– with the subtitle: Real Life in Fake Cities.

I met Benoit at a café in Paris, in lively rue Montorgueuil. For a good long talk about Life, politics and Cinema. We know each other from way back, when he was a student at Zelig Documentary Film School in Bolzano. It was in February so no words about pandemic.

Benoit made a very succesful graduation film at Zelig, “Unifinished Italy” (2010) that travelled the world and won many awards for its originality in style and subject (“Italy, home of ruins: A foray into the unfinished, Italy’s most prominent architectural style between the end of WW2 and the present day.”). Now he lives in Paris, has a child, teaches film at a university and makes film.

He told me that his newest film, “The Real Thing – Real Life in Fake Cities”, where he worked (again) with colleagues from Zelig, Bastian Esser on camera and Philipp Griess as production manager, was invited to be screened at the Copenhagen Architecture Film Festival. Great, I said, we can meet and I can show you Copenhagen. The festival was scheduled for April/May but was postponed because of the pandemic – till now where the film will be shown at the festival on Saturday at the Danish Cinemateket. Sold out. And there has been a screening in Aarhus October1st.

As original as “Unfinished Italy”, with superb camerawork, this film has also toured all over – festivals like HotDocs, BAFF (Buenos Aires), Ambulante Mexico and as you can maybe see on the poster several broadcasters have picked it. Including arte. So he has reached an audience. Here is the director’s own film description from his website, link below: “The Real Thing is a journey into a copy of our world, Seeking the monumental copycat architecture of China and other countries around the world, Residential areas where people live an everyday life in places simulating other places… mirrors in which a certain image of the world is reflected…”

As written on this website Copenhagen Architecture Festival has a strong focus on films, so Benoit Felici is in good company with directors like Pedro Costa and Patricio Guzman.

The two websites are excellent, with photos, teasers, production notes – super-informative.

http://www.benoitfelici.com/?portfolio=archi-faux

http://therealthing.film/

”My headline is ordinary people”. Director Marc Isaacs is behind the camera skype-talking with his producer, who gives him the information that the broadcasters of today only want to give money for more commercial/sensational stories. Not ordinary people stories. Isaacs decides to make his film anyway, in his own home. The result is “The Filmmaker’s House” that premieres at the Sheffield Doc Fest in ten days, and later goes to IDFA in Amsterdam, where his film is in the Masters Section together with works of, among others, Viktor Kossakovsky, who years ago in a similar no funding situation made a film not in but from his house, “Tishe!” Don’t give up, don’t take no for an answer, just take your camera” as I heard Portuguese Pedro Costa say the other day.

 

No more name-dropping. I was happy to see “The Filmmaker’s House” and thought back on the director’s “All White in Barking” that was screened 2009 in Belgrade at the Magnificent7 Festival. Ordinary people. Words by me written for that film on that occasion: “…Multiculturalism and its problems… how do you treat this theme in a documentary. One answer you can find in this film of Marc Isaacs, who has a big respect for all his characters, which does not make him refrain from arguing with them from behind the camera. It is thematically a very important film, charming and funny as it is and about people, neighbours, the ones we never meet. Yes, it is very universal this debate-raising documentary that searches the nuances and goes for solutions, otherwise not present in the media.”

This could be used to describe ”The Filmmaker’s House” as well. Isaacs has the skills to be able to talk to people, to bring the extraordinary out of them. And to frame it in a story that has several layers. I found an interesting article/interview with the director, written by Carmen Gray. Here is a quote:

“Isaacs has been inspired by Algeria-born French philosopher Derrida, who in his writings drew a distinction between conditional hospitality and that of a much more radically open kind.

“Derrida’s Of Hospitality goes back to the Old Testament –  the story of Lot offering his daughters to strangers that arrive – and Islam, by which you’re supposed to give three nights of shelter to a stranger without even asking their name, who they are, or why they’ve come,” he (Isaacs, ed.) says. “There is this notion of absolute hospitality, because as soon as you ask somebody their name you have power over them. Of course, it’s related to property ownership. It’s interesting in regard to the homeless figure in my film. Maybe since he doesn’t have a house he’s the one who can offer ultimate hospitality, because he doesn’t have anything to protect.” 

(https://uk.lush.com/article/marc-isaacs-his-new-film-brexit-britain-and-radical-hospitality?fbclid=IwAR2sIJQxYPa_hEx4Id2H36qqGgM1F19A4Wd0Lidym6Zxzq073dNskb4GuTE,)

So, here is the house where the filmmaker lives. A nice house with a garden. The director behind the camera. There is a woman in the house. She (PHOTO) is from South America, she cleans. She just lost her mother but she does not want to go the funeral. A homeless man passes by. The director knows him, has visited him in the hospital. He asks if he can lie down on the couch for five minutes. The cleaning lady prepares the couch for him. Through the house passes two men, an older overweight and a younger, who assists him to take down high fences in the garden of the house to be replaced by lower ones that give a much more open look to the neighbour, a covered muslim woman, who enters the filmmaker’s house with lovely homemade food to offer to the two fence-workers, the cleaning lady, the homeless man who turns out to be from Bratislava, and the director, Jewish. She is not going to eat because of ramadan.

And things happen – the cleaning lady washes the feet of the homeless, who is also taken to have a bath, the big man doing the fence unpacks his huge sandwich, no thank you to what the muslim woman had brought, he is a dedicated fan of the football club Arsenal, wears a fan shirt and urges, as the other do, the homeless man to call his mother in Bratislava. He also tries to convince the cleaning lady to go to her mother’s funeral.

A lot happens, see for yourself – no spoilers – it’s about helping each other. Can we? Even if we want to? Sounds like a very banal film, it is not, it develops, it surprises, there are twists and turns, the filmmaker is there and is offered help from the cleaning lady, who wants him to get rid of tapes from a previous film that brings back memories to him that have been very hard to live with.

Intelligent film, playful, fun to watch, lovely characters, who are who they are – on the stage of the Real and Extraordinary Life.

http://www.marcisaacsfilms.com/main.html

No doubt, Gianfranco Rosi is one of the most interesting directors of our time. And a very good choice it is to make a retrospective of his films at the upcoming IDFA in Amsterdam. And according to tradition to have the director make his Top 10. Very appealing it is, click the IDFA link below and you will get the whole list.

Pleases me so much to see that Rosi also favours Robert Kramer’s 255 minutes long ”Route One/USA” that was quite an eye-opener for me, when I was at the celebration of the National Film Board’s 50 year anniversary in 1989 in Montréal. 

And Bunuel’s ”Los Olvidados”, and de Seta’s ”Banditi a Orgoloso”, watched decades ago at the Danish Film Museum – loves that Rosi also includes ”10 shorts by de Seca” from the 1950’es. They will for sure be on my list, when/if I can visit the festival (right now it does not look so good…).

Happy to see Susana de Sousa Dias ”48” on the list. The Portuguese director does not get the attention, she deserves for her amazing archive films. But – see link below – she has been an important director for the editors of this site. 

Final great words from Orwa Nyrabia, IDFA’s artistic director:  ”Rosi handles every shot like a jeweler would treat a unique pearl, with great care, patience, and with utmost respect, like a sacred object. Then he puts his pearls into a hidden thread, he keeps on examining the way they are ordered, the dialogue between each one of them and the others. What we see in the end is a film, a creature that seems so coherent you cannot see the thread anymore, you cannot imagine that a complex matrix of artistic choices was behind what you see, you even have to think: did he just find the film somewhere? Has it always been there, this way, on its own?”

The photo of a younger Rosi is taken from the catalogue of the Magnificent7 festival in Belgrade 2010, where Rosi came to present his ”Below Sea Level” in the Sava Centre in front of more than 1000 spectators.

http://www.filmkommentaren.dk/blog/blogpost/1938/ (About Works of Susana de Sousa Dias)

https://www.idfa.nl/en/article/134787/gianfranco-rosi-hoofdgast-op-idfa-2020

Contrary to colleague Allan Berg, who sat in jury with the Portuguese director in Bilbao in 2003, I have never met Pedro Costa.(See link below). I had hoped to do so last night at Cinemateket in Copenhagen, where he was announced to be present to introduce and talk about two of his films, ”Colossal Youth” and ”Vitalina Varela”. But he did not come for family reasons. Instead a young man from Cinemateket, Oscar Pedersen made a good introduction. Obviously he knows about Costa and his many films that are now being shown in Copenhagen. 8 films.

BUT – most important – I saw the two films, all together I was in the cinematic universe of Pedro Costa for almost 5 hours. Which was quite a unique experience. In the cinematic universe that he has created around Fontainhas, the now-vanished Lisbon neighbourhood that he first began chronicling over two decades ago. In the cinematic universe with non-professional actors. Vitalina Varela, who Costa met in connection with “Horse Money” (2014) is the protagonist in the film that carries her name – it’s her story (she came from Cap Verde to Lisbon to meet her husband but she came too late, the husband had died 3 days before her arrival) that is the starting point for the film and she is the one who has – so to say – made the script.

I know that because I decided to meet Pedro Costa virtually, where there are 

 

so many masterclasses with him and Q&A’s from festival screenings. In these (even if he refrains from being too specific about working methods) he tells that with Vitalina they made sometimes up to 40 takes to achieve precisely what was wanted. It was a collaboration. And when Costa is asked about the light and sound, he just says « It’s Work, we are four people on the set, and the actors, and we work, for years, we need time, I don’t understand how colleagues can live with only 5 weeks of shooting… » Words to that effect. Work… and he stresses how important it is for him to know everything about the people and the place, historically, sociologically, anthropologically. “It’s obnoxious to write a script to get funding and to have a sales agent to sell your film”. He is not a happy man when it comes to cinema today, he talks about John Ford, Mizoguchi, Godard, Jean-Marie Straub – and Wang Bing, with enthusiasm.

Back to “Vitalina Varela” that came out 2019 and has won awards. “Let me quote from the TIFF (Toronto) talks: Shot almost entirely at night, Vitalina Varela plays out as a series of burnished, painterly still lifes, its namesake monumentalized in stunningly static compositions that are at once expressionistically heightened and starkly beautiful in their austerity…”

Out of darkness come magnificent claire-obscure scenes. According to Collins claire-obscure is « the artistic distribution of light and dark masses in a picture”. I can’t find a better way to describe what I saw last night in a dark cinema in Cinemateket in Copenhagen.

Ventura is also in the two films from last night as is Vanda, Ventura is the father of Vanda in “Colossal Youth ». It’s difficult to get funding for my films, « they » say that it is the same film I want to make, in a way they are right, Costa says in one of the interviews – but this is my world. And my people with whom I am always in contact.

Go to youtube and search for Pedro Costa and you will find a lot of material. Search also for Vitalina Varela – there is a lovely 8 minutes long interview with her after she got the Best Actress Award at the Locarno FF.

Allan Bergs note/review of ”In Vanda’s Room” and ”Horse Money”: http://www.filmkommentaren.dk/blog/blogpost/4814/

There is an interview (by Daniel Kasman) with Costa to be recommended: https://mubi.com/notebook/posts/cinema-must-be-a-ritual-pedro-costa-discusses-vitalina-varela

The photos from the film are taken from there. 

There is only 4 hours drive from Vilnius in Lithuania to Riga in Latvia… but the pandemic prevented us to meet face to face for the conversation organised by the Baltic Sea Docs Zane Balcus during the event in the beginning of this month. But everything was – like the conversation with local producer Uldis Cekulis – recorded and now you have the chance to get acquainted with the documentary film poet Audrius Stonys and (some of) his work. Stonys is a constant inspiration when he talks about the background for the 7 films we picked for the conversation. Films like “Antigravitation”, “Uku Ukai”, “Flying over Blue Fields”, “Ramin”… and the latest work that he did with Kristine Briede, “Bridges of Time”. He mentions three directors who have inspired him, Jonas Mekas, Henrikas Sablevicius and Herz Frank. The latter “opens” the conversation – that lasts around 80 minutes and is introduced by Zane Balcus.

Here is the link: https://vimeo.com/463029306/e3924b411c

Photo: Agnese Zeltina.