Yesterday festival director of Ji.hlava International Documentary Film Festival in Czech Republic announced the theme of the 22^nd festival, that takes place October 25-30: Memory.

“Numerous documentary filmmakers focus on historical events, record testimonies, creating a map of personal memory. Actually, anything that is captured by camera lenses will be preserved for future generations, only the recording media are always new and different. Places and things have their own memory, too,” said Hovorka in connection with a presentation of the festival’s visual design, see the poster above.

The artist behind the poster is Slovak Juraj Horváth, who has written this poem:

I don’t collect, I just find
Used, 
Bleached, 
Cracked, 
Worn, 
Dusty, 
Broken, 
Decayed…
Objects.
I place them next to each other, on top of each other.
I slightly shape them, 
Combine and complete their stories.
Soft documentation.
Story seemingly falling into place,
But I also lay traps, false tracks.
I exaggerate, steal others’ memories.
To get rid of my enemy,
To train my imagination.

Furthermore, exciting, what will come out from his hands and eyes: Jean-Luc Godard has agreed to make the festival spot for the festival. Will be premiered at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival on July 2. His latest work, “Le Livre d’Image” will be screened in Jihlava.

http://www.dokument-festival.com/news-detail/41890%7CMemory-Godard-Jihlava%2521

The closing film of the 2018 edition of the Magnificent7 Festival for European documentaries in Belgrade was Finnish “Entrepreneur” by Virpi Suutari with music composed by Sanna Salmenkallio, who was there to introduce the film that had the highest amount of spectators of the seven magnificent films shown, 876, in the new venue of the festival, Kombank Dvorana at the centre of Belgrade on the Nikola Passic Square – Pasic (1846-1926) was prime minister of Serbia and Yugoslavia and mayor of Belgrade.

Sanna Salmenkallio talked briefly about the film, received on behalf of the director Virpi Suutari the traditional BelMedic Award, a diploma and money, and was welcomed by a local violinist, who played a piece from the film´s music score.

And I – with the 875 other spectators – sat down to enjoy the film with a

special ear for the music. I am very often disappointed with music in documentaries but in this case I loved the way the composer added to the mostly staged scenes in a film that is sooo Finnish, meaning surprising in its mix of lovable and absurd scenes.

In the two hour workshop the next morning Sanna Salmenkallio told how she got into composing after having played violin. “I started with violin, had two children, got divorced and had no time to go out to play violin. So I turned to composing”, she said with a smile. “And then came Virpi Suutari and it became very natural with film after dance theatre and opera”. “The first we did together was “White Sky” and after that “The Idle Ones” (both together with Susanna Helke). “You have to be a kind of midwife”, she said, “and I am very nerdy…”. “If I am to make music for a film about Chechnya, I read all I can get hold of, topic is crucial for me”. “If I don’t believe in a topic, I say no to a job offer”.

There were many words on the collaboration with Pirjo Honkasalo on “The Three Rooms of Melancholia”. “Pirjo is my film school”, she said, and explained how the two of them came to use a contratenor voice for the film. “Now I understand that the contratenor is the main character of the film”, Pirjo Honksalo said after the film was finished.

“Garden Lovers”, that was shown at Magnificent7 festival in 2015, has a funny background story. “Virpi called me and said she wanted to use bossanova music in the film. She wanted to buy some but it was far to expensive, so could I compose some…”. “I did but quite a challenge it was as I come from classical music!”

Sanna Salmenkallio showed clips at the workshop. One was from a film, “Elegance”, that came between “Garden lovers” and “Entrepreneur”. It is about rich men who goes hunting, among them a top executive from Nokia. There was money for three instruments, we went for baroque music – and the scenes we saw were both scary (the act of killing) and satirical in the way the rich men’s world were depicted in image and music.

“I’m looking for the tone of the film and when that is found/has been chosen I can move forward “, she said. “The opening is the most complicated and therefore often the last to be decided upon”. “I’m composing for the movement” was another interesting comment from Salmenkallio.

Sanna Salmenkallio, who is a big fan of Bernard Hermann, the composer of Hitchcock’s “Vertigo”, whose partiture she has studied in detail, did the recording of the music for “Entrepreneur” with a symphony orchestra in Bratislava, “it was possible because I had the notes and because I was producing while the recording took place. Virpi was with me, it was very intense and I had to ask her not to talk…”. “Of course it is totally unfair to a director, who has ben working for a couple of years on her film, for a composer to come in and record the music in 4 hours!” “But I think we succeeded, the film has an inner soul”.

Sanna Salmenkallio, who is now busy working with prisoners doing “documentary theatre” and is composing music for “Hamlet”, ended up showing us a 7 minutes short from 2017, “Nocturne. Ali and Sanna”, shot by Pirjo Honkasalo, Ali sings, Sanna plays violin, wonderful. “I’m studying Arabic music”, she said.

Brilliant meeting with a brilliant artist.

www.magnificent7org.com

Photo from left taken at the closing night, the festival team, almost all of them present: Ana and Nenad Popovic, the parents of the small boy Bogdan, who is playing with the stick of his grandfather, Tue Stin Milleric, Ema Teokarevic, Svetlana and Zoran Popovic, Milica Novkovic, Aleksandar Mitrovic, Nevena Djonlic and Lea Vahrušev.

… Malla Grapengiesser, Per Bifrost and Alexander Rynéus, the trio behind “Giants and the Morning After”, was what we in Danish call “hyggelig” with Zoran Popovic as “hyggeonkel” (uncle), asking questions about Ydre, the small society 300 km south of Stockholm towards Malmø. Malla, who is from Ydre, and who was the director and producer, with the two young men doing the camera, had in the beginning the idea to make a series, she showed the material shot to film consultant Cecilia Lidin at the Swedish Film Institute, who was not able to support a series. “We did a lot of interviews in the beginning but ended up not using them”, she said. “It was basically a wide and broad idea and we wanted to capture the mood of a place, where life goes on with all its contrasts”. “We were there to shoot 19 times and ended up with 200 hours of material”. “We aimed at creating a fairy tale atmosphere in the film”.

“Through Folkets Bio we had 30 screenings in different small places in Sweden and the screenings

were followed by good discussions in the small communities, who had the same challenges as we saw in Ydre”.

The characters, the main ones, even if the film luckily does not follow the international rules about “strong characters, strong story”, are wonderful. The mayor is this “hyggelige” old bearded man, who goes around with gifts to the families, who increase the size of the population and ask the families to get more babies… and the owner of the sawmill factory Bengt and his wife. The two has a sweet – and hilarious – scene where they have been asked to talk about if they should give up or continue the factory, which has been in the hands of Bengt’s family for decades. I thought immediately about Roy Andersson and his Swedish stories. Malla told me that they did the sound mix at Roy Andersson’s studio but they had not had the chance to show the film to him. Do so!

As one can see in the film Ydre is a pearl of beautiful nature;: woods, a valley, lakes and it was the intention of the filmmakers to catch all seasons. But there was no snow and a chase of snowflakes turned out to be unsuccessful… To come back to Andersson there is a wonderful bus trip scene of fine absurdity. where muslim women are being introduced to the wonders of Ydre. And they take part in the traditional Midsummer celebration that the Swedes are so good at. As Malla said the new people coming from war zones need the calmness that Ydre offers.

The photo shows from left: Zoran Popovic, Malla Grapengiesser, Alexander Rynéus and Per Bifrost.

Definition of “hygge”: the practice of creating cosy and congenial environments that promote emotional wellbeing. (Collins) 

With few well placed questions by festival director Zoran Popovic, director of “The Distant Barking of Dogs” Danish Simon Lereng Wilmont performed a fine 2 hour workshop, sharing with the participants the doubts he had had when filming in Eastern Ukraine, and the decisions to be made. Being asked about the final sequence, which is shot with her mobile phone by the babushka, the granny, Aleksandra is her name, Simon said, that he had made the decision to have it there NOT to end with a “happy ending” = granny and the boy Oleg sitting calmly in the landscape. She actually shot several scenes of the kids and their reactions, when bombs were falling, Simon said, but if I had put more in, it had ended being a war film and that was not the idea! The scene shows that Yarik is not as used to being in the war zone as Oleg.

Simon told about his two previous short documentaries that had children as characters – one about the son of a sumo wrestler and one about children fencing – and how he had problems getting funding for the film at the Danish Film Institute; should it go to the documentary consultants and/or the children film consultant. It helped, when the two short films won Al Jazeera awards that enabled the director and the producer Monica Hellstrøm from the company Final Cut for Real to start the research and casting. “I wanted a boy who lives in the shadow of the war”, Simon said, “how do you feel when you are afraid”, he asked Oleg, who answered in a way that made it easy for the director to make him the protagonist.

Funding-wise the film was pitched at Nordisk Panorama and later at IDFA in Amsterdam, where

Sundance’s clever Tabitha Jackson declared interest and committed, which made Nordic tv stations come on board, one after the other.

“I was very much hanging out with the kids, they often asked me to film, I ignored them to make them less interested and therefore more natural, when I started the shooting. I got into their world and also after a long time of skepticism from her side, I gained the trust of Aleksandra, who ended up cooking for us”. “We stayed in Mariupol, 25 kilometer from their place”.

Aleksandra became the narrator. “I did several interviews with her in the beginning to gain her trust and when they were translated, I discovered that she was excellent in phrasing what it meant to live in a war zone, so I decided to use that, we enter the war with her”.

“Slices of life… that’s what I wanted to show, but during the editing process and when pitching the project, I was constantly bombarded with questions about dramaturgy, the three arcs and all that…” (Shit, my comment!).

“We did editing for half a year, we had 9 cuts and at the 7^th and 8^th version I invited people like Joshua Oppenheimer and Niels Pagh Andersen to comment on what they saw. It was very helpful”.

Simon also talked about the two composers he had used, but I did not get that down on paper.

“The Distant Barking of Dogs” has won 19 awards (!) and the director is wanted everywhere. He has just left the hotel to go home from the Magnificent7 festival, where he had a great time with his son Fabian, 9 years old. Tomorrow Simon Lereng Wilmont goes to Washington and New York, two more festivals for a remarkable film:

I want you to stay with me, always, says Oleg to his granny Aleksandra. Of course I will, she says, and I get tears in my eyes, writing this.

www.magnificent7.org

 

 

 

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!

www.magnificent7.org

… indeed there is, at the new venue of Magnificent7 festival in Belgrade at a new time of the year, in June, where it previously was in January/February. The cinema Kombank Hall, before it was Dom Sindikata, totally renovated, has an atmosphere of openness, you feel welcomed, and sitting with around 1000 spectators watching a documentary on a big screen… what else can you ask for being part of a festival that is in its 14 edition and has always attracted the clever Belgrade audience. The image and the sound, no complaints from my side and the reception of festival director Zoran Popovic (Photo), when he goes on stage to introduce the film and the director/filmmaker present is second to none. The audience adores him!

There are still two of the seven films to be screened: Scott Barley’s “Sleep Has Her House” and Virpi Suutari’s “Entrepreneur”. Barley is here as is Sanna Salmenkallio, the composer of the Finnish film. Two extraordinary films to be enjoyed by the Belgrade audience inside – outside the cinema the temperature has luckily dropped from the 32 degrees yesterday.

More reports will follow but let me give you a quote brought to Belgrade by Georgian Stefan Tolz, artist Andy Goldsworthy about filmmaker Thomas Riedelsheimer: “Why are Thomas’ films so special?”, “I think it’s the fact that he does very little directing or asking me to anything in particular. He’s a hunter like I am. He’s always waiting for opportunities to occur”.

http://www.magnificent7festival.org