Bettina Haasen: Hotel Sahara

Mauritania, Nouadhibou, a place at the coast, a place from where Africans want to go to the promised land, Europe, and from where many boats are leaving and have left, with people on board… with many tragic drowning events as a result. Many never made it.

Extremely well shot and produced, this film takes the audience to a place and an atmosphere of Waiting and to characters, who open their hearts and reveal their dreams to the camera. It’s a film with the ambition to describe a collective, it has the structure of a collage, it gives information, there is a respect for the characters so it understandable and well deserved that the film travels so well – visit the site of the film – as a reference point of one of the most actual problems of today.

But it is also a film that some times, though not all the time, seems to have been taken over by the cameraman. The images are so well composed and constructed (stranded ship wrecks, the Sahara landscape, sequences that play with light and the ocean in several angles, purely aesthetically thought and not really serving any narrative purpose), that they once in a while kill the contents and do not involve the audience emotionally.

Germany, 2008, 52 & 85 mins. (I saw the shorter version)

www.hotelsahara.tv

Aleksander Gutman: 17 August

This fine Russian director has, apart from the masterpiece ”Frescoes” from Georgia, made a couple of very strong documentaries shot in prisons, ”Three Days and Never Again” and ”Blatnoi Mir” (directed by Finnish Jouni Hiltunen, Gutman was production manager), and here comes another that I do not hesitate to call masterly done as well.

One day in the life of a prisoner, sentenced to lifetime for murders, a man in a small cell, watched through the small window in the dark cell door, walking from one end to the other, exercising, making a cup of tea, praying with his head towards an icon of the bleading Jesus hanging on the wall, getting some food… and a small walk to a strongly fenced and guarded courtyard, filmed from above to achieve the impression of a man in a cage, A close-up study that works because of the brilliant combination of pictures with the monologue of the prisoner. On Life, on the conditions in the isolated prison, on being alone and away from it all, on being close to guards who are there all the time and in a way sharing his destiny.

Sometimes with some shots from the courtyard outside. A horse stands there, an old man comes and makes it ready for transport, they leave the prison, and the camera stays – later on they come back with a coffin to pick up the corpse that we have seen in a previous scene. Or a window with a cat. Did I say that it was black and white. And slow. And extremely well edited. Not a moment too much. Sympathy for the murderer? No, not really, but respect for a human being, curiosity.

Russia, Poland, 2009, 62 mins.

http://www.eurekamedia.info/index.php?id=209

Bichlbaum & Bonanno: The Yes Men Fix the World

Well, no need for a review, the film has already been on the market for a long time, discussed and created debate, it is funny, it is a modern satirical, political film, it raises questions like Michael Moore does, you can not but agree with the two activist showmen and wish them good luck. See the film and read this from their website. It will soon be on dvd everywhere, on tv, and in festivals and in cinemas:

“Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno are two guys who just can’t take “no” for an answer. They have an unusual hobby: posing as top executives of corporations they hate. Armed with nothing but thrift-store suits, the Yes Men lie their way into business conferences and parody their corporate targets in ever more extreme ways – basically doing everything that they can to wake up their audiences to the danger of letting greed run our world.

One day Andy, purporting to be a Dow Chemical spokesperson, gets on the biggest TV news program in the world and announces that Dow will finally clean up the site of the largest industrial accident in history, the Bhopal catastrophe. The result: as people worldwide celebrate, Dow’s stock value loses two billion dollars. People want Dow to do the right thing, but the market decides that it can’t.”

www.theyesmenfixtheworld.com

Ton van Zantvoort: A Blooming Business

It is actually ”a dirty business” to be interpreted in different ways: the use of chemicals in the flower farms and the consequent pollution of the Kenyan Lake Naivasha, and the abuse of people living there who have no labour rights, very low salary, long hours of hard work, sometimes unprotected against the spraying of chemicals… and so on, so forth. But the film  pleasantly refrains from shouting to its audience, on the contrary the director treats the subject in a careful way, in a low voice bringing the mentioned terrifying information to the spectators through the characters, he has chosen, who are the ones with whom we get linked emotionally:

The mother with three children who gets up early in the morning to make breakfast and who goes to work and comes back late evening to cook again and be with her children. The fisherman who claims that the water is polluted because of the chemicals from the farms. The man who sells water (from the lake!) and transports it around on donkeys. The young filmmaker-to-be who has filmed inside the farms and wants his footage to be shown all over the world instead of the lying news reports from BBC and other Western tv stations. And others…

I learned something I did not know about, I met some people whose life situation is tragic and I was touched and informed in an intelligent non-sensational cinematographically beautiful manner. Thanks!

Have a look at the site of the film, a very well designed and informative piece of work – and did you know that 300.000 people work in the flower industry!

Holland, 52 mins., 2009 (next bigger festival: DOKLeipzig)

http://www.newtonfilm.nl/

Jørgen Vestergaard: Et rigtigt bondeliv

Nogle af Jørgen Vestergaards film er simpelthen umistelige. Blandt disse først og fremmest hans mesterværk Et rigtigt bondeliv. Som altid har Vestergaard taget sagen i sin egen hånd og nu fået også den ud på dvd som led i et stort genudgivelsesprojekt. Det er så godt. Og gensynet med den 15 år gamle film er gribende. Det er jo en stor, en omfattende, men også præcist lavmælt elegi over en vældig kulturs sidste årtier i midten af 1900-tallet.

Det første jeg hæfter mig ved, er de medvirkendes aldeles usentimentale munterhed. Dernæst ved deres vedkommende viden om tingene og nøjagtighed i hver oplysning, i hvert udsagn. Vestergaards værk rejser sig som monument ved sin uhyre omfattende og detaljerede research. Her er noget så sjældent som ordentlig besked om tingene, og arkivmaterialet er på plads. Det, der tales om, er det, som indklippet viser. Det er frydefuldt. Grønthøster og Ferguson. Møgspredning og roehakning. Faglig og nøgtern præcision.

På dvd-en ledsages bondefilmen af den på mærkelige måder noget svagere Fjordfiskerne og den i mine øjne mislykkede Brødre. Den første lider under tydelige ambitioner om større tv-relevans. Om det er pålagte eller selvpåtagne begrænsninger er ikke klart, men så kompromisløs som Et rigtigt bondeliv er den ikke. Værre er det med Brødre, hvor Tue Steen Müller (dengang SFC programredaktør) foreslog at optage den uden dialog! Dels er de to medvirkende ikke meget uden deres særlige sprog som bærer af en særegen livstolkning, dels er det vestjyske sprog nok selve sammenhængskraften i Vestergaards sørgesange over denne egns forsvundne bonde- og fiskerliv. Og skildringen af de to fine mænd i den smukke gård fungerer slet ikke som billeddigt. Heldigvis findes der flere dages optagelser med de to brødre. Med dialog på vestjysk fra Holmsland. Der ligger i det materiale en film og venter på Jørgen Vestergaards energiske dvd-projekt, som han egenhændigt så prisværdigt fører ud i livet: samling på det samlede værk.        

Jørgen Vestergaard: Et rigtigt bondeliv, 1994. 59min. Fjordfiskerne, 1996, 55 min. Brødre, 1996, 11 min. With English subtitles. Forlaget Knakken, Thisted orpo@thisted.dk

It’s (not) only Television

… is the obvious and banal slogan for a professional meeting in Trento, Italy that starts today and goes on in the coming three days. Buyers, tv commissioning editors, festival people, film fund representatives and some critics from around the world meet to talk about documentaries in general and first of all look at what is new in Italian documentary. Organised by the Italian documentary organisation doc.it, which launches the themes to be discussed in captions like these:

Discussion on cross-platforms, Are we serious on series, Theatrical releases for documentaries – How can we break the monopoly of theatrical distribution that banishes documentary-films?, Alternative Distribution.

The headlines illustrate clearly the necessity for the documentary community to find other funding possibilities than public broadcasters. In Italy more actual and necessary than in most other European countries… with the (almost) total monopoly of the Berlusconi entertainment channels. 

http://www.italiandocscreenings.it

A text about Film by Christopher Pavsek

It is not everyday you see such an interesting thoughtprovoking text about film as the one I saw when visiting the site of Christopher Pavsek, that accompanies his film: To Those Born After (idfa 2005)

I firmly believe that film can be intellectually engaging and emotionally moving at the same time. Flms which demand serious effort on the part of their viewers can also be enjoyable. Brecht taught us that to think and learn does not of necessity exclude the possibility of pleasure. That is, I believe, a utopian element of my film. You have to work at it when you watch, but hopefully the work provides joy and is worthwhile. Not all work, after all, has to be toil done merely to earn a wage.

It is also utopian that something beautiful can be cobbled together from so much that is ugly. It proves that there is hope. This is important to remember for people like me who are constitutionally bleak-minded; it is also good to recall for my friends who tell me that my film depresses them. I think it is the world that is depressing them and my film makes them realize this a little.

If that were all that my film did I would not consider it a success. It also seems to offer a bit of an experience of beauty. That experience is disconcerting because you do not generally expect something like beauty to emerge in an artwork where you see human beings murdered and literally blown to pieces. But it is also intellectually reassuring in that it shows a way forward.

A critic once wrote something about my film that I cherish. He said the film “shows us how to cross the world several times with the minimum of means — with no more than a pilgrim’s staff.” I take this to mean a couple things. “To Those Born After” is a piece of what is called “appropriate” or “sustainable technology” in the arid language of economics. The only difference is that it so far has profited no one. But it is also a comment on the possibilities of minimalism, a minimalism whose goal is not to reduce art to pure aesthetic gestures but to propel art outward into the world and to allow the world into art. The simple signs and symbols have always been the best. My favorites: a camera and an eye; a hammer and a sickle.

There are two images that I believe should be shown on film or video only with the greatest care or perhaps not at all. One is the image of the World Trade Center burning and collapsing. It turns your mind off to see that; the response is Pavlovian. The other is any image of George W. Bush speaking with synchronous sound. The ban on graven images that Adorno and Benjamin so cherished was misplaced. Images of god or utopia are not the problem. It is images of people like Bush that are dangerous because the images grant a particular substance to him when he literally has none, aside from his crude corporal materiality. Godard once said that the original mission of cinema was to show us that the world was there. But then it became the mission of cinema to make us believe in the world on the screen. The last thing we should do is believe in a human being who has no thoughts of his own and who says nothing that is true.

My eldest daughter is the child in the images at the end of the film. She is a remarkable human being worth believing in. From very early on she disliked having her picture taken and that’s why so many pictures of her that we do have are stolen images. Not quite “life caught unawares” but more like “life caught with its guard down.” I don’t bother her much with the video camera now. The few video bits we do have of Sophie often end with her snarling at the camera or turning away as she realizes she’s been caught, as she does at the end of this film. It is a good reminder that we should be careful of what we demand from those born after. We don’t, after all, want them to turn away as well.

http://www.sfu.ca/~cpavsek

… and there are more clever words from this director to read on the site of D Word that right now discusses the report Honest Truths: Documentary Filmmakers on Ethical Challenges in Their Work published by Pat Aufderheide on September 8th.

http://www.d-word.com

IDFA Top Ten

An interesting compilation of films has been advertised for the coming idfa:

Israeli filmmaker Eyal Sivan (Haifa, 1964) will compile this year’s Top 10 for the 22nd International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam. Major themes in his Top 10 include how our collective memory works, ethical issues and the representation of history. Themes that are also central to his own work. Here is the list of films:

Blind kind, Johan van der Keuken (1964), Ici et ailleurs, Jean Luc-Godard (photo) (1976), Hitler connais pas?, Bertrand Blier (1963), Ma’loul, Michel Khleifi (1985), The Memory of Justice, by Marcel Ophüls (1976), Moeder Dao, de schildpadgelijkende, Vincent Monnikendam (1995), Testimonies, Ido Sela (1993), Punishment Park, Peter Watkins (1971), Philips Radio, Joris Ivens (1931), S21, La machine de mort khmère rouge, Rithy Panh (2003).

Independence saved for Latvian Film Centre

On this site the development in the critical situation around the survival of the National Film Centre in Latvia has been followed closely. And it seems like the independence of the Film Centre is saved. I wrote an email to Ilze Galite Holmberg, the director of the Centre to congratulate her on the succesful Baltic Sea Forum and to hear if things were clearer now. This is a clip from the answer from her:

There was a Cabinet of Ministers Committee meeting – and that supported the independence of NFC, with reforms, smaller budget etc, etc. This has to be officially confirmed by the Cabinet of
Ministers meeting, but we are told that normally it happens that in 99% cases the latter confirms what the former has adopted. So we have great hopes, but of course the reorganization will bring unpleasant things too…

… photo from Latvian classic “The Minutes Older”, director Herz Frank, camera Juris Podnieks.

BANANAS!* strike back at Dole

Swedish director Fredrik Gertten fights back against Dole… the case that we have written about earlier on this site – go to “search” and write bananas to get the background Here comes today’s: From the press release:

LOS ANGELES, Calif. (September 10, 2009) — In response to a defamation lawsuit brought by Dole Food Company, Inc. against the makers of the documentary film BANANAS!*, attorneys for filmmakers Fredrik Gertten, Margarete Jangård and WG Film AB today filed a Motion to Strike Dole’s Complaint under California’s Anti-SLAPP statute, which allows the court to dismiss meritless lawsuits filed for the purpose of stifling protected speech.  Lathrop & Gage attorney Lincoln Bandlow serves as lead attorney in this matter.

As set forth in the motion, the film Bananas!* provides a balanced account of issues surrounding the treatment of banana workers and covers one of the many lawsuits filed by Nicaraguan banana workers against Dole and other companies regarding the adverse health effects suffered by workers as a result of the use of the pesticide DBCP in banana fields.  Dole’s lawsuit, as set forth in the motion, simply seeks to “poison the fountain of free speech” by intimidating anyone who speaks out on this important issue of public concern who does not comport with Dole’s “spin” on recent events pertaining to DBCP litigation. 

In addition to filing an Anti-SLAPP Motion, WG Film AB also filed a Cross-Complaint against Dole, seeking to recover damages for Dole’s improper tactics in interfering with the film’s premiere and its participation in the Los Angeles Film Festival.  As set forth in the Cross-Complaint, by “recklessly and falsely attack[ing] WG Film’s integrity and competency as a documentary film maker to the heads of corporate sponsors of the Festival” and making “similar false and defamatory statements to the General Consul and Ambassador from Sweden,” Dole caused the film to be removed from competition and clouded the film’s world premiere, causing the filmmakers substantial damage.

“We are very pleased that the truth about our film will finally be known and that the public will see that this lawsuit was simply an effort by Dole to silence the public discussion of important issues,” said Gertten, the director of the film.

Mr. Bandlow added that “if there ever was a lawsuit that cried out for the speech-protecting mechanism of California’s Anti-SLAPP statute, it is Dole’s absurd defamation action.  We are confident that once the Court sees the actual film, rather than Dole’s patently false description of it in the complaint, this action will be summarily dismissed, my clients can proceed with the film’s distribution and seek to recover the damages suffered by Dole’s censorship-by-intimidation tactics.”

An electronic version of WG Film’s brief with links to relevant clips from the film and other material can be found at:
files.me.com/jshaeffer/pt6ujd (file size: 880 MB). A copy can be made available upon request.

Excerpts from the motion (PDF):

The Anti-SLAPP motion »

Director Fredrik Gertten’s declaration »

Producer Margarete Jangård’s declaration »

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Lathrop & Gage LLP Art Menke
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