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/

The awards in Leipzig… Helena Trestikova won another first prize for her ”Réne”, which will be play here in Copenhagen at cph:dox. I did not see it yet but I am sure it deserves a prize, based on what I have seen before from her hand.

Second prize, plus two others, went to wonderful ”Oblivion” by Heddy Honigmann, a director whose work I have followed for many years, always with pleasure and admiration. I wrote a review of the film in the new DOX (Issue 79, November 2008), let me give you a small quote:

”In 1994, the director made ”Metal and Melancholy”, also from Peru, seen through the taxis and their double-job drivers. This new film from Lima is melancholic as well, and beautiful, but you also feel a well-documented anger on behalf of the people you meet who struggle every day to survive”. A humanistic, political film for a big audience. Thank you!

In the same DOX issue you will find a review of Z32, written by editor Ulla Jacobsen.

Still from Oblivion by Heddy Honigmann.

www.edn.dk
http://www.heddy-honigmann.nl/hhonigmann/
http://www.dok-leipzig.de/v2/cms/en/home/index.html

I have previously – in my diaries from DocLisboa – mentioned the new masterpiece by Avi Mograbi, Z32. It was also shown at DOK Leipzig, Avi Mograbi was there and I told him again, as in Lisbon, that his films divide people, for which reason he will never get a prize in a documentary festival, as juries tend to go for compromises. Right I was, no prize for Mograbi in Leipzig.

One of the reasons could be found in the review of the film from the Leipziger Volkszeitung, November 1st, written by Norbert Wehrstedt, who, as many others, objects to having talking faces in documentaries… he had hoped that this narrative element had died long time ago. He reduces thus the film to be a ”Hörbuch mit Bildern” that nobody needs. Words, words, words to put it in another words.

I totally disagree to this classical rejection of talking faces. It depends on who is talking, on camera angle, light, rythm and reason for using talking faces. What Avi Mograbi does, is that he innovates the documentary language by using talking masks, as his main character, the killing Israeli soldier, does not want to face the camera. Very intelligent trick that combined with his Brechtian musical element, himself singing comments to the soldier’s crime, makes the film into a universal essayistic wish for reflection.

Z32 runs in festivals all over, look out for it and if you are in Copenhagen, you can reach it at cph:dox.

http://www.dok-leipzig.de/v2/cms/en/home/index.html
http://www.cphdox.dk/d1/front.lasso

Of course, you have to be careful when you take a quote from the press office of a festival. Especially as you have not been able to follow the festival intensely because of other obligations. But I went to the festival centre at the new museum every day, met directors and other guests who I knew and they had a good time and were generally happy with the programme. As were the expected-to-be-critical students of the Zelig documentary school in Bolzano. So here comes the quote:

”Crowded cinemas, many international filmmakers and industry guests, lively discussions and a fantastic atmosphere all over the place were characteristical for the 51st edition of the International Leipzig Festival for Documentary and Animated Film. … Festival director Claas Danielsen anticipates a slight decline of audience numbers compared with last year’s 50th anniversary of DOK Leipzig (31.000 viewers). Happily, the number of German and international industry visitors has proved to be stable: Altogether, 1.400 accredited visitors from 49 countries (1.450 in 2007) have come to Leipzig in order to make use of both the manifold film programme and the DOK Industry offers.”

It is amazing what my younger friend Claas Danielsen has achieved in the few years he has been director of the festival. He has changed the festival from being sleeping nach der Wende to a modern international meeting point of high quality. Even if I had suggested Baltic and other films to him and his selection group, and they were wrong in not taking more from my list (!), I was not disappointed with the films I had time to watch in the superb digital video library.

Photo: Claas Danielsen with Al Maysles (left)

http://www.dok-leipzig.de/v2/cms/en/home/index.html

This monday the first documentary commissioned for the internet by Arte France starts its broadcast. ”Gaza Sdetor – Life in Spite of Everything” is an experimental 60 day interactive project by French documentary production company Bo Travail with Arte France and its web team.

Each day two short 2-minute films will be shown – one from Gaza (Palestine), one from Sderot (Israel), two neighbouring towns but divided by just a few kilometers and a border. The short films will be about life as experienced by the people who live in the separated towns and their daily survival. Under difficult living conditions and the threat of air attacks and bombings, people keep on working, loving and dreaming. Life in spite of everything.
The Palestinian team Ramattan Studios and the Israeli team Alma Films/Trabelsi Productions shoot and edit the two minute pieces each day and FTP them to Paris where subtitling and any final editing takes place. The films are then uploaded for broadcast each morning. Text written by Don Edkins, edited from

http://blogit.yle.fi/dokblog
http://gaza-sderot.arte.tv/