… is the title that festival directors Svetlana and Zoran Popovic use, much better they say than the English title “Gods of Molenbeek”, right they are, but the film is the same beautiful piece of poetry by first time feature duration director, Finnish Reetta Huhtanen, who was here at the Magnificent7 Festival and will go to HotDocs and DokFest München and CinéDoc Tbilisi. So well deserved. Huhtanen had a fine Q&A, well attended, after the screening last night.

Here are some clips of what we – meaning Svetlana and Zoran Popovic and me – have written about the film:

…The enchanting magic of childhood; the infinite contemplation over a leaf, a frog, a dark hole; accidental encounters that become the most significant ones in the world; the games which are the funniest and the most serious thing; curiosity, laughter, tiers, the unimaginable existence of honesty… (Popovic).

…We are the strongest in the world, they shout in one of their games, indeed they are, Aatos and Amine, who in the end split up, as Aatos is moving to Finland. It gave me a tear in the eye but I trust that a friendship like this will last. Tear in the eye, I had that many times, watching the boys and their happy faces wanting to discover the world. For me here is another tribute to childhood and imagination following – to mention two masterpieces –  films like Marcel Lozinski’s «Anything Can Happen» where the director’s son is running around in a park asking old people questions about God and Life and Death, and JoJo from Nicolas Philibert’s «Etre et Avoir».Please God, be good to Aatos and Amine!… (Müller)

The picture is taken in Helsinki, where I had the privilege to award the film as the best Finnish documentary of the year during the DocPoint festival. Aatos, 9 years, his mother and his little sister.

http://www.magnificent7festival.org/en/index.php

… indeed there is and it was also a woman, who was the first to say thank you for the selection of Claudia Tosi’s „I had A Dream” last night, Srbijanka Turajlic, the protagonist, the political activist and mother of the director of „The Other Side of Everything” Mila Turajlic. And a loyal spectator of the films of the Magnificent7 Festival here in Belgrade.

Great film, she said, and I could only agree. “I Had a Dream” is a film full of energy, and humour, a film that makes you happy seeing that there are women like the protagonists Daniela and Manuela, who try to change politics in Berlusconi’s Italy change with warmth and dedication. And make you sad as this is also a film about Europe today, where anti-European waves are everywhere as well as xenophobia. Claudia Tosi has found an excellent way of telling her story by  having on screen the two women comment, what we and they see during the many years, she has followed them. And Tosi has a fine direct way of  – off-screen – putting questions to the two, and she is there, when they have their political meetings locally and in the parliament. It’s a no-bullshit film, an honest film.

Magnificent7 – seven films, where 6 of them this year are directed or co-directed by women.

3 more films will come, today two of them directed by women, Heddy Honigmann’s

“Buddy” and Reetta Huhtanen’s ”Gods of Molenbeek” will be shown.

http://www.magnificent7festival.org/en/index.php

I have just said goodbye to the Macedonian cameraman Samir Ljuma, who expressed his joy to have been here at the Magnificent7 Festival, where 1300 spectators were totally enthusiastic about ”Honeyland”, the opening film tuesday night. Yes, I said, this is what festivals are for – the famous triangle of a film, the ones who have made it AND the audience.

Samir Ljuma did a workshop session together with Atanas Georgiev giving inside information on the production of the film, the editing, the camera work and of course the relationship with the protagonist Hatidze. Workshop session is a wrong word, it was a masterclass, so precise with one master, who was not there (editor and producer Atanas Georgiev) and one who was very much present, painting the film, Samir Ljuma, because a painting it is, in my review

I refer to Vermeer, and Zoran and Svetlana Popovic wrote like this in their introduction on the website ”created magical sights of the mountains, villages and village life and especially refined painting-like nocturnal scenes lit by the fire…”

400 hours of material… a lot to be thrown out of course, Atanas said, who built the film as a fiction using classical dramaturgical rules – as you can see in the film. 100 shooting days over 3 years. We need conflicts, Atanas said to the shooting team, give her one line she can say to get the opposition to the gypsy family entering her territory. And he got it, “they are Turks”, she says to her mother in one of those magnificent scenes inside the small cottage, where the old mother has been lying in her bed for 4 years.

Yes, the kids were looking at the camera, Hatidze was very natural. She is now living in the village, the film crew bought a house for her and check out

http://honeyland.earth/

read this: “You’ve obviously met Hatidze, the Sam family and their 7 kids. Actually, they are 8 kids now. The last one was born on the day of the film’s premiere at Sundance back in January. The Sundance Kid… who would have thought. They would be happy to meet you too, but they are in Honeyland, a place far away, where anything goes and nothing is for sure. You can now help Hatidze, these 8 kids and their parents to have a better life by donating. After all, it would be a transaction, since these are tough kids and even tougher people. They wouldn’t want your pity, so instead they would like to make you an offer where you buy some of our finest honey and they’ll earn it one way or the other. You can get a jarful of 30g of Honeyland’s finest honey and we’ll make sure that both you, Hatidze, and the Sam’s get what’s yours. The earnings from your goodwill will go into improving the lives of the protagonists as well as the local community.”

The film that won three awards at the Sundance Festival, has now an American distributor, who wants to take it to the Oscars… Good luck!

http://www.magnificent7festival.org/en/zemlja_meda.php

It was a very pleasant festival to attend, the DOKer in Moscow. That ended last night. You sense immediately that the organisers are filmmakers, who spread their enthusiasm for the genre and want invited guests, fellow filmmakers to have a good stay in the metropolis. As a jury member you are treated perfectly – meeting questions like these all the time: ”Are you ok, is there anything we can do for you?”

For me it was the right thing to be at the festival during the whole period, watching films in a cinema and not online on a computer.

I was a juror in the short film competition, that had 14 films from 12

countries. Criteria for selection, my guess: Quality, Diversity, Geographical spread. And a thematic programming, if possible, like in this year’s programme where “family issues” were on the agenda. We jurors responded to this by giving honorary mentions to a film with focus on the mother/daughter relationship, as well as one that had focus on the father/son. See http://www.filmkommentaren.dk/blog/blogpost/4506/

Another theme – naturally – was „Russia“. There was a film called „The Patriot“ about young Vasily Vlasov, who ist he right hand of Zhirinovsky, the far right politician, who is always good for a racist or antisemitic or chauvinistic scandal. The young man is in the Duma, we follow him at home with wife/girlfriend and with his mother – both are more interesting than him.

The other film about Russia, 39 mins. long, « For Russia, for Faith », takes place in France at a summer camp, where young people with Russian blood in their veins meet to hear about and celebrate, what was before the bolchevik revolution in 1917. It started as a reportage but as it went along it had at least one character, who is being developed. One oft he DOKer key persons told me that in a way she found it touching to watch a film about thoughts and language before 1917, a bit of aristocracy, with another language than Russian of today and a deep religious belief.

I did not get that as I don’t speak Russian, what I saw reminded me of my short soldier time, where discipline was wanted and failed again and again. And humourous it was, when you see kids turn right, when left is being demanded. Vice versa.

And some few words about the winning short film, „Sanatorium“ by Masha Osipova, a complete film, amazing that it is a debut, it is so fine and precise and personal in its personal commentary about the unhappy child she (the director) was, when the parents sent her to the sanoratorium. Promising director you dare say!

www.midff.com

Motivation for the Winning Film

For its ability to create atmosphere through a clear aesthetical choice, through its expressive language using methaphors to convey a personally experienced childhood trauma, the jury has chosen to award

SANATORIUM by Masha Osipova

Motivation for a Special Mention

For portraying a daughter/mother relationship with dignity and honesty, choosing to make a sad family story positive, with humour and warmth, the jury has chosen to give an honorary mention to

FAMILY IN EXILE by Fatima Matousse

Motivation for a Special Mention

For portraying a son/father relationship of great pain, using a powerful cinematic language, including the so-called hybrid, setting up scenes, the film has a therapeutical element and can be seen as a lessonin what cinema can do. The mention goes to

THE DAM by Natalia Koniarz

Motivation for a Special Mention

In this film the main hero had to go. But before that the one in question was  the central character in a family, whose members had very different opinions i in a story full of humour that is not always the case in documentaries.

The mention goes to TUNGRUS by Rishi Chandna

https://www.midff.com

Is there something wrong in saying that a film is perfect. For me No. What I mean is that it has the right rythm, is balanced in the treatment of in this case a difficult subject, attracts you emotionally, has a lot of fine cinematic solutions, i.e. expressive combinations of sound and picture, holds back information, lets (in this case) its characters develop slowly, uses archive material in a fine way…

I was very impressed by Austrian Stefan Bohun’s film about his and his three other brother’s search for themselves and the fifth brother Jakob. At the screening here in Moscow, where it is in the feature duration competition of the DOKer festival, the director told the audience that the hardest was not the filming in the mountains of Tyrol and in Porto in Portugal or “to write” the film, the pain came when in the editing room with his family on screen.

It is always a challenge for filmmakers to create atmosphere. Bohun makes it with a fine sensibility.

https://www.midff.ru/