Ex Oriente 1 – Production

Helge Albers represents the Flying Moon Filmproduktion based in Germany. A company that started 10 years ago and produces fiction as well as feature length documentaries. Albers gave the Ex Oriente participants a brief intro to the documentary history of a company that has been very much orientated towards a theatrical distribution. With success:

The first example shown was the film by Uli Gaulke, ”Havana, mi amor” (photo), that came after ”Buena Vista Social Club” profiting from the huge interest in Cuba. The film had 60.000 tickets sold in the cinemas and gave the company a profit of around 30.000€. The same director made later on the ”Comrades in Dreams” that became a festival hit but a cinema flop. Nevertheless the company has a focus on theatrical release and added a distribution branch to its activities which gave a sensational good result with the film ”Full Metal Village” (director Korean Sung-Hyung Cho) that made 190.000 cinema tickets on the basis of first 16 and later 53 prints. The film had no television support on board up front with a budget of around 200.000€.

Albers said that the dvd distribution of this film, supplemented by a good income from festival fees was financially much more interesting than the vod (video on demand) that he was much more sceptical towards. Saying that people normally connects internet to something that is for free.

www.flyingmoon.com

www.docuinter.net

Bananas

Swedish film director and producer Fredrik Gertten has made a film, Bananas, that has reached the headlines – before its actual release. The Malmö based Gertten, who has been enormously active internationally for many years, and who for the film has obtained support from the American funds ITVS and Sundance, will see his film premiered in the coming days. In a letter to the international documentary community he and his coproducers describe the problems they are facing:

We have been working on the feature documentary BANANAS!* since 2006, and we are slated to launch the film at the Los Angeles Film Festival, held June 18-28 this year.

The film follows a landmark court case – Tellez et. al. v. Dole Food Company Inc. et. al. – where a group of Nicaraguan banana workers, with the help of attorney Juan Dominguez, sues Dole Food for using a banned pesticide in their Nicaraguan plantations. Prolonged exposure to this pesticide was known to cause sterility in human males. It was the first time that agricultural workers from the developing world gave testimony against a US-based multinational in a US court.

In January, 2008, a full jury found Dole Food guilty of causing harms to the workers, and of acting with malicious intent. They awarded damages to the workers, and Dole is now appealing the verdict. Despite this appeal, during the trial the CEO of Dole Food admitted on the stand that he continued to use the aforementioned pesticide in his Nicaraguan plantations, after it was banned in the US.Dominguez had many other, similar cases in line following the Tellez case. Dole accused Dominguez of fraud, and the presiding Judge, Victoria Chaney, sided with Dole and threw out all remaining cases. At this point the Tellez decision stands, and case is still under appeal by Dole.

Recent developments have called the validity of certain aspects of the case into question. As those of you who have done courtroom documentaries can attest, court cases can keep developing years after the verdict. Regardless of the final outcome, the film is an accurate representation of the case over a period of time, and our broadcasters and all our other partners support the film 100%.

On May 8, the law firm of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher LLP, who represented Dole in court, attempted to get Judge Chaney to stop the film from being screened at the 2009 Los Angeles Film Festival. The Judge stated to those present: “Just so we are clear, I am not in any way going to make, and I will not consider, any request for prior restraint on free speech. Okay? So, don’t ask me to go try and contact the film company. I don’t have jurisdiction over them. But even if I did, don’t ask me for it.”

As they were unsuccessful with Judge Chaney, Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher LLP sent us a letter demanding we ‘cease and desist’ plans to screen the film at the Festival. The first such letter sent to us, on May 8 of this year, was copied to all the corporate sponsors of the LA Film Festival, but was not copied to the LA Film Festival itself. A copy of this letter and related letters are available here.

To date, neither Dole nor Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher LLP have actually seen our film. They are basing their comments on a three-minute trailer and information posted here on our website, www.bananasthemovie.com.

Dole’s team is now moving on to yet another strategy and have contacted the Swedish Consulate in LA and the Swedish Ambassador to the US in Washington, asking them to help stop the film.

To date they have only succeeded in getting the Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles (LAFLA) to pull out of ‘co-hosting’ the film’s opening night at the Festival. However, a lawyer from Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher serves on the board of directors of the LAFLA.

Out of respect to the LA Film Festival, we did not broadcast any of these actions until now. However with days to go before our premiere, we are spreading the word.

We are considering all our options given Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher’s actions.

As we move forward, we hope you as our allies in the international documentary community will throw your support behind us. Dole and their counsel’s interference with us, ITVS, the Festival, and their sponsors represent a serious threat to independent documentary production.

Please join our mailing list for breaking news by filling out your mail address in the sidebar to the right, and join our facebook group.

Things will begin to move rapidly, and we will keep you updated as they come.

 

In thanks and solidarity,

Fredrik Gertten
Margarete Jangård
Lise Lens-Møller
Bart Simpson

BANANAS!*
www.bananasthemovie.com

Free Thought Documentaries in Moscow

As part of the Moscow International Film Festival (19.6-28.6) two Russian documentary gentlemen, very often present in Western documentary events, Sergey Miroshnichenko and Grigory Libergal, have put together a fine programme. This is what they say:

43 masterpieces of world documentary filmmaking were shown in the program “Free Thought” since 2006. We were right in our undertaking. Our audience is the main indicator and it permits us to look with confidence at the prospects of our program and further advance of documentary films on TV and in cinema.

Once again this year the main participants of the program “Free Thought” are winners of the biggest international festivals like Sundance, Full Frame, Amsterdam, Leipzig, films that have won the American “Oscar” or the Prize of the European Film Academy to the best documentary of the year. As usual we have included films with high box-office returns and high TV ratings. We still believe that cinema must face the viewer and hope that all our movies will be a success with the audience of the Moscow Film Festival. This year we are introducing directors like Alex Gibney, James Marsch, Alex Gibney, James Marsh, Werner Herzog, Helena Třeštiková (photo from René), Erwin Wagenhofer  and other talented masters.

When we were selecting for our program we realised that documentary filmmakers have turned their attention to the inner world of man, his place in society, his ability to resist global manifestations of evil in all its forms. In his last interview the prominent Russian writer Alexandr Solzhenitsyn offered the following definition of good and evil: “The border between good and evil goes through all the countries, all the parties, through all classes and people, through every heart. And even in the heart of every person this border shifts with time. It always recedes, increasing the portion of good or the portion of evil. People are never the same throughout their lifetime. They change in the course of their lives, their portion in good and evil varies”. The authors of the films in this program try to push this border towards goodness and we are happy to help them with our humble work.

Link

Capturing Reality 2

The NFB (National Film Board of Canada) production on the art of documentary, featuring 33 directors from 13 countries, are being used for debates among filmmakers and with the audience. Here is a quote from a Realscreen article illustrating the never-ending-discussion:

…One of the most conflicting sequences in the film concerned the ethics of documentary filmmaking and how much of a film can be scripted or pre-planned. For instance, in a segment about interviewing subjects, Nick Broomfield (photo) says that he sees a habit has formed with directors who come into subjects’ homes or workspaces and move around their furniture and light the space a certain way to get the optimum effect. While he thinks this is destroying their environment and essentially losing the truth in the situation, Errol Morris admits he’s done it and he stands behind it.

Likewise, director Barry Stevens uses Werner Herzog’s Little Dieter Needs to Fly as an example of fudging the truth. He says that Herzog asked his subject, a man who had been in the Navy, to open and close his front door a number of times to illustrate his need to feel like he’s not locked in. While Stevens says it made a strong image in the film, he also feels it wasn’t true. While some people might say ‘don’t let the facts get in the way of a good story,’ Stevens believes that when it comes to documentaries, you absolutely should let them get in the way…

http://www.realscreen.com/articles/news/20090611/capturingreality.html

http://www3.nfb.ca/webextension/capturing-reality/

Petr Lom: Letters to the President

Den korte udgave af Petr Loms film fra Iran bliver vist i aften på DR2 under den danske titel “Breve til præsident Ahmadinejad”. Den er fin at se, selvom jeg klart foretrækker den lange udgave, som blev anmeldt på filmkommentaren.dk sådan her.

Petr Lom’s film “Letters to the President”, short version is being shown on Danish DR2 prime time, 8pm. Here is the review of the film that is also to be shown in Donegal in the coming days, see below:

Ahmadinejad, president of Iran, receives 10 million letters per year and 76% of them are answered! This is stated by an employee from the administration that takes care of this personal contact between the president and the population.

Ahmadinejad, a president, who does not like the red carpet, as it is said in the beginning of the film, by one of the people interviewed,. A man of the people. A man who constantly shouts for hate towards Israel and the US, as seen in the film. As in previous films by the film director and cameraman, same person: Petr Lom, meets the people with an open mind and the camera ready to catch what he can in a tongue-in-cheek journalistic documentary that gets much closer than the usual, normal tv-reportages shot in Iran. Due to the original letter-angle we as viewer are taken from place to place, including the birthplace of the president, to meet not only supporters and propagandists of Iranian politics, but also citizens who are critical and dare express themselves. ”He is like a gardener who plants seedlings but do not water them”, one says. Others ask repeatedly for help, and the president is filmed caressing some of his fellow-citizens and helping a woman who faints from emotion when she meets the president. ”I am your servant”, he says in this wonderfully open, non-conclusive and nuanced insight to an Iran that has its election in June 2009.

Canada/France, 2009, 74 mins. and 52 mins.

http://www.filmstransit.com/

www.letterstothepresidentmovie.com

Vurdering:

  

Guth Gafa: One More Documentary Oasis

… is placed in Donegal in Ireland, an international documentary film festival it is, with a very fine international programme as well as an Irish. This is how the organisers present their festival:

”When we established the festival in 2006 there were a number of factors we could be certain of; we knew the location was first-rate in terms of its beauty, that’s one of the reasons we’re based here after all; we could be sure that visitors would be warmly received in the best Donegal tradition, and that they would revel in the local culture; and we knew we could run a good festival with local support and co-operation. What was less certain was whether we could get sufficient quality films and film-makers to come, not only to Ireland, but to one of the most remote parts of the country.  We think we’ve succeeded beyond anything we could have hoped for when we started out in 2006, in attracting multi-award winning directors and films to Gort an Choirce.

The challenge, after 3 years, is to maintain the high standards that we have set ourselves and continue to build the Festival from year to year.”

No problem, several fine films reviewed on filmkommentaren.dk, are on the programme: Petr Lom’s Letter to the President (photo), John Webster’s Recipes for Diaster, Kim Longinotto’s Rough Aunties, Geoffrey Smith’s The English Surgeon, Ben Kempas’ Upstream Battle and Gan Chao’s The Red Race. And many others including King of India by Indian Arvind Sinha, who will be in Donegal for the screening. Well done, organisers!

http://guthgafa.com/index.php?page=home&hl=en_EN

Capturing Reality

33 filmmakers, 13 countries, 1 passion: The art of documentary. This is the way that NFB, National Film Board of Canada, launches its interview-film that includes great filmmakers like Maysles, Kim Longinotto, Werner Herzog (photo), Molly Dineen, Heddy Honigmann and Stan Neumann. I did not have the chance to watch it at the idfa 2008 but the clip on youtube, see below, looks promising.

One little thing, however, where are the filmmakers from the Nordic countries? Jørgen Leth and Jon Bang Carlsen from Denmark, Stefan Jarl and PeÅ Holmquist from Sweden, Pirjo Honkasalo from Finland, Margaret Ohlin from Norway – not to talk about some names from the Eastern part of Europe: Herz Frank, Viktor Kossakovski, Sergey Dvortsevoy, Mira Janek, Marcel Lozinski…

There is room for a follow-up of this fine initiative.

http://www3.nfb.ca/webextension/capturing-reality/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lPavxiKKT2w&feature=PlayList&p=8295162E814D62B8&index=0

Tiananmen June 1989

I suppose that all public broadcasters have put a focus on the massacre on the Tiananmen Square in Beijing 20 years ago. A taboo in Chinese history, it is simply forbidden to mention it in Chinese media, channels like arte have made available interesting interviews with surviving witnesses and activists from the Democratic Movement in 1989, brutally knocked down and for several of the interviewees with year-long imprisonment as a consequence of their involvement.

The interviews are part of the web-series of arte, made for the strand ”arte reportage”.  

http://www.arte.tv/fr

Herbert Tobias

Born in 1924 (died in 1982) German photographer Herbert Tobias was sent to the Ostfront as a soldier when only 19 years old. In the exhibition in Hamburg a series of photos documents how it was for a young man, still a teenager, to be where tragedy reigns before your eyes. ”Dirt, lice and Exhaustion”, he calls one of the motives from Russia. The exhibition is big and divided into themes and styles, in documentary language both observational and staged. Fashion photography. Street motives, moments of magic. A range of Berlin photos from the 50’es, ruins and more ruins, how was it possible to rebuild this city? Staged and unstaged erotic and for the post-war period provocative homosexual tableaux.

Impressive exhibiton that stays until August 16 at the Haus der Photographie, Deichtorhallen, Hamburg. Beautiful hall. Photo: Klaus Kinski and Thomas Harlan, actor and writer taken by Tobias

http://www.deichtorhallen.de/

http://www.herberttobias.com/bio.html

De Gerlache: Magritte, le jour et la nuit

A museum for René Magritte has opened in Brussels and as the cultural channel of Europe, arte celebrates this important event. But how to make a film about an artist, whose oeuvre was huge, an artist who behaved like a good bourgeois without any scandals attached and without any wish to come up with any easy interpretations. And yet such an influential artist for current filmmakers and designers and other visual artists who claimed or claim to be in line with the surrealist thinking. How?

The director’s answer to these questions was to introduce an actor as the one, who walks around where Magritte was, in his footsteps, watching and talking to people who knew him or his wife Georgette. For biographical documentation and artistic interpretation. It is sometimes made in an elegant way, and sometimes the image manipulations are clumsy. Basically you do not get anything new to know about Magritte, or a better understanding and feeling. It is all very staged with the actor and his trying to make the painter alive, and it helps when small home film material clips with Magritte are shown. All of a sudden you are touched by a playfullness without pretentions in sequences that are for me killed by a wall-to-wall narration in first person delivered by the actor who is said to discover Magritte… I think it could have been done much more fresh and direct.
 
Belgium/France, 2009, 52 mins.

Watched on arte, June 4 2009. Repeats on 7/6, 17/6 and 22/6

http://www.arte.tv/fr/programmes/242,date=4/6/2009.html