Documentaries in France

The French CNC (Centre National du Cinéma et de l’image Animée) has published a study on the market for documentaries in France. According to the French Media Desk and their weekly newsletter no. 194 (newsletter@mediafrance.eu) the study concerns the creative documentaries.

2225 hours of documentaries have been produced in 2009, a progress of 8,1%. The contribution from television is the biggest in 20 years, 47,3%. The documentaries represented 6,5% of the market in 2009 – and with 2008 statistics the sales of tv documentary programmes were 26% of total sales.

Documentaries for cinema release: 30 films were produces for theatrical release in 2009 with almost 3 mio. Tickets sold. The duration of their prseence on the screns are longer than for fiction and animation. In general a French cinema documentary is released in 27 copies.

Crisis… where? (Photo: Agnes Varda)

For details: www.cnc.fr

Hotakainen & Joonas Berghäll: Steam of Life

Stories from Life. Stories brought to the screen by Finnish men. Stories mostly told in saunas where the men are naked. To be naked can also be a metaphor for being vulnerable. Which is exactly what the men are in this extraordinary documentary that keeps your attention from start till end. The clouds or the fog of steam that fill the screen inside or outside the saunas are like the intimate and painful words that hang in the air – or they are to be watched in stunning images from the Finnish landscape, urban or (mostly) in the countryside at the lakes, at the forests.

Sometimes it is good to talk, says one of the men, and they do talk these Finnish men, who – as another man says – normally are meant to be tough. About being a father without seeing your children. About losing job and family. About having a bear as a friend, maybe the only one, out in the wilderness! About a train driver who could not stop when someone jumped to kill himself in front of the train. And the final story about the man who heartbreakingly for 10 minutes give us the story about the death of his daughter.

There is an underlying tone of sadness throughout this film but there is also warmth and (some) humour, and there is the best film music score (Jonas Bohlin) I have heard for a long time to accompany the anxiety and bad feelings that are being sweated out in the sauna AND the tableau-like images (camera: Heikki Farm) from beautiful, melancholic Finland. Do they just sit and talk… no, the director has made them sit and talk, it is amazing what they tell us, no masks, unplugged you might say, and totally controlled in editing with a grande finale that I will not reveal for you.

Trailer(s) and background material for the film, that might be onits way to be nominated for an Oscar… google the title.

www.oktober.fi

Finland, 2010, 82 mins.

Andrea Deaglio: Il futuro del mondo passa da qui/2

… the subtitle being ”city veins”. I wrote about it in June and promised to come back with a review when the film was finished. Which is now.

Angelo, Roky, Frida, Reno, Darius, Gerardo, Jasmina… names of people, who have that in common that they are characters in a film that as location has the  outskirts of Torino, where they all live outside normal urban society trying to survive. For a limited time as the area will be turned into a golf and similar kind of recreation centre, as well as it will be object to making transport out of the city easier through new roads etc.

From this description you might expect a political correct activist film like many others – it is not. On the contrary, the focus is the human. Deaglio and his cameramen follow the individuals in their daily activities: Roky gets up, goes to the lake to get washed, goes to get some drinking water… Frida goes to the drug meeting point… Reno cooks and finishes his van Gogh painting. Washing of hair. Repairing a bicycle. Doing nothing.

The images are stunning. Making the area look beautiful. They come as tableaux, chaptering the characters stories which in words are told by themselves through audio on black images. As I don’t understand Italian, for me the words appear subtitled on black with no ”disturbing” images. Which makes the effect very strong – precise small stories of situations they have experienced, facts accompnied by emotions. The director has no intention to sentimentalise or romanticize – I sense an honest, truthful and distant view, and this is why you stay linked to the screen where you also get many interesting and surprising camera angles. In other words – welcome to a non-mainstream documentary film talent.

http://cityveins.blogspot.com/

http://www.fctp.it/movie_item.php?id=751&type=2&lang=_en

http://vimeo.com/5504493

http://www.ilfuturodelmondopassadaqui.it/ (ready by August 2010)

Marianna Economou: Twelve Neighbours

A street is Athens is the stage for this warm and very well made documentary. The director has come there for years, and again this confirms the simple sentence: Time is quality. If you are a good filmmaker, know your skills and has an eye for people and situations. Marianna Economou has.

A young Iraqi immigrant talks about an old woman on the other side of the street. She is afraid to go out and she only leaves when she can see him. ”I love her. Like my Mum”. In a cellar a Pakistani immigrant has made the room his home, the tv set plays his local music movies as he talks to wife and child at home. An old woman distributes funeral wheat to the people of the street – this is what is being done on ”All Soul’s Day”. The montage is like that, the director builds up the viewer’s relationship with the characters, who live and/or work there. The baker, the old man at the window, who sings for us at the end of the film, the sisters at the flowerish courtyard, it is all very stimulating to meet these ordinary, fine people. Also those who can not sustain their small businesses and have to give up. It is Life with tears and laughter. The director also visits a quite extraordinary clone of Anita Ekberg, who listens to opera and as a real drama queen imagines herself on the stage. 

The key person, however, is the café owner and host of the Alekton theatre. A creative place with poem readings, music and theatre. Costa is his name, known by them all, initiator of activities, and a man who talks to the camera about respecting ”the other”. A message film? Yes, a very nuanced and mature hommage to everyday life as it is being lived all over the world in small streets all over the world.

Greece, 52 mins., 2009

Director cv and stills from the film: http://www.idfa.nl/industry/info/profile.aspx?id=0f8eac84-e6b1-4928-a2a5-433cb44ea6ee

Bingöl Elmas: My Letter to Pippa

Italian Pippa Bacca, peace activist dressed in a wedding gown, decided to travel to Jerusalem. By hitchhiking. She did not make it. In Turkey she was raped and killed. Bingöl Elmas, Turkish filmmaker, decided to finish the travel of Pippa, wearing a black wedding dress as a sign of sorrow.

What we as viewers get from this journey is a fragmented picture of Turkey today, at least as it can be read through the meetings Bingöl has with truck drivers, men and women and children in villages she passes, old people, young people, farmers and business men. She is constantly being followed by her crew colleagues, they film and she films.

The director is a good talker, she gets easy into discussions with the men, and she makes them talk. Some think that they can get a night with her, others are sceptical to her intentions and several warns her to be alone with men on the highway! Of course the camera to a certain degree excludes the most ”chauvinistic” dialogues to develop but this is luckily not the only target for the journey. The scenes where she talks to women, especially the old ladies and to families are the most interesting and authentic as they unfold in a very light and unstressed manner.

The film is part of the series ”The Other Turkey” made for arte France. On the website below the intention of the series and its context is explained.

Turkey, 60 mins., 2010

www.otherturkey.tv

www.asminfilm.com

Elena Demidova: Cranberry Island

Russian countryside village and a family. Mother and father and 4 children. We have seen it many times before, and we will see it again. With pleasure. You smile, you think ”how the hell can they survive under these poor circumstances”, some would say ”in this shit”, but you enjoy and you feel sometimes that this is too much. The latter comes especially in connection with the charismatic entrepreneur, the husband and father, who in the beginning of the film is constantly yelling at his wife, quite unsympathetic actually, but slowly the director (who is also the camerawoman, sound engineer and editor) builds him up as a character, who wants to create good life conditions for his family, and you get some empathy for him. His big project is to build and make work a windmill. But he is also a beekeeper, the family has a couple of pigs, and he has installed hot water and a wc in the house.

In the house where the lovely mother expresses herself to the husband: ”I don’t need your idealism. I see Life. We will lose everything with your idealism, our children before all.” Marina is good piano player and in the cosy sitting room, the children does their homework, one of them fighting with German words. A tough life, indeed, and they go to the city to try to find a job in the house of the Prince of Lichtenstein, as I got it!

For good and worse you can see that the film crew is one woman. Elena Demidova has spent a lot of time with her characters, they talk to her behind the camera, she has their confidence, and she has caught some of those beautiful magical moments that you can’t script – you just have to wait for them to happen. On the other hand the technical quality and the editing of the film suffers a bit when you have to do it all by yourself…. the windmill, the red thread in the storytelling, yes it works at the end of the film. And Marina sings like an angel!

The film won the environmental prize at the Message2Man Festival in St. Petersburg – see below.

Russia, 71 mins., 2010

Trailer: http://www.kinoglaz.fr/u_fiche_film.php?num=5719

Contacts: arazlogova@hotmail.com antel-dem@yandex.ru

doxpro St. Petersburg

During the Message2Man International Film Festival (se below) I had the pleasure to run a small doxpro workshop for around 10 young and younger Russian filmmakers. Through three hot mornings (July 17-19) the group discussed four projects that had been selected and all had a written proposal and visual material to present. Several others joined with projects they wanted to bring to the table for sharing and discussion. With the four projects as starting point information was given on the European documentary landscape, that is far too closed for the many Russian talented filmmakers. This is precisely why Ludmila Nazaruk and Viktor Skubey has initiated the website www.miradox.ru and the doxpro international program for documentary professionals. Let me repeat what Nazaruk said when the first edition of doxpro was organised in November 2009:

”Every year in Russia more than 3000 non-fiction films are produced, more than 400 of them have state financial support, but only 5-7 films end up on the international market. For Russia it is disastrously low. Real co-productions, that bring together broadcasters, distributors, sales agents, distributors, cable channels, IT-platforms (Video-on-demand, Pay per view), we do not see.

DOXPRO intends to become a business platform for the interaction of Russian and foreign documentary, to form long-term international cultural and economic ties, and create favorable conditions for realization of joint projects in the field of documentary filmmaking. Analogues of such programs to date in Russia do not exist.”

After these two sessions it is easy for me to say that there is talent and projects with international potential. DoxPro is the right forum and the participants like the openness, and to have their projects focused. Production skills are needed, writing and presentation skills as well, but the most obvious missing link is the language. Too few of the filmmakers speak the international documentary community language: English.

www.miradox.ru

News from Paris : August

If you are spending time in Paris in August, here are a few ideas, which might not be in your travel guide.

The Forum des images (recently renovated and situated down in Les Halles, great cinema and great program) organises for the tenth time le Cinéma au clair de lune, open air projections of various classics (Rohmer, Godard, Renoir, Beineix…) who all has Paris as a setting, shown in different places around Paris (Montmartre, Place des Vosges, Parc Montsouris…). It runs from August 4th to 22nd and it’s all for free. Take a look at the program:

http://www.forumdesimages.fr/fdi/Festivals-Evenements/Cinema-au-clair-de-lune

In Milly-la-Forêt, 50 km South-East of Paris, lies the house of Jean Cocteau. It has just been opened to the public end of June this year. Cocteau bought the house in 1947 and lived there until his death in 1963. The house and the garden have been carefully restored.

“With the advent of success, Milly became a sort of refuge, far from society life. Irises and peonies, an orchard full of fruit trees, and the dogs and cats were always there to welcome him. The poet came to rest, to center himself, and with his companion Edouard Dermit to receive friends, stroll in the gardens and over the bridges crossing the castle moat, take time in his gardens, work late in his office or in his attic workshop.

After the poet’s death in 1963, and until his own in 1995, Edouard Dermit kept the sitting room, office, and bedroom of the poet intact, allowing for their perfect restitution today. He also protected 500 of Cocteau’s most beautiful works which he inherited, a first selection of which we now display here.

In addition, there is a permanent exhibition of some of the most beautiful portraits of Cocteau by Picasso, Warhol, Blanche, Modigliani, Man Ray, and more.

Purchased and restored with support from the Ile-de-France Regional Council and the Essonne Departmental Council, this house becomes, by opening to the public, a unique exhibition venue and place of memory.” (Pierre Bergé, from the website)

Maison Jean-Cocteau, 15 rue du Lau, 91490 Milly-la-Forêt. Tél. : 01 64 98 11 50. Open from Wednesday to Sunday 10 am-7 pm.

http://www.jeancocteau.net/maison_galerie_en.php 

Documentaries in Sarajevo and Prizren

Two festivals are coming up in Bosnia Herzegovina and Kosovo:

1) The 16th Sarajevo Film Festival runs from July 23 through July 31, 2010, with eighteen mid-length and feature documentaries from the Balkans, Turkey, Cyprus and Austria competing in the documentary programme. In additon to a wide array of features and shorts, the festival also hosts the CineLink Co-production Market (July 28 – 31).

”The long Road through Balkan History” (photo) by Zeljko Mirkovic is one of the competing documentaries, reviewed on this site. Others are Turkish Doga Kilcioglu’s ”Married to the Camera”, Croatian Nenad Puhovski’s ”Together”, review will follow next week on this site as it will of Greek Marianna Economou’s ”Twelve Neighours”, Romanian ”Paradise Hotel” by Sophia Tzavella and ”The World According to Ion B.” by Alexander Nanau. The two last ones were shown at the Message2Man festival in St. Petersburg.

www.sff.ba

2) Totally dedicated to documentaries and short films is the festival Dokufest in Prizren, Kosovo that runs from July 31 to August 7, 2010. It includes a wide range of sections. There is an international and a Balkan competition in which the films of Mirkovic, Puhovski, Nanau and Kilcioglu mentioned above in the festival in Saravejo will also compete. Internationally are films like ”Chemo” by Pawel Lozinski, ”The Mouth of the Wolf” by Pietro Marcello, ”The Player” by John Appel and ”Six Weeks” by Maciej Krawczyk to be found. All reviewed on this site. Also in the competent programme selection are two films that have been showed earlier this year at the Magnificent7 festival in Belgrade: ”The Living Room of the Nation” (as part of a big Finnish retrospective) and ”Les Arrivants” (”The Arrivals”)

http://www.dokufest.com

Message2Man/6

An almost two year old boy running around observing what goes on. And touching the Golden Centaur statuettes lined up to be given to the winners. A conferencier shouting Russian words into the microphone trying to make a festive atmosphere. Next to him a very professional female interpreter who repeat in English. One after one the winners are called to the stage… but not many of them are present. The atmosphere is supposed to be lifted by loud music that is generally tough for the ears. Nothing is really planned in details and people are sweating during the hour it takes before departure to the farewell reception.

A nice atmosphere, some would say chaotic, my fellow jury friend said ”excuse me my French, but this is a complete disaster”, I would call it anarchistic – and yet, politics are being made, the director of the main private sponsor, a Dutch company, is called to receive a medal as was he a filmmaker, and the board of directors give special prizes for filmmakers, who were not on the lists of the juries…

And outside my travel partner and I look at the young women, who fight to walk the high heels, that they all have. If you don’t wear them, you are not a real woman, one of our young smiling guides told us her mother had said. Photo from “Paris Return”, winner of Message2Man category Best Documentary, see below.

www.m2m.iffc.ru