører sig, er de blot tre alkoholikere i gang med at drikke sig ihjel. Deres skæbne kan det være meget, meget svært at engagere sig i filmkunstnerisk, og det lykkes heller ikke. Det ender som cases for professionelle socialarbejdere. Der er fine, fine tilløb i det lyriske stofs behandling, men det socialrealistiske stof er traditionelt demonstrerende: her er noget galt. Javist er noget galt, men sagen er, at det var meget, meget værre i virkeligheden. Det fremgår af historien i Jesper Bo Petersens tekst.

Senere: Min blogkollega Tue Steen Müller meddeler i en mail fra Memorimage festivalen, hvor han, som det ses ovenfor, arbejder disse dage: “… jeg fandt den (Hjemløs) meget intens, meget vellykket med en fantastisk energi i stort alle scener. Hun er bogstaveligt talt tæt på hele tiden og de bliver stærke karakterer for mig.” Det har læserne af Filmkommentaren og Ditte Haarløv Johnsen krav på at vide, mener jeg.

Ditte Haarløv Johnsen: Hjemløs Danmark 2010, 55 min. Fotografi: Ditte Haarløv Johnsen og Minka Jakerson, klip: Jeppe Bødskov, lyd: sylvester Holm og Frank Mølgaard Knudsen, musik: Mark Solborg, produktion: Nature & science www.naturescience.dk ved producer Anders Drud Jordan. DR2 i aftes på Dokumania. Vises i dag og fredag på Cph:Dox.

News from Paris : Le Mois du film documentaire

November is the month of documentary films in France, Le Mois du Doc opens this weekend for the 11th time: More than 1200 sites, nearly 3000 showings and an audience of around 150.000. This event was created by the association Images en Bibliothèques with the objective to coordinate visibility on a national level and to highlight the fine collections of documentary films that French libraries (now a days called médiathèque) have in their possession. These collections are often considerable and rare, thanks to the deliberate politics of the French Ministry of Culture giving resources and freedom to the video librarian over the last 20 years. Le mois du Doc has grown into a major event helped by an overall growing popular interest in documentary films (Arte has had an important role here) and now includes cinemas and French cultural institutions abroad. A large majority of the showings are followed by debates, permitting filmmakers and audience to meet.

http://www.moisdudoc.com/

One of the places where le Mois du Doc is hosted in Paris, is at la Bibliothèque publique d’information (Bpi) at the Pompidou Centre. From November 6th to November 28th the cycle Filmer l’invisible (Filming the invisible) runs in the Cinéma 1 of the Centre. The program is a journey in contemporary documentary organised by Catherine Blangonnet. The films (by Rithy Panh, Alexandre Sokourov and many others) are from all around the world, but all from the last decade, 30 films in 23 showings.

Link to the Pompidou Centre

Here is a translation of the presentation of the program:

The last decade has shown a great formal invention to explore the different levels of reality: the intimate, the political, the sociological, the mythological. It is this imagination and this freedom this program aims to reflect in its diversity.

Despite the title, you will find no mythical, supernatural or religious dimension. What is in question here, is the capacity of documentary films to reveal what was to remain invisible without the eye of the filmmaker, to make visible something of the world until then unnoticed.

As different as the themes they go about are, all the selected films goes beyond the limits of their “subject” and offers the possibility of unexpected perceptions.

This program will try to establish that there is no need to show or to demonstrate to be able to understand or feel and that documentary, although it is an invitation to reflection, has less to do with knowledge than with the relation with the other.

http://www.bpi.fr/fr/la_saison_culturelle/cinema/filmer_l_invisible.html