… stands for Rencontres Internationales du Documentaire de Montréal and is a 10 day long festival event with ” Dozens of activities: workshops, roundtables, master classes, tributes, kids’ screenings, receptions and parties, and a market “with the mission of supporting and stimulating independent documentary filmmaking and facilitating meetings between professionals, artists, producers, distributors and exhibitors from around the world.”

The dates are November 10-21 and the film programme includes more than 100 films and a good audience – in 2009 28.500. There are several competition sections, and BRAVO also prizes for best camera, best montage etc. Which is unusual in documentary festivals.

Among the films are several that has been reviewed or noticed on this site: “17 August” by Alexander Gutman, “La Danse-le Ballet de lÓpéra de Paris” by Frederick Wiseman, “Steam of Life” by Joonas Berghäll, “Armadillo” by Janus Metz, “Autumn Gold” by Jan Tenhaven, “Disco and Atomic War” by Jaak Kilmi, “Kill the Referee” by Yves Hinant and “Katka” (PHOTO) by Helena Trestikova. And many, many other films, among them several French-Canadian that we seldom see in Europe.

http://www.ridm.qc.ca/en

The night of making some people happy, others disappointed. The award ceremony to hand out more than 70.000€ and statuettes. Speeches and clips. Main prize, The Golden Dove, went to the Swedish film “Vodka Factory” by Jerzy Sladkowski (PHOTO), The Silver Dove to “Steam of Life” from Finland.

The Fipresci Jury, film critics, very rightly awarded “48” and the jury I was part of, the EU prize for safety workplaces (8000€) went to Tomas Kudrna for his “All that Glitters“, which also got the prize for Best East European Documentary given by the local bnroadcaster MDR.

The German competition was won by the film “How to make a Book with Steidl”, an intelligent and well made observation of the publisher,who works with famous artists like the photographer Robert Adams and the legendary Robert Frank and Günther Grass.

All awards and the jury motivations are to be found on

www.dok-leipzig.de

Every monday the opponents to the GDR regime met at the Nikolai church in Leipzig. With candles in their hands – speeches, “stille und schweigend” as said one of the leaders, former priest at the church, Christian Führer, who also referred to the 70.000 people who formed the “Leipziger Ring” on October 9 1989. “Jetzt oder Nie. Demokratie”.

The other day these important moments in the history of Germany were remembered at an award ceremony full of dignity in the church, where the festival and the Stiftung Friedliche Revolution (Peaceful Revolution) inaugurated the first “Leipziger Ring” prize – a beautiful statue and 5000 Euros. The awarded film was from New Zealand, “There once was an island” about a Polynesian culture about to disappear. Festival director Claas Danielsen referred to an 1983 incident where a group of young people welcomed the foreign guests with candles in their hands protesting against the regime – some of them were sentenced to one year of prison, and expressed his joy to the natural connection between current history and the festival. A very special evening it was with speeches, organ music, and a film screening.

www.stiftung-fr.de

www.dok-leipzig.de

Photo: Friedensgebete in der Leipziger Nikolaikirche, 30. Oktober 1989, Gerhard Gäbler.

He has only made 5 films, Sergey Dvortsevoy, but he is one of the most wanted documentarians for the so-called masterclasses. His popularity is huge as the attendance proved at the festival, where the room was packed for the 2 1/2 hour session, where Dvortsevoy  entertained by talking, answering questions and showing clips from his work. I made an interview with the director 15 years ago for Danish television DR, that showed “Paradise”. What Dvortsevoy said on that occasion was exactly the same as here in Leipzig with the difference that he now speaks excellent English and knows how to structure his intervention. A charming showman as one said to me afterwards.

The first clip was – of course – the small boy eating and falling asleep in “Paradise”. Dvortsevoy told about his fights with the Kazakh cameramen, who did not understand that he wanted to have the boy filmed from one angle in long takes and not from different as they were used to. And he told about the problems that the family in the film still has with the authorities: How can you show the world that we are poor and dirty and wash our hair in kefir milk? (As a woman does in a beautiful scene in the film).” I was recently in India and the people told me that it was the same for Satayit Ray… they said to him, you sell poverty”.

Two clips from “Bread Day”: The long opening scene where the women push the wagon and (as the closing of the masterclass session) the goats kissing each other. The film was made on 35mm material (all his films were made on film material) that Dvortsevoy had won as awards for “Paradise”. The film ration was 1:2,5, and he instructed the cameraman NOT to shoot before he said so – “remember that every second costs 3-5$”!

You have to catch what you can not describe… “I love the image, I love life”, was one of many sentences from Dvortsevoy, who said that he is constantly analysing to find the energy in the scenes through the deep image, not the nice image. To the obvious question why he is not making documentaries any longer, he answered that it was so difficult to get funding for his documentaries and that it was also a moral question with reference to the people he has filmed in “Paradise”. More about this is to be found on this site. On the site of the festival you can find a podcast of the masterclass.

www.dok-leipzig.de

… and a jury member means that you are treated well, very well indeed. You are in a nice hotel, you get a per diem so you can go and buy yourself a wienerschnitzel or a curry-wurst, and a beer and lots of coffee, to stay awake and alert when you go to the warm cinema halls or down to the market videotheque, where you get a booth and just need to log in and write the title of the film, and vupti (do you say so in English?) the film comes up on the screen. Full service in other words and good meeting places to say hello to old and new friends. I am in one of the many juries, the one for safe and healthy workplaces, 8 films have been picked from the overall programme, and the jury has to choose one of the 8, a creative documentary on the subject of work.

The local newspaper reports daily on the films and this morning the film journalist characterised the film “48” (PHOTO) by Susana de Sousa Dias as a radiodocumentary with some images connected. He is totally wrong as he can read in the review(s) both Allan Berg and I made after seeing the film at Cinema du Reel this year in March – it got the Grand Prix at that festival.

A couple of grumpy remarks to the otherwise professional festival: Last night a film was cancelled because the projection machine could not screen NTSC HD format – why was that not checked in beforehand? And in the same cinema (Wintergarten), at the repeat of the very same film, the organisers allowed the audience to enter when the projection had started, around ten times getting their faces into the screen! Come on organisers, tell the doormen NOT to allow any entrance during screenings. Respect for the films!

www.dok-leipzig.de

The opening of film festivals is something that veterans like me normally avoid because of boring official speeches and/or a moderator trying to be funny and/or blonds or brunettes in high heels being there for their looks, knowing nothing about what the film festival is there for.

In Leipzig it is different because of the ambition of the festival director to make a long and reflective and personal statement. Last year Claas Danielsen attacked television for their poor programming and funding of the creative/artistic documentary and this year he had chosen a more soft approach asking the audience “to see and hear with the heart” – and act. The emotional speech was given with passion, commitment and point of view. He referred to strong films in the programme and the debate they raise – Danish Armadillo and Into Eternity were the ones mentioned. Names coming up were Sarkozy and Gert Wilders… in connection with the profiling of the festival programme that has a lot of political films as well as films touching upon the xenophobia of today´s Europe.

An opening night that continued in an atmosphere of seriousness and dignity by the showing of Patricio Guzman´s masterpiece Nostalgia for the Light (PHOTO). Like Joris Ivens did in China with his last film, L´Histoire du Vent, where he placed himself in the open land desert, Guzman goes to Atacama desert in his native country to visit the astronomical observatories, to examine the light with the aim to make an essay on the past and on memories. An intelligent reflection, total beauty in camerawork and touching when he meets women, who look for the remains of the dear ones, killed an buried during and by the Pinochet regime. A woman tells how she found the foot of her brother, the foot with the sock, and his teeth forming a smile that she remembered.

www.dok-leipzig.de

… and the local Leipziger Volkszeitung has an interview with festival director Claas Danielsen, who stresses that the 53rd edition of the festival could need a couple of days more for a festival that he predicts will have many full houses this coming week as it had the previous week. 347 productions from 58 countries, 223 of them documentaries, the rest animation – and 4 competition programmes.

And a lot of meetings for professionals, looking for funding or to get their knowledge about the industry updated. Belgian filmmakers come as a delegation as does the Chileans, who will be extra warmly welcomed, be sure of that. To follow up on the small text yesterday on the miners, I read a long article in the Sunday Observer estimating that the succesful rescue and the solidarity expressed in and outside Chile will finally take away the label of Chile being only remembered for the death squadrons of Pinochet.

What is in the competition programme, Danielsen is asked: … again many political films have been made that deal with the themes of our time… told with many different kinds of handwriting, which do not care about the old dogmatic documentary thinking but go essayistic, poetic, playful, imaginative and even experimental. Later on in the interview, Danielsen praises the Polish documentary as well as the Finnish – readers of filmkommentaren.dk will know that this is very often the same estimate made here.

www.dokleipzig.de