Gasnier & Nezan: Zanzibar Musical Club

This film insists on being a Film. From the very start. This is a story to be watched – it follows  the old mantra: don’t talk about it, show it. No commentary. No formatted tv. And oh yes, they succeed with this moderne and yet old-fashioned Film sentence. In other words it is pure seduction if you agree on the premise, that they, the filmmakers, will not give you a lot of background information to understand a context (you can search/google for that afterwards to read about Zanzibar and the taraab music tradition), they invite you to open your eyes, watch what we the filmmakers saw and heard of wonderful music. If you accept that game, basically if you want a Film like this, you will have a joyful trip, where you meet great characters and artists, who perform in an environment full of frivolity and religion (it is a muslim society) at the same time.

Fishermen, music, the following of a man to his home, a violin player he is, a brick game in the street, street shots, no story but plenty of ambiance, and yet, there are many stories and impressions given through a fabulous camera work, sometimes in tableau-like images, sometimes with a dancing camera to accompany the songs, that are being song by young and old in clubs or in the streets or at more official events. The texts of the songs most often refer to Love, impossible or difficult or just possible love, there is a lot of melancholy expressed, but also more naughty hints are in the texts. It is obvious that the listeners in the film know about the songs and it is wonderful to see the women, who get up to dance. Seduction, music unites, this is an old culture and there are stories connected that need to be remembered.

One who remembers, and who still performs is the almost 100 year old Bi Kidude, who with not many teeth in her mouth is a storyteller who knows so much and wants to convey it. She is filmed at rehearsals and at concerts. Magnificent! My overall impression – To rephrase one of the texts in a song: I am drunk with tenderness.

France & Germany, 2010, 85 & 52 mins. (I saw the long version, in the tv version there is a voice-off)

www.lesfilmsdupresent.fr

Tomas Kudrna: All That Glitters

Good news for a good film reviewed on this site a couple of days ago, edited from the press release of the festival DOK Leipzig:

“All That Glitters” by Tomáš Kudrna, developed at the Documentary Campus Masterschool 2007, has been selected for the official programme of DOK Leipzig. It will run in the section non-competitive International Programme. DOK Leipzig is the largest and most traditional German festival as well as one of the leading international events for artistic documentary and animated films.

Amy Hardie: The Edge of Dreaming

Our American readers can watch (on PBS, 10pmEST) Amy Hardie’s great film tonite. If you live outside the U.S. you can watch it online for free from tomorrow and for the next three months. On the site mentioned below. I post the review that I wrote after the premiere at idfa 2009:

There you go, a real camera stylo personal essay film with an original, personal style. I was completely taken in by the beauty of the film, “The Edge of Dreaming”, of Scottish filmmaker Amy Hardie. It touched me, made me reflect on my own life, my family life, my growing up, at the same time as the intensity of storytelling makes you stay in an atmosphere of listening and watching and reflecting. For me this is what a good documentary can be with many layers, a mature commentary, about Life and Death, and told in numerous stylistical lines. You can´t help fall in love with the family of Amy Hardie. They live in (Scottish) nature surroundings that a camera can only adore. And you can´t help admire the manner Hardie, using rough home video material, goes visually elegantly back in time and forward again. We get her story about her first husband, who died years ago, but who comes back to her in a dream to ”announce” that she will die when she is 48 years of age. There are dream sequences, and there are stunning images that make me think of classic Dutch paintings. It is all mixed brilliantly and without any predictability. I better stop my praise and give you the prose of the producers from the idfa catalogue:

This is the story of a rational, sceptical woman, a mother and wife, who does not remember her dreams. Except once, when she dreamt her horse was dying. She woke so scared she went outside in the night. She found him dead. The next dream told her she would die herself, when she was 48. The film explores life, dreams and death in the context of a warm, loving family whose happiness is increasingly threatened as the dream seems to be proving true. The final confrontation, returning inside the dream with a shaman, reveals a surprising twist to the tale.

Scotland, 2009, 73 mins. – and (bravo) with the support of ZDF/arte, More4 and VPRO plus of course Scottish Screen.

http://www.pbs.org/pov/edgeofdreaming

Nenad Puhovski: Together

Energetic festival director (ZagrebDOX) and producer (Factum) Nenad Puhovski is also a film director, and a very committed one. With his new film he has for years been following people who – with his words – ”were, are or wish to be emotionally engaged with others”. They are very different, but they all want to be together with another person. Their differences and communication skills are reflected in the way the film comes out stylistically. With some characters the director puts up the camera and waits for good moments to happen, with others who could be mentally challenged, he has to put questions to get answers on how Love came to them. It makes the film a bit unbalanced with an intercut editing that goes from one story to the other, and then to yet another one. There are five stories in the film, they each have their own atmosphere, one could call it ”colour” – also emphasized through the use of different music elements.

Having said so, some of the stories sit strong with the viewer. For me the story with the lesbian couple goes close and develops into a touching small drama. Here you sense an intimacy that you can only get if you as a director knows your approach and has achieved the confidence and the respect of both young women in the couple. Some other wordless scenes work fine in terms of rythm and metaphor for happiness – like the one where a couple (those on the photo) do a bed together, or the scene with the widow who are at the cemetery, or the fine scenes with the man in the wheelchair, who challenges the viewer with his direct language: We all fuck!

Truffaut said that if nine out of ten films were about Love, it was one too little. I would not mind if Puhovski goes back to one of the couples and see how it goes og does not go. We can all learn from that!

Croatia, 2009, 87 mins.

info@factumdocumentary.com

www.factumdocumentary.com

Dokumania: Cities on Speed

Den danske dokumentarserie, bestående af fire film med hver deres egen stil og ”håndskrift”, bliver nu vist på DR2’s tirsdags-strand ”Dokumania” den 24. august og 31. August klokken 21.30. Jeg skrev en artikel til tidsskriftet DOX om serien, her er et redigeret udsnit, særligt om filmene fra Shanghai og Mumbai (photo), instrueret af henholdsvis Nanna Frank Møller og Camilla Nielsson/Frederik Jacobi

This is an edited text about the Danish documentary series ”Cities on Speed”, which is to be broadcasted on DR’s documentary strand ”Dokumania”:

Characters: The four films are classic in thematic appproach but they are also modern documentaries in the way that the emphasis is put on the character driven formula. Professor Shu and photographer Xu from Shanghai, migrant Yasin, civil servant Mr. Das and Ms. Veena from Mumbai, Mr. Taher in Cairo and Antanas Mockus and Enrique Penalosa from Bogota are all megacity citizens of different background and with different stories. They are all involved in, for some you could say victims of, the mega-problems of the pancake-effect as Mr. Shu in Shanghai

shows with his hands: These cities broaden out more and more like when you make a pancake. What can we do?

Conflicts and Stories: Mr. Shu in the film ”Shanghai/Space” has a vision. He wants to go underground with the roads, wants to create an artificial sunny atmosphere, a human eco-system down under the ground. Which should full of life and birds singing. So it becomes bearable to live over ground where the real sun shines. Mr. Yu, his antagonist, goes around taking photographs of the change that the city takes, he has done that for decades, and he and his wife have to move into a modern flat in one of the skyscrapers. Two different times, one looking forward, one looking back. Two stories and two main characters that do not directly confront each other.

In ”Mumbai/Disconnected” the three characters are narratively connected, to show the disconnection in the city and between them. Yasin and his family wants the new cheap nano car, this is his big wish in life, to prove that he is something and that he can fight the poverty. Mr. Das, the civil servant is part of the leadership of the road development project and has constant problems in fulfilling the requirements of the World Bank that has given a loan to construct a flyover road solution to improve the totally devastating transport situation in a city of soon 20 million people. And last but not least Ms. Veena, very well-off, who fights the plans of the flyover, and does it with passion and clever words, as a senior citizen, as she says, who measures the air pollution and concludes that ”the air is not breathable”. Yasin has a life where he can not afford to think about pollution and city strategies, and he does not get close to Mr. Das and Ms. Veena who meet in a dramatic citizen-city administration discussion.

Issue and Creative Treatment: In terms of the premise above (a commissioned, informative documentary series), the ”Mumbai/Space” takes the prize. It presents the core of the – with an understatement – problem in an attractive way and you never doubt that the directors (Camilla Nielsson and Frederik Jacobi) know what they are talking about. The characters are all personalities who are interesting. You laugh and get angry with them and you have a clear sense of the absurdities in the situation. You like them all, and this is luckily not a black and white film. It has no conclusions and you want the best for Yasin and his family. You wish Mr. Das success in his small office with piles of paper and when he is on inspection tours in the city, and you understand completely why Ms. Veena protests against having more stinking gasoline smell just outside her windows. The questions are a thousand on how to solve – if possible – the problems which are social, political and enviromental. It is more than serious but the filmmakers know that painting it all black would mean that noone would care. Now they tell the stories with fine characters and a light tone that is also due to the wonderful choice of music: The Raymond Scott Quintet, from the end of the 1940es, sounding like British civil propaganda films from the period. A limited speak commentary introduces, and the story goes fine from one character to the next setting up problems and questions that are later on touched upon. Well crafted and good cinematography.

The film by Nanna Frank Møller, “Shanghai/Space” is contrary to the Mumbai and Cairo films less issue-orientated but goes much more artistically deep with the characters, or should I say Character: Mr. Xu, who is portrayed so convincingly beautiful, and who will forever be connected to my memory when the talk comes to Shanghai. An old man who tells his life story through a low-key, melancholic narration connected to his photos taken over a period of decades. These are photos of Shanghai as it was and is when the camera follows him and his wife in the suburbs documenting how the trees and people and houses look like before they disappear. The old China. “The change has come to me”, he says, the family has to move, and again – the camera follows him to diffferent flats that he looks at, up to the point where he finds the one where he wants to be. It is thus more than a presentation of the changing Shanghai, and of the underground plans presented by the (also) charismatic constantly smiling professor Shu. It is a personal drama, a human story that is unfolded about a man, Mr. Xu, who during the cultural revolution was sent to a camp because photography was a bourgeois occupation. The film is full of details like the difficult moving of the photographic magnifier and the choice of cinematographical approach suits perfectly the man with the camera: Non-moving almost still life paintings, one after the other. The whole film is so well mastered that I do not hesitate to say that Nanna Frank Møller, after this third film as director, proves to be one of the big talents in the new generation of Danish documentarians.

www.dox.dk

http://www.dr.dk/dr2/dokumania

OFF Odense Film Festival/1

The 25th edition of the festival in Odense, Denmark takes place 23-28. August. There are many reasons to congratulate the municipality of Odense for keeping alive this film festival for all these years in spite of constant battles to raise the necessary funding. The 2010  festival, as it is being presented on its site, see address below (programme both in Danish and English), is communicated with a lot of fresh energy and proudness, now with a focus on the short film as it looks today, the one for the big screen and the one for the internet via YouTube etc. I switch to Danish language in this posting as well as in the one below, which is a tour down memory lane for this blogger.

Programmet er omfattende med den internationale konkurrence i centrum. Det er animation og fiktion og dokumentar, og det er film fra filmskoler verden over og fra lande som Finland, Canada og Frankrig, som stadig dyrker den trængte filmgenre professionelt. Programmerne er delt ind i temaer, desværre med besynderlige overskrifter som ”inderlig eksistens”, ”ejendommelig eksistens” og ”intet er som det syner” m.fl. Sælger det billetter til et ungt publikum?

Måske er det lige meget for der plejer at være fuldt hus i Odense til festivalen, der nu overalt i sin branding slår på at være OFF mainstream, et valg som også slår igennem i valget af nogle fremragende internationale dokumentarer. Publikum kan se ”RIP – A Remix Manifesto”, Ulrich Seidl’s controversial ”Tierische Liebe”  og ”Crumb” af Terry Zwigoff. Og så er der et pitching arrangement for kortfilm, YouTube konkurrence, masse af aktiviteter for børn og unge osv osv. Bravo!… Photo from the short film thriller “Kitchen Sink” by Alison MacLean, Australia, one of the many eternal hits (from 1989) from the retrospective festival section.

OFF Odense Film Festival/2

En lille tur ned ad Memory Lane: Klokken er fem, sagde festivaldirektøren, så er det tid til en kold øl. Der havde vi 4-5 udvælgere siddet fra morgenstunden i et af kommunens mødelokaler og set bunker af kortfilm tilsendt fra hele verden. Direktøren hed Jørgen Roos, dansk kort- og dokumentarfilms største navn (1922-98). Fra 1985 og 12 år frem var han leder af festivalen, og havde folk som journalist Mogens Damgaard, filmkonsulent Ulrich Breuning og undertegnede til at hjælpe sig med at sammensætte et program, der havde et højt kunstnerisk niveau og samtidig var overraskende, fantasifuldt og eventyrligt. For det skulle det være for en festival, der foregik – og foregår – i H.C. Andersens by, den forfatter som samme Jørgen Roos nåede at lave flere film om. (”Mit livs eventyr” og ”Andersen hos fotografen” er med i en antologi, som er tilgængelig via filmstriben.dk). Vi så film i en uge og hvert år udspilledes det samme lille drama efter et par dage. Jørgen Roos sukkede og erklærede, at der nok ikke blev en festival i år for der var ikke film nok af høj kvalitet! Det var hans ene holdning, der ofte var præget af at vi i timevis kunne rende ind i en stime af amerikanske universitetsfilm, som var mere eller mindre håbløst umodne jokes. Den anden holdning var filminstruktørens generøse indstilling til sin métier – jamen, tænk at han/hun har arbejdet i et år eller mere på sin film, og den er måske ikke helt vellykket men der er vilje og ambition og talent… der kom et par film fra Uruguay og Ecuador med på den konto! Den frie film kæmpede Jørgen Roos for, den film der ikke skulle igennem rækker af tv-redaktører eller filmkonsulenter, den film der var personlig og modig. Og helst på film, 35 eller 16mm, tænk, sagde han engang med henvisning til videoens fremmarch, tænk på den dag, hvor vi ikke længere kan se ridser på lærredet, hvor det hele er sterilt! Jeg tror, han ville have hadet YouTube for det lille billede og (ofte) manglen på æstetisk overvejelse, men han ville have glædet sig over at her lever den frie film i bedste velgående.

Magdalena Pieta: Planet Kirsan

I have never heard about Kalmykia before. Have you? I checked it: An autonomous republic it is, member of the SNG, close friends to Russia with ONE leader, Kirsan Ilyumzhinov, who himself was a chess champion and wants to turn his country into a country for chess players, masters of the game. Around 300.000 inhabitants, and ” a nearly empty desert the size of Scotland” (according to an article in New Yorker)

Demographic and political Information is not the subject of Magdalena Pieta’s film. She goes mostly for the chess and the children. Politics is in the background shown through huge official ceremonies and parades, sometimes intercut with the chess games and preparations, that form the foreground of a film that is surprising and fascinating to watch. First of all because of the filmic qualities and the quite challenging structure of the film. It has no real classical narrative to go from, and yet there is a red thread that takes the viewer with and to a tournament for a couple of kids, who she follows and sometimes gets pretty close to. She catches dialogues, faces, emotions and she conveys the extreme competitive atmosphere. That is the hard reality for the kids. ”Only winning matters” as it is being said by one of the tough charismatic teachers of Alekhan and Amir. They win and they lose. They cry and they laugh. Intruding into this docu observation is a little girl wearing a hat as a chess brick. She is not noticed, she is visible for the viewer but not for the ones in the picture.

The sound of the film contributes to this fairy tale tone that is the aim of the director. Almost through the whole film you hear the wind of the steppes that surround the chess city, Elista is the name. Combined with the presence of the small girl and the excellent wordless close-ups of the kids, you sense the kind of fascination that has been the motivation for the director to go there. And the surrealistic feel she must have had being there. And, yes, the one responsible for the construction of this dreamerish situation, Kirsan himself is being interviewed. Or rather he talks, about chess. ”When everything else might change, chess remains”, he says with a smile. Charisma, he has.

Poland, 2010, 50 mins.

http://www.dokweb.net/en/ex-oriente-film/upcoming-films/-planet-kirsan-166/?off=30 (trailer9

Zeljko Mirkovic: I will Marry the Whole Village

If you think you have read about films by Mirkovic from Serbia before, you are right! He has developed a special touch in documentary filmmaking and he chooses subjects that appeal not only to a local audience but also internationally for tv. Like this new one from the productive director and producer, an edited quote from his site:           

”The village of Matejevac, in the south of Serbia, has over 300 unmarried men (almost one third of the men living there). The village is only a ten-minute drive from the city of Niš with the population of around 400,000 citizens, but the women there do not want to live in the countryside… Peca, an unmarried accordion player, has decided to take the matter into his own hands and to carry out a great project aiming at marrying the young and old by attracting women to the village. And to get married himself in the end.”

The film is full of humour, Peca is a sympathethic character, and nice music is the element that binds the story together with a classic storyteller, who addresses the camera directly. As do the bachelors when they make their small promotion video. There is a bit of amateur comedy in the film when Peca goes around to do publicity for his mission. It is all together light-hearted and joyful to watch. They get together, the men and the women, they have fun, they sing and dance, and drink… and Peca, a text at the end says, continues to matchmake.

Serbia, 2010, 57 mins.

http://www.optimisticfilm.com/eprojekti.html

Tomás Kudrna: All that Glitters

It is a very rich film that Czech director and journalist Kudrna has made from post-Soviet Kyrgyzstan. From the gold mine Kumtor, co-owned by a Canadian company. The creative documentary elements are obvious. Cinematography is stunning – there is a standpoint already here: If you want to make a film about man destroying nature, you have to make it magic and beautiful to watch. It is, indeed. Characters match each other perfectly – the tractor driver/obedient worker Nurbek, the local boss/mediator to the Canadian management Kerim and the doctor/social activist Baktigul. Around them there are several important side characters, including the Canadian director of the gold mine. And the narrative line is clear – slowly Kudrna, showing his journalistic skills, gets more and more into the core of the story. By insisting and by being there for a long time, doors are opened and he can go deeper and deeper.

In the beginning he is not allowed to film at the mine. Then he is being ”given” Nurbek as the super worker, you may follow him, he was told. He does and is able to open up Nurbek, to make him a human being and not just a tool for propaganda. This happens very much by including Nurbek’s wife, who also works at the mine and who is vey much in doubt about their participation in

the film. Her point is that if they say something positive about the mine, they will be met with criticism from their neighbours (who are already jealous because of their relative wealthiness), and if they something bad, they will get problems with their superiors at the mine. The theme of what to say and what not grows gradually in the film.

Kerim was already at Soviet time a leader. He is energetic and does not refrain from involving himself in heavy discussions on camera, especially with the doctor Baktigul, who is the link to the fatal cyanide accidents that happened at the mine more than 10 years ago – as well as she is the one, who fights for better social conditions for her fellow citizens in the town. She points at the responsibility of Kumtor in this respect. AND they do help, the Canadians, to a certain degree, and make a lot of publicity out of this when for instance Kerim hands out gifts and money to WW2war veterans!

Kudrna tells his story in an unusual way. He does not use a spoken commentary. In the beginning I was doubtful if it would work with the first person texts on black, but you get used to it as the film develops and are happy that images and action can unfold without a voice-off. And you are never uncertain about the open-minded, respectful and yet critical position of the director – you hear him once in a while put questions, and you hear the characters address him. At the end of the film he turns brilliantly to Kerim and Nurbek and make them dialogue about if it would have consequences if Nurbek were critical to Kumtor. (I am very curious to hear IF the film has had any consequences for any of the three main characters?)

The bigger political and business frame is also in the film. The president of the republic, Bakiyev (who is now ex-p after the riots in the country in April this year) is in the film as well as the president of the Canadian company, who agrees to an interview, is sympathetic but also very careful about what he says. There is money in all that glitters and you don’t want to lose the contract with the government in a post-soviet country that in many ways still act as was it a Soviet republic.

A character driven, informative and creative investigation into the conflict between man and nature, between business and environment, between profit and social security, told through engaging characters, who live in a new system, or do they? Yes, rich it is, this film, rasing questions, giving no easy answers, a real documentary!

Czech Republic, 2010, 99 mins.

http://www.catndocs.com/

http://www.dokweb.net/en/documentary-network/articles/film-of-the-week-all-that-glitters-1014 (trailer)