Wonderful Losers and DocuDays UA
From wintercold Copenhagen it looks good – the documentary community performs well in many corners of the world. Facebook and newspapers bring back news from the Berlinale, where a hybrid doc/fiction, Romanian “Touch me Not” takes the Golden Bear, ZagrebDox has opened with Marta Prus fine “Over the Limit“, veteran festival in Paris Cinema du Réel has announced its program (we will get back to that), here on www.filmkommentaren.dk we have covered intensely the Docs&Talks festival, soon Copenhagen will be filled with CPH:DOX documentaries, the Oscars are close, the Americans – shame on you – will not let in the Syrian producer and a main protagonist from “Last Men in Aleppo“…
Let’s stop for a moment in Lithuania that celebrates its 100 year right now, where dear friend Arunas Matelis has his “Wonderful Losers-a Different World” running in cinemas. I was in contact with him and he told me that the film has an attendance of 9000 viewers, quite a lot for a documentary and quite a lot for a small country – he hopes, he says to me in a mail from Dublin, where the film has been shown these days, to reach around 12000. The film has found its place in commercial cinemas and Matelis is a master in promotion. Look at the photo of one of his protagonists, Danish Chris Anker Sørensen, who is carried around in the streets of Vilnius.
Arunas Matelis will at the end of this month be in Kiev for the DocuDays festival that starts March 23 and includes a retrospective of Matelis film – “Before the Flight Back the Earth“, the bicycle films and a collection of his great short films. More about the festival above.
