From one award ceremony to the next, thanks to Online. Two nights ago I was in Kiev for the Docudays ua, last night I was in Nyon for the ceremony of the Visions du Réel, where many awards were given out, big money compared to what is possible at the Ukrainian festival.

And quite a different style of a show : It started with a man (did not get his name, head of the Board ?) talking directly to the camera, welcoming and thanking everyone around the festival, giving statistics, summing up what he characterised as « un grand succes ». Followed by Emilie Bujès, the festival director, who, joined by a colleague, was taking the viewer through the awards, introducing juries and filmmakers and clips. They did but failed a lot of times as one award was announced and another one came on the screen. Luckily the two ladies ended up laughing of their messy, unprofessional situation, where a coordination between technique and speeches was not prepared. 

First time mistakes… but what functioned well was the presentation from the side of jurors, who had – some of them – prepared small original videos to introduce the winners. The same with some of the winners, when they were to express their « thank you´s ». And bravo to the organisers for having asked the winners to make their own trophées. Great fun to see the different versions, all should have a fish included as Nyon is close to water, lake Geneva.

The winners… I have not watched in beforehand, except for the two I had as links (Traces of a Landscape http://www.filmkommentaren.dk/blog/blogpost/4743/

and Mimaroğlu http://www.filmkommentaren.dk/blog/blogpost/4744/ )

but I will catch up and watch at least some of them. Two of them for sure: Legendary Finnish master Markku Lehmuskallio (81 years old) and his son Johannes with „Anerca, Breath of Life“ (Photo) and Polish Tomasz Wolski’s „An Ordinary Country“. I have with pleasure seen other works of both filmmakers.

All awards are listed below in the list from the festival’s website. 

https://www.visionsdureel.ch/programme-2020/palmares-2020

I have been to many award ceremonies at the Docudays ua festival in Kiev. I was there again last night. Online. Which was of course different from being in a cinema hall with hundred of other film enthusiasts. Who express their support with the winners through the atmosphere the always innovative organisers create in a tone that is far away from officialism.

No, I was sitting in a comfortable chair in a garden house in Copenhagen watching and listening. And it was nice and worked – when I had found out how to avoid having both the Ukrainian and English language in my ear!: two moderators in an isolated room leading the show, a phantasy character being the delivery guy to bring the awards to the post office, clips from the films, small “thank you”s from the award winners, artificial applauses, and the juries saying why they decided this and that film… Funny to see my countryman Mikael Opstrup, one of the jurors, motivating a choice from his home 20 minutes bike ride from where I was last night. Crazy world situation!…

 

And if I had been there, in Kiev, I would have invited him to go to have vareniki & vodka as I have had with – among others Lithuanians Arunas Matelis and Audrius Stonys and the dear friends from the festival, Dary’a Averchenko and Roman Bondarchuk. Or do as I did with Roman and one of his daughters, Agatha: go to the Georgian restaurant to have chacha and khinkali! Memories!

Back to the awards – the whole list you can get below via the link from the festival webpage, but to be noted: two awards to Hassan Fazili’s „Midnight Traveler” that is  available on online platforms, for professionals on IDFA’s Docs for Sale and in Denmark on Filmstriben. Did not see it yet. One award was given by Current Time TV, always helpful and committed Natasha Arshavskaya motivated the choice.

And as always the teenage jury not only made an excellent choice, but also an excellent motivation to award Russian “Immortal” by Ksenia Okhapkina (http://www.filmkommentaren.dk/blog/blogpost/4572/) – my review, the motivation, click the link below from the website.

The Ukrainian “War Note” – have not seen it – received two awards, including that of the audience, and could have had one more but as Oleg Sentsov said, words to that effect, we took it away from competition as “all films from Eastern Ukraine are important, we don’t want to evaluate them”.

AND – of course – there were awards to the masterly “The Earth is Blue as an Orange”. Two: One in the competition for Ukrainian new docs, and the main award in the international competition. Iryna Tsilyk, the director, was thanking and told us that she has not yet shown the film to the mother in the film – who has resisted to watch it on her smart phone. The mother… the hero of my review, here is the beginning, were I declare my love:

“It is an emotional journey that director and writer Iryna Tsilyk takes the viewer on. For 74 minutes. One full of beauty. Very much because of the mother in the film, Anna, the protagonist, whose face expresses, what it means to live in the war zone in Eastern Ukraine with four children, and her mother. You see her alone in the kitchen, worried, in a melancholic mood, that is understandable on the background of the war – she decided to stay with the family; they could have moved. You see her smilingly tell one of her small boys how to pull out a rock tooth! You see her fighting with the stove to make the house warm. You see her taking the train with one of her daughters, Myroslava, who wishes to study cinematography. They come to an eximanation – in Kiev it must be – the girl thinks she failed. They get a phone call, she did not fail, daughter and mother cries of happiness. So did this viewer!…”

Go to the website, there are recordings of conferences, interviews, the festival is strong on the industry side as well. 

https://docudays.ua/eng/2020/news/kino/winners/

http://www.filmkommentaren.dk/blog/blogpost/4702/(the Earth etc.)

DocsBarcelona has launched its program for the 23rd edition of a festival with an industry section. I will with other posts get back to the industry activities – conferences, masterclass, speed meetings, public pitch, rough cut session.

The festival includes 35 documentaries from 22 countries.

One of the films is SOLO by Artemio Benki, who sadly passed away April 15. His masterpiece can be seen during the festival – by an audience in Spain. From May 20 8.00 pm until May 23 8.00.

At the fine new web page of DocsBarcelona you can see the superb trailer of SOLO:

https://docsbarcelona.com/en/movies/solo

And here is the review I made of the film on this site in May 2019:

 

“Towards the end of the film, Martìn Perino is in a school class with his friend, the dancer Solé. He talks to the students: ”Solé and I would like you to write down, what you feel or think, when you listen to the music, I am going to play. Please put your words down on a piece of paper”.

They do so. Now it is my turn to put down, what I feel and think after having watched ”Solo” – for the second time. I feel that I have been given the gift of getting very close to a man with an extraordinary musical talent. For playing and composing. A very generous move from a fragile man, who spent 3 years at el Borda, the psychiatric hospital in Buenos Aires, gets out from there but is still under treatment. He lets me suffer with him, be happy and enjoy, when he is at the piano. And a very – towards him – respectful and compassionate move from the filmmakers to convey, what they got from Martìn Perino. There is energy in every scene, you are invited to follow the ups and downs of the pianist, you often have the same tense feeling as he has, when he is fighting for the freedom, that he fears. Chain-smoking and if his hands do not carry a cigarette, they are searching for a piano to play on. Classical pieces or his own compositions.

The construction of the film is excellent. The opening tells the viewer, where we are: El Borda, where the patients are fragile and where Perino is playing the composition that he has made for the hospital, its personnel and patients. Enfermaria, he calls it. And then, step by step, you get to know Martìn Perino. Often through conversations or situations with friends at the hospital, like Luis, who says “with your music you can tell your whole story”. Perino, no let me call him by first name as I think I now know him so well, Martìn tells at a lunch scene that at a moment, he was so scared to be alone in the streets that he had to ask Luis for support. The charismatic therapist has through the film several conversations with Martìn, scenes full of atmosphere, both when they take place in the hospital or at the home, where Martìn lives after being released from Borda. A messy place, the home, it was before the place of his parents, and Martìn has obviously problems in coping with making it orderly. Or he does not care. He visits his former teacher, giving her his story about “all that happened in  my head”… and then the music “started from my chaos… I didn´t suffer in vain!”. He has a lot of humour at the same time as he is desperate to get permission to play. Or to get to a piano. It is “a psychological urge”.

He walks the streets of my wonderful Buenos Aires – my father was born there, could not help thinking about it when watching and I write these words with tears in my eyes… – as I had so many times through “Solo”. You can have tears, when you feel sadness but also when you watch and listen to the music of a great pianist like Martìn. And – thanks for holding back that aspect – there was a mother, who thought Martìn was a genius… As he says to the therapist, “I have to get rid of the genius”. Nevertheless, when he plays for the bourgeoisie of BA: “My mother was a pianist and when she was very ill, I played her favourite piece for her, Alberto Gianestra´s “Dance of the Beautiful Maiden”. And he does that in the film. Formidable!

As is the film by Artemio Benki… and the camera work of Diego Mendizabal. The pain, the suffering, the joy, the introvert side of Martìn. Through many close ups. Did not know the dop, checked his filmography, he has quite a track record. Thank you first of all to Martìn Perino for letting me into your life.

2019, Czech Republic, France, Argentina, Austria, 84 mins.

https://www.slingshotfilms.it/solo/

https://www.lacid.org/fr/films-et-cineastes/films/solo

… subtitle: The Robinson of Manhattan Island… 

The Happy Woman and the Sad Man… that’s how the couple Güngõr and Ilhan Mimaroğlu has been characterised, tells the son of Güngõr, Rüstem Batum. He says so in the third and last chapter of the multilayered documentary that (also) is a love story. The couple was together for more than 50 years. Ilhan died in 2012, in New York, as the title says; after his death Güngõr returned to Istanbul. 

In New York, at the Columbia University, Ilhan Mimaroğlu studied music, became a pioneer in electronic music, published avant-garde music, set up his own record company Finnadar and worked with – among others – Charles Mingus. Güngõr Mimaroğlu was a very active leftist in the 1960’es and 1970’es, took part in many demonstrations and ended often, arrested, in police stations, where her husband picked her up! When computers ”took over” his kind of music, Ilhan Mimaroğlu gave up composing and went for street photography, while she became a business woman.

Apart from in the 3rd out of 3 chapters you don’t see Güngõr but hears her voice telling about the two and their life – and some music historians bring the necessary information to image from New York and Istanbul… Ilhan was also a fine filmmaker as the film shows in a brilliant way using his 8mm material in such an appealing way that you want to go back to the two metropoles right away.

The scoop of the film – the multilayerism – is that the filmmakers have succeeded to make sound and image go together to create an atmosphere that conveys the greatness of the artist combined with voice-off’s and the few but important pieces where you see him perform. Plus – again few – footage from NY of today and of Güngõr, now a fine old lady alone in her appartment in Istanbul.

Cinema for the ear was what Ilhan Mimaroğlu called his composed music, ”rebellion against tradition” was his mission, also expressed on the back of a t-shirt that says: ”Measly Mozart”!

He was not happy with the lack of interest in his art. When he closed Finnadar, the record company, he says “thanks for not listening. I am Ilhan Mimaroğlu. And that’s it.” 

Let me say ”that’s it” as well – thank you for a fascinating look at a fine multi-artist, who deserves much more attention.

http://mimaroglufilm.com 

Turkey, 2020, 77 mins.

I will try to avoid too many superlatives in this review of a brilliant documentary that is currently being shown at the online Visions du Réel festival in Nyon. So I have chosen to start with a copy-paste of the festival’s precise synopsis taken from the Cineuropa magazine:

 

“The film’s subject is Czech painter, photographer and experimental filmmaker Jan Jedlička, whom the Visions du Réel website calls “one of the best-kept secrets in the world of art”. Due to the political situation after 1968, he emigrated from Czechoslovakia and settled in Switzerland. For almost ten years, he was looking for new inspiration when, suddenly, during a holiday trip, he fell in love with the flat landscape of the Maremma region in Tuscany. He found his new artistic home there, and as an artist, he began from scratch. The documentary follows Jedlička at work in the present and dives into the past in order to help us understand his artistic career. The film tries to capture how he rediscovered his landscape – this time his inner one.”

To meet sympathetic Jedlička is a wonderful experience in a film that follows his daily rythm, takes its (his) time, goes with him in the landscape of Maremma in Tuscany, where he finds the motives and brings back pieces of rocks and stones from where he, with his mortar stone grinding and with water, brings forward colours that he uses for his interpretation of the wetland that is Maremma. “I need to have the reality next to me… the presence of reality keep us awake”, he says. He also reflects on loneliness and silence as he could experience in a house in Maremma – “that is not freedom”. He stands on the beach next to the anthropomorphic – as he calls them – wooden sculptures formed by the waves of the sea. He is in his atelier and his home in Zürich and Prague, he makes mezzotints, he is a fabulous photographer, playing with lights and darkness, he is with famous Steidl that publishes a photo book with his works, he praises b/w polaroid.

The film camera (maestro Czech cameraman Miroslav Janek) observes and interprets, I would say paints synchronically with the great artist Jan Jedlička is. It’s all about curiosity, he says, keeping the tension and interest  (good advice to documentarians from a modest man) who – shows the film with archive material, a lot shot by him – has an eye for nuances and a very gentle way of looking at the world.

Making portraits of artists is about finding a tone that fits and characterises the artist without staying on the surface and limit yourself to biography. Petr Záruba cleverly leaves the story about Jedlička leaving Prague in 1969 in the background to let the audience be with him in the creative process. It was a lovely journey to be taken on. Thanks.  

Czech Republic, 2020, 66 mins.