This film that I first got to watch yesterday having heard and read about it, only positive words… Here is the annotation from IDFA’s Docs for Sale:

“Benedetta (Barrese) wants to disappear. An iconic fashion model in the 1960s, she became a muse to Warhol, Dali & Penn and Avedon. As a radical feminist in the 1970s, she fought for the rights and emancipation of women. A fight against the manipulating world of images and against her son’s camera, who filmed her since he was a child, despite her resistance.”

And in the CinéDoc Festival in Tbilisi, where I was in the Caucasus jury, the international jury gave the film the main award with the following motivation:

“This film openly talks about respect, dignity, beauty and honesty. The film makes us think about how we treat privacy and who has the right to use it, which is a very important question for any documentary film. An emotional insight into a relationship between mother and son.”

And yet, why is it that I am disappointed with the film. Too high expectations? Maybe. But also because I got the impression of an insecure director, who took one path of storytelling and then went for another one and then and then… He starts by casting beautiful young women asking them to pose, having a beauty spot placed on the right chin. Which is what his mother has, his now old mother who still has a remarkable face and a charisma significant from all the great archive material in the film. BUT the film is about a mother, who wants to get away from the camera and who wants to have her son Ben to put down the camera to she can be with Ben.

As the jury in Tbilisi indirectly formulates it : she has the right to the privacy that he, the son and filmmaker, abuses constantly. Instead he has chosen to have a little bit of everything, creating her biography via archive and reconstruction of her as young – where a stronger focus on her wanting to disappear, to sum up her life, put it in boxes and be together with her son would have been much more interesting. Intimate conversations on life and opinions…

Italy, 2019, 90 mins.

https://www.thedisappearanceofmymother.com/welcome

The BFI Doc Society publishes a very good newsletter. In the one I received yesterday, there was a text about the presence of Chinese artist Ai Weiwei, whose last film ”The Rest” was screened at the Sheffield Documentary Festival. He was interviewed by Jess Search, here is a bit of what he said about documentary:

“Documentary is always a challenge. it’s very close range. If it’s fighting, it’s like boxing. You have to take all those punches and you have to feel the pain… and about the medium… “You cannot hide, you expose yourself and also you have no excuse about any mistakes. So I love it because it’s so truthful and clear and direct. It’s a very honest form, as honest as it can get. So that’s why it attracts me so much. Because it requires observation, understanding and passion, it requires a lot of passion.“

His previous documentary, edited by Danish Niels Pagh Andersen, « Human Flow », was praised on this site:

http://www.filmkommentaren.dk/blog/blogpost/4066/

At the first session of the Ex Oriente the directors taking part were asked to write a text “I am your character” in a couple of hours. I used the two hours before meeting the directors with their texts to write about some images that stayed on my mind from what I had seen. For you readers I have made some notes below so you know just a little bit of what I am talking about. Here is my small image-poetry:

The view from my hotel window.

Three angles, the church next door, the green and more green, the man packing his car. For a Sunday drive ?

Football – Dani Alves making a great goal on my apple computer last night, they say he is 36 years, no no, he is young as ever. 1)

Football without ball. Jan Gogolas clip with the kids, who are bored of the match going on, talking about the teeth that they are losing and getting…

The intellectuals as Gogola called them in conversation about Vaclav Klaus breaking a pen somewhere far away from the stadion. 2)

… and the little boy crawling into a cupboard or whatever it is in the flat in Pilsen. Unforgettable. 3)

Cut to the people looking into the kiosk, to Ania, the mother of everyone in the Polish town, a man giving her flower, you are beautiful he says. 4)

Love

the mother in Belarus, who has a mission, she cares, she travels her country to fight the

dedovschina

magic word to say, terrible meaning 5)

and this morning the clips from Israel, the Palestinians having their eyes covered, cut to corpses, the boots of dead men and a boy who is in jail because he is addicted to the internet, gosh ! 6)

and the small Roma in Maidan, no-one wants him but for the director Olga PHOTO (by Daniel Svoren) who sits next to him, she cares, she is a hero, is he a lost soul 7)

as maybe also Jesse from Canada is, coming back to hug her mother in Romania and to meet her father,

where do I belong, here or there or everywhere 8)

everywhere,

the world is ours as Lubo and Laco visualise, let the music and the poetry take us to Manhattan and to the streets of Paris, with or without teeth 9)

all is possible, there are no limits, if you want to send a message, use the post office, if you want say something, use the image, make

a composition that is your own, put your heart into it, learn from

Rembrandt, Brueghel, Tarkovski, Truffaut, Coutard, Sokurov, Hanak!!!

Notes:

1. Copa America, Bresil – Qatar 5-0
2. Film 2-0 by Pavel Abraham, 2012
3. Project by Jaroslav Kratochvil: Comfortable Century
4. Project by Daniel Stopa: Women in Kiosk, Staron Film
5. Project by Anna Bodyako & Alexander Mihalkovich: The Mothers´Crusade
6. Israeli producer Hilla Medalia showed strong clips from “Uncensored Voices” and the Chinese internet-film
7. Project by Olga Zhurba: Roma, producers Viktoria Khomenko and Darya Bassel
8. Project by Laurentiu Garofeanu: Lost and Found
9. Film Steam on the River by Kirchhoff and Remunda, 2015

It was a very entertaining afternoon experience yesterday in Banská Stiavnica attending the screening of the 2015 documentary by Robert Kirchhoff and Filip Remunda (they call each other Robo and Filo!) followed by a masterclass with the two that gave us, the Ex Oriente audience, an insight to the making of the film. And you could sense, from the film and the class afterwards, that it had been quite as fun to make the film, as it was to watch it. Let me tell you what the film is about through the annotation from the distributor’s catalogue:

„The story of three extraordinary but aging jazzmen coming from former Czechoslovakia: Laco Deczi now lives in New York, Jan Jankeje in Stuttgart and Lubo Tamškovič used to live in Paris. Laco’s close friend Chris DePino, a musician as well as a politician close to George W. Bush, is attempting to put on a concert of the Czechoslovak Jazz Stars commemorating the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Of course the concert may never be organized… A film about the transience of fame which is fleeting, just like the steam that silently appears and disappears over a flowing river.”

And yet this text is not covering what we saw. As Kirchhoff said the film is

about creativity, about these old people improvising, “trying to live a life in poetry”, being themselves, charismatic each in their own way. The film is full of fine surprising moments and it is touching to see Lubo walking through the Paris where he was once a star, going to the places where he used to play, having his last gig, Remunda called it a “documentary miracle”, where he is not playing the trumpet but singing, making the club full of dancing people. Without teeth in his mouth.

Being asked about their collaboration, Remunda said, that when he wanted harmony in the creative process, Kirchhoff was going for disharmony – and the two gave a tribute again to Jan Gogola, who seems to help everyone in the documentary circles in the two countries. The dramaturg went to the stage to “correct” the two directors in some issues, making Remunda say that Gogola always explains precisely what we have thought and done!

Jazz music was like an island of freedom in Soviet times, a freedom that Laco still expresses with humour wanting to write scenes to be used in the film, while the aristocratically well dressed Lubo walks around in Paris looking for Ray Steven Oche. The film includes the funeral of him, filmed in a very fine touching way.

While writing this Ivana Pauerová Milosevicová sits in front of me saying that she was at concert in Prague with Laco, celebrating his 80 year´s birthday, last year – he was young and energetic as ever.

www.dokweb.net 

I am in Banská Stiavnica in Slovakia, where the first session of the Ex Oriente workshop takes place. I have been invited as a substitute for Iikka Vehkalahti and I am happy to attend at the workshop of which I was part from the beginning, was it in 2002?, until I stopped in 2009. 12 projects with director and producer present from the CEE countries take part, in a later post I will mention some of them.

Last night Jan Gogola, director/dramaturg/script writer/teacher, a clever man, who was also at Ex Oriente from the beginning, had been asked to talk about and show clips from films by the two legendary directors, Slovak Dusan Hanak and Czech Karel Vachek. A very fine session that took place in the Cinema Akademik here in the Kulturstadt Banská Stiavnica. He showed fragments from ”Pictures of the Old World” from 1972 by Dusan Hanak, a film that I have adored and used several times at different schools. And from Vachek’s ”Moravian Hellas” from 1963.

Gogola thought that Hanak had chosen to make his film four years after 1968 to remind the audience of human values forgotten after the normalisation process started with the occupation of Czekoslovakia by the Warsaw pact countries. The fragments, around 20 minutes of the hour long documentary, reminded me of a tradition for philosophical reflections, old people and their faces, a man with a microphone asking ”what are the values of life”, it is sooo moving and so wonderfully filmed with close-ups and sometimes still photos. Gogola said that the film is not a document, it is a monument. Normalisation… meant that the film was ”kept out of public space for 20 years”.

Have to confess that I am not able to ”enter” Vachek’s films, there are too many references to history and culture of Czekoslovakia. Sorry.

After the presentation I talked football with Gogola, he is a connaisseur, we talked Nedved, Masopust, Hamsik, Peter Czech… and Panenka, who is the character of the great film Gogola has made.

www.dokweb.net