After many journalistic documentary investigations into politics and suppression in North Korea, it is refreshing to watch this work from the hands of Czech director Linda Jablonska, who joined a group on its totally controlled tour to Pyongyang. As no communication was possible to local people – followed 24h by official guides as the Czech group was – the film gets its quality from showing the reactions of the travellers to what they see. And dont see. At the same time as you as a viewer gets the tourist tour as well.

There are many comic situations – should we bow in front of the monument of Kim-il-Sung? – and disagreements within the Czech delegation. One is more and more against everything and feel increasingly uneasy by being there, another likes a children’s show and disagrees that it is (only) propaganda, and a third one makes many fine remarks comparing this country with the Czekoslovakia he grew up in: We had some sweets to give to the children here but they did not take them, they just stared. The same happened when I was a kid and was offered sweets from French tourists. We were told not to… we grew up in this.

I don’t want to make problems, you hear the director say from behind the camera, and indeed she does not want to play heroic journalist, who tries to get behind the facade. Instead, she has made a good documentary about people like us in the West – who travels to discover the world – in this case with huge limitations. They leave the country in question, North Korea, and go to China… which the Czech tourists call a free country!

Czech Republic, 2009, 79 mins.

http://www.docuinter.net/en/net_archive.php?id=563

Czech film director Jana Boková lives in Buenos Aires, in a chosen exile as many of the friends she visits in this film about what exile means and about whether you can return and find your roots and yourself at the place that you come from. As a theme it is very interesting, unfortunately you can not say the same about the film, which has a feel of repetition. Not that the characters are not interesting, they are, at least some of them, but the director is not able to convey an interesting atmosphere or an intensity that could have made the film a strong document. For that, the film would have needed a less sketchy and loose structure, less unimportant café talks, a drastic cut out of loads of touristic images from Paris and much more. Plus the stressing of some points like the fine one with the man, who was in Paris in 1968, saw and took part in the riots but hurried around to tell the French revolutionaries that they should definitely NOT think, as many did, that things were better in the communist countries.

Czech Republic, 1h 50 mins., 2008

Three persons in one room. Plus a film crew. Not a lot of space but the great Czech director and cameraman Mira Janek manages to move around to observe and catch the intense atmosphere of quite a unique family: blind mother, blind daughter and seeing man. The mother is the central character and the one that communicates with the camera, the one that performs wonderfully for the viewers and the one whose story we get told without any sentimentality but with energy and humour. Very much present is also the hyperactive daughter, who dances in circles when the mother sings – and the husband, always in the background doing something in the kitchen, or taking a nap on his chair or smoking a cigarette on the balcony. Only once Kataryna forces him to the forefront to tell the story about how the two of them met. Wonderful!

Kataryna K. comes from Ukraine. She went to Prague, met her Honza, got pregnant and gave birth to a girl, who inherited her sight handicap. Kataryna talks through the whole duration of the film and stays passionately around the Jewish rituals and songs she knows about. Archive from their wedding highlights this very important event in their life.

A room with music, Kataryna rehearses the performances she is doing outside the room – and sometimes she sits at a desk and talks to the camera. Or at the piano. The room is full of cakes and the film is in the good sense of the word simply sweet! What a Life and what a Woman.

Czech Republic, 2009, 53 mins., for Czech Television

http://www.kviff.com/en/film-detail/2797-the-confessions-ofkaterynak/

In a very professional set-up the site ”Short Film News” offers you – with a daily update – news from the film world in Asia, and the rest of the world with a strong focus on North America. Being based in Iran the site covers Iranian cinema under the caption ”Iranian News” and there is also a section called ”Documentary”.

Here is a text clip from ”about us” by the editor, Marjan Riahi:     

Short Film News, as the first news network on short films and documentaries in Iran & Asia, was established in 2004 by Riahi sisters as a non-governmental independent institution. Considering the activities of thousands of filmmakers on short films and documentaries and producing 3 thousand short films and documentaries each year by Iranian filmmakers, it was necessary to have a professional network media to cover the related news to this field. Since, in the last decades, the most success of Iran cinema in the international events belongs to Iranian short films and documentaries, and on the other hand, the audiences of short films are increasing all over the world due to new medias (internet, mobile phone, etc.), we decided to activate the English page of our website in 2005 as well. Our main goal is to make an international network for independent filmmakers all over the world where they can find the related news to festivals, short films and documentaries events in different parts of the world. We publish all news relating to short film and documentary in any part of the world and filmmakers and festival directors can contact us for publishing their news in our website. Introducing Iranian shorts and documentaries to the festivals and other showing programs is another service we can arrange. We can provide a collection of the best Iranian shorts and documentaries for the events and festivals interested in screening Iranian films.

http://en.shortfilmnews.com/

This film has a powerful rythm that you seldom meet. It is not the MTV-style that is so much present in modern documentaries, it is more carried by an expressive associative editing that could be compared to a Russian tradition that again could be said to go back to the principles of Eisenstein. Or to – in some sequences – Armenian director Pelichian and his masterpiece ”Seasons”. Contrary to that one, young Kravchenko, her second documentary it is, uses interviews with characters, who are filmed in ultra close-ups, intercut with images of landscapes, of old women, of wedding rituals, from the country side, and with archive material from war and destruction, and building-up again. Accompanied by a sound design that stresses the tension and vulnerability in the treated theme.

It is Chechnya and it is young people, who got tragically hurt during the Chechen wars, 1994/95-1996 & 1999/2000. They lost – most of the ones in the film – a leg as kids, and they are now part of a one-legged football team that in the film is going back to Grozny after a tournament in Moscow (my guess, it is not being said). Adam, Muslim, Ibrahim, Aslanbek, Isa and others survived ”a childhood in war”.

Red Cross has supported the film and the fact that the youngsters are together and do something, is in itself uplifting. You want to believe that they still have the chance to get a decent life. With her unconventional interpretation of their situation and her energy in filmmaking, through the excellent scenes from the football matches and the beautiful way the young men express themselves… she gives hope. Even if a tragicomic scene in the film reveals that the word ”happiness” does not exist in Chechnyan!

Russia, Ostrov Studio, 2009, 39 mins. Producer: Sergey Miroschnicenko.