Filmstriben.dk

.. og danskerne kan nu se streamede film, også dokumentarfilm, hjemme hos sig selv via deres lokale biblioteks hjemmeside. Det har været i gang længe, nu er jeg gået i gang med at prøve muligheden af.

Først har jeg kigget på dokumentar nyheder. Og det falder i øjnene, at den internationale succes Waltz with Bashir af Ari Folman fra 2008 er tilgængelig. Det lover godt! Importerede dokumentarfilm på bibliotekernes hylder er igen omsider en mulighed, efter filminstituttet for mange år siden lukkede af for den vitale luksus. Folmans film har været anmeldt og flere gange omtalt her på bloggen.

Men nu de nye film. Der er endnu ikke film fra i år, men listen over film fra 2009 er en lille begyndelse…

…All Boys af Markku Heikkinen, Burma VJ af Anders Østergård, En feminin dreng af Nanna Frank Møller, Kvinder i forandring af Barbara Clos og Lisbeth Lyngse, Nobody Passes Perfectly af Saskia Bisp og Usynlige piger af Sidse Stausholm. Østergaards og Frank Møllers film er begge anmeldt her på siden af Tue Steen Müller. De øvrige vil jeg så se og skrive om.

Heldigvis går Filmstribens udvalg også tilbage i årene. Der er fine film, højt værdsat her på Filmkommentaren. Som for eksempel: Purity Beats Everything af Jon Bang Carlsen, 2007, Slobodan Milosevic on Trial af Michael Christoffersen, 2007, Fra Thailand til Thy af Janus Metz, 2007, Fotografi af Steen Møller Rasmussen, 2006 og længere tilbage en perle som Nattegn af Tom Elling, 1997 og en herlighed som Et rigtigt bondeliv af Jørgen Vestergaard, 1994.

Efter sigende er der omkring 300 dokumentarfilm i denne generøse distribution. Og tallet skulle støt vokse, loves det og filminstitutdirektøren Claus Ladegaard forsikrede for nylig på DOK-mødet, at alle dokumentarfilm med institutstøtte automatisk vil blive lagt i Filmstribens distribution, så snart, de er færdige. Sandelig nye tider…

www.filmstriben.dk  Still: Waltz with Bashir.    

Doc Alliance: Free films

More free viewing for documentary addicts. A generous offer is given by the Doc Alliance (the four festivals in Nyon, Leipzig, Jihlava, Warsaw and Copenhagen). Below is their promotion text, and the films are available from April 21-25. When you visit the site, notice also all the very fine titles available for screening for a very small amount of €’s:

To celebrate the upcoming 2010 edition of Visions du Reel Nyon (April 15 – 21), DocAllianceFilms.com will offer free streaming of the five documentaries from the Doc Alliance Selection 2009,

“Maggie in Wonderland” by Ester Martin Bergsmark, Beatrice “Maggie” Andersson und Mark Hammarberg (Sweden, Finland 2008, 72 min) Maggie, a young woman from Kenya, films her world in the Swedish city of Malmö. A creative portrayal of the meaning of social isolation. “

Auto*Mat” by Martin Mareček (Czech Republic 2009, 90 min). Martin Marecek invents a militant, jubilatory action to combat the automatisms generated by Prague’s automobile culture. “

Big John” by Håvard Bustnes (Norway 2008, 86 min) The rise and fall of a young boxer coached by his father ‘Big John’ – who was also his trainer, impresario and agent. ”Hotel Sahara” by Bettina Haasen (Germany 2008, 85 min) Nouhadibou in Mauritania: a melting pot of dreams, hopes and the terminus of countless young African emigrants who end up here. “

Survival Song by Yu Guangyi” (China 2008, 94 min) A family of Chinese peasants is condemned to poverty and broken apart in the name of modernity. A deeply moving and sublime social tale.

www.docalliancefilms.com

idfa: for Viewers Worldwide

8 excellent documentaries can be watched for free on the net, made available for screening by idfa, International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam. Let me just mention three of them – Florin Iepan’s Romanian ”Children of the Decree” about the atrocities during Ceaucescu, Heddy Honigmann’s ”Underground Orchestra” set in Paris and as always with this great director dealing with people, and Danish Jørgen Leth’s masterpiece ”Haïti Untitled” from 1995, his declaration of love to the country where he lived until the earthquake this year forced him to leave his totally destroyed home. Photo: Jørgen Leth.

http://www.idfa.nl/industry/idfa-tv/films/worldwide.aspx

Dokumentärer i SVT

The following text is in Danish as it includes information on the excellent documentary service that is provided by SVT, Swedish public television, that is available for viewers in the Nordic countries. There are not many broadcasters – if any – that has such a range of time slots, often at prime time, for the screening of documentary films and programmes:

Jeg abonnerer (det er gratis) på et nyhedsbrev fra SVT. Det bringer mig til en velredigeret og indbydende website, der oplyser om kommende dokumentar-visninger på et af de følgende mange strands: ”Dokumentärfilm”, ”Dokument Inifrån”, ”Dokument Utifrån”, ”K Special” og ”Dox”. Hvor ”K Special” (fredag aften kl. 20, se nedenfor om Boris Mitics film) altid har været garant for høj kvalitet og visning af ikke-engelsk sprogede dokumentarer, er ”Dox” nyt. Her er hvad Ingemar Persson, programchef for dokumentar, siger herom:

På tisdagskvällarna sänder vi de hetaste nyproducerade dokumentärfilmerna och de odödliga klassikerna. Under rubriken Dox visar vi världens bästa filmer om verkligheten. Vi vill ge publiken tv-kvällar de inte glömmer. Dox-filmerna visas varje tisdag kl 22.00 i SVT1 och det utlovas dokumentärer från både Sverige och världen som fängslar, engagerar och provocerar.

På Twitter giver SVT besked om dokumentarnyt, på hjemmesiden er der interviews med fine svenske instruktører som PeÅ Holmquist (om hans seneste Gaza-film), Erik Gandini (om Videocracy, filmen om Berlusconi), Nina Hedenius (om den fremragende film “Naturens Gång”) og Nahid Persson (filmen om persiske Farah Diba) – og en del film kan ses på nettet. Med andre ord: SVT tager dokumentaren alvorligt. Foto: The Last Tightrope Dancers in Armenia, vist på K-Special.

http://svt.se/2.118538/dokumentar?lid=index_313009&lpos=sajt&from=innehall_ao

http://twitter.com/svtdokumentar

Boris Mitic: Goodbye, How are You?

A special treat for those of us who have access to Swedish television, SVT2, that tonight at 8pm shows one of the most original Serbian documentaries from the last years. With repeats Saturday April 17 at 11.20 am, and Tuesday April 20 at 11.15 pm. This is the review that was written for this blog:

It is one of those films where you are attracted by the visual and the tone of the film and the words, in other words by the film, and still feel like you want to watch and listen again. Because you did not get it all. Being a chaptered film essay of highest originality, with funny playful captions, you can actually do your re-view by clicking your remote control. To pick the chapters. And you can visit the (also) rich website to get on your screen the aphorisms. Simply to read what you heard.

I say so because it is a difficult film for someone from outside of Serbia and ex-Yugoslavia to fully recognise and sense the constant dialogue between image and words. Much is archive from places and demonstrations, and conflict and war situations. Also from today, also from Kosovo, but also here you have to give up sometimes as you dont have the references in your visual memory. At the same time as the images and the tone and the words keep your attention the whole way through.

Nevertheless, let me skip the eternal (Nordic?) rational wish to understand everything… there is so much to discover in this ambitious journey in absurdity and subtlety where you are taken by the hand by a ”me”, the voice of an old man, who is summarising his life and talks about his friend and about the duels he would love to have. With other people and with himself. My Serbian language knowledge does not exist but the voice of the old man sets me in the mood of laughing of what is being said and what I watch. But not only laughing. There is also a sadness, a sad wisdom I would call it, from the writers and philosophers, who have inspired director Boris Mitic for making this clever satirical catalogue of image & words. It took him ”4 years of travelling 50.000 km along Balkan side roads to make 400 shots” for a story and a visualisation to which there is but one thing to say: Good Day, I am fine. I saw your film. I feel it like I do when I have seen a play of Samuel Beckett. Provoked and entertained in a creative way. Want to see it again. Bravo!

Serbia, 2009, 60 mins.  

http://www.dribblingpictures.com

Underground Films

Indiepix, American distributor of independent films, including documentaries and experimental titles, offer their films to be bought as a dvd, to be downloaded to your own computer (pc and mac) or to be viewed as a vod (video on demand). For reasonable prices. You can subscribe – for free – to their newsletter from where I have taken the following text:

In the wake of WWII, with the advent of portable cameras, the world of filmmaking exploded beyond the bounds of the moneyed Hollywood studio system. Filmmakers no longer had to seek approval – or funding – to make their visions a reality. Hell, you didn’t even need training, just a camera and a dream (dream occasionally optional). Filmmakers such as Maya Deren, Kenneth Anger and Stan Brakhage created countless films in the 1940s and 50s that tested the limits of the medium in subject matter, style and narrative continuity. In addition to garnering praise abroad from the new Wave filmmakers in France such as François Truffaut, Morris Engel’s low-fi Little Fugitive also became the first independent film to be nominated for an Oscar in 1953. In the 1960s and 70s, brothers George and Mike Kuchar added an absurdist, kitschy sense of humor to their short films showing that just becuase it’s arty, doesn’t mean it has to take itself seriously. Freed from the profit-and-loss constraints of procuring Hollywood backers, these new low-fi, no-budget filmmakers were able to take film out of the realm of entertainment and turn it into an art form. PHOTO: Jonas Mekas.

And if you’re in the New York area, the new documentary, It Came From Kuchar, is screening this week at Anthology Film Archives! Tickets are available through the IndiePix Box Office. We hope to see you there!

http://www.indiepixfilms.com/collection/underground-films?ref=NEWSLETTER

Visions du Réel Nyon 1

The important documentary film festival in Nyon, Switzerland takes off in two days, April 15 and goes on to April 21. As usual a huge programme is offered, an emphasis is put on the authored documentary, a strong collaboration with and influence from the European cultural channel arte is visible, workshops will take place, a market will be filled up with buyers, and feature length documentaries will be pitched. The festival has all the elements.

Also for creating a debate, I hope! Big surprise it is for me to see that the film of Nino Kirtadzé, “Something about Georgia” has been chosen for the international competition. I saw the film at the premiere in Tbilisi and wrote about it on this site. Here is some of my hard criticism: … big disappointment, I have to say. Pure propaganda for the politics of the president Saakhasvili, who according to this film has no opposition in his country… Propaganda, yes, and it could be ok, of course documentaries should have a standpoint, a personal view…

… but this new film of Kirtadzé film is unbalanced in film style, focus and narration. The start makes the viewer think that we will get close to the president. We don’t really, we don’t get an impression of him. The film then  introduces the theme Georgia-Europe and we see loads of sequences where diplomats and politicians meet to discuss, most of it journalistic material as if we were watching the news on television. This is made to explain the political development before and during the war, and after with Europe as the one to blame for inactivity towards Russia and Russian aggression. Kirtadzé tries to involve ”the ordinary Georgian” and their reactions, but in most cases it does not really work, as she wants to go back to ”big politics” and the president and his opinions. The director had the conclusion of her film in her head before filming, her narration is set up to prove her point of view. This is not the way to make documentaries!

To check if my understanding of the film was totally wrong, I talked to several film people in Georgia, who previously have praised Kirtadzé as a fine filmmaker. They were more than shocked over the film, and told me that even people in the entourage of the President found it too much and totally unbalanced and political naïve.

Four other films from the international competition have been reviewed or noted on this site: Volker Koepp: Berlin-Stettin (a mature, clever personal historical film), Sergio Basso: Giallo à Milano (bravo for taking this very talented impression from Italian Chinatown),  Michael Madsen: Into Eternity (the best new doc from Denmark for a long time, a clever film and surprising in its narrative), Pavel Kostomarov: Together (a brilliant cameraman turns into a fine director with this intense and original love story).

http://www.visionsdureel.ch/en

Visions du Réel Nyon 2

Festival director Jean Perrret leaves the festival after this edition. Here are his fine words of goodbye: It is comforting to feel the quietness emanated again by the films selected for this 16th edition of Visions du Réel. Not that they are slow,  oh no, some of them are very fast-moving in the way they tell stories! They convey a different experience which documentary filmmakers share with their spectators when they – filmmakers – take time to cast their gaze and focus their attention on the faces, landscapes, voices and din of the world. This film genre is comforting when the real world takes shape thus in its exciting complexity. It is exhilarating to share with the audiences these visions that reflect the extraordinary diversity of genres, scripts and viewpoints. Nearly 2,000 films have been viewed by the members of the Working Group, which is made up of specialists hired to spot the most striking films, to write the texts of the Catalogue and to moderate debates and meetings. At a time when the conditions under which films made by independent directors can assert their identity are deteriorating in terms of production and distribution,

the 2010 Programme is an exemplary illustration of fierce and stubborn resistance to run-of-the-mill audiovisual fare.

It is impressive for us to have taken the decision to step down from the Management of Visions du Réel this year when we can share in the extraordinary success that we feel entitled to claim. At the same time we know we owe that success to the filmmakers and producers and film professionals and public- and private-sector financial partners and film-goers and partners of all cultures, along with other accomplices, who have placed their trust in us for 16 years. To them we say, quite simply and with true gratitude, thank you. It is reassuring that the Nyon International Film Festival is this year opening a new film theatre for its viewers, since the future is theirs. Tomorrow a new director will be able to give these Visions the momentum they need to continue this adventure: to usher in the privileged era of a Visions du Réel entirely committed to depicting the radiant beauty and convulsive unsightliness of a world in search of authentic narratives.
Jean Perret, Director

Photo: Together by Pavel Kostomarov.

http://www.visionsdureel.ch/en

Ripping Reality

The Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival (April 29 – May 9) has introduced an interesting category in this year’s festival programme: Ripping Reality. Ten films have been chosen that in each their own way have added something new to the documentary genre in the last decade. I was asked to give my point of view on this and listed 10 Eastern and Central European works that are close to my heart and demonstrates originality and innovative strength. The Hot Doc people, led by festival director Sean Farrell, has put up a website that has a lot of interesting texts on the state of the art of the documentary. Here is my text contribution for the initiative – and do visit http://www.hotdocs.ca/film/program/Ripping%20Reality

and

http://www.rippingreality.com/

Tue Steen Müller: The last decade of documentaries, a new wave or new waves… well, you can have a look at it from different angles. As a documentary workshop organizer, both in my time as director of EDN (European Documentary Network) and now as a free lancer, I see more and more upcoming talents who try to fight their ways through endless sessions of

pitching projects to public broadcasters, whose editors have been forced to go more and more mainstream. The battle is lost as it was said by ex-leader of Arte France documentary section, Thierry Garrel, and what he meant was that in the most important place for creative documentaries, Arte, the formatting has arrived and will stay. The same can be said for ”Storyville”, where Nick Fraser a decade ago could take risks, where he today is threatened by the BBC wish for higher ratings. Play safe, this is what we have to do nowadays, another Arte editor said to me the other day.

So even if we see more emerging talent, documentary festivals all over, a growing audience, to watch documentaries have become a natural thing, often in the cinemas or on the net or on dvd – at the same time as public television, and many of the bigger festivals by the way, goes for the formatting of the creative documentary. Quantity before Quality. The result is that the average television viewer gets the impression that a documentary is a film, where there is voice-off talking from start till end, a lot of interviews and quick editing.

The exceptions that I found, the originality, the personal films with a personal style or handwriting – I saw them primarily in the Eastern part of Europe, where I have been working and where the message to the young filmmakers have been quite clear: You should know about the Western European documentary market and its demands, but please please keep your own voice. The coming list includes films that I have found important from the last decade from the East of Europe:

1. CITIZEN HAVEL (Pavel Koutecky, Miroslav Janek, Czech Republic, 2008)
Yes, it is quite classical in its observational style and therefore also untypical for documentaries of today, where for instance Arte has dropped the observational documentary from its programming policy. 12 years of filming and what a character!

2. BLIND LOVES (Juraj Lehotsky, Slovakia, 2008 )
Five years of research getting to know his blind characters and then writing a script using situations and dialogues that he had heard to put together a four episode hymn to Love. A first feature length from Lehotsky!

3. THE MOSQUITO PROBLEM (Andrey Paounov, Bulgaria, 2004)
Intelligent, non-linear dramaturgy, humour, many layers, shot on Film.

4. 66 SEASONS (Peter Kerekes, Hungary/Slovakia, 2003)
Inspired by Jan Gogola, dramaturgical icon of Czech Republic, this is a way to deal with history in a constant surprising humorous way.

4. THE BELL (Audrius Stonys, Lithuania, 2007)
It starts as a piece of journalism and shifts slowly into a piece of cinematographical beauty taking the viewer by surprise. A true poet.

5. BEFORE FLYING BACK TO EARTH (Arunas Matelis, Lithuania, 2005)
A masterpiece daring to deal with hospitalised children with cancer in a lively, non-sentimental way.

6. RABBIT A LA BERLIN (Bartek Konopka, Poland, 2009 )
Well, it was nominated to an Oscar, quite unusual for a film that is playful, multi-layered, original in approach to its theme, super!

7. CZECH DREAM (Filip Remunda, Vit Klusak, Czech Republic, 2004)
Long before the Yes-men and much more cinematic, satirical on a high level, a breakthrough for new Czech documentary.

8. ANOTHER PLANET (Ferenc Moldovanyi, Hungary, 2008)
A cinematically beautiful hymn to the children of this world, Moldovanyi has his own style of passion.

9. CASH AND MARRY (Atanas Georgiev, Macedonia/Croatia, 2009)
Original in its form, very actual in its theme, European problem number One today, getting into the EU paradise!

10. CHEMO (Pawel Lozinksi, Poland, 2009)
The title says what it is about, the form is pure observation through close-ups, it is made with love and knowledge about Cinema – putting together sound and image in a personal, organic flow. (PHOTO).

I could mention many others. And these new films don’t just come out of the blue, they build on a tradition of great filmmaking, a tradition that they oppose or continue: Russian Kossakovski and Dvortsevoy, Latvian Herz Frank, Ivars Seleckis and Juris Podnieks, Polish Marcel Lozinski and Kieslowski, Czechoslovak Dusan Hanak, Estonian Mark Soosaar and many others further back in time.

Another Planet gets Another Award

There are many films the career of which we have been following with great pleasure. Another Planet by Hungarian Ferenc Moldovanyi is one of them. The film has won the Special Award from the Ukranian Helsinki Human Rights Union at the 7th International Human Rights Documentary Film Festival, which took place in Kyiv from 26th March to 2nd April 2010. (See more about the festival on this site)

Another Planet has won 18 awards and been presented at 58 festivals in 43 countries on four continents and has been broadcast by various prestigious television channels. Congratulations.

Several other films like “Burma vj”, “Cash and Marry” and “The Living Room of a Nation” were also awarded at the festival in Ukraine.

www.docudays-ua