Storydoc – Music in Documentaries

Sanna Salmenkallio, Finnish composer, working both in film and theatre, talked to the participants about music in documentaries stating from the start of her lecture that for her there is actually no difference in making music for documentaries and for feature films. By showing clips from three films, two Finnish and one Danish, Salmenkallio opened eyes and ears for all of us in the auditorium.

It is hard to summarize such a clever presentation so let me just quote the Finnish composer through the notes I made:

It is about what the audience feels… film music is like ritual music… we see things better through music… you have to think when composing that those are actually real people… film music should support the film… much less important is giving information… each musical theme has to be like a character… music is changing our sense of time… music is creating memories…the colour of music is very important…

Salmenkallio explained how she had been working with Danish director Phie Ambo on the film ”Mechanical Love” (2007), where the two of them went for music that has the atmosphere of a fairy tale. No techno, she said, which could maybe have been a more obvious solution for a film on this subject. I have seen ”Mechanical Love” before but never seen it like this time where I could see how the music score binds the beginning of the film together in a beautiful way. Ambo and Salmenkallio met before the rough cut of the film – please come to a composer before the picture side is closed, she said – the composer improvised on a piano while watching the material, they discussed and made the decisions on ”the colour” of the music and listed where music should appear. Salmenkallio also showed clips from the masterpiece of Pirjo Honkasalo, ”Three Rooms of Melancholia” (2004). Magnificent music, contra-tenor singing.

www.storydoc.gr

StoryDoc – the Creative Documentary?

Emma Davie, Scottish filmmaker and film teacher at the Edinburgh College of Arts did a brilliant lecture on what a creative documentary can be. She was adressing her colleagues with advice and reflections that came from the clips from the films she had chosen.

She started with ”My Body” (2002) by Norwegian Margreth Olin, a personal film with a wonderful grainy texture – Olin had found her form, Emma Davie said, do the same, do not think about a big audience, make films that talk to your best friend.

”Do not make documentaries if you don’t have to”, is one of the Ten Points made by Russian director Viktor Kossakovski, who also said that you should not think during the filming but before and after. The clip from ”Belovs” (1993), the masterpiece of the Russian auteur, made Emma Davie say that it is so giving to see the ordinary changed. The joy of looking and be looked at were introductory words to Marc Isaacs ”The Lift” (2002), yes, filmed in a lift, people going in and out, a film that has its limitations in time and space. But what if you have a person, who actually do not want to be filmed. Like the father in Alan Berliner’s original ”Nobody’s Business” (1996), a neo-classic, full of humour and visual ideas, perfect in rythm.

The creative documentary does not pretend that it knows all, the simpler the more fascinating, Emma Davie said, and use suspense if you can. She referred to Berliner’s film, will the father give in and actually reveal anything from his past?

Davie ended with Marcel Lozinski’s ”Anything Can Happen” (1995) (PHOTO), a unique film, one of the absolute favourites of this blogger. The little boy in the park going to old people on the benches, having dialogues with them about life and death, about being old, about religion. Pure pleasure.

As was the lecture of Emma Davie.

www.storydoc.gr

StoryDoc – Storytelling

Film is an emotional stream, Niels Pagh Andersen said, Danish editor, living in Finland, and working with films from many different countries. TV documentaries, feature duration docs for cinemas. Andersen has a long and strong cv. And he delivered an inspiring lecture. He started saying that we all want to bring order in chaos, don’t we? At least this is the job of an editor. Simplify, he said again and again, and referred to some drawings of Picasso, where he (Picasso) found the essence of a bull. The essence, find that, you get much deeper, the simpler you put things. If you want to teach something particular, write a book!

Give a minimum of information, Andersen emphasized, get to the emotions. Look for the inner development of the characters and hold back information, don’t tell everything up front. Create expectations, let the audience work, communicate that ”something is going to happen”. And remember the aspect of identification.

He showed two clips – one from the ”Cities on Speed” series, ”Mumbai Disconnected” (2009) by Camilla Nielsson and one from ”Prostitution Behind the Veil” (2004) by Swedish Nahid Persson. For the last one, Andersen stressed how important it is to build up a sympathy for the characters, he used the word love, in this case two mothers, and prostitutes, who you get to know later in the films from a more dark side in their relation to their children. 

The link below will take you to a longer interview with Niels Pagh Andersen.

http://www.dfi.dk/resultat.aspx?sq=Niels+Pagh+Andersen&ssr=1&sgi=967206473

www.storydoc.gr

Steadywing – the camera choice of Helmrich

Below you find the praise of the camerawork of Dutch director Helmrich, who won the main prize at idfa for his “Position among the stars”. He and many other masterclasses are to be found and looked at on idfa.nl – “on demand”. Take a look and here is a small text from the very same site about Helmrich’s camera. There you can also see how the steadywing looks like:

Position Among the Stars concludes Dutch director Retel Helmrich’s Indonesian trilogy about the Christian-Islamic family the Sjamsuddins. Helmrich (b. 1959) filmed this and the preceding installments (The Eye of the Day and Shape of the Moon) (PHOTO) using the Single Shot Cinema technique, a style he developed and perfected himself. He chooses to actively engage with his subject rather than remaining a neutral outsider – a position that typifies Direct Cinema. He aims to record events from the inside, not observe from a distance.

To achieve this, Retel Helmrich created the Steadywing, a construction that allows the filmmaker to move the camera continually in an exceptionally fluid and intuitive way – as he did among the family members featured in his trilogy. Helmrich’s invention has proved to be an inspiration for an entire generation of young filmmakers. He gives master classes all over the world, and this year he is coming to IDFA. For more information, go to www.singleshotcinema.com.

http://www.idfa.nl/nl/idfatv/idfa-2010/on-demand/masterclass-leonard-retel-helmrich.aspx

Idfa Winners/2

Even if not having seen all films in the main long feature documentary section at idfa, it is clear that the good choices of the jury appear to be based on artistic quality and subject relevance. Where nobody has waited for or asked for a film like the First Prize winner ”Position among the Stars” (one more film about people, a family, who lives in – for many of us – a far away country), the Special Jury Prize given to ”You don’t like the Truth – 4 Days inside Guantanamo” (Photo) has its actuality and relevance as a film that goes behind the many news bits and discussions about the camp in Cuba. To give an evidence to how one (and many more?) prisoners have gone through the most outrageous interrogation beyond any human decency. It is simply a film that should go everywhere and hopefully also will. It is intense in its split-screen use of the security camera footage that catches the interrogation of a 16-year old boy. You shake your head in despair watching this investigative (many interviews with cell mates and lawyers and a psychiatrist) Canadian film about the mental torture of a Canadian citizen. For more about the content and background, click on the title in the text below or go the site of the film.

”Position among the Stars” is third part of a trilogy about a family in Indonesia. 6 years after his second film about the family Sjamsuddin, three generations, the director Helmrich presents one more big humanistic epic that can be compared to Satayit Ray’s Apu-trilogy. Helmrich goes or rather flies from situation to situation, his camera is constant moving, there is an outstanding flow in the narrative, and he is met with open arms and minds by his characters. You sense that they like him, like he likes them, but empathy is of course not enough to make an exceptional film like this – the director know his stoytelling dramaturgy, he knows to play with contrasts: countryside/big city, young/old, old world/modern life, and he does it through scenes with the warm and loving grandmother, her sometimes desperate son, who is a representative for the local community, split as he is between his mother’s generation and his niece, the teenage girl, the hope of the family, who is the one who must have an education, the first one in the family. There is a development of the characters in the film. There is laughter and tears. It’s all there and I am looking forward to seeing the whole trilogy when it is published on dvd. Look out for it.

The Jury did well BUT BUT BUT I heard that the members watched (some of the?) films on dvd at home before coming to the festival. Objection! Juries at the most prestigious and important documentary film festival in the world MUST take their time to come to idfa to sit in a cinema to watch the films on a big screen as the audience in Amsterdam did. No excuse, respect for the filmmakers and their works.

www.youdontlikethetruth.com

www.idfa.nl

idfa Winners

At the end of last week the winners of the 23st idfa festival were announced. From the site of idfa I have taken this press report with easy references to content description of the films awarded, many of which will be going to other festivals and/or be shown on “a tv near you”:

Leonard Retel Helmrich’s Position Among the Stars, which opened the festival, was on Friday awarded both the VPRO IDFA Award for Best Feature-Length Documentary (valued at €12,500) and the Dioraphte IDFA Award for Dutch Documentary (€5,000). This is the first time at IDFA that a director has won the award for feature-length documentary twice. Retel Helmrich also won in 2004 with The Shape of the Moon (PHOTO). Nick Cunningham sums up:

“Position Among the Stars (the Netherlands) is the last instalment of his trilogy about the Indonesian Sjamsuddin family. The jury citation reads: “The film gives a fantastic insight in the lives of poor people in Indonesia. The filmmaker shows the rise of Islamic fundamentalism and the decline of Christian worship. The storytelling is clear, complete, poetic and not without humour. The filmmaker has patiently dedicated twelve years of his life to observing the lives of his subjects. With its beautifully observed details, the film is an example of how a master documentary maker can distil the essence of his subject. Retel Helmrich takes the time to be with his subjects, to take part in their lives, while maintaining his own view”.

The jury also granted a Special Jury Award to directors Luc Coté and Patricio Henriquez for You Don’t Like the Truth – 4 Days inside Guantánamo (Canada). The film concerns the case of Omar Khadr, who ended up incarcerated in Guantánamo Bay at the age of sixteen and is based on recordings of his interrogation. The jury felt that the film’s “effective use of

evidence, opinion and testimony, creates a provocative and moving story that reaches into the dark hole of our consciousness, maintaining a consistent visual and audio vocabulary that allows its viewers to determine what is just and what is moral.”

Dutch filmmaker Boris Gerrets received the NTR IDFA Award for Best Mid-Length Documentary (€ 10,000) for People I Could Have Been and Maybe Am, in which the director attempts to break through the anonymity of the big city by filming conversations with strangers on the streets of London with his mobile phone.

The IDFA Award for First Appearance (€ 5,000) was presented to Monster Jimenez for Kano: An American and His Harem (the Philippines), about an American who assembled a harem for himself in the Philippines and is now in prison for rape. Nevertheless, his many wives stick by him.

The Public Broadcaster IDFA Audience Award (€ 5,000) went to Lucy Walker’s Waste Land (UK/Brazil), about art photographer Vik Muniz, who is making a series of photographs of refuse scavengers at the world’s biggest refuse dump, in Rio de Janeiro.

Eva Küpper received the IDFA Award for Student Documentary (€ 2,500) for What’s in a Name  (Belgium). The film is about New York body art performer Jon Cory and his sexual ambivalence. The film includes explicit performances he calls “gender terrorism.”

The Hyves IDFA DOC U Award – the € 1,500 award granted by a separate youth jury – went to Autumn Gold (Germany/Austria) by Jan Tenhaven. Autumn Gold follows five aged athletes preparing for a competition in Finland.

The first ever IDFA Award for Best Green Screen Documentary (€ 2,500) went to Into Eternity (Denmark/Sweden/Finland) by Michael Madsen. The film is an existential message for future generations about Onkalo, a depot deep below the rocky ground, where Finnish nuclear waste is to be permanently stored.

The jury also gave an honourable mention to The Pipe (Ireland) by Risteard Ó Domhnaill about resistance by local activists on the west coast on the Irish west coast to the construction of a gas pipe line by multinational Shell.

Another first this year, the IDFA DocLab Award for Digital Storytelling (a Canon 5D Mark II camera, made available by Canon) was presented to HIGHRISE/Out My Window (Canada) by Katerina Cizek. HIGHRISE/Out My Window portrays apartments and their inhabitants in thirteen world cities through 360-degree images.

www.idfa.nl

Idfa Docs for Sale

Many visitors to the festival in Amsterdam (November 17-28) are there to look for films to buy for their national television channels. The buyers sit in their booths and choose among more than 500 films, as do festival representatives from all over the world. For the buyers the work is mostly of a pre-selection nature where the films are watched for maybe 10 minutes and then a decision is taken to ask for a dvd screener to take home for final decision, or to state ”not interested”.

The Docs for Sale, that also includes an online service during the whole year – good for those who do not travel to idfa – and for those of us who can not see the films when at idfa because of meetings and attendance of the Forum (see below) – has a hit list of the most watched films. Again a pleasure to see on the top 10 that Latvian ”Family Instinct” has been watched 59 times and that Serbian ”Cinema Komunisto” (PHOTO) and Danish ”Blood in the Mobile” have 57 screenings.

Number 1 – well tv buyers, like the rest of us, like food made with a high artistic quality and a film about ”El Bulli” is of course not to be missed. The film, watched 86 times, is directed by German director Gereon Wetzel and lasts 108 minutes, and this is the catalogue description:

The chefs at the world-renowned, Michelin-starred Spanish restaurant El Bulli have turned cooking into an art form. The doors are only open to the public for six months of the year; the rest of the time, a select team of experts is hard at work creating a new avant-garde 30-course menu. Looking on from the sidelines, we watch experiments with structure, sound, color and – finally – flavor. Cooking with liquid nitrogen, something the restaurant is particularly famous for, is but one of the many unconventional preparation methods used here. Owner Ferran Adrià is always on hand, tasting everything created in this flavor lab and coming across like a softened-down version of Gordon Ramsey. We discover that experimental dishes such as Parmesan Crystal and Vanishing Ravioli came about largely by chance. When one of the chefs fished out an ice cube from his Coke glass and dropped it in the gravy on his plate, he thought, why not make a dish from ice cubes? And why not mix oil with water, for a cocktail that leaves a deliciously soft coating on the lips? At El Bulli, it’s all about feeling something, experiencing something. In the words of top chef Adrià, “The more bewilderment, the better.”

www.idfa.nl

Lithuanian Documentaries – for free

An early christmas present for documentary lovers: The offer to watch artistic short documentaries from the country of filmmakers who, if any, master the poetic film language: Lithuania. In times where these kind of films have problems in getting to the big festivals, that more and more select by subject – political and social – the initiative deserves a huge BRAVO! It comes from DocAlliance, the excellent online portal for Video on Demand offering permanent access to 400 outstanding documentaries selected by the five partner festivals (Leipzig, Nyon, Copenhagen, Warsaw, Jihlava). Twenty new films are added monthly and these can be acquired through streaming or download.

This offer for free streaming of Lithuanian docs runs until the 28th, i.e. this upcoming Sunday. If you want more information – Filmkommentaren has written about Arunas Matelis 12 times, Audrius Stonys 24 times – the two masters, whose works (at least some of them) you can watch, and as for the film “Man-Horse” by Audrius Mickevicius you will find an enthusiastic review. IF you don’t have time to watch the films now, you can do it later by paying a cheap fee. The selection of films for video-on-demand is done with competence.

Here comes the list of films and the site address:

Flight Over Lithuania or 510 Seconds of Silence by Arunas Matelis, Audrius Stonys, Lithuania, 8 min
A legendary film, which was one the Top 10 at the international exhibition EXPO 2000 in Hanover/Germany as one of the best films demonstrated at the exhibition.

Man-Horse by Audrius Mickevičius, Lithuania, 52 min
A film about an old farmer Jonas and his horse. An intimate story about the existential relationship between human and animal; it is about solitude and the daily effort to survive.

The First Farewell to Paradise by Arunas Matelis, Lithuania, 15 min
The film seeks to convey the senselessness and beauty of the daily life…

From Unfinished Tales of Jerusalem by Arunas Matelis, Lithuania, 26 min
Film based on a strange old pagan tradition, still preserved in only one village in Semogitia (a part of Lithuania). The tradition goes back to the archaic space of the magic’s of folk theater.

Confession by Oksana Buraja, Lithuania, 34 min
A two-part experimental film that explores the very nature of creativity. The second part – Confession – is like an “inside-out” of “Crete Island”, revealing the behind-the-camera reality and the brutal creative process which can sometimes lead to certain constraints.

SunDay. The Gospel According to Lift-Man Albertas by Arunas Matelis, Lithuania, 19 min
Although it consists of only 20 shots, this film is a rich allegory that one can read in different ways. Religious references and allusions to Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot urge themselves upon us, and Matelis’s view of reality is just as sad as it is humorous.

Uku Ukai by Audrius Stonys, Lithuania, 30 min (PHOTO)
A meditative film poem full of rhyming images about movement, old age and the human body.

Countdown by Audrius Stonys, Lithuania, 45 min

http://docalliancefilms.com/

Idfa Festival Nominations

The festival in Amsterdam has a nomination system like the one used at the Oscars – three films in each category of competition are shortlisted – and the directors have to wait until saturday night to hear if they are the lucky winners.

You can read all about it on the site below and you can for free click on the titles and watch the trailers of the films. I did so for the ”Abuelos” that competes in the First Appearance catagory. It is directed by Ecuadorian Carla Valencia Dávila and is about her two grandfathers, one who was killed by the Chilean dictatorship, the other who had special medical curing skills. Looks absolutely beautiful, the trailer.

Personally I am very happy that the Latvian ”Family Instinct” (PHOTO) by young director Andris Gauja has been nominated in the category of films of mid-length duration. It is a courageous and honest film that creates a lot of ethical debate because of its very close observation of a family that lives a life on the edge. I had the privilege of watching rough cuts of the film and see Gauja as a very much wanted new talent in the strong Latvian tradition for documentaries.

Take a look at the trailer on the websites below.

Two very well known films by readers of this site are nominated by a jury of young people – ”Autumn Gold”, which is also number one on the list for the Audience Award – and ”Armadillo”, not further presentation needed. 

http://www.idfa.nl/industry/Festival/news/latest_news/25-11-10-nominations.aspx

http://www.fafilma.lv/en/films/family-instinct

Idfa Forum: Justice for Sale

I post this article from the idfa site to higlight one of the most appreciated documentary projects that was pitched at the Forum 2010:

Twin sisters Ilse and Femke van Velzen, filmmakers and human rights activists, returned last week from the Congo, where they are shooting their latest film Justice for Sale, to pitch the international funding community for the €175,000 needed to guarantee its completion. Forum attendees heard their pitch yesterday. Nick Cunningham reports.

Justice for Sale follows two young Congolese human rights lawyers who battle against injustice in their homeland. The film is the Van Velzens’ third on the subject of the Congo, following Weapon of War (2009) (PHOTO) and Fighting the Silence (2007). “As young girls in primary school, we stood up for other children that were bullied,” explains Ilse. “Years later, when we started to make films about human rights, we realised that we can expose injustice [in

developing countries] to a worldwide audience and give oppressed people a voice.”

The film, she further explains, is not just about corruption, but also the total failure of Congo’s judicial system. Quite often, victims of crimes will never see the perpetrators in court, and every year thousands of innocent people are wrongly accused and imprisoned in inhuman conditions. “Corruption is found at every level, big or small,” she claims. “So corruption is seen and felt throughout the whole film.”

So far, the Van Velzens have secured a pre-sale to Dutch broadcaster IKON. Their aim over the next few days is to doorstep as many international commissioning editors as possible to build the widest distribution base for the film.

Ilse explains why the medium of documentary is effective as a campaigning tool for the causes she espouses. “For a Western audience, it creates awareness,” she stresses. “When people don’t know or are ignorant about a certain subject, they cannot act. When they know what human right abuses happen in the world – because they have seen a documentary that goes deeply into the subject – they at least have the option. That is important. Secondly, it’s very important that human rights films are also brought to the attention of policymakers, international governments and NGOs. It can work as a very powerful lobby tool.”

Justice for Sale was developed at leading documentary development programme Greenhouse, under the part-tutelage of Dutch documentary filmmaker John Appel (The Player, 2009). “It is very well researched and they have two very good characters: two lawyers, who are really engaging, so they have a very good starting point to make a strong film about the legal system within the Congo,” he explains.

“The main goal for Greenhouse is to make a subject into a film and to look for universal meaning and to add more and more layers. I think that Ilse and Femke, having made a few films already, are now more aware of what it means to have a more cinematographic approach to the subject, and we will help them with this.”

Nick Cunningham