Who Wins the Oscar for Documentaries?

It’s on Sunday the 24th that the Oscars will be distributed. 4 American feature documentaries are among the 5 nominated. The only non-American is “Of Fathers and Sons”. I have seen all five films, here follows some comments on their chances. I mention the directors knowing that on stage to receive the statuette the winner will be accompanied by producer(s):

Of Fathers and Sons, Director Talal Derki: Oh, I would love Talal to get the Oscar. I have seen the film several times, made Q&A’s and masterclass with him… a well told cinematic film that hurts and makes you depressed, sad is too weak a word; it goes to the heart and to the stomach… But a non-American film to win? Probably not, remember the two Joshua Oppenheimer films that were nominated but did not make it.

Free Solo, Directors Elizabeth C. Vasarhelyi & Jimmy Chin: Well, would not be surprised if it wins because of its theme: a man wants to climb the 3,000ft high El Capitan Wall without rope… but Oscars are meant to be for “artistic and technical merit”, this National Geographic product does not live up to the former.

Minding the Gap, Director Bing Liu: This is the one I think will win. And if so, no objections from me. The film is about three young boys (the director being one of them) growing up to be men, skateboarders all of them, friends who all three have suffered in their childhood and who fight to find themselves – it’s dynamically told, it touches racial questions, one is black, one is white, one has Chinese origins, and the three develop in the film that is shot over several years. And it’s a Film, produced by Kartemquin Films that stood behind the classic “Hoop Dreams” by Steve James.  

Hale County Thís Morning, This Evening, Director RaMell Ross: This is a fascinating film, an “auteur” documentary and for that reason it will not win in America! The director plays with style, it has strong poetic moments, it is impressionistic, surprises you and deep down you get the feeling of the Deep South in the US. Absolutely no objections if it wins, but not likely, I am afraid.

RBG, Directors Betsy West & Julie Cohen: If it wins, it is because of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, this fantastic woman who fought and still fights injustice as Supreme Court Justice, lovely to watch, a fine piece of journalistic documentary.

https://oscar.go.com/nominees/documentary-feature

Betsy West & Julie Cohen: RBG

Hero. Icon. Dissenter… three words heading the FB page of RBG, the film about Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. When in New York in December the news broke, that she was hospitalised for one more cancer illness; my wife’s brother who lives there said „oh, bad news, if she does not make it, Trump will put in another conservative asshole“.

She made it, she is still there to make her voice heard, the 85 year old (86 in March) liberal, some say leftist dissenter, who was appointed by President Clinton in 1993. After having been fighting against gender discrimination for decades.

The film tells the story of her life through interviews with her, with her

biographers, with her children and her grandchild, with politicians – using wonderful archive material going back in time, material where you see the charismatic small woman, who appears serious – with some dry humour as when she responds to whether she knows why she is called the Notorious RBG: yes, I know the Notorious B.I.G, we have a lot in common, both born in Brooklyn, he a black rapper, me a Jewish lawyer! – whereas her late husband Marty was the extrovert full of humour, he being the one taking care of the household, as she was always having her nose into papers of a case, often with few hours of sleep.

The film has been a huge success in the US – close to 15 mio.$ income from cinema tickets – and she has become a cult. Go online and you will be offered tshirts, cups and whatever with RBG.

In an interesting interview with the directors, link below, they say:

„Well, we are journalists who make documentaries. Our documentary is a piece of journalism, as far as we’re concerned. We’re telling truths and revealing a life. And we are doing it—we hope—in an artistic way. But, at the heart of the work we do is the search for the truth.”

It’s a film that you enjoy to watch. Artistic, no, conventional in storytelling. But yes, that’s what it is, a fine piece of journalistic documentary.

USA, 2018, 98 mins.

https://www.documentary.org/online-feature/justice-served-notorious-rbg?fbclid=IwAR0nVACEX6BWgcG0GI9qF2b1xd-NMLPsC1lcfhY_vYJlLx_ZkfG3F7RyR9s

Kim Longinotto: Shooting the Mafia

Kim Longinotto, in her latest film presented at this week’s Berlinale (and already shown at last Sundance), portrays the Italian photographer Letizia Battaglia who has documented the Sicilian mafia over more than four decades. Battaglia happened by chance to become a photographer for the Palermo daily „L’Ora“, when – almost already 40 – she asked for a job as a journalist during the Sicilian summer holidays. After just a few days of work, she had to report her first mafia assassination. Over the years, Letizia Battaglia has become the woman who has seen an immense number of crime scenes, burials and finally court trials. Her mostly black and white pictures have been shown in museums and exhibitions around the world.

Longinotto depicts this courageous woman by putting together her biography and life story and intertwining it with the development of the Sicilian society under mafia oppression along forty years. The result is a beautifully woven collage of love and life on the biographical side and ritualized murder, terror and blood on the other.

In the newly shot footage of the film, the filmmaker sets up a series of meetings where Battaglia comes to talk with her „ex-lovers“ (all younger than the now 80-year-old photographer). Together they remember their times passed as a couple and these moments slowly develop the story of a woman, who always went her own way, despite all real risks and obstacles she had to face.

The description of the Sicilian mafia is far away from the romanticized images we know from so many movies. In real life, mafia kills fathers and sons relentlessly, they carve eyes out and blow up bombs that are far too big to only hit their target. The power of this criminal organization is based on a well-spun net all across the society, from the Sicilian mountain villages to the churches and finally up to the heads of state.

Longinotto instead, prefers to glamourize a bit Battaglia’s life story. She creatively interweaves pieces of Italian classical movies that apparently show the same situations Battaglia has lived and that combine the fascinating beauty and lust for life of the protagonist with that of the actresses of those times. I personally have some doubt about the choice of the music, famous Italian classics that for my ears have little to do with any of the stories told.

However, a huge load of archive footage of all kinds (newsreels, home movies, pieces of documentaries, photographs…) has been chosen and artfully strung together in order to create a strongly emotional picture of what it means to face such a power as it is the mafia’s, with a photo camera, emotions, and art.

GB, 2018, 94 mins.

Scott Barley : Sleep Has Her House/ 2

It was one of the magnificent 7 films in the Belgrade festival last year in June and now it goes to ZagrebDox in the Slow Dox section. Go and see it – it is something special as the two texts here underlign, the first one is from the website of the festival, the second one is what I wrote after the screening in Belgrade :

A spectral landscape where human traces have completely disappeared. Only animals under the cover of darkness quietly await the arrival of a mystic spirit diffusing over the forest basins. This feature-length cinematic nocturne is a nightmare, a romantic excursion into unbridled wilderness, and an apocalyptic vision in one. Employing slowly passing images of dusky and seemingly deserted landscapes, Barley envelops nature in a cloak of impenetrable mystery, transcendental repose, and chilling expectation.

Painting with an I-phone! I had the most amazing aesthetic experience for a long time in the cinema yesterday night at the Kombank Dvorana cinema during the Magnificent7 festival in Belgrade. 90 minutes with landscapes, rivers, valleys, woods, sunset, barely visible graphic prints on the film screen, from pleasure to nightmare, no dialogue, cinema pur, a rollercoaster of impressions and associations remembering our Danish master Per Kirkeby seeing some of the colourful images, created by Scott Barley, a visual artist using the film medium, making a visual installation in the dark room that the cinema constitutes, thinking of Casper David Friedrich of course but also of Muybridge and his horses or maybe better of the white horse in Pirjo Honkasalo’s “Three Rooms of Melancholia” – and towards the end it’s Götterdämmerung without Wagner but with lightning and thunder at a sound level that made me want to hold my ears and close my eyes to avoid the epileptic seizures that I could have inherited from my father. I can’t remember being so much physically attacked by the film medium. I read that the director is born in 1992, this Anselm Kiefer of cinema, gosh I was suffering with this nightmarish pleasure!

http://zagrebdox.net/en/2019/program/dox_special/slow_dox/sleep_has_her_house

ZagrebDox 2019

Step by Step is the way that Croatian ZagrebDox festival has followed to announce its program for the 15th edition. The last couple of days the inviting website of the festival – link below – has told its readers what to expect in the competitive sections at the festival that starts February 24 and goes on until March 3. There are 18 films in the regional and 19 in the international category, plus ”Happy Dox“, „Biography Dox”, ”Controversial Dox”, ”Masters of Dox”, ”State of Affairs”… and more.

In the regional competition you will find films praised on this site, Eszter Hajdú’s brave critical film from ”Hungary 2018” and Claudia Tosi’s ”I Had a Dream” (photo) that also deals with politics through two – the word again – brave wonderful women. Also I can warmly recommend the short film ”In Between“ by Samir Karahoda from Kosovo, it has style and message.

From the International program loyal readers of this site might remember the text about Andrei Kutsila’s beautiful and thoughtful ”Summa”, those who can read Danish ”Island of the Ghosts”, reviewed and loved by colleague Allan Berg, the promising 1968-film ”My Unknown Soldier” by Anna Kryvenko and ”The Raft” by Marcus Lindeen.

I will be at the festival – looking very much to be present at a festival that has a high quality – short and long documentaries, award winning films from all over. Read all about it, good texts present the program on the site:

http://zagrebdox.net/en/2019/home

Borch Hansen & von Lowzow: Jørn Utzon

Instruktørerne hedder Lene og Anna til fornavn og filmen har undertitlen „Manden og Arkitekten“…

og det er, hvad vi får som tilskuere i den kendte Nordisk Film stil, som er designet til et internationalt marked som filmene om Karen Blixen, Knud Rasmussen og P.S. Krøyer var det – det vil sige biografisk fra a til z, bygget op omkring arkivmateriale, privat og offentligt, interviews og en kommentatorstemme, der tager os ved hånden. Og med stemningsskabende musik.

Åh nej, det er bare for meget af det gode, når der bliver sagt ”geni” i hver anden sætning og når sukkersøde sætninger veksler med musik fra ”væg til væg”. Men er du med på genren og formen, er det faktisk godt at være i selskab med den smukke høje mand, der aldrig – ifølge filmen – kritiserede andre og som hyldede arkitekturen som ”the art of capturing simplicity”.

… den smukke mand med den smukke hustru Lis. Deres livslange kærlighed er der billedmæssig dækning for: privatfotos, private filmoptagelser og først og fremmest, hvad to af parrets tre børn siger om deres opvækst, Lin Utzon and Jan Utzon. De taler om deres liv i Danmark, i Australien, på Hawaii, på Mallorca og der er masser af optagelser med den lykkelige solbrændte familie på havet, som han elskede. De taler ikke bare kærligt om deres forældre, de giver også besked.

Og så er der jo lige det at de huse, som Utzon tegnede er så gennemfotograferede og filmede, mange gange med Utzon selv bag kameraet, at du som tilskuer får noget af vide om, hvorfra Utzon fik sin inspiration, i nogle sekvenser brillierer Utzon selv som den ”greatest teacher”, en af de udenlandske arkitekter, som interviewes, kalder ham.

Operahuset i Sydney fylder naturligt nok meget i filmen med arkivmateriale og udtalelser. What a scandal; Australierne behandlede ham skidt og det blev ikke bedre, da han kom hjem til Danmark, hvor han skulle betale dobbeltskat. Efter Sydney i 1967 boede han i udlandet til 2004, men fik opgaver – National Assembly i Kuwait, Bagsværd Kirke, Paustians Hus plus at han tegnede huse til familien på Mallorca.

Arkitekten Oktay Nayman, der arbejdede med Utzon, til os danskere: I værdsatte ham ikke, tænk på alle de huse, han kunne have tegnet for jer.

Filmen har premiere i flere danske biografer fra i morgen. Med engelske undertekster.

Danmark, 90 mins., 2019.      

Auteur Filmklub

Efter mange års fremragende filmformidling valgte filmproducent og forfatter Ebbe Preisler at gå på velfortjent pension fra sin Mandagsdokumentaren. Preisler var før Mandagsdokumentaren en vigtig person i både dansk og europæisk dokumentar-sammenhæng. Det kan I læse lidt mere om her: http://www.filmkommentaren.dk/blog/blogpost/375/

Gode folk har taget over og dannet Auteur Filmklub Kvarterhuset. De forklarer selv at ”auteur” betyder at filmskaberen er i centrum for arrangementerne, at filmklub er en klub med programaktiviteter og at Kvarterhuset er det nye faste visningssted, hvis i klikker her

https://www.auteurfilm.dk/

adressen er på Amager og det er også her at ”auteur dinners” på franglais finder sted i Øens Spisested i Holmbladsgade. Næste middag – den 21 februar – viser den glimrende film ”En frygtelig kvinde” (foto) hvor instruktøren Christian Tafdrup spiser med og diskuterer den for mange kontroversielle film.

Og så går det ellers løs med en række dokumentarfilm. Bl.a. ”Dreaming Murakami” af Nitesh Anjaan og Christian Braad Thomsens ”Karen Blixen – Storyteller”. Klik på linket ovenfor og få alle oplysninger. Herfra skal der bare lyde et Bravo!

Manager af Auteur Niels Elbæk har bedt mig tilføje et par links, de kommer så her:

Jeg vil blive rigtig glad, hvis du kan tilføje to links mere til dit blogindlæg:
1. Link til hjemmesiden for filmklubben, der nu ligger under Kvarterhuset: https://kvarterhuset.kk.dk/artikel/auteur-filmklub-kvarterhuset
Der kan man også finde programmet.
2. Samt gerne dette link, hvor man kan melde sig ind i klubben: https://elkfilm.us16.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=41733784baf060d6b03437c71&id=5ff1d977be

Torquil Jones & Gabriel Clarke: Bobby Robson

— with the subtitle “More than a Manager” is a well-made classic football documentary about the legendary Englishman, who played football 20 times for England and was a coach/manager for more than 50 years, not only in England but abroad in Holland, Portugal, Spain before he returned to his last job in the club, that was very close to his heart, Newcastle United. With classic I mean, interviews with players who praises Robson, archive with him, clips from games.

Bobby Robson (Sir Robert William Robson) (1933-2009) was a true British gentleman, an old school coach, for several of the players a father figure like for Paul Gascoigne, Gazza, this fantastic player who later on spoilt his carreer through alcoholism. In the film Gazza comes back several times saying how Robson was always checking how he was. To help him. The same for Brazilian Ronaldo, who was 19 when Robson took him to FC Barcelona supported by Danish coach, former star Frank Arnesen, who had discovered Ronaldo and brought him to PSV Eindhoven.

There are wonderful clips from Ronaldo’s stay at Barca in 1996-1997 and this year is in many ways the focus of the film. Robson loved to be in Barcelona but the fans did not like his kind of football, even if the won titles for the Catalan club. He took over from Johan Cruyff and his style was not appreciated. Nevertheless, Pep Guardiola, who was playing for Barca that year, praises him, as does Robson’s “translator”, José Mourinho, who learned from him – well, my comment, the gentlemanship he did not take with him! At a press conference you see Robson, who had just been sacked next to the new coach, Dutch van Gaal… no charisma at all!

If not for him, I would not have had a career, says Gary Lineker (the best coach England has ever had, is another sentence from the brilliant goal scorer), the same goes for another great player Alan Shearer, who stresses that Robson saved Newcastle United.

The private Bobby Robson is also in the film. His widow talks nicely about their life together, and one of the sons, with private archive and information about how he overcome a handful cancer operations, except fort he last one…

England, 2018, 100 mins. Available on Netflix.   

Mads Brügger: Cold Case Hammerskjöld

Fy for pokker… nu ved jeg at der er en organisation i Sydafrika der hedder SAIMR, South African Institute for Medical Research. En hemmelig loge, som var indblandet i mordet på den svenske FN generalsekretær Dag Hammerskjöld i 1961, hvor hans fly på vej til Congo faldt ned under mystiske omstændigheder. Hvordan og hvorfor døde svenskeren, som ville kolonialismen til livs og mødte stor modstand fra hvide i det sydlige Afrika.

Om dette har Mads Brügger lavet en film sammen med Göran Björkdahl, som har undersøgt Hammerskjöld-sagen det meste af sit voksne liv. Det er nærmest blevet en besættelse for ham. Brügger har arbejdet med Björkdahl i seks år på bedste journalistiske vis OG i bedste Mads Brügger film-stil, hvor han er i billedet, spiller den hvide mand med tropehatten, som vil grave resterne af flyvemaskinen op, men får ikke lov, tænder hænder-rystende en cigar, bliver spurgt af Björkdahl hvorfor han ryster på hænderne, ”du plejer jo at være en cool fyr”, og deri har svenskeren ret, når Brügger selviscenesættende klædt i hvidt som medlemmerne af SAIMR – får vi at vide – dikterer filmens manuskript til først den ene så den anden sorte sekretær, som ikke blot skriver ned, men også reagerer på oplysningerne om at sorte får indsprøjtninger med aids.”Gruesome” siger den ene sekretær og hun har ret og det er imponerende og rystende, hvad de to graver op af informationer og vidnesbyrd fra mennesker, som tør stå frem.

I forbindelse med filmen er der skrevet lange artikler i Observer og andre steder, hvor undersøgelserne og hovedpersonerne præsenteres. Som en anmeldelse har fremhævet er filmens indhold en sensation – afdøde Maxwells dagbog som afslører meget, Geoffrey Jones som ifølge slutteksterne nu lever i skjul somewhere pga. hvad han siger; han går så langt at han siger CIA, da han bliver spurgt, hvem der kunne have stået bag flystyrtet og mordet på den pæne, ordentlige Hammerskjöld, som har lagt navn til en fin allé i København, der huser den amerikanske ambassade!

Som film leverer Brügger her sit bedste; han blander iscenesættelsen med en ærlig tvivl da han opdager, at han er på vej til at grave noget stort ud af historiens glemsel. Han glider fra at være hovedperson i nok en absurd historie til hen i filmen at lade tropehatten ligge og give publikum en vejdrejet spændingsfilm, der har mange humoristiske elementer, men endnu flere, hvor hovedet rystes over kolonialismens hæslige hvide ansigt. Fy for pokker!  

Danmark, Sverige, 2019, 128 mins.

DocPoint 2019 Summing Up

A total of 107 films were screened at DocPoint Festival in more than 260 screenings, a fifth of which were sold out. The documentary film event for children and young people, DOKKINO, organised in connection with the festival, gained 3 000 visitors. “I am pleased that a diverse festival audience was again inspired by documentary films”, says the Executive Director of the DocPoint-elokuvatapahtumat association Tapio Riihimäki. ”The good vibe and the warm atmosphere at DocPoint screenings is noteworthy and our international filmmaker guests have also remarked upon it.”

The most viewed film during the festival week was GENESIS 2.0 (Photo), the startling journey of the director Christian Frei to the core of cloning and ethics. Among the most popular films at the festival were AQUARELA depicting the power of water, OUR NEW PRESIDENT and FAHRENHEIT 11/9 both analysing Donald Trump’s ascent to power but from different viewpoints, and the poetic CIELO, of which all four screenings were sold out. Of the Finnish premieres, the biggest audiences were drawn by Reetta Huhtanen’s GODS OF MOLENBEEK and Arthur Franck’s THE HYPNOTIST.

The DocPoint audience and Tue Steen Müller, the Danish film critic making this year’s Critic’s Choice, were unanimous: the winner of the Audience Award GODS OF MOLENBEEK is also the Critic’s Choice. Müller says: “The filmmaker has cleverly made a film that puts the magic of childhood in the foreground as a comment to the world around the two boys. It is charming! This film will travel the world.”

Give us feedback!, please We’d love to here from you – and arrange an even better festival again next year! The 19th DocPoint – Helsinki Documentary Film Festival, it will take place from 27th January to 2nd February 2020. See you there!

https://docpointfestival.fi/en/blog/2019/02/04/diverse-audiences-inspired-by-docpoint-festival/