Here comes a list of films from this year´s CPH:DOX that has already been reviewed on filmkommentaren.dk. As the policy for our independent and self-funded blog-site is that we only review and comment (almost) positively, you can consider these links as recommendations:

An Evening with Ai WeiWei

http://www.filmkommentaren.dk/blog/blogpost/4066/

Victor Kossakovsky: Aquarela

http://www.filmkommentaren.dk/blog/blogpost/4408/

Emir Kusturica: El Pepe

http://www.filmkommentaren.dk/blog/blogpost/4441/

Eszter Hajdú: Hungary 2018

http://www.filmkommentaren.dk/blog/blogpost/4405/

Aboozar Amini: City in the Wind

http://www.filmkommentaren.dk/blog/blogpost/4398/

Bettina Perut & Iván Osnovikoff : Los Reyes

http://www.filmkommentaren.dk/blog/blogpost/4406/

Herzog & Singer: Meeting Gorbachev

http://www.filmkommentaren.dk/blog/blogpost/4386/

Vitaly Mansky: Putin’s Witnesses

http://www.filmkommentaren.dk/blog/blogpost/4390/

Kim Longinotto: Shooting the Mafia

http://www.filmkommentaren.dk/blog/blogpost/4463/

Nicolas Geyerhalter: The Border Fence

http://www.filmkommentaren.dk/blog/blogpost/4437/

Anna Eborn: Transnistra

http://www.filmkommentaren.dk/blog/blogpost/4475/

https://cphdox.dk/en/programme/program-a-z/

It is indeed overwhelming the program of CPH:DOX. Films, now also with a section for fiction films, concerts, the CPH:Forum with 33 projects, including well-known directors being present like Petra Costa, Victor Kossakovsky, Guido Hendrickx, Mila Turajlic, Shaul Schwarz and Ben Rivers… focus on art and innovation in form… the extra-ordinary.

But let me stay with the film program: 200 films, five international competitions, ”Among this year’s new initiatives and highlights are a major theme on Europe including films, talks and an exhibition, a new programme dedicated to fiction films, and guest stars such as Ai Weiwei and Pamela Anderson!”

We will review many of the films, but let me draw your attention to 3 films and filmmakers risking to drown in the big ocean of titles:

Lithuanian ”Animus Animalis” by young Aiste Zegulyte, original in form and theme: People, Animals and Things. Palestinian Lina Alabed’s ”Ibrahim”, ”a cinematic letter to her father, who disappeared during a political mission in 1987 and never returned”. I have heard about that film for a long time, made with Danish help. Russian wonderful director Alina Rudnitskaya’s Danish production “School of Seduction”.

Talking about Denmark – and it is a Dane who writes this – it is good to see many new Danish films announced after a bit meager 2018. There are films by Phie Ambo, Pernille Rose Grønkjær, Eva Mulvad, Andreas Johnsen and new names as Marie Skovgård and Sun Hee Engelstoft.

https://cphdox.dk/

Yes. Documentary is Cinema. Where the best directors know what they are doing. Have chosen a form for what they want to tell. Before shooting. This is what Swedish Anna Eborn has done with this gem of a documentary film. She is working with video and with 16mm film, she has created a superb sound design and used music so it matches the sequences. The critic has no objections!

Actually this is a quote from my review of Eborn’s previous film ”Lida” from Ukraine but it fits perfectly for the one, she presents now, ”Transnistra”, shot by Virginie Surdej.

The film stands out, it is far away from main stream documentary, let me just point at some of the magic this film delivers:

The opening summer scenes of the youngsters at the river with Tanya in the middle surrounded by, well they are boys, all of them pretty much interested in Tanya, she talking about love all the time – the filmmaker stays long with them creating an atmosphere of waiting and searching. You can see it is shot on film material, it gives a beauty to the image, nothing to do with the often sterile video image.

The river is the point of return in a film that also goes to the poor place, where Tanya lives and to the abandoned houses, where the youngsters hang out, smoking, talking about everything and nothing, being together in a social context that can be only characterised as poverty. They have no education, they have dreams of getting away as many in this part of the world.

And yet, important to stress, this is not a social report, it is a close look at youngsters/teenagers and how they love and don’t love each other, how they create their own little space of life in Transnistria, ”the breakaway republic largely unrecognized internationally, sitting between Moldova and Ukraine, which seems determined to maintain a Soviet lifestyle”.

… and the closing scene with Tanya and Tolya, touching… maybe a farewell moment, Tolya thinks, while Tanya is recording him singing. On her cell phone. Wow, here is a young director who catches a moment of life and love, Truffaut will clap in his hands whereever he is.

The film will be shown at the Tempo Festival in Stockholm, at Docville in Belgium and at CPH:DOX: https://cphdox.dk/en/programme/film/?id=1187 and will be released in Danish theatres in June. And at many other festivals I am sure.

http://www.filmkommentaren.dk/blog/blogpost/4027/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outline_of_Transnistria

Sweden, Denmark, Belgium, 93 mins., 2019

Last night the winners were announced in  Zagreb, here comes some of them, click below and you will get the whole list:

Nebojša Slijepčević Tue Steen Müller elimir ilnik, Jury International Competition

BIG STAMP FOR BEST FILM IN INTERNATIONAL COMPETITION
UP THE MOUNTAIN (Photo)
Yang Zhang, China – The film captivates with its visual beauty and directing skills, introduces us into the life of a remote community, depicting celebrations, grief, birth and death, spectacular parties and intimate conversations. We can rightfully say that each shot in this film is like a painting, a glorious meditation about true values in life.

SPECIAL MENTION – INTERNATIONAL COMPETITION

MINDING THE GAP
Bing Liu, USA- A painfully honest film in which the director fully discloses himself and his friends, a universal tale of the scars left by domestic violence.

SPECIAL MENTION – INTERNATIONAL COMPETITION
MY UNKNOWN SOLDIER Anna Kryvenko Czech Republic, Latvia, Slovakia – The author bravely reveals hidden family history before the camera and manages to find an original approach to historical events about which we seemed to already know everything.

Nedad Begović, Melanie Iredale, Igor Mirković, Regional Jury

BIG STAMP FOR BEST FILM
UNA PRIMAVERA
Valentina Primavera Austria, Italy, Germany – Our winning film is a very personal insight in to domestic abuse, and a great example of a filmmaker turning their camera on their own dysfunctional family to produce a work so intimate and warm whilst making a bigger statement about the systemic issue of patriarchal violence and coercion. The documentary’s central character is a 60-year-old woman who after 40 years of marriage, is not afraid to boldly start her life all over again, and her daughter’s filmmaking is just as bold. The award goes to Una Primavera – an Austrian, German & Italian co-production from Valentina Primavera.

SPECIAL MENTION – REGIONAL COMPETITION
IN THE NAME OF THE REPUBLIC OF CROATIA Goran Dević Croatia – Special mention goes to the film which tells the centuries old and everlasting story of an individual fighting for his political ideas and the establishment which tries to silence him, without asking too many questions. The film itself opens these important questions again, without imposing the answers, led by the hand of a talented and skilful filmmaker Goran Dević in his film In the Name of Republic of Croatia.

SPECIAL MENTION – REGIONAL COMPETITION
4 YEARS IN 10 MINUTES Mladen Kovačević Serbia – Special mention goes to the film 4 Years in 10 Minutes. With willpower and perseverance, the author climbed Mount Everest and made a dramatic and exciting film whose drama doesn’t stop once the goal is met. Motivation and understanding of this film will definitely arise in those living at sea level, too. And those in between.

YOUNG JURY
Christian Sønderby Jepsen, Zorko Sirotić, Marko Grba Singh, Young Jury

LITTLE STAMP FOR BEST FILM OF A YOUNG AUTHOR UP TO 35 YEARS OF AGE
STILL RECORDING Saeed Al Batal, Ghiath Ayoub Lebanon, Syria, France, Qatar, Germany – The main award the Little Stamp goes to an honest inside story from hell. With camera as a weapon, film’s protagonists overcome fear and send out the truth while maintaining friendship and unity in the midst of the ruins of Syria.

SPECIAL MENTION – YOUNG JURY
EASY LESSONS Dorottya Zurbó Hungary – Special mention goes to a simple and cinematic, well developed portrait of an impressive Somalian girl trying to fit in a new society, despite the echoes of her past.

SPECIAL MENTION – YOUNG JURY
TAURUNUM BOY Jelena Maksimović, Dušan Grubin Serbia – Special mention goes to a well composed coming of age journey, cleverly shifting from one character to another in a successful and descreet observation of marginalized kids in the suburbs of Belgrade.

zagrebdox.net/en/2019/news

Her name is Anastasija, she is one of the children in “To Be Continued” by Latvian documentary master Ivars Seleckis, who is here at ZagrebDox, where his film was shown last night. Tonight Seleckis (who will be 85 this year) will receive an award given by Nenad Puhovski, ZagrebDox festival director, who himself at each edtion of the festival chooses a film to be awarded. A ”My Generation” award. I have known Seleckis for more than 20 years, this time I have had time to pass time with him at dinner and breakfasts, together with a dear friend Lelda Ozola from the National Film Centre of Latvia. This morning I learned why the director/cameraman always wears a beret… ask him when you meet him, good story.

Another master at the festival was Sergei Loznitsa, who in a totally crowded cinema performed a masterclass with the title ”Use of Archive Footage Between the Authentic and Constructed”. He had only time to show clips from three of his many archive-based films. Although it is always interesting to listen to Loznitsa – and I loved to have ”Blokada” (2005) on screen, the fantastic film about the siege of Leningrad, as well as ”The Event” from 2015, also archive, from 1991, the coup and the call for freedom shot in Leningrad/St.Petersburg – he should have been given more time, and maybe he should have focused on one film and gone deeper with, for instance, the last archive work, the amazing ”The Trial”. Also shown at the festival.

Orwa Nyrabia, artistic director of IDFA, was at the festival invited and interviewed by Nenad Puhovski – he was as always precise, open for questions, promised that there will be changes at the Forum, which has renewed itself but needs more changes following the changes in the media landscape, where broadcasters are not influential on the development of documentaries any longer, at least in funding terms. The question about why no central and Eastern documentary projects were chosen for the Forum 2018 was raised again, Orwa Nyrabia referred to the answer he gave through filmkommentaren, link below. Re the meeting: It can only be a simplification from the one hour with Nyrabia but the message could be: less mainstream films and projects, more ambitious creative documentaries and projects. Wish him all the best luck with this!

http://www.filmkommentaren.dk/blog/blogpost/4376/

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/