DokLeipzig Winners

A bit post festum an extract of the awards at the DOK Leipzig 2009. Several of the winners have been mentioned or reviewed on this site:

The International Jury for Documentary Film awards: for Documentary Films and Videos / Long Metrage (longer than 45 min) a Golden Dove along with € 10.000 granted by TELEPOOL GmbH to the film “The Arrivals” by Claudine Bories and Patrice Chagnard (France)

The International Jury for Documentary Film awards an Honorary Mention to the film “The Living Room of the Nation” by Jukka Kärkkäinen (Finland) An Honorary Mention to the film “17 August” (PHOTO) by Aleksandr Gutman (Russia, Poland, Finland)

The Jury for the Healthy Workplaces (!) Film Award awards for the best documentary film about the subject of work the Healthy Workplaces Film Award along with € 8.000 granted by the European Agency for Safety and Health at Work (EU OSHA) to ”A Blooming Business” by Ton van Zantvoort (The Netherlands)

The Jury of the Doc Alliance awards for a film from the Doc Alliance Selection the Doc Alliance Award along with € 5.000 to “Maggie in Wonderland” by Mark Hammarberg, Ester Martin Bergsmark and Beatrice Maggie Andersson (Sweden)

The MDR (Mitteldeutscher Rundfunk) awards for an excellent Eastern European documentary film the MDR Film Prize along with € 3.000 to “Chemo” by Pawel Lozinski (Poland)

The FIPRESCI Jury (Fédération Internationale de la Presse Cinématographique) awards the Prize of the Fédération Internationale de la Presse Cinématographique to the film “Cooking History” by Peter Kerekes (Austria, Slovakia, Czech Republic).

Thomas Heise: Material

It’s November 9 and it is 20 years after the fall of the wall. Broadcasters programme accordingly, festivals as well, let me re-mention one of the most interesting documentaries from that time that totally avoids all the clichés and is made by one of the best current German directors, Thomas Heise. Here is a re-post of the review:

It takes some maturity and courage to publish your own archive Material that was meant to stay on the shelf. Thomas Heise – what an understatement! – is indeed a mature and experienced filmmaker, who meiner Meinung nach is one of the leading documentarians of our time. I dare say so having seen ”Stau-Jetz geht’s los”, ”Barluschke”, ”Vaterland” and ”Kinder.Wie die Zeit vergeht” – and those titles constitute only a part of the filmography of the German director, who now offers the audience to watch the 164 minutes of his  social, political and cinematographic interpretation of our time. And his time as a citizen of the GDR and now the united Germany.

Most of the Material is documents shot by the director himself. Dokumentation, as they would say in German. Heise observed the rallies in Berlin in November 1989, when ordinary Genosse were allowed to take the floor and express their opinions about the leadership of the state. And he was  in the prison, when staff members one after the other aired their plea for respect from the increasing crowd of protesters outside – followed by inmates who wished for amnesty in order to take part in the changing world on the other side of the bars.

These sequences, and many more from the archive Material of Heise, show something seldom seen before: the ordinary GDR citizens at the microphone leading up to the fall of the wall. The fall we never see, because we know about it, on the contrary, Heise wants the film to have an actuality and  succeeds perfectly to fulfill that ambition through his aestetical elegant 360degree camera movements in empty depressing spaces, through images from the prison of today, and through an amazing self-ironical, multilayered sequence from a screening of a (Heise-directed, I suppose) film in a cinema: The film is running while the audience starts to fight in front of the screen, the leftist against the rightists, or maybe fights in other constellations. Godard could not have done this better! And was this what the unified Germany was aiming at – totally absurd it is that a social film is running on the screen while social riots unfold in front of the camera. Passive people argue to the cameraman that things like this should not be filmed! Heise did. Thanks for that and for a very intelligent work that I can’t wait to see one more time.

www.deckert-distribution.com

CPH:DOX 09/2

Tre års tornerosesøvn er forbi, uhyret jaget på flugt, støjen ophørt. Posthus Teatret åbnede igen i forgårs for at deltage i CPH:DOX visningerne. Københavns mærkværdigste og mest stædige biograf viser igen film, som biografdirektørerne kan lide og som de holder på plakaten lige så længe, som de kan og som de synes. De kan fortsætte deres kavalkade, genoptage deres import. Mon ikke? Vi glæder os til at have god tid til de store film i den kræsne kunstbiograf. 

http://www.posthusteatret.dk/

Memorimage 09/4

The festival in Reus ended last night. The jury chose ”Of Time and the City” by Terence Davies as the best film, honouring the personal courage of the director not to forget his personal commentary and creative use of archive material to describe Liverpool, his home town. For the best production Peter Kerekes was chosen for ”Cooking History”, an ambitious, structurally original and controversial treatment of War. Both films have been reviewed on this site.

For the research the jury gave the prize to ”Shanty Town – The Forgotten City” (PHOTO) for its excellent work to find and convey a part of Barcelona unknown to most people. Here is the catalogue description of the film:

During the post-war period, hundreds of thousands of people came to Barcelona, fleeing from poverty and political persecution. Given the lack of housing on their arrival, many of them spent years living in caves and shacks. They were workers looking to improve their quality of life, forced to live in a shantytown. When flats were finally built, they were constructed in substandard buildings and remote areas, a phenomenon known as “vertical shantytowns”. Modern Barcelona has chosen to forget a part of its history, a history that is now told through the mouths of those who endured it. Images shot by amateur filmmakers contrast with the official testimony, offering a glimpse of what that city of forgotten residents was really like.

www.memorimagefestival.org

Memorimage 09/3

Director Josep Rovira and researcher Montserrat Bailac told me that I would probably not really understand their ”Dear Dona Elena”, as there was no contextual information given in the film that makes a focus on the fifties of a Spain during the Franco regime. They were wrong, I got it all, as the film is a kitchy compilation of wonderful, archive based stories about (mostly) women who write to a Dona Elena, who either gives them an answer on radio or through letters sent to those who write because they have questions to be answered and problems to be solved.

In an elegant montage the director links the content of the letters to archive from the time, documentary material but also fiction, with close-up on the letters that were found recently, and with a sound score that conveys the atmosphere of the purist decade. You are entertained when you hear the question of whether a French kiss can make you pregnant, and you freeze a bit when you listen to the letter from a woman, who is getting beaten up by her husband, with the answer back from Dona Elena: You have to please your husband, and then all will be fine! Only for a Spanish audience, NO, the conservatism of the fifties, the supressed role of the women, the lack of sex education, the images from the homes – all that is to be found all over, I guess, at least in a Nordic country, where I come from, well the role of the church is not to be compared, but apart from that the similarities are more significant than the differences.

www.memorimagefestival.org

Memorimage 09/2

The festival invited producer and director Edmon Roch to present his ambitious docu-spy film ”Garbo – the Man who Saved the World”, which is the story about Juan Puol, the double agent who during WW2 for the Germans was Arabal and for the Allies Garbo. Roch showed half of the film within a closed master class arrangement – the film will have its international premiere at idfa in Amsterdam, where it will be in the First Apperance competition.

Roch, however, though this is his first film as a director, is not a beginner as it was obvious from the high production value of an archive based, entertaining narrative that includes clips from feature films (you see Leslie Howard, Peter Lorre, Edward G. Robinson among others), documentary archive from Barcelona and elsewhere, and interviews with knowledgeable people who have studied the life and mystery of the intelligence work of Pujol.

I don’t like reconstruction, Roch said, and if I had fictionalised the film totally with actors, noone would have believed this extraordinary story. From what I saw the audience (the film will be released in cinemas in Spain) at festivals and in television can look forward to a fascinating and playful documentary film. Huge potential. Can’t wait to see the whole film!

www.memorimagefestival.org

Memorimage 09/1

Reus, town of Gaudi in Catalonia, a couple of hours from Barcelona. For the fourth time the city hosts a film festival that deals with memories and presents films that work creatively with archives. It is a small festival with an exclusive and high quality programme. Among the films shown are Terence Davies ”Of time and the City”, Peter Kerekes ”Cooking History”, Jaak Kilmi’s ”Disco and Atomic War” – all written about on this site. I am a juror and look forward to seeing these films again as well as the other works by for instance Sergei Loznitsa, Pavel Medvedev and Katia Forbert Petersen & Annette Mari Olsen (Photo from “My Iranian Paradise”).

There are production workshops, case studies – it’s all very promising, I can say after the opening screening (”The Judge and the General” by Patricio Lanfranco and Elisabeth Farnsworth) last night in the beautiful theatre Bartrina.

www.memorimagefestival.org

CPH:DOX 09/1

It’s show time in Copenhagen. The international documentary film festival starts November 6 and runs until November 15. A huge programme is set up to satisfy the local documentary addicts and the visiting professionals.

BUT they don’t get the best of the best. A close study of the programme shows that there are no films from Eastern Europe, so often praised for originality, strong human interest topics and cinematic quality on this site. Russia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland. Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Serbia, Croatia, Macedonia etc. Films from these countries, films that win awards in festivals are simply not there – Czech Republic is represented with one film, and that’s it. The festival has sections that group the best films of the year, there is an amnesty award, there is a section for ”new vision” – but there are no films by Sergei Loznitsa, Audrius Stonys, Marko Skop, Jan Gogola, Peter Kerekes (Photo from “Cooking History”), Atanas Georgiev, Pawel Lozinski, Bartek Konopka, György Nemes – all names that loyal readers of this site know, and I could have mentioned many more. Not good, actually quite insufficient programming.

www.cphdox.dk

Dola Bonfils: K-notatet 2

FC (vi ved det er forsvarschefen) er i Polen. DC (vi ved det er departementschefen) er på pinden, ventende. Politikerne er på spring med følelsesparaderne oppe. Den inderste kreds i forsvarskommandoen er samlet, en situation er ved at komme ud af kontrol, spin-manøvren er i gang, de har FC i røret, læser forslaget til pressemeddelelse for ham. ”Uheldig..”, han retter et ord. ”Nej, ’upassende’ er det rigtige ord, fastholder Tim Sloth Jørgensen og de andre omkring bordet nikker og siger ja og bekræfter. Og Tim (som han jovialt kaldes) skærer igennem: ”Alle her synes det også. Vi skriver ’upassende’…”. Og FC bøjer sig.

FC, altså forsvarschefen Jesper Helsø er en ganske anden type leder end de tidligere og nok også end de senere. Rummelig, gammeldags moderne, ubureaukratisk, uteknokratisk, humanistisk indstillet. Filmen følger hans og medarbejdernes arbejde med at præge det kommende forsvarsforlig med værnenes egne forslag samlet i K-notatet. Dybt fortroligt. Undervejs skildrer filmen også et par episoder med ubehagelig presseopmærksomhed, som forsvarsledelsen må spinne sig ud af. Det er i 2003. Upassende, som de undskyldende på FC´s vegne skriver, har Helsø under et foredrag for de værnepligtige sagt, at han ville provokere ved at foreslå tre måneders værnepligt. Ved at køre ud i rabatten, kunne han tvinge dem, politikerne, til at forhandlingerne kom ind på midten af vejen igen. Men nu spurgte de og journalisterne, om der var flere af forsvarschefens forslag, som var provokationer.

Bonfils filmhold fik af Helsø adgang til selve situationsrummet. Jeg fandt aldrig ud af, om han mente et særligt war-room, hvor cheferne blev samlet i krisesituationer, eller om det blot var adgang til møder af den slags, som den refererede scene, som et møde med planlægning af en mulig operation i Dafur, som overværelse af træning i at blive udsat for tortur og en række flere rum, ja, nemlig situationsrum, instruktøren lister os ind i. Det observerende kamera registrerer, at sådan er der her, dette sker der. Vi forstår det umiddelbart. For vi er styret af Dola Bonfils egen personlige nysgerrighed. Hun vil præge sit værk med det signerende blik, som hun engang kaldte de gode films tydelige vinkling. Fra disse autentiske steder samler hun materialet til en samfundsbeskrivelse, som konstant har nålen inde og mærker, hvordan det er. Hendes samfundslære er ikke en oversigtlig tekst at lære til eksamen om, hvordan det bør være.

Hun har i en række film gjort det med institution efter institution, gymnasiet, politiet, sundhedsvæsnet. Dybt loyalt, vidende og gennemført skeptisk, kritisk. Nogle burde finde på at udgive dette værk samlet på dvd. Og K-notatet er så den seneste af disse samfundsskildringer inden Dola Bonfils en årrække blev optaget af at være til fingerspidserne engageret filmkonsulent på DFI. Det er hun ikke mere, nu venter jeg spændt, spændt på den næste film. Imens finder jeg alle de gamle frem og ser dem en efter en. På mandag er K-Notatet og Bonfils filmkunst emnet på min mandagshøjskole i FOF-Randers.

Dola Bonfils: K-notatet, Danmark 2004, 59 min. Manuskript: Dola Bonfils, fotografi: Henrik Bohn Ipsen, klip: David Rosenquist, lyd: Roar Skau Olsen, produktion: Claus Ladegaard. Produceret af Easy Film. Del af Magtens Billeder, 12 film på DR1, findes i samlet dvd-udgivelse, Det Dansk Filminstitut. Kan lånes på biblioteket og findes på www.filmstriben.dk 

Jihlava 09/6

Stop reading if you want to avoid a personal text that is full of emotions and warm thanks from me to the women running the IDF, Institute of Documentary Film, based in Prague with the task to promote Eastern European Documentaries. Sunday was the closing day of the Eastern European Forum where 20 exciting film projects were presented/pitched to broadcasters and film fund representatives with an audience that included sales agents and distributors from all over the world. And mind my words: excellent films are in the process of being made.

Sunday was also the last Eastern European Forum for me after years as a tutor and moderator and conductor of the Ex Oriente workshop. It has been pure pleasure and I feel both proud and humble to have been part of a promotion team that has seen one strong film after the other be developed into strong and original creative works.

Go to the website of the IDF and read all about the films coming up in a year or two. Yes, it takes time to make creative documentaries, and it takes time to raise funding for them, and many will not be able to do so, but they make the films anyway! And what a gift to the Eastern European filmmakers to have IDF. Thank you for having given me so many wonderful moments, to Andrea Prenghyova, Ivana Milosevic, Hanka Rezkova – and all the other clever and dedicated and creative people! Thanks for generosity, warmness and friendships that will last.

Photo from Jihlava taken by Bulgarian documentarian Svetoslav Draganov. Autumn and a white line leading the festivalgoers from location to location.

www.docuinter.net