In the Cinema in Gori Georgia

… Well, actually there is no cinema in Gori so the Cinédoc-Gori Mini Festival takes place in the big theatre that was built in 1937-38 to honour Josip Stalin, who was born in Gori… he never visited the theatre, it is being said.

BUT I did this afternoon to attend the screening of one of my darlings from the last years, Ukrainian Roman Bondarchuk’s “Dixieland”, written by Dar’ya Averchenko and produced by Latvian Ilona Bicevska. The film was screened as part of the CinéDOC MiniFestival for documentaries, this one in the section for young people. A clip from a previous post about the film written at its premiere in Kiev at the DocuDays:

“The film about jazz music performed by kids in a band in Kherson Ukraine, led by their old teacher, who founded the band just after WW2, picking up homeless children to give them the chance to develop their skills, gave them a life, simply – is a warm, so well made – Bondarchuk has indeed a documentary-eye – interpretation of a happy childhood, where kids have a good time developing their creative skills. As it is written in the catalogue: We all live once in Dixie Land – the country where politics, money and death do not exist at all. But over time this country is disappearing… yes, we are in Ukraine of today.”

I introduced the film and asked the young audience to give me comments after the film that I can forward to the Ukrainian/Latvian team.

Indeed the seven-eight commentators liked the film. They found it wonderful to see a film about real people, happy people one said, much more happy than we are here in Georgia! Others also praised the film saying that it was realistic and emotional. And one wanted to know what the director had done, I mentioned „Ukrainian Sheriffs“ and „Volcano“. It was great to feel that the audience appreciated the initiative to screen documentaries that they normally don’t have a chance to access.

I asked Anuka from the organising CinéDOC team to address a sweet looking girl to ask her if she plays an instrument. No, she said. Would you like to? Yes. Which instruments? Piano… and violin. Oh, yes, films can inspire, also when you are seven year old.

CinéDOC Summer School in Gori

It’s too hot to be outside during the day, and the organisers of the CinéDOC Summer School know that. The brilliant team from CinéDOC has made the 15 participants (10 from Georgia, Armenia and Azerbadjan plus 5 students from Konrad Wolf Filmuniversität in Babelsberg Germany) meet 4 tutors (editors Albert Elings (Holland) and Dana Bunescu (Romania), cameraperson Merle Jothe (Germany) and myself from morning till evening, where we all go to the cinema, where the Cinédoc-Gori Mini Festival takes place. It opened last night with the sweet and charming “Transparent World” by Vakhtang Kuntsev-Gabashvili was shown. It won the Caucasus award at CinéDOC two years ago. I wrote an enthusiastic note on the film on that occasion – http://www.filmkommentaren.dk/blog/blogpost/4226/ and I enjoyed to watch the film again, Beka and his father making a film. Lovely!

The film programme also includes films for children – like “Dixieland” from Ukraine – and this year’s winner at CinéDOC in Tbilisi, “The Disappearance of My Mother”. Read more about it on

http://www.cinedoc-tbilisi.com/?lang=ge

And again a salute to the CinéDOC people, who organise regional screenings all over Georgia, very well organised with regional coordinators, it’s film cultural policy!

Eva Mulvad: Kirsebæreventyret

Denne vidunderlige film er nu blevet til en lille tv-serie i to afsnit. 1. afsnit har været sendt på TV2, det kan nu ses på TV2 Play og 2. afsnit sendes på onsdag den 31. juli om aftenen. TV versionen er naturligvis noget anderledes end filmen, som jeg ved premieren skrev begejstret om:  

Eva Mulvad har atter en gang lavet en smuk og tydelig film om et moderne menneske. Han er godsejer, han hedder Harald Krabbe, han har et projekt ved siden af gårdens grundlæggende landbrugsproduktion, han vil optimere de mange kirsebærtræers udbytte, lave fornem vin i stedet for almindelig marmelade. Eva Mulvad vil skildre udvidelsen og fornyelsen, forsøget. De er energiske mennesker de to, de klæder hinanden de to.

Hvor kommer det overskud fra? Jeg tror det kommer fra elegancen – det elegante menneskes sikkerhed, det sikre professionelle greb, som igen kommer af en ubøjelig tro på det sikre valg.

Om kirsebæreventyret lykkes fortæller filmen i den tilbageholdte videns form, det udvikler sig til en thriller, jeg sidder og frygter tilbagegang, uheld, nemesis… læs mere:

http://www.filmkommentaren.dk/blog/blogpost/4496/

Sergei Loznitsa: State Funeral

There he goes again, the master of dealing creatively with archive, Sergei Loznitsa. His new film, to be premiered at the Venice International Film Festival (August 28 – September 7), entitled ”State Funeral” is – I have copy-pasted from Screen Daily, link below for the whole article –

… about the “grandiose, terrifying and grotesque” spectacle of the funeral of Joseph Stalin.

It will be the latest of Loznitsa’s montage films based on archive footage following Blockade, Revue, The Event and The Trial…

“I have been working with footage which was shot between March 5-8, 1953 for a film called The Great Farewell by directors including Sergei Gerasimov and Ilya Kopalin,” Loznitsa explains. “But the film was banned after people in the Soviet government saw it and so it was never released. The film only appeared during the period of perestroika in the 1990s.”

Berlin-based Loznitsa worked with 100 reels of material he found in the Russian state archive, which includes footage of the four-day event in Berlin, Warsaw and Prague as well as the major Soviet cities.

“The film will follow the chronology of the four days – from the announcement of Stalin’s death to the funeral in the Red Square,“ Loznitsa explained. “I want to present audiences with the opportunity to be inside that time and feel it.

“My generation can now start to talk about this time because for previous generations like that of my parents, there are still the painful memories,“

https://www.screendaily.com/searchresults?qkeyword=loznitsa

Review of «The Trial»: http://www.filmkommentaren.dk/blog/blogpost/4393/

Review of “The Event”: http://www.filmkommentaren.dk/blog/blogpost/4148/

Welcome to the Documentary World

29 film Zelig students got their diplomas recently, as last moment of the three years professional course in documentary filmmaking, edition 2016-2019, which just ended at the end of June.

The final exams have been conducted by a commission formed by external experts in the three school specialisations (Valerio Moser for Directing/Project Development, Martin Rattini for Photography/Light, Cornelia Schöpf for Editing/Postproduction) and by a member of the school staff. The graduates presented and discussed their graduation films and a significant piece of work realised in these years.

Their final films are now being submitted to International Film Festivals and will be presented in a local event in Bolzano which will take place in November.

Here the list of the graduates:

DIRECTING / PROJECT DEVELOPMENT
Maria Benedetta Boldrin
Giuseppe Crudele
Clara Delva
Antonio Di Biase
Erald Dika
Caterina Ferrari
Julie Iris Hössle
Linda Nyman
Thomas Saglia
Martin Telser

PHOTOGRAPHY/LIGHT
Tamara Diepold
Simone Endrizzi
Julian Giacomuzzi
Annachiara Gislimberti
Mark Modric
Mattia Ottaviani
Philipp Rubatscher
Marcus Zahn
Luca Zontini

Andrea Bertoldi

EDITING/POSTPRODUCTION
Emma Baruffaldi
Iain Thomas Beairsto
Aaron Beitz
Gabriella Cosmo
Claudia Gerstl
Giulia Micheli
Lorenzo Misia
Petra Pirandello
Nadja Werner

www.zeligfilm.it

Luke Moody Leaves Sheffield Doc/Fest

In a very interesting article, written by Nick Bradshaw, in Sight & Sound, the head programmer of the Sheffield Doc/Fest Luke Moody reveals why he decided to leave the festival after 20 months as director of programming. Bradshaw writes about films shown in the programme films that are far away from the British television tradition, many films from Latin America…

Two years ago, on this site, in another interview, Moody explained what his vision was for the festival, link below. And now he says goodbye.

A couple of quotes from the article indicate why «… Such visions are hardly British broadcast television fare, and for Moody that’s reason to question the dominance on the Doc/Fest board of the British factual TV departments, who since the festival’s founding have increasingly retreated from international film co-production and turned to formatted entertainment. (The BFI also has one seat on the board; Moody counted it as an exception to his complaint.) “The only thing I hear from them is self-interest: ‘Where’s my commission?’,” he said when we met this year. “They’re not performing a job to take the festival forward and accept new partnerships or grow the festival, or support a programme that is progressive. They’re from a tradition that is a dinosaur – the likes of Netflix, Amazon, HBO and Hulu are far more progressive and will take their audiences…”

Quite som criticism… and he continues « … the day after the festival ended, Moody resigned from his role. “This festival needs to find a new vision and I’ve tried to bring that – for the programme to be international, and representative of a broader spectrum of what documentary and nonfiction can be,” he wrote to me. “But their anchor is the festival as it was 10, 20 years ago – putting forward colonial forms of filmmaking, annually offering and pressuring to include content only relevant to a domestic market and directed by white men over 40. The chimney needs sweeping before a fire can be lit…”

Colonial forms of filmmaking…!

Read the whole article, link below.

https://www.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/sight-sound-magazine/comment/festivals/sheffield-doc-fest-2019-film-programme-latin-american-outreach-luke-moody-resignation

http://www.filmkommentaren.dk/blog/blogpost/3951/

Jola Dylewska: Marek Edelman… and there was Love

in the Ghetto… made in cooperation with Andrzej Wajda and Agnieszka Holland

Marek Edelman (1919-2009): Holocaust survivor and the last leader of the Warsaw Ghetto. When being interviewed – close up of his face, smoking one cigarette after the other – he appears to be a grumpy old man apparently not liking all the questions, at the same time as he enjoys, and he does that very well, to talk about the women he knew, the couples he remembers. No talk about the horror in the ghetto, there was (also) love in the ghetto. That’s what Edelman wants to remember. There is a text at the end credits: “He always said: “It’s easy to hate, but love requires effort and dedication”.

It’s about Love in the Ghetto in a film that is built up in a very simple way: Edelman talking, b/w archive from the ghetto, love songs, and staged scenes mostly with no dialogue, love scenes, well made, mostly without dialogue, co-written by Holland and co-dramatised by Wajda.

It sounds schematic but it works, it is touching, there is a fine never bombastic editing from Edelman to the staged scenes to the strong archive photos from the ghetto. There is Tosia, the nurse, Dola the red-haired beauty, Pola who leaves her boyfriend to go with her mother to the Umschlagplatz, where the wagons were waiting for them.. as they were for the blond Hendusia Himelfarb, who could have been saved, Edelman said to her, but who chose to walk with the children from the sanatorium…

Umschlagplatz – Edelman stood there watching the crowds – thousands of people – passing by, waiting to see if some of his pals came that way. “What could you see in their eyes”, the director asks him,”Nothing, it was one big crowd passing me”.

It is painful for him to talk about it, he responds irritated and he refuses to say yes to the director, when she says that the wagons were going to the gas chambers. ”I don’t know”. He himself was working at the hospital, he had a card to show, so he was not deported. In a scene from the hospital white cards are distributed, a woman gets one but wants it to be passed on to her daughter…

There is a monument in Warsaw, where the Umschlagplatz was. You see it in the film. On the wall it is written: Between 1942 and 1943, more than 300,000 Jews from the ghetto that had been established in Warsaw went to the Nazi death camps along this path of suffering.

Poland, Germany, 2019, 80 mins.

Alexander Mihalkovich: My Granny from Mars

Yevpatoria, Crimea, Ukraine, occupied by Russia since 2014. A song from the film about the city:

“Here the sea gives me so much tenderness and love and health for years to come. Gardens and wonderful colors are all around, the joy of life is here to stay…”

And the film shows you, how attractive Yevpatoria is at the seaside, where the granny Zina lives, Ukrainian she is, being visited by Sasha, the director of the film, 30 years old – and by her children and grandchildren as well as neighbours and her sister, who all come to join the celebration of her 80th birthday.

Zina with her beautiful face, combing her hair… some fine sequences in what I

find the strongest conveyed layer in a film, that is built as a musical or at least is full of music: the layer with grandchild and granny, the love between them, her worry about his profession, about him not having found a partner in life, about… all the clichées which are not clichées but that´s how grannies are (I am on my way to be the same as a grandfather!), at least the caring and strong ones from the generation, who remembers the second WW and the fight for life afterwards. Zina remembers the airplanes from that war, now there is another war going on, where she as Ukrainian is surrounded by Russian orientated citizens. Isolated, wishing to move away, but “I have moved enough in my life”.

Zina has not been to a restaurant for 30 years, in the film she goes to one near the sea with the family to celebrate, she gets presents from the neighbour, who is in her 90’es, forgotten on that occasion are the discussions about politics. The framing is the musical, as the director calls it, when he takes a photo of granny and her son, who came for the celebration from Israel, where he lives. The daughter comes from Belarus as the director, whose first feature film this is.

Chapeau for the director to have chosen the many songs, several of them song by the old ladies in the film, to be a red thread of the narrative, it gives the film a poetic dimension, where it could have been far too easy and bombastic to go for the Ukrainian/Russian theme the whole way through. For me it is there, it is understandable.

I was, a year ago, at the Sarajevo Film festival part of a jury put together by the Jihlava Film Festival with Current Time TV as the sponsor. We gave (from 10 candidates) a shared main prize to “My Granny…” with this motivation:

“For a choice of charismatic protagonists, treated in a highly cinematic way, and for the sense of absurdity in a difficult and unstable environment.”

Long Live, I hope, a granny like Zina! A universal character.

https://eefb.org/interviews/alexander-mihalkovich-on-my-grannie-from-mars/

Ukraine, Belarus, Estonia, 2018, 73 mins.

Photo: Granny to the right, her sister to the left.

IceDocs Iceland Documentary Film Festival/2

From FB I copy who were the winners of the new documentary festival in Iceland:

In our closing screening we didn’t only see a wonderful documentary, The Human Shelter (by Danish director Boris Bertram, ed.), but also gave awards to the winners of the festival. Here are the winners:

Shorts competition: All Inclusive (dir. Corina Schwingruber Ilić)
Mid-length competition: Haunted (dir. Christian Einshøj)
Main competition: Bruce Lee & the Outlaw (dir. Joost Vandebrug)
Mainland Special Mention: Honeyland (dir. Tamara Kotevska & Ljubo Stefanov)

Congratulations to all the winners – your films were simply stunning!

PHOTO from The Human Shelter, colleague Allan Berg reviewed it: http://www.filmkommentaren.dk/blog/blogpost/4223/ in Danish.

IceDocs Iceland Documentary Film Festival

This is how the organisers introduce the festival:

Welcome to IceDocs!

“The first ever edition of Iceland Documentary Film Festival takes place in Akranes on 17th-21st of July 2019. Our mission is to introduce quality documentaries to local audience and visitors alike as well as connecting filmmakers and industry people from all over the world. The event will take place in the small and quaint industry town of Akranes, just 45 minutes outside of Reykjavik.”

According to good friend, Italian Claudia Tosi, whose film “I Had a Dream” was in the program, the festival was (from FB) ”an amazing experience”, that ends today with many sections and according to the films being there absolutely ”quality documentaries”.

44 films, at the festival, the following have been reviewed/written about on this site:

Animus Animalis – http://www.filmkommentaren.dk/blog/blogpost/4476/

Aquarela – http://www.filmkommentaren.dk/blog/blogpost/4408/

Home Games – http://www.filmkommentaren.dk/blog/blogpost/4258/

Honeyland – http://www.filmkommentaren.dk/blog/blogpost/4449/ (Photo)

How Big is the Galaxy – http://www.filmkommentaren.dk/blog/blogpost/4523/

I Had a Dream – http://www.filmkommentaren.dk/blog/blogpost/4389/

In Praise of Nothing – http://www.filmkommentaren.dk/blog/blogpost/4102/

http://icedocs.is