From the very well organised industry part of the the festival, I would like to highlight 3 of the projects that I am looking forward to see as finished film:

”Into Eternity” from Danish Michael Madsen and his producer Lise Lense-Møller. A project about nuclear waste and where it is put with a Finnish underground storage as the example, but a story also with a lot of scientific and philosophical questions to be raised by a young director with his very own voice.

”Hunting Down Memory” from Norwegian Thomas Lien and Petter Vennerød about a 27 year old Norwegian who lost his memory in a Chinese train. The film goes with him back to explore his own forgotten journey. Fascinating clip. (see photo)

”Complaints Choir” by Danish Ada Bligaard Søby and Morten Kjems Juhl, a great film project – quote from the catalogue: … a funny and intimate film about the phenomenon of complaining, set in the heartland of positive thinking and with thought provoking jumps to choirs in other countries and to the Finnish island where it all started.

www.finemellow.dk
www.merkur.no
www.magichourfilms.dk
http://www.cphdox.dk/d1/front.lasso

A learning lab. This is what Tine Mosegaard, the organiser, called the DOX-Forum in the catalogue intro for the 3 day industry event, an integrated part of the film festival. A programme consisting of pitching sessions and seminars like the one reported about below.

And it was actually a learning lab for me, who is involved in 4-5 pitching sessions per year, where broadcasters react to projects that are normally still in the development phase. Here it was a different set up. The projects were almost all of them at the end of shooting and those project holders who were best prepared, profited from the presence of skilled people from classical distribution agencies or new online and digital platforms. The possibilities for a variety of distribution outlets seem to be growing at the same pace as the decrease of financial investment from broadcasters into creative documentaries. For more information, go to some of the web sites below.

14 projects were pitched, and as an experienced pitch trainer, it hurt me to experience several of them stumbling blindly through their presentation. The result was naturally that the panelists spent all time asking to the project content and therefore did not get to the distribution advice for their soon-to-be-released film. With exceptions, of course, read about those at  text 19.

Picture from Documentary of the Month-film

”Welcome to the New World of Distribution” is an article by Peter Broderick that you can read on

www.peterbroderick.com
www.cineticmedia.com
www.eldocumentaldelmes.com
www.indiepixfilms.com
www.icarusfilms.com
www.microcinema.com
www.widemanagement.com
 

Nomally panel discussions are boring with a lot of repetitions. This one was different. The panelists complemented each other and were open in their sharing information and points of views on the involvement of the art museums in distributing films.

Jytte Jensen from MOMA New York told that the museum is pretty active in that field, showing documentaries regularly and keeping a film on the agenda for a week. The latter provokes a review in the NY Times. Without paying rental fee, as it is great promotion for the film and filmmaker to be at MOMA! However, when the museum buys a print for its collection, they pay 2,5 times the print prize. Or money is given through handling fees. She mentioned ”Dinner with the President” (= Musharraf), updated version, as a current example. Director: Sahiba Sumar.

ICA in London was represented by Mark Adams, who takes care of the film activities of this Institute of Contemporary Arts. He stressed that their documentary involvement had grown, both in terms of their screenings and with the, primarily 35mm, distribution they operate. Re payment ICA operates as every other art cinema distributor.

Andrea Picard from Cinematheque Ontario, curator of Wavelengths at the Toronto Film Festival, was the one who underligned that there are more and more visual artists who move into making films, but she also stressed that there is actually nothing new in this: dada, fluxus, surrealism, Dali, Man Ray etc. But there is also a move in the other direction, from the film world to the art world. The names of Chantal Akerman and Pedro Costa. This move seems also to have a financial reason, if I understood it correctly – more funding available in the art scene. Crossover is the key word, as it is for the cph:dox programme policy.

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

Around 20 minutes into this staged documentary I started to get impatient. Come on, make the story move, we got the message, the neighbours dont like each others, they dont talk, it is a silent war, where they will not fight or terrorise each other as in subjectwise similar films like the classic of Norman Maclaren. But then it takes a turn. The filmmaker asks his father, one of the neighbours, what was the biggest moment in his life. Difficult question to answer for a man, who has difficulties to express emotions, but he gives the answer. And the filmmaker goes to the neighbour to give us a positive impression of him.

We will never sit down and have coffee and pastries, says the father of the filmmaker about the conflict. More than a decade ago something happened that created a total split up between the two families. The result was that a fence grew up, a kind of no-mans land, a Berlin wall, in otherwise peaceful Western Jutland of Denmark in a town called Tarm. Where they speak a strong dialect and express a certain kind of stubbornness. Because nobody really recalls what happened, nobody knows who owes an apology.

The film is brilliant to look at, the mise-en-scène  style is carried through, a promising debut, that reminds me of the early films of Jon Bang Carlsen.

Denmark, 2008, 47 mins.

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

Trefeurig is the name of a small village community in Wales. This is where director and cameraman Gideon Koppel takes us – on a stunningly beautiful, wonderfully slow, and editing-like surprising voyage that I have difficulties in forgetting after two viewings at the markets at DOCLisboa and now at cph:dox.

I long to watch it on a big screen, I want to dwelve into the landscape paintings, to a rythm of Life that is disappearing. But it is also a documentary about the people, who live there and as a librarian educated in the last century, it creates a sweet memory in me to see a library bus arrive and the old people come to get their books and have a chat with the librarian. Who worries because ”they” want him to install a computer to make his work easier! ”How are you”, ”keeping going” is a dialogue often performed in the film. Many, many banal daily life scenes, but in the film lifted up to something different, a confirmation of the value of Life.

It is season after season, it is gorgeous when you see a whole image full of a scenery with sheep going down slooowly, absolutely outstanding, episodical, f… all modern claims for ”story”, nostalgic, yes, a hymn to nature, with a precise sound design and music by Aphex Twin. A quote at the end of the film, dont know from whom: It´s only when I see the end of things, I get the courage to speak, the courage, but not the words.

Wales, 2007, 94 mins.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/filmnetwork/A39788239

http://www.walesonline.co.uk/whats-on/whats-on-news/2007/12/03/library-van-inspires-film-of-changing-community-91466-20194101/

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

We met him years ago, this Hungarian director, who stood behind the much discussed, but great film ”Children of Kosovo”. We, meaning colleague Allan Berg and I, who defended the director’s right to use extremely aesthetical cinematographic means to describe the tragedy in Kosovo.

His focus was the children, as it is in this new film where Moldoványi has filmed in four continents, again with a stunning visual result, where you sometimes end up in a breathless state, at the same time as you look at and listen to the stories from children, who are suffering in their daily life. No commentary, no information about where we are, it is not what I want, the uncompromising director seems to say. I want you to come with me on a tour round this wonderful world, where many children live in total misery. The child soldier, the shoeshine boy, the child prostitute who was raped when she was 8 (!), the girl who sells chewing gum in the street, the scavenger. And so on. They give us their dreams. They give us their daily life. We watch it, feel ashamed, depressed, at the same time as we feel that we must believe that a change could happen. If the energy of these fine children could be transformed into something positive. If…

The title comes from Aldous Huxley: Maybe this world is another planet’s Hell. Moldoványi, one of the most ambitious documentary directors that I know about, has made another unique film.

Hungary, 2008, 95 mins.

http://www.engram.hu/Main.nof?nyelvid=2

http://www.another-planet.eu/moldovanyi-uk.html

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

Jakob Skovgaard Petersen, his wife and their two children  were in Cairo for some years. Petersen was appointed Head of the Danish-Egyptian Dialogue Institute and he was there during the cartoon crisis. A brilliant and knowledgeable man, not only a man with diplomatic skills and strong in dialogue but also a man, who was able oppose prominent religious and political leaders. The man is fine and is awarded when he gets home. The director decided to make a point out of this as the film starts and ends with Petersen being greeted by Her Majesty the Queen. That was a wrong decision, it is completely irrelevant for a film that could have focused much more on the dialogue and not on the family side of Petersen’s stay in Cairo. The wife plays tennis and feels insecure about the children in such a big city. They have parties, take Danish ministers around to meetings, and yes, a little bit of this and a little bit of that, no focus, superficial. There is, however, one very good scene in the film where Petersen sits in a soukh, drinks tea and discusses with some journalists from al-ahram. More of that could have made it interesting.

Denmark, 2008, 60 mins.

http://www.cphdox.dk/d1/front.lasso ’

I was at the Film House tonight to meet Jan Troell, the 77 year old Swedish master, who right now experiences big international success with his latest feature, ”Maria Larssons evige Øjeblik”. English title is ”Everlasting Moments”. A whole evening programme was set up with Troell and his wife Agneta Ulfsäter Troell, from whose family the story about Maria comes. I was there for the first part of the evening, a well structured meeting with the director.

This first part opened with the film about Troell, ”Troell’s magic mirror” by Swedish Thomas Danielsson. Sympathetic it is – even if it sometimes feels a bit messy as it wants to have too much information conveyed within the hour it lasts. But you love every little word Troell says, this modest lyrical observer of the world we live in. Troell talked afterwards about his work, with many references to his old, late friend and inspiration source, the photographer Georg Oddner, that he made a brilliant documentary about, ”Presence”.

Playful Troell showed four of his small homemade films to the audience after ”Reflexion 2001” from the NY twin towers, a filmic requiem with music of Arvo Pärt. Joyful were the short film about ladybirds having sex and the one about a snail on a lunch table. Satirical was a film about animals getting a yellow tag according to EU rules. The absolute climax, however, came with a short film about some older men and women with rackets in their hands, but without any tennis balls, caught in their more or less silly movements and interesting facial expressions by the camera of Troell, their documenting tennis partner!

http://www.dfi.dk/english/Danish+films/Directors/DirectorFact.htm?DirID=9917
http://www.cphdox.dk/d1/front.lasso