Odense Film Festival

If you want a qualified overview of what has happened in Danish documentary, short fiction, animation and children film during the last year – you should go to the 23rd Odense Film Festival that takes place next week, August 19-24, in Odense. Yes, this is where Hans Christian Andersen was born.

The festival is competitive with a wide range of prizes to be given, not only for films from the national competition programme but also for an international competiton programme of short films.

The festival programme is rich, full of special sections, workshops and seminars, and has its own ambiance around the art cinema Café Biografen. Check it if you can with your own eyes, and if you can’t, go to the website, see below. Selectors for foreign festivals can catch important titles here.

As for documentaries in competition, several of them have already been reviewed on filmkommentaren – ”Purity Beats Everything”, ”Milosevic on Trial” , ”Forførerens Fald”, ”Being Frank”, ”Vesterbro” to mention a handful. You can click them all on this blog.

Later this week we intend to review some of the new films.

http://www.filmfestival.dk/Webnodes/en/Web/Top/Forside

Still: Milosevic On Trial in the national competition.

Redaktionen på ferie

Forleden hyldede vi os selv i anledning af ét års fødselsdagen for filmkommentaren. På skrift. Samme aften blev der sagt skål i Haut-Médoc og i Vecchia Romagna hjemtaget fra Italien. Det blev vådt og langt her i Allinge, hvor redaktionen holder ferie. Dagen efter var stille, meget stille, men i går begav vi os ud på den traditionelle tur på kyststierne fra Allinge til Gudhjem. Vi huskede det som en 2-3 timers tur. Det tog 4½ time før vi var fremme ved Café Klint og den saltstegte sild og fadbamserne!

Efter frokost ned til det vidunderlige museum for Oluf Høst. 10 år gammelt er museet, som er indrettet i huset, hvor maleren boede og skabte sine Bognemark-billeder. Vi drak kaffe i den smukke have og så filmen om Høst, som journalisten Rasmus Nielsen har lavet. Den har herlige gamle klip med maleren.

Hjem med bus, skøn mad og første del (af 15) af Fassbinders serie ”Berlin Alexanderplatz”. Fremragende. I en ny lækker boks med masser af bonusmateriale og i en såkaldt remastered version.

http://www.ohmus.dk/

www.secondsightfilms.co.uk

http://www.leksikon.org/art.php?n=3994

Foto: Vi er næsten fremme, lige før Gudhjem Havn..  

Happy Birthday / Tillykke

www.filmkommentaren.dk has today been alive and kicking for one year. What started as an idea in the head of Allan, has now become a regular “con amore” passion for the two of us. We are proud and happy to have experienced that after a year and without any substantial promotion, we now have between 450 and 550 computers that hit us every day.

We don´t know (most of) you but we hope you like the texts we offer you. In a year it has been around 300 – and we continue with the ambition to have one new text every day. Be it a review of a new or old (classic), be it reports from different parts of the world, be it the film political discussions we have tried to initiate in Danish. Big or small, personal or informative, we try to do what the newspapers and magazines don´t do. With a clear focus on documentaries.

Remember that you are welcome to take part in debates, comment on what we are writing or come up with texts to be published. In Danish or English.

Photo: TSM in his element, here a Zagreb masterclass..

Georg Misch: A Road to Mecca

… with the subtitle, The Journey of Muhammad Asad. Who was originally Leopold Weiss, Jewish, born in Austria, but converted to islam in the 1920’s and became, as said by a Palestinian on the West Bank, ”an enlightened Islamic thinker, a great scholar”, still today worshipped for his contribution to a modern understanding of the Quran, that he late in his life (he died in 1992) translated and interpreted in a way that made his version banned in many places.

The title of the film refers to his book about islam – and the subtitle to a book he wrote and to the structure of a film, that takes the viewer to the places where the cosmopolite Asad went: Saudi Arabia, Pakistan (he became the first UN representative of the country), USA, Morocco, Spain. The film crew meets people who knows about Asad or have met him, they interpret his importance, what he has meant for them, at the same time as the story of his life is told. He rode the camel, he lived with the bedouins, he helped the constitution of Pakistan to come to life, he talked against extremism, and had quite a different, non-militant interpretation of jihad.

A lot of respect for this well made thought provoking, rich and multi-layered film that must be a very useful and intelligent visual tool for debate in the world of today.

Austria, 2008, 92 mins.

www.mischief-films.com

Bazzoli/Lelong:Amour,Sexe & Mobylette

What a charming film, full of Life and Love! Taking place in a small town in Burkina Faso, it is built as a film for cinema release with several parallel stories circling around the St. Valentine´s Day. Old people´s love, young people´s love, a young man who suffers because she is far away – and a lot of opinions on love and sex, on polygamy, and on aids and circumcision.

These opinions are conveyed through local radio journalists and a photographer, who walks the town to ask questions about love and sex on behalf of the filmmakers. Who also follow heated discussions among the young ones or let childen present their love drawings in a school class.

If they are playing themselves or have been given a role in the film, or both – is not important as the whole tone of the film has an authentic feel of honest lightness and the characters come out to be open-hearted and minded. There is a respect for the subject and for the characters, that is very much represented in the old man, Jean-Marie, the fisherman, who opens the film and sets the action. Charisma and dignity. Not to forget to mention the music composed by the local master Yoni.

France/Germany, 2008, 92 mins.  

www.amoursexeetmobylette.com

www.cinedoc.fr

Lithuanian Classics

I write this in a summer house on Bornholm. On this island I met – for ten consecutive years – Henrikas Sablevicius, the godfather of the so-called poetic Lithuanian documentary. I never spoke directly to him (no English from his side, no Russian or Lithuanian from mine) but he was always there to defend the non-propagandistic documentary and his influence was enormous on the young filmmakers.

When in Vilnius a week ago I was given a dvd with four films, one of them by Sablevicius ”Trip throught a Brume Meadow” (1973, 10 mins.), an earlier one by R. Verba ”A hundred-Year-Old-Desires” (1969, 20 mins.) and two by the students of Sablevicius – ”Ten Minutes before the Flight of Ikaros” by Arunas Matelis (1990, 10  mins.) and ”World of the Blind” by Audrius Stonys (1992, 24 mins).

The two first films include some text that is not translated, the film of Matelis has subtitles, Stonys film is (almost) wordless.

All four films describe – in stunning 35 images and with composed music and with masterly use of sound – people and landscapes in that spiritual language that is Lithuanian documentary.

Sablevicius died a couple of years ago. He also introduced me to 999. Thanks.

www.documentary.lt Photo: Henrikas Sablevicius.

Masterpieces with Children

3 new photos on the title page of www.filmkommentaren.dk. All with children, all from masterpieces that have been written about:

From left “Ten Minutes Older” by Herz Frank (USSR/Latvia), “Before Flying Back to the Earth” by Arunas Matelis (Lithuania) and “Three Rooms of Melancholia” by Pirjo Honkasalo (Finland).  

Svetoslav Draganov: Tell me What is the Universe

A short piece of observation that was done by one of Bulgaria´s most talented young documentary directors – in connection with the shooting of a feature film by Stephan Komandarev.

The characters are extras from the film, the village is Sokolitsa in Bulgaria, where live also gypsies and people full of charismatic pocket philosophical wisdom. And faces that can suit any film, fiction or documentary.

There is casting, there is shooting of a scene in a camp, there is kissing and drinking, there is shooting of a scene with a white bearded priest, who the director catches up with to let him be the one that asks the fundamental question that became the title of this small, unpretentious fine film that should tour all festivals that look for films about people.

Bulgaria, 28 mins., 2007

www.cine-ma.com

HYPE The Obama Effect

Some documentaries get a lot of publicity even before they are ready to be seen. Not surprisingly a film about Barack Obama made by a producer, who is characterised as the direct opposite of Michael Moore, is talked about on the media right now. See for yourself the clips on the web site. The film comes out September 1. There are other kinds of documentaries than the creative, author driven that we normally write about on this blog…

http://www.hypemovie.com/index.html

Radovan Karadzic and BBC

Just a brief note on this day where Karadzic has been flown to the Hague Tribunal. Actually just a link to the BBC website where you can see not only yesterday’s images from the Belgrade protests against the catch of Karadzic, or the joy in the streets of Sarajevo, but also a brilliant small report from a BBC journalist from Sarajevo in 1992 or an interview with Karadzic from 1995.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7532281.stm