Magnificent7 – Opening Night

The Sava Center in Belgrade hosted two films for the opening of the 6th European Feature Documentary Festival, Magnificent7. The big hall made last night room for around 1500 spectators for each of the two films, that were introduced to the Serbian audience, who could do nothing but enjoy the fascinating insights to normally closed worlds that were given in ”Pianomania” and ”Kill the Referee”.

In the Austrian/German coproduction ”Pianomania”, directed by Lilian Franck and Robert Cibis, you meet Stefan Knüpfer who is an extremely sympathetic and energetic magician in his profession that is to tune pianos for world famous pianists like Pierre-Laurent Aimard and Lang Lang. Aimard and his way to recording Bach’s ”The Art of Fugue” constitutes the red thread of the film, whose editor Michèle Barbin is in Belgrade to meet the audience.

Eric Cardot, present in Belgrade, is one of the three directors of ”Kill the Referee”, that provides an insight to the world of those men on the pitch, who we love to hate. Shot during the Euro 2008 the films follows the referees at work – the funny and amazing sound communication between the referee and his assistants during the matches are recorded – in the dressing rooms before and after the matches, at the meetings with the UEFA officials, including Michel Platini, as well as their families at home, watching husbands and fathers at work. English Howard Webb (photo) is the main character in the film, the man who was threatened by the Polish nation because of a mistake in the opening match against Austria!

The organisers of Magnificent7 had invited the former international Serbian referee, Zoran Petrovic, to attend the screening which he did with applause to the film and clever reflections on the hardships of a profession that to my opinion has never been so well conveyed as in ”Kill the Referee”.

www.magnificent7festival.org

Magnificent7 – a Sexy Festival

The 6th European feature Documentary Festival opens tonight in the big hall of the Sava Centre in Belgrade. My guess – based on ticket office information and on experience from previous years – is that more than a thousand spectators will attend each of the screenings of the two films of the opening night: ”Pianomania”, presented by the editor Michèle Barbin, and ”Kill The Referee”, presented by one of the directors Eric Cardot.

As usual the organisers Svetlana and Zoran Popovic, with their team of young Serbian filmmakers (Mila Turajlic, Iva Plemic, Sonja Blagojevic, Jelena Stankovic and Andrijana Stojkovic) have done a huge work to promote the festival in electronic and printed media.

… including a free full page advertising of the festival in the local version of Playboy! Yes, documentaries are getting ”sexy” and can appeal to a big audience and find a natural place surrounded by Hugh Hefner’s girls and a big article on the best football player in the world, Leo Messi. Greetings from a sunny, snow covered beautiful Belgrade. More reports to come.

Photo: “Pianomania” by Lilian Franck and Robert Cibis.

www.magnificent7festival.org

TV3 Awards

The Catalan public broadcaster TV3 has since 1990 performed a very honourable competition for reports and films that ”raise a voice against the violation of human rights. The goal is to defend the rights of individuals and democratic values such as tolerance and respect for minorities”.

I was in the jury this year together with TV3 Head of Documentaries Joan Salvat, Colombian producer Maria Pia Quiroga living in Buenos Aires,  Lebanese filmmaker and distributor Soha Saleh and Melissa Caron from Echo Bridge Entertainment. 15 films were to be seen from a total of the around 50 that had been sent in for the competition – a pre-selection had been done.

The films came from different continents, they had a diversity of themes, sometimes reportage style, sometimes more personal, and many times a mix between investigative journalism with the clear goal to inform, and more creative documentaries that go to create an emotional link to the viewer. Brain and Heart. For most of the films there was a clear commitment from the filmmaker, for many there was a lack of visual thinking. Result: storytelling based on words. All presented themes were interesting and important.

There were indeed many words in the film that the jury chose as the winner of the 10.000€ of the TV3 International Award. But they were there as part of the dramatic story, ”The Coca Cola Case”. Which is the title of the Canadian film by German Gutierrez and Carmen Garcia. It is a well crafted and well told, sometimes visually very elegant, shocking story about the more than dubious activities of the multinational giant all over the world with an emphasis on atrocities in Colombia. An annotation from the site of the producer, National Film Board of Canada: This feature length documentary presents a searing indictment of the Coca-Cola empire and its alleged kidnapping, torture and murder of union leaders trying to improve working conditions in Colombia, Guatemala and Turkey. The filmmakers follow labour rights lawyers Daniel Kovalik and Terry Collingsworth and an activist for the Stop Killer-Coke! campaign, Ray Rogers, as they attempt to hold the giant U.S. multinational beverage company accountable in this legal and human rights battle.

The film will be shown at the DocsBarcelona festival that starts February 3 where also the award ceremony for the TV3 prize will take place.

Canada, 85 mins. 2009

http://www.cinemapolitica.org/the-coca-cola-case

http://www.hour.ca/film/film.aspx?iIDArticle=19104

http://www.nfb.ca/film/coca_cola_case_trailer/

info@argusfilms.ca

www.docsbarcelona.com

Kalandia – a Checkpoint Story

This is one of those films that stays in your mind. Not because it is a high-quality visual experience, not at all, almost on the contrary, but because here is a filmmaker, who has committed herself to act by doing what she finds important: documenting a daily expression of intolerance and humiliation of human beings in a conflict zone. As it takes place on the road between Ramallah and East Jerusalem.

For six years the Israeli filmmaker Neta Efroney went to the Kalandia checkpoint on the West Bank, stood there, observed what happened, and created a relationship to some of the Palestinians who had to pass the checkpoint daily to go to work or to school. Children being taken through mud, looking at soldiers with machine guns and seeing their parents being searched or shouted at. What wounds will these children have when they grow up? They are taken through these kind of turning gates that stops and leaves you stuck for a moment until it is your turn to continue your journey to do the work in Jerusalem in the country Israel, where many of them they have a citizenship.

What an achievement of the filmmaker to use this method! She continues from the very first moment till the end where the wall is built that separates Palestine and Israel. (The wall that the Israelis call “the security wall”!). She talks to the people from behind her camera, also to an older soldier who claims that his young colleagues are too eager to be controllers and have forgotten that the people who want to pass are human beings, who are not necessarily terrorists. The film is never sentimental, it documents, by using the mere dates of filming as chapters in a diary format that simply by adding one date after the other makes the viewer think. The director is an active member of ”Machsom Watch” (Checkpoint Watch) that is a non-profit association of Israeli women, who observe, document and publicize what happens close to home. ”You don’t let us live”, says a man to the camera carried by the Israeli filmmaker.

How long is this inhumanity and humiliation going to last…

Israel, 2009, 60 mins.

jmtreves@012.net.il

netaef@netvision.net.il

Erlend E. Mo: Sannhetsjegeren 2

De tre herrer på fotografiet leder efter sandheden. Vist nok på hver deres måde. Eller rettere, den nærmeste gør. Han hedder Tore Sandberg, han er privatdetektiv. Rigtig privatdetektiv. I virkeligheden. Han har fattet mistanke til en bestemt sag om to sammenhængende mord. Mener en uskyldig mand er blevet dømt. Det er en af arbejdsdagene i tiåret 1998-2008, hvor han arbejder med sagen.

Manden i midten er en pensioneret politimand, fra kriminalpolitiet, meget erfaren. Han hedder Frode Asbjørnsen. Han er efterhånden blevet ven med Sandberg, men er stadigvæk skeptisk. Stiller sig hele tiden tvivlende, men bistår ham hele vejen igennem. Hans sandhed er de opklaringer, politiet har foretaget, de domme retsvæsnet har fældet. Så han arbejder på at fjerne tvivlen.  

Den bagerste mand er filminstruktøren Erlend Mo. Han er ekspert i at følge langvarige historier, han bliver bare hængende ved med sit kamera. På sin måde lige så stædigt vedholdende som de to første. Så han har arbejdet på sin film gennem en stor del af det samme tiår. Han laver dokumentarfilm. Vil på sin måde finde sandheden om denne jagt på sandheden og lade sin film skildre den.

På vores blog her anmeldte Tue Steen Müller 19. maj sidste år filmen og gav den begejstret alle seks penne. I går så vi den så i FOF-Randers mandagshøjskole og blev rystede. Vi forstod at det med sandhed ikke er så enkelt. Den døve anklagede forstod ikke ordet, måske blev det slet ikke oversat til tegnsprog. Han forstod, ja, han vidste fra sin daglige avislæsning, at der ude i de ikke-døves verden var sket to mord. Og så opfattede han det således, at dommeren ville have ham til fortælle, hvad der var sket. Det kunne han jo så gøre efter sin avisresearch, og hans fortælling blev opfattet som sand, og det blev hans skæbne. “Jamen, jeg slog ikke pigerne ihjel”, fastholdt han, men hans fortælling modsagde ham. Sandhed er en abstraktion sagde den kloge og indlevende psykolog. Den findes ikke i virkeligheden.

Erlend E. Moe: SANNHETSJEGEREN, Norge 2009, 86 min.

Cinéma du Réel

The 32th (!) edition of the festival in Paris takes place March 18-30. Both bloggers of this site will be there to report in Danish and English. Here is an overview of what the programme includes, taken from the site of the festival, and signed by its director Javier Packer-Comyn.

The 2010 Cinéma du Réel programme: International Competition / First Films / French Panorama. Some forty international and French films that have mostly never been screened, with particular focus on the films’ documentary writing and ethics. Encounters and debates with the invited filmmakers. And this year, for the first time, the First Films section focusing exclusively on first works.The Dedication: Albert Maysles. Revisiting the works of Albert Maysles (PHOTO), a landmark figure of the 1960s’ American direct cinema and the musical documentary (with his late brother, David). This tremendously vivacious 82-year-old will propose a retrospective based on the first part of his work, as well as a master class. Both of us. Both of us plunges us into the creative process of filmmakers working in tandem, in pairs, in partnership, in couples. We take a look at how various individual films are made and try to understand how this singular, yet double, entity comes to light in their filmmaking. With films by Yervant Gianikian/Angela Ricci-Lucchi, Jean-Luc Godard/Anne-Marie Miéville, Yann Le Masson/Bénédicte Deswarte, Raymonde Carasco/Régis Hébraud.

Exploring Documentary – forms of film pamphlets. This year Exploring Documentary focuses on a subversive film form that is all too little known, the film pamphlet. Music in motion. A programming built around several major innovative works that explore the relationship between the documentary, music and the human body. How to film music, the myth of the singer, the stage or act of creation… With films by Amos Gitai (A Brand New Day), Dan Graham (Rock my Religion), Derek Jarman with his clips, Peter Whitehead (Pink Floyd London ‘66-67) or Mathieu Boogaerts (Le Journal de Michel).

Icarus the filmmaker (or the story of the eye’s vertical movement). The theme of this seminar is the history of the aerial view from photography to satellite images, including cinema. Workshop with Xiaolu Gou This young Chinese filmmaker and author lives in the UK (Golden Leopard at the last Locarno film festival). In her works horizons broaden and different creative fields meet up. The film redefines its own geography, changes the vocabulary, and oscillates between fiction, documentary and literature. With more to come!

http://www.cinereel.org/spip.php?page=plan&lang=en

Jarmo Jääskeläinen: Marcel Lozinski

This text about Polish master Marcel Łoziński is written by grand old man in Finnish documentary, for many years a producer, director and commissioning editor at YLE, Jarmo Jääskeläinen. The text is taken from the site of the international film festival Docpoint that takes place in Helsinki 26-31.1.2010:

If one were to look for a pair for Marcel Łoziński in developing Polish documentary, it would be Krzysztof Kieślowski. They were best friends, and both belonged to the generation of directors that in the beginning of the 1970s were no longer satisfied with what their teacher Kazimierz Karabasz had taught them in the Łódź film school. They abandoned realistic observation of the environment and began to look for deeper stories, often containing staged, fictive elements, that would critically portray the totalitarian system of power in their country.

The basic conflict in their films was created by juxtaposing the individual and an unrealistic system. Both Łoziński and Kieślowski encountered various forms of censorship. They developed special expertise in writing between the lines, in finding forms of expression that the handbook for censorship did not yet have a chapter on. A good example of this is Łoziński’s How to Live (1977), a story from an educational summer camp of the Union of Young Polish Socialists. Just a few months earlier, workers in Ursus, Radom and other parts of Poland had started to protest against the price increase of food supplies. Thousands lost their jobs and many of the protesters got unreasonable prison sentences. Meanwhile, the summer camp of Marcel Łoziński’s film is all dance and laughter, although there are individuals present who dissent. Many of his other films also cannot be fully understood until they are reflected against the social circumstances in Poland at the time.

Kieślowski’s documentaries were often built on stories about an individual or a small group, Łoziński’s on larger themes and collectives. This difference led

Kieślowski to fiction, and Łoziński found new ground in Poland’s unspoken history. These films will not be seen in DocPoint’s retrospective this year, but I will mention two examples: the 1988 film Świadkowie (“Witnesses”) that deals with the butchering of Jewish war survivors by the Polish in Kielce in 1946, and Las Katyński (“Katyn forest”), completed a year later, in which the families of Polish officers that were murdered by the Soviet secret police NKVD in spring 1940 visit the execution sights, where the bodies of the thousands that were shot on political grounds lie.

Teaching young documentary directors is an area where Kieślowski and Łoziński are almost on par. Kieślowski established a university media department in Katowice, where he taught for over ten years. Lozinski was involved in establishing the Andrzej Wajda Master School of Film Directing in Warsaw. He is in charge of studies in documentary film directing. It is hard to find a young or middle-aged documentarist in contemporary Poland who has never studied under Kieślowski or Łoziński.

And finally, when I am asked which Łoziński film I like the best, the answer is short and simple: 89 mm from Europe (1993). The distance between the wheels of a passenger train coming from the West is changed, because the gauge will be 89 millimetres wider, when the journey continues east from the Belarusian city Brzesc. Work goes on as if nothing unusual were happening, and the workers look gloomy. Western tourists peek out from the windows of the passenger carriages. This is the border between East and West – between Rome and Constantinople. Finland, too, is 89 millimetres away from Europe.

Still from “89 mm from Europe” by Marcel Lozinski. Polish Film Institute has published a dvd box with documentary films of Marcel Lozinski.

Jarmo Jääskeläinen

Translation by Anna Volmari

Nicolas Philibert: Imagination takes flight

This text is taken from the site of the Finnish documentary film festival Docpoint, that goes on 26-31.1.2010:

I never made the decision to become a documentarian, to place myself in some fixed category. I don’t even like the word “documentarian”. The term is an attempt to give a strict definition to a genre known for its porosity and constantly evolving boundaries; a genre that is almost inseparable from the one it is always opposed to: fiction. After all, images are not as true to ”reality” as they are to the intentions of their creator.

Nevertheless, my first film was a documentary (His Master’s Voice, 1978) and it made me want to make another one and another one, and I’m still as excited as ever. So I have become a documentarian and, although I dislike the word, nothing has managed to quench my thirst for filming; not the efforts needed to get a project started and surmount one’s demons nor the threats that hang over the existence and circulation of one’s most personal works.

I feel the need to create a frame for each film, a starting point that I can build upon. This frame consists of the things that I find motivating and exciting when working together with the subjects of the film. When filming starts, the final destination is unknown to me and I don’t know which path I will follow. A

lot depends on the things that emerge through work and encounters. Naturally the journey is different with each film.

Movies always tell something else than what was expected of them and maybe it’s better that way. When I started filming Every Little Thing at La Borde psychiatric clinic, I would have had great difficulty defining the subject of the film. Actually, I still don’t quite know what it is. It is not so much a film about La Borde than a film made because of La Borde. I hesitated before starting to make it… When you are holding a camera, you have power over others. It is essential to know how not to abuse this power. When I decided to make this film, it was to confront my fears and hesitations, all these things that were holding me back. Thus the subject in itself is not as important as the questions that the film evokes in me.

When I start making a film, I inform myself as little as possible. The less I know, the better it goes. Besides, if I know too much about a subject, I’m no longer interested in making a film about it. The idea of making a film from an omniscient point of view is completely foreign to me. I prefer to build upon not knowing. Louvre City is a good example of this: there is not a word of commentary in the film, although the co-producers wanted to add it. When making In the Land of the Deaf, I had decided to dive straight into the oddity of sign language, without an interpreter or other outside help. At first, I felt lost… However, I had decided not to consult experts or doctors or educators. If I had approached the subject that way, the deaf would have felt they were being filmed as research subjects.

Movies must hold their secrets and leave questions unanswered. Shady areas, words left unsaid, the interplay between what is shown and what is not, what is told and what is left to be assumed, invisible parts, reluctant characters; all this moves the viewer and shakes up his or her thoughts and prejudices, allowing imagination to take flight. When everything is smooth, familiar, transparent, tame, soothing and without any roughness or obstacles, there is no story to be told, only stagnation.

http://www.docpoint.info/en

Translation by Heini Lilja

Forgotten Transports to Göteborg Film Festival

”What an achievement! I don’t recall, when was the last time that I witnessed so captivating a historical documentary, here told by Czech Jewish survivors of the holocaust. They were interviewed between 2000-2006 by Lukas Pribyl, the researcher, writer and director behind the four 90 minutes long films that share the same title, ”Forgotten Transports”, with the adding of where the transports went: ”to Latvia”, ”to Estonia”, ”to Belarus”, ”to Poland”.

This is a text clip from this site where Lukas Pribyl’s films were given an enthusiastic review in August 2009. I also put the film series on my list of best films 2009. Now I see with pleasure that the prestigious film festival in Göteborg, in its very exclusive documentary section, includes 3 screenings of each of the 4 films. I can only say to our Swedish readers and the Danish professionals, who visit the festival: Go and watch these impressive films.

The 178 pages big catalogue also invites to screenings of other high-quality documentaries that have been written about on this site – and will be screened next week at the Magnificent7 festival in Belgrade: ”My Life With Carlos”, ”Pianomania” and ”Kill the Referee”.

The festival goes from January 29 to February 8.

http://www.giff.se/

www.forgottentransports.com

Zelig

… does not only refer to the fictional documentary, mockumentary, of Woody Allen, but is also the name of the film school in Bolzano in the Alto Adige region of North Italy. Documentary films are being taught and made here in an atmosphere of warmth and competence. I can say so about the school and its permanent staff having been one of the priviliged regular teachers there since 2007. Diploma films are now in production from the hands and eyes of the students, who have been there for almost three years and who this summer will leave the protected environment of the film school to enter the audiovisual jungle. With skills, knowledge and hopefully a hunger to tell stories. (Several of the students have been writing on this site, write zelig under “search”).

A new three year cycle 2010-2013 lies ahead and the deadline for application is February 1st. This is a quote from the site where YOU, upcoming documentarian can find more info:

“No more than 30 candidates will be admitted to the 2010-2013 cycle. Past experience has shown that a large number of applicants will be competing for these slots. Therefore the admissions process has been divided into two phases. 
The tri-lingual exam commission will select up to 60 candidates from all the applicants, and invite them to Bolzano for a five-day battery of admissions exams. Recommended age of applicants: 20-30 years.”

http://www.zeligfilm.it/