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

DOKU.ART 2 – Stanley Kubrick

For lovers of Stanley Kubrick – and who is not? – the festival programmes a documentary by British Jon Ronson, made for Channel 4’s True Stories, 48 minutes long. The text about the film and its background goes like this:

Stanley Kubrick’s meticulous, painstaking research periods in preparation for a new film project became legendary. As the years went by, the time between films grew longer and longer, and less and less films were made by the director. Meanwhile, the world was waiting for a new Stanley Kubrick movie. What on earth was he doing? When Kubrick died in 1999 he left behind thousands of boxes of archive material. His estate near London was filled with boxes containing Kubrick’s carefully documented life: scripts, research, correspondence, costumes, props, models, production schedules, photography, books and film equipment. Ronson takes us on a delightful and light-hearted stroll through Kubrick’s archive, seeking to understand the enigmatic director through the things he left behind, and by speaking to those closest to him. Ronson asks: is it possible to get to understand the man – and his extraordinary working methods – by looking through the vast number of boxes that remain after his death? With irony and at times burlesque details, this is the first documentary to open some of the boxes, starting a process of study that will keep film historians working for years.

http://www.doku-arts.com/2009/program/StanleyKubrick.html

DOKU.ARTS 1

Taking place in Amsterdam June 11-14 at the Film Museum this international festival for films on art presents an exclusive selection of films, with Agnès Varda (photo) as honorary guest meeting an audience that has the possibility to watch a fine retrospective of her works. The festival has an excellent website beautifully built with trailers that makes you want to go and be there. In a documentary world where many festivals are simply based on taking titles from Amsterdam idfa or DOKLeipzig, this is a refreshing and different approach. Here is a quote from the ambition of the organisers:

“Most of the films selected for the festival will be screened for the first time in the Netherlands. DOKU.ARTS wants to remain a small festival, presenting between 20 and 30 films. There are no competitions or awards, but the festival invites all the directors to attend the screening of their films in Amsterdam. The in-depth film talks, moderated by Dutch art and film critics, are at the heart of the festival.

DOKU.ARTS was founded in 2006 at the Academy of Arts in Berlin. In 2008 the new director of the Filmmuseum, Sandra den Hamer, formerly director of the International Film Festival Rotterdam, invited the festival to move to Amsterdam. Founder and artistic director of the festival is Andreas Lewin.

http://www.doku-arts.com/