Last day of festival. I have a seminar in the morning where I present the state of the art of documentary in Europe. I am trying to find the right approach to the audience which includes people, who come because they are interested in culture in general, experienced filmmakers and younger people who want to work with the media.

Plus a couple of foreigners. I talk about the decline of documentary in television, about the golden age in festivals and on the internet – and show some clips that have these magical moments that you can only catch if you are very well prepared, and have a good portion of luck. As had Sergey Dvortsevoy when he made his diploma film from Kazahkstan, ”Happiness”. From there to the staged documentary, to the documentary where the filmmaker is present in his film (master example: Nick Broomfield) and to the docu-comedy. So much to talk about during three hours. Hope I gave the 35 people in the theatre some food for thought.

In the afternoon I saw two films by Lebanese director Maher Abi Samra, who has studied in Paris at the INA and who won the first prize in Leipzig 2007 for his short film, ”Merely a Smell”. Here he also showed ”Shatila Round-About” from 2004, which is a filmic visit to the Palestinian refugee camp that was subject to a massacre from the Israeli and the Falangist side in 1982, and since then was one of the locations for the ”Guerre des Camps” where Arafat and Assad, to put it simple, were battling to gain the power over the Palestinians.

Samra, however, has not made a political film but puts his focus on the human side. He observes some characters, who just hang around without anything to do, they sit on these ugly white plastic chairs that flood the world, they tell their stories, they express their wishes for a future that is more than insecure, they can leave the camp (8-10000 live there) if they wish but as the director said to me: they are mentally totally linked to this spot.

As a spectator you get a very strong impression of what it means to live here, in slum, a boring life, as one says, with the television running constantly in the background. With some tourists occasionally passing by with the camera. A life based on memories.

The evening comes. ”The Shutka Book of Records” gets the audience Prize, money and a small sculpture, the audience shouts ”Bravo DOXBOX”, I can only agree and express a big applause for this new festival that now travels to two other cities in Syria. To mission for the art of documentary.

It all ends with the magnificent film ”Santiago” by Brasilian Joao Moreira Salles. It will be dealt with in a review on this site. So this Diary 6 is all from Damascus from my side.  

Sometimes, actually very often, reality cheats you, or in this case the weather! While I was in safe surroundings inside the Al Kindi cinema to a session about ethics and documentaries, about the relation between the filmmaker and the person being filmed, about the relation between the filmmaker and the society, not that easy an question in a country like Syria – my wife was fighting with a sandstorm in the desert.

During the session in the cinema I got a text message that she and her companion on the excursion had sought refuge at Red Cross in the desert of Palmyra. I got a bit chocked at least for the moment it took before the next message arrived: Evacuated to a brilliant Arabic restaurant! What a tour, someone had forgotten to check the weather forecast and there they were in the middle of a sandstorm.

She is back in the hotel with sand all over and we are getting ready to go to the cinema to see if the audience is still loyal to the DOXBOX festival. Tonight the programme will be ”The Monastery” by Pernille Rose, ”Salvador Allende” by Patricio Guzman, ”Seeds” by Wojciech Kasperski and ”Belovs” by Viktor Kossakovski. Quality programme. And quality hospitality in a country where there are many eyes watching what you are doing. 

Still: Jørgen Laursen Vig (by Frej Pries Schmedes)  

It is monday morning and once again I find myself with Pirjo Honkasalo and Niels Pagh Andersen, who are to talk about ”3 Rooms of Melancholia”. For four hours with 25 people in the hall. It goes very well, we manage to relate to the audience – Niels invites us with his gesticulating, competent, open-minded generosity to the world of editing a material that has a very small ratio (1:7 at the highest) and Pirjo sits there full of professional dignity. A film director from a generation where you make films when you have something to say. She shoots on film and she pushes the button when her intuition and the situation invites her to do so.

Later in the afternoon I saw the first prize winner of Leipzig 2007, ”Don´t Get me Wrong”, a Romanian film by Adina Pintilie. Shot in a psychiatric hospital the director has chosen a mere observational approach to the patients, which makes you feel pity for them but also highly embarrassed as the director has no voice, no point of view. We are invited to a peep show to watch grown up naked people having their diapers changed again and again. It crossed my border of what you can film, when the people being filmed do not know that they are being filmed.

One of the Arab Film Institute films showed talent: ”Bird of Stone” by Hazem Hamwi. It is a film – as Niels Pagh Andersen said – with a visual power and an ambition to question what is normality. The main character is Abu Hajar, a man who is barking like a dog when people ask him to do so, a man who takes his own way in life and literally when he walks in the desert or in the modern machinery world, where the filmmaker takes him. The interviews with him shows a philosopher in life, whereas the people talking about him, situated at the end of a corridor, like they were taken in for questioning, well they represent our tendency to talk about other people, especially those who are a bit different. A film that can travel!

Finally the darling of the festival so far, a full house saw Aleksandar Manic ”The Shutka Book of Records” from 2005. They loved it as did my blog-colleague Allan Berg when he was in the jury in Slovenia a couple of years ago and gave Manic a prize for this highly entertaining documentary from the Roma capital in Macedonia.

No, they don’t know it or them, says Orwa Nyrabia, one of the DOX BOX organisers, when I doubt him stating that the audience to the seminar of French academic Martin Barbier, ”Back to Basics”, had never heard about ”Nanook of the North” or its director Robert Flaherty.

DOXBOX has thus not only an actual role to play by presenting new films, it also wants to educate an audience and invite them to know about the history of documentary film.

Barbier served that purpose when he talked about sound and documentary and showed clips from all the classics, especially from a French point of view. Among others the wonderful Clouzot film about Picasso, which is available in all Fnac shops in France. And Alain Resnais and Chris Marker.

After the screening I asked a couple of young Syrians if they learned anything. One of them answered immediately: Yes, Nazis suck… She referred to the clip from Leni Riefenstahl ”Olympia” and to the last clip from Claude Lanzmann´s ”Shoah”!

In the afternoon one more look at ”3 Rooms of Melancholia” by Pirjo Honkasalo. I have seen it several times and yet it makes a big impression one more time. There are not many documentary filmmakers like Pirjo with such a humanistic commitment and such a courage to do a different and much more poignant narrative. She makes the rest of the documentariands look like pedestrians.

Read more at: www.millenniumfilm.fi/2004_melancholia.html

Full house for the film of Omar Amiralay from 1982, ”The Misfortune of Some”, produced for the French channel Antenne 2, during the Lebanese war. Amiralay is the Syrian documentary filmmaker, his films have been shown all over the world, he is the role model for the young Syrian filmmakers and now also active at the Arab Film Institute, the film school in Amman.

I am told that 5 of his films are banned in Syria and that he was not allowed by the authorities to introduce or discuss the film that I saw – even if he was there in the hall to support the organisers of the festival by his mere presence. Respect! The film is first of all a portrait of total turmoil, the French (sub)title being ”Un homme dans la tourmente”. This man is a charismatic and extremely funny round figure, who is a taxi driver and turns into a kind of undertaker during the film and the events it is covering.

We get to learn about his relationship to women and about many other common daily issues in the world. We see the bombed Beirut, and stylistical breaks to this main character, among other things there is a scene with a group of people (a big family?) that watch television. Underlined with a sound score that gives the absurdity of it all.

A discovery for me, and Arab neo-classic, would like another view with someone giving me some background of historical nature. … and then a revisit to Werner Herzog with ”Lessons of Darkness”, what a masterpiece. More about the festival, already now a success in terms of audience: www.dox-box.org

This is a small report from the first day of the new DOX BOX documentary festival in Damascus. At the opening yesterday there was full house in at the Al Kindi Film Theatre, where the DOX BOX team, headed by Diana El Jeiroudi and Orwa Nyrabia welcomed the flight-delayed foreign guests – and first of all a full house of an audience, that watched the classic “Light & Shadows” by Omar Amiralay, Mohammad Malas and Ossama Mohammad from 1994, followed by Pirjo Honkasalo´s “3 Rooms of Melancholia”, that will be subject to a masterclass, where the Finnish director will be accompanied by Danish editor Niels Pagh Andersen.

The atmosphere is all very generous and full of hospitality, the catalogue is fine, the organisers are nervous, it is as it should be for a first edition of a long awaited festival in a country where the tradition for documentaries is not really existant.

For the Danish readers – the Danish Institute in the soukh of Damascus is exactly so beautiful as the rumours had announced. The Institute supports the festival and we are several who think about projects that would qualify one to stay in the historical building so wonderfully kept with courtyards that are second to none when it comes to beauty.

The film programme starts in a while: Nicholas Philibert, two Arabic documentaries that I will write about, Herzog with his “Lessons of Darkness” and Remunda´s “Czech Dream”. Cross fingers for audience!