Vilnius Diary 4

One of the participants at the workshop, Italian Davide Mastropaolo, asked me for advice on a film that a friend had made with himself involved as co-producer. The film is about to be finished but – have you heard about that before? – the filmmakers has run out of money for a film that they have basically financed themselves.

I saw the approx. 80 minutes long totally professional film about the Gaza Hospital in Beirut that now is a ruin where Palestinian refugees live a tough life. But that is not the story that director Marco Pasquini wants to convey. At least not the main story that is being told by some great foreign women, who worked at this PLO hospital in Lebanon in the beginning of the 80’es and did their surgeries on survivors of the massacre in the refugee camp Sabra and Chatila. In the film the women are brought back to Beirut to what was once the hospital they lived and worked in. To give us their experience with precision and emotion.

The film is thus about past and present, the past brought to us through fantastic archive material from the time of the massacre and later on in the 80’es, where the hospital stopped to work at the moment of the start of the Lebanese civil war. Readers of filmkommentaren.dk may have read my sceptical comments on ”Waltz with Bashir” that takes place at the same time and at the same place, seen from an Israeli soldier’s pov. This Italian film is for me much richer in content, a classical beautifully shot documentary. Please finish it and get it to the audience.

Photo: The barber in the film, another fine character.

Link to Cinema Italiano info&news

Vilnius Diary 3

I showed a clip from ”Citizen Havel” yesterday here at the Summer Film Academy in Lithuania, as an example of how important it is to have access and to have time to follow a character, who is known widely by the public. I compared with ”Primary” by Leacock and Robert Drew, about John F. Kennedy, and ”War Room” by Pennebaker about the campaign to get Clinton to the White House.

And I praised the work of Pavel Koutecky who filmed Havel for 12 years and the work of Mira Janek, who took over when Koutecky died tragically before the film was finished.

Vaclav Havel as a character in the film… amazing… Vaclav Havel as a film director, needs to be seen, have a look at the website below where it is announced that Havel goes for direction of films!

http://cineuropa.org/index.aspx?lang=en
http://www.summermediastudio.com/

Vilnius Diary 2

Audrius Stonys made a lecture this morning. I have heard him doing so many times and have written several praising sentences on filmkommentaren.dk  – about this filmmaker who is for sure to be considered as a national poet in his own country, and from a world perspective as an excellent representative of a different documentary cinema.

The biggest censors are inside yourself, Stonys said, who grew up in a country occupied by the big empire and who did not really see films in general geting better after the independence. He said so after another pleasant view of the 1978 Herz Frank film ”10 Minutes Older”. I truly believe that film is a conversation between equal partners, Stonys continued, the audience takes part in the creative process, this meeting is the most important part of the filmmaking.

I don’t believe in films without mistakes, he said and went on to show a clip from his own ”Flying over Blue Fields”, where a sport aeroplane lands on a field, a man gets out, parks the plane and goes inside while the camera observes chicken and bushes accompanied by music. No words, I don’t trust them, Stonys said, and showed another clip, from his early work, ”Earth of the Blind”, that has no words at all. I want to catch the impossible, he could also have said the invisible and the emotions in a face, like he demonstrated in the film from 2000, ”Alone”, a film in many layers: a girl that visits her mother who is in prison, a film crew that is (the director’s words) ”using” her, and an atmosphere of melancholy, a feeling that is present in most of Stonys films. He did not show films from recent years, he could have done so, and demonstrate that he can also cope with words as he did in ”The Bell” that you can read about on this site.

Vilnius Diary 1

I am in Vilnius for a summer film school where students from countries all over Europe have gathered to make short documentary films about or rather from the 2009 European cultural capital. 10 films are to be made, research is going on, lectures have been performed as well pitching of the projects. Tutors are Belgian director Anne Levy-Morelle (”Gabriels Dream”), Polish Bartek Konopka (photo from his ”Rabbit à la Berlin”), Polish-English Witold Starecki, Finnish Heikki Ahola, local superstar Audrius Stonys and me as the only non-filmmaker.

Films to be made? Among others one that takes it starting point in the fact that there is a Frank Zappa monument in Vilnius, another takes a look at the ”independent republic” in the middle of the city, Uzupis, a third intends to bring in a story from the KGB Museum, a fourth wants to convey the spirituality of this pearl of a city….

http://www.summermediastudio.com/

Hubert Sauper: Darwin’s Nightmare

This brief intro comes because a documentary neo-classic is broadcast on Danish television tonight, on DR2 in prime time (8.40pm). It has been in Danish cinemas, it is available from the DFI, and if you have already seen it, take another look. The film is avaiIable on dvd from several sources. I shift to Danish and quote the Danish newspaper Weekendavisen:

“DET var for film som Darwin’s Nightmare, at Vorherre skabt dokumentargenren. Hubert Saupers billedessay er en forfærdende, intenst ubehagelig og på godt og ondt uforglemmelig rapport fra et sted, Lake Victoria i Tanzania, hvor evolutionen har frembragt et regulært mareridt. Overordnet er området hærget af krige og etniske konflikter, som har varet så længe og er blevet så uoverskuelige, at man fra mediernes side har opgivet at følge ordentligt med. Som Sauper påpeger: »Alene i det østlige Congo er antallet af krigsofre på en enkelt dag lige så stort som den 11. september i New York.«”
“Det er en skelsættende og uafrystelig film, som demonstrerer at dokumentargenren for længst har givet fiktionen baghjul, når det gælder om at flytte holdninger og skabe opinion om en sag.”

www.dfi.dk

www.dr.dk/dokumania

Maziar Bahari arrested in Tehran

Well known and respected documentary filmmaker and journalist Maziar Bahari was arrested yesterday morning in Tehran according to Newsweek, that he works for. This is the start of the article of Newsweek:

Among the dozens of people arrested overnight in Tehran was NEWSWEEK reporter Maziar Bahari, who has covered Iran for the magazine for over a decade. Bahari was home asleep at 7 a.m. when several security officers showed up at his Tehran apartment. According to his mother, who lives with the 41-year-old reporter and documentary filmmaker, the men did not identify themselves. They seized Bahari’s laptop and several videotapes. Assuring her that he would be their guest, they then left with Bahari. He has not been heard from since…

http://www.newsweek.com/id/203036

Bul(garian)doc Films and Humour

… will be very much present at this year’s edition (number 20!) of the Sunny Side of the Doc. A so-called Bulgarian umbrella has been established to promote the films and projects that come from a country with several fine films from recent years. Initiator is the production company Agitprop represented by Martichka Bozhilova and Anna Stoeva, who are there to serve customers with Buldoc, ”a non-fiction kitchen”, together with other producers, the local MEDIA Desk and the national television. A presentation will be made of the new Balkan Documentary Center with this logline:

Is the Balkan documentary sector heading for roofless cars or roofless houses?

Photo from one of Agitprop’s masterpieces, ”Mosquito Problems and Other Stories” by Andrey Paounov.

http://www.sunnysideofthedoc.com/fr/

http://www.bdcwebsite.com/

http://www.themosquitoproblem.com

Ex Oriente 4 Directing

Stan Neumann visited the workshop and showed his 2004 production for Arte France, ”Language does not Lie”, a film based on the diaries of Victor Klemperer, who survived Das dritte Reich and whose diaries were not published before the mid 1990’s, more than 30 years after his death in GDR, another regime that he was opposed to in his diaries.

The film is fabricated, the word Neumann used in the Q&A, on the diaries (1600 page!) from 1933-45, working with a very precise minimalistic film language. How can you build something, when you have nothing, Neumann said. I wanted to see it all from his place, literally, so I introduced a room with a desk by a window, a desk with a typewriter on which letters, one by one, are typed, to establish the nazi language. In between archive material and close-ups on diary pages reconstructed tableaux are introduced like in one fabulous sequence that tells about the consequences of hiding the Jewish star in public.

How refreshing it is to watch a film that talks not only to the heart but also to the head, with this brilliant text as a continuous reflection on what was going on in Nazi Germany. Much more impressive than the loads of tv films, the ”Hitler-hours” we call them in Denmark, that are broadcast every day all over the public broadcast system. Neumann stressed that he did not see Klemperer as a victim but as a fighter and had his own comment on today’s documentaries – too many documentaries are eaten by characters, and psychology, do something different please, he said to the filmmakers and producers at Ex Oriente 2nd session in Pisek.

The film will soon be out on dvd in France, published by Editions Montparnasse. Photo: Victor Klemperer.

www.docuinter.net

Ex Oriente 3 Directing

Italian director Alessandro Rossetto came to Hotel Biograf to show his 1999 documentary Bibione Bye Bye One, which is a wonderful b/w 75 minutes long journey into an area and a culture that the director knows from his childhood, 100 kilometres north of Venice.

In a very inspiring talk after the film, Rossetto told how he had been filming over three summers with 2 hours of 16mm material in the first summer, 6 in the next and 3 in the last. He had already edited a one hour version after the two summers of shooting but was not happy with the result returning to the summer resort to catch scenes that he knew he wanted. 5 years before the shooting of the film, Rossetto had done his research by doing 2 years of photographing people and situations. The film is indeed about people, showing faces, built through small stories with characters that are caught with the tenderness that the director kept on saying that he went for. To lose time can be a richness for a project, he said, urging the workshop participants to ”protect” their first idea of a film, it could have a deepness that you can not explain. And waiting please, waiting is important, just stay there and you become a character as the others, the man with the camera. And thus you get what you want.

The film is for me a neo-classic, reminding me about Lindsay Anderson’s O Dreamland with an absolutely great camerawork where you feel that you are drawn into a world that you don’t know and at the same time feel good to be in, accompanied by music that stress atmosphere and timelessness. Robert Frank has been mentioned as a photographic inspiration for the film from Bibione.

www.docuinter.net

www.docvideo.it/catalogo/

Ex Oriente 2 Sales

This EU MEDIA training programme, organised by IDF (Institute of Documentary Film), based in Prague, is currently holding its second session out of three in Hotel Biograf in Pisek, Czech Republic. Projects from Eastern European countries are being developed and the participants profit from meeting professionals with experience in the documentary world of directing,  producing and distributing.

Danish born Gitte Hansen Schnyder from First Hand Films (FHF) in Switzerland talked about promotion and sales. She did so in general terms, with the showing of clips from FHF films from the catalogue. The actual example of a huge success is ”Burma vj” (photo) by Anders Østergaard. The film has sold to more than 20 tv channels and have been released theatrically in several countries.

Gitte Hansen gave a lot of valuable information, here are some points: More than 80% of our income still comes from tv… For every tv slot there are 100 films available, the tv people say, so the competition is strong…

And you should put this question to yourself: Are you ready to send me that project? The timing is very important. We – First Hand Films – want to be part of the launch. We want the freshness. On the other hand it is good to know that half of the income comes from older films… The festival world and the theatrical world are growing together. Festivals have become a market…

www.docuinter.net