Bartek Konopka: Rabbit a la Berlin

Yes, this is the way to make a different film for the celebration of the 20 years of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Playing masterly with the film language, wanting to surprise us. To tell us the same story but in a completely new way. With music that associates a fairy tale with rabbits in the leading roles. But also as an informative commentary-born popular science film about the city lives of a threatened species. With interviews of course. Tongue-in-cheek, sometimes visually from the point of view of the rabbits, sometimes from the anonymous spectator perspective with a look at what happens and happened to the rabbits of Berlin. It is balanced, has its own satirical tone – and beauty – and brutality when you cut together an innocent rabbit and a human body being carried away by a person in uniform. It plays perfectly with the rules of the documentary subgenres: history doc, nature doc, information doc, fairy tale doc… if that did not exist, it has been invented now!

Classical montage principles have been used. Cut from a rabbit to the people putting up the Wall. With an understated suprised commentary: they behave strange these people, as was this the thought of the rabbit. But it was to protect them, the inhabitants, that the Wall was put up. And the rabbits understood this and obeyed and were not shot at as long as they did not try to run away to the other side… Rabbitland, as the film commentary (brilliant by the way, what a fine text, a great example of subtlety) calls it, however, gets more and more into the mood of passivity and apathy. Until the day when everything changed and everyone, including the rabbits, got their freedom, were no longer locked behind walls and discovered that there were people without uniforms. But freedom? Two older people standing at the broken wall staring into a new world… is this for us, do we dare enter?

Poland, Germany, 40 & 50 mins.

http://www.deckert-distribution.com/news/new_films.htm

Short Film Studies – Call for Papers

Short film expert par exellence Richard Raskin, Associate Professor at the Information and Media Studies at Aarhus University in Denmark has asked us to post the following, which we do with great pleasure:

“I have been asked to start a new journal – SHORT FILM STUDIES – that will be published in the UK by Intellect Books. Could you possibly help circulate the call for papers attached here? I am hoping to include articles written by people working with short films in a variety of frameworks – at funding organizations, national film institutes, regional film centers, film festivals, etc. – in other words, not just by academics.”

More about the new journal: Short Film Studies is a new peer-reviewed journal designed to stimulate ongoing research on individual short films as a basis for a better understanding of the art form as a whole. In each issue, two or three short films will be selected for comprehensive study, with articles illuminating each film from a variety of perspectives. Occasionally an outstanding commercial or PSA will also be included… and go to the site below to know where to send your texts!

Photo: Chris Marker: La Jetée (1962)

http://www.intellectbooks.co.uk/journals/view-Journal,id=191/view,page=0/

Komeda – the Soundtrack for a Life

Krzysztof Komeda… was the one who made the music for several of the films of Roman Polanski, Jerzy Skolimovski, Andrzej Warda, Danish Henning Carlsen and Jørgen Leth. He died in 1969, 38 years old.

I am sure you remember the lullaby in ”Rosemary´s Baby” and maybe also the extraordinary score from”Sult” (”Hunger”) by Henning Carlsen. Both directors are interviewed in this tv documentary, that is well done and is wonderful to watch simply because it includes so many film clips from the great film that Komeda made music for. We hear about his way of working and living back in the times of the European iron curtain. Polanski’s short films arte quoted as well as his early polish works like ”Knife in Water”. Both Polanski and Carlsen stress that ”we were working for Krzysztof, not him for us”. Social and political background is added to this competent work on the often neglected art of film music that Komeda mastered. 

2008, Germany, 52 mins. Director : Claudia Buthenhoff-Duffy

http://www.krzysztofkomeda.com

http://www.komeda.vernet.pl

Fipa

Fipa means Festival International des Programmes Audiovisuels and has been going on in Biarritz for 23 years. It is a festival for television orientated programmes, including creative documentaries, reportages & current affairs, music and performing arts programmes, short films, panoramas. The best of the best new is not here, a producer told me because that would mean that you ”burn other possibilities” = other festivals of more importance, festivals that do want national or international premieres. But films like ”Videocracy” by Erik Gandini and a new film by the Hungarian master Peter Forgacs (”Hunky Blues”) have found their ways to the casinos where most of the film screenings take place in classy surroundings.

I have been in Biarritz for many years watching the festival and the market from a distance as I have been working for the Archidoc programme (see below) and its pitching session. And I have many critical remarks to make. First of all the festival programme is published quite late, the publicity is lousy. Secondly is it a huge exaggeration to call Fipa an international event. The television people from the Nordic countries and UK and Holland and Belgium have long ago dropped Fipa, simply because the market is too weak or because they sense that this is a national gathering! From the numbers of people from arte and France Télévisions that I have seen during the years I can only agree with them. Not a place to do business but a place to watch programmes and eat oysters. And shake your head after numerous meetings with French bureaucracy.  

Photo from Forgacs film: Péter Forgács created a documentary exploring the fate of hundred thousands of Hungarian men and women who arrived to the United States between 1890 and 1921. To tell their sagas the director weaved this grand epic from the early American cinema, found footage, photographs and interviews. The film reveals the difficult moments of arrival, integration and assimilation, which eventually fed the happiness of the later generations and their fulfilment of the American dream.

http://www.fipa.tm.fr/en/

Archidoc at Fipa

10 projects were presented at the third and final session of the EU MEDIA Training Programme, Archidoc, initiated and run by the French film school la fémis. With a constantly changing, rather dramatic weather outside the Casino Bellevue in Biarritz the filmmakers from Spain, France, Romania, Russia, Poland, Latvia and Italy were getting ready to pitch their archive based documentary projects to a panel of experienced producers and some broadcasters from Belgium, Greece, France, Switzerland, Germany.

They did a good job, their trailers were of high quality due to the supervision provided by Internationally acclaimed editor Erez Laufer and his team, who had worked with the filmmakers at two previous sessions in Paris and in Jihlava in Czech Republic.

The reactions from the panelists were in general of the same depressing nature when it came to talking about the personal creative story and its chances to get a place on public television: ”We like what we saw and heard but we do not have slots for that”. Whereas more obvious themes like a film on designer Paco Rabanne and on ”sex in the USSR” seemed to fit into modern tv…. the more important it is to keep the public film funding in good shape around Europe.

http://www.lafemis.fr/index.php?rub=4&srub=12&ssrub=44

Magnificent7 – Full Houses

Last night of a festival with a small amount of films and a huge audience. With the focus on the authored films and with the authors – or other creative persons from the crews – present  and taken care of in a warm family-like atmosphere, created by the organisers from Kvadrat film school and production company, Svetlana and Zoran Popovic. Surrounded by a team of young Serbian filmmakers, and supplemented by a workshop with the present filmmakers for 35 film students and upcoming documentarians.

Two films were shown in the big hall, ”Below Sea Level” (PHOTO) by Gianfranco Rosi, watched by almost 2000 people, and ”My Life with Carlos” by German Berger, watched by around 1200 spectators. A loyal and enthusiastic audience attends and year after year it is growing in this festival for European feature documentaries. An estimate is that the audience grew 50% this year for at least 4 of the screenings. The sixth edition of Magnificent7 is over and the organisers have no reason not to be proud of what they are doing on a shoestring budget. The festival was the only one totally dedicated to documentaries 6 years ago when it started, now there are two other documentary festivals in Belgrade as well as the international FEST that has included documentaries in their programme.

This can only be called a Magnificent Film Political Work.

www.magnificent7festival.org

Magnificent7 – Nina Hedenius

In ”Way of Nature” (”Naturens Gång”) Swedish filmmaker Nina Hedenius uses a radio piece to convey to the audience that there is a world outside the farm that is the location of her film. In a workshop session at Magnificent7 in Belgrade, the director showed clips from her previous films, and revealed that a radio clip from her film ”Vintersaga” from the 70’es was the same as the one in the film from 2009, including a report on Israeli bombing in Southern Lebanon! Noone has reacted, said Hedenius, who refrains completely from social and political themes in her films – even if you can only interpret this 20 year old sound clip as a subtle comment to world politics!

To verbally characterize the work of a filmmaker as Hedenius, who does not use many words but insists on the image, seems unfair and a banalization… but I dare phrase that this unique filmmaker, who does everything herself, is constantly searching for beauty. Her films bear witness of a background as a painter working with magic images where she very often goes ultra-close and transform the skins of cows, or the feathers of chicken, or the hair of a dog into abstract tableaux that you can dive into meditatively.

For ”Way of Nature” Hedenius edited for 14 months, 4 to 5 hours per day. The reason for this long period is to be found in a very strong work on the sound. In the session in Belgrade, she told how she records sound when she is shooting but ”cleans” the sound to make it more authentic. I cant have a dog barking outside the image if there is no dog in the film! Unique in production, Hedenius is as well. She presents her projects to SVT (Swedish public television)(she only wants one financier and no producer), gets the funding, respects the deadline and delivers without having anyone seeing the film in beforehand. Not even colleagues and friends, I asked her, no I get confused from comments. An independent and free filmmaker who is so because of her groundbreaking audience successes with ”The Old Man in the Cottage” (Gubben i Stugan) and now ”Way of Nature”. (Both films are available on dvd, Swedish version, but the dialogue is so scarce that the films can travel all over).

www.magnificent7festival.org

Magnificent7 – Asylum Seekers

Take a look at the photo. The young woman leaning forward is Caroline. She is a social worker at a reception centre for asylum seekers in a municipality of Paris. The woman with her back to the camera is Zaleh, she is Sudanese, pregnant, and has come for help. Caroline is good at her job – from a bureaucratic point of view, but when it comes to deal with the asylum seekers as human beings, she has no idea.

”The Arrivals”, by French couple Claudine Bories and Patrice Chagnard, awarded with the Golden Dove at DOKLeipzig 2009, is an impressive and masterly done direct cinema documentary about the European political and social problem number one: Immigration. In this case told through the observation of people on each side of the desk – the seekers and the helpers. Apart from a couple of small tours in the streets of Paris, the scenes in the film are all shot inside the small offices of the centre or in the bigger room, where the first registration takes place. The characters are Ethiopians, Mongolians, Sudanese, Sri Lankese… and then there is Caroline and Colette, who is the motherly social worker, who is constantly over budget but finds her ways to solution.

It is touching, you laugh and you cry, and you think while you are watching one humiliating moment after the other. At an excellent session the two French filmmakers invited the audience to get an insight to methods of filming and reflections on the profession of being a documentarian. The camera was integrated in the room, they never forgot that they were filmed, and we did not want them too, said Chagnard. At the beginning – the first out of 4 months of shooting – we lost the power, we were too quick and they did not really trust us, but gradually we achieved our ”authorisation intérieure”, which is the most important, because when you have that, the reality organises itself, and you have the patience and the courage to wait. This is an important humanistic, creative document about a European reality, that could be everywhere where people come and aim at a better life than the one they had. And it shows the strength of the observational style combined with time and cinematographic skills.

France, 2009, 111 mins.

www.magnificent7festival.org

Magnificent7 – Striptease

Eric Cardot is in Belgrade because of his co-direction of ”Kill the Referee”. At a session with young filmmakers from Serbia, he revealed how the film came about. It was the football association UEFA, that wanted the film and addressed the producers of the – in Belgium and France – very well known tv series Striptease. UEFA wanted human stories to be conveyed to the audience, and not necessarily a defense for the profession of being a referee.

To illustrate to the seminar participants what is Striptease, Cardot showed a 13 minute long Striptease episode about the production of kosher wine, amazingly funny because of the characters and atmosphere of presence. For the series – Cardot has made 10 of them – 800 episodes have been made starting at primetime at the RTBF, Belgian television, and developed by Marco Lamensch and Jean Libon. The series is now run by French television since 1992, in Belgium it stopped in 2002. The broadcast often ends up with scandals for the involved as Cardot himself explained and showed with a clip from a four hour long series called ”Police et Polissons”. A policeman attacks a youngster in his office, verbally and physically in a scene that resulted in the sacking of the policeman after its broadcast. Very much direct cinema style!

Striptease is out on dvd in boxes published by the distributor MK2.

http://television.telerama.fr/television/27354-rencontre_avec_marco_lamensch_et_jean_libon_les_createurs_de_strip_tease.php

www.magnificent7festival.org

Magnificent7 – Finnish Living Rooms

Jukka Kärkkäinen (JK) and his cameraman J-P. Passi (JP) are in Belgrade to present their film ”The Living Room of a Nation” that has been highly praised on this site several times. The JK presentation of the film and himself was full of shyness and a sense of showmanship. Gazing at his shoe and clutching his hat he told the audience that they were at eye level with the characters, physically and mentally. We showed them who we were and they showed us who they are. Tero (photo) is my alter ego, the difference is only that he wants to be in front of the camera, me not. Russian director Sergey Loznitsa and Swedish master Roy Andersson are sources of inspiration, JK continued, and sang a song before the screening, translated by his cameraman from a Nokia phone. The two have definitely already won many hearts here at the Magnificent/ festival in Belgrade. Here is a text clip from the review of the film from this site:  

…this minimalistic approach is underligned by the way the camera is placed without any movement recording what happens within the frame. Or one could say on the stage of Life. It gives a distance, it gives you respect for the people you are watching, and, the more you get into the film, also compassion for their destinies. The main character is the young man, who becomes a father – you never see the mother – and knows that a new life must begin, without alcohol. Towards the end of the film you hear him say that he can only see his child once a week. He is indeed a tragic character, as is the big man who moves from one apartment to another, a smaller one, where he gets his arm chair placed at the point for watching television. The filmmakers must have been with the characters for a very long time. It all seems so truthful what we are invited to watch, most of the time with a sad feeling but as in a play of Samuel Beckett or a film of Roy Andersson, the interpretation of meaningless goes well with humour. And bravo for an editing that elegantly takes us from one situation and character to the next and the next… and back again.

http://www.thelivingroomofthenation.com/

http://www.deckert-distribution.com/films/deckert_268.htm

www.magnificent7festival.org