DOK Leipzig Starts Monday

… and will continue untill the 3rd of November. With films, many excellent industry activities, film talks here there and everywhere. The ticket counters are open, I am sure there will be full houses for many films and there will be a great atmosphere at the festival centre in the Museum of Fine Arts – the impressive Museum der bildenden Künste that hosts the film market and discussions and receptions BUT also has interesting exhibitions, right now „Point of No Return… Transformation and Revolution in East German Art“. I will for sure watch that – and films from thursday the 31st, where I will be at the festival. Press releases are coming from Leipzig these days. I have edited/shortened and copy-pasted some of them:

Look at the photo… no surprise for me, who grew up with 16 and 35 mm reels at my time at the Danish Film Board. I know how to feed a 16mm Bauer or Bell&Howell projector! Anyway, the-times-they-are-a-changing and the festival announces the following :

« An impressive 18,000 metres of film will roll across spools during the festival week! While the majority of the film programme is stored digitally on hard disks, in every DOK Leipzig edition there are still a few films made with analogue film reel. This year there are 24 films in 16mm and 35mm format. Most of them will be shown as part of the Retrospective, the Brothers Quay oeuvre, or the DEFA Matinee on Eduard Schreiber. The analogue technology required to screen these films is still available in the CineStar Kino 5, along with the Astoria and Wintergarten cinemas in the Passage Kino…“

Nostalgia, yes, and the press reléase informs the reader how scratches are removed from the films… All right, but keep some of them! I remember the godfather of Danish documentary, Jørgen Roos, who once, with tristesse, said to me at the time, where video was taking over as shooting medium: One day we are going to miss the Film Experience, the grains, the scratches…

Back to the copy-paste and money:

„A record-setting 82,000 euros in prize money will be awarded during this year’s edition of DOK Leipzig. In addition, the festival features non-cash prizes valued at an additional 11,000 euros, which filmmakers can for instance use for the development of their film projects. This year marks another positive development in regards to prize sponsorship: for the first time, all of the Golden Doves in the long film competitions are endowed by prize sponsors. DOK Leipzig is also delighted to welcome a new sponsor this year in the Weltkino film distribution company, which has chosen to endow the Golden Dove in the German Competition in 2019. Furthermore, public broadcaster MDR is once again sponsoring the Golden Dove in the International Competition, and the Medienstiftung der Sparkasse Leipzig is contributing the prize money for the Next Masters Competition, as in previous years.

“I would like to particularly thank all of the festival’s prize sponsors, partners and supporters. Without their wonderful support, it would not be possible to bring over 300 films and nearly 2000 international industry professionals to Leipzig or to give our Leipzig audience such an unforgettable cinema experience every year,” acknowledged festival director Leena Pasanen. “I hope that this terrific commitment to the festival will remain strong for many years to come.”

A total of 24 awards will be presented at DOK Leipzig this year.

From 28 October to 3 November this year, DOK Leipzig is showing 310 films and interactive works from all around the world. The festival will open on 28 October with the world premiere of THE FORUM, a film by Marcus Vetter.

https://www.dok-leipzig.de/

Loznitsa opened the Astra Film Festival

The fine Astra Film Festival in Sibiu in Romania placed Sergey Loznitsa’s “State Funeral” as the opening film. The Head of Programming Csilla Kató explains why in an interview with Cineuropa, below a link to the whole interview, made by  Stefan Dobroiu.

Cineuropa: The 26th edition of the Astra Film Festival has ended. What would you consider to be the strong points of this edition?
Csilla Kató: For example, the fact that we selected as our opening film Sergey Loznitsa’s State Funeral [+]. In my opinion, it is a sign of maturity, as at every festival, the opening film is chosen with great care – it is, after all, a statement about the festival’s spirit and agenda. A movie with a running time of 135 minutes, made entirely from archive footage, in which the soundtrack is the only intervention by the director, proved to be the right choice for us. In State Funeral, Loznitsa plays with both the conventions of cinema and the expectations of the audience: the audience is allowed to get lost among archive-footage sequences and is also left to interpret what they see according to their own background and personal perspective. This example of documentary cinema could not have been imagined by any screenwriter and would have been impossible to make within the conventions of fiction cinema. And the film worked well for the audience gathered to attend the opening of this edition.

https://cineuropa.org/en/index/

IDFA Announces Competition Selection

I missed the live streaming of the IDFA press conference yesterday afternoon, where artistic director Orwa Nyrabia was on stage to tell the documentary community, which films he and his programmers had chosen. But the website says it all – also that ”64% of the competition titles are by female filmmakers, with 47% in the total program”.

Having mentioned this important point for festivals around the world, let’s go to the films. I will surf a bit on the lists of selection, where it is obvious that Nyrabia’s ambition of also showing films that are not from the US or from the UK, is fulfilled:

Happy to see that Iranian Mehrdad Oskouei opens the festival. I saw his ”Starless Dreams» at the Dokufest in Prizren 3 years ago, ”an interview based observational documentary about, no with young girls in a prison, it is also called a rehabilitation centre. They are there because of drugs, robberies, even murders, and they are talked to by the director, whose soft and mild voice communicates understanding and compassion…” (http://www.filmkommentaren.dk/blog/blogpost/3647/)

The opening film seems to pick up on a similar subject, a quote from the press release, ”Sunless Shadows steps into the enclosed world of five young Iranian women, all accomplices in the murder of their abusive husbands, fathers, or brothers-in-law…”. I have reserved a ticket!

In the Feature-Length Documentary section, I am even more happy to see Italian Valentina Pedicini with “Faith”: ““Warrior Monks” and “Guardian Mothers” they call themselves, the martial arts champions who are members of an Italian sect living together in a monastery. Led by a Kung Fu master, they are like Shaolin monks but with a Catholic twist. Utterly devoted to their faith, they train constantly so they are able to combat evil in the name of the Father. Director Valentina Pedicini was granted access to a way of life defined by discipline, and the resulting black-and-white film is surprisingly intimate…” Pedicini and her cameraperson Bastian Esser graduated from the Zelig Film School in Bolzano, super-talented theyt were and are; as teacher at the school I kept on telling Valentina, “make documentaries”; after a couple of feature films, here she is. Wow!

And it is difficult not to be emotional mentioning that my hero since I started dealing with documentary, Danish Jørgen Leth is there, in competition, with “I Walk” – have mentioned before that he will receive an award at the festival for his oeuvre.

And there are films by Sung-Jun Yi, Marlene Edoyan, Maasja Ooms, Pushpendra Singh, Hilal Baydarov, Laura Herrero Garvín, Marianne Khoury, Heidi Hassan & Patricia Pérez Fernández and Kivu Ruhorahoza…

Look at the names, this is definitely a change in IDFA selection policy. Chapeau!!!

Blogposting should not be too long, so I kindly ask you to check the website of IDFA to see the mid-length section as well as the digital DocLab as well as the “immersive non-fiction” as well as the DocLab Spotlight, not to forget the documentaries for children competition, always exciting.

Click here and you get all 321 films:

https://www.idfa.nl/en/collection/documentaries?page=1&filters[edition.year]=2019

Back to the competition “For First Appearance” – debut feature films, where the Georgian “A Tunnel” is listed. I know Nino Orjonikidze and Vano Arsenishvili very well from visits to Tbilisi, have seen their short films including the middle length “The English Teacher”. So curious to see the final result and glad to observe that good old Hans Robert Eisenhauer is helping and that arte/zdf is on board as broadcaster. The story, taken from the website, a quote:

“People are hard at work extending the railroad in a remote Georgian mountain village. When they’re done, the new Silk Road Express will run through here. But before this high-speed connection between China and Europe can go anywhere, a tunnel has to be dug—a tunnel that goes right through a mountain where villagers have their fields and pastures. In his office at the station, an old-time stationmaster prepares for his role in the future, when a lot more trains will be coming through the station…” I have high expectations, dear friends!

Again the names of the directors communicate that these are films far away from the Anglo-Saxon mainroad: Alux Ayn Arumpac, Alejandro Salgado, Ilya Povolotsky, Carol Benjamin, Malgorzata Goliszewska & Katarzyna Mateja, Tali Yankelevich, Meng Han, Lucy Parker, Marija Stojnic, Simón Uribe Martinez and then a Danish name Eva Marie Rødbro, first appearence, new also for me.

Looks indeed very promising!

www.idfa.nl

DOC NYC

I was happy with the many positive reactions on Russian director Alina Rudnitskay, who was the one I praised in the post yesterday. Danish producer Sigrid Dyekjær told me that Rudnitskaya’s fine ”School of Seduction” was to be screened at DOC NYC, the festival in New York that runs November 6-15 (and at DocPoint in Helsinki January 2020). My knowledge of the New York festival is almost zero so I asked Dyekjær, who recommended it, and made me check the website:

Dedicated to D.A. Pennebaker, the festival ”is curated” in 21 (!) strands, it’s the 10th edition, and it has new strands Masters,

• Investigations, Green Screens,

• Food for Thought, plus

• returning sections include high-profile Special Events; competitions Viewfinders and Metropolis; national and global takes in American Perspectives and International Perspectives; and thematic sections Portraits (profiling singular individuals), Modern Family(on unconventional families), New World Order (on today’s most urgent issues), In the System (inside looks at institutions), Fight the Power (on activism), Art & Design (on art, photography and design), Behind the Scenes (on filmmaking), and Sonic Cinema (on music). Short-form content (114 films in total) is represented by the festival’s Shorts Competition and DOC NYC U (showcasing student work), selected by Programmer Opal H. Bennett.

I digged into the long list of films to be shown and found important films like ”Advocate”, ”Mother”, ”Honeyland”, all reviewed on this site, ”The Cave” that I am to see very soon, ”Diego Maradona” that I missed when it was in cinema in Copenhagen, embarassing, ”The Edge of Democracy”, ”For Sama”, both reviewed, as are ”The Wind. A Documentary Thriller” and ”Cold Case Hammarskjöld”… and many many others that I would love to see.

Number one on my list, however, is Michael Apted’s ”63 UP”, a milestone in the history of documentary. The participants in this documentary series were 7 years old, when Apted started filming them which he has done every 7 year. It’s amazingly wonderful, I have seen them all, I have talked to Apted about them, when my wife and I met him and his wife in Moscow and in Venice Beach, I would love to see the whole series again…

Apted is given a Lifetime Achievement Award at the festival. Of course!

63 UP

63 UP

Alina Rudnitskaya on School of Seduction

I have followed the career of Alina Rudnitskay and will continue to do so. Below you find links to films she has made and about which I have written. This post deals with her latest production, “School of Seduction”, that was given highest marks on this site, click below – the reason to come back tot he film is an interview with the Russian director, where she talks about the film and her disappointment, when many did not understand the context of the film, she says – read the whole interview:

“I started this project ten years ago – I wanted to make a film about women. It was a time when everybody was trying to learn how to be a “bitch”: this successful, powerful female. That’s how I came across a place called the Bitch Academy. I started to go there and talk to the teachers, and in 2007, I made a short film about it. It was successful at film festivals, and everywhere, people would ask me about these women: “How is their life right now?” I suggested that maybe we should continue. We agreed that if something important were to happen in their lives, they would call me…

I ended up finishing the film in Denmark, and people struggled to understand the context of this story. “Why do they go to these classes? Why do they behave like this?” They didn’t understand the reason, and the reason is that Russia is still a patriarchal country, where men come first. To be successful, for a woman, means having a rich husband. It’s really important. Your status depends on the status of your husband. My idea was that Putin would represent this view. We started to look for anything he might have said about women, and yes, we found out that he talks about them a lot [laughs]. We were really surprised! His approach is very traditional, like all of his ideas, I think…”

Festival people, check out the filmography of Alina Rudnitskaya.

https://www.cineuropa.org/it/interview/379081/

http://www.filmkommentaren.dk/blog/blogpost/4485/

Blood (2014), Victory Day (2015), I will forget this day (25 mins.) (2011) , Bitch Academy (29 mins.) (2008), Besame mucho (26 mins.) (2006), Civil Status (29 mins.) (2005), Communal Residence (13 mins) (2002)

Petra Costa: The Edge of Democracy

”There is so much to say about this first feature documentary by young Brazilian director Petra Costa. So much positive because of its visual brilliance and so much because of the way it treats its painful theme…”.

This was written almost 7 years ago after I had seen ”Elena”, a film that toured the festival circuit and created expectations for Costa’s next film. Which was excellent as well. ”Olmo and the Seagull” came out in 2014, a film she wrote and directed together with Danish Lea Glob – a work that Allan Berg praised on this site in his analysis, link below, for its portrait of a creative process, with references to theatre, to Chekhov, and to Virginia Wolf. Berg expressed his content that here was a Film and that he did not have to write about documentary or fiction. Words to that effect.

If you substitute ”first” with third in the quote above, Petra Costa’s third film

”The Edge of Democracy » is indeed dealing with a painful theme. It is a film that is based on documentary material but in many ways constructed as a drama: The recent development of Brazilian politics told from the director’s personal point of view, the loss of the dream of democracy –with a tone that you could call sad, a melancholy that associates to Chekhov. There is no Brazilian clichés, no bossa nova (before the end credits), no Copacabana, no Gilberto Gil. At the same time as the drama between the political protagonists is – to say the least – Shakespearean:

Look at the photo – you see the popular, charismatic, the man from the working class, Lula pass on the presidency to Dilma Rousseff, who is from the same party as him, the Worker’s Party, PT, but note the man to the left, Michel Temer, the vice-president from the PMDB party, who – as Costa says in her personal voice-off – was waiting to take over, contributing to the impeachment of Dilma… Temer was President for a couple of years until he, as many others, was arrested for involvement in financial operations to be cathegorized as corruption. He was followed by another criminal, Bolsonaro, whose references go back to the military dictatorship that ended in 1984, the year Costa was born.

The film is full of details about the financial scandals, about how power corrupts; for someone whose knowledge of Brazilian politics is little, it is complicated to follow, but you get it all due to Costa’s commentary and due to her open position and cinematic skills:

Her parents were in opposition to the military dictators. As Dilma Rousseff her mother was imprisoned and tortured, but her family was also part of the elite and often during the film, like when Bolsonaro was elected president, she says “many in my family voted for him”. Costa’s sympathy lies with Lula and Dilma, she has access to them and there are fantastic scenes with the two, mostly shot in cars, where you get close to them. Dilma during the impeachment process: “I am K, a Kafka’sque character, but a K with a lawyer…”, she says ironically, and with Lula it is amazing to follow him, when he is sentenced to prison and the crowd shouts at him “don’t turn yourself in”. Which he did. 12 years.

Petra Costa takes me as the schocked viewer, who lives far away from the big wonderful country – as in her first film – but here using archive material to guide me through one corruption after the other, sometimes you feel that you are watching a thriller (¡) – with visual brilliance to the presidential palaces, to the utopian capital Brasilia that separates the elite from the people, to family archive, to close-ups of Dilma and Lula, to a scene where a cleaning lady in the President’s Palace says that “there is no democracy in this country”, to her own statement that the divided country is run by some few families… To Dilma, in a conversation with Costa’s mother, saying that being a President you have lost your freedom.

Quite brave by a young director to combine complicated reportage material with a personal angle and narration. A film full of painAn inspiration it must be for other documentarians!

Brazil, 2019, 1 hour 53 mins.

Available on Netflix.

http://www.filmkommentaren.dk/blog/blogpost/3279/

http://www.filmkommentaren.dk/blog/blogpost/2239/

Sommer og Svendsen: Mandskoret

Instruktørerne har disse fornavne: Petter og Jo Vermund…

Jeg havde min kone med til pressevisningen i Grand Teatret, som skal have megen ros for at vise dokumentarfilm på det store lærred. Og det var netop, hvad Ellen sagde, da vi rejste os efter 74 minutter. 

Virkelig en film, der skal ses i biografen. Og hun fortsatte sine begejstrede udtalelser, da vi drog nedad Strøget i dejligt efterårsvejr. Fremragende, jeg har overhovedet ingen indvendinger. Velorkestreret (!), man kan godt høre at de ikke professionelle sangere, men det er en film fuld af midaldrende, charmerende mænd, der har det godt i hinandens ugentlige selskab, og når de optræder og kommer med frække tilbud til damerne (der ligger en puleliste I kan skrive jer på!)

Som filmen skrider frem, ser vi den ene rørende scene efter den anden, hvor korets karismatiske leder og dirigent Ivar kæmper med sin kræft – vil han nå at optræde med koret som opvarmning til Black Sabbath på Tons of Rock festivalen?

Som korets medlemmer bliver berørt af, hvad vej det går med Ivars sygdom, blev vi berørt af de gribende scener mændene imellem. Kom ikke og sig at mænd ikke kan udtrykke følelser. Disse scener er filmisk skildret med stor nænsomhed. De to mænd bag kameraet fylder biografoplevelsen med kærlighed og respekt – og humor.

Norge, 2018, 74 Minutter.

DOK Leipzig Retrospective BRDDR

There are films by Andrew Thorndike, Harun Farocki, Heynowski/Scheumann, Eduard Schreiber, Alexander Kluge, Thomas Heise, Thomas Harlan… among others.

The focus of the 10 programme retrospective is explained in this fine text from the festival:

“There’s nothing still standing and no one still alive”. The roof of Hitler’s bunker is detonated in August 1988. There’s no longer even a single stone in front of the Theatre of the Jewish Cultural Association either. Eduard Schreiber’s TRACES (1989) explores what remains of the Second World War, but first and foremost what no longer does.

With this year’s Retrospective, DOK Leipzig turns its attention to the four

decades between the National Socialist dictatorship and the Fall of the Berlin Wall, during which two German states existed: an era pervaded by enthusiasm for the future and repression of the past, by economic reconstruction and political reform as well as a neck and neck race of opposing ideologies.

While autumn 2019 will be characterised by the anniversary of the Peaceful Revolution, DOK Leipzig takes on a slightly different perspective on the events: “We made a conscious choice not to place the date 1989 at the centre of our focus. We’re more interested in what happened before and after”, comments Ralph Eue, programmer at DOK Leipzig, who curated the Special Programme together with film scholar Olaf Möller.

Reciprocal relationship: the enemy brothers FRG and GDR

What anchors the film selection is the idea that the former West and East Germany could not have existed without one another: “The provisional state of West Germany and the provisional state of East Germany behaved like two enemy brothers towards one another, each of whom urgently needed the other in order to understand themselves”, explains Eue.

Before the backdrop of this reciprocal relationship, the selected films also enter into dialogue with each another. The ten programmes that make up the Retrospective forge different thematic paths to this end, which enable events in both former German states to be juxtaposed. The Volkswagen city thus meets the “Stalin city” and the economic miracle is contrasted with anti-fascism. And while the West engages with the “brothers and sisters in the East” (AUS DEM ALLTAG IN DER DDR: DRITTER VERSUCH EINER REKONSTRUKTION), East Germany also eyes its enemy brother and draws on its anti-Communist initiatives for its own propaganda (KGU – THE COMBAT GROUP OF INHUMANITY, 1955).

The Retrospective offers a colourful compilation of formats, ranging from an VW advertising film (AUS EIGENER KRAFT, 1954) via a CDU party political broadcast (THE ECONOMIC MIRACLE, 1957) all the way to an animated film that extolls the virtues of the Deutschmark (… SIE BEWEGT UNS ALLE, 1950).

It goes without saying that the reunification era is not left out. The Retrospective programme examines it in bottom-up fashion: In SNACK-SPECIAL, Thomas Heise turns his attention to the everyday experiences and worries of people at a Berlin fast food stand during the period of upheaval.

And ultimately, the hypothesis comes up again and again that reunification didn’t just mean the end of East Germany but also that of West Germany in its previous form. In ES WERDE STADT! by Dominik Graf and Martin Farkas, this exact hypothesis is examined in detail by way of the history of television, taking in numerous different facts and ideas.

https://www.dok-leipzig.de/en/festival/sonderreihen/retrospektive/retrospektive-filme

Dmitry Kabakov: Present Simple Tense

Looking down from the sky. Moving over an area with houses accompanied by the director’s voice telling the viewer that this is my place, a kind of brief prologue in a melancholic maybe nostalgic tone. Existential questions raised. And then down to earth, to a smiling happy boy on bike, driving around a town with glimpses of happy gatherings, old women dancing, and driven by lovely energetic music by Evgenyi Kadimsky. It’s a dynamic optimistic start.

The title: ”The simple present tense is when you use a verb (here a film, ed.) to tell about things that happen continually in the present, like every day, every week, or every month. We use the simple present tense for anything that happens often or is factual.”

… explanation for a complicated English title chosen by Russian director Dmitry Kabakov. I met him in Riga a month ago and he sent me a link to this new film by him. Thank you for that, I enjoyed it. Because of the director’s good documentary eye for situations and details in everyday life in his Zvavoronki, where he has lived since he was three years old. Because he takes his time, let scenes stand long and because he has a position:

Fences are built in his town. Around houses, at the railway, at the roads. Borders that separate. Trains that pass by, only some stop. Political refugees from Tajikistan, they don’t speak Russian, meeting slogans on the walls like ”Russia for Russians”. The director takes a lot of time to give a historical background of Tajikistan. Not necessary, what is interesting is the fate of the characters of today.  

It’s a big family that is in focus with the boy on the bike, Mukhammad, as the one to be followed from, when he goes with his father “to pick up” a new baby, sibling number 7 and his mother at the hospital till you see him as a fence builder after his Tadjik family has been forced to move away from the house that they had been allowed to stay in by the church in the town.

Between the boy on the bike and the same older boy doing fences you find the film. Next door to the house of the Tadjik family is the green house, where an old couple live. The woman is a teacher and invites in Mukhammad and his sister to be taught languages and mathematics. She is lovely. A strong woman. Her talks with her mostly silent husband are most often about the living conditions of the refugees, she has a true humanistic approach to life and people. The camera catches, no I would say caresses the couple, when they are inside and when they sit on a bench in the garden.

The couple is the director’s parents, he reveals towards the end of the film, you sense that in the tone of the film and in sequences… the father – he does that often – sits in his own thoughts for some time, gets up to take something from the wife’s place in the garden and walks towards the door to the house. Slowly.

The title, “The simple present tense”, is used to tell about things that happen continually in the present, like every day, every week, or every month… that’s what the film does in a very fine way.

Russia/Latvia, 2019, 91 mins.

Detlefsen og Unmarck Kjeldsen: Fat Front

Still: I byen er der ingen anerkendelse…

Louise Detlefsens og Louise Unmarck Kjeldsens film Fat Front har premiere i biograferne i dag. Gå i biografen og se den! Det er en dejlig film. Fornem journalistik, gribende filmscener, elegant klipning, bevægende klogt indhold, fire energiske medvirkende, som med svingende følelsesindhold aldrig taber intensitet.

Sammen med instruktørerne VIL de dette budskab som sammenfattes allerede i titelfrekvensen i en dialog mellem den første af de stolte medvirkende og hendes forsigtige veninde of screen i kabinen på en skilift som jeg ser på vej op i højderne. Replikker på klart klingende norsk:

Synes du jeg er tyk? / Nej. / Men hvis du skulle beskrive min krop? / Jeg ved ikke, hvilket ord jeg kan bruge… Jeg ville nok sige: “Hun er lidt kraftig.” / Kraftig? Det giver mig et billede af mig selv som en kampesten. / Kraftig bygget? / Det er jeg ikke. Det er jeg virkelig ikke. Overhovedet ikke. / Hvad med rund? / Det passer jo til en snemand. Jeg synes det er den værste gang bullshit. / Jeg forsøger at skåne dig. / Ja, men… Der er ikke nogen bedre beskrivelse end ordet tyk. For det er det jeg er. Ja, jeg er tyk. 

Og hun stiger ud af kabinen, ja, hun er tyk. Veninden, som så ikke er tyk, bagefter. Hun går forrest opad i den høje sne, kraftfuldt, kendt med dette forhold i fjeldet, stiller sig glad og breder armene ud mod den vide udsigt og råber:

Hallo Verden, kan du høre mig? Jeg er tyk! Jeg er tyk og jeg er totalt ligeglad! 

Still: I naturen er der fuld anerkendelse…

Ja, den her dejlige frigjorte film er selvfølgelig ikke et søgende, tvivlende essay, den er fra begyndelse til slut og hele vejen igennem en selvbevidst og overbevisende pamflet. 

Og den har levet i mit hovede, i hele kroppen faktisk gennem nogle dage, hvor jeg har vendt og drejet min opfattelse og jeg ved det vil blive ved. For filmen er en tekst, et budskab som vil overbevise, en tekst som har ændret mig, den er en pamflet som virker.

Jeg skriver derfor lige her, lige her i Filmkommentaren ordet FED for sidste gang, fra nu er ordet TYK… Der er ikke en venlighed til forskel, der er en viden om historien og kulturerne og mennesket til forskel. En ny viden jeg ikke vidste jeg ikke havde.

Still: I det rette element… vægtløs.