The short name is ”Nationality: Human”, the long one is the South Caucasus Documentary Film Festival of Peace and Human Rights. The festival is supported by the Open Society Georgia Foundation (Soros) and partners and the woman running it is Helena Zajicova, czech, with connection to the One World Festival in Prague. Zajicova told about the festival and showed the most popular film from this year’s selection: Neighbours by Norman MacLaren (1952). Here is a text clip from the site of the festival:

The festival screens annually 10-12 high quality documentary films, selected by the festival board out of a number of films preselected jointly with partners from the One World Film Festival in Prague. Local organizes then choose 6 films to compose a three-day festival program with follow-up discussions. All films are dubbed in Russian and national languages. (Photo from “To See if I’m Smiling” from Israel, reviewed on this site)

Another interesting initiative was brought to the participants of the Pitch.Doc day in Tbilisi. Susanna Harutunian and Hasmik Hovhannisyan from the Golden Apricot IFF in Yerevan, Armenia (takes place yearly in July) informed about the DAB (Directors Across Borders). Again a cross-cultural get-together – here is a text clip from their 2009 website:

Summarizing the selection results for the 3rd DAB Regional Co-production forum, we are happy announce the following: more than 40 projects were submitted for both Directors Across Borders and Armenia-Turkey Cinema Platform sections. We would like to thank all the producers and directors for their interest in the forum and submitting their projects. This year the format of the event has changed a little. In particular, in the frames of co-production forum, two main events will take place – Directors Across Borders co-production workshop, which will invite 10 projects from the countries of the region (namely: Armenia, Turkey, Russia, Georgia, Ukraine and Estonia) and Armenia-Turkey Cinema Platform Documentary Development Workshop, for 6 documentary projects aimed to be co-produced between Armenia and Turkey.

http://www.ya-chelovek.caucasus.net/_team.html

http://www.gaiff.am/

http://www.tbilisifilmfestival.ge/index.php

The Pitch workshop has started. 10 projects have been selected from 5 countries: Georgia, Armenia, Azerbjadan, Ukraine and Moldova. A diversity of themes were presented by filmmakers with a different background. They met each other, heard about the state of the art in Europe and pitched and got feedback from colleagues. The organiser of the workshop, Anna Dziapshipa, who works at the Georgian Film Center, and who is also working as a producer, and the director Salome Jashi (her films have reviewed on this site) did a fine case study on their work-in-progress, Bahkmaro and Those Who Work There. This film-to-be was pitched at the Baltic Sea Forum in Riga September 2008, did a year of the Ex Oriente EU MEDIA training workhop in three stages – and was very succesfully received at public pitching sessions in Leipzig and Jihlava this autumn. The film project was originally in its early development phase supported by the Gothenburg Film Festival Fund, a very honourable move from the Swedish, who are here to pick one of the 10 film proposals at the workshop to give a grant of 5000€.

The workshop takes place at the Goethe Institute in Tbilisi, and I have again to express admiration for the generous attitude of the Germans in this part of the world, where support is granted to local filmmakers, very often also as a financial help for development and production of documentary films.

Friday the 5th a public pitching session will take place within the framework of the international film festival.

Photo: Anna Dziapshipa, Tue Steen Müller and German co-producer Heino Deckert in Jihlava.

http://www.tbilisifilmfestival.ge/index.php

Arrived early morning in Tbilisi coming from Copenhagen via Istanbul. Turkish Airlines, to be recommended for its service. Drove on George Bush Street to the hotel, yes, George Bush Street! Says something about in which direction Georgia wanted and wants to go. Westwards. A film title in the catalogue, ”Misha vs. Moscow: The Battle for Georgia´s Future” stresses what is the problem right now after the unlucky war between Russia and Georgia last year in August. As the annotation to the film from 2009 (by American John Philp) says: … president Saakashvili finds himself ostracized by his Western allies facing demands to resign following a disastrous war with Russia… can he regain his crown as the darling of international politics or has the war torpedoed for good any chance for peace in the region…

But what a beautiful city, the old town with atmosphere, small shops and cafés mingle with posh shopping malls, messy pavements, (some) renovated houses from early XX century. Opening of the festival tonight.

http://www.tbilisifilmfestival.ge/index.php

It is the 10th edition of the international film festival that starts tomorrow in Tbilisi, capital of Goegia. And goes on until the 6th of December. Mike Leigh is guest of honour and makes a masterclass and there is an Italian focus, a series on Hamsun and film, introduced by Jan-Erik Holst from the Norwegian Film Institute, Iraniian films, German and of course a national programme.

I will be there to take part in Pitch.Point, the first pitching session for documentaries Georgia, arranged by the Georgian Film Center and with 10 projects to be pitched from Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Ukraine and Moldova. Also there is a chance to watch new Georgian documentaries, among them a new one by award-winning director Nino Kirtadze, “Something about Georgia”.
Photo from the documentary by Salome Jashi, “Speechless”.

http://www.tbilisifilmfestival.ge/index.php

MOMA in New York needs no further introduction as the museum of modern art. Less known – at least in Europe – is it that this museum, often much more precise and professional than festivals all over, put together interesting film series for its huge audience. This time it is about “Lithuanian Cinema: 1990–2009” from December 4, 2009–December 13, 2009. Here is the fine intro text from the site of MOMA:

This is the first U.S. survey to explore the last twenty years of fiction and nonfiction feature and short films from Lithuania. Since the Baltic republic declared its independence from the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, Lithuanian filmmakers, unconstrained by ideology and despite limited infrastructure, have made a number of distinguished works exploring themes of identity—both personal and national—in original, passionate, and provocative ways. Some Lithuanian filmmakers have earned international reputations, including Sarunas Bartas; Arunas Matelis, who was awarded the Directors Guild of America Best Documentary Filmmaker award in 2007 for Before Flying Back to Earth; and Jonas Mekas, whose creative and organizational activity in the U.S. has been essential to American independent filmmaking. Other filmmakers like Raimundas Banionis and the team of Romas Lileikis and Stasys Motiejunas, whose films appeared early in the “liberation” of Lithuanian cinema, deserve to be better known abroad—as do Kristina Buozyte (The Collectress) and Gytis Luksas (Vortex), both of whom are enjoying their American premieres. All films are from Lithuania and in Lithuanian with English subtitles.

Readers of this site will know that Lithuanian documentaries very often have been noted or reviewed – these are the documentaries selected by MOMA:
The shorter ones are ”Ten Minutes Before the Flight of Icarus” (Arunas Matelis, 1991), ”Earth of the Blind” (Audrius Stonys, 1992), ”Spring” (Valdas Navasaitis, 1997), ”Grandpa and Grandma” (Giedre Beinoriute, 2007), and the longer ones ”Before the Flight Back to the Earth” (Arunas Matelis, 2005) and ”Man-Horse” (Audrius Mickevicius, 2008).

The small photo is from “Man-Horse”. The director wrote to me these lines: “Next wednesday I will fly to NY. I am happy for my neighbour Jonas. The longest trip in his life was about 100 km, now his images will be more far away.”

http://www.moma.org/visit/calendar/films/1020

From the press release of idfa, impressive numbers, yes, the interest in documentaries is huge, bravo: Although the festival runs until Sunday, we can already cautiously say that the festival has once more received more visitors than last year… If the trend continues, the number of visitors will increase from 157,500 in 2008 to 165,000. Net income rose from € 700,000 in 2008 to € 750,000 this year. The number of (inter)national guests remained approximately on a par with 2008, at 2,295. IDFA’s online activities were better visited this year than ever. Since January 2009, the website has attracted some 600,000 visitors, from 210 different countries. The trailers, full films and festival reports on the documentary channel IDFA TV were viewed during the festival a total of almost 6,000 times a day (4,000 in 2008).

The VPRO IDFA Award for Best Feature-Length Documentary (consisting of a sculpture and € 12,500) went to Lixin Fan for “Last Train Home”, about the heroic journey undertaken by countless Chinese workers each year from the new industrial areas to their families in the provinces. The jury stated that this is a striking, honest film about a topic that is of relevance to the entire world.

www.idfa.nl

There you go, a real camera stylo personal essay film with an original, personal style. I was completely taken in by the beauty of the film, “The Edge of Dreaming”, of Scottish filmmaker Amy Hardie. It touched me, made me reflect on my own life, my family life, my growing up, at the same time as the intensity of storytelling makes you stay in an atmosphere of listening and watching and reflecting. For me this is what a good documentary can be with many layers, a mature commentary, about Life and Death, and told in numerous stylistical lines. You can´t help fall in love with the family of Amy Hardie. They live in (Scottish) nature surroundings that a camera can only adore. And you can´t help admire the manner Hardie, using rough home video material, goes visually elegantly back in time and forward again. We get her story about her first husband, who died years ago, but who comes back to her in a dream to ”announce” that she will die when she is 48 years of age. There are dream sequences, and there are stunning images that make me think of classic Dutch paintings. It is all mixed brilliantly and without any predictability. I better stop my praise and give you the prose of the producers from the idfa catalogue:

This is the story of a rational, sceptical woman, a mother and wife, who does not remember her dreams. Except once, when she dreamt her horse was dying. She woke so scared she went outside in the night. She found him dead. The next dream told her she would die herself, when she was 48. The film explores life, dreams and death in the context of a warm, loving family whose happiness is increasingly threatened as the dream seems to be proving true. The final confrontation, returning inside the dream with a shaman, reveals a surprising twist to the tale.

Scotland, 2009, 73 mins. – and (bravo) with the support of ZDF/arte, More4 and VPRO plus of course Scottish Screen.

www.idfa.nl

I saw two films supported by the Jan Vrijman Fund. ”For Home Viewing” by Mikhail Zheleznikov is a half hour, wonderfully controlled, cinematically original and funny first person story by the director, who tells about his view from his home window, in the house in St. Petersburg where he grew up, in the USSR, and now under totally different conditions. Also with humour is the film ”The Last Tightrope Dancer in Armenia” by Inna Sahakyan that introduces two old masters of an art form that is disappearing. They tell what was once, and they say what they hope to happen – that at least one of their students will take over. A warm film that takes us to a place and a culture that we did not know anything about.

www.idfa.nl