I have been thinking a lot – why does this film not involve me? Why do I stay in a careless mood? I had high expectations, I had read about it, seen the overall praise it has got and I know that audiences have queued to buy cinema tickets. And I see that the state of Israel wants the film to be the country’s Oscar award contribution!

Is it because it is an animation film based on real conversations between the director and his fellow soldier comrades from way back when they went to the Beirut hell that ended up in the massacre on civilians in Sabra and Shatila. A story about memories. That for some of them have turned into traumas.

It is all so well made, perfect craftmanship, it is beautiful to watch, it is packed with emotional music, full of effects, sometimes as an action film… and yet, or maybe therefore, I dont care about their stories. The superbly manufactured animation makes an emotional blockade until the last couple of minutes where the director leaves the animation and invites us to watch horrible archive images of the mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers and children in deep shock and screaming grief over a massacre observed and thus accepted by Sharon and his soldiers. I have seen these sequences before. This is the story about Sabra and Shatila.

http://waltzwithbashir.com/home.html
http://www.aarhusfilmfestival.dk/index.html
http://www.cphdox.dk/d1/front.lasso

Hammarsberg, Bergmark & Andersson: “Maggie In Wonderland”. Andersson is Maggie, credited as co-director in this moving documentary about herself, a Kenyan woman, who lives in Malmö on the 15th floor with a balcony full of pigeons.

“It’s me telling you about my life”, Maggie says behind the camera when she points around in her flat that has the look of loneliness and trouble. How did she end up in Sweden – this is not told, what we get to know, we get from the scenes with Maggie behind the camera, or Maggie followed and observed by a cameraperson. She tells us that she suffers from not seeing her son, who is in Kenya. She tells us that she was with a man in this appartment, he was violent and got out. We see her in conversation with a not very understanding school teacher who tells her to stop school because she missed too many lessons. And in a late night street scene, she films while being attacked by someone. She repeats several times that many take her, a black woman, for a prostitute.

It is a film that goes in many directions and I cannot help asking if she has not been offered psychological help. I dont want to think the Swedish public system is so bad that nothing has been done to get out of the trauma. The film indicates nothing of that sort… The ending shows Maggie cleaning up, ready for a new start, a new year. Wishful thinking from the filmmakers side?

Sweden, 2008, 72 mins.

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

Have to confess that I had never heard about Natasja before her death in a car accident on Jamaica summer 2007. 60+ was not her target group! But this fine documentary, that avoids to take the sentimental approach and thus succeeds in giving me proof of and reason for her artistic skills and popularity –  shows her enormous energy and appetite for Life. She was made for camera appearance as the many recordings by her friend Karen Mukupa demonstrate.

The film jumps back and forth from Denmark to Jamaica, no chronology, nothing exotic about Reggae-land, it is mostly her directly addressing the camera or an audience with her music and lyrics, written by herself. High quality all over. What a loss of a winner, who by the way was also a master jockey on a horseback.

Denmark, 2008, 60 mins.

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

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