The fourth film to be shown at the unique festival in Belgrade, starting this coming saturday, under the subtitle “European feature documentaries”, organised by Svetlana and Zoran Popovic and their team, and with me taking part in the selection is

WORLDSTAR

A young German author, impressed by photographs of a Czech photographer, goes with his friend’s recommendation to visit him. She was welcomed with a combination of the worst rude words. So it all began. This is a film about an old man with no needs and a remarkable past, facing the hype as an artist against his will. There isn’t any important city in the world where his unusual work hasn’t been exibhited. In this very moment some of the leading metropolis’ galleries are exhibiting, for amazed visitors, the photographs taken with the strangest camera ever made. But, while in the art circles worldwide his photos cost up to 12 000 Euros, Miroslav Tichý lives alone in an old, waste house, isolated from the world, surrounded with only a few friends. “They should have come earlier, now it’s too late.” – he said refusing to talk about the fame. The German director Nataša von Kopp discovers for us the new “Tichý Ocean” in the middle of Europe in the begining of 21st century.

www.worldstar.sleeping-tiger.com

MY WORDS: “What a character! He is around 80 years old, and there he sits, Miroslav Tichý, a brilliant photographer, who does not want to take part in all the fuss around him being a génial artist. The gallery owners and the art critics come to his room, where he sits drinking his beer and slivovica, they ask him all kind of clever questions to his work. He doesn’t give a damn. The young female filmmakers, however, have succeeded to be there and to make him talk to them, and thus to us. Thanks to that, it’s great fun to be with him. This film is full of talent!”

More about film and festival at

www.magnificent7festival.org

The third film to be shown at the unique festival in Belgrade, starting this coming saturday, under the subtitle “European feature documentaries”, organised by Svetlana and Zoran Popovic and their team, and with me taking part in the selection is

A FATHER’S MUSIC

The unusual father-son adventure. The film author, son of a famous conductor of East Berlin State Orchestra, Otmar Suitner, tries to relive and regain the important and missing moments of his own childhood. He invites his father on a journey through time and space. In this brilliant musical and film search, like in a symphony, all the important themes are being discussed: the successful career of a great conductor, personal view of music and family memories through a prism of irony regarding recent German history. A surprisingly open dialog between father and son reveals the unusual craft of balancing through life – between Communists and West, between personal life and career, between a wife and a mistress. Under the guidance of two great masters, the musician and the filmmaker, father and son, in the rhytm of fusion of the perfect shots and lavishing, exciting music, we enjoy in this fascinating revelation of time, people, beauty and love. The film has been screened and awarded at big festivals, such as Leipzig, Lisbon, Montreal and in Museum of Modern Arts in New York. This is the best documentary film in Germany in 2007.

www.nachdermusik.de

MY WORDS: “There is this moving family photo of a big man holding the hand of a boy walking away from the camera to somewhere. Father and son who were never really father and son, as the son lived with his mother in the West and the father lived with his wife in the East as renowned and tributed conductor of music. The film is a voyage back in time with father and son (and the two women). It’s without pretentions, full of humour and the son’s ambition to make the father conduct just one more time. Silent beauty, stylistically perfect film and wonderful music!”

More about festival and credits of film at

www.magnificent7festival.org

… for feature length European documentaries

For the fourth time I have had the privilege to select film for this unique festival together with the two organisers Svetlana and Zoran Popovic

THE MOSQUITO PROBLEM AND OTHER STORIES

Made in a Fellini spirit, this structurally unusual film develops before us a gallery of strange characters and even stranger stories. A little town, somewhere in Bulgaria, is under attacks of mosquito swarms and everyone is forced to defend himself in his own way. And just about when you think that their problems are huge and almost unberable, the emence “ghosts” start to emerge from the darkness like in a thriller or a horror movie. Followed by piano sounds and dishevelled narrator, near the rusty cranes, along with cheerleaders’ singing and in the shadow of a mountain big phantom nuclear power plant, through the waste island of horror, where the cows and sheep walk and the gigantic buzzing mosquitos bring with their stings the destinies of our heroes closer together. A whole little world which is currently converted by ideologies, regimes and dreams of economical prosperity.

MY WORDS: “Have you ever heard of Belene, a town in Bulgaria? No, I suppose you haven’t. And you maybe never really wanted to… Nevertheless, having seen this witty and at the same time mind-provoking film, you will say, yes I have met people from Belene, who are eccentric and charming and who share their thoughts on life in a town which suffers an almost year-round mosquito infestation. It’s not only a beauty in human approach, it is also innovative in a dramaturgical structure.”

More about the film and the festival at

http://www.magnificent7festival.org/selekcija/the_mosquito_problem.htm

This is the fourth edition of a unique festival of only 7 films but with a huge audience and a warm support from its visitors. It is organised by Svetlana and Zoran Popovic and their team, and I have had the privilige to select films for the festival together with the couple. During this week – up to the start of the festival January 26, I will infom about what we think are magificent films.

NOMADAK TX

Content: A film which takes us on a journey all around the planet in a fantastic rhytm of images and primary sound of a unique archaic instrument – txalaparta. Just like in fairy tales, this journey begins when two young Basque men, musicians Harkaitz Martinez and Igor Otxoa, inspire life to simple pieces of wood.

The uniqueness of txalaparta is that it has to be played by two people and the music is made through a dialog of two musicians. They expand the dialog and spread it around the world – from India to Lapland, through Mongolian plains and Africa. In search of new sounds they go through icy wastelands, Siberian mountains, burning hot deserts. During this great adventure the leading characters meet musicians of various cultures and they join their celebration of sound.

www.nomadaktx.com

My comments: “At the first glance you might think that this is just another politically correct film – and then you discover that these young, charming music talented guys are able to establish more than just a superficial contact with people from al over th world. It’s music, it’s culture clash and diversity, it’s a dream of a better world that is conveyed to us.”

More about the film and credits to be found at www.magnificent7festival.org

Following the example of last year’s festival, the international and national competitions are now open to fiction films as documentaries. We said it last year and we repeat it again today: it is not a question of creating a sterile contrast between the true and the made up, but instead of appreciating a film as a producer of meaning, of truth, of intelligence and of our world. We can never have enough of that.

Jean-Pierre Rehm

– who is the director of the festival in Marseilles: http://www.fidmarseille.org/