Talking Documentaries

It was a person in the audience, who appealed to the panel: We are world famous for our writers – Joyce, Beckett etc. – now it must be time to become known for our films. He, and around 100 other filmmakers and film students attended the Talking Documentary two-day seminar that ended yesterday in Galway. Organised by the MEDIA Antenna and the Galway Film Center the two days had a programme with money and slot and strand and distribution and profile and policy issues on the first day AND content and style and ethics on the second. I chaired the first day sessions with Christina Mueller from DR/TV Denmark, Gitte Hansen from First Hand Films in Switzerland and Sari Volanen from YLE – in the morning – and with the whole range of documentary broadcasters and funding mechanisms in the afternoon. The morning was quiet and full of great clips from films like “Armadillo“, “Burma vj” and “Steam of Life“, whereas there was a nice atmosphere of opposition to the panel in the afternoon, where especially the representatives from the public broadcaster RTE was met with demands for more flexibility in the scheduling and in the fact that whenever the broadcaster enters into coproduction, there HAS to be an Irish angle. The RTE is not positive towards feature duration documentaries, even if this seems to be the current success in Ireland, very much because of the policy of the Irish Film Board. The film that is on the international agenda right now is “The Pipe” (PHOTO), that was premiered in Toronto and is in the new competition at idfa in Amsterdam, the “Green competition”. I will write more about the film later.

The Miners

Oh, what a medium television can be as we have experienced during the last week! Direct tv. Cinema verite. I refer to the rescue operation of the 33 miners in Chile, even more emotional for me, who was in the country a couple of weeks ago. Films will come, the miners will be tempted to take part in loads of tv shows, books will be written, tabloid newspapers and tabloid tv companies will exploit them, we know that, but nothing compares to the broadcast of images from 700 meters underground and from over-ground – and respect for the men, who organised themselves so well down in hell and have decided NOT to talk publicly one-by-one to the waiting cameras. They have a spokesperson and he will talk. Another kind of reality television, authentic, truthful, dramatic, full of emotions and compassion.

Off the Main Road!

The Tafaseel web documentary magazine, see below, asked me to write an article for their first edition. Here it is:

3 months per year I am away from home. I travel in and outside Europe to talk about documentaries, the market, the television slots and strands, the film funds, the festivals, how to write proposals and make trailers that work. Or I organise and moderate pitching sessions and invite TV people – commissioning editors – to come and comment on new proposals. I have done so more or less since the EU in the beginning of the 1990’s  introduced the MEDIA Programme, a support mechanism that has meant a lot, and still does, for the international cooperation and coproduction for the documentary. 20 years later you see the results, for the good and the worse. First the good, and then the but…

Whenever possible on my tours around I show examples of successful films that were made within the coproduction, international documentary world. Where so-called creative documentaries mostly are human interest stories, and/or with political, social, environmental issues conveyed in a professional, appealing, debate creating way. For the heart and the brain.

I show the trailer of ”Caviar Connection” by Dragan and Jovana Nikolic from Serbia, who at the EU-supported IDFA forum some years ago got the biggest applause for their project presentation as well as a lot of interest from broadcasters and distributors. I show a clip from ”Blind Loves” by Slovak Juraj Lehotsky, who developed his film project through the EU-supported Ex Oriente training programme into a film that went to Cannes and won a prize at the festival. I show a clip from ”Good Bye, How are You” by another Serbian director, Boris Mitic, who travelled the pitching fora and the festivals to raise  funding for his film. I show a clip from Macedonian Atanas Georgiev’s ”Cash and Marry”, that started as a Croatian based production but got an Austrian producer to help get EU- and other money. And I don’t let young filmmakers leave the room without having seen LaTVian Herz Frank’s 1978 masterpiece, ”10 Minutes Older” – at a time where there was no EU-funding, during USSR, where LaTVian capital Riga was the place for the free poetic documentary reflection.

All these films – from Eastern Europe – have one thing in common, as it has been said by BBC’s Nick Fraser: They come from countries where television has no money for documentaries, and therefore has had no (bad) influence! Was this a self-criticism from a man who for years have been running the prestigious TV strand Storyville? Knowing Fraser, I doubt it, but on the other side, his statement gives a very precise, indirect characterisation of the disease that threatens the creative documentary, the formatted TV. Which, to be fair, Fraser does not stand for.
The films that I mention above are exceptions from the rules. Most of the documentaries made for television today are made according to non- creative standard rules for duration, storytelling, rhythm in editing, voice-off and approach to controversial subjects. You know very well what I talk about – a historical film for example, from BBC and/or German ZDF looks like this: Black and white archive material, a commentary that explains what you see or adds a lot of information in a flow of words that kill the visual impact, interviews with witnesses and/or experts, voilá, that is the menu and we eat it most often with pleasure.

The films mentioned above have followed some of these rules but they have also kept their own voice, and thus they surprise the viewer.
Wow, can films also be like that!

Well, some of them have been involved in fights with the TV editors, who – sorry to say – often claim to know that this will not be understood by their audience. This is too artistic for my audience… is a sentence that I have heard again and again. Read it again, please, ”too artistic!”. Excuse my French, but f… you!

When ”Caviar and Connection” got a huge applause at IDFA it was precisely because the presentation and the project were off-the-main- road, originally thought and presented with a special sense of humour. It was simply different and the editors around the table loved it as I am sure that the viewers did in the respective countries, who bought the film when done. We want to be surprised, we want to experience something new, we want to be challenged, don’t we? Don’t ever underestimate the audience! Don’t ever try to please!

Follow your own artistic ambition! Build up a documentary culture in your country (Finland is still the example with a film school, several financing sources to access, a film festival, in other words a respect for the documentary genre as an important cultural element)! Set the filmmakers free – re-enter some Dadaism and surrealism, and keep the good will and the political correctness for other TV programmes!

… OR if you use ”formatting”, make it clear that this is an aesthetic choice and not a demand. James Marsh’s ”Man on Wire” is maybe the best example in that category – playful, genre- conscious, a thriller but also a human story, multi-layered, or Agnes Varda who is completely her own in the autobiography, ”The Beaches of Agnes”, elegantly playing with the genres. Or ”Burma vj” by Anders Østergaard, who brings political archive material into a fictitious frame. Or ”Nénette” by Nicholas Philibert who brings an ultra-observational choice (of a 40 year old orangutang) into a philosophical essay. 

Tafaseel-mag.net

A new, very interesting, well edited documentary web magazine, tafaseel-mag.net, published by Syrian filmmakers and festival organisers of Dox Box has been launched. No.1 includes a lot of interesting articles and comments and reviews and news, that I am looking forward to read further, as it opens to Middle Eastern and Arabic documentary matters, not very well known.

Here is the editorial of the magazine written by director and producer and festival organiser Orwa Nyrabia (PHOTO):

It is easy and predictable to romanticize the launch of a magazine for the documentary in a region where circa 350M people live, and make a smaller number of films a year than the 5M living in a small country like Denmark. Some of the world’s richest countries are part of this region, hundreds; if not thousands; of television channels are targeting it, yet, local/regional production is limited to soap operas, and most of the time satisfied enough with dubbing international productions and making regional hits out of them.

TAFASEEL is about trying to understand this odd situation, in details…

… and pushing against such a dim status quo.

In our region today, thoughts of ‘Survival of the fittest’ are the trend, and many cultural bodies and operators are defending the ‘Diplomacy of Culture’ where what is courageous and daring becomes a risk, where a tender and sleek kind of culture is encouraged, all that in a region where ‘capital’ and ‘conservatism’ are growing up together, leaving the ‘non-conservative’ no matter of what kind, out of the financing circles.

Doc-makers, and their subjects, are not the fittest, they are the enemies of diplomacy, they are the ones who cannot be politically-correct, the ones who know that ‘correctness’ is nothing but a tool of oppression and formatting, and they are certainly not conservative. It would be enough to see the ‘documentary’ conservatives are making to know that they come from another reality, with different ethics and remote perceptions.

Documentary Films get made because of an intriguing, and sometimes painful, blend of love and hate, to one’s own life, society, country, world… and for that, it is an art of bravery, even when it seems to be different from that.

TAFASEEL comes today to defend the documentary, as a cultural critical attitude towards the world, as an art, a free form of self expression and also as a possible industry. Defending documentary involves promoting it, but does not involve being diplomatic. It is about development of an art and an industry, a development we believe is crucial to a wider development: that of the human condition.

TAFASEEL will try to keep a ‘different’ style of writing and reporting, which is that of a filmmaker. The articles of TAFASEEL will be written for a filmmaker reader, a director, producer, cinematographer, editor… whether experienced or aspiring.

TAFASEEL will try to present the world of documentary in Arabic, and the documentary in the Arab world in English, and will also build an Arab world filmmaker’s angle towards what is happening in the world of documentary.

TAFASEEL will never be a complete work, it is naturally a continuous work in progress, open to suggestions, to opinions, and to development, with every new issue.

Please be generous with your critique of it, as that is the only way to make it better.

DocLisboa

… is one the best progrqmmed festivals in Europe. The 2010 edition goes from October 14-24 and has several interesting film historical highlights parallel to the international and Portuguese sections. The directors who are presented to the local and international audience are Joris Ivens, Marcel Ophuls and Joergen Leth. Which means that films like “Histoire du vent” (Ivens), “Le chagrin et la pitié” (Ophuls) and “66 Scenes from America” (Leth) will be made available. The widow of Ivens, Marceline Loridan, and Leth will attend the festival to give masterclasses. Also to be noticed is a tribute to Swiss documentaries that includes the masterpiece of Peter Mettler, “Gambling, Gods and LSD” (PHOTO).

www.doclisboa.org

MK2 + la Cinematheque

Our Paris correspondent, Sara Thelle, has already written about Film Socialisme by Jean Luc Godard, and her article was one of the reasons that I, with great expectations and huge pleasure, went to see the film in MK2 Beaubourg, where it still runs at one of those fine late morning screenings, once per week, that is practised by the chain of cinemas of Marin Karmitz (MK). My friend and I left the cinema in complete agreement on the quality and playfulness of the latest work of the old man, who has not stopped challenging the film language in a film that has many layers and reflections, and is serious and full of humour at the same time.

At such a good mood we left the Beaubourg quartier heading for Bercy, to la Cinematheque Francaise, to watch the exhibition “Brune et Blonde” that has just opened and runs in the French capital until January 6 2011. Film history, the stars and their hair, clips from films back to the silent movie, brilliantly edited and displayed, supplemented by paintings by, among others, Paul Delvaux, and photos by, among others, Man Ray. But the main attraction was, without any doubt, the clip scenes, where many evoked wonderful memories like Silvana Mangano in the classic “Rice Girl” (PHOTO), in her sensual, seducing dance. Brigitte Bardot, Catherine Deneuve, her sister Francoise Dorleac, Ingrid Bergman, Julia Andrews, Penelope Cruz… For the exhibition a series of short films had been made; the one of Abbas Kiarostami with a little girl, who is asked to let her hair be cut, she thinks about it, hesitates for a moment, but says no, and hesitates again when she is asked to cut the hair of her friend – a master’s work, go and watch it, well go and take an hour or two in the exhibition to have your film history evoked, open for blonds and brunettes.

DOK Leipzig: Caucasian Lessons

The upcoming festival in Leipzig (October 18-24) has an interesting retrospective with films from the conflict zone in Caucasia. Here is the site introduction text:

“Eight programmes with some twenty films will give you sufficient opportunity to deal with a transit and conflict zone between Europe and Asia, between the old world order and a new region. Political stories from Georgia, the clash of traditional and post-modern lifestyles in Armenia, archaic culture and crazy poets from Azerbaijan. The focus is also on the battle in the media around the events in Southern Ossetia, the search for terrorists in Dagestan as well as the war-torn countryside in Nagorno-Karabakh, where the effects of the conflict are still felt. And finally: Figures of loss – the disintegration is omnipresent.”

A couple of the films have been reviewed or noted here: Georgian Salome Jashi’s ‘The Leader is always Right‘ , Nino Kartidze’s propaganda piece ‘Something about Georgia‘ , ‘The Last Tightrope Dancer‘ by Inna Sahakyan and ‘A Story about People in War and Peace‘ by Vardan Hovhannisyan – the two latter from Armenia. Not written about, but seen at Baltic Sea Forum is the shocking film by Andrei Nekrasov, ‘Russian Lessons‘ (PHOTO), that I would need to watch again before writing about a film that is more controversial than the rest of the programme. Nekrasov, Russian, has been threatened to death for this film, in Russia, whereas he is said to be a hero in Georgia in his description of the recent war.

A bench in Recoleta

Saturday in Buenos Aires. Sunshine. Spring has come to the wonderful city of Argentina. We (my wife and I) have just come back from some days in Chile. I met filmmakers who are going to DOKLeipzig and to idfa. The Chileans want to tell the world that they are making documentaries. For that purpose the Ministry of Culture has granted funds to send delegations to the two big festivals and markets coming up in September and November. The Chilean documentary has been and still is dealing with the atrocities committed through the Pinochet dictatorship, the shadow of a nation, but there are also other and more current issues being dealt with. I left with a bag full of dvds and projects. And with a very pleasant impression of a country that had Pablo Neruda and Salvador Allende and still has a colourful Pacific Ocean Valparaiso. With Patricio Guzman as the father of Chilean documentary. “The Battle of Chile”, a masterpiece.

Back to Buenos Aires and the sunshine and to the walking in the city on the last day before the loooong journey back to Europe, 17 hours before Copenhagen. We wanted to have lunch at the Lola restaurant where we had dined before, wonderful place in the Recoleta area. I booked a table for 2pm, and we went out and sat in the sun the two of us. I phoned Rodrigo Vila, the organiser of DOCMeeting Argentina and thanked him for his generosity, and told him that he should rest with his family and not care about us.

That proved to be totally wrong… Having finished the phone call, I got up and saw that my bag with computer, passports and expensive glasses, and calendar and notes for several films to be written about on this blog was gone!!! Stolen, simply while we were sun-enjoying. Rodrigo Vila arrived and was our saving angel – in a bit more than two hours we had made a police report, had passport photos taken and had been to the Danish embassy, where we were kind of robbed again: 1100 US dollars for two passports, price for opening the embassy on a saturday! Unfortunately Buenos Aires is going that way, said Vila, an incident like this happens every bloody day.

A day in the life of a film consultant! 

Peter Kerekes: Cooking History

The Danish audience, at least the one in Copenhagen, centralised Danish cultural policy, but that is another story, will have the possibility to watch one of the most awarded and spoken about documentaries from the recent years, “Cooking History” by Slovak Peter Kerekes. The film is number two (after “Last Train Home”) after the launching of “Documentary of the Month” by the Danish Film Institute. The film has been reviewed and “career-followed” on this site. The director will attend the opening screening in Copenhagen.

www.dfi.dk

Jakob Rosenkrands: Jagten på de røde lejesvende/3

Historien sluttede overraskende underfundigt. Jagten på de røde lejesvende lykkedes. Til sidst blev deres topbeskyttere Nissen og Knudsen smidt ud. Den nye direktion kunne fotograferes som ”gruppebillede uden dame” som en af de nye så morsomt kunne udtrykke det. De blå lejesvende havde overtaget DR, om dette slutspil handlede 3. og sidste del. Men de blå fra CBS og omegn har måske sejret ad helvede til over de røde fra RUC og omegn. Det kunne Hjort Frederiksen nøgternt ironisk notere på sin måde ved at indse, at i dag er et folkeoplysende program utænkeligt i prime time. Alt der er nu underholdning. Jakob Rosenkrands lyttede sig nysgerrigt og undrende frem til historiens morale. En dokumentarisk bedrift.

Jakob Rosenkrands: Jagten på de røde lejesvende, 3. del DR2 søndag aften. Net-tv her.