”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. 

PATRICIO GUZMÁN

by Tue Steen Müller

2010. Patricio Guzmán in Damascus. The great director behind the film historical classic The Battle of Chile from the beginning of the 1970’es met the audience of young wannabee filmmakers and older people, who remember the dramatic period where the government of Salvador Allende and ”la pouvoir populaire”, as the French speaking director put it, tried to unite the Left and introduce democracy in Chile. We all know how that went.

In 1973 Guzmán films The Battle of Chile, the 5-hour documentary on the end of Allende’s government. After the military coup, Guzmán is threatened to be executed and spends two weeks arrested inside the national stadium, unable to communicate his whereabouts to anyone. He leaves the country in November 1973. He lives in Cuba, Spain and then France, where he makes In the Name of God (Grand Prize, Festival of Popoli, 1987), The Southern Cross (Grand Prize, Festival Vue Sur les Docs, Marseille, 1992), Chile, Obstinate Memory (Grand Prize Festival of Tel Aviv, 1999), The Pinochet Case (International Critic’s Week, Cannes, 2002), and Salvador Allende(Official Selection, Cannes, 2004). In 2005, he makes My Jules Verne…

THE BATTLE OF CHILE

About The Battle of Chile Guzman in his Damascus address to the young filmmakers said that it is a film on words. It is a film on the quality of the politics of the people from the base – the working class. The five hour long film had an editing time of three years. Cuban film people came to watch at the editing room and said that they had never seen such a high political culture. The films deals with the period from 1970 and to the military coup and is about ”le pouvoir populaire”. Guzman referred to the East german political filmmakers, who were filming in Chile at the time, Heynowski & Scheumann, and told that their cameraman filmed the bombing of the presidential palace, whereas Pedro Chaskel, the editor of Guzman, filmed the flight over the palace. The two teams exchanged footage… (for buying dvd’s of the films, consult the site of Guzman).

The attack on La Moneda was watched by Salvador Allende surrounded by his guards and is a iconic scene in Guzman’s film. “How could a team of five – some with no previous film experience – working with one Éclair camera, one Nagra sound recorder, two vehicles and a package of black-and-white film stock sent to them by the French documentarian Chris Marker produce a work of this magnitude?” (Pauline Kael in The New Yorker).

NOSTALGIA FOR THE LIGHT

In an article to be read on the website of the BFI, 2012, critic Geoff Andrew writes: “A couple of years ago, at the Cannes Film Festival, I fell in love. The object of my affections was a film – Nostalgia for the Light (Nostalgia de la luz), by Patricio Guzmán, the exiled Chilean documentarist famous for the three-part 1970s epic The Battle of Chile (La batalla de Chile) – and my desire was to programme it in an extended run at BFI Southbank. It took a while, but my dream came true, thanks to the UK distributor New Wave Films; not only that, but we’re accompanying the run with a retrospective of Guzmán’s earlier work and welcoming the director on-stage for an interview with the season’s curator, Michael Chanan. What, you may ask, were the characteristics that gave rise to this love at first sight? My first response, admittedly somewhat predictably, would be beauty; visually, Nostalgia for the Light is quite wonderful to behold. But rest assured that its beauty is more than skin-deep; it is notable for its quiet, deeply compassionate humanity. Still, many films are beautiful, and I don’t fall in love with each and every one of them. The real reason for my ardour, I suspect, was the fact that the film stood out from the crowd, from its mysterious opening scene to its profoundly moving ending; in short, it immediately struck me as unique. That’s extremely rare in an artform as genre-oriented as the cinema. And what more could one possibly ask of a love-object?…

Guzmán is often considered as a political filmmaker but in connection with the release of Nostalgia for the Light he writes: “I’m not a sociologist. Neither am I a politician. I make films that are metaphorical and poetic; I interpret reality through my own personal way of looking”…”

The opening of film festivals is something that veterans like me normally avoid because of boring official speeches and/or a moderator trying to be funny and/or blonds or brunettes in high heels being there for their looks, knowing nothing about what the film festival is there for.

In Leipzig 2012 it was different because of the ambition of the festival director to make a long and reflective and personal statement. The year before Claas Danielsen attacked television for their poor programming and funding of the creative/artistic documentary and this year he had chosen a more soft approach asking the audience “to see and hear with the heart” – and act. The emotional speech was given with passion, commitment and point of view. He referred to strong films in the programme and the debate they raise – Danish Armadillo and Into Eternity were the ones mentioned. Names coming up were Sarkozy and Gert Wilders… in connection with the profiling of the festival programme that has a lot of political films as well as films touching upon the xenophobia of today´s Europe.

An opening night that continued in an atmosphere of seriousness and dignity by the showing of Patricio Guzmán’s masterpiece Nostalgia for the Light. Like Joris Ivens did in China with his last film, L´Histoire du Vent, where he placed himself in the open land desert. Guzman goes to Atacama desert in his native country to visit the astronomical observatories, to examine the light with the aim to make an essay on the past and on memories. An intelligent reflection, total beauty in camerawork and touching when he meets women, who look for the remains of the dear ones, killed an buried during and by the Pinochet regime. A woman tells how she found the foot of her brother, the foot with the sock, and his teeth forming a smile that she remembered.

Under arkitekturfestivalen i Kødenhavn CAFx 2020 vises i Cinemateket tre af Patricio Guzmáns film som en trilogi:

Lysets Nostalgi (2010) / 12. oktober kl 14:15 

Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j6VDlxFYmKg

Perlemorsknappen (2015) / 11. oktober kl 14:00

Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pPnbCuGKohU

The Cordillera of Dreams (2019) / Dansk premiere / 12. oktober kl 16:45

Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DpMbsXuQs7Q