Oan Kim and Brigitte Bouillot are their full names.

This text is written by festival directors Svetlana and Zoran Popovic.

A superb documentary work that ranks in style with the films of some of the most important French authors.

This is a story that introduces us to the dark inner spaces of a man crucified between Korea and France, to the spaces of a personal history inextricably intertwined with the history of a nation, to the spaces of colours, paintings and painting, to the immeasurable space between the painter and the fluid surface of the canvas, to the microcosm of innumerable droplets. This is an exciting personal search and a refined essay on art and the artist. Together with Brigitte Bouillot, Oan Kim tells the story of his father, one of the most important contemporary artists in South Korea. This is the story about the dilemmas and secrets that the son faces when trying to make a study of the father, a study in which close up shots of his always unusually pensive father are intertwined with the shots of his work. This precisely captured meditative peace is filled with additional flow of oneiric fragments of drama and unrest. Authors create together the film as a perfectly constructed puzzle where the last, smallest piece will give the final meaning to the whole story. In a musically precise rhythm, in a slow pace, the authors build a real cinematic tension that keeps the viewers nailed from the beginning to the end of the film.

This is a film about a secret hidden in depths of a torn being who turned into a charismatic artist so that he could testify to the world about the beauty that rises above the dark abyss.

France, South Korea 2021, 79 minutes

http://www.magnificent7festival.org/en/kapi_vode.php

“The Filmmaker’s House” is masterly made film by one of the most important documentary authors in Great Britain, created in facing a space that we usually think of as a set of walls and things.

What makes the house we live in? Marc Isaacs presents his own house primarily as a place where film ideas and films live. And one of these films he makes in front of us and introduces us to unusual people who come from different parts of the city and the world, and invade at different times, announced and unannounced, creating together events in which they have different roles. All of these events unfold gradually – from simple everyday situations to unexpected ones, and each one brings some surprising blend or dramatic twist. Everyday life before us alternately becomes an amazing film and a surreal show. How brilliantly documented the unpredictability of life! Marc Isaacs’s films are astonishing precisely when the author allows charismatic people to seemingly create their own stories in front of his camera which also participates in the events. Behind that illusion, the author carefully directs and guides the flow of the film with discreet directions, provoking and encouraging his heroes. They become a part of his house and his everyday life, he and his camera become an oneiric part of their existences.

This film is a manifesto of the power of documentary film to create captivating cinematic stories from simple scenes of reality.

Great Britain 2020, 75 minutes

http://www.magnificent7festival.org/en/kuca_filmskog_autora.php 

This text is written by Svetlana and Zoran Popovic

Morocco. Vast desert. People living under tents. And a house like a grain of sand, the grain that becomes a pearl in a shell. 

Mohamed El Aboudi comes to his native Morocco to follow a young teacher who arrives to the wasteland and tries to establish a school among the nomads – a school for children who by birth are not meant for education, yet only to repeat the lives of their fathers and mothers. This is the story of a name inscribed above the door of the small house in the desert, a name that brings joy, arouses curiosity, triggers children’s play and opens the way to new knowledge. The film introduces us to fascinating, cruel landscapes with a few people and children, while they carry together the centuries-old burden inscribed in the books of ancestral laws. Mohamed El Aboudi, with great talent of documentary observer, in a refined manner, discreetly, carefully not to interrupt the newly created sensitive bonds between the teacher and his students, reveals a whole world hidden behind tradition and customs, behind strict laws of survival. Gradually and always with respect, the author approaches school, classes and wonderful moments of school breaks, but also parents and families, their everyday routine, as well as dramatic events in which all fears about the survival of hope become fears about the survival of the community, nature, planet. Collisions of desires and prohibitions, games and obligations, joys and worries build an unusual saga of striking scenes and characters testifying how precious is the striving for new knowledge. A saga about strivings that are the only ones that truly change the world. 

An enchanting documentary made about the school as a wonderful saving oasis.

Finland, France, Morocco 2020, 78 minutes 

www.magnificent7festival.org

To sit in a cinema watching documentaries! In Malmø where the 32nd Nordisk Panorama takes place. Anita Reher, my colleague from the time where EDN (European Documentary Network) was alive and kicking, invited me to be a juror in the competition for new talents called New Nordic Voice. Thanks. To sit in a cinema… have not done so for a loong time. 

The festival opened Thursday night as always at this Nordic gathering in a good atmosphere.

To be honest I considered not to go to watch a film having read that it dealt with a man, who would beat a record of playing arcade games… what is that?

I went and liked the film a lot. I did not learn anything about arcade games but I met some great personalities, “heroic outsiders”, they are called in the describtion below that I have taken from the website of the Danish Film Institute. I would add artists to characterise them. The protagonist Kim “Kanonarm” Købke who is not, to say the least, a big talker. During the film he mumbles, hmmm, strange sounds come from him while he is playing – and still the line I remember so well is “oh, some wonderful plants” said by the player, while he is out in the dark peeing in a small break from the ambition to beat the record! One of his friends (Michael) Dyst is a writer, who reads some of his fine poems in between the arcade games. Reminds me of Yahya Hassan. And Carsten (Tommy Lauridsen) who has dedicated his life to analyse the music of Johan Sebastian Bach! There are other personalities in the Bip Bip Bar on Fælledvej in Copenhagen and there is a lot beer and music. And fun. The film has a flow with energetic scenes put together in a way so there are also pauses from the sound of the arcade machines. Here is the synopsis: 

 «A film about friendship and arcade games that will put a smile on your face and tug at your heartstrings. With the help from his friends at Bip Bip Bar, Kim Cannon Arm attempts to be the first in the world to play an arcade machine from the early ’80s for 100 consecutive hours. With its collection of heroic outsiders, dreams about legendary world records, quirky hairdos and brilliant players, the documentary praises solidarity and the attempt to achieve the sublime.”

Quite a refreshing documentary!

Will come back with more small reports but not about the films from the competition – the jury still have 6 long documentaries to watch before deciding the winner.

Denmark, 2021, 97 mins.