IDFA returns to cinemas in November

(with the) Program extended by limited online screenings
 

The International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA) is planning its 33rd edition. With Dutch cinemas now re-opening, IDFA is looking forward to holding the festival in theaters from November 18th to 29th, albeit with potentially reduced capacity. The festival’s competitions will remain intact, to be presented in cinemas and extended with limited virtual cinema screenings and events. 

IDFA competition and audience screenings

 
to be continued…

IDFA will once again offer a launchpad for new films. Every film selected for IDFA 2020 will premiere in cinemas, with a number of online screenings to follow. Limited tickets and scheduled screening times will be central components of IDFA’s virtual cinema model, ensuring the films are available to Dutch audiences who cannot attend in person. 

As always, prestigious international juries will be invited to judge the festival’s various competitions. Whereas 300 films and projects were selected for previous editions of IDFA, this year’s festival will screen around 200 titles. All program sections will stay intact except for the thematic focus programs and IDFA on Stage.

Despite limited seating in theaters this year, IDFA will give priority to the real-life cinema experience, ensuring filmmakers get their deserved stage. IDFA 2020 will expand its theatrical offering with a sub-selection of 20 films, to be screened in over 60 theaters throughout the Netherlands. Beyond the cinema halls, supplementary online screenings at fixed times will allow local audiences to choose their preferred route through the festival. In response to the economic challenges of this year, IDFA 2020 will give priority to supporting filmmakers as their films go online, and to theaters as films go theatrical, through a revenue-sharing model. 

Introductions and live Q&As will remain central to the festival screening experience, whether in cinemas or online. All filmmakers in the selection will be warmly welcomed in Amsterdam. All screenings and events will follow the required health measures in place in November.

IDFA DocLab, the festival’s new media program and exhibition space, will return to Tolhuistuin this year, where several live events will also take place. Additionally, DocLab will present events for 30 or 100 visitors at other locations such as ARTIS Planetarium.

August 1st is the submission deadline for all films completed after April 30th, 2020. For all performances and interactive/immersive new media projects, the submission deadline is July 1st.
 
IDFA Industry
This year, IDFA Industry will continue to connect a global network of documentary film professionals. Accredited guests who can travel are welcome to join the program in Amsterdam. During the festival, professional activities such as industry talks, sessions, and meetups will take place both in Amsterdam venues and online, ensuring they are available to accredited guests around the world. All will be organized with the highest hygiene measures and within the distancing and crowd limitations of the moment.
The markets IDFA Forum—running November 23rd to 27th—and Docs for Sale will take place online. Wherever possible, other industry activities will combine virtual and in-person formats. In addition to selecting a new line-up of high-profile projects, the Forum will present a range of extra projects this year to support filmmaker teams looking for co-production and co-financing partners. Docs for Sale will offer new documentary films from this summer onwards in addition to previously released titles that have regained new relevance in 2020. Both the Forum and Docs for Sale will open for entries on June 12th. Accreditation will open in August.

IDFA’s new talent development program IDFA Project Space is set to launch at the end of June. The program will offer creative and professional development to selected filmmakers from the IDFA Competition for First Appearance, the IDFA Bertha Fund, and IDFAcademy.

Finally, IDFAcademy during IDFA—taking place November 19th to 20th  and 23rd to 25th—will move to an online program in order to best accommodate filmmakers from all over the world. At the same time, IDFA Project Space will offer a continuation for selected filmmakers who are present in Amsterdam in November.

IDFA 2020 will take place in theaters from November 18th to November 29th and will be extended online.

Photo from the opening film last year: Sunless Shadows by Mehrdad Oskouie

Krakow FF Awards Intl. Doc Competition

… and Fipresci Award

Having watched all the competitive films the International Documentary Jury of the 60th Krakow Film Festival consisting of: Łukasz Żal – chairman (Poland), Renata Santoro (Italy), Tod Lending (USA), Eva Mulvad (Denmark), Martin Horyna (Czech Republic) has decided to award the following prizes:

 

THE GOLDEN HORN for the director of the best film – Radu Ciorniciuc for Acasa, My Home (Romania, Finland, Germany)

‘Acasa, My Home’, is awarded the The Golden Horn for its remarkable and complex storytelling that is presented from the children’s perspective of a Roma family. This extraordinarily intimate and authentic film artfully captures the multiple layers of the social, emotional and political realities the family wrestles with as they struggle to maintain their way of life, dignity, sense of self-determination and cultural identity. It is highly unusual when a single documentary film, such as this one, is able to successfully examine and explore so many important aspects of the human condition within one beautifully crafted story. 

THE SILVER HORN for the director of the film with high artistic value – Maciej Cuske for The Whale from Lorino (Poland)

‘The Whale of Lorino’ is awarded The Silver Horn for its immersive experience where metaphorical imagery and sound let us plunge into the reality of a native Siberian village located in a distant, forgotten corner of Russia. The film at times makes us uncomfortable and disturbed, while at other times we feel deeply connected. The director uses a circular narrative structure that challenges the audience to interpret their experience of the community and confront their own prejudices. In the end, this extraordinary film beautifully captures the cultural relationship between man and the environment, and paradoxically shows us that the men who hunt endangered whales for subsistence, are also living lives that are on the edge of extinction. 

THE SILVER HORN for the director of the film on social issues – Mehrdad Oskouei for Sunless Shadows (Iran, Norway)

‘Sunless Shadows’ is awarded the Silver Horn for being an outstanding cinematic piece of work on an important social issue. With precision, authenticity, sensitivity and creative elegance the director presents dramatic stories of domestic violence, hidden traumas, and the collective responsibility of a patriarchal society for the crimes committed by its young female individuals who are in prison for having committed murder. As great art often finds a way to combine the laughter and the tears, we find ourselves both crying and laughing in the company of these remarkable girls who courageously face death sentences while living in an Iranian prison. 

SPECIAL MENTION for Hey! Teachers! directed by Yulia Vishnevets (Russia)

For the richness of a multi-faceted story set in a seemingly ordinary backdrop, and for the insightful, bitterly ironical take on how the Russian public education system can sometimes break down the idealism of certain teachers whose altruistic goal is to educate and improve the lives of their students. 

The FIPRESCI (International Federation of Film Critics) Jury consisting of: Jan Storø (Norway), Jihane Bougrine (Maroko), Nachum Mochiach (Israel) has decided to award the International Film Critics Prize to Margreth Olin, Katja Hogset, Espen Wallin for The Self Portrait (Norway)

‘The Self Portrait’ is the kind of movies that hits you from the beginning and stays with you. It’s a perfect example of real-life cinema boasting both authenticity and aesthetic vision. Heart-breaking and relevant, both brave and emotional, it is a powerful documentary about illness and art where photography can change our vision of life.

The Krakow Film Festival recommendation to the European Film Award in a documentary category: 
The Self Portrait, dir. Margreth Olin, Katja Hogset, Espen Wallin (Norway) that also got the AUDIENCE AWARD.
Punta Sacra, dir. Francesca Mazzoleni (Italy)

More awards read

https://www.krakowfilmfestival.pl/en/60th-kff/awards/

Krakow FF Back to the Cinema

This is a copy paste from the Krakow FF website of today:

The 60th Krakow Film Festival invites you to screenings of award-winning films at the Pod Baranami Cinema in Krakow!

The pioneering decision to organize this year’s entire Krakow Film Festival program on the web was a success! The virtual cinema screening rooms has been packed to the brim from the first day of the festival! An enthusiastic, numerous audience participates in meetings with the creators and special live events. The organizers receive thanks and praises coming from all over the world. The Krakow Film Festival has prepared a unique surprise for the viewers. On the last day of the film holiday, you are invited the cinema!

Traditionally, on Sunday, the last day of the festival, the organizers invite the audience to an unforgettable marathon of films awarded in all festival competitions. This year will be no dofferent. Sunday screenings in the virtual cinema will start at 11.00 a.m. CET and will last until late evening. The last tickets are waiting for viewers.

The Krakow Film Festival decided to immediately react to the lifting of some restrictions on cinema activities and invite the audience to screenings of the winning films on 7th of June and have the audience fill all the rooms of the friend Pod Baranami Cinema. Thus, KFF will become the first festival in Poland realized entirely online and in the cinema!

We have often said that despite the great excitement with the new formula of this year’s festival, we can’t wait to get back to the cinemas. We are happy that this can happen much earlier than we thought. Thanks to this, the finale of our festival will be truly unique and will certainly go down in history, emphasizes Olga Lany, spokeswoman for the Krakow Film Festival.

Screenings in the cinema halls of the Krakow Pod Baranami Cinema (at the Main Square and in the Małopolska Garden of Arts) will start in parallel with the virtual screenings – at 11.00. Tickets are PLN 15 and they will only be available at www.kinopodbaranami.pl and at the cinema ticket offices. A detailed screenings program will be announced after the closing ceremony of the festival, which will take place on June 6 at 7.00 p.m.. Immediately after the Gala, selected award-winning films will also be shown: films of the winner of the Golden Hobby-Horse in the Polish competition, winner of the Golden Dragon in the short film competition and winners of the Golden and Silver Horn in the international documentary competition.

Photo: Romanian documentary “Acasa, My Home” by Radu Ciorniciuc. Could be one of the winners of tonight and thus one to be shown in the cinema tomorrow.

Zoom In Zoom Out

And what are your thoughts about that? The moderator of the pitching session – sitting in her home somewhere in North America – asks the sales agent sitting in her home in Zürich Switzerland. The pitching team is from Norway, the project deals with people in Peru. The pitchers are in their homes in Norway, I am watching from my corner chair in a garden house in Copenhagen. Where I have been with my wife since beginning of April, watching the garden come to life with a lot of green but also blue and red flowers – and birds singing you good morning, when the sun rises. Pure Monet.

No complaints from me, this is Covid times and we have to take care. And we do. Even if we can only see the dear small ones very little. 

Restrictions also in the documentary world of course. Films are being screened 

online, industry talks are online, webinars the same, interviews, master classes…

No complaints from me… I am used to watch films on my MacBook Pro, when films are to be selected for festivals or to be reviewed on the blog or evaluated for the critics panel at this festival in Krakow; a true pleasure I have been invited to take part in for many years. But I have also been in Krakow, in the cinemas together with fellow viewers to sense that special atmosphere you only find in a cinema hall with large screen, high quality images and good sound. 

Nothing compares!

Back to the industry events going online currently. The other day Zane Balcus from the Baltic Sea Docs wrote so well on this on www.filmkommentaren.dk: … “Several of the arguments in favour of or against digital could be experienced at an online visit to Visions du Réel. Nothing of the constituent components of the festival took place physically. I hadn’t planned to go to Nyon this year, but the possibility of attending the festival online made me join it. During the festival, I focused more on the industry section, specifically Pitching du Réel and Docs in Progress. While watching previously pre-recorded presentations assembled in blocks and streamed to the participants, the missing element was the energy of live event – the ability to feel and evaluate project representatives in the course of the presentation, presentation form, trailer nuances on a high-quality and large screen with good quality sound, the interaction of moderator with pitchers and decision makers, audience reaction…” She makes no conclusions, and how could we, it is Pro & Contra:

If you do these events online, you can have more people – and if everyone sits at home, it is greener, maybe more effective, some say, for instance Brigid O’Shea from DOKLeipzig, where all industry activities now will be digital. But the human element of meeting each other, profiting from being physically together in group sessions, being inspired by other filmmakers and their comments, this kind of reciprocity you can’t create online.

The film screenings online, as you have in Krakow this year, have been, in terms of numbers, at other already finished festivals, like CPH:Dox in Copenhagen, Munich, DocuDays in Kiev and DocsBarcelona, still running, overwhelming… almost 120.000 tickets in Copenhagen and almost 140.000 in Barcelona. In the mentioned festivals a new audience has been reached, who has welcomed the chance to sit at home watching documentaries, when cinemas have been closed.

Cinemas… Nothing compares.

They know that in Krakow, they will learn from the online experience, they will have good numbers for the online, they will maybe repeat some of the online screenings and they will have cinema screenings next year again.

Photo by Kasia Wilk from pitching at Krakow FF 2020.  

Openings Inspired by Krakow FF

I have been brought back to thinking about the different ways films start, while watching the Krakow FF international competition of this year. I think we all agree about the importance of catching the attention of the audience from the very start. Hook the viewers, so they stay for the duration of the story. Some starts are very short before the title appears on the screen, some are long, some give a promise, some set the tone and the atmosphere, some try to do all of it, some put up some questions that might or might not be answered. 

Some editors have told me that they often wait with doing the opening until the end. Having built a story or tried to, they suddenly – together with the director – “discover” the film and what is important and what not. Where do you want to take the audience? What do you want to say? Examples:

Norwegian “Self Portrait” uses a bit more than one minute to let you into the gripping story. You see a couple of photos of a woman from behind, a woman walking, who becomes “alive” walking across a field, turns around and looks at you; off screen she has told us that when a child, she decided to stop time as she is now able to do, when she takes pictures. The last photo is of herself, the anorectic Lene Maria. Credits come and we know, what the film will be about, the character, the theme, the tone.

In “Sunless Shadows” (Photo) Iranian director Mehrdad Oskouei’s voice is heard on a black background: Dear Sara, when you come into the room, sit down, push the red button and talk to the camera… she does and she talks about the murder, she has committed. Content of the film is thus revealed and the director’s and the director’s involvement and method and stylistical approach.

In Romanian “Acasa, My Home” by Radu Ciorniciucthe opening describes a paradise for kids – they swim in the lake, they fish, they have boys’ fights, they enjoy life in the nature. Until they are interrupted. The director states upfront with whom he places his sympathy.

Polish Maciej Cuske – in The Whale from Lorino – opens with wild images of sea waves smashing against rocks somewhere in the world. The images are matched with words of a fairy tale about whale and man. An opening that makes the promise of a film with poetic moments.

Openings… I am totally indoctrinated by words of Niels Pagh Andersen, Danish editor, mostly famous for his work on Oppenheimer’s «Act of Killing» and «Look of Silence»: Hold Back information, give the necessary input upfront, but don’t pour a lot of information into the head of the poor viewer. Build it up, step by step, give the viewer a chance to take part, remember that the film is made in the head of the viewer, remember that one viewer interprets in one way, another in another way!

That is what a good documentary can do – by good I mean documentaries that have many layers, many openings, to use that word again, for interpretation. 

And from a previous Krakow festival: Is Piotr Stasik’s New York film a film about New York. Absolutely. Is it about «la condition humaine », our existence, loneliness, a philosophical work, is it about Love, Yes to all, it has many layers, a film that will be watched and evaluated differently depending on age and sex. And where you are in your own life. I go to visit family in New York every second year, I have observed people in the underground as Stasik is doing, it’s fascinating but I know it so well that I can go to the other levels: Life as we live it, together or alone. And as a film buff who wants to be surprised, I enjoy the sound and rythm that the director gives me. It’s new and innovative.

Happy Birthday Krakow FF

60th edition! Wow! And then you have to go online! Instead of having all of us invited passionate film lovers sit and applaud one of the most important documentary festivals ever.

A challenge for you but I am sure the festival will make that a success as well. I write „as well“ because I have visited the festival many times and always felt the good organisation and the generosity that meets you as a guest. Of course with a good program, retrospectives etc. Memories…

Actually, I dont remember the first time I was at the festival. But it could have 

been in 1987, where I was travelling for the Danish Film Board (now the Danish Film Institute) with two Danish film journalists. It was not long after the tragic crash of a LOT flight in May, where 183 died. We 3 were in general hesitant to fly – I still am – but arrived safe to Warsaw and took the train to Krakow. On the way back, however, we left Warsaw, circled around for an hour or so before we landed. In Warsaw! It was a LOT flight… Technical problems «they said». We waited, drank a lot of vodka and went with the same flight home. That it was the same flight, we were not informed before we landed.

Thanks to www.filmkommentaren.dk I can now easily follow some of the visits to the festival. Let me jump to 2011, where Krzysztof Gierat invited me to be part of the international jury that also included Marcin Koszalka, who (my proposal) at every little jury meeting served a different glass of Polish vodka on the condition that the jurors gave points to them. We did. 

I wrote several articles from the festival, that had Wojciech Staron as winner of the Golden Horn with “The Argentinian Lesson”. I already knew his “Siberian Lessons”, I am a big fan of “Brothers” and of his collaboration with Jerzy Sladkowski. At this year’s festival he is there as cameraman on “Bitter Love”. Pawel Kloc got the Silver Horn for “Phnom Penh Lullaby”. I remember that I was in doubt but luckily the other jury members insisted – and having seen the film many times and used it at film schools, I now see how unique a documentary it is.

The festival has always known how to honour the artists: 

In 2012 Helena Trestikova received the Dragon of Dragons honorary award, the one that of course also has been given to Marcel Lozinski, in 2016, who celebrated his 80th birthday recently. He is one of my true documentary heroes with “Anything can Happen” on the top five of my best documentaries ever. And I love the film Pawel, the son, made, “Father and Son”, knowing that Marcel also made his version! That’s another story.

One more jump to 2016, where I met young and younger filmmakers who was associated to the Wajda Film School (oh, I remember making a lecture at the school with Wajda himself and Marcel Lozinski on the front row…) 

The young ones… In 2016 Piotr Stasik had a new film. The innovative “21 x New York”. I was – as this year – part of a critic’s panel where all 6 members gave top points to Stasik’s work, but the jury decided for another film!

I had more luck in 2018, quote from the filmkommentaren text: “Sometimes it´s jackpot! I had voted for – in my post yesterday – four films and they were all awarded: Talal Derki for his “Of Fathers and Sons” (The Golden Horn and the Fipresci), Marta Prus for her “Over the Limit” (The Silver Horn, The Silver Hobby-Horse (National Competition), The Audience Award – and awards to her editor Adam Suzin, and to her producers Anna Kepinska and Maciej Kubicki), Pablo Aparo and Martin Benchimol for “El Espanto” (The Silver Horn for Best Medium Length Documentary) and Stephen Nomura Schible for “Ryuichi Sakamoto: Coda” (Best film in the DocFilmMusic Competition and Student Jury’s Award).

Yes, Marta Prus deserved the recognition. I – and she, I guess – had hoped for awards at DocsBarcelona and Cinédoc Tbilisi, did not happen, I saw the film several times that year, held Q&A’s with her. What a talent she is!

Back to the festival and its atmosphere. Krzysztof Kopczyński, a very good friend for decades, who took me to Moscow with Stasik, Cuske, Sauter (I think) to meet Russian filmmakers in the Polish-Russian coproduction series and who is the director of the impressing film on Dybuk… and loves the good life. Krzysztof and I have been eating wonderfully at the old Jewish quarter of Krakow, Kazimierz. Next year again, please!

 … which leads me to Bartek Konopka and Piotr Rosolowski with their “Rabbit à la Berlin”, a fantastic work that their powerhouse of a producer Anna Wydra managed to bring for an Oscar nomination!

Innovation was a word I used above and that I use again to characterise Pawel Lozinski’s „You Have No Idea How Much I Love You“…

With a little twist, I hope I gave you an idea, why I love Polish Documentary Cinema! And the Krakow Film Festival!

Congratulations, dear friends: Kasia Wilk, Barbara Orlicz-Szczypula and Krzysztof Gierat and all the other brave birthday children in Krakow. 

Photo: From “Bitter Love” by Jerzy Sladkowski, camera Wojciech Staron, in the international competition of the Krakow FF 2020.

138.506 Spectators at DocsBarcelona

Take a look at the photo above. Taken by the photographer F Fagregas: A concert with The Boss, Bruce Springsteen at Nou Camp. Where I have been several times with Joan Gonzalez, director of DocsBarcelona. Last night at the award ceremony he announced that the audience for DocsBarcelona 2020 Online was so big that the famous stadium for Barca i.e., where Messi plays, where Ronaldinho and Laudrup have played, would have been too small as it can “only” room a bit more than 90.000. The number of spectators for DocsBarcelona online, available for viewers in Spain, was 138.506! Of course it is not totally comparable but the amount of cinemagoers at the festival four years ago was 10.000 and 2 years ago the number passed 25.000 cinemagoers. Mr. Data, as Gonzalez sometimes calls himself, was right when he wrote that this forms a giant step for the documentary genre and he continued that the online will stay, NOT as the first priority, that will still be to show the festival films in the cinemas, but as a means to reach new audiences, to create a documentary culture!

It would be interesting to know, of course, from where in Spain the audience comes. Gonzalez, on the basis of twitters, if I got it right, said that he thinks 60% are from Catalonia, 40 % from the rest of Spain.

From me, as Head of Programming, I am happy to see artistic, personal documentaries like “Winter Journey”, “Songs of Repression”, “Advocate”, “Rising from the Tsunami” and “Vivos” attract more than 4000 spectators in the few days they were available. The winner – b/w, experiment in editing, for many “special” – had close to 2500 spectators.

Long live the art of documentary cinema.

www.docsbarcelona.com 

Storm Henriksen og Lindgreen: Mod, Sved og Tårer

Det er en ungdomsfilm står der og det udelukker mig, jeg lammes i interessen på forhånd og så har Andrea Storm Henriksens og Ina Lindgrens lille tv-serie næsten selvfølgelig en bestemt vinkling i front nemlig at undersøge et sociologisk problemfelt om unge mennesker som ikke passer ind i de mere fastlagte og sædvanlige uddannelsesrammer. Det er den journalistiske vinkel læser jeg på forhånd men jeg læser også dokumentafilmtræk når jeg ser filmen, træk som dukker op, Frederick Wiseman minder i skildringen af miljøet, af institutionen, af den vidunderlige cirkusskole og i portrætteringen af de fire hovedpersoner.

Skildringen lykkes til overdådighed, den skole er et fagligt fantastisk og emotionelt rart sted, men portrætteringerne får ikke plads nok til at montagens karakterudviklinger af de fire bliver rolige og tydelige, men jeg er også mest optaget af alderdomsfilm og frydes til gengæld ved kameraskabte ærlige scener, to eksempler:

Samtalen mellem eleven højt oppe i trapezen og læreren på gulvet, den scene som jeg elsker, som jeg kunne se til et sekund før den dør af sig selv og jeg er en erfaring og et minde rigere som efter et digt…

Samværet mellem eleven ved klaveret som har meldt sig ind på skolen her for spring, trapez og jongleren (som han loyalt slider med) men i pauserne sætter sig ved klaveret og spiller og hun som har set ud som han har set hende, hun sætter sig på bænken hos ham og han lærer hende stilfærdigt venstrehånden og de spiller sammen som det måske kan bruges ved afslutningsforestillingnen. Og så synger han, synger og spiller en blues. Ja, kald det bare forelskelse, kærlighed i spæd begyndelse…

Det er som to små kameraiagttagelser i Wiseman film og der er adskillige af dem at opdage og tøve ved i denne fine lille tv-serie, det er et smukt og rigt værk med en sikker puls som kulminerer i den store finale, en serie for ungdommen og alderdommen at juble over. Se den!

SYNOPSIS 1

A documentary series in two parts about a group of young students at an alternative school in Denmark. At AFUK (the Academy for Untamed Creativity), also called “The Circus School”, it is acceptable to be different. The school believes in quirky characters, and that everyone is capable of much more than they think they are. 

For a year we follow the students on the “artist course”, a group of young talents within circus and performance, as they develop their unique skills. These young people have never had much success within the framework of the traditional education system but at AFUK they will get a chance to live out their talent and personalities, which they have often felt insecure about and not often been fully appreciated for. They are committed and have a lot invested in this school year, where new friendships and a new sense of community could emerge. (Danish Film Institute site)

SYNOPSIS 2

Mod Sved Tårer er en ungdomsfilm, der foregår på en kreativ ungdomsuddannelse i Danmark, hvor der er plads til at være anderledes. Akademiet for utæmmet kreativitet, også bare kaldet AFUK, er et alternativ til det traditionelle gymnasium. ”Man skal turde at være den man er” og ”Du kan så meget mere end du måske selv tror” er nogle af AFUKS kerneværdier. Hen over er skoleår følger filmen fire unge elever på AFUKS artistlinje, der på hver deres måde ikke føler, at de passer ind på et almindeligt bogligt gymnasie. Vi møder Mads, Oliver; Zanya og Andy første skoledag og filmen følger dem fra den første nervøsitet til de står stolte og modige med helt ny styrke både fysisk og mentalt, foran et stort publikum og talentspejdere til skolens afslutningsforestilling Festivitas. Mod Sved Tårer er en ungdomsfilm om identitet, om ikke passe ind i det mange forventer af en og om modet til at søge nye fælleskaber. (Made in Copenhagen site)

Mod, sved og tårer” af Andrea Storm Henriksen og Ina Lindgreen. Premiere på TV2 den 2. juni 2020. Den smukke tv-serie i to dele kan desuden ses på TV2 Play fra den samme dato.

Krakow FF Puts a Focus on Denmark

Tonight the opening of the Krakow Film Festival takes place at 7pm. 

The festival 2020 goes online – with the same high quality in selection as always. Competition programmes, thematic sections, a Dragon Award for the master Peter Forgacs, films for kids, industry events and much much more.

Including a very generous gesture towards Denmark: “Special guest of this year’s festival is Danish cinema. In Focus on Denmark section we will see the latest documentary and short films from Denmark, as well as a special programme for kids and youth and a selection of student films.” A fine bravo to Danish documentary in the 60th edition of the prestigious festival. An honour.

On that occasion you – whereever you live, for free, with English as the language – will have the chance to meet 4 Danish top documentary producers, who have contributed to the current success of Danish documentary worldwide. The producers who will talk about coproduction are Sigrid Dyekjær, Kathrine Sahlstrøm, Signe Byrge Sørensen, Malene Flindt Pedersen – who will be joined by Ane Mandrup, Head of Documentaries at the Danish Film Institute and Kim Christiansen from DR Sales (Danish Broadcasting Corp.), executive producer. It’s my job to be the moderator.

The conference has a duration of 90 minutes and takes place Tuesday June 2nd at 12-13.30 via the link below, You can put question to the panel (write mail@tuesday.dk). Photo: Eva Mulvad’s A Modern Man 

https://www.krakowfilmfestival.pl/en/industry/industry-zone/panels-conferences/focus-on-denmark-presentation/

 

 

 

Grit Tind Mikkelsen: Rebeccas rum

Rum hedder det. Både i ental og i flertal, både i fysisk betydning og i mental betydning. Rebecca hedder også Vera og hun kan godt være i to tilstande, viser det sig. Grit Tind Mikkelsens dejlige film spiller på alle disse alternativer i en gennemført diminuendo, som dog desværre mod slutningen forstyrres en del af en metafor over havets tilstande. Unødvendigt, for hovedpersonen Vera Rebecca er konstant i scenen  og fortæller selv det hele i én uafbrudt dialog med de andre og med sig selv, og det er og bliver Rebecca Veras egen smukke, smukke film hvert sekund, indlevet støttet af Grit Tind Mikkelsens kloge instruktion og fornemt observerende kamera og Anna Heides uforstyrret elegante klip fra det voldsomste til det mest tyste. Jeg vil tillade mig herefter fra de to at vente mig flere kloge og gribende film, mere filmkunst altså.

Danmark 2020, 69 min. Filmen havde premiere under CPH:DOX og kan streames på DR-TV fra 31. maj 2020.

SYNOPSIS 1

 The entrepreneur Rebecca Vera Stahnke has broken off all contact with the established fashion industry, and is now focusing all her efforts on the new concept Veras. From the hopeful beginnings in empty storefronts to the harsh tone of board meetings, Rebecca fights on all fronts for a space that is hers. In a reality where tonnes of clothing and highly-strung confrontation is a part of everyday life, Rebecca’s biggest challenge is ultimately herself. ‘Pieces of Rebecca’ follows the personal journey of a young entrepreneur’s first years, but is above all a human tale of Rebecca herself – the woman behind the phenomenon Veras. (CPH:DOCS site) 

SYNOPSIS 2

Rebeccas Rum er et intimt og poetisk portræt af en passioneret arbejdsnarkoman, som forsøger at finde en balance mellem sin profession og den hun er.

 Iværksætteren Rebecca Vera Stahnke har, efter en krise, kappet kontakten med den etablerede modebranche, og satser nu alt, hvad hun indeholder, på sit nye koncept Veras. Alt ved denne rejse er personligt og i løbet af Rebeccas første år som iværksætter, følger instruktøren hendes udvikling i håb om at fange den menneskelige fortælling.

 Rebecca introducerer os for et farverigt univers midt i København, samtidig med at hun slider for at få plads til sig selv i en pulserende og hårdtslående verden. Fra den håbefulde start i tomme butikslokaler, til de skarpe hjørner til bestyrelsesmøderne, kæmper Rebecca på alle fronter for et rum, som er hendes eget.

I en virkelighed, hvor tonsvis af tøj, højspændte konfrontationer, ubetalte regninger, Airbnb og kontor-udlejere, der opfører sig som røvhuller, er en del af hverdagen, så er Rebeccas største udfordring i sidste ende, sig selv. Mens Veras vokser sig stor og efterspørgslen bliver større, mister Rebecca bid for bid sig selv i sit arbejde. Hun erkender at for at overleve, må hun skabe et privat rum, hvor hun blot behøver at være Rebecca.

Rebeccas Rum går bag om facaden og portrætterer virkeligheden for en modig og visionær kvinde i et skelsættende år af sit liv. (Line Bilenberg i sin pressemeddelse)