I had never heard about him before, Alvis Hermanis, even if the Latvian film team Inese Boka and Gints Grube wrote in their file that he was famous all over Europe. They did so when we met at Ex Oriente workshop, first session, almost half a year ago, and one more confession: I did not understand their film project because I did not understand the working method of Hermanis. I do so now, and am so happy with the way that this intriguing project was received when pitched at the Baltic Sea Forum. The trailer not only explained it all but also did what a trailer should do: gave appetite for more. Luckily there was a fan and connaisseur of Hermanis in the panel, Outi Saarikoski from Finnish television YLE, who will take the project and help its further development, as will documentary veteran and expert, Russian Grigory Libergal, as one ot the three parts of the film will be shot in Moscow. Let me quote the short description of the theatre director in the catalogue, film working title is Larger than Life:

… a storyteller who claims he is able to transform any real life story into extraordinary documentary theatre. He once declared that no classic play or novel is more interesting than the life story of any real human being. Story is the only thing that makes it possible to describe and portray our world. The film tries to answer the questions: is life more interesting than its transformation in theatre, and is it possible to capture and record the secret of story creation.

www.mistrusmedia.lv

… so who were they, the people at the table who were supportive and constructively critical, well simply wanted to help and in many cases asked for meetings and to be kept updated on the development of the projects. If and when the positive reactions turn into letters of commitments and at the end into contracts that is of course another story, but for many projects this first step was also a proof of the potential of the project – and many returned home in a state of creative confusion, as the advices were different:

Cynthia Kane from ITVS in the US was as usual always warmly encouraging the pitchers and showed her passion for good social and human interest stories. Her US colleague from Sundance Institute, Cara Mertes, analysed quickly the projects’ weak and strong points, as did Alex Szalat from Arte france, who as Reinhart Lohmann from ZDF/Arte fought their best to see where the slot-linked European cultural channel par exellence with a strong tradition for creative documentaries could place the projects. Not easy… more easy for veteran forum panelist Wim van Rompaey, Lichtpunt in Belgium, who go for 52 minute documentaries that have an ethical angle to be discussed, and who never leave a forum without bringing one or two projects to his committee. Katja Wildermuth from MDR in Germany is for many an exemplary clear-talking commissioning editor as she always communicates yes, I would like to talk more, or No, this is not for me. Flora Gregory represented Al Jazeera and went for the more reporting documentaries, Charlotte Gry Madsen from DR/TV brought some optimism advertising the new historical and cultural digital channel, Austrian distributor (Autlook) Peter Jäger was looking for artistic theatrical documentaries and Russian Grigory Libergal (photo) was an excellent commentator on content and brought knowledge on Russian situation to the table. The three Baltic channels (represented by Marje Jurtshenko, Anna Rozenvalde and Tadas Patalavicius) did their job and supported their producing colleagues, and neighbouring YLE editor, Outi Saarikoski, was again wonderfully unpredictable and funny in her remarks.

www.nfc.lv

I can’t mention all projects that were pitched at the Baltic Sea Forum, and there is not enough space to highlight the many that did receive very positive feedback, but I will write about a couple – see above – that went very well and which some of you documentary professionals will meet on other marketplaces, and some of you members of the documentary audience will get to meet as finished works,  hopefully as artistically interesting and ambitious as they were this weekend, when presented on the top floor of Hotel Albert in Riga.

So here first some remarks on pitching in public fora: The ones which are easiest to convey are the ones that are able to provide a strong and precise verbal pitch accompanied by a – yes, it helps, but of course you can’t adapt that tone for all subjects – trailer full of humour. Estonian Kiur Aarma, who worked with Jaak Kilmi on ”Disco and Atomic War”, had this time teamed up with Hardi Volmer (”Man from Animazone” on Estonian animation artist Priit Pärn) to bring forward a project (”The Gold Spinners”) on the production of commercials in the USSR. The broadcasters queued to express their enthusiasm after a superb trailer. Experience says it takes time but it looks so obvious that this film could be made asap with international funding. It is funny, informative, personal and Aarma just showed quality with the ”Disco…” film. Similarly great director Yuri Khashchavatski from Belarus (photo, search his name on this site) with his Estonian producer Marianna Kaat stands strong with the non-humourously toned film on the political brainwashing of the Russian population with the Georgian war as the starting point. Talking about authors with own hand writing, it was a pleasure for the Forum to include Estonian Kersti Uibo (”The Dark Side of the Hill”), Russian Andrei Nekrasov (”The Golden Autumn of Socialism”), Russian Alina Rudnitskaya (”The Blood of a Stranger”) and Latvian Peteris Krilovs (”Willing Collaborationists”).   

www.nfc.lv  

It’s over, the 13th session of the Baltic Sea Forum, that started on the island of Bornholm in Denmark and now has its permanent place in Riga. It is very efficiently organised by the National Film Centre of Latvia that paradoxically now is heavily threatened by the political situation of cut downs due to the huge financial crisis in the country. (This has been written about earlier on this site). In this week a decision is expected to be taken whether the independent structure of the film centre will be kept or the organisation will be taken back to being an office in the Ministry of Culture.

At the Forum 24 documentary projects were presented to a panel of 14 commissioning editors, sales agents and film fund executives from France, Germany, Finland, Denmark, Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Russia, Austria, Belgium, Holland and the US. For two days the pitching of the projects took place at the top floor of the Albert Hotel in the area of Riga, where Sergey Eisenstein’s father were the architect of many beautiful buildings.

Parallel to the meeting for the professionals a film festival took part open to the general audience in the Cinema K. Suns. I was there for 3 screenings and they were completely sold out. The humourous ”Disco and Atomic War” by Jaak Kilmi and Kiur Aarma, a mix of archive material and reenactments, charmed the audience due to its originality and the story about what it meant to be a child in Soviet Estonia making all kind of efforts to be able to watch Finnish television. Jaak Kilmi (photo, to the left) proves to be a fine talent for docu-comedies with a serious background. And the film will travel all over, no doubt.

www.nfc.lv

”The making of the documentary film Blood In the Mobile and the campaign and website bloodinthemobile.org is addressing the issue of illegal mining in Eastern Congo: Congolese children from the age of 5 to 15 are staying up to 72 hours in narrow mine tunnels. The minerals the children escavate from the mines are bought by the mobile phone industry, and used in the production of our phones.”

Voilà, this strong text piece is taken from the website that has been established by Frank Piasecki Poulsen and Mikkel Skov Petersen, who were here in Riga for a whole day seminar where they shared their experience and thoughts on how to build an audience, how to ”own” your audience, how to do crowd funding, how to build a network. Poulsen, who was behind the film ”Guerilla Girl”, that is now being distributed worldwide on different platforms, had just come back from shooting in Congo and showed strong material from his upcoming film. Skov Petersen invited the ”digital natives” (people born after 1978), as well as the ”digital immigrants” (the rest of us!) to different websites where filmmakers have built an audience and/or raised funding outside the traditional public and broadcast sources.

A very good day and I can warmly recommend the two energetic Danes for presentations and seminars on what they themselves call ”the upcoming new media reality”. Below some sites to visit:

www.bloodinthemobile.org

www.bravenewfilms.org

www.indiegogo.com

www.ageofstupid.net

I am in Riga for the Baltic Sea Forum (BSF) for new documentary projects to be pitched this coming weekend.  The BSF, however, includes a hig quality film programme for the general public at the Cinema K. Suns in Riga.

One of the films to be shown is ”Civil Status” by Alina Rudnitskaya, a brilliant observational documentary filmed at the Civil Registry office in St. Petersburg, where people come to have births, marriages, divorces and deaths registered. ”It’s like a theatre here”, one says in the beginning of the film, and it indeed is, the Theatre of Life. This has obviously been the aim of the director – to catch these emotional moments, where people come to have their divorces registered or to get married. The young women working in the office have a job that shifts from being verbally attacked and called idiots, to situations where they are subject to flirt, or where they master the happy ceremony of marriage. Faces, joy, sorrow, fun, despair… the camera stays sometimes at a distance and sometimes it goes very close.  That close that we are watching a couple having a dialogue of reconciliation, or to be more precise, she tells him ”that there was nothing between us”, and begs him not to sign but walk home and give it another chance. Dramatic scenes like this are in the film.

It’s all very well composed, rythmical, with atmosphere conveyed,  and lives up to what a documentary should be: multilayered and universal. And about Life.

Russia, St. Petersburg Documentary Film Studio, 29 mins., 2005

This clip from an article in Realscreen makes you think… is he right or wrong:

“Filmmaker John Greyson is taking his boycott of Israel to the Toronto International Film Festival. Greyson, who withdrew his film Fig Trees (photo) from the Tel Aviv International LGBT Film Festival in April, has written to Toronto festival organizers to take his short documentary Covered out of the September event’s Short Cuts Canada sidebar. Greyson, who is also a film professor at Toronto’s York University, said the action was done in protest over TIFF’s inaugural City to City program because it spotlights Tel Aviv, not over the Israeli directors showing their work in Toronto.

In his letter Greyson complained the Tel Aviv sidebar does not include Palestinian artists or filmmakers…” Of course the organisers of the festival thinks Greyson does wrong and should have kept his film in the programme and taken initiative to debate. Should he – I am not convinced.

http://www.realscreen.com/articles/news/20090831/greysontiff.html

http://www.indiewire.com/article/war_of_words/