Verzio Documentary Moments

When you have been watching scenes and footage from 8 projects at the Verzio DocLab Budapest last week there are moments of what you could call authentic truth that stay in your mind. Let me mention 4 of them:

A mother draws the curtain and lets in the sunshine to the room, where her grown-up son sleeps. She caresses him, he looks at her and the dog that also waits to be included in the moment of happiness. The severely disabled son smiles. Anna Rubi caught this moment that will leave no one untouched when “Your Life Without Me” comes out and will create debate in Hungary that “still lacks humane state care”.

Black & White, a mother and her daughter Erin (MacPherson), the director, sits next to each other with a cup in hand. None of them talks but you sense in this moment that something is wrong because of the framing and because the scene stays long. That unique cinematographic moment will stay in “The Pursuit of Grief” – the mother has lost her husband, the daughter Erin her father.

One-two, One-two-three, wife and husband train dance steps in their kitchen in “Dreams at Sunset” by Ibolya Simó. The scene is fun to watch – and touching as you have just been told that their two sons have passed away, one after cancer, the other took his own life. They now want to make reality out of “it is never too late to start living”, a sentence from the catalogue.

Another dance scene moment in a house in Budapest where the director Sára Timár dances with her old father thus showing her love to him, who used to be an important person in Hungarian dancing. This poetic dance moment followed in a scene, where a visit to the cellar reveals that something completely different had been going on… “Under the Dance Floor”, working title of the film-to-be.

Young filmmakers with an eye for people and situation. You need to be curious and have the skills to get close to achieve moments like these.

www.verzio.org

Foto: Anna Rubi 

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Tue Steen Müller
Tue Steen Müller

Müller, Tue Steen
Documentary Consultant and Critic, DENMARK

Worked with documentary films for more than 20 years at the Danish Film Board, as press officer, festival representative and film consultant/commissioner. Co-founder of Balticum Film and TV Festival, Filmkontakt Nord, Documentary of the EU and EDN (European Documentary Network).
Awards: 2004 the Danish Roos Prize for his contribution to the Danish and European documentary culture. 2006 an award for promoting Portuguese documentaries. 2014 he received the EDN Award “for an outstanding contribution to the development of the European documentary culture”. 2016 The Cross of the Knight of the Order for Merits to Lithuania. 2019 a Big Stamp at the 15th edition of ZagrebDox. 2021 receipt of the highest state decoration, Order of the Three Stars, Fourth Class, for the significant contribution to the development and promotion of Latvian documentary cinema outside Latvia. In 2022 he received an honorary award at DocsBarcelona’s 25th edition having served as organizer and programmer since the start of the festival.
From 1996 until 2005 he was the first director of EDN (European Documentary Network). From 2006 a freelance consultant and teacher in workshops like Ex Oriente, DocsBarcelona, Archidoc, Documentary Campus, Storydoc, Baltic Sea Forum, Black Sea DocStories, Caucadoc, CinéDOC Tbilisi, Docudays Kiev, Dealing With the Past Sarajevo FF as well as programme consultant for the festivals Magnificent7 in Belgrade, DOCSBarcelona, Verzio Budapest, Message2Man in St. Petersburg and DOKLeipzig. Teaches at the Zelig Documentary School in Bolzano Italy.

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