Look at the photo – happy award winners of the ZagrebDox Pro announced last night. Below, I have copied a text from the site of the festival. I attended the pitching forum, good atmosphere, good presentations, well trained by Leena Pasanen and Stefano Tealdi, the latter being – for my taste – a too polite moderator with panelists, who had problems in being short and precise. Here comes the text:

Following a four-day workshop and the Pitching Forum presenting the projects to the members of the international panel, the award ceremony of this year’s ZagrebDox Pro training programme took place. The best projects are Museum of the Revolution, 4 Goodnight Stories and Raising Predators.

The HBO Europe Award, a diploma and 2000 euro for further project development went to the Serbian-Croatian project Museum of the Revolution by Srđan Keča about an unusual friendship between an old woman and a little girl living in the ruins of an abandoned utopian project, presented at ZagrebDox by producer Vanja Jambrović.

The ZagrebDox Pro Online Mentor Award, a diploma and a one-year online mentoring with elimir ilnik went to director Anđelka Vujinović and the co-author and DoP Mija Mujović for the project 4 Goodnight Stories. Closely documenting the life in the biggest nursing home in Serbia, this project explores the meaning of old age and its taboos and captures mood of the last moments.

The best project of this year’s edition of ZagrebDox Pro, according to the joint decision of all the panellists is the Hungarian project Raising Predators by director Réka Ugron and producer László Józs, about Sandra the falconer who has a hard time establishing an emotional connection with her children due to her own dramatic childhood memories. They won the ZagrebDox Pro DCP Award, including a diploma and the professional DCP format material…

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

Tonight the award ceremony will take place at the 15th edition of the ZagrebDox. I have been in the International Competition jury together with Nebojša Slijepčević and elimir ilnik. The results will be announced on this site tonight or tomorrow.

It is always a pleasure to be in a jury. It gives you the chance to have good film talks with your juror colleagues, in this case with two fine filmmakers. Slijepčević, whose ”Srbenka” is on my ”best of 2018” – http://www.filmkommentaren.dk/blog/blogpost/4308/ – and Serbian ilnik, whose name was of course familiar to me but I had never really had the chance to see his works and understand the important role he has played in Yugoslav film history.

Thanks to ZagrebDox for closing (a bit of) this gap: ilnik had a masterclass, where he showed “Among the People: Life and Acting”, a 83 minutes long film that demonstrates, what he himself called “my Methodology”. The film is full of clips from his films (documentaries and fiction) mixed with conversations with some of the people, who were in his early works. They talk about, what it meant to them to be invited to be in a film and it shows wonderfully ilnik in action as the director, who gives lines to the non-professional actors. You get very easily the feeling of a true documentarian, who knows how to approach and get the best out of the “protagonists” as he puts it. And does so with humour and respect.

It’s the social and political aspects of a society that interests ilnik, whose works are full of critical comments. Among the many quotes  from his films there is one where the director has invited a handful of homeless people to come and stay in his house – going out in the streets of Novi Sad asking people, what they thought about homeless people and what could be done for them. There is indeed not a lot of understanding and compassion! On the photo another example, a woman looking at a photo from, when she was young and was filmed by ilnik.

Around 20 of his films will be screened at Centre Pompidou in Paris in April.

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

The following text is a copy paste from the website of DocuDays UA in Kiev, explaining the visual concept refelcting on how

… the new digital world changes us, our way of thinking, habits, ways of communication, our whole consciousness. We’re glad that 3D printing of transplant organs has been invented. Drones have become an everyday reality, and we’re waiting for driverless cars. Smart houses are becoming common, AI robots entertain elderly people, they pick up balls at tennis courts and play chess.

We hope that digital technology will allow us to fight corruption. For example, if Ukraine moves all its government activities online, all the notes, queues,

 

payments will be visible, and there will be less room for abuse. Meanwhile, cryptocurrency is quickly becoming a part of the global economy, which, according to international experts, leads to the creation of new virtual states – that is, the new world order.

At the same time, hacking, surveillance, intrusion in our privacy has grown to a threatening scale across the world. The world is outraged at Russia’s involvement in the US presidential election via digital technology, its intrusion in the Brexit vote in England, cyber attacks against businesses, government institutions, and ordinary consumers of information technology.

In 2012, the new term “digital rights” was coined. The UN Human Rights Council passed a resolution which states that all of our offline rights shall fully apply online. In April 2014, the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe approved the Guide to Human Rights for Internet Users, based on the European Convention on Human Rights. However, at the moment, the digital sphere has very few tools to protect the biggest achievement of human civilization, the concept of human rights.

And Ukraine doesn’t even have a dedicated law about any criminal punishment or civil responsibility for unacceptable online activities.

So how do we protect human rights in Ukraine under the new world order? How do we preserve the freedom of speech, safety guarantees for journalists, human rights activists? How do we protect the internet from the ever more powerful online stream of hate speech, online calls for terrorist attacks, xenophobia, racism, nazism and hate against humanity? How do we protect our voting rights against cyber attacks? How do we protect children from potential harmful content online? How do we protect everyone’s personal data? How do we protect people with HIV and LGBTIQ+ people from stalking and attacks?

As we prepared the 16th Docudays UA Festival, we researched trends, strategies and forms of human rights protection in the digital world. The Festival’s central program, NETWORK, will tell our audience about the activities of the Bellingcat Agency, which investigated the most high-profile cases, such as the fall of the MH17 flight or civilian deaths in Syria, by comparing data from open electronic sources. And the film The Cleaners will reveal the new profession of “social media censors” who manually clean out everything “threatening” that appears on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. We plan to discuss the phenomenon of idols, the extremely popular Chinese bloggers, after watching the film People’s Republic of Desire.

This time, the Rights Now section will feature a program of Impact Films, which became a part of successful activist campaigns, including through social media. We expect their authors and activist to visit our Festival, share their experiences and inspire us to change the world around us for the better.

About the visual solution: We invited the artist Oleksiy Say to work with us. Oleksiy is known for his Excel Art style, making mosaics in Microsoft Excel, an app for processing big arrays of data, associated with the clarity of reports and the monotonous mundanity of the digital world. In his ironic work, Oleksiy explores the office culture which emerged only 15 years ago and has affected the identity, motives, sources of aggression, and the whole way of thinking of contemporary people:

“For me, it’s like an archeological cross-section of culture. Like Trypillia… Culture as a combination of the way of life, aesthetics, the whole public order.”

http://docudays.ua/eng/

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.