That Nanna Frank Møller is an excellent editor has been proved many times, primarily in her collaboration with Danish director Max Kestner. That she has a talent for directing herself became obvious with the film about the circus sisters, ”Someone Like You”. Here she is with another proof: a film about 14 year old Hairon, who has Brasilian parents but lives in Denmark with his mother and her Danish husband, one more dad for Hairon.

”Let´s Be Together”, however, is the story about son and (Brasilian) dad, told in an intimate and gentle film language, full of respect for the drama that lies in a teenager, who loves to dress like girls and women do.

Hairon wants to be Cleopatra for his birthday and this forms the structural frame of the film. Mother and Hairon go to Brasil to see Brasilian father and to have the Cleopatra costume prepared. Strong conversations are unfolded, interpreted brilliantly in rythm and music and in an editing that have wonderful pauses that are full of information and emotion. ”You must know to control your life a bit”, the father says in one of the many scenes with the two together. Would be wrong of me to reveal the end scene of the film, it is so fine and impressive and well thought and performed by a big talent in new Danish documentary.

Denmark, 2008, 82 mins.

http://www.cphdox.dk/d1/front.lasso  

If you like me are waiting with great expectations on one of the most talked about and praised documentaries from this year, since the premiere at the Cannes Film Festival, the Israeli film Waltz With Bashir, you can warm up with a radio interview from the Guardian Film Weekly.

This animated documentary covers the 1982 massacre of three thousand Palestinians by Christian militia in Beirut.

And why not visit the site of the film (or YouTube) to watch some trailers before the screening at CPH:DOX.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/audio/2008/nov/05/animation-sheffield-doc-fest
http://waltzwithbashir.com/
http://www.cphdox.dk/d1/front.lasso

In the previous text you can find a review of one of the many documentaries, the one about Patti Smith, that Copenhagen offers its documentary audience from Friday November 7-16. We will follow the amazing festival  programme with reviews, reports and notes.

Several of the films have already been written about or reviewed on filmkommentaren.dk Go to the box “søg” and write the title of the films if you wish to have our opinion. Here are the films listed randomly:

Everything is Relative. Citizen Havel. Dolls. Gonzo. Man on Wire. Standard Operating Procedure. Stranded. Z32. The English Surgeon. Black Heart. Solange on Love.

And here is a clip from the site of CPH:DOX, in their own words:

“CPH:DOX, Copenhagen International Documentary Film Festival, is the largest documentary film festival in Scandinavia. Each year the festival fills the Copenhagen cinemas with a selection of more than 150 documentary films from around the world. During the ten festival days, CPH:DOX also presents five whole days of professional seminars and provides an international forum and meeting place with the newly founded DOX:FORUM. Acknowledging the rapidly growing interest in documentary film, CPH:DOX was founded in 2003 as an off-spring of Natfilm Festivalen, the biggest film festival in Copenhagen. Supported by film professionals as well as the national press, CPH:DOX grew from 14.000 admissions in its first year to an impressive 26.000 in 2007. In 2008 CPH:DOX runs from 7-16 Nov.”

http://www.cphdox.dk/d1/front.lasso

Still: Z32

The film is a bombardment of words. From start till end Patti Smith reads texts of her own or by the many poets she has been inspired of in her multifacetted career as singer, painter, photographer, writer and visual artist. Actually, it is wrong to say that she reads the texts, she recites them as were they music, and this is what gives this film a flow and a rythm and a structure that is like a visual collage in very different styles and moods.

She goes to the places where were Arthur Rimbaud, she reads Allen Ginsberg to us, she travels the world, she takes notes, she takes pictures. And yet the most emotional parts are filmed in her big NY room, where she sits alone in the corner and comments on and shows her ”Objects in Life”.

She puts all her heart into this film that has been made over a period of 12 years, from the point when Patti Smith decided to get back to the music after having been living a family life out of the spotlight. There is a lot of concert sequences, there are photos that serve to take us back to Chelsea Hotel and Burroughs and Mapplethorpe, there are sequences with her and her children, there is a small jam session with Sam Shepard… it is a very rich film that you can only love for a 16mm (sometimes b/w, sometimes colour, sometimes direct cinema, sometimes interviews and staged scenes) camera work with nerve.

It premiered at the Sundance Festival, was at the Berlinale and will for sure come to a cinema or festival near you. I watched it on arte. AND NOW IT IS AT CPH:DOX AS IS PATTI SMITH HERSELF!

US, 2008, 108 mins

Photo: Patti Smith performing in Helsinki 2007

 http://www.dreamoflifethemovie.com/
http://www.pattismith.net/
http://www.cphdox.dk/d1/front.lasso

Danish Short Docs online… What a brilliant initiative taken by the Danish Film Institute and the newspaper Politiken: 12 films with a duration between 3 and 5 minutes are now available on the web edition of the newspaper. One new per day. I have seen the 6 first which are very different but all try to adapt to this distribution medium and all try something new. Janus Metz and Sine Plambech invite us to experience a joyful break in the work of thai prostitute girls (thai dialogue, Danish subtitles). Veteran Jon Bang Carlsen reflects in a wordy and strong montage on the destruction of nature somewhere in England (Danish commentary). Malene Ravn and Vibeke Winding have visited a wonderful man from Christiania, whose small house is on the authorities list to be taken down (Danish dialogue). Malene Choi gives us a small dreamerish visual taster for a longer film. Christian Vium invites us to meet Brian Mphahlele who was in prison and got heavily tortured during the apartheid period (English langugage). And finally Christian Braad Thomsen and Bente Petersen introduce ”Mink in Love”, tough action and gentle caress (No dialogue, English intertitles).

So if you non-Danish speaking people want to get all out of it, start with the two last mentioned. I will be back later with mentions on the remaining six.

Still from Nybegynder by Janus Metz and Sine Plambech.

Danske læsere og festivalbesøgende får her en fin prolog til cph:dox.  

http://politiken.tv/clips/
http://www.dfi.dk/aktuelt/Nyheder/filmkunst_paa_netavis.htm

In Leipzig, at the same time as the festival, the final session of the Discovery Campus Masterschool took place with training of the participants for two concluding mornings with the pitching of projects that have been developed during the year with the help of producers and commissioning editors.

From stories about tourism, women in Afghanistan or in Morocco or in Brazil to Eastern European contemporary stories about a Bulgarian town without the women, who have all gone to Italy to work, or about Dimitrovgrad where socialism and capitalism meet, or to a big theatrical epic about the men who started Greenpeace way back, to a sweet story about long play records, to a couple who experience love through pain, to people in LA who get into trouble and store their dearest belongings, many of them to end up on an auction… to a Swedish project about men in their 40’es who join a swimming club to get away from the meaningless of Life! Hopefully these films will be ready within the next couple of years. They deserve it. Some got funding at the pitching, some have to develop further.

Lots of joy, very good visual tasters, losers and winners – losers, not necessarily their fault but because of the market limitations that were obvious during the two mornings where around 40 television people and a few film fund representatives were seated to respond to the pitching. Discovery Campus is an excellent training programme, very much because of the staff and the head of studies, filmmaker Peter Symes from the UK. And the Discovery Campus also is behind the new online meeting point Reelisor. Have a look at that.

Still from The Solitary Life of Cranes by Eva Weber, who took part in DC with the project LA Storage.

http://www.discovery-campus.de/v2/
http://www.reelisor.com/