Patricio Guzmán: The Cordillera of Dreams

He speaks slowly. With a calm voice. The totally mastered personal text of Patricio Guzmán takes the viewer back to the Chile that he left after the coup d’état in 1973. All his films, he mentions in this third part of a trilogy (Nostalgia for the Light and The Pearl Button are the two first) deals with his beloved country. This time with the „Cordillera de los Andes” as the metaphoric background – with stunningly beautiful images of the mountains, the rocks with or without snow, a wall as he says, a mystery as one of his interviewes says, where stories are hidden; history, the traumatic past of a country that is still suffering from the dictatorship of Pinochet.

 

“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”… Guzman has said in connection with the trilogy. A documentary essayist as was Chris Marker, who helped Guzman to get negative material to continue filming what became “The Battle of Chile” (Below a link for the cinephiles, an article where Guzman tells about his relationship to Marker, quite a story about the generosity of the latter!).

Back to the film and the Cordillera that takes up 80% of Chile, from North to South. The Cordillera that turns its back to Santiago, the city where the 79 year old director was born. He takes us to the house where he was born, the facade is intact, the rest is a ruin. And he takes us to the house, where he and his colleagues met in the morning before they went to the streets to film for “The Battle of Chile”.

He remembers his days in the stadium, where Chile, some days before it became the place, where political opponents were taken by Pinochet and his thugs before thousands of them disappeared, had played football against Italy. And he goes to the empty skyscraper, where Pinochet and his people implemented the neoliberal economy – Milton Friedman was his advisor – that still reigns the country. The Cordillera is now mostly on foreign hands!

Guzmán talks to sculptors, a volcanologist who have lovely descriptions of their relationship to the Codillera as well as persons who analyses the political and economical situation of Chile today. But first and foremost he visits Pablo Salas, journalist and documentarian.

He stayed, I fled. He filmed (from the beginning of the 1980es) here, I made my films from a distance, Guzmán says with his mournful voice. Salas shows clips from his video library, demonstrations, brutality, water canons, tear gas, arrests, clubs hitting the demonstrators. But there was so much that was not filmed, says Salas referring to the concentration camps, the torture chambers etc.

It is a divided country, says Salas, so many live from the copper. Anyhow, the two – Salas and Guzmán – have hopes for the future, at least film-wise, «there are so many young film directors who document and interpret what is happening». Guzmán ends his film wishing that Chile could come back to its (his) childhood and joy. 

Chile, 2019, 86 mins.

http://www.filmkommentaren.dk/blog/blogpost/4821/ – more about Guzmán on this site.

And there are several masterclasses with Patricio Guzmán, just google.

https://chrismarker.org/chris-marker-2/patricio-guzman-what-i-owe-to-chris-marker/

https://vimeo.com/278586384 (a vimeo, one and a half hour with Pablo Salas)

ZagrebDox Special Edition/ Awards

When you say A, you also have to say B. So here comes an edited versión of the press release of the ZagrebDox Special edition concerning, who were the lucky winners at the festival that ended last night:

In international competition the jury consisted of the award-winning Croatian documentary filmmaker Goran Dević, the Slovenian director, producer, teacher, artistic director and Makedox programmer Petra Seliškar, and the Czech director and photographer Anna Kryvenko. The main festival award, the Big Stamp, went to the film Froth (PHOTO) by Ilya Povolotskiy. “In a selection of 17 films, the jury was attracted by the minimalist portrayal of an isolated community in the direct film tradition. The director managed to discover the place and its history in today’s scenes of Murmansk,” said the jury. The special mention in this category went to the film Exemplary Behaviour by Audrius Mickevičius and Nerijus Milerius, with the following statement: “For an exceptional and dramatic personal approach to saying goodbye, collective revenge and systematic punishment turning a real life story into cinematic meditation. This film helps us understand the logic of the prison system, as well as people going through it, their lives, families and stories. The director himself faces issues with the system and has to find a way to come to terms with it.”

The Croatian journalist and editor Dean Šoša, the Italian set designer and 

 

director Valentina Primavera and the film producer and artistic director of Trieste Film Festival Nicoletta Romeo are the members of this year’s regional jury, which gave the Big Stamp to the film Acasa, My Home by Radu Ciorniciuc. “A sober portrayal of the troubles of the oppressed class without any embellishment, rhetoric or moral judgment, following the taxing and intimate journey of a big Romanian family from the wilderness of the Danube delta to the big city, from an idyllic natural landscape to the civilisation and possibility for a better future, at least for younger generations,” said the jury. A special mention went to the Croatian film One of Us by Đuro Gavran. “A narrative documentary demonstrating empathetic closeness with the protagonists, a group of friends whose 15th prom anniversary unmasks a brutal discovery, a coming-of-age story about monsters from the past and a new, wiser outlook on life,” said the jury statement.

ZagrebDox also awards the Small Stamp, an award to the filmmaker up to 35 years of age. This year the Young Jury consisted of the Dutch director and producer John Appel, the Belgrade-based editor, director and screenwriter Jelena Maksimović, and the Mediterranean Film Festival Split director and Cinema Network president Alen Munitić. The Small Stamp this year went to Radu Ciorniciuc, the director of Acasa, My Home, “for a powerful directorial debut opening up important questions about the modern world and speaking about a family who have to give up their home in the wilderness and integrate with the society in a unique, plausible and emotional way,” said the jury. A special mention in this category went to Ilya Povolotskiy, the director of Froth, “for an exceptional cinematic language bringing us close to people and their daily struggle on the shores of the Barents Sea.”

The My Generation Award, presented by the founder and director of ZagrebDox Nenad Puhovski to a filmmaker of his generation, went to the American Oscar winner Alex Gibney, whose latest film Citizen K was screened in The Best of the Rest section. 

The award of the International Film Critics’ Federation FIPRESCI, decided by the Macedonian film critic, writer and Kinenova festival programme director Igor Angjelkov, the Croatian film critic Marijana Jakovljević and the Latvian film critic Zane Balčus, went to the film Acasa, My Home by Radu Ciorniciuc. “For a film tackling many contemporary social issues: what kind of lifestyle to choose, what place to call home, how to adapt to new circumstances. Exploring these issues, the filmmakers open up space for the audience to think and form their own opinion. From a long observational process we are presented with a powerful story immersing us into the lives of the protagonists and giving us access to the key moments, highlighting emotional connection,” said the jury.

www.zagrebdox.net

I Pledge

Directed by Nikola Dragovic & Milutin Petrovic. Based primarily on VHS-tapes recorded by Predrag Bata Miloševic with Igor Dikic (Goga) as the protagonist.

A soldier’s story. Could be anywhere, any soldier. A young man’s story. Seen from today, 30 years later. Universal when you think about the film as I did after two screenings. Because even if I have been visiting Serbia once a year during the last 15-16 years, and have heard about/seen films about the end of Yugoslavia and the war and conflicts, there are many details referring to battles and geography that I know too little about. And yet I would argue that this is a universal human story. For you to know before reading this positive review…

 

Positive because it is well constructed and emotional, because it shows the crazyness of war and what – in this case – a young man of 19 years drafted for the Yugoslav National Army in 1990 had to go through.

The scoop is that his uncle , who presents himself in the film, Predrag Bata Miloševic, is a dedicated cameraman, who filmed Goga when he was drafted for the army. Actually before that very day… 

The film starts with footage of the whole family saying goodbye to the young man, what a party, he gets (sorry for my French) pissed and the scenes are full of this strange atmosphere of not knowing what will happen; including worry as does the mother shows so clearly – she is a very important person in the film.

The cameraman, he is called Bata, follows him and the family to the ceremony, where the soldiers give their pledge to the nation and the flag…

30 years later Goga sits in his armchair looking at himself – as does his mother. They comment on what was filmed then AND what was filmed in 1992, again in an interview with Bata, after he had served the army for three years. That’s where the horror stories start. He was in Varazdin in the Republic of Croatia, where the Yugoslav National Army had bases and where they got into battles with the Croats at the time, where the neighbouring country Slovenia close to Varazdin had already declared their independence from Yugoslavia. Goga tells what happened, how he and others got out, how others had surrendered, how he got back to Belgrade, was accused of being a traitor, beaten up and sent back to army duty– and how he suffered, when it was all over and he was back with the family. Nightmares – he stuttered when he came back, says the mother.

In the film Goga goes back to the barracks and to Varazdin and meets with a Bosnian lieutenant who was the only one taking care of the soldiers – «the kids» as Radimir Cacic says in the film (Wikipedia: In the Battle of the Barracks, Cacic led the September 1991 negotiations with the Yugoslav People’s Army to abandon the Varadin barracks). 

How do you see the young man (himself) on the tapes 30 years ago? «He is lost», Goga says. And he is not the only one, the only soldier who has gone through horrible times. But not many have an uncle, who has followed along with a camera. It is amazing material put together in a fine way – pacifistic , mingling the story with absurd Yugoslav army propaganda films to stress the absurdity.

Serbia, 2020, 86 mins.

Giedrė Žickytė: The Jump

As you can see from the photo of the flyer, the new film by Lithuanian director – and producer – Giedrė ickytė premiered yesterday at the important Warsaw Film Festival, with three more screenings. Go if you happen to be in the Polish capital. It is the first stop of a long festival career (next one is Roma Film Festival), I am sure. And she deserves that, Giedrė ickytė, I can say so having followed the film for the years it has been on its way. I just read how Davide Abbatescianni introduced the film in Cineuropa, a very fine introduction with no spoilers, link for the whole article below:

”It’s Thanksgiving Day, 1970. The US Coast Guard sets out to meet a Soviet vessel anchored just off the shore of Martha’s Vineyard. A one-day conference between the two nations has been set to discuss fishing rights in the Atlantic Ocean. While the talks are in full swing, Lithuanian sailor Simas Kudirka jumps across the icy water onto the American boat in a frantic bid for freedom. To his horror, and to the outcry of the world media, the Americans return him to the Soviets and he is tried for treason. The event sets off a series of protests throughout the USA begging for his freedom and all hope seems lost, until new information about Simas’s citizenship surfaces.”

On the flyer the film is launched as “a cold war thriller”, which it is, but it is much more than an ordinary Netflix film with the two super-powers… I am biased as I have seen material and versions several times – and what has amazed me from the very start is the warm and humorous angle with which the director connects to the lively and lovely protagonist, the once young and now old Simas, whose story is second-to-none. It’s about politics way back in the 70’es without minimizing the humanistic approach from both Simas and the American sailors, who had to ”return him to the Soviets”, as written above. And those helping him, Lithuanians in America.

Giedrė ickytė, producer herself and her Latvian producer Uldis Cekulis, and many many others deserve a thank you for never giving up, when it comes to get access to (and pay for!) archive material and people who remember, like Henry Kissinger, a scoop to have him on camera, and on archive at the funeral of President Gerald Ford.

The Jump. The old man goes to have a swim. He walks along the bathing pier, puts his hand into the lake to feel the temperature, stands up and jumps. Beatiful metaphoric beginning and it comes back at the end, where he gets up from the water and goes to his house. He watches the American film based on his life (Alan Arkin as him), ”it’s very American in style”, he says. The film of Giedrė ickytė in much closer to the tradition of Baltic documentary. Thanks for that!

Lithuania, 2020, 85 mins.

https://cineuropa.org/en/newsdetail/393414/

http://www.moonmakers.lt

Benoit Felici: The Real Thing

– 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/

Marc Isaacs: The Filmmaker’s House

”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

Gianfranco Rosi at IDFA

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

ZagrebDox Special Edition

This is a copy-paste of a text from the website of ZagrebDox festival that started LIVE (with online possibilities given as well). The 16 films mentioned below are in the international competition. More than half of them have been reviewed and/or noticed on this site. So, here you go:

A special edition of the International Documentary Film Festival ZagrebDox takes place from 4 to 11 October at the SC Cinema and &TD Theatre of the Zagreb Student Centre, with around fifty recent documentary titles. ZagrebDox PRO, the festival’s training programme, was largely held in March online. October gives us a chance to present these fifty titles to a live audience.

The film The Cave by Feras Fayyad has so far won around 15 prestigious international awards, including an Oscar nomination, Critics’ Choice Award and the IDA Award, award for the most valuable documentary of the year and recently two Emmys for creative art. it is a story about the Syrian war from the point of view of doctor Amari Ballour, who runs an impromptu hospital in a cave. The winner of the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA), the film In a Whisper by the duo Heidi Hassan and Patricia Pérez Fernández is a story about a friendship overcoming geographic vastness, and IDFA’s winner in the medium-length section, Anticlockwise by Iranian 

 

director Jalal Vafaei is a touching portrayal of the filmmaker’s family confronting the oppressive Iranian regime. The same festival gave the best director award to the Iranian film veteran Mehrdad Oskouei for the shocking film Sunless Shadows, about the fate of five young Iranian women sentenced over killing their abusive husbands and fathers. A special mention at the last IDFA went to another film from ZagrebDox’s international competition, Froth, a debut film by the young Russian director Ilya Povolotsky, an impeccable study of a small eclectic community of ‘subpolar cowboys’ living in a semi-abandoned town along the hostile shores of the Barents Sea. The grand prix winner at CPH:DOX, Ridge by John Skrog, called by the jury statement the contemporary Swedish version of Tarkovsky, by way of a minute and skilful use of film language conveys the impressions of Scandinavian summer leisure. The Polish film Wind. A Documentary Thriller (PHOTO) by Michał Bielawski, the winner of the MDR Award for the best Eastern European film at DOK Leipzig, uses suspense to evolve into an impressive cinematic symphony on the unpredictable and destructive wind blowing several times a year in the Polish region of Podhale.

Exemplary behaviour by Audrius Mickevičius and Nerijus Milerius, the winner at DOK Leipzig, questions the notions of crime, justice and forgiveness in a story about the inmates at the Latvian Lukiškės prison. The Swedish director Mikel Cee Karlsson in the film Fraemling is trying to clarify the destiny of his best friend, gradually unmasking his strange hidden life. Using documentary footage, interviews and re-enactment, the author creates a story about the thin line between the victim and guilt. The controversial Israeli lawyer Lea Tsemel, known for her fearless and passionate fight for the rights of Palestinian political prisoners, is in the focus of the film Advocate, which earned the directorial duo Rachel Leah Jones and Phillippe Bellaiche a dozen awards at renowned festivals and got them shortlisted for an Oscar nomination. The young American director Luke Lorentzen in his new documentary Midnight Family, winning around twenty awards all over the world including the best cinematography at Sundance, joins a Mexican family on frenetic, turbulent night rides across the streets of Mexico City. Filmed in a cinema verité style, the film follows a private family ambulance service unmasking the fatal flaws of the state health system. A special mention at Sundance went to the film The Painter and the Thief by Benjamin Ree, a tender heart-warming story which, skilfully avoiding sentimentalism, depicts an unusual friendship between the protagonists. With an award from the Locarno festival, arriving to Zagreb will be 143 Sahara Street by Hassen Ferhani, an intimate and evocative documentary about a small café in the middle of the Sahara desert. The notorious Brussels neighbourhood of Molenbeek, known for suicide bomber attacks and police patrols, is the scene of the film Gods of Molenbeek by the Finnish director Reetta Huhtanen, through the eyes of two boys hailing from completely different backgrounds. This lyrical piece in a fresh and imaginative way approaches one of the today’s burning issues – the (im)possibility of coexistence in diversity. Family secrets, repressed memories and silent traumas are in the centre of the family drama It Takes a Family, in which director Susanne Kovács expounds a complex, personal tale of her own family, the Holocaust and the terrors of the past which still, generation upon generation, leave a trace in the present. The Grand Prix winner for the best documentary at last year’s Karlovy Vary festival, the film Immortal by the Russian director Ksenia Okhapkina shrewdly unveils how the political power mechanisms influence daily life, even in seemingly benign situations.

http://zagrebdox.net/en/2020/home

Pedro Costa/ 2

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. 

Making a Mountain

Directed by Kaspar Astrup Schröder and Rikke Selin Fokdal.

The film had its world premiere today, October 1st and will be screened tomorrow at Cinemateket in Copenhagen at 4.30pm as part of the Copenhagen Architecture Festival. Where there will be a discussion after the 55 minutes long informative corporate film that has been made to give the viewers in the architecture world here and abroad an insight to what it means to build a mountain in a flat country.

I refrain from making a film review, it’s of course amazing images from above and from different angles, the architect Bjarke Ingels is a good lecturer and the CEO (until 2017) of Amager Ressource Center Ulla Röttger conveys the enthusiasm and energy that the film lacks.

Where is the festive celebration of this fantastic new building in Copenhagen? And who decided to use Scheherazade by Rimsky-Korsakov from start till end…

To be fair  – here is the description of the film attached to the link I received:

“Wilkommen, bienvenue,” the CEO sang in 2011 when BIG won the architecture competition for a large waste-to-energy plant with a ski slope on top. A camera has followed the process since the tentative beginnings of what became known – from the very first sod cut – as a visionary project that combines waste management and infrastructure with spectacular architecture and a recreational urban space.

But it is going to be an uphill struggle …

The challenges soon pile up along with questions: How do you even combine a waste-to-energy plant with a ski slope? How far is a property developer willing to go? And how much can an architect actually push through when all is said and done?

In a cinematic construction site symphony, we follow our main characters from the popping of champagne corks and the vision taking off, through broken dreams about smoke rings and abrasions from artificial snow, to the first trip down the black slope.

Denmark, 2020, 55 mins.