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/

Less than 24 hours after she arrived in Moscow Italian documentarian Claudia Tosi (“I had a Dream”, DOKLeipzig winner 2018, http://www.filmkommentaren.dk/blog/blogpost/4389/) ran into trouble… We were having lunch in the Tretyakov Gallery, dumplings, preparing for watching world class art.

Tosi looked at her cell phone, said something in Italian that I did not understand, in English it was the f… word, she explained: Someone has taken money from my credit card, €400. She left the lunch, went to a café on the other side of the street, that had internet, called her father to ask him to contact the bank to block further activity.

Well, that has happened to many of us but when Tosi came back, she knew what had happened! It’s the guy outside the gallery, who is going around with his mobile in his hand. Russian hacking, I said, having no clue how a thing like that is possible. And maybe the Italian director was writing a drama.

But back in the café Tosi met a Russian woman, who understood English, understood and recognised the drama – We have to call the police…

On the photo taken by me you see four policemen, two police cars and two women, the one to the right the helpful woman and the one with her back to the camera, Claudia Tosi.

The young man with the mobile phone was taken to the police car, driven away and Tosi was asked if she would give a statement. Of course!

Our guide, Tatyana Soboleva, came back to us after a tv interview, got the story, we three left the café and the young man was back in action with his phone. How he can access a bypassing foreigner’s bank account, is still an enigma, at least for me.

Reality wrote its script!

Getting into the October cinema from the noisy boulevard with the constant traffic jam in Moscow is a blessing. Again a lot of people were there to watch the first competition program of short films, and they were not disappointed. Four films of high quality, that’s all I can write as a member of the jury.

I was thinking back in time, where I attended the short film festival in Clermont-Ferrand year after year, which mostly showed short fiction. Here in Moscow it’s short documentaries that reach the screen and/or hybrid works. Film history has often pointed out that short films are the step to making longer films, feature length, it might be but I did not sense that with the four films I saw yesterday. They were finished works in themselves, strong stories, well shaped with sense of the cinematographic possibilities. Each with their own handwriting. Far from being student films. I congratulated the selector Nastia Tarasova for her choice and look forward to the films of today Friday.

After a good meal into the darkness again to watch a film from Poland, “Diagnosis”, a documentary feature film debut of the director Ewa Podgórska and producer Małgorzata Wabińska. From Lodz, and that is an important piece of information as the film ” is a journey into the depths of subconscious of a city formed by human beings”, where some inhabitants undergo sessions on a couch, performed by a Frenchman – and from there the film takes its audience into the lives of the chosen characters, and slowly – in a puzzle-like narrative, where the characters through the editing are put to communicate with each other – you get to know that this is a film about la condition humaine. You are surprised, when watching the film and that’s a compliment, the film director dares to break dramaturgical rules, it plays with emotions, it is fragmented, maybe the form takes over once in while but I was impressed and entertained (company name Entertain Pictures!). I was there with Finnish film couple, Iiris Härma (who made the wonderful ”Leaving Africa” – http://www.filmkommentaren.dk/blog/blogpost/3154/ – and Visa Koiso-Kanttila, the latter director and cameraman praising the quality of the cinematography. Agreed! A Q&A afterwards focused on the film as a post-Soviet interpretation, not at all, it’s the universal theme of Life and Love that is at stake.

http://en.pisf.pl/news/polish-creative-documentary-diagnosis-goes-to-idfa?wcag=1

https://www.midff.com/

… which means Copenhagen Architecture Festival that includes a lot of interesting documentary films, two of them can be seen at the art house cinema Grand Teatret in the centre of the Danish capital.

Both have been reviewed on this site. Thomas Riedelsheimer’s “Leaning into the Wind” with fantastic landscape artist Andy Goldsworthy was at the Magnificent7 festival 2018 in Belgrade, where Svetlana and Zoran Popovic presented the film as “Riedelsheimer’s sophisticated filmmaking proceeds from breathtaking physical matter and goes beyond trying to reveal the ideas that move the artists. And before our very eyes these ideas are transformed into remarkable forms pervaded by the rhythms of nature.” http://www.filmkommentaren.dk/blog/blogpost/4266/

And staying in Belgrade I reviewed Nicolas Wagniere’s “Hotel Jugoslavia”, a quote “…Wagnières says that he during a decade has come back to the city and the hotel and that he has filmed “pour garder and pour regarder”. He conveys his point of view very much through his personal voice off – one of the best sequences is the interview with the mother, who remembers how people stood together after the ww2, eager to build a new society of unity and brotherhood, values that are no longer part of the Serbian society. Wonderful propaganda footage…” http://www.filmkommentaren.dk/blog/blogpost/4301/

The festival has an amazing program to offer, it runs until the 14th of April.

http://cafx.dk