Boris Mitic: Goodbye How are You? 2

This is a clip from a text made by the director, to be found on his website in full length:

… I myself have systematically collected aphorisms for the last ten years. Whenever I wonder why I am still living in this crazy country after years of civil wars, domestic repression and international satanization, I turn to my collection of aphorisms for reassuring consolation and a 100%-proof optimism fix.

Understanding the world around you, fighting back at the Gods with pen and paper, turning satire into a state of mind – it really means transcending it all. All of a sudden, a wasted childhood becomes an asset; terminal living in Serbia – a privilege. From this perspective, Serbia stops being a traumatized, post-war country lost in transition, and turns into a stylish crossroads full of off-beat characters trying to contribute to a better understanding of this world by making up great lines.

These authors – vagabonds, politicians, psychiatrists, dentists, postmen, winemakers… – have no illusions that they can change anything, but they also can’t bear to stay idle, so they do a brilliant service to humanity – they make their ingenious comments public. If they can’t change the world around us, at least they can change our perception of this world. More than often, this is more than enough…

http://www.dribblingpictures.com

Planete Doc Review 1

For the 6th time this international documentary film festival takes place in Warsaw at the Kinoteka. The programme is overwhelming in volume AND quality. No wonder that the festival two days ago received The Main Award at the Polish Film Institute Awards in the category International Film Event.

Take a look at the website of the festival that starts on the 8th of May and goes on until the 17th. And not only in Warsaw as the festival announces a ”Digital Weekend” of the festival (May 8-10) with proud and enthusiastic words like these:

The festival will be hitting 22 cinemas across Poland! Modern technology is opening up a panorama of possibilities. A whole new community is in the making – community in which films not only enrich our sensory perceptions, but make us feel at home in the global village and offer a glimpse into the complexity of the world around us. For the first time in Poland, and perhaps even the world, people will be able to come to a festival that is not confined to any one place, but staged right across the country. People will be able to view 10 of the films at this year’s Planete Doc Review festival in any one of 22 cinemas at the same time before casting their votes for the winner of the Arthouse Cinemas Award. All this has been made possible by the iplex.pl online cinema and the Arthouse Cinemas Network…

Photo: Rabbit a la Berlin by Bartek Konopka, 54 mins. 2009 – to be shown at the festival with a follow-up discussion on 1989.

www.docreview.pl

Planet Doc Review 2

Honour your master… this is what four young Polish filmmakers do. They have all come out of the Andrzej Wajda Master School in Warsaw, and their names are already known outside their own countries in festival circles and as participants in international training sessions like Ex Oriente.

At the festival Thierry Paladino, Piotr Stasik, Marcin Sauter and Maciej Cuske present a film on Andrzej Wajda himself, presented at the website like this:

… the truest and most intimate portrait of the Master of Polish Cinema, the winner of the Academy Award for Lifetime Achievement. It shows Andrzej Wajda’s struggle on the set of his most personal film Katyñ: a story of Polish army officers murdered by the Soviets. In 2008, Katyñ was an Oscar nominee in the Best Foreign Film category… 54 minutes is the film that I look forward to watch.

www.docreview.pl

www.docuinter.net

Planete Doc Review 3

The festival includes no less than 6 competition sections with the Millenium Award as the main one. 19 films compete for the 6000€, several of them known to readers of filmkommentaren.dk. Like ”Kites” (photo) by Polish Beata Dzianowicz, ”Burma vj” by Danish Anders Østergaard, ”Another Planet” by Ferenc Moldoványi, ”The English Surgeon” by Geoffrey Smith and ”Blind Loves” by Juraj Lehotsky. And on a note basis Slovak Peter Kerekes ”Cooking History” and Polish Marcin Latallo’s cinema version of ”Our Street” – both to be reviewed here on a later occasion.

What a relief to see this festival letting go all the special regulations and demands for exclusivity and world premieres that is otherwise to be found in the festival world. The Polish audience will profit from this golden collection of new quality documentaries. And a bit older ones as well – there is a retrospective with films of Austrian Nikolaus Geyerhalter (”Our Daily Bread”, ”Elsewhere” and ”Pripyat”).

What else – allow me to put on Danish glasses and promote the fine film of Katia Forbert and Annette Mari Olsen, ”My Iranian Paradise” which is in a special programme called ”Iran Gate”. More about this film is to be found on the website of the Danish Film Institute, see below.

www.docreview.pl

http://www.dfi.dk/tidsskriftetfilm/64/frontpage.htm  (article called ”Bridgebuilding”)

Lichtpunt

Flemish language broadcasting company Lichtpunt in Belgium introduces itself like this: ”The aim of Lichtpunt is creating informative programmes on subjects from a humanistic point of view. Above all we attempt to approach our television viewers as being open minded and outspoken adults. Special attention is given to situations where frankness and freedom is being limited. The themes treated are analysed from an ethical and not from a political point of view.”

Lichtpunt, in volume a small broadcaster, is (pre)buying a lot of documentaries as well as being involved in some coproductions. But the channel has also produced several interview programmes with European culturally important characters like Ken Loach, Günter Grass and Hans Magnus Enzensberger. Producer and commissioning editor Wim van Rompaey sent me screeners of these ”Tidjgenoten” to watch and what a pleasure in nowadays television to see programmes where the interviewer is well prepared, the interviewed responds to this with intelligence and the programme takes its time and uses good archive material or material shot for the programme. Information, entertainment, interesting talking faces, food for thought. Enzensberger (photo)… what a charming and lively man, who among many matters talks about his travelling around to look at and try to understand the world. ”Man muss es anschauen, entdecken, man interessiert sich für etwas anderes”, than yourself.

http://www.lichtpunt.be/index.php

Brügger & Bertelsen: Quatraro Mysteriet

Som stor beundrer af ”Den 11. Time” satte jeg mig for at se første afsnit af ti (på DR2) af makkerparrets nye serie om EU embedsmanden Antonio Quatraro, som i 1993 faldt eller blev skubbet ud af et vindue i en kontorbygning på rue de la Loi. Et stort filmprojekt hvor de to leder efter sandheden om den uheldige italiener og de mange spegede forbindelser, han havde.

Jeg sidder der også næste gang og håber inderligt at kvaliteten stiger klækkeligt. Stort set hele dette afsnit foregik på et hotelværelse i Casablanca, hvor de to journalister fra Danmark udspørger en engelsk journalist, som tilsyneladende ved alt om sagen. Og som Bertelsen beder om at forklare hvordan EU er opbygget. Det bliver til en kolossalt kedelig omgang interview-tv, som fotograf og instruktør Jeppe Rønde forgæves prøver at gøre spændende at se på med forskellige fotografiske indstillinger på de tre mænd i et rum. Indstillinger som bliver klippet sammen med de to ombord på en flyver på vej til Bruxelles i samtale om sagen og om flymaden. Det er et forsøg på at skabe den absurde, kloge komik, som kendetegnede ”Den 11. Time”, det fungerer bare ikke her hvor studiet er afløst af en journalistisk undersøgende og opsøgende opgave.

www.dr.dk

Hotdocs 2009

The big international documentary festival in Toronto is running now and until May 10 and they do a wonderful promotion and information work for the audience and for us who are not there. Annotations on the film, written interviews, it’s all there… Lots to pick up…

… including some, unfortunately, hopeless ”daily updates” video clips with the staff members presenting their favourites films of today. Hopeless because they are amateurishly shot and sometimes it is difficult to hear what they say because they are placed (like the artistic director Sean Farrell) in a sofa, “relaxed” with disturbing sound around them, pitching the films in a small talk way. The trailers would have been better on their own without these unprofessional intros.

Photo from Norwegian Håvard Bustnes award-winning “Big John”.

http://www.hotdocs.ca/

6-2

Football is creative! When Barcelona plays like they did tonite. In Madrid, against Real. No, not creative. Artistic. Pure pleasure. As they write on the website of FC Barcelona:

Now that’s what you call football! (2-6). Barça have won at the Bernabéu with an amazing display of attacking and entertaining football. Henry (2), Puyol, Messi (2) and Piqué scored the goals in a historic victory that leaves the team just five points away from the championship title. May 2, 2009 will go down as one of the most historic days in the proud history of FC Barcelona. A day to compare with that magnificent February 14, 1974 when that legendary side led by Johan Cruyff won 5-0 at the Bernabéu. 35 years later, Barça have once again brought Madrid to their knees with a recital of football at its very best…

I watched it alone with a constant sms contact to other Barca fans and with my Barca shirt next to me. Oh, to witness magical moments like these. Look at the photo, a brilliant goalkeeper, Casillas, what could he do, nothing but face the fact that he had been an extra in a drama that was second to none.

http://www.fcbarcelona.com/eng/home-page/home/home.shtml

The Factual and the Fictive

The Documentary Film Centre at the University of Westminster in London arranges in May 5 screenings and filmmaking discussions under the headline: The Factual and the Fictive: A series of screenings/talks exploring hybrid fiction/documentary film-making.

One session is dedicated to Iranian director Mohsen Makhmalbaf, another to Austrian Ulrich Seidl, one to Portuguese master Pedro Costa and his “In Vanda’s Room”, one to Werner Herzog led by his British coproducer and former commissioning editor André Singer, and finally a whole day is dedicated to pioneer political filmmaker Peter Watkins from “The War Game” (photo) to “La Commune”. With an understatement: a programme that is not bad at all.

http://www.wmin.ac.uk/mad/page-2067

20 Years of Democracy

1989 will be remembered in festivals and on tv. And documentaries will be a strong visual element to show the changes that took place when the Berlin Wall went down, followed by the decline of the USSR. The following text about a fine, generous offer to watch great films for free on the net is taken from the newsletter of DOK Leipzig:

The 20th anniversary of the peaceful revolution and the ensuing social changes will play a central role, even before becoming the focus of a special programme at the 52nd International Leipzig Festival for Documentary and Animated Film. All year round, the festival is pursuing its mission to promote documentary film and to initiate a broad discourse about socially relevant topics. It is in this sense that the online platform „20 Years of Democracy in Film”, launched in co-operation with the festivals One World Prague, One World Bratislava, Verzio Budapest and Watch Docs Warsaw, is going to present documentary and animated films by East and Central European filmmakers.

22 contributions from 1990 through to 2007 that deal with vital issues of the social and political transformation processes that have taken place over the past two decades are available as free streamings. Among them are outstanding, multiple award winning works by filmmakers as renowned as Jan Svankmajer, Maciej Janusz Drygas, Pavel Koutecky, Marko Skop (photo from his film ”Other Worlds”) and Tamas Almasi. Germany is represented by films by Gerd Kroske, Thomas Heise, Marc Bauder/ Dörte Franke and Wolfgang Ettlich.

www.dok-leipzig.de

http://www.20years.org