Jan Gogola on Dusan Hanak

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

Sidse Torstholm Larsen og Sturla Pilskog: Håbets Ø

På Grønlands Nationaldag på fredag den 21. juni fylder Grønlands Selvstyre 10 år. I den anledning sender DR2 dokumentarfilmen Håbets Ø – en film af Sidse Torstholm Larsen og Sturla Pilskog, som allerede nu kan streames på DR TV.

Her gentager vi Allan Bergs anmeldelse af film:

En ung kvinde får ordet, forstår jeg, i en samtalekreds for alkoholikere som ikke drikker. Hun er smuk, fotograferingen er smuk, det hun siger er smukt at lytte til, dette vidunderligt langsomme sprog, som i underteksterne burde være oversat omhyggeligt litterært filmen igennem (jeg så på Randers bibliotek en engelsk version med undertekster, som gjorde mig skeptisk), men scenen er smuk, Henrik Bohn Ipsen har fotograferet, og jeg kan ikke rose ham nok, alene i sin cinematografi har han lagt grunden til endnu en klassisk bysymfoni. Her om Maniitsoq i Grønland. Med fotografiet til denne film og tidligere kameraarbejde som til Inuk Silis Høeghs Sume, 2014 og Lene Stæhrs Eskimo Diva, 2015 uddyber Bohn Ipsen det dokumentarisk filmfotografiske og danske blik på det almindelige liv i Grønland i linje efter fotograferne Jette Bang, Jørgen Roos og Teit Jørgensen.

Kvinden i samtalekredsen er på vej ud af alkoholens lås og jeg følger hende

opmærksomt, for karakterudviklingen af hende er tydeligst blandt de tre som medvirker filmen igennem. Hendes spontant fascinerende nærvær og Bohn Ipsens lydefri sikre kamera og opmærksomme blik på alt i og uden for billedet, dette filmfotografi er alene denne vigtige film værd. (Henrik Bohn Ipsen har i Nicole N. Horanyi: En fremmed flytter ind, 2017 fotograferet en fuldstændig lignende scene som jeg oplever med samme følelsesindhold. Det bevægede mig mærkeligt forleden aften i bibliotekets sal).

I Håbets ø er der med denne kvinde mere at nævne. Der er scenerne hjemme på værelset med nænsom skildring af ungt liv, (hvor ville jeg dog gerne forstå dialogen ordentligt via omhyggeligt oversatte undertekster. Til norsk eller dansk), men altså en skarpt fotograferet og præcist instrueret scene i fiskefabrikkens kantine, hvor kvinden taler alvorligt, og vigtigt må jeg forstå, med en arbejdskammerat. Og der er en munter scene en sen aften blandt venner på gaden, hvor jeg i hvert fald opfatter at den unge kvinde er optaget på en videregående uddannelse i Nuuk. Og med den tro på fremtiden i hendes afrejse: jeg kommer hjem igen med viden og ny energi, former filmen sin højtidelige slutning.

Der har ellers været bekymring undervejs. Ud over den unge kvinde bygger instruktøren Sidse Torstholm Larsen sin beretning om den store skuffelse i Maniitsoq på to medvirkende mere, en socialarbejder, det er ham, som energisk følsom leder alkoholkurset, og en kommunal koordinator, som omsider frustreret må se i øjnene, at byen efter mange års arrogant påtvunget venten er blevet snydt af et stort amerikansk aluminiumsselskab. Det har ikke i sinde at bygge den fabrik i byen, som det har optioner til, selskabet har blot villet holde et norsk selskab væk. Og nu er det for sent for bystyret at skifte partner. Noget helt andet må gøres – og jeg mærker at turisme ikke er dette helt andet. Der må gribes tilbage i historien, til de grundlæggende eksistensbetingelser.

Det læser jeg af de iscenesatte samvær, af de spontane møder og især af interviewene som alle er smukke, men afgjort mest givende når jeg har ansigtet og kroppen i billedet og dialogen ikke lægges under dækbilleder (selv om de i sig selv er skabende) og der mister sit poetiske indhold og står faktuelt nøgne.

Orwa Nyrabia Talks about IDFA Changes

Readers of filmkommentaren will know that I am very happy with Syrian Orwa Nyrabia being the artistic director of IDFA. Step by step he is changing the festiwal together with his competent Staff. This post aims at making you read the fine interview with Nyrabia, for cineuropa made by Vladan Petkovic. Here is a clip:

… The strong presence of films made by northern filmmakers about the rest of the world is not enough any more. This is interesting: it’s not necessarily a bad thing, but being limited to it is certainly a relic of the past. We know today that we can’t just be watching films about the Balkan war, about the Syrian war or about the Congo, without giving a serious platform and due respect to filmmakers from these societies who are telling us their stories in their own way. This way may not exactly be designed to triumph at box offices in the West, but they are there to add to our own cultural awareness and to the development of our understanding of the world, as well as to challenge our own prejudices. This is, to me, the core of this job and of documentary festivals in general, not only IDFA…

https://cineuropa.org/en/interview/373908/

Jakob Brossmann & David Paede: Listen to the Radio

With the Austrian title: «Gehört, Gesehen – Ein RadioFilm“…

5 years after maestro Nicolas Philibert made his „Maison de la Radio », here is another equally fascinating visit to a radio broadcasting channel: Ö1, part of the ORF in Austria, a Kulturradio, praised for its quality and suffering from budget cutbacks like similar radio stations in many countries. Contrary to the French documentary the two directors put the focus on how the staff, led by the boss of Ö1 Peter Klein, looks for solutions to keep the existing loyal listeners and find some new ones in times, where many politicians want to drop the license fee and want to have (indirect) influence on the program profile…

This populist move happens at the same time as the station is about to celebrate its 50th year of existence and works on a new piece of music jingle to introduce itself.

Oh yes, I thought while watching the well made observational documentary… this could be the characterisation of the situation in my Denmark, where DR, the public broadcaster like ORF, faces a budget cut of 20% (unless a new government will change that) and where the P1, the equivalent to Ö1, sometimes in a quite desperate manner, is seeking new ways to perform an independent journalism that is constantly, like the Austrian, accused of being intellectual and leftist.

I make this parallel to say that the film has an international appeal as a cultural institution with a threatened profile in a Europe that goes towards the right and is not interested in public service broadcasting with no commercials.

Ö1 broadcasts and produces a lot of music, which forms a kind of red thread in the documentary. Including the search for the piece that can be used as a new program jingle. And the search for the right voice and tone for „Guten Morgen Österreich“; quite amusing sequences come up to convey the atmosphere in the radio studios, where listening is so important.

How do we get on, is an often asked question at the internal meetings, how do we re-invent ourselves? More collaboration within the staff, more experimentation, what is critical journalism today, is it possible, the camera often stays with the charismatic Peter Klein, the Programmchef, a man whose job (also) is to tell the colleagues that whatever new initiatives are needed and found, budget cuts are coming.

Towards the end of the film, in connection with the election in Austria, you follow the producer of the coverage desperately asking for sound bites with the candidates… difficult it is for a radio channel to get to Kurz and Kern, the political figures at that time. „Television comes first“, she says to a colleague;

of course, but having written that, remember dear reader, if you want reflection and analysis and cultural experiences

– Listen to the Radio.

https://www.filmladen.at/gehoert-gesehen

http://www.filmkommentaren.dk/blog/blogpost/3441/ (link to Brossmann’s previous film, Lampedusa in Winter.

Austria, 2019, 90 mins.

Yuriy Shylov: Projectionist

I have met Valentin, the projectionist, on screen, at several workshops and presentations, and I have seen how fragments, all these clips, of his life slowly have become a film that now – bravo – is to have its premiere in the competition at the festival in Karlovy Vary beginning of July. Ukrainian producer Gennady Kofman was so kind to send me a link so I could see the final result of a work on its way for some years.

Sometimes you get disappointed, when you see a final result, after numerous pitches and presentations. In this case no; On the contrary I enjoyed to see how the director has succeeded to let the viewer into the projection room of a cinema, a place that has been Valentin’s second home for more than 40 years. In his private home he takes care of the mother, who is in bed and close to the end of her life. As the cinema is also close to have THE END. A fire helped it go that way and now the cinema is hosting events, light shows and other modern activities. Seen from Valentin’s point of view. With the director’s fine sense of creating atmosphere.

Long live the art of cinematography he says to his friend and collaborator in the cinema, Volodymyr. With vodka in the glass and irony in the voice. You can’t help love Valentin for his appetite on life – more enigmatic is Volodymyr, the side character, who takes the last word and a little dancing step in the film, addressing the director/cameraman in a very moving way. I won´t say more, but what I can say is that Valentin survives an illness and enjoys the stay in the sanatorium at the sea, where he is recovering to end up good looking, dancing with the women.

There are many Valentins in the world. And Volodymyrs. Who live a life behind the scene with their passion for film and the place for films to be seen, the cinema. As Herz Frank says in the Baltic „Bridges of Time“, when they are no longer among us, they are still alive on film, like this one. That is luckily wonderfully unpretentious.

Ukraine, Poland, 2019, 72 mins.

Kristof Bilsen: Mother

”Me No Worry, Me No Care, Me Go Marry a Millionaire, If He Dies Me No Cry, Me Go Marry Another Guy”… are the words Pomm uses to wake up Elisabeth, who reacts with a smile. Pomm calls Elisabeth mother or granny, she is her caregiver in the centre in Thailand, where Western alzheimer patients stay and are given care by Thai women like Pomm.

Who is the central character of the film. And who has been given a camera by the director to make video diaries that are included in a film that deals with a theme of importance to all of us. Before the mentioned warm and touching scene, up front in the film, before the title credits, Pomm has filmed her house and the youngest of three children, Nadia, with words of sadness: I gave birth to three children but I can not take care of them. She has to earn money away from home to support them… Alas, the eternal story of rich and poor, the lack of equality in the world we live in.

Yes, Pomm, the young woman on the photo, is a MOTHER. The old woman

who is next to her suffers from Alzheimers. She, Elisabeth, is a MOTHER as well but has reached the stage of the illness, because of a stroke, where she is not able to communicate with words, only with sounds that are not understandable. Pomm has three children, two of them live with herMOTHER 4 hours from the centre in Thailand, where she works as a caregiver for Westerners with Alzheimer.

… meanwhile, somewhere in Switzerland, the 57 year old MOTHER Maya has been diagnosed with the illness and her family decides to bring her to Thailand, where she becomes the new patient of Pomm.

The two stories are interwoven with Pomm as the link.

It’s an ambitious second feature documentary film that talented Kristof Bilsen has made after his success with ”Elephants Dream”, that I praised on this site, link below.

And it is a film full of emotions – love and sadness, life and death – with Pomm as the central person, who gives so much care to the patients, presence and care she is not able to give to her children and her mother. That’s the tragedy conveyed in the film stated from the very beginning till the end, where Pomm visits little Nadia, who lives with her father and who is totally in tears, when the mother hugs her saying that she has to stop crying otherwise your father will not allow me to visit you any longer! It is a heartbreaking scene, almost unbearable that the film should end like this…

The film that goes from Thailand to Swizerland, to different places in Thailand and presents Elisabeth as a dying patient, and Maya as one who comes with her caring family to have fine moments with Pomm… has accordingly a difficult narrative construction even if Pomm with her voice-off reflections is there to bind all the elements together. The question is whether Bilsen succeeds to create the emotional flow that he aims at with his great cinematic skills and ability to get close to his characters. And whether he overestimates the viewer’s (in this case me) ability to digest so many emotional scenes – to see Maya almost disappear in front of your eyes in the best part of the film, where Pomm takes her around, where she smiles but says nothing but seems happy, going on to the scene where she is unable (or unwilling?) to communicate on skype with her husband in Switzerland. And from that to the mentioned scene at the end with Pomm and the youngest Nadia. After we earlier have heard that Pomm’s father wanted to take his own life through a motorbike accident – that could give the family a life insurance! He failed and used a gun instead!

Less is more I have been thinking. But Is that a fair critique of a film that has stayed in my mind since I saw it last night. Probably not! It will be a film that travels to raise good discussions about how we face old age and illnesses like dementia, with the indirect message delivered in an emotional frame that we have to care!

Belgium, Holland, UK, Switzerland, 2019, 82 mins.

https://www.motherdocumentary.com

http://www.filmkommentaren.dk/blog/blogpost/2982/

Michal Bielawski: The Wind. A Documentary Thriller

The Halny? Shocking film! Says someone coming from a flat country after having watched a film about the power of the wind in a mountain area.

I had never heard about the halny before so I made a visit to Wikipedia and got this answer:

Halny is a warm windstorm that blows through the valleys. It is often disastrous; ripping off roofs, causing avalanches and, according to some people, can have some influence on mental states.

Precisely what this film shows.…”The Wind. A Documentary Thriller” is an interpretation of our situation : when nature in this form takes action, we have no chance. We have to face the consequences of the catastrophies that we create ourselves, some say, others refer to destiny, God´s will…

Nevertheless the people living in the Tatra mountains fight to survive. They try to stabilise their houses, when the wind is coming, they cut up the trees that have fallen on the roads, blocking the traffic, including the ambulances that hurry to help people with serious problems, some of them suicidal.

My hero in the film is the woman, who writes poems that are celebrating the forest. Like Danish author Hans Christian Andersen, known all over the world for his fairy tales, wrote in one of his books, she does like him, embracing a tree in one of the best scenes of a film that in a fragmented, powerful style conveys an overall drama with several fine parallel stories, and a soundscore that with the wind justifies the characterisation, “a documentary thriller”.

Fear, life and death, father and daughter: His house burns down, he has breathing problems, he goes to the doctor, he continues the lost battle against the evil power. She, the poetess, wants to buy a piece of forest, it’s beautiful to watch her emotions, as it is to watch the young ambulance nurse taking care of the victims.

Michal Bielawski’s film reminds me, with its own competence in content and cinematic skills, about current films about man and nature – Kossakovsky’s “Aquarela”, “The Earth” by Nikolaus Geyerhalter. Hate the word but films like these seem to be trendy – and yes, documentaries are raising the crucial questions our planet is facing, they do so in different styles, with different voices, make us think when we are given a visual statement and a visual artistic comment to the time.

Poland, 2019, 74 mins.

Sheffield Doc/Fest Opens With Maradona

… the new film by Asif Kapadia („Amy“ and „Senna”), one of the masters in archive based documentaries, „The movie melds personal recordings with omnipresent reportage to portray the turbulent years of a gifted footballer burning brightly in late 1980’s Napoli“, the festival website says. Gosh, I am looking forward to that film about legendary „Diego Maradona“, the title of the film that was shown in Cannes.

The festival in Sheffield runs from June 6 – 11 with films from 47 countries and with 57% of the competition titles directed or co-directed by female filmmakers.

Competition titles, the festival has several categories, where films are nominated. There is a Grand Jury Award, where the film on Maradona is listed, as well as the highlighted „For Sama“ by Edward Watts. There is an Art Award, where I find the film by Susana de Sousa Dias „Fordlandia Malaise“ – the website has a fine list of trailers, look at the one by Susana. There is the Tim Hetherington Award, where I find the excellent „Dark Suns“ from Mexico, by Julien Elie. There is the International Award, where „Earth“ by Geyerhalter is as well Belgian Kristof Bilsen’s „Mother“, executive produced by Kirsten Johnson… and a couple of more award sections.

„Ways of Seeing“, good selection as I see it from festival director Luke Moody and his team.

https://sheffdocfest.com/

Krakow Film Festival – And the Winners Were

– a copy paste from the festival’s FB page:

Having watched all the competitive films the International Documentary Jury of the 59th Krakow Film Festival consisting of: Jacek Petrycki – chairman (Poland), Talal Derki (Germany), Marja Pallassalo (Finland), Shane Smith (Canada), Ágnes Sós (Hungary) has decided to award the following prizes:

THE GOLDEN HORN for the director of the best film – Rachel Leah Jones and Philippe Bellaiche for Advocate (Israel, Canada, Switzerland)

THE SILVER HORN for the director of the best medium-length documentary film – David Ofek and Tal Michael for Around the Bed of a Dying Collaborator (Israel)

THE SILVER HORN for the director of the best feature-length documentary film – Àlex Lora and Adán Aliaga for The Fourth Kingdom (Spain, USA, Mexico)

The FIPRESCI (International Federation of Film Critics) Jury consisting of: Irena Kotelovich (Belarus), Nino Kovačić (Croatia), Nachum Mochiach (Israel) has decided to award the International Film Critics Prize to Àlex Lora and Adán Aliaga for The Fourth Kingdom (Spain, USA, Mexico)

Krakow Film Festival – Who Will Win

I was not in Krakow for the festival this year, but I saw the films in the main international competition and gave my points together with other film journalists – and made 4 texts for the Daily Newspaper, which is edited by kind and competent Anna E. Dziedzic from the festival. My last text delivered yesterday was my overall impression of the films in the category mentioned. Here it comes and when the awards are given later this evening, I will make a post and you can see if my impressions match those of a jury. Here is my text:

Comments to our time. Interpretation of subjects that touch world-wide. Creative documentaries. Character driven… it’s all there in the 2019 selection for Krakow Film Festival, the international section with 16 titles. Diversity, also in quality, from my point of view, take a look at the critic’s mark system, where some get high and some low marks.

Were there any extra-ordinary films. Any that stood out ? In terms of subject and cinematic interpretation? “Of Animals and Men” did for me. The film by Łukasz Czajka, 56 mins., touched me because of the shocking story about how the German invasion and occupation during WW2 destroyed the life of the Warsaw Zoo. For men and animals – telling at the same time about the bravery of the couple Antonina and Jan Żabińskis, who let Jews hide in the empty zoo, where the animals had stayed, or at their own home. As the brutality of the Germans increased, the risk of being captured became bigger for those hiding. Jan helped providing documents for the Jews, getting many out from the ghetto, Antonina likewise, and she was the one, who played Offenbach on the piano when dangerous situations came up, and Chopin when the Germans had left again. The film is well made mixing archive, interviews and a fine voice-over based on Antonina’s memoirs. And no, I have not seen the fiction film based on this amazing story.

Dutch “But Now is Perfect” (Photo) by Carin Goeijers also impressed me. The fate of a refugee… nothing new, unfortunately, in that, but the director has made an aesthetical choice that makes content and style match each other perfectly. You move around in the Calabrian town that has set up a good model for having refugees integrated in its life in a story that is told backwards. With a Nigerian woman as the lead character, full of life, charismatic, hoping…

From Italian Calabria to New York, to follow the life of another refugee, René from Mexico, in “The Fourth Dimension”. He lives in a small community, “Sure We Can”, where, under the supervision of Ana, formerly UN employed, homeless and alchoholics (like René who is now sober) end up and can calm down, away from the rough life outside the metal curtain, that is taken down every night. The film has several layers, the fine social initiative is one but the inner life of René, his yearning for another life, his interest in aliens from other planets, his dreams and hopes, his quiet life with cats, kittens and chicken is conveyed in a cinematically skilled tone by the two Spanish directors Àlex Lora Cercós and Adán Aliga.

Krakow Film Festival has always had Israeli documentaries in its program, this year is no exception. I was touched by the silent drama of the dying old Palestinian man in “Around the Bed of a Dying Collaborator” by David Ofek and Tal Michael. “Forgive me”, he says to his sons, for working for the Israelis, having sold Palestinian land to Jews making the family’s life a true hell. AND the big international coproduction “The Advocate” by Rachel Leah Jones and Philippe Bellaiche about the Israeli hero lawyer Lea Tsemel, who for decades have taken lost cases for Palestinians, who have committed murder or other criminal attacks to be punished by the Israeli state. Bellaiche, also the cameraman, again shows, like in the films he did for Avi Mograbi, his talent for bringing the audience close to subject and character.

Will any of these films be awarded, or will „The Wind. A Documentary Thriller“, that I wrote about in the first daily, or «Wongar“ or „Pariah Dog“, mentioned in the second newspaper.

A jury will decide.

https://www.krakowfilmfestival.pl/en/59th-kff/festival-newspaper