DOCSBarcelona Pitching Forum 2

What were they about, the 24 film projects at the Pitching Forum – what films can you expect to be ready within the next couple of years, what were the themes and stories presented at DOCSBarcelona 2010:

The invention of the personal computer. Mister Edhi – a Pakistani equivalent of Mother Teresa. Chinese in Congo. The fate of an Uighur refugee. My father was a Colombian guerilla fighter. Swedish helpers in Africa. Hitler’s schools in South America. Copyright. Iraqis in America. Bullfighting. Hungary, a horse nation. Llorenc Barber, a composer. Tourism changed Spain. Gospel music unites. Chinese build a railway in Angola. A Russian child in an orphanage. Anacoana, a Cuban female orchestra. Children becoming soldiers in Israel. Housing in London. San Mao, a Chinese writer. Veteran table tennis. The life and death of a mountain climber. School buses buried in the desert! A detective in Bengal.

Quite a mixture! High professional level. Good trailers, with the humourous projects being the easiest to convey in a pitching session.

www.docsbarcelona.com

DOCSBarcelona Pitching Forum 3

A special tribute was given to the Swedish commissioning editor Vera Bonnier, who had her last pitch at DOCSBarcelona. For 34 years Bonnier has worked for SVT, the Swedish public broadcaster, and has now decided to retire. She comes from a tradition in public broadcasting where it was possible to commit to a film project and then find place for it on the programme schedule afterwards. Today it is mostly the other way around – first comes the time slot and what it requires, when it comes to theme and approach, and then the film projects have to fit in.

Vera Bonnier, however, has been enormously flexible in her way of getting films she loved scheduled on the cultural slot K-Special, that runs prime time friday night. A personal note: This is a programme that I love to watch as Danish television friday night is nothing but quiz shows and American series.

Also on this last international documentary event for Vera Bonnier, she demonstrated this unique eye for seeing the talent and bending the rules for what can be considered as ”culture”. With warmth and personality. Thank you!

www.docsbarcelona.com

DOCSBarcelona Festival

The same philosophy as always: To build a dialogue among film, audience and director. This is how Joan Gonzàlez, DOCSBarcelona director, phrases what he wants the young festival to be, he himself being very much dedicated to the introduction of the documentary genre to a young audience. This is done through the 7-11 section of a festival that otherwise is built with sections: History, Catalan Day, Doc!Doc!Doc! (for new talents who want to enter the international doc community), Le Dernier Repas (films chosen by a film personality, this year the retiring Catalan Cinematheque director Roc Villas), Kids and Teens, X-tra, Panorama and opening/closing ceremony films.

Let me mention one film that has stayed in my mind since the opening of the festival: ”Sins of My Father” by Nicolás Entel. A story told through the eyes of Sebastián Marroquin, the son of Pablo Escobar, public enemy number 1 in Colombia, a drug dealer, who became one of the richest men in the world – in an interview with the son, he is called the most notorious and brutal drug lord in the history of Colombia. Marroquin is here in Barcelona, a mild and generous man, who has had the courage to go and ask for forgiveness to the sons of prominent politicians, who were all killed by his father. The film follows that story, the process of reconciliation, as well as it is describing the life of the father, who controlled everything and made things that goes beyond any gangsterfilm ever made. At some times during the film what is being told is totally surrealistic! Escobar was (to use the phrase from The Guardian, see link below) gunned down in 1993.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/nov/08/pablo-escobar-son-drugs-victims

www.docsbarcelona.com

Oscar Nominations 2010 – Documentaries

What a pleasure to see that two documentaries by committed and skilled documentarians – as they have been praised on this site – both of them non-American in a very American classement, have made it to the grande finale: “Burma VJ” and “Rabbit a la Berlin”! Congratulations! Check the many notes on “Burma VJ” via “search” and read a re-post of the review of “Rabbit a la Berlin” below.

Documentary (Feature)

“Burma VJ” Anders Østergaard and Lise Lense-Møller

“The Cove” Nominees to be determined

“Food, Inc.” Robert Kenner and Elise Pearlstein

“The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers” Judith Ehrlich and Rick Goldsmith

“Which Way Home” Rebecca Cammisa

Documentary (Short Subject)

“China’s Unnatural Disaster: The Tears of Sichuan Province” Jon Alpert and Matthew O’Neill

“The Last Campaign of Governor Booth Gardner” Daniel Junge and Henry Ansbacher

“The Last Truck: Closing of a GM Plant” Steven Bognar and Julia Reichert

“Music by Prudence” Roger Ross Williams and Elinor Burkett

“Rabbit à la Berlin” Bartek Konopka and Anna Wydra

 http://www.oscars.org/awards/academyawards/82/nominees.html

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