Docudays UA – The Festival Concept

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/

Eastern Logic – Documentaries

Love the text below – read more and see the great trailer for East Doc Platform on https://dokweb.net/articles/detail/659/east-doc-platform-2019-to-highlight-eastern-logic

This year’s theme, Eastern Logic, refers to the unique identity shared by the countries of the former Eastern Bloc. “Eastern logic” aptly describes thinking that manifests itself in documentary films from this region, not only from a technical aspect, but also thematically. Compared to Western productions, Eastern documentaries are a certain phenomenon, and are set apart by their difference, oddness, and openness. Often technically imperfect, they nevertheless have their own style, and though this differs from country to country, a certain “Eastern” perspective dominates. Eastern Logic is about the search for an identity for a region that over the past thirty years has tried to adapt to newly imposed conditions instead of finding its own identity. Eastern Logic is therefore mainly also about us, about our perspective and acceptance of who we are.

Docudays UA – Ukrainian Doc Preview

The festival in Kiev takes place March 22-30 and I am happy to go again, always a pleasure to be at a festival that has an idea, makes a (political or social) statement, know about the documentary world and pick the best of the best for screening.

Darya Bassel, Program and Docu/Pro coordinator at the festival, introduced the other day, on the website of the festival, see link below, a Doc Preview, ”a presentation of post-production stage Ukrainian documentary projects to selectors representing leading international festivals, sales agents and distributors…”the perfect venue to launch their a journey into the international market”.

Of course a good initiative but what struck me was the truth in the first lines

of the interview with Bassel: ”The contemporary documentary film market suggests a rather short lifecycle for a single film. A couple of years is all you have to premiere the film domestically and internationally, tour the festival circuit, sell the film on TV or a to vod-platform and also hit the cinemas”.

Sadly she is right. Two years and then up on a shelf for eternal oblivion. A documentary has a première, goes to festivals, maybe (seldom) ends up on television, and that’s it. And yet it is much better today than “in the old days” because of the streaming possibilities and the connected digitization. We can’t complain in my country Denmark, where there are (free or very cheap) sites for films by Jon Bang Carlsen and Jørgen Leth to mention our local heroes, whose films are also distributed abroad through retrospectives. But all the other ones… as Bassel says the life is short for a film, that a director/producer has been working on for years.

I do so every day, watch documentaries on my MacBook Pro and I praise initiatives like DocAlliance and its dedication to film history, as well as I say Bravo every time a festival puts spotlight on a director or a country or “a wave”, not to forget the film museums and their retrospect work.

Having said so, back to the motivation for making the DocPreview in Kiev, more from Darya Bassel:

“For this fascinating and challenging journey, you will need a few dependable allies: a distributor that is madly in love with your project and a whole group of predisposed festival selectors and TV editors, who will be waiting to grab your film as soon as it hits the screens. The best way to make sure they are on your side is to promote the project before it is complete, at pitching sessions, film markets and work-in-progress presentations.”

http://docudays.ua/eng/

ZagrebDox 15’th Edition

The 15th edition of the Croatian international documentary festival starts tomorrow. It is a festival that year by year has grown and developed, with competitions for international and regional films and a lot of side sections. You can’t complain if you live in Zagreb and want to have a quality overview of what happens in the world of documentaries!

On the FB link to this blogpost you could see a photo of the jurors of the first edition of ZagrebDox, sent by festival director and founder Nenad Puhovski. In the middle you see IDFA’s Head of industry then and now, Adriek van Nieuwenhuyzen, to the left Croatian filmmaker and script writer Krsto Papić, who passed away in 2013, and to the right me.

The three of us had the job to award the best in both the international and regional competition. Read what we decided:

“’Three Rooms of Melancholia’ (photo) by Finnish filmmaker Pirjo Honkasalo is the best International Competition entry at the 1stZagrebDox. ‘Images From the Corner’ by Bosnian and Herzegovinian filmmaker Jasmila banić is the best regional competition film. The best film by a young filmmaker is ‘Life In Peace’ by Antoine Cattin and Pavel Kostomarov.”

Two big names in European cinema, Honkasalo and banić, and two Russian/Swiss names who have made several important works since then.

Back in Zagreb this year I have been invited to be a juror again, this time with Serbian elimir ilnik, whose work I know far too little about, and Croatian Nebojša Slijepčević, whose ”Srbenka” I saw in Sarejevo, and wrote enthusiastically about: http://www.filmkommentaren.dk/blog/blogpost/4308/

ilnik hosts a masterclass that I look forward to, the same goes for Sergei Loznitsa and then there is the impressive ZagrebDox Pro with project development and pitching, led by Leena Pasanen and Stefano Tealdi.

Also that has grown since the start in 2005, where EDN colleague Cecilia Lidin and I tutored with a small panel. I remember that late editor from ORF Frans Grabner took part as well as Rada Sesic, of course, who will be there again this year. Films like “Cash and Marry” by Atanas Georgiev, “Wongar” by Andrijana Stojkovic, “Caviar Connection” by Dragan Nikolic, “Sevdah” by Marina Škop and “I will Marry the Whole Village” by eljko Mirković were there, to mention a few.

Gonna be good days in Zagreb, arriving Wednesday, staying till the end.

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

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.