Buried Alive – The Chilean Mine Rescue

I did not get the name of the director of this Channel4 production but it does not matter as the film was without any authored point of view – a mere report about what happened, chronologically structured with interesting and clearly explained facts about the different rescue plans in technical terms, and some interviews about the drilling experts on location.

No surprises, no filmic ideas, a quickly produced programme with terrible muzak meant to make us emotionally involved.

It was much more emotional to see the direct unedited footage at the news when the actual rescue took place. So short ago.

A cynical market it is – loads of fiction films are also on its way – who comes first, but when does a well made documentary come about the miners in Chile. Take your time, we can wait. At least we spectators, not the tv channels apparently.

UK, 50 mins., watched on DR1 17.11.2010

News from Paris: Armadillo in France

The Danish documentary Armadillo, Grand Prix at la Semaine de la Critique in Cannes this year, is getting ready to take in France. Distrib Films is in charge of the distribution and the film will be launched December 15th with 40 to 60 copies in the French theatres (MK2, CGR a. o.).

Press showings takes place next week and a special screening is organised in la Maison du Danemark in Paris Tuesday night November 23rd followed by debate in the presence of the director Janus Metz (unfortunately no more seats are available). The film will be released on DVD in France in April 2011.

Filmkommentaren will be following closely how the film is received in France.

http://distribfilms.com/Armadillo

Cinema Vérité in Iran – Winners

We have written about the Cinema Vérité documentary film festival, held in Tehran from November 7-12 under the slogan “Reality for All” – see below. The winners of the festival have been announced like this:

Iran’s 4th Cinema Verite International Documentary Film Festival has announced winners during a ceremony held in the capital city of Tehran. Iranian filmmaker Siavash Sarmadi won the event’s Best Film Award for his political documentary Searching for Reality. The festival’s Best Film Award in the international section went to French director Nicolas Philibert’s Nenette. Veteran filmmakers Morteza Sha’bani and Khosrow Sinai were also honored with lifetime achievement awards during the event’s closing ceremony.

Other national section award winners of this year’s festival were as follows: Best Short Film: Live Desert, Hossein Safi. Best Mid-length Film: Ariobarzanes, Khosrow Heidari. Best Cinematographer: Hossein Safi for Snails. Best Editor: Bahareh Khorrami and Roya Majdnia for Dim Room, Twilit Window. Best Narrator: Shahram Derakhshan for The People Who Have Everything,Best Sound Effects: Akbar Ebrahimi for Live Desert

The festival screened films from Turkey, Sweden, Canada, the US, Argentina, France, Germany, China and Brazil among many others.

http://en.shortfilmnews.com/shownews.asp?id=2146463716

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