Summer camps for kids. Indoctrination performed by charismatic leaders. Sometimes with abuse of minors. A well known theme for many documentaries. With traumas carried into adulthood like it was for Hungarian Judit Oláh, who is the director of this well built documentary that has unique archive material from the so-called Epipo camp that she attended several times, a camp for children from the intellectual class in socialist Hungary in the 1980’es, different from the propagandistic pioneer camps, seen to be an alternative, a free zone, in the film the word “Epipoland” is used.

Judit Oláh has gathered other adults from Epipo to hear, what they remember, set up in a studio in the form of a psycho drama. The talk goes quickly to be about Pal Sipos, the leader of the camp and the one, who molested boys sexually and who went on to be a popular figure in youth television. Today he is living abroad – the director is in contact with him but he does not want to take part in the film… which is not so important as we viewers see him in archive material also shot by himself.  

In a key scene Judit Oláh interviews her father and asks him whether he did not notice that something was wrong in a camp, where humiliation was performed daily and where she – the director – had the nickname “mediocre”!. What would you ask him if you met him today, she asks the father, who apparently feels uncomfortable by, what he hears about a man with whom he worked, as director of the tv shows in which Sipos was appearing.

The director calls Epipo “the scene of my failure”. Judit Oláh was in contact with Sipos, had 3 hours of talk with him that she does not use hoping to get him on camera. No success.

Humiliation, sadistic cruelty, collective masturbations – 25 years later… “We tried to find the hell again, interpret the events together, play them, process them. We created a beautiful movie and a good experience that you can show terrible things this way.” Says Sylvia Konyor (on Facebook) – one of the protagonists of a documentary that the director says also has this purpose: “you have to learn to speak up!” 

Hungary, 2020, 84 mins.

Positive message from the Kiev festival, DocuDays, as always with clever thoughts and energy:  

This year, due to the quarantine, we have decided to hold the 17th Docudays UA online. On 24 April through 3 May, we will present over 45 live streams of RIGHTS NOW! human rights events and DOCU/CLASS Documentary Workshop events. Every evening throughout the festival, a new episode of The Village by Claire Simon will be presented. In addition, over 50 films will be available free of charge on our DOCU/SPACE platform until 10 May. This decision is full of challenges and experiments for us: thus, Docudays UA will become the first Ukrainian film festival to be held online. Not only Kyiv residents, but the whole Ukraine will have a chance to visit the festival.

We want to support our audience, so all festival screenings and online broadcasts will be free of charge. If you want to, you can pay any amount you wish for watching a film.

The Docudays UA team thanks all its donors and partners, directors of the festival films for their solidarity and contributions to implementing this ambitious decision. Thus, during the quarantine, we offer you to have a new, absolutely untrivial experience of attending the International Human Rights Documentary Film Festival online. Let’s stay home to watch and discuss documentary films together.

Viktoriia Leshchenko, Docudays UA Programme Director: 

“The decision to hold the online festival already in late April was not easy for us. Of course, no kind of virtual event can replace a physical one. And we really understand the filmmakers’ feelings about the fact that their films are not shown on cinema screens. We are extremely grateful for all the directors’ and partners’ favorable attitude to this idea in this troubled time. This festival is our act of solidarity with the global cultural community and a way to support our audience during the crisis. It is an instrument of personal reboot and communication with the world under the conditions of global isolation.”

… In a week, we will publish a detailed programme and schedule of festival online broadcasts. The information about festival passes and industry accreditations will be sent to their holders’ emails.

Photo: The Earth is Blue as an Orange, by Irina Tsylik, awarded at the Sundance Festival.

https://docudays.ua/eng/2020/news/kino/moving-online/

The Krakow Festival – that runs its 60th edition online – announces its intl. documentary competition programme. I have taken bits and pieces from the press release: 

”In this difficult time of quarantine the documentary competition will be your window to the world. It will take our audience to the faraway corners of the world and let them take a close look at the heroes from different cultures, their emotions and problems. Films from prestigious festivals as well as long-awaited world premieres will be competing for a Golden Horn and Silver Horns in front of the international jury. Three Polish productions are among them.

All quiet on the eastern front… 

This year we have a considerable number of films from Russia and about Russia. Most of all they reveal a picture of Leviathan in the state of inertia, but the documentary filmmakers offer us also a completely different image of that country. And they do it by using a great variety of means, Anita Piotrowska, film critic and curator of the documentary competition, says.

Maciej Cuske’s film “The Whale from Lorino” is a unique journey nearly to the end of the world – to Chukotka. In order to survive, the local tribe is forced to whale hunt. A little bit farther south lies a small island of Kunashir, annexed by the USSR after the WW2. Japanese inhabitants, who had lived there for generations, were all forced to leave. The protagonists of the “Kunashir” documentary still to this day discover traces of the Japanese past while looking forward to a brighter future. “The Foundation Pit” shows uncensored present-day Russia through a YouTube video kaleidoscope. The grumbling and cursing, recorded by the desperate and frustrated, fills the screen. All messages are addressed to President Putin. At the same time the heroes of a Swedish documentary “Bitter Love” (PHOTO) by Jerzy Śladkowski sets off on a river cruise on the Volga to mend broken hearts, experience unforgetable love affairs and save struggling relationships. 

The films are…

“Acasa, My Home”, dir. Radu Ciorniciuc, 85’, Romania, Finland, Germany

“The Self Portrait”, dir. Margreth Olin, Katja Hogset, Espen Wallin, 70’, Norway

“Sunless Shadows”, dir. Mehrdad Oskouei, 74’, Iran, Norway

“Kunashir”, dir. Vladimir Kozlov, 71’, France

“Bitter Love”, dir. Jerzy Śladkowski, 86’, Sweden

“I Love You I Miss You I Hope I See You Before I Die”, dir. Eva Marie Rødbro, 76’, Denmark

“The Painter and the Thief”, dir. Benjamin Ree, 102’, Norway

“Odmienne stany świadomości”, dir. Piotr Stasik, Poland

“Higher Love”, dir. Hasan Oswald, 78’, USA

“The Whale from Lorino”, dir. Maciej Cuske, Poland

“The Foundation Pit”, dir. Andrey Gryazev, 70’, Russia

“An Ordinary Country”, dir. Tomasz Wolski, 53’, Poland

The Krakow Film Festival is on the exclusive list of the Academy Awards documentary feature qualifying events and the winner of the Golden Horn is shortlisted for the Oscar selection. KFF also qualifies short films (live action, animated, documentary) for the Academy Awards and recommends them for the European Film Awards.

The programme of the 60th Krakow Film Festival will be moved entirely online! The latest documentary, animated and short films from around the world, awaited Polish premieres and meetings with filmmakers will be available online, from the safety of your own home. The full festival programme will be announced mid-May.

https://www.krakowfilmfestival.pl/en/

… and today came the news from Barcelona:

With regards to the health emergency caused by COVID-19 and the uncertainty of its evolution, DocsBarcelona changes its format to guarantee the health of its participants, the continuity of its team, the sustainability of the project and, at the same time, the quality and diversity of content for our audience and attending professionals. For this reason, we will turn the 2020 edition (23rd DocsBarcelona) into an online edition, both the festival screenings and the industry activities. DocsBarcelona online will take place on the same dates, originally planned, from 20th to 30th May 2020.

This change in format has taken place after a deep reflection, together with our main collaborators. Currently, we are intensively working to make our program available to our public and to give opportunities to projects in development, specially in these particularly difficult times for the audiovisual and documentary sector.

http://www.docsbarcelona.com/en/

It’s an understatement to say that I was shocked watching this film, that was part of the CPH:DOX Online program, that you can access until Sunday. Content-wise I don’t recall having been presented with so much hate and intolerance in 75 minutes, as this internationally financed documentary includes, rightfully, at the festival, placed in the section that includes films that are documentaries/investigative journalistic reports. ”Behead all blashphemers” is one of the first sentences you hear – later on (commenting the case of Asia Bibi, more later) some kids in the street say that they don’t need to eat anything today, “we are waiting for Bibi’s head”. Words to that effect. It’s painful just to write about it, so let me take an easy escape and quote the BBC intro:  

 

”In Pakistan, the blasphemy law prescribes a compulsory death sentence for disrespecting Prophet Muhammad and life imprisonment for desecrating the Qur’an. This (Storyville) documentary follows the stories and fates of four people accused of blasphemy. The most famous of them is Asia Bibi, a Christian woman who claims she was falsely accused by her Muslim co-workers after a disagreement. As the elections in Pakistan loom, the country is split between those who feel the law is being misused and want to change it, and those who believe it must be preserved at any cost. Its greatest advocate, cleric Khadim Hussain Rizvi, goes on a mission to do just this. As his campaign heats up, he gathers millions of supporters, sympathetic to his goal, and silences anyone attempting to change the law by condemning them to death. As the world awaits the outcome of Asia Bibi’s trial, Rizvi uses the blasphemy law as a key platform to run for prime minister of Pakistan in the upcoming elections. Amidst the hysteria, those who oppose him and even his own followers become pawns in the ultimate quest for power…”

The director Naqvi said the project was “the most dangerous film” he had ever worked on. ,“When I was initially approached to possibly explore this topic, I refused,” he explained. “As I saw my country falling prey to the political ambitions of a despot, one who was using Islam as a veneer, I wanted to expose Rizvi. Here was a cleric who did not speak for me or other Muslims, he only spoke for his own political ambitions. In doing so, he was also responsible for the lynching of several minorities and Muslims, who had been falsely accused of blasphemy. He had to be stopped and this was what motivated me to make this film.”

… to expose Rizvi (PHOTO); indeed the director succeeds. I have no words to describe what I think of him.

The film also follows the work of Gulalai Ismail, human rights activist, whose NGO is closed, and who is being threatened to death for her actions. She is now in exile abroad as is Asia Bibi, whereas many other mentioned in the film have been killed or executed according to the blasphemy law.

Naqvi, the director has previously taken part in CPH:DOX winning the F:ACT Award in 2015 for the fine “Among the Believers”, jury motivation:

“For its ability to show us a country with complex political situation, for unprecedented access to part of its educational system with far reaching consequences and to the dedication the filmmakers have shown in the following the story the jury has decided to give CPH:DOX F:ACT Award to “Among the believers” by Hemal Trivedi & Mohammed Ali Nagvi. (Filmkommentaren cph:dox 2015).

UK, Pakistan, USA, 2020, 75 mins.

First the short synopsis of the film, explaining the title and introducing…”Noura and Machi (who) search for answers about their loved ones – Bassel Safadi and Paolo Dall’Oglio, who are among the over 100,000 forcibly disappeared in Syria. Faced with the limbo of an overwhelming absence of information, hope is the only thing they have to hold on to. ‘Ayouni’ is a deeply resonant Arabic term of endearment – meaning ‘my eyes’ and understood as ‘my love’. Filmed over 6 years and across multiple countries in search of answers, Ayouni is an attempt to give numbers faces, to give silence a voice, and to make the invisible undeniably visible…”

… take a look at the photo above: Happiness. Noura and Bassel. A couple in 

 

love. Later you see a video from their engagement party and you hear about the actions taken by the two activists to draw attention to the Syrian regime and its brutalities. Contacts to the media. Together with a BBC journalist we – the audience – watch people being beaten up in the streets. Unbearable footage. 

A quarter of an hour into the film, the location shifts to a mountain area, to the beautiful Mar Musa monastery, not far from Damascus to introduce the priest Paolo Dall’Oglio… let me quote the director Yasmin Fedda from the press material:

„This started as another film. A film about a priest I knew in Syria – Father Paolo Dall’Oglio, who had set up a well known monastic community that focused on interfaith dialogue. In 2011, he became involved in the Syrian revolution and passionately called for the world to respond to the atrocities happening in the country, to support human rights. He was expelled from Syria, his home of over 30 years. He was loved by so many Syrians. I met and filmed him in Paris shortly after he had left Syria. We spoke about the situation, his position, his take on things. I didn’t think it would be the last time I saw him, but I knew he was committed to what he believed in, whatever the cost. A couple of months later, in July 2013, he had gone to Raqqa (briefly liberated, before its total takeover by Daesh) to negotiate for the release of journalists kidnapped in the city. He leaves for the meeting and is never heard from again – kidnapped, with only rumours about his fate. Forcibly disappeared… »

What a wonderful man and how beautiful it is to see how his sister and his Italian family start to make videos to put online, to get the fate of the respected Roman Jesuit priest known. 

The sister Machi also joins the London double decker bus that is „decorated“ with photos of just some of the tens of thousands of Syrians, who have been forcibly disappeared during the revolution in the country.

The main focus, however, is on Noura Ghazi Safadi. It hurts to see her change during the years of waiting for news about her husband – from 2015. Noura is a human rights lawyer and activist and « one of the establishing members of Families for Freedom, a Syrian women led advocacy group for detainees and their relatives ».

I take a look at the photo above again. And remember it when I see Noura talking to cameras in front of the double decker that also went to Paris. Or in studios. Or at the end of the film after she had got the news that Bassel had been executed. 

Needless to say that this documentary is emotional to watch, at the same time as it is a documentation of the campaigns performed by human rights activists, the protests, the videos distributed, the compassion from many but not many enough. Respect!

UK, 2020, 75 mins.

Musa Hadid is the mayor in Ramallah. A busy man, who goes around in his city, talks to his citizens, tries to solve smaller and bigger problems. With a focus on the smaller. He wants the city to be welcoming foreigners on visit and first of all a nice place to live in. We are not replacing political leadership, he says, referring to what is the job of the President Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen). The film, shot in 2017, follows the mayor when he and his city council prepare for the xmas celebrations – how should the xmas tree look like, how is his fountain outside the City Hall to be lit, in colours, with music. But Musa Hadid can not avoid the occupation – and he does not, when a German delegation visits with proposals on how to solve the everlasting conflict with the Israelis suppressors ! And it does not get better when the message from Donald Trump is announced : We are are going to have an embassy in Jerusalem. The consequent demonstrations and confrontations with the Israeli army entering Ramallah give the film a dramatic shift with the e-cigarette smoking mayor behind the glass walls of his city hall looking at youngsters throwing stones with the usual answer from the occupiers : tear gas.

The film follows the sympathetic mayor closely, you can only respect him at the same time as you understand his more than difficult job. At a point he talks about « dignity ». How is that possible if I am asked to undress by a 16 year old soldier from the occupying country, when I am travelling outside Ramallah. 

USA, 87 mins., 2020