”I will not let Kais feel my sadness”. Words from the father in this small gem of a film. Father and son. From Syria. Coming to Norway for a new beginning.

But we, the audience, feel the sadness of Rabeea. Thanks to the gentle way the director sets the tone, letting us read the face of the father, who has one reason to live: Creating a future for Kais, his son, who towards the end of the film, where he is 7 years old and has started in first class in school, is told (some of) the story of the journey they have taken from Syria to Lebanon to Turkey and through Europe to a welcoming Norway.

Bravo Dad, Kais says, in a wonderful sequence where the two are out skiing in snowy Norway. Kais learns Norwegian quite quickly contrary to the father, who also fights with his health. In the beginning we see him in a wheelchair in Copenhagen Central Station, in Norway he gets an operation of his damaged leg, he ought to have one more on his back but says no: Kais gets scared if I say the word “operation”. He kills the pain with pills.

It is never sentimental, but touching it is to see father and son. There is so much love in their relationship – that the film conveys with respect without pushing for emotions. Absurd it is to see Syrian boy Kais celebrate the Norwegian national day on the 7th of May singing with a flag in hand. He will adapt to the new country with the energy and openness his loving father passes on to him. The father… What a world we live in. 

Denmark, 2020, 78 mins.

This fine – in aesthetics as well as in content – documentary won The Dragon Award for Best Nordic Documentary at the Göteborg Film Festival beginning of February this year. The jury‘s motivation is so precise and well written that I will use some of the words as starting points for this review’s recommendation to show the film on big screens, when festivals ”open” again.  

This award is given for the curiosity of the directors in observing vastly different opposing groups, resulting in a polyphonic portrait of a country in which peace doesn’t seem welcome. The precise use of photography and editing submerges us in the differing realities presented and creates a stark contrast between the political sensibilities at play in the natural and urban environments, and the associated poverty and luxury. This film goes beyond being an intimate portrait of a country, and makes us reflect upon colonialism and post-colonialism, capitalism and anti-capitalism, and what keeps us going as humanity.

…Observing vastly different opposing groups. The film takes its beginning in the 2016 peace agreement between the government (when the President was Santos) and FARC. There is a focus on the strong young and sympathetic soldier from FARC, Ernesto, who is to be a leading character through the film. He believes in the peace, believes in putting down the weapons after more than 50 years of war, believes in the right movement for FARC from guerilla to political party. He ends up being disappointed, when all hope for peace is crashed; the government sends soldiers to stop the farmers from picking coca leaves to end their sole possibility for having an income; brutality reigns, paramilitary groups operate, the war continues. Another character is a man from the decadent upper class, who says that he would never allow a FARC person to enter his palazzo, and who has no sympathy for the political class – that also includes a right-wing female politician, who express her philosophy more or less like this: the poor are happy with their lives and so are the rich. No problem!

… The precise use of photography. I would go further in my characterisation: The camera work is excellent, lots of close-ups, energy in the scenes with an editing that lets some of them (the scenes) be loose and develop like those with Ernesto and his friend in the tent in the jungle. Funny they are.

… beyond being an intimate portrait of a country. Yes, definitely there is this clear sense of classes, in that way the filmmakers have succeeded in creating a drama as good as any fiction.

2020, Finland, 90 mins.

I was at the DokuFest(ival) in Prizren in 2016. Great experience with good films and an atmosphere of generosity in a beautiful place. Since then I have followed the program set up through the fine communication from the organisers. In that respect Eroll Bilibani is a key person. The other day he announced on FB: I will be sharing 1 film from Dokufest production, each day during the #COVIDー19 #QuarantineAndChill #OneFilmADayKeepsDoctorAwayFilm #5 WHOSE FLAG IS IT? by Barış Karamuço. All films will be available on Dokufest.com‘s Sweet & Short Quarantine.

I asked Eroll to pick one film for me to watch and he took the mentioned ”Whose Flag is it?” because “although produced 4 years after Kosovo’s independence the film is still very actual as there are mixed feelings about state flag vs. national flag, which ads to dilemmas of national identity and ethnicity”.

I watched the lively 14 minutes long film that is far from taking the issue (too) serious as it invites you – in 2012 on the 17th of February, the day where Kosovo celebrates its independence – to be with kindergarten children and their teacher, who talks about the flag and asks the kids to draw it on their own. As you can see on the photo. The stay with the children is cut with statements from people with quite different opinions, some saying that the result of the competition was influenced by the EU to others, who like the flag and its stressing that the 6 stars represent 6 ethnic groups.

DokuFest is the producer of many short films, does film teaching during the year, is a strong cultural factor in the young country. Respect!   

https://vimeo.com/57599879?fbclid=IwAR0MWZR57MerLbiTButsng4FT7AsexO-isIGCVg5_vct6Batj4jNzCvUgTE (the film)

https://dokufest.com/2019/ (other films)

https://vimeo.com/user10268202/videos (Dokufest productions)

The initiative of the CPH:DOX to put documentaries online for the audience in Denmark can only be described as IMPRESSIVE, FANTASTIC, BRAVO – support it by buying tickets, there are so many fine films to watch until March 29. The 7 films on the list marked like this are films, we have written about on www.filmkommentaren.dk OR films we have seen and can recommend. Have a good film festival at home!  

Kampen om Grønland – Kenneth Sorento

Lever elsker savner – Sine Skibsholt

Songs of Repression – Estephan Wagner & Marianne Hougen-Moraga
Show Dancer – Laurits Flensted-Jensen
A Colombian Family – Tanja Wol Sørensen
En Splittet Familie – Mira Jargil
Being Eriko – Jannik Splidsboel
A New Beginning – Ala’a Mohsen
Et År For Evigt – Pauline Merrilgaard
I Love You I Miss You I Hope I See You Before I Die – Eva Marie Rødbro
Tove i stykker – Peter Lopes Andersson & Sami Saif
Prelle – Lytter til mig selv – Anita Beikpour
Tilfældets Gaver – En Film om Jørgen Leth – Kasper Bech Dyg
Love Child – Eva Mulvad
Little Girl – Sebastien Lifshitz
The Kingmaker – Lauren Greenfield
Caught in the Net – Vit Klusak & Barbora Chulipová
Crazy, Not Insane – Alex Gibney
Citizen K – Alex Gibney
This is Not A Movie – Yung Chang
Aznavour By Charles – Marc Di Dominico
Meet the Censors – Håvard Fossum
Robolove – Maria Arlamovsky
Andrey Tarkovsky: A Cinema Prayer – Andrey A. Tarkovsky
Martha: A Picture Story – Selina Miles
The Edge of All We Know – Peter Gallison
Oeconomia – Carmen Losmann
iHuman – Tonje Scheel
Vivos – Ai Weiwei
Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets – Bill & Turner Ross
Self Portrait – Margreth Olin
Oliver Sacks: His Own Life – Ric Burns
Wood – Monica Lazurean-Gorgan, Michaela Kirst & Ebba Sinzinger
Collective – Alexander Nanau
Last and First Men – Johann Johansson
Acasa, My Home – Radu Ciorniciuc
Margaret Atwood: A Word after a Word after a Word is Power – Nancy Lang & Peter Raymont
Disclosure – Sam Feder
The Earth Is Blue As an Orange – Iryna Tsilyk (PHOTO)
Martin Margiela: In His Own Words – Reiner Holzemer

https://www.cphdox.dk/online

The Filmkommentaren posts about this film goes back to 2010, where Dana B., the Croatian director of the film, presented the project at the Greek Storydoc. I was part of the Ex Oriente 2011, when Dana took part, searching for a way to tell the amazing story about an amazing woman, a true hero. Finding new material again and again. Researching for years. ”I wanted to make a true and honest film”. In 2008 at the Sarajevo FF, she came to show the solutions, she had found, I repeat myself: 

 

„Dana Budisavljevic is the director who pitched together with producer Miljenka Cogelja. An extraordinary story about an extraordinary woman Diana Budisavljevic, who during WW2 helped children, mostly Orthodox, herself being Catholic, out of the concentration camps set up by the Germans and their Croatian partners, the Ustashas. It’s 10000 children and the film is a docufiction using an actress to play DB, sequences with survivors who go the places, where the camps were and shocking archive material from the camps. The director has – from the scenes I saw – found her form, she has made her aesthetic choice, b/w and colour mixed, the b/w maybe tinted a bit, it looked impressive…”

And now finally I got to watch the final film, that premiered last year in July, through a link provided by the director. And I am full of admiration. The film is stylistically in full control moving smoothly from fiction scenes with actors to arranged scenes where survivors are taken back to the locations of the ustasha concentraton camps to almost unbearable archive material from the camps, where Diana B. rescued the children through her own campaign, with big risks. You see children, who were taken away from the camp, including many who would not survive their bad health situation.

On the photo above you see Diana B. – played by the actress Alma Prica – and her husband (Igor Samobor) in a key scene, where he, successful doctor, asks her to stop her campaign. He takes out his identity card that says “Serb 498” – I am orthodox, it can be dangerous if you continue. She does.

Dana B. has based her film on the diaries of Diana B., as the title says. In a fine interview from Cineuropa – link below – she reflects on docu and fiction – “…one of them had to be understated, and I decided that the fiction scenes would be the understated ones so that they could expose the facts and re-tell the story of Diana. They could show what happened because the witnesses could not possibly know that. They could bring out the emotion because they remember the camps, but they do not know who saved them, who Diana was or how she got involved. They were selected carefully and filmed in a certain way so that they could be on an equal footing with the fictional characters…”

Very clever and so well done, balanced with an intense atmosphere and very good cinematic solutions like the one that starts and ends the film: Zivko, a witness, in a boat on a lake, says that he does not know, who were his parents or where he was born or what name was given to him – I only have this, the number on a coin around the neck given to him at the camp.

The film won 4 awards at the festival in Pula last July. And it was shown at Gothenburg FF this year; in the catalogue Diana Budisavljevic is compared to Wallenberg and Schindler.

Croatia, Slovenia, Serbia, 2019, 88 mins.

https://cineuropa.org/en/interview/375681/

Acclaimed Ukranian director Serhiy Bukovsky has made a film that invites me – and an audience – to meet the composer Valentyn Silvestrov. I knew the name but not the person and just a little about his quite impressive work. When I saw that the film was to be premiered in Kiev during the DocuDays festival, I contacted Dar’ya Averchenko, who on FB had posted a text about a press screening of the film. She was so kind to send me a link. As the DocuDays festival is postponed, I guess the film has not yet had its official premiere. Until then and until I can see – and hear ! – the film in a cinema, these words of recommendation:

 

The film is divided into three chapters/films of each around 40 minutes, entitled: “The Virus of Expression », « Memory Corner » and « Alleluia » : First I thought « why » but watching, it is quite clear. To simplify, the first one is about creation following recordings of his works, the second is a conversation the director has with the composer in his home, the third one is a performance of one of his choir works.

A clear division and yet from chapter to chapter there is a progression, where you get to know Silvestrov and his look at music. A composer, as he says, is successful when his work is performed as it was meant to be. In the beginning you see him at a recording being unhappy with what he hears, making corrections to be conveyed by the recorder to the conductor, it takes time, you think wow, he is a stubborn old man but in the middle chapter, in the interesting conversation in his home, you feel the dedication and you hear about his problems with the Soviet authorities because of his avantgarde music, as it was condidered. 

Through the whole film Bukovsky goes away from sequences – keeping the music most of the time – to let images from the beautiful ice-winter landscapes in and outside the city emerge ; often with trains passing by ; there is a sense for the detail and I did never feel it as « an illustration ». We are also in his humble flat, in a wonderful scene Silvestrov is looking at a Bruegel 2019 calendar, page by page, he is into art as he is into poetry with several sequences with music that he has composed to poems of the national poet Sevchenko (1814-1961). His poems are like psalms, he says, they can be song and recited. Patriotic psalms.

What is your favorite sound, Bukovsky asks Silvestrov. « When Dante describes music, he says « dolce », a tone taken with care and ease ».

Bukovsky tells the audience that Silvestrov completed his 9th symphony in 2019, he began working on it in 1996, the year when his wife died. Discreetly the camera travels along photos of the wife, never going into biographical details. At least not directly.

The last part – the choir singing « Allluia » – introduces again the urge for perfection in performance by Silvestrov. The choir that includes first of all young girls with braids – and its conductor – is interrupted again and again by the composer, « more tempo » etc. and at a moment a girl faints and the composer feels guilty because of all the breaks, he has made. They finish and Silvestrov turns to Bukovsky saying, « you can edit it right ? »…

Lovely film. Lovely man. Made « with care and ease”.

Ukraine, 2020, 2 hours and 23 minutes.