Stepping out of the Metro on Kongens Nytorv yesterday morning on my way to the Royal Theatre’s “Stærekassen”, Danish poet Peter Laugesen was steps ahead of me. It threw my thoughts back to my dear friend and co-editor of this site, Allan Berg Nielsen, who passed away some days ago. Allan loved Laugesen, made in 1989 a film with him, photographer was Lars Johansson. I was just getting the idea that Laugesen, an old beat poet, was maybe invited to read a poem at the opening of the second day of the festival’s Forum. Of course not, Laugesen passed “Stærekassen” with his dog…

It IS wonderful that the Forum can hold its 4 day Forum in a theatre like this one that has its special atmosphere of performance from the stage with an audience. There are balcony seats and seats near the ceiling, where “les enfants du paradis” can be placed. Many stairs, wooden floors, toilets for “damer” and “herrer”, the latter with pissoirs as I remember them, where you line up and can talk to your neighbour…

“Change” was the title of the first day’s Forum, presented like this by the festival: CHANGE is our development co-production training program in collaboration with IMS and EAVE, featuring documentary projects in development from Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine.

Great initiative implemented for the second year with Georgian “Nana´s Wings” as the first project on stage, presented by director Maradia Tsaava and producer Mariam Chachia, both filmmakers previously praised on this site for their works “Water has No Borders” and “Magic Mountain”. Maradia Tsaava introduces like this: “it was a dark, cold, very windy night, when Nana arrived in a small-town Telavi. She had only one thing with her – a small brown bag… This is how the film will start, the story of my grandmother’s aspiration to fight post-war agony with art””. They presented precisely and with passion and had a trailer with a cliffhanger, i.e. do you want to know more. The project was previously presented and awarded at CinéDoc Tbilisi

6 projects were presented, a couple without allowance to write about them. Let me mention a couple more from this session: Ukrainian Pavlo Dorohoi, whose “Metro” and “89 Days” I have met before and appreciated, came with “The Ferryman” (Photo), very good trailer, promising film-to-be about 16-year-old Danylo, “who works as a ferryman in the shadow of a destroyed bridge 50 km from Kharkiv to earn money and continue his studies at a sports academy, but dreams of becoming a professional kayaker collide the reality of wartime”. And “Land of Fairy Tales and Dreams” by Denis Pavlovic is also one that could end up successfully on the screen with its stories from Transnistria, the almost unknown region in Moldova that supports Putin. Some tour guides are meant to be the guiding characters.

The format was fine, the classical one: 7 minutes presentation and 7 minutes questions from the moderator, who was American Sean Flynn, very well prepared, and the teams had been trained in beforehand, but the moderator’s tone was monotonous, it gave a dry atmosphere but luckily there were screens in both sides of the stage that brought his words as he was speaking…

… and then today the Forum for projects that are developed, many of them close to being characterized as “ready to go” but still lacking funding. I listened and watched the first six that went one after the other – after a pretty long but ok start with speeches by Kathrine Kiilgaard and Niklas Engstrøm, managing and artistic director of the festival, the new head of Industry and Training Mara Gourd-Mercado and the project manager Anna Krasztev-Kovacs. There was a tribute to late Jess Search, who was a moderator of the Forum for many years, her wife Beadie Finzi was there and a clip was shown. Respect.

And then the moderators took over, professional and experienced Karolina Lidin and Tabitha Jackson, who managed the short time in a fine way, having three commentators come on stage for presentation of themselves and questions to the teams pitching.

Let me mention two of the six projects: The Chinese/Dutch “Whispers in May” by Dongnan Chen, a film made in collaboration with the kids taking part, having Qinghua, who is 14, having her first menstruation that “sets in motion a quest for self-discovery … a road trip with her two besties to find a skirt for the menarche rite of passage”. The presentation was charming and convincing, the clip full of poetic scenes, lovely!

And then Arthur Franck, whose “The Hypnotist” I saw and loved some years ago, Finnish humour, Franck took the audience’s attention totally with his stage performance of “Showtime in Helsinki”, 1975; cold war meeting with Kissinger, Gerald Ford, Brezhnev, Honecker, Harold Wilson, Olof Palme… Maybe the most important and simultaneously the most forgotten Cold War event to take place, as they put it in the catalogue. “Horror and comedy”, Franck said.

to be continued… in Stærekassen in Copenhagen.

A brief and warm recommendation of the Danish debutant Zara Zerny’s film on a group of men and women between 80 and 100, who lost their husband, wife or partner and how they have overcome the grief connected. But mostly about the memories, the small and bigger moments of a long life together, and suddenly you are alone. Some of them, however, have found a new partner in life, some not but cope very well – from their home or from the nursing home they have moved into.

It sounds thematically like a déja vu so it´s all about how the film is constructed and the director’s skills to get close, asking questions in a fine respectful manner. Zara Zerny’s ambition is clear from the start, I am not going to make an interview film, it has to be lively and for my taste she succeeds fully. She is playing with the protagonists, they are playing with their bodies, there are movements and it helps of course, when one of them – the one on the photo – was performing at Cirque du Soleil togther with his late wife. They had a comeback when they were 73! Archive proofs their ability.

There is also the clever, reflective 100 year old woman, who is eating an ice. There is the homosexual, who has found or was found by a 20 year younger man, who finds him sexy. There is the woman from the countryside, who got a child before marriage, which was not approved by the parents. There is talk about being unfaithful, yes of course most of them say, not a big deal…

The tone is light and I understand completely, why the CPH:DOX has chosen to send this film to all corners of the kingdom. It will be appreciated as it was for me and my wife – we (at least I) are not 80 years yet. But we are getting there.

Denmark, 2023, 76 mins.

… Knud Brix took part in the creation of the film as did producer Andreas Dalsgaard, Elk Film. And many others…

Again it is beautifully demonstrated, how important Time is, when you do documentaries. This film is shot over a period of 8 years, 2015-2023. Things happen during these years for the protagonists Gerel Byamba and her son Temuulen, who is six years old, when we meet him. With a cliché: the camera loves the two and convey through many close-ups expressions – hate, love, sadness – of mother and son.

Gerel hates the Chinese, has formed her own feminist gang that has as its mission to fight prostitution and enter with violence brothels. She uses the swastika, wanting Mongolia to be for Mongolians only, the camera is with her and her gang at a couple of raids. Quite tough to look at.

Paradoxically, Gerel takes a job as security officer at a Chinese railroad project in the Gobi Desert. The son is left in the capital Ulaanbaatar with some family, misses his mother, who tried to get her father take care of the boy. In vain. Slowly the film tells its audience about her childhood, a mother who passed away, while Gerel was a child and a father, who was not present in her life.

The film provides in an excellent way the necessary information to its audience about Mongolia but where it really catches the attention and evokes emotions are in the scenes between mother and son. Especially after she comes back from the job, has saved enough to get a good flat for Temuulen and herself. It is amazing how natural these scenes are, chapeau to the filmmakers for getting that close and for creating poetic moments. The scene where Gerel opens up to tell her son about his father is second to none. It seems like the filmmakers started out to make a journalistic documentary about the nationalistic movement and the anti-chinese thinking, but – as the years went by – focused on mother and son and made that relation THE theme, outstandingly put in the foreground in what is a true creative documentary that took me by the heart,

A strong contender to awards at CPH:DOX.

Denmark and other countries, 2024, 86 mins.

Early in this amazing film a boy says about the balloon phenomenon: It’s an art form. People express themselves through the balloons, I’ve heard… cut to a policeman who is in the middle of a balloon on ground. Do you like it, the director asks him. Yes, it’s beautiful, but forbidden, he answers.

Before that, in brief television clips, we have seen raids on the so-called balloon gangs, actions that the director, who in Portuguese takes us into the world of Baloeiros, questions: how come it seems to be seen as more dangerous than the drug scene in Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo, the locations of the film.

Danish Sissel Morell Dargis, a grafftti artist, entered the balloon environment, when she was 19 and slowly – as the film puts in – she is accepted with her camera. First by “Playboy”, then by Jaba and first and foremost by the respected Godfather of the Baloeiros, Sergio, to whom the film is dedicated. “He was the one, who had most confidence in me”. They open up to her with some skepticism as it is an invitation to a secret world, because of the constant police surveillance. At some point Sissel says that she was observed by the police as well and had to change cards for her phone. Nobody wants to say when and where a balloon release is to happen, some of the balloons, at least one, is said to have measures of a football pitch! And why Pavarotti on a balloon, Sissel asks in a scene, that takes place in a workshop, where the balloons are created. We don’t know, but Brazilian people love opera, is the laughing answer!

Oh, there is so much energy and passion in this film. Maybe the right word is Presence. Because of a young girl with a camera asking questions again and again to discover a world, she knew very little about. Curiosity is what she has, as a true documentarian combined with a lot of courage. Her intimate talks with “Playboy” and especially Jaba give the social dimension; it’s not a rich world and she does not really get an answer to the question, where the money for the creation and release of the balloons come from. Sponsors there are for sure.

There are two interconnected ways: You can be part of the creation and you can be part of the crazy chase of the balloon. Or both. Once the balloon is up in the air the question is where it will land! Both parts are followed in a film about an art form and its artists. I have been in Rio and Sao Paulo enjoying the passion around football, now a brilliant film has shown me another Brazilian world of passion, sharing, loving, fighting to be the best. Thank you for bringing me there. And be sure this film will travel all over!

Denmark and other countries, 2024, 93 mins.