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… but there has been time to visit the Hermitage museum and fight one’s way to study the great collection of Rembrandt works (oh, documentarians, go and study how he caught the magical moments when he did his portraits)  and the two ”Madonna with Child” by Leonardo da Vinci – as well as an exhibition of Picasso set up due to the French-Russian cultural year.

I write ”fight one’s way” as the Hermitage – apart from being one of the most wonderful art museums in the world – also is a battlefield where tourist groups from all over, led by sometimes very loud-speaking militant guides, who want their group to have the best views. And the best place to take photographs. Why is it not possible to see, just see, without gazing through a camera?

Film-wise the visit made me want to re-view Alexander Sokurov`s ”Russian Ark” (photo), a one-shot feature length film interpreting the museum magnificently, made to celebrate the 300 years of St. Petersburg. I remember the head-shaking commissioning editors when the film was pitched at the idfa forum. Not possible, and why a one shot, they said, led by BBC’s Nick Fraser – they were very much wrong the rating hunting tv executives. The film is available through many dvd outlets.

www.m2m.iffc.ru

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Don’t say that films are not being made… the selection committee of the festival watched 2853 films from 83 countries. 73 were selected for the international competition (documentaries, animation, short fiction) and 24 for the National Documentary Competition, ”Gateway to Russia”. Looking back at the Grand Prix list of the festival’s 20 years one finds new classics like ”The Belovs” of Viktor Kossakovsky (in 1993) and ”Bread Day” of Sergey Dvortsevoy (in 1998).

The documentary profile of the festival is definitely social as readers of this site will be able to know by reading about ”Victor” (photo) by Andris Gauja from Latvia and ”17 August” by Alexander Gutman from Russia. Finnish director Jukka Kärkkainen introduces his favourite character Tero (the main protagonist in his masterpiece ”The Living Room of a Nation”, reviewed and noticed several times on this site) in ”Do you still remember Hilma Limperi”, and Bulgarian international producer Martichka Bozhilova presented the impressive ”Paradise Hotel” about a gypsy residential area that in socialist times was meant to be ”a paradise”, which it is absolutely not nowadays.

No complaints, watching films is a privilige, 3 two hour programmes per day, that is how it goes in a sauna-like hot hall that yesterday night (saturday) had a good audience, whereas earlier screenings had a limited attendance.

www.m2m.iffc.ru

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Mikhail Litvyakov is the director of the festival in beautiful St. Petersburg. He has passed the seven decades of age but there was no sign of lack of energy when he was on stage to welcome guests and audience in the Dom Kino, to the 20th edition of a festival that includes an international competition, a national competition plus several side programmes. He and the president of the festival, film director Alexey Uchitel, and the rest of us, were pleasantly suffering the heat of St Petersburg when the opening ceremony took place ending with an honorary prize of the festival given to Agnès Varda, who was there to introduce her fine last film, ”Les Plages d’Agnès”, a film with many layers, young in spirit, and also a fine piece of film history presenting clips from her own films such as ”Cléo from 5 to 7” and ”Le bonheur” with constant references to the love of her life, late Jacques Demy.

I am here to chair the international jury for a programme that includes documentaries, animation and short fiction – and to hold a small project development seminar with Ludmila Nazaruk from DoxPro, a continuation of the November 2009 meeting that has been reported on this site.

www.miradox.ru

www.m2m.iffc.ru

Nagham Mohanna: Back to Gaza from Corfu

Young Palestinian filmmaker Nagham Mohanna, who took part in the mediterranean/middle east documentary training program Storydoc (see below) sends this report on her journey back to her home via Egypt. I have made some small edits and language corrections:

Hello everybody, I hope everything is ok and not so horrible as I am feeling now. Let me tell you about my travelling because it is really amazing. I left Corfu at 7:25 am and arrived in Athens at 8: 20 am on Saturday. Stayed in Athens airport around 5 hours.

Left Athens at 2:30 pm and arrived in Cairo at 4:30 pm.

And here we begin. The opening of a torture journey. When an Egyptian officer saw that I am Palestinian the procedures were started, to know if they can let me enter Egypt or not.

While waiting in the airport and seeing how other people with other nationalities entered Cairo without any problems, they called me to investigate about my job and the workshop that I attended in Corfu. They told

me that maybe they will take me immediately to the border and not let me enter Cairo again.

I asked them how could that happen as I am a journalist and a girl and you have to show for me some respect! At 10pm they called me back and told me that I can enter Egypt, but that another Gaza filmmaker who attended the workshop will be expelled. I thought that I did not want to miss a big opportunity to discover the way and procedures of expelling, so I asked them to expel me with other people.

The procedures are: They called me into a special room where they put the Palestinians inside. It is not allowed for anybody to get out, actually it is not a room it is more like a prison. I sat with people and started to chat with them. It was really horrible what I heard and saw, from women, children and men in the same room, sharing the same toilet. There were people who had spent 4 days with their children – one of the children got sick and he spent time suffering the fever without seeing a doctor. Another spent a month inside this room without getting out. People are waiting for their flight and for visa to go to other countries like Saudi Arabia. Some young people prefer to spend many days in this room instead of going back to Gaza. I met lovely people there. I spoke with them a lot – the child Mahmoud who suffers from Autism, he was with his father and brother without his mother, who couldn’t travel with them because she does not have Palestinian ID so she couldn’t be with her children. I loved these kids, who kept coming to hug me.

At 1 in the morning they took us to another area at the old Cairo airport and put us in a room underground. This is really like a cell (3m x 5m)  and does not allow us to get out. The difficult thing was that I was so sleepy because I did not sleep well the last night, so I needed to sleep but the uncomfortable chair did not give me the chance to sleep. I am writing this section sitting in the room that I am talking about.

At 7pm in the morning they told us that they will take us to the bus, and now I am sitting in the bus going to the border. We are moving with the traffic of Cairo. I spent like 6 hours in the bus, slept around 2 and reached the border at 1:45pm. The good thing that I left the border at 3pm to Gaza I did not spend lots of time in the border, now I am going home, I miss my home, my bedroom and my bed for sure, home sweet home.

What I am really furious about is that the massage I made in the hotel in Corfu was gone, and really, I need extremely now 2 hour of massage to recover my bones again!        

So I am in Gaza  after travelling for two days, I am sure that each one of you took like hours to reach your home and sweet bed, but every thing has a different way when it reaches Gaza.

Janus Metz: Armadillo/10

The Danish documentary “Armadillo”, directed by Janus Metz and filmed by Lars Skree,  about Danish  soldiers in Afghanistan has been running in Danish cinemas for 6 weeks. More than 100.000 tickets have been sold, and the film is still running. The following are text clips from the Danish press release from the distribution company

ARMADILLO er nu blevet set af over 100.000, og det er sket i løbet af bare seks uger. På trods af hård konkurrence fra bl.a. VM i Fodbold, ”Sex and The City”, ”Twilight: Eclipse” og den danske sommer, har den danske ARMADILLO præsteret over alle forventninger i de danske biografer. Allerede i åbningsweekenden trak filmen 25.000 danskere i biografen til den intense historie om danske soldater udstationeret i Afghanistans urolige Helmand-provins. I den forgangne week-end ramte publikumstallet 100.225.

ARMADILLO kører fortsat i mange biografer landet over

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j61c-d_Uo

www.dfi.dk

Karlovy Vary Awards

What a wonderful and well deserved piece of news. The Best Documentary film (category: under 30 mins.) at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival was yesterday given to the Lithuanian documentary ”The River” by Lithuanian filmmaking duo Julija Gruodienė and Rimantas Gruodis. Described at the IDF (International Dcoumentary Institute) site in the following way: An introduction  to life in a remote village. Via eloquent, visually striking footage and the villagers’ humorous commentary, the directors acquaint us with a local way of life whose rhythm is set by a river. Prize 5000$.

I have just been to Lithuania to view the annual production 2009-2010. Still quality but a very remarkable effect from the financial crisis of the country. So much more great the Gruodiene and Gruodis win, a veteran couple in Lithuanian documentary, I can say, having met Gruodis several times during the Baltic Film & TV Festival on Bornholm 1990-2000. I remember strong works like the perestroika masterpiece ”Ona and Mykolas”, ”The Pain”, ”The Bathhouse” and ”The Territory”.

The Best long documentary was won by Mikael Wiström, Alberto Herskovits for ”Familia”.

http://www.documentary.lt/Default.aspx?Element=I_Manager2&TopicID=70&Lang=EN&IMAction=ViewArticles

http://www.dokweb.net/cs/

www.kviff.com

Howard Webb and Kill the Referee

The World Cup final on Sunday with Holland and Spain has English Howard Webb as the referee. For doc-foot addicts he is a very well known person as the main character in the brilliant insight to the world of referees in the following film that I saw in Lisbon last year. This is the text that I wrote, and good luck Mr. Webb!:

”Kill the Referee” is a film of Belgian and Swiss nationality, directed by Yves Hiant, a film for football fans like this blog writer – as loyal readers and friends have noticed. And it is amazing because of its unique access to a handful of referees and to the back stage of the Euro08. The film crew follows the referees into the dressing room, at the internal meetings where the selection of the teams take place and through the video evaluation of the matches, and into the hotel rooms, and at the homes where parents and wives follow their heroes in action. And heroes, well this is not what the players consider the referees to be, it is a hell of a job that takes lot of courage. Howard Webb, English referee, was haunted by the whole Polish nation (including death threats againgst him and his family) after his performance in the match Austria against Poland. He gave a penalty to Austria in the last minute of the match – which was absolutely correct and a very brave decision – but had allowed an off side goal to Poland earlier in the match, for which decision he did not go to the knock-out stage of the tournament. Webb is the hero of the film but there are also fine sequences and follow-ups on a Spanish and an Italian referee. What is the most astonishing in the film is actually that you hear the communication that is done between the referee and his linesmen during the match. Wow, for this technology, and bravo UEFA for letting a film like that be made. Good publicity for the job of being a referee – which does not mean that I will not shout the next time I see an unfair decision from one of those in black!

Kill the Referee, 2009, 75 mins., director: Yves Hinant

News from Paris: Godard – Film Socialisme

While Cannes is still waiting for Godard, we had the great pleasure in Paris to spend the evening of June 18th in his company after a special screening of Film Socialisme in le Cinéma des Cinéastes near Place Clichy. The evening was organized by Mediapart, an important Internet news site founded in 2008 by Edwy Plenel (journalist and former managing editor of Le Monde), who hosted the event.

Film Socialisme (Vega Film, 102 min.), with the subtitle La liberté coûte cher (Freedom comes at a high price), continues in the line of collages of video, documentary archive, text, graphics, music and dialogue that Godard has been making since the late eighties, this time at the lengths of a feature film. It’s political, it’s poetic and radically experimental.

The film is “a symphony in three movements”, a triptych composed of the following three ‘tableaux’:

Des choses comme ça… (Things like that): Set on a cruise ship in the Mediterranean, different personages, including Patti Smith, the philosopher Alain Badiou and an undefined war criminal, strolls in and out of the kitsch decadence onboard the boat. Underneath lies a story of some ‘lost’ gold from the Spanish civil war and the destiny of Europe.

Notre Europe (Our Europe): A garage somewhere in rural France run by a family with two kids and a white lama. The children revolt and hold their parents to an explanation of the concepts of freedom, equality and fraternity, all filmed by a frantic television-crew.

Nos humanités (Our humanities): A visit to six legendary sites: Egypt, Palestine, Odessa, Hellas (“Hell as”), Naples and Barcelona. The film ends with a beautiful sequence borrowed from a film by Agnès Varda (herself present amongst the audience that evening), showing two trapeze artists on a beach. The final words are: No comment…

Godard uses several techniques that result in a multilayered and multidimensional “experience”, more like a painting. Godard mixes shots of different definitions from HD to low definition video (filmed by mobile phones), saturated colours blown up. There are beautiful images. The sound equally varies in space (coming from left, right, middle) and in intensity and quality. Godard compares it to painting with different tools: brushes, spatulas, knifes… And then there are the constant quotations, symbols, clichés, all adding to the density.

“We have freedom of expression, but we don’t have freedom of impression” Godard pointed out during the nearly two hours he spent with the audience after the film. He did not always answer the questions put to him by the audience, he was mocking, funny, but most of all generous. On the speculations whether Film Socialisme is his last film, Godard retorts that all his film have been ‘his last film’, at the time À bout de souffle was his last film too…

The video of the entire rendezvous with Godard can be viewed on the site of Mediapart in partnership with Arte.tv :

http://www.mediapart.fr/content/rencontre-publique-avec-jean-luc-godard

In May Mediapart did another interview with Godard filmed in ten episodes:

http://cinemasparagus.blogspot.com/2010/05/two-hour-interview-with-jean-luc-godard.html

The trailer (the entire film at high speed) can be seen on the official website of Film Socialisme: http://www.filmsocialisme.com/

Godard – impostor or genius? The critics are, as always, divided in two. For my part, I tend not to try to understand, but to just sit down and be “impressed”. It is a film that you have to see several times.

French press (quotes translated by me):

Les Inrocks, May 14th, 2010:

“A probing investigation of a fragile Europe on the brink of the abyss. The view is sinister, but the cinematographic gesture is brilliant and brisk”.

http://www.lesinrocks.com/cine/cinema-article/t/44989/date/2010-05-14/article/film-socialisme/

Le Monde, May 18th, 2010:

“Godard operates by constantly moving on to the next scene. The links are not obvious, but they allow you to bounce from one notion to another, until a logic is reached”.

http://www.lemonde.fr/festival-de-cannes/article/2010/05/18/film-socialisme-jean-luc-godard-decu-d-une-europe-qu-il-voudrait-revoir-heureuse_1353205_766360.html

Evene.fr, May 2010:

“… if Godard’s films have seemed unstructured or confused, it is simply that the Franco-Swiss film-maker has always refused to indulge in the hypnotic powers of the cinematographic language…

each of his films warns, in its own way, against the risk of manipulation that exists within any symbolic language. Therefore, his apparent hermetic style pertains to a scrupulous honesty… that has nothing to do with a banal mystification for idle intellectuals…

what is at stake is not so much to destabilize the audience as to grant them the mental space necessary to liberate their associations of ideas and feelings, in the experience of a cinema freed from common expectations and norms”.

http://www.evene.fr/cinema/actualite/jean-luc-godard-cannes-film-socialisme-nouvelle-vague-2711.php

Some reviews in English:

Jordan Mintzer in Variety May 17th, 2010:

“Grandpère terrible Jean-Luc Godard continues to flip the bird at cinematic convention in “Film Socialisme,” one of the 79-year-old auteur’s more challenging works, and one that carries his experiments in sound, image, narrative and montage all the way to the subtitles themselves.”

http://www.variety.com/review/VE1117942789.html?categoryid=31&cs=1&query=godard+film+socialisme

Robert Koehler on Filmjourney, May 22nd, 2010:

“…Film Socialisme is a work that can’t be properly assessed without identifying it, first, as militantly experimental… This all creates a fascinating reading-watching-listening experience that expands cinematic spectatorship far more than any 3D innovations, even if, like adjusting to iambic pentameter in the first minutes of a Shakespeare performance, your motor functions aren’t ready for it.”

http://www.filmjourney.org/2010/05/22/cannes-2010-day-godard/

Matt Noller, Slant magazine, May 18th 2010:

“I’m not going to actually review Film Socialism, as any type of critique I could make would be fundamentally worthless. To praise it would be to pretend to understand something I did not; to attack it would amount to no more than a superficial dismissal…

If you haven’t liked Godard’s contemporary films up to this point, Film Socialism seems unlikely to sway you. If you’re a fan, you will at least be familiar with his techniques here.”

(http://www.slantmagazine.com/house/2010/05/cannes-film-festival-2010-day-six/)

Should you be in the south of France this summer, a Godard retrospective runs at the Cinéma Utopia in connection with the Festival d’Avignon. Film Socialisme is screened from July 13-21:

http://www.cinemas-utopia.org/avignon/index.php?id=1022&mode=film

The dialogues of the film are published in book form: Film socialisme : Dialogues avec visages auteurs (97 pages, ed. P.O.L, May 2010)

Film Socialisme can still be viewed on the big screen in Paris.

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Storydoc is an EU supported training programme ”for filmmakers with Mediterranean projects”. The first 2010 session took place July 5-7 in Corfu, where these words are being written the day after a workshop that was full of heat outside and inside AND of passionate filmmakers with film projects at different stages of development. From the following countries: Greece, Germany, Romania, Scotland, Italy, France, Croatia, England, Latvia, Bulgaria, Palestine and Israel. 24 projects were worked upon with tutors (generalists, commissioning editors, directors, editors, distributors and producers) from Denmark, Greece, Israel, Palestine, France, Germany, Scotland, England, Finland and USA.

A workshop de luxe as said Cecilia Lidin from EDN referring to the amount of and quality of the tutors present, as well as the variety of projects.

Three long and intense days full of discussion and watching, everybody at the same hotel (swimming pool and beach to be reached by lift), eating together and the semifinals of the World Cup of football. Storydoc is run by Chara Lampidou and Kostas Spiropoulos helped by producer Rea Apostolides and me as responsible for content. The second session will take place in Athens, December 5-7.

French director Stan Neumann (photo) was one of the invited tutors.

www.storydoc.gr

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UK based Saeed Taji Farouky came to the workshop with his story about ”The Runner” (photo), the activist athletic who wants, through the running, to raise awareness about the non-recognition of his country Western Sahara, occupied by Morocco. Salah Ameidan is his name and he wins all sympathy as he is presented in the intimate trailer. The director was given an award that includes transport and stay at the Documentary Campus workshop in Leipzig in October where he will be able to pitch his project to around 45 commissioning editors. (See website below)

Also awarded with scholarships and 1000€ were 1) Croatian Dana Budisavljevic, who is developing a film project called ”Diana’s List” about Diana Budisavljevic, who saved thousands of Jewish children during ww2. 2) Greek Marianna Economou who has a wonderful proposal to make a film that deals with Greek mothers who make and get sent food for their sons abroad! ”Flying Food” is the name. Gorgeous idea. In a less humourous style 3) Palestinian filmmaker Mahammed Abu Sido presented his ”Waiting for You”, an unlucky family story told by the director who wants to unite his family in a film, as it is not possible in real life!

www.touristwithatypewriter.com

www.storydoc.gr