We have to wait until October 10 before the festival in Leipzig, that takes place from October 29 to November 4, announces its official selection. But the efficient press department of DOK Leipzig warms us up with news. This time about the juries – there will be 10 (!) all together – and their mix of film people and writers and visual artists. I can’t mention all – link below but here is a fragment of the press release that came out the other day:

“This year, in addition to the Next Masters Competition Long Documentary and Animated Film there will be a separate dedicated competition for short films. For this reason, the Next Masters Jury, which will preside over both competitions for up-and-coming young filmmakers, has been expanded to include two additional members. Austrian director Ruth Beckermann, who is being honoured at DOK Leipzig 2018 in the Homage section, will be teaming up here with Romanian colleague Adina Pintilie. Both filmmakers were awarded at Berlinale 2018: Beckermann for “The Waldheim Waltz” (PHOTO) and Pintilie for “Touch Me Not”. DOK Leipzig is showing Pinitilie’s debut film “Don’t Get Me Wrong” (2007) in the special programme Re-Visions. The two directors will be joining third jury member Thierry Garrel, producer and former director of the documentary film department at ARTE France. 

Internationally renowned Finnish filmmaker Mika Kaurismäki is also slated to serve as a jury member at DOK Leipzig. Joining respected Tunisian producer Dora Bouchoucha and Lithuanian author Laimonas Briedis, who visited the city previously for the 2017 Leipzig Book Fair, Kaurismäki will be rounding off the jury for the International Competition Long Documentary and Animated Film…”

https://www.dok-leipzig.de/en/festival/wettbewerbe/juries-2018

Enfin, someone wrote on FB, when it was announced that the film «Fahavalo» by French company Laterit had been chosen for a festival, the World Film Festival/Festival des Films du Monde in Montréal, a festival for fiction, shorts and documentaries, link below. World premiere September 1^st.

I echo the “enfin” about the film and take some quote from the review I wrote months ago, The whole review is here:

http://www.filmkommentaren.dk/blog/blogpost/4187/

”I’ll try to tell you the story”, says the weak old man in a blue shirt with a hat

on his head. He is adressing the camera crew. ”I was 22 in 1947”, the year that is the focus of the film, the year when a rebellion took place led by the ”Fahavalo”, the enemies it means, against the French who had colonised Madagascar. An uprising against the Vazaha, the French, the Europeans. He was one of the freedom fighters and he paid his price, 8 years and 9 months in prison. The rebels were hiding in the forests and long after they were defeated, many of them were still there.

That old man is just one of the storytellers in the film. A handful of other men and women still alive are the witnesses found and involved in the film by the filmmakers. In conversations, which are conversations and not interviews – and conversations that most of the time include listeners, relatives, children and grandchildren, who want to hear and – you sense that – are proud of what they did back then…

On the photo above you see cameraman César Paes, assistant director and set photographer Tiago Paes, Berthe Raharisoa, in her white dress, a lively lady, born in 1925, who was part of the MDRM. In the film she sings the anthem of the resistance party. Lovely!

And to the right director and producer Marie Clémence Andriamonta Paes, as the name indicates she is half Malagasy, half French. It is of course a huge advantage that she speaks the language and can communicate directky with the witnesses.

All I know about Madagascar, I know from Marie-Clémence and César Paes and their films.

http://www.ffm-montreal.org/en/press-releases/195–ffm2018-documentaries-of-the-world.html

I was there last year for this gem of a festival for creatice documentaries. It is done with a very personal touch by the couple Petra Seliskar and Brand Ferro. It’s primarily an outdoor screening festival – the weather invites you to share beautiful evenings at the amazing Kurshumli An in the old city – with indoor workshops; this year they had two top names to deal with the theme “Directing Reality”: Finnish Pirjo Honkasalo and Polish Wojciech Staron.

If you google Makedox, you will see many clips from the workshops and small talks with filmmakers, who participated like Boris Mitic (In Praise of Nothing), Marta Prus (Over the Limit) (there was a fine focus on Polish documentaries) and Simon Lereng Wilmont. whose “The Distant Barking of Dogs” won the main award in the Main Selection. Not the first award for Wilmont and his film – with another multi-awarded film “Of Fathers and Sons” by Talal Derki getting a special mention from a jury that consisted of Honkasalo, Staron and Mariam Chachia, young talented director from Georgia.

There were many other sections and juries and awards, let me mention one, the best short film: Heba Khaled’s content-wise terrible, stylistically overwhelmingly strong “People of the Wasteland” that has the following description “Using  footage filmed and gathered during more than two years through a GoPro camera placed on the heads of different Syrian fighters in the enemy region, the film presents the violence, the horrors and the absurdity of war in a first-perspective point-of-view. In the chaos of war, the lines between good and evil become blurred and the location is intentionally left unclear to remind us that war affects us all, not only Syrians.”

I have seen the film, have to see it again, shocking reality!

http://makedox.mk/mk/en/

Would have loved to be in beautiful St. Petersburg again for the festival Message to Man, that I have visited many times. The dates are September 15-22 and I am “anderswo engagiert” .

The festival has a huge program – if you are on FB with it you are bombarded with news every day – and there are many interesting films in the competitive sections, of which there are no less than 6: International Full-Length documentary Films, Short Docs, Short Fiction, Short Animated, National Competition of Docs and the In Silico Experimental Short Film Competition.

Let me mention some of the films: The controversial “The White World According to Daliborek” by Vit Klusák, the super-productive master Sergei Loznitsa has his “Victory Day” in competition, Romanian “Infinite football” (PHOTO) by Corneliu Porumboiu is there (will there be played football as in Tbilisi and other festivals thanks to tireless main character Laurentiu Ginghina?), Bernadett Tuza-Ritter’s “A Woman Captured” that is and deserves to be everywhere, Wang Bing is there with “Mrs Fang”… in the national competition I am curious to see what talented Tatyana Soboleva comes with, “Uncle Sasha, or One Flew Over Russia” is the title as well as the film by Alina Rudnitskaya (together with Sergey Vinokurov) “Fatei and the Sea”… and In Silico presents a new work by former students of Zelig Film School in Bolzano, Mark Olexa and Francesca Scalisi, “Black Line”.

https://message2man.com/en/

Happy to say that I agree with the competent decisions made by this jury: Leena Pasanen (Festival Director of DOK Leipzig, Germany), Luciano Rigolini (Artist-photographer, producer, Switzerland), Marina Gumzi (Producer/ Scriptwriter, Slovenia). I give you the links for the reviews I made during the festival 

HEART OF SARAJEVO FOR BEST DOCUMENTARY FILM

SRBENKA

Director: Nebojša Slijepčević 

Croatia 

Financial award, in the amount of 3,000 €, sponsored by Government of Switzerland.

http://www.filmkommentaren.dk/blog/blogpost/4308/

SPECIAL JURY MENTION

NINE MONTH WAR/ KILENC HÓNAP HÁBORÚ

Director: László Csuja 

Hungary, Qatar

http://www.filmkommentaren.dk/blog/blogpost/4315/

HUMAN RIGHTS AWARD

ARAF (PHOTO)

Turkey, Greece, Bosnia and Herzegovina

Director: Didem Pekün 

Best film of the Competition Programme – Documentary Film dealing with the subject of human rights. Award in the amount of 3,000 €, sponsored by Government of Switzerland.

http://www.filmkommentaren.dk/blog/blogpost/4316/

Here comes a copy-paste of the press release from Jihlava FF. The presentation of the projects took place at the same conference room in Hotel Europe as the Rough Cut Boutique, this time, good for the presenters, they were in spotlight, it helped to create some passion from the very diverse group of people, who were selected by Marek Hovorka and his festival team. I was a member of the jury, so no personal comments would be fair. Here comes the text:

“Ten outstanding documentaries from Central and Eastern Europe, planned for theatrical release during the upcoming 12 months – the Docu Talents from the East –  were presented yesterday at the Sarajevo Film Festival.

Projects from Azerbaijan, Belarus, Czech Republic, Macedonia, Poland, Romania, Serbia and Ukraine made it to the final selection of Docu Talents from the East 2018.

The Docu Talent Award was newly granted to the most promising projects. The international jury selected two winners: An absurd tragicomical Ukrainian-Belarussian documentary placed in today’s Crimea My Granny from Mars directed by Alexandar Mihalkovich and produced by Volia Chajkouskaya, and an intimate artistic documentary film Birthday directed and produced by Hilal Baydarov from Azerbaijan. The awards are accompanied with financial prize 2,500 USD for each project, in cooperation with the festival’s partner Current Time TV.

The jury gave the following statements:

“For a choice of charismatic protagonists, treated in a highly cinematic way, and for the sense of absurdity in a difficult and unstable environment.”
 

(My Granny from Mars)

 (PHOTO)

“To a new voice that reveals a pure sense of time, by capturing the universal nature of reality.”

(Birthday)

http://www.dokument-festival.com/industry/docu-talents/2018

Yesterday morning the Rough Cut Boutique presented the five projects that under the leadership of Rada Sesic and Martichka Bozhilova were developed with the tutorial help of people like editor Tom Ernst, producer Stefano Tealdi, commissioning editor Hanka Kastelicova, Katrine Kilgaard from CPH:DOX, Aleksandra Derewienko from Cat&Docs in Paris, Jenny Westergaard from YLE Finland and others.

The presentation took place at a conference room of Hotel Europe, not the best place as the presenters were standing in almost total darkness, no spotlight on them, which made the atmosphere a bit sleepy. The verbal presentation (I was told that they were trained in pitching, sorry could not see that) was followed by clips/scenes from the rough cuts. Have to confess that it is difficult to get a true impression of a film from the visual material.

There were awards for the best projects. They went like this:

– 20.000 EUR postproduction award by Digital Cube Romania: DAUGHTER OF CAMORRA, Siniša Gačić

– IDFA Award – the winner will be fully invited to IDFA 2018: DIARY OF A SERIOUS OFFENDER, Danilo Ceković

– HBO Europe Award – 2000 EUR: DAUGHTER OF CAMORRA, Siniša Gačić

– CAT&Docs Award  – 2000 EUR: THE MAGIC LIFE OF V, Tonislav Hristov

– DOK Preview at DOK Leipzig 2018 and visit to the Festival and presentation: ONE OF US, Đuro Gavran

There was a big quality difference among the five with the Finnish/Bulgarian collaboration (Kaarle Aho and Tonislav Hristov) on a high professional level (superb camera work), whereas the others were beginners or less experienced.

Luckily there was a guest project that I knew about from way back, a film – again – dealing with the past, “Aktion DB” (PHOTO); Dana Budisavljevic is the director who pitched together with producer Miljenka Cogelja. An extraordinary story about an extraordinary woman Diana Budisavljevic, who during WW2 helped children and women out of the concentration camps set up by the Germans and their Croatian partners, the Ustashas. It’s 10000 children and the film is a docufiction using an actress to play DB, sequences with survivors who go the places, where the camps were and shocking archive material from the camps. The director has – from the scenes I saw – found her form, she has made her aesthetic choice, b/w and colour mixed, the b/w maybe tinted a bit, it looked impressive.

https://www.google.com/search?q=Hulahop+films&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&client=firefox-b