Ana Barjadze: Bitter Sugar

More than well done by Georgian young director Ana Barjadze and her producer Irina Gelashvili, who have now won the Adami Media Prize, ”Project Pitching Winner”. What that is you can read by clicking below – and via another link you will be able to get detailed information about ”Bitter Sugar”, the project of the two which was awarded. Here is the brief, call it a logline, text:

Nika, Gika, and Levan – three brothers from a small, dying Georgian town – navigate life, only relying on each other, while their absent mother provides for the family from abroad.

This will be a full-length documentary drama. The project is now ready for the production stage and we are looking for international partners. We won a grant from the Georgian National Cinema Center for Filmmaking. The project has been developed on a variety of platforms, including through the Cinedoc mentoring program (where it received pitching prizes at the Doclisbo and Ji’hlava Film Festival). The project was presented at the Kyiv International Film Festival and at the Golden Apricot festival in Yerevan. We are also invited to the IDFA festival for the market of producers (producers).

https://www.adamimediaprize.eu/adami-project-pitching-nominees/bitter-sugar

The ADAMI Media Prize was created in 2015 to encourage filmmakers, journalists and audio-visual media professionals in the EU Eastern Partnership countries (Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Moldova, Ukraine) to promote topics of migration, tolerance and cultural diversity. The prize is open to broadcasters and audio-visual media producers in the six participating countries, rewarding outstanding TV, film and online programmes that deal with diversity-related issues. Alongside the prize, ADAMI organizes networking events and fosters exchange among media professionals in Eastern Europe and the EU…

The word ADAMI derives from the Georgian word adamiani, meaning human being, based on the first human, the biblical Adam. Above all, ADAMI is about people. Behind all TV programmes and media productions are people; they create and distribute images of people, made for people — images that shape Europe’s future.

More information: https://www.adamimediaprize.eu/about-adami

Joan Gonzàlez is Honored

It was a happy and proud man I talked to the other day. A man who had been honored, and wanted to share his joy with me. So well deserved the honor! First an edited and translated version of a press release and then my words, a speech I could have held had I been there:

The L’Acadèmia del Cinema Català included on December 2 six new Membres d’Honor to salute their contribution to the film industry in Catalonia. One of them was Joan Gonzàlez, director of the festival DocsBarcelona and producer of more than 100 documentaries, and with a background at the TVE and TV3. In 1996 he created DocsBarcelona that also exists in Medellin and Valparaiso. DocsBarcelona distributes documentaries to more than 80 places in Spain, and now DocsBarcelona headed by Gonzàlez is working on “nextus” that aims at making documentaries part of the school curriculum.The prestigious award to Joan Gonzàlez is the first one given to a documentarian.

 

For many of us it never goes beyond the words, when it comes to put into reality all the good intentions about promotion of the documentaries. Few have had the strength and courage to link all the elements of the chain from production to the meeting with the audience. Joan Gonzalez has and what he has done for the genre during the many years of existence of his company Parallel 40, based in Barcelona, deserves respect and admiration. In Catalunya, of course, and in Europe and in South America.

Training, production, distribution, film commission administration, festivals, tv management – it is all happening or has happened under the umbrella of Parallel 40, and with a clear goal statement, here taken from the site of the company: ”Parallel 40’s mission is to contribute to society’s cultural enrichment through the audiovisual medium.”

Joan Gonzalez is a visionary, some will say a dreamer, I will add that many of his dreams have and will come through. Step by Step as his slogan is. When I met him in Granada 25 years ago for the first EDN documentary workshop in Spain, he was one of the participants and made his first documentary pitch. Not very convincing. But he was thrilled about the format, and he took it all to Barcelona, and became the organiser of what is now a very well established event, DocsBarcelona. At that time he was managing a local tv station and doing a lot of training, which is still very much on his agenda. 

He is definitely a talent scout, his office is full of talented carefully picked young people, who get the injection of documentary enthusiasm from their director.

A man with high ethical standards, who is not afraid to use the word ”trust”, when he describes, what he wants people to associate with his company. He has lost some battles with this attitude but he has always come back full of optimism and with new ideas.

On a personal level: Joan is a dear friend, I have always enjoyed his company, I have loved to work with him. To share with him our common passion FCBarcelona and go to the Camp Nou, to sing Jacques Brel with him in his car, and to meet his lovely family: Montse, Berta and Marti.

Congratulations!  

Ai WeiWei: Rohingya

Almost a million Rohingya refugees from Myanmar live in the biggest refugee camp in the world, Cox Bazaar in Bangla Desh… Ai WeiWei has made a film from the camp. Danish editors Niels Pagh Andersen and Charlotte Munch Bengtsen watched, what footage Chinese camerapersons came back with and made what the director wished the film to be:

A slow, quiet meditative film with long sequences, no close ups (almost) but panoramic images and a recreation of sound as the sound that they had to work with came from the camera. Danish Henrik Gugge Garnov was the one who helped with that.

I got this information from what I would call a master’s class after the screening of the film in the Danish Cinemateket two days ago. Niels Pagh Andersen entertained the audience with his pedagogical skills answering questions from the audience that was, like me, impressed by the film, which is simply beautiful allowing or I would prefer to say inviting us to go ”into” the well composed images, study and learn above the life of refugees, who survive in the poor society they have formed with schools, churches, crafts, funerals, everyday activities like cooking, eating, washing the dishes, washing clothes in water that are taken up from underground, playing football.

In mostly stunning images you watch the human beings in the camp doing something– you study and think about their situation compared to your own, and you wonder what will be of the many children in the film, when they grow up. Are they to stay here, do they have a chance to leave the poverty, settle and build a decent life for themselves and their family? You see the energy of the children, when they play with or without a football, or when they go to get water for the family – and you think they will make it. Hope?

Editor Niels Pagh Andersen, called ”the skinny romantic” by Ai Weiwei, and his co-editor let us leave the film full of the atmosphere the film establishes so well. Far from reportage, far from pouring information towards the spectator, it’s a film that finds humanity in the life of refugees. 

Signed by a refugee as he is himself, Ai WeiWei. 

2021, 122 mins.  

Karim Kassem: Octopus

The IDFA website intro to this remarkable hybrid documentar-fiction goes like this: ”The aftermath of the explosion that took place at the Port of Beirut in August 2020 is revealed in quiet stillnes, from the destroyed buildings and the despair of local residents to the cautious first sounds of reconstructions.”

Thanks to the director for choosing a totally different approach to the catastrophy in Lebanon’s beautiful capital. It surprised me in the beginning as there was no talking, no dialogue, no facts concerning the human and material consequences BUT ”merely” an invitation to look and think, while watching superbly framed image compositions of faces and buildings and wounded apartments, with this little ”action” = the mark of an octopus on a piece of wood, a symbol of what… maybe adaptibility according to my encyclopaedia, life goes on, Beirut will survive but how; there is nobody home when the man knocks on doors in a spoilt appartment building but a lift takes the viewer to the top, to blue sky or blue sea… hope?… there is something mysterious about an octopus.

And there is something surrealistic in the atmosphere in the film that invites you to look at faces of people in Beirut, in shock maybe and/or reflecting on what Life can do to you…or. Still kids are playing in the streets.

A fascinating intelligent work! 

The film was shown at IDFA and won Best Film Award in the Envision Competition.

Lebanon, Qatar, United States, 2021, 64 mins.

www.idfa.nl

Nidal Al Dibs: Homemade Stories

The website intro text to the film, which was in the Envision Competition at IDFA:

„As the revolution turns into war; Nidal, a Syrian filmmaker, is forced to leave the country. He locks his Damascus home door and travels with his wife and daughter to Cairo, at the time celebrating a successful revolution. He is invited by friends to open an old cinema theater which they are about to renovate. Nidal, whose refuge in Cairo keeps extending indefinitely longs for his home and city and finds refuge in navigating personal family home videos and memories as he discovers a new space: an old locked cinema in the heart of Cairo. He attempts to make a film about longing to his home by filming the cinema, to tell a story of hope. Perhaps also of despair…”

Yes, but also a film about the love of a father (and mother) to their child Salma, who sees herself in Damascus on the videos her father shot, who dances and sings and bring Life into a story that is not uplifting to say it with an understatement.

Yes, and also a film about compassion and friendship. As the apartment in Damascus is empty, a friend moves kindly Nidal asking if he can move Salma’s bed into the bedroom as his daughter does not like to sleep alone.

Yes, but of course also an hommage to the Cinema, the place to dream dreams. Paradiso.

The producer is Cairo-based Mostafa Youssef, Seen Films, I think it was in his offices that I was for a workshop in 2012 – I read that the office/studio recently was burnt down in a fire accident!? Alas.   

Syria, Egypt, 2021, 69 mins.

www.idfa.nl

Ruslan Fedotow: Where are We Headed

The winner of the IDFA Award for Best First Film and the IDFA Award for Best Cinematography. No objection from my side. Observational documentary cinema with a location so well known, the Moscow Metro. And yet a film with several layers because the filmmaker demonstrates his skills in choosing the people he and his camera met in the Moscow Metro. Choosing and making decisions on whom to stay longer and on whom to stay short in the montage.

Where are we headed, a long and fun sequence with two drunk men in the train, to your house, one says, to my home, the other sasys but where is it, pure Samuel Beckett… and the red-haired woman who stares at the dog sculpture  – one of the many in the Moscow metro – and caresses it again and again. Why?… and the man who is violently put down on ground by police or guards… the same who tells a man in xmas clothes that he can not play between 5 and 8… and the many songs that are related to Russia and Russian culture as the film is (also) about the Russia far away from Kremlin and politics, Putin, however, is on the television screen in the metro, it’s him the man on the FB link is looking at New Year’s Eve.

The director’s point of view – or better tone or better wish or even better love towards the people, he has been filming, comes clearly at the end of the film: There is sunshine of the faces in the train and there is a long sequence shot of an elderly couple in love. His hand caressing her chin, she takes it away with a flirting smile. Lovely ending scene. In sunshine.

Belarus, Russia, 2021, 63 mins.

www.idfa.nl

IDFA Winners 2021

Mr. Landsbergis wins IDFA Award for Best Film in the International Competition and Octopus wins IDFA Award for Best Film in the Envision Competition

Last night, IDFA announced the winners of the competition programs during the IDFA 2021 Awards Ceremony. The ceremony took place in Amsterdam’s Compagnietheater, in addition to being live-streamed.

The 34th edition of IDFA has run as an in-person event, with twelve special online screenings for audiences, and an extensive library of films, talks, and consultancies available to online guests around the world. To date, IDFA has received over 100,000 cinema visits.

… and the winners were:

 

 

International Competition

Mr. Landsbergis (Lithuania, Netherlands) by Sergei Loznitsa is the winner of the IDFA Award for Best Film (€15,000).

“It is not easy to bring history to life. It is even more difficult to make it thrilling, urgent, and totally enriching, to make it feel like we are living through it as it happens. On every level of craft, the winning film represents a monumental achievement that fully explores the role one man, one nation, and one historical moment can play in the still-unfolding story of the global struggle for freedom and self-determination. The 2021 IDFA Award for Best Film in the International Competition goes to Sergei Loznitsa’s stunningly complete and gripping Mr. Landsbergis,” the jury reported.

The IDFA Award for Best Directing (€5,000) in the International Competition went to Diem Ha Le for Children of the Mist (Vietnam).

The IDFA Award for Best Editing (€2,500) went to Danielius Kokanauskis for Mr. Landsbergis (Lithuania, Netherlands), and the IDFA Award for Best Cinematography (€2,500) went to Where Are We Headed (Belarus, Russia), filmed and directed by Ruslan Fedotow.

The jury members for the International Competition were ​Arne Birkenstock, Claire Diao, ​Elena Fortes, ​Jessica Kiang, and ​Ryan Krivoshey.

Envision Competition

Karim Kassem won the IDFA Award for Best Film in Envision Competition (€15,000) for Octopus (Lebanon, Qatar, United States).

“This film develops its own imagistic language: a language of mystery and loss in the aftermath of a tragedy. It was made with great respect toward the subject matter and it felt like a story told from the inside. There are no answers presented, just the questions of life in the face of a disaster,” the jury reported.

The Award for Best Directing (€5,000) in the Envision Competition went to Pim Zwier for O, Collecting Eggs Despite the Times (Netherlands), and the Award for Outstanding Artistic Contribution (€2,500) went to Lindiwe Matshikiza for One Take Grace (South Africa).

The jury for the Envision Competition decided to award a special mention to Skin (Brazil) by Marcos Pimentel.

The jury members for the Envision Competition were Andrea Arnold, ​Joe Bini, ​Charlotte Serrand, and Akram Zaatari.

IDFA DocLab Competition for Immersive Non-Fiction

Sacha Wares and John Pring won the IDFA DocLab Award for Immersive Non-Fiction (€5,000) for Museum of Austerity (United Kingdom).

The Special Jury Award for Creative Technology (€2,500) went to Marcel van Brakel and Mark Meeuwenoord for Symbiosis (Netherlands).

The jury members for the IDFA DocLab Competition for Immersive Non-Fiction were ​Myriam Achard, Avinash Changa, and ​Eleanor (Nell) Whitley.

IDFA DocLab Competition for Digital Storytelling

Tamara Shogaolu won the IDFA DocLab Award for Digital Storytelling (€5,000) with Un(re)solved (United States, Netherlands).

The Special Jury Award for Creative Technology (€2,500) went to Ravi and Emma (Australia) by Kylie Boltin, Ella Rubeli, Ravi Vasavan, and Emma Anderson.

The jury members for the IDFA DocLab Competition for Digital Storytelling were Marie Blondiaux, ​Arnold van Bruggen, and Sanne De Wilde.

IDFA Competition for Short Documentary

Handbook (Germany, Belarus) by Pavel Mozhar won the IDFA Award for Best Short Documentary (€5,000).

A special mention in the IDFA Competition for Short Documentary went to

Wolf Whispers (France) by Chloé Belloc.

The jury members for the IDFA Competition for Short Documentary were ​Eliane Esther Bots, ​Pamela  Cohn, and Sara Ishaq.

IDFA Competition for Youth Documentary

The IDFA Award for Best Youth Film (€5,000) went to Shamira Raphaëla for Shabu (Netherlands, Belgium).

A special mention in the IDFA Competition for Youth Documentary went to Water, Wind, Dust, Bread (Iran) by Mahdi Zamanpoor Kiasari.

The jury members for the IDFA Competition Youth Documentary were Ulla Haestrup, Eef Hilgers, and Edwin Mingard.

IDFA 2021 cross-section awards

This edition was the first to present four cross-section awards. From the International Competition, Envision Competition, Luminous, and Frontlight selections, three international juries chose the winners of the IDFA Award for Best First Feature, the IDFA Award for Best Dutch Film, and the FIPRESCI Award. From across the program, an international jury chose the winner of the Beeld en Geluid IDFA ReFrame Award for Best Creative Use of Archive.

From the nominated films, the IDFA Award for Best First Feature (€5,000) went to Where Are We Headed (Belarus, Russia), directed by Ruslan Fedotow.

The jury also awarded a special mention to Children of the Mist (Vietnam) by Diem Ha Le.

The jury members were Mahdi Fleifel, Daniella Shreir, and Jacqueline Zünd. 

From the nominated films, the IDFA Award for Best Dutch Film (€7,500) went to Maasja Ooms for Jason (Netherlands).

A special mention was awarded to Housewitz (Netherlands) by Oeke Hoogendijk.

The jury members were ​Susanne Guggenberger, ​Sacha Polak, and ​Farahnaz Sharifi. 

The FIPRESCI Award (€5,000) was given to Jafar Najafi for Makeup Artist (Iran).

The FIPRESCI jury members were Nino Kovačić, ​Steffen Moestrup, and ​Elena Rubashevska. 

From the nominated films, the Beeld en Geluid IDFA ReFrame Award for Best Creative Use of Archive (€5,000) went to Robin Hunzinger for Ultraviolette and the Blood-Spitters Gang (France).

A special mention was awarded to Sergei Loznitsa for Babi Yar. Context (Netherlands, Ukraine).

The jury members were ​Pascal Capitolin, ​Maciej J. Drygas, and ​Giovanna Fossati. 

IDFA Forum Awards

Yesterday, the IDFA Forum Awards were announced at the Compagnietheater. Bettina Perut and Iván Osnovikoff’s project La Casa won the IDFA Forum Award for Best Pitch, Anna Shishova-Bogolubova’s The New Greatness picked up the IDFA Forum Award for Best Rough Cut, while the DocLab Forum Award went to Continuum VR by Daniela Maldonado, Tomas Espinosa, and Paula Gempeler. Each award includes a cash prize of €1,500. Read more about the IDFA Forum Awards here.

IDFA 2021 facts & figures

IDFA 2021 still has three more days to go. With approximately 3,000 guests in Amsterdam and online, extensive health and safety measures such as reduced venue capacity were in place to ensure the safety and wellbeing of all present. The measures taken have proven effective for the public, international guests, and staff; no outbreaks have occurred. To date, IDFA has received over 100,000 cinema visits.

The International Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA) continues until Sunday, November 28.

De Sousa Dias & Schaefer: Journey to the Sun

… their first names are Susana and Ansgar, well known by

the editors of this site due to their films “Still Life“ and „48“, (http://www.filmkommentaren.dk/blog/blogpost/1938/).

This new film by the Portuguese couple demonstrates again how perfectly they know how to combine aesthetics and history with sound that include stories told by now old Austrians „who were sent to stay with host families in Portugal to recuperate after the Second World War“, when they were 6 or 8 or 10 years old.

You don’t get their names but your hear their voices and you are slowly taken into their experience. What they remember from the early post-war journey to the sun. It was for most of them a positive stay in rich homes, where they got close to families and maids and cats and dogs, in houses like palaces unlike the bombed Austria that they had left – there were 5000 who went. Memories for life.

The journey is told from beginning till end after 10 months stay. The boat trip, the arrival where families picked their kids, the language barriers, the joy of being there with a couple of testimonies, that tell another side of the stay. „I was locked up for 10 months“, says a man, who stayed with a priest. But others say „I never felt homesick“, „there was caressing and hugging that I did not know from home“. They wrote letters to home, they were sent after being censored as the letters arriving – astonishing!

Some remember how important religion was for the families, they took part in ceremonies, and one remembers to have met poverty – a barefooted boy who lives in a cave! In contrast to the one, who had met Salazar, who sent 6 pineapples to the kids every year for christmas or new year. 

And then the touching Goodbye´s, back to Austria, hard for many of the kids. One tells that when she came home, she spoke only Portuguese and could not recognise her mother.

The film is as excellent as their previous archive based works mentioned above. The two have their very special way of storytelling, where scratched images from chronicles bring witness of the time as does lovely family photos and films from the wealthy families archive. If you can say so – “small” sounds accompany sometimes the images, there is never a direct illustration of the words, except when the Austrian “kids” say that here is my mother, or grandmother, or talk about “the doctor” who always wore a suit even on the beach – the fotos of the girls stay long, you are invited to look at them, “enter them” as Sousa has put it and think your own story or your family´s – for instance on how you looked at that age, and for me as well how my two meter tall uncle from Argentina was also always in an ironed white shirt and perfect suit. Or my father standing on a boat in 1931 going from Buenos Aires to Southampton.

This is what the emotional “Journey to the Sun” does. It broadens out its theme through the montage and brings childhood memories into a historical context that could be of today, where kids are taken away from their roots. In this case they come home to Austria to find themselves and create an identity.   

Portugal, 2021,107 mins.

www.idfa.nl

IDFA: Kapanadze & van der Horst

A debutant and a veteran director, two very good films, award candidates I guess, I watched them, I give you some brief texts about them. Recommendations: Ketevan Kapanadze’s ”How the Room Felt” and Aliona van der Horst ”Turn Your Body to the Sun”.

An informative quote from the site text of the Georgian film: In the Georgian city of Kutaisi, a local women’s football team constitutes the heart of a group of female and non-binary queer people, who get together regularly to hang out, to party, to hug each other, and to discuss existential issues…

I had a smile on my face during the whole film because it is full of warmth and atmosphere, I loved watching and listening to the young women/girls, seeing them drink, dance, SMOKE (OMG!), expressing their feelings towards each other, being happy, being sad – hanging out as said above. Of course the film relates ”to a society that’s not known for embracing its LGBTQ+ community” but the film is far from being a campaign film or a journalistic report, it is an observational film about individuals to whom you get close – Lara (or is it Lana), Anuka, Anano, Sopo… and it is amazing to know that this is a first film, when you see the many tableau-like scenes, where nothing happens, and scenes full of poetry, so well set up and told. Talented film language.

The debutant is in the International Competition as is Dutch Aliona van der Horst with her touching, aesthetically superb «Turn Your Body to the Sun». An informative quote from the site text: The incredible life story of a Soviet soldier of Tatar descent who was captured by the Nazis during WWII. Today, his daughter Sana is tracing the path of her silent father, trying to understand what made him the man she knew as a child, through his diaries, as well as various personal and public archives and registries…

The daughter and her sister are on the train to Siberia, where the father was in a camp for 14 years! An incredible story, as written above and a Film that masters the many layers, giving the audience the necessary information to follow a man, who was in the Soviet and German army ending up in the American around D-Day. When he came back from the camp, where he was sent punished for being a traitor, he suddenly said ”I saw Notre Dame”. One of the beautiful moments that stand out in a narrative, where van der Horst succeeds brilliantly to make the fabulous archive alive, colouring those pieces that were b/w, and making the letters and diary fragments fine pieces of literature… they arrive to the camp in  Siberia in a poetic film that I feel happy to have seen. 

How the Room Felt, Georgia, 2021, 74 mins.

Turn Your Body to the Sun, Netherlands, 2021, 93 mins.

www.idfa.nl

Niels Pagh Andersen: Order in Chaos Launch

I have already posted (on FB) advertising texts about Danish editor Niels Pagh Andersen and his book launch at IDFA sunday morning through a debate with IDFA director Orwa Nyrabia. The launch was set up as a masterclass with the two as part of the IDFAcademy with access by accredited guests. 90 minutes followed by sales of the book in the foyer of the big hall in the Compagnietheater – outside you can see one of the canals in a sunshine that makes the beauty of the city significant.

Andersen… impossible to make „a normal“ report of his live performance so I have chosen to quote the editor, who was nicely dressed up for his „book birth“ and started asking Nyrabia if he could walk while talking. Permission given. And here goes some sentences I put down on my paper:

I started with a kind of unofficial mentorship with Danish star editor Christian Hartkopp. I did everything. „The Pathfinder“ was my real debut, fiction, it was Oscar nominated. After that I did all kind of things but I was losing my dream. And myself.

Second life… I learned something with documentaries. You need to be humble when you are moving in the real world with ordinary people.

From analog to digital… brought a lot of bad habits. «They» are postponing the decisions and end up with too much to choose from. We need structure and we need chaos.

I am helping making the director’s film… to find the director’s tone…

Sometimes it helps to take a walk together. The creative dialogue. Ambition: «We can dance».

I want to work with something I don’t understand. Life is a learning process. (The Pirjo Honkasalo experience ”Three Rooms of Melancholia” as an example). I am curious and not afraid. We can always go to the shrink and have our narrative adjusted!

… Niels was talking about ”the authentic now” that I find difficult to write short about, it is so well described in the book as is what he means by ”subtext”…

Why? The longing to see the world. The film tempo has gone down. More slow films. 

My audience is more intelligent than me. 

Screenings… the worst screeners are directors. They only see how they would have made the film.

… and you know what, you should buy the book!

 https://orderinchaosbook.com