Films on Bornholm

Memories... of a festival on Bornholm, Balticum Film & TV Festival, that ran in the 1990’es in Gudhjem and Svaneke, and meant quite a lot for this blogger. (If you write Bornholm in ”Search” you will get numerous texts referring to a festival and a pitching forum that took place at this wonderful island, initiated by the Baltic Media Centre).

Nostalgia, yes, and it came back last night in Allinge, where a huge People Meeting (Folkemøde in Danish) is taking place until sunday. Politicians make speeches, all kind of  associations have tents that you can visit, debates are made in a relaxed climate where you can meet ”your” politician, and/or be enlightened in a classical Danish folk-high-school-kind-of tradition.

For that reason – and now I come to the film side of it – it is only very right that the Danish Film Institute together with the leading Danish newspaper Politiken has arranged film screenings where an introduction is made, the film is screened and then you can go and talk about the topic. Here I finally got to watch Nishtha Jain’s “Gulabi Gang”, produced by Norwegian Torstein Grude, a fine film, in my view more interesting than the one Kim Longinotto made about the same fabulous movement that was formed by Sampat Pal, according to her “not a gang in the usual sense of the term, we are a gang for justice”.

… in the mornings, in the summer house, the film screenings include “Krtek” (The Mole), the masterpice children animation film series by Czech Zdenek Miler, beautiful, funny and more than attractive for two year old Henry. The first he says when he wakes up in the morning! Zdenek Miler said in an interview: “When I draw Krtek I am drawing myself,” his creator, the Czech animator Zdenek Miler, once said. “What I mean is that Krtek is the ideal that should be me. But I can’t meet that ideal.” To my sorrow I found out that the film series is no longer available in Denmark. A cultural scandal! But if you have friends in Czech Republic (I have, thanks Veronika Liskova)…

http://www.dfi.dk/Nyheder/FILMupdate/2013/Juni/FILM-MED-KANT-PAa-FOLKEMOeDET.aspx

https://www.facebook.com/pages/Gulabi-Gang-the-documentary/125738920900493

http://www.gulabigang.in/

History is What’s Happening

Have to confess that my knowledge of The Robert Flaherty Film Seminar was very limited until my former colleague from EDN Anita Reher got the job as executive director and put me on the mailing list for news. Frequently press releases arrive in my mailbox giving the impression of an active organisation that makes much more than a yearly seminar, see below. Yesterday was a good day as the executive director could announce ” that it (the Flaherty…) is the recipient of an Educational Grant from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in support of the Flaherty's continuing efforts to foster all forms of the moving image and encourage dialogue between audiences and makers with the goal of illuminating our shared humanity.” Good that the Academy is not only about Oscars. The grant was 15.000$, Anita told me from a crowded minivan on her way to work:

Tomorrow this year’s Flaherty seminar starts. It runs until the 21^st of June at the Colgate University, Hamilton, NY. The theme is History is What's Happening. From the press release: The Seminar will examine the frame and subject of history in cinema to understand how the social and political conditions of the past are inextricably linked to the present. Pablo de Ocampo, a curator based in Toronto and the Artistic Director of The Images Festival, is the 2013 Seminar Programmer.

http://flahertyseminar.org/

Nicolas Philibert on DocAlliance

One more generous free offer from ”your online documentary cinema”, the vod DocAlliance, starts tomorrow and runs until June 23:

7 films by Nicolas Philibert, who once wrote the following about his method:

”I feel the need to create a frame for each film, a starting point that I can build upon. This frame consists of the things that I find motivating and exciting when working together with the subjects of the film. When filming starts, the final destination is unknown to me and I don’t know which path I will follow. A lot depends on the things that emerge through work and encounters. Naturally the journey is different with each film...” (A quote from a text for the Finnish Docpoint festival).

Filmkommentaren.dk has posted several texts about the works of the French documentarian. To mention a couple of them – ”La ville Louvre”, ”La moindre des choses”, ”Nénette” and of course ”Etre et Avoir” – all of them available online for two weeks.

Make your own retrospective of films by Nicolas Philibert!

http://dafilms.com/event/125-retrospective-of-nicolas-philibert/

Jan Troell: Land of Dreams

On the National Day of Sweden, June 6, SVT (Swedish national public tv broadcaster) had a present for its viewers. At 8.20 in the morning a broadcast was made of the classic documentary by Jan Troell from 1988, Sagolandet (Land of Dreams). The film has a duration of more than 3 hours, is a personal essay, in which the director reflects on the state of the society, he lives in and in which his daughter is to be brought up. The film raised heavy debate when it came out, ran in cinemas for a year and is by the director reckoned as his most personal film, shot over a period of 4 years.

Troell (born 1931) expresses his (mild, often ironic) critique of his country including the American psychologist Rollo May as a questioner and commentator. Among other May talks to the prime minister Ingvar Carlsson, who says the famous sentence ”yes, I think we should have a debate about freedom every tenth year!”.

Troell has, normal for his whole oeuvre, done everything himself, direction, camera and editing. He performs an excellent montage, creating long lyrical sequences, accompanied by precisely chosen music that comments or pays hommage to man.

Troell, world known for his feature films ”Here’s your Life” and ”The Emigrants”/”The New Land”, has done many documentaries, long and short, ”A Frozen Dream” and ”Presence” (”Närvarande”), the latter about his close friend and collaborator, photographer Georg Oddner. 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan_Troell

Sweden, 184 mins., 1988

Vurdering:

Michael Glawogger at DocsBarcelona

The job given to Michael Glawogger at DocsBarcelona was very simple: find 7 clips and talk about them in your master class. He found 6 and surprised this blogger, who thought he knew the work of the Austrian filmmaker, by showing ”Haiku”, a film he made in the 1980’es, wonderful in editing and – as he said – a film that includes the theme that he was to develop a couple of decades later: work. To prove that, he showed a sequence from ”Workingman’s Death”, that has a dialogue between workers about prostitutes, the theme of the director’s latest work, ”Whore’s Glory” (photo), that is in the official selection at the festival.

Glawogger is not only an important artist, he also has the gift to be able to talk precisely about what he does, and how he approaches his characters. And he does that in a provocative way that is perfect for a master class as well as a Q&A session like the one he performed yesterday in the new Filmoteca in Barcelona. The audience wanted to know how he got the prostitutes in ”Whore’s Glory” to participate, how his research was done, if he paid them to take part (yes, of course), how much the film’s budget was (2 mio.€ the answer was), practical as well as ethical question.

Masters come to Barcelona, last year it was Viktor Kossakovsky, this year he was followed by Michael Glawogger. For sure, two of the best documentary (if not the best) artists of our time.   

http://www.glawogger.com/news_en.php

http://www.glawogger.com/htm/Kurzfilme/main_kurzfilme_en.htm

Documentary Boom in Cannes

The trade magazine Screen Daily has a long article (May 20) on the big presence of documentaries in Cannes. The article, written by Melanie Goodfellow, mentions films to be shown and sold as well as statements from people who sell and distribute documentaries.

Rithy Panh is there with what is called a hybrid work, ”The Missing Picture” and Marcel Ophüls presents his autobiographical film in the Director’s Fortnight section. ”Ain’t Misbehaving” is the title of the film that has interviews with Jeanne Moreau and Fred Wiseman, reflects on the director's relationship to his famous father Max, and includes clips from the director’s two masterpieces ”Le Chagrin et la Pitié” (English title, see poster photo) and ”Hotel Terminus” – that every documentary interested should have on their shelf, available on dvd they are.

At the festival in Cannes there is a Doc Corner with sales agents, documentary festival people – and a documentary Brunch for talking and mingling.

Anaïs Clanet from Wide House in Paris is quoted for this fine statement: “I definitely have a sense that more and more companies are getting into documentaries,” comments Clanet, head of Paris-based documentary specialist Wide House who is selling Ophüls’ Ain’t Misbehavin. “I see a lot of companies, traditionally specialising in fiction, now handling documentaries. They have woken up to the fact documentaries can actually be more profitable than fiction and easier to place, especially when there are fewer and fewer broadcaster slots for fiction features”.

Another important player in documentary sales: “It is a tough time because prices for TV rights have dropped but at the same time I am optimistic,” reveals Peter Jäger of Vienna-based doc specialist sales company Autlook Films. “Digital revenues are beginning to pick-up, not enough to compensate for the loss of DVD sales but enough to give me hope.Documentary, even when dealing with big subjects, is essentially a niche product and niche products lend themselves well to digital distribution although a theatrical release remains important.”

Read the whole article: http://www.screendaily.com/festivals/cannes/cannes-documentary-boom/5056470.article

Claude Lanzmann: The Last of the Unjust

The Guardian published a very interesting article Tuesday May 14. Agnès Poirier had seen the new film by legendary Claude Lanzmann about Benjamin Murmelstein, who collaborated with the Nazis as the last Jewish Council President in Theresienstadt. Poirier talks to Lanzmann about Murmelstein and the film that will be shown in Cannes tomorrow. I have taken some quotes from the long article:

... There are two men on a balcony looking out at the panorama of Rome. It is the summer of 1975. "Are you happy in Rome?" says one. "As happy as an exiled Jew can be," says the other. The man asking the question is Claude Lanzmann. He has just started work on what will take him 10 years to finish: Shoah, the ground-breaking, nine-and-a-half-hour film about the Holocaust, composed of first-hand testimony and eschewing historical footage...

Lanzmann never included Murmelstein in ”Shoah”, now he gets ”his own film”.

... Murmelstein, who called himself "the last of the unjust", perfectly represented (those) contradictions. His testimony raises a trail of questions, all painfully complex. Indeed, his extraordinary presence, blunt sincerity, acerbic wit and erudition would shake anyone who has inherited history's prejudices against those Jews who worked with the Nazis. Lanzmann has endeavoured to rehabilitate them. In the preamble to his new film The Last of the Unjust, which will screen at the Cannes film festival on Saturday, he writes that Murmelstein's revelations never ceased to haunt him, and that the time had come to share them. "Murmelstein was brilliantly intelligent and extraordinarily courageous," Lanzmann says. "During the week I spent with him, I grew to love him. He does not lie: he is as harsh with others as with himself"...

France, 2013, 220 mins.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2013/may/14/claude-lanzmann-last-unjust

Ex Oriente Film: A Decade of Excellence

Normally we do not do promotion for training programmes but there are exceptions. As this one, the Ex Oriente Film workshop based in Prague, that enters a new decade, after – this is how the organisers, led by Veronika Liskova – phrase it themselves: A Decade of Excellence, name of a new facebook page of the workshop.

Indeed it can be characterised like that, says this blogger, who was part of the tutor team the first 7 years having seen great films being born, which took inspiration from Ex Oriente.

Let me pick some from the impressive list:

”15 Young by Young” with Latvian Ilona Bicevska as the tireless producer and organiser of the multimedia project that ended up on arte. ”The Art of Selling”, Estonian/Finnish coproduction by Jaak Kilmi, the name in new Estonian documentary as director and producer. ”Bakhmaro” (photo), unique work by Georgian Salome Jashi produced by German Heino Deckert. ”Blind Loves” by Juraj Lehotsky from Slovakia, produced by director Marko Skop the film went the whole way to Cannes and to theatrical release in several countries. ”Cash and Marry” by Macedonian Atanas Georgiev, produced by Sinisha Juricic from Croatia, and ”Elektro Moskva” by Dominik Spritzendorfer and Elena Tikhonova, the latter had its premiere in Nyon this year and has its next stop at Sheffield Doc Fest – and many more will follow.

I stop here, could have mentioned many more, check out for yourselves, there are website links to most of the films and info on distributors. I took the alphabetical order... Deadline the for 11th season of Ex Oriente: June 1st.

http://bit.ly/hR0QbM

http://www.dokweb.net/en/ex-oriente-film/completed-films/

Cinemateket maj/juni 2013

The following text in Danish is praising the Copenhagen Cinemateket, part of the Danish Film Institute, for its programme for May and June. A real treat for film lovers, film history with the giants Luchino Visconti and Satyajit Ray in front but also a tribute to Christopher Walken and new films from Egypt as well as a series of films by the Korean Chan-Wook Park – and a handful of strong documentaries.

Jo, det er den rene gavebod, som det 64 siders programhæfte fra DFI præsenterer for maj og juni – det er en god idé med det nye format, overskueligt og indbydende – og det siger jeg ikke kun fordi jeg rammes i hjertekulen, når jeg ser at 8 film af mesteren Luchino Visconti bliver vist med et løfte om at flere følger til efteråret. De står alle sammen på dvd-hylden, men at gense ”De lange knives nat”, ”Leoparden” og ”Døden i Venedig” på det store lærred i forhåbentlig flotte kopier – det er derfor vi har et filmmuseum. Og så er der den vidunderlige Apu-trilogi (foto) af Satyajit Ray, dokumentariske og vemodigt poetiske film, som det skrives så rigtigt af Jesper Andersen i introduktionen.

På dokumentar-siden: Anne Wivels grundige Kierkegaard-film med bl.a. Møllehave og Garff, Jørgen Leths ”Det gode og det onde”, og fra udlandet bl.a. Carlo Guillermo Protos gribende ”El Huaso” om faren, der ønsker at tage sit liv. Den vises i en serie med nye fransk-canadiske film.

Personligt glæder jeg mig til at gense Dariusz Jablonskis ”Fotoamator” (”Amatørfotografen”) fra 1998. Jeg var medlem af juryen ved idfa i 1998, hvor filmen fik hovedprisen i konkurrence med Sergey Dvortsevoys ”Bread Day” og Viktor Kossakovskys ”Pavel og Lalya” – jeg tror ikke festivalen har haft et stærkere felt siden da, og jeg har tit tænkt på om vi valgte den rigtige vinder. Jablonskis fremragende film bygger på lysbilleder taget af en nazistisk bogholder i den jødiske ghetto i Lodz.

http://www.dfi.dk/filmhuset/cinemateket.aspx

The Mexican Suitcase

You can easily spend some hours at the Parisian Musée d’art et d’histoire du Judaisme with the excellent exhibition of works of the three photo documentarians Capa, Taro and Chim (open until June 30), also called photo journalists, also called war photographers – they are all of it and indeed documentarians as a huge amount of the photos are just as much interpretations as reports on what happened. Here is the introduction taken from the site of the museum:

“The legendary Mexican Suitcase containing Robert Capa’s Spanish Civil War negatives, considered lost since 1939, has recently been rediscovered and is exhibited in Paris for the first time. The Suitcase is in fact three small boxes containing nearly 4,500 negatives, not only by Capa but also by his fellow photojournalists Chim (David Seymour) and Gerda Taro. These negatives span the course of the Spanish Civil War (1936–39), through Chim’s in-depth coverage from 1936 and early 1937, Taro’s intrepid documentation until her death in battle in July 1937, and Capa’s incisive reportage until the last months of the conflict. Additionally, there are several rolls of film by Fred Stein showing mainly portraits of Taro, which after her death became inextricably linked to images of the war itself. Following the end of the war and amid the chaos of the Germans entering Paris in 1940, the negatives were passed from hand to hand for safekeeping, and ultimately ended up in Mexico City, where they resurfaced in 2007…”

Everyday life situations, soldiers at the fronts, corpses, photos from the refugee camp at Montjuic in Barcelona, copies of the magazines where their articles were published, to whom it may concern letters from authorities within the Communist Party in France and elsewhere asking for a good reception of the photographing comrades (under cover names), the famous photo of the fashionable couple Capa and Taro in a café in Montparnasse…

Capa needs no introduction but to see the photos of Gerda Taro is a revelation as well as the ones of David Seymor (“Chim”). The latter died in 1956 in Suez (Capa in 1954 in Vietnam), whereas Taro lived only to become 26 killed in 1937 at the battle of Brunete. She is buried at the Père Lachaise cemetery.

Trisha Ziff has made a documentary film on the Mexican Suitcase, released in 2011, praised for its qualities, can be bought on dvd. I did so at the museum.

http://www.mahj.org/en/3_expositions/expo-The-Mexican-Suitcase-Capa-Taro-Chim.php?niv=2&ssniv=1

http://museum.icp.org/museum/collections/special/chim/chim2.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/22/arts/design/22taro.html

http://www.themexicansuitcase.com/

http://museum.icp.org/mexican_suitcase/story.html

Vurdering:

Cattin & Kostomarov: Playback

Let me pass on some words from the Aleksei German obituary in Guardian February 26 (written by Ronald Bergan) – he died 74 year old after he

... for more than 10 years, (German) had been struggling to complete History of the Arkanar Massacre, based on the 1964 science-fiction novel Hard to Be a God by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky. Set on another planet, it is an allegory about the Stalin era that might also be applied, to a certain extent, to Putin's Russia. It was finally nearing completion when German died. According to his son, Aleksei, a superb film-maker in his own right, there remains only some re-recording of sound and editing to be resolved…

Let’s hope so, because what Antoine Cattin and Pawel Kostomarov show in their film (finished before his death) about German, shot almost exclusively on the set, witness that another masterpiece might be on its way from the hands of a director, who made 6 films, half of them being shelved during Soviet times.

Cattin is the one who tells the story about his meeting with German and with Russia after he (Cattin) had left Switzerland. In an intelligent way, through a chaptering of the film, he puts in his own interpretation of what he sees on the shoot of German’s film and the reality of Putin’s Russia. He makes an interview with German in the film, and German says that fascism will always be possible in Russia, although he does not see current signs in that direction.

Otherwise the film is a fascinating insight to a great director (helped by his wife with whom he also argues quite a lot) and his way of working with a lot of footage taken from the screening view post of German. He is constantly angry or grumpy around something that does not function as is his main actor… would say that this film could make weak directors-to-be consider once more if they have chosen the right profession! For the rest of us – please finish the film, and please cinematheques give us a retrospective of German’s work, which by many have been equaled to the one of Tarkovsky.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2013/feb/26/aleksei-german

Vurdering:

Docu Days Awards 2013

The festival is over, awards were given last night, again the Red Hall in the Cinema House in Kiev was packed with primarily a young audience full of enthusiasm. You may have head-shaking opinions about the architecture of the Cinema House and its many references to communist times but it is very practical to have two screening halls plus big corridors to socialise, a café, a restaurant and the festival office in the same building – with another venue 5 minutes away.

I was in the Docu/Life jury where we (Russian critic Lyubov Arkus, director Audrius Stonys and I) watched seven films of high quality, to give two special mentions and one Jury Prize. The mentions were given to Romanian Noosfera by Ileana Stanculescu and Artchil Khetagouri and to Latvian The Documentarian by Ivars Zviedris and Inese Klava. The motivations go like this:

Noosfera: A warm intimate close-up portrait of the excentric Nico, who as a scientist and a teacher conveys his look on the future of the world and love, trying to adapt his vision to his own life. The directors show great talent for catching everyday life situations and originality with respect and humour.

Documentarian: A hilarious and intelligent film about filmmaking, it raises all basic questions on the relationship between the one who films and the one who is being filmed. Inta is a film star, clever in her analysis of the film that

EDN Award 2013

Friday night two old boys in the documentary community, Italian Stefano Tealdi and Catalan Joan Gonzàlez got the EDN Award 2013. I allow myself this characterisation of dear friends, who were there, when EDN (European Documentary Network) started and who are still making strong efforts to make documentaries be produced and seen, as well as young talent to be developed. Organisers, tutors, inspirators, producers they are.

Ove Rishøj Jensen from EDN stated it like this: The EDN Award 2013 is presented to Stefano Tealdi and Joan Gonzàles for over 15 years of contributing to the outstanding development of the Southern European documentary culture. The contribution has been done by initiating and running Documentary in Europe and DocsBarcelona… Today we often take international networking opportunities for granted. However, it has not always been so. Behind the international documentary structures and European collaborations we see today, are the works of pioneers. People who created the structures we are now working in. They saw opportunities before anyone else knew they were there, and they have created financing opportunities where there were no financing opportunities before. Among these pioneers are Stefano Tealdi and Joan Gonzáles. Therefore we are honouring them with the 2013 EDN Award.

Pioneers, yes, very well deserved recognition indeed. The award was presented at the Thessaloniki Doc Fest. (Photo: Tealdi left, Gonzàlez right).

http://www.edn.dk/news/single-view/article/the-edn-award-2013-is-presented-to-stefano-tealdi-and-joan-gonzales/?tx_ttnews%5BbackPid%5D=111&cHash=ae9cf2e91f694302ca135fcbb8d633b0

EDN & DocAlliance join Forces

Here is an offer you can't refuse, taken from the EDN website: EDN is happy to announce that all members, who are part of the organization on April 12, will get free access to over 700 documentaries at Doc Alliance Films.

EDN and Doc Alliance Films will offer all members of EDN free access to stream the over 700 documentaries available at the DAFilms.com web site. The offer will be available for current EDN members with a valid membership on April 12 and those joining the organization before this date. The over 700 documentary films at Doc Alliance Films will be available for streaming for three months. The free streaming period will start on April 16 and run until July 16 2013.

DAFilms.com is an online documentary distribution site offering access to a selection of over 700 documentary films from around the world, with an emphasis on European cinema. In addition to offering notable recent films, the website also functions as a film archive of important documentaries. This includes works by masters such as Ulrich Seidl, Jørgen Leth and Peter Mettler. Every month, DAFilms.com expands its catalogue with the addition of up to 20 new titles. The films are selected on the basis of strict dramaturgic criteria, with an emphasis on their social and aesthetic value and signature style. Photo from Michael Glawogger's extraordinary "Working Man's Death", one of many classics at DocAlliance.

http://www.edn.dk/

http://dafilms.com/

Thessaloniki Doc Fest 15

The 15^th edition of the Thessaloniki Documentary Film Festival started two days ago and runs until the 24^th of March. The programme is as always impressive – as is the communication from the festival that in a classical journaistic form reports on debates, speeches, meetings with the directors present, for us who are not able to attend… The section titles give a clear hint to what the visitors will be able to watch: “Greek Panorama”, “Music and Dance”, “Human Rights”, “Habitat”, “Portraits: Human Journeys”, “Recordings of Memory”, “Stories to Tell”, “Views of the World”. The director and selector for the festival, been there from the very beginning, Dimitri Eipides has put together a tribute to celebrate the 15 years. Here is his introduction and a link to the list of 36 films, in alphabetical order, (PHOTO) "Gaea Girls" by Kim Longinotto:

A retrospective marking the 15 years of the Thessaloniki Documentary Festival can only be in the form of a summary. For how can one fit so many films, so many conferences and masterclasses, so many guests, so many parties – so many memories, in other words – in just a few lines? Each one of the Festival’s editions stands alone, as a living, breathing life collage, rich with emotions, experiences, social and existential questions, empathy and spiritual elation. Our tribute entitled “A Fascinating Journey” does not refer to the Festival’s best editions or best moments. In our hearts, each Festival is the best one. Our aim was rather to seek out and bring to mind of some of the documentaries that were especially discussed and loved by audiences; documentaries that followed developments or revaled hidden aspects of our daily lives; documentaries that caused a reaction; documentaries that moved or inspired us. This is a selection of films which we have been unable to been unable to forget; films which drew the public to the Festival; films which gave shape to the Festival’s character, ethos and role. It would not be an exaggeration to say that these documentaries are responsible for the boom of the documentary genre, its renewal, its release from past constraints and its elevation as the main form of expression of the human experience. One could say, then, that this 36-film tribute is our own summary of the fascinating journey the Thessaloniki Documentary Festival has been taking us on all these years. We hope you enjoy the view!

http://tdf.filmfestival.gr/default.aspx?lang=en-US&page=1110

Jon Bang Carlsen – The Inventor of Reality

Danish master Jon Bang Carlsen is in Bucharest these days. He has been invited to present a retrospective of his works at the International Human Rights Documentary Film Festival, One World Romania, that runs until March 17, like the one in Prague, ”in memory of Vaclav Havel”. With a reference to his films shot in Ireland, ”It’s Now or Never” and ”How to Invent Reality” the Romanian organizers presents Bang Carlsen as ”the inventor of Reality”. Here is a clip from the text:

This year One World Romania organizes a retrospective dedicated to the Danish documentary filmmaker Jon Bang Carlsen. Fairly unknown in Romania, but considered a legendary director who reinvented documentary film, Carlsen will be... a special guest of the festival. Between the 11th and the 17th of March, the audience will have the chance to see more than half of his works, produced between the 1970s and 2013, and to participate in debates with the director.

In his work, Jon Bang Carlsen has always explored the land between fact and fiction. From 1977 onward, mise-en-scene with real characters plays a very important part in his productions, and this method is detailed in his meta-film, How to Invent Reality (1996) – which will also be screened in Bucharest. His documentaries are often visually and symbolically powerful staged portraits of marginal figures and milieus that involve compelling stories...

There are many other films at the festival, ”Shoah” in its full duration and ”Act of Killing” just to mention two masterpieces.

http://oneworld.ro/2013/l/en/news/103/jon-bang-carlsen-at-owr-the-inventor-of-reality-in-bucharest/

Iris Olsson: Between Dreams

As the third edition of Cinetrain arrived at its finish line a few weeks ago, it might be just the right time to have a look at one of the first films produced within this unique creative documentary project, which took up the original idea of the Soviet documentary filmmaker Medvedkin, who in the  1930’s pulled a film studio off its stone foundations and reset it inside the train carriage to chronicle lives of his people and open up realms often unattainable in a fixed film studio.

“You know that place between sleep and awake, the place where you can still remember dreaming? […]”  “Second to the right and then straight on till morning”, Between Dreams too seems to have found its own Neverland. A short documentary conceived as part of the first edition of Cinetrain 2008, the films draws upon the parallel between the dreaming and waking worlds. “A cryptic, puzzling, yet ultimately satisfying vignette of our most peaceful and vulnerable state”, the film explores the unsettling dreams of those who share the sojourn of a train on the 9, 500 km ride from Moscow to Vladivostok.

Perched on the dingy wagon beds, fellow travellers recline as the night approaches falling into the arms of Morpheus. Everything around them is enraptured with drowsiness: the objects, the neighbours, the entire décor reads sleep. The jolting noise of a train sluggishly come in sync with the sound of sleep creating a somewhat hypnotic pacing. This beautifully crafted short documentary attempts to unfetter the dark secrets of passengers through the stories of their dreams. Some stories that are given voice are left anonymous, faceless. “I am sitting on a white bench in a white room,” a woman tells. “My sister's husband enters the room. He has a gun in his hand. I see a bullet fires out in a slow motion towards me. Not long after that dream, he got killed.”

Taking dreams as “part of the adversary’s game” more often than as a harbinger of a good fortune, this 11-minute film hauntingly revisits the characters' night time foregone experiences that are recurrently resisted in the light of a day.

There is a degree of shadow felt in a film that gives it a certain dark mood evincing the relatively abstruse and little known phenomenon.

Gorged by the land of dreams, the train as if having passed through the sweet circles of Morpheus eventually meets the purple sunrise with a love story of a young woman with a little son by her side who tells how she met the father of her son in a dream a few years back...

2008, Olsson, 11 minutes.

http://www.cinetrain.net/russian_winter/betweendreams.html

Vurdering:

Ally Derks Goes to New Zealand

… to be honoured for her work at The Documentary Edge International Documentary Festival in April. Director of the festival, Alex Lee, asked filmkommentaren to convey the news, which we do with pleasure. Some clips from the press release:

“We want to honour Ally for her enduring legacy as well as to introduce her to great New Zealand films and filmmakers. We hope she can help us inspire our city officials, government and business why it is important to support documentary and our vision to be the largest and most important documentary festival and industry event in Asia‐Pacific. And that this is do‐able” says Alex Lee, director of Documentary Edge. “She is the highest international documentary figure to ever visit New Zealand”.

“Called a “High Priestess of Documentary” (IndieWire) and arguably the world’s most passionate and influential documentary voice, International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA) Founder and Director Ally Derks will attend the Documentary Edge International Documentary Festival 2013 (Documentary Edge) –to make a keynote speech at the Screen Edge Forum and receive the inaugural 2013 Documentary Edge International Documentary Super‐Hero at the annual awards ceremony!”

“Derks has been a champion of documentary fighting for its existence and passionately nurturing its growth. She has been mentor to many filmmakers and festivals worldwide. She has been a key figure and advisor in helping and inspiring Documentary Edge’s work.”

Maybe you smile a bit of all these big words, but they are well placed, indeed!

www.documentaryedge.org.nz.

Photo by Bert Nienhuis / Courtesy IDFA, taken from press release.

Agnès Varda Online Festival

What a feast! And don’t say you can not afford it – it is for free! And it lasts until February 17!

I am referring to another generous offer from ”your online documentary cinema” provider DocAlliance.

17 films of Agnès Varda, voilà.

Including ”The Beaches of Agnès”, ”The Gleaners and I”, the documentary she made about her late husband Jacques Demy, ”L'univers de Jacques Demy” and several short films like ”Salut les Cubains” (photo) from 1963, that has the following description on the site of DocAlliance:

”Four years after Fidel Castro came to power, Agnès Varda brought back from Cuba 1,800 photos and used them to make an educational and amusing documentary.”

Have a nice festival and tell others about it!

http://dafilms.com/

Magnificent7 2013/6

The 9th edition of the European Feature Documentary Film Festival ended Sunday night at the big hall of the Belgrade Sava Centre. Manuel von Stürler presented his ”Winter Nomads” followed by Helena Trestikova’s ”Private Universe”. For the first film, that the European Film Academy voted to be the Best Documentary Film of 2012, and that is this week being released in cinemas in France, around 1000 spectators attended the screening that included a small lamb entering the stage to be saluted by von Stürler and animal lover, festival director Zoran Popovic!

Trestikova’s film was watched by around 900 enthusiastic viewers, who followed the life of an ordinary Czech family over a period of more than 30 years on the background of the country’s history from 1968, Husak, Havel, EU etc.

Staying for a moment with the statistics, the festival augmented its number of viewers with around 10% from 2012 going up to about 6000 – for 7 screenings!

This monday morning the festival held masterclasses with von Stürler and Trestikova. The latter took us, in a very well prepared presentation with 11 scenes from her films, through her work of long-time observation. She showed us clips from ”Marcela”, ”Katka” and ”René” (Best European Documentary in 2008) and talked about the ethical questions connected to being so close to her characters, helping them ”outside” the film as well, to get on the right track in their lives. Trestikova said that she did not really consider herself as a filmmaker, more as a chronicler, who has new films coming up this year and has plans to continue to film René and maybe also the family in ”Private Universe”. Deep respect for Trestikova for a constant non-tabloid humanistic focus on people outside the celebrity spotlight.

Several of her films are available on the vod DocAlliance:

http://dafilms.com/director/167-helena-trestikova/

http://hivernomade.ch/en/

Nicolas Philibert with Film on Radio France

For this blogger Nicolas Philibert is one of the most important documentary directors of out time. Filmkommentaren has written about his films frequently, below you have a link that will take you to ”collected posts” about the French director, who in the 5th edition of the Damascus DoxBox festival in 2009 was reported to have said the following at a master class:

”Constantly looking for beauty... my work consists of creating the conditions for something to happen, he said, this great filmmaker, who masters the art of listnening to the other. I am a documentarian and not a fiction filmmaker, I do not want people to play roles. Maybe I ask them to repeat something or ask if I can be present on a special occasion but they are themselves.”

There is a new film by Philibert at the Berlinale Panorama section. It is presented like this:

”La maison de la radio by Nicolas Philibert, France/Japan.
Creator of images Nicolas Philibert has always been fascinated by the “blind” medium of radio and its ability to fire the imagination. Millions share this passion. For many, radio lends life a rhythm and structure, bringing – between kitchen and bathroom – the world to their homes. With this work, Philibert pays tribute to its diligent makers by bringing the invisible to the screen. And so achieves what every filmmaker seeks.”

The film will be released in April in France. Below also a link to an interview (in French) with the director.

http://www.filmkommentaren.dk/blog/blogpost/1931/

http://www.filmsdulosange.fr/en/film/13/la-maison-de-la-radio

http://www.telerama.fr/cinema/nicolas-philibert-realise-un-documentaire-sur-la-maison-de-la-radio,71515.php

Godard, Pennebaker & Leacock

... and 7 wonderful minutes with Jefferson Airplane performing from a roof in New York Midtown in 1968. Yes, it is film and music history at its best as Richard Brody, cinema editor at The New Yorker, wrote yesterday urging the locals to run to the Film Forum to get acquainted with ”One P.M.”, shot in the revolutionary year, but never completed.

The article is a must-read for all lovers of Godard AND legendary documentarians D.A. Pennebaker (photo) and Richard Leacock. An excerpt from the article by Brody (who wrote ”Everything is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard):

… a rare, obscure, and fragmentary—yet exemplary, fascinating, and even intermittently iconic—film, “One P.M.,” … It was, in the event, edited by the great documentary filmmaker D. A. Pennebaker… Pennebaker and another great documentary filmmaker, Richard Leacock, were the film’s producers and its principal cinematographers. Godard had intended to call it “One A.M.” (“One American Movie”); Pennebaker called his cut of the footage “One Parallel Movie,” but the initials, as Godard noted, could also stand for “One Pennebaker Movie.” And, in this form, it’s one of the most extraordinary time capsules of the era…

Yes, it is politics, as you will see in the clip with Grace Slick and her band but it also reminds you about what the nervous always present direct cinema camera work was. Great.

Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/movies/2013/01/one-pm-all-day.html#ixzz2ImqAxHVu

P.P.P.

Taken from a newsletter from FID, the International Film Festival in Marseille (July 3-8), where a passionate director Jean-Pierre Rehm writes:

Concerning our upcoming 24th edition… a retrospective will be devoted to Pier Paolo Pasolini. A Mediterranean figure, certainly, since such is the orientation of Marseille, but also a personality of mythical importance. Poet, writer, playwright, critic, polemicist, screenwriter, actor, painter, filmmaker: some go so far as to call him a contemporary saint. The wager of this undertaking devoted to Pasolini remains largely before us. That is why, citing his own words, we have baptized this homage, “P.P.P., the scandalous force of the past.” Implemented in conjunction with three local organizations, Alphabetville, the CIPM and INA Région, the programming of his films, amplified by an exhibition, readings, round-tables, etc., will take place a month-and-a-half before the festival. A way of multiplying the possibilities to better embrace, in its integrality, his untimely oeuvre that is generous as well as dazzling.

Bravo!

http://www.fidmarseille.org/dynamic/

http://mubi.com/cast_members/2150

DocPoint Helsinki

The programme of the Finnish documentary film festival reflects again that the festival selectors know what they are doing – and they should in a country that has such a high standard in documentary culture.

From January 22-27 more than a hundred films will be shown. Personally I am not sure I like the thematic curating approach that is used to section the films to be screened on the website, I find it confusing, but behind headlines like ”Der Prozess”, ”Hard Day’s Night”, ”Higher Ground”, ”Home Sweet Home”, ”Kaleidoscope”, you find many exciting works like Eugene Jarecki’s ”The House I Live In”,  Jerome le Maire’s ”Tea or Electricity”, ”Private Universe” by Helena Trestikova, ”The Gatekeepers” by Dror Moreh and ”The Reluctant Revolutionary” by Sean McAllister – to mention those seen by this blogger.

There is a retrospective of films by Mario Ruspoli, ”surrealist as a documentarist”. Have to confess that I know his name but do not remember having seen any of his films. I quote from the site of Cinema du Réel 2012, where a retrospective was held: "Mario Ruspoli (1925-1986), one of the pioneers of the modern documentary, explored and experimented with image and sound techniques, yet his work remains unfamiliar to many despite its richness, its eclecticism and its historical importance. This year (2012), Cinéma du réel is proposing some of his classics and little gems." And now DocPoint does the same. Bravo!

There is – of course – a series of New Finnish documentaries, 13, with good names like Susanna Helke, “American Vagabond”, the original and touching “Finnish Blood Swedish Heart” by Mika Ronkainen and “Hilton” by Virpi Suutari. There is “North by Northwest” with films from Sweden, Latvia, Lithuania, Russia, Norway and Denmark. I mention the films that have been reviewed on this blog: “Winter go Away”, “The Will” (“Testamentet”) and “Documentarian” – at the same time as I would like to raise attention for Lithuanian Giedre Beinoriute’s “Conversation on Serious Topics” (photo) that will be reviewed here as soon as I get the final version of a film, I was priviliged to watch when in rough cut state.

And there are more sections ending up with the “Winners and Bestsellers”, 12 films and I am happy for the Finnish audience that they are to watch “I am Breathing” by Emma Davie and Morag McKinnon and many more films that have been at DOKLeipzig and idfa.

http://docpoint.info/en/content/etusivu

Cinema Eye Honors 2013

Awards are being lined up to be distributed these days. The Oscar nominees will be announced in a couple of hours and in three days the Golde Globe comes up. Good for cinema with all this artificial competition?, maybe, good for publicity for the documentary genre in general, I think so. Here is another one, Cinema Eye, quite interesting:

Just a couple of lines about the Cinema Eye Honors taken from the press release that was received this morning: The Cinema Eye Honors were founded in 2007 to recognize excellence in artistry and craft in nonfiction filmmaking.  It remains the only international nonfiction award to recognize the whole creative team, presenting annual craft awards in directing, producing, cinematography, editing, composing and graphic design/animation.

Lovely to see “5 Broken Cameras” (photo) by Emad Burnat and Guy Davidi to receive the main recognition for “Outstanding Achievement in Nonfiction Filmmaking”. Michael Moore accepted the award for the two directors, saying ““I personally feel it’s one of the most beautiful pieces of artistic cinema, you don’t see this on the evening news. You don’t see Palestinians portrayed this way.”

Direction prize went to Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady for “Detropia”, the audience chose “Bully” by Lee Hirsch and Jeff Orlowski was honored for an outstanding achievement in cinematography for “Chasing Ice”. Not to forget a film close to the heart of this blogger, “Argentinian Lesson” by Wojciech Staron, which got the “Spotlight Award”. More to be read about on the website, also that a Legacy Award was presented to Chris Hegedus and D A Pennebaker for “The War Room”, a classic in documentary history.

http://www.cinemaeyehonors.com/

Apted & Miroshnichenko: The Up Series

As the 56Up landmark documentary has started to roll out in US theaters past weekend, it might be just the right time to take a look at its Russian equivalent that was broadcast on ARTE in winter of 2012.

Inspired by the UK-based Granada's World in Action documentary directed by Michael Apted,  the Russian director Sergej Miroshnichenko too dares to probe the statement by the Jesuit maxim "Give me the child until he is seven and I will give you the man" in his 28Up series "Born in the USSR."

The first footage that now looks like a few generations old, was filmed in the 80's. "Born in the USSR" is the film about a group of ordinary 7-year-old children taken from all over the expansive territory of the Soviet Union and the course of their lives in the post-Soviet era.

Alike Apted, Miroshnichenko revisits children every seven years with the gaze of an interested observer coming to their lives to ask the questions of love, marriage, success, career, class, and prejudices. Yet "Born in the USSR" goes beyond the hypothesis that lies at the heart of the original film -- whatever happens by 7 sets the course. Sure, Apted never claimed to have been able to predict lives of those children but he did articulate on the idea of the core personality, that look in the eye, and the essence that one sees in the faces of 7-year-olds manifesting itself later in their adult lives. Deftly inter-cut footage from earlier films with contemporary interviews puts forth Apted's surprising discoveries that seem to support the ruminations of the Up series.

However, I reckon, "Born in the USSR" excels in bringing to light accounts of ordinary lives in resonate with changing times. "Born in the USSR" masterfully tells the stories of very different people who were born in the empire that aimed for uniformity. They come from Russia, the Baltic states, Caucasus, and Central Asia. They witnessed the fall of the Soviet command and found themselves in the environment of transition with the prospects, values, and norms that have changed drastically. 

"Born in the USSR" is more than a film about life in the post-Soviet era. It is even more than a mere collection of biographies. Direct and unpretentious, it raises a universal question about growing up, about hopes and dreams, adult realities and their disappointments, and the big question is what life has in store in times where nothing is certain.

DOX Winter 2012/13

Beginning of January, no markets or festivals or workshops. Time to read the European Documentary Film Magazine, number 96. And time for a review of a magazine that has a strong and good focus on reviewing documentaries (critiques it is called) ”surrounded” by reports from festivals and industry related material, relevant as the publisher is EDN (European Documenary Network) and the majority of readers are film professionals, who are members of this organisation. (The membership includes a subscription the magazine).

First the positive and then the But...

Two great gifts for the reader. Buying the issue you receive a dvd with the film ”Tonia and her Children” (photo) by Polish master Marcel Lozinski, and if you go to the end of the magazine you will find an excellent essay by BBC’s Nick Fraser, a chapter from his book ”Why Documentaries Matter”, wonderfully, eloquently written and with clever observations on the approach to documentary filmmaking by Godard, Lanzmann, Ophuls and Maysles – with the 60’es and cinema vérité as the starting point.

There is a good article about war cameramen, an overview of new films about ”female muslim identity”, festival reports from Mumbai and Oulu, issue-led articles from workshops, an hommage to Sundance Institute, legal matters to be observed in the US, a photo section from Greece, it is all ok, maybe a bit more classical and predictable compared to other DOX magazines edited by Truls Lie, who previously has pleased this reader with interesting reflections in an essay format.

But... the main focus of the Winter issue is ”Pitching. What makes it a must for filmmakers”. 7 pages. The editor has got the idea that it would be good to have a database for pitches, he writes about that and he tests it by asking different involved ”players” if that is a good idea. Most of them say – surprise, surprise – that it is very important to meet each other before making any arrangements for financial commitment. At the same time as some say that the EDN online pitch on specific subjects like art and history is a good idea. Of course it is and of course the pitching for coproduction today, as we see it at the MEDIA-funded events in Europe and elsewhere, is more a promotion tool for projects than a realistic meeting point for picking up money. And of course the pre-pitch workshops are of value for the development of the projects. The 7 pages on pitching are too much vox-pop – x thinks this, y thinks that but x disagrees – where a much more deep journalistic investigation based on facts and/or case studies would have been the right way to go for a quarterly magazine. Who profits from the pitching sessions? How many and where? Which kind of films are pitchable? Are real coproductions totally away from the pitching landscape? Etc. etc.

www.dox.dk

www.edn.dk

http://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/publications/risj-challenges/why-documentaries-matter.html

DOCAlliance Offers Free Streaming

Again the excellent vod DOCAlliance – calls itself very rightly ”your online documentary cinema” with over 700 quality films – invites (documentary) film lovers to watch films for free, this time its 11 most watched documentaries of 2012. From December 31 to January 6.

Seen from a Danish perspective it is great to notice that Jørgen Leth’s bicycle race classic ”A Sunday in Hell” (1977) as well as his masterpiece ”Haiti. Untitled” (1996) are on a list that includes several Czech and Slovak films. ”Solar Eclipse” by Martin Marecek is a both funny and clever work on two Czech electricians in Zambia, fighting to teach the locals how to have their electricity in good shape. Personally I will take a look at the film on a writer, whose name I know but have never read. Here is a quotation from the site of the vod: 

“The key impetus for Arnošt Lustig’s (1926-2011) (photo) writing consisted in the ordeal of his painful holocaust experience. His first short story collection set in the environment of Nazi concentration camps was published in 1958; considering it his best book ever, Lustig kept on returning to the dramatic historical experience. He knew too well that the “Auschwitz experience” is beyond description and that while trying to describe it, one may get swept by the dark current of dreadful memories; many a “holocaust writer” took his own life (e.g. Primo Levi, Jean Amery, etc.). What helped Lustig escape the fate of his famous colleagues was probably his intense optimism. However impoverished, humiliated and marginalized life could be, it has always been the main axis of Lustig’s interest. His desire to live (and appreciate life) has not been suppressed even by the tragic episodes of his stays in concentration camps (Theresienstadt, Auschwitz, Buchenwald). That is the fundamental victory of Arnošt Lustig over the darkness of war and primarily over the machinery of Nazi hatred, aimed, in its principle, at the very value of life.”

http://dafilms.com/event/103-most-watched-docs-of-2012/

Jonas Mekas: My Paris Movie

Jonas Mekas loves Paris. So does this blogger and his wife. We were there in December last year. Funny to sit in New York, the home of Mekas, one year later, in his Anthology Archives cinema, in the hall named after Maya Deren.

Mekas in Paris, his latest long film, from 2011, 159 mins., a film he made, because, according to his own words: ”A few months ago Danièle Hibon, a curator at the Jeu de Paume museum in Paris, very casually asked me if I would consider making a new work to celebrate 20 years of cinema at the Jeu de Paume. Since it was Danièle who in 1992 curated my first exhibition in Paris, also at the Jeu de Paume, I said, without a second of thought, Of course I will do it, absolutely so!”

A tribute to Paris it is. Also literally. I have never seen so many toasts being given as in this film that most of the time takes place in bars and restaurants or in private homes at the dinner tables. White wine, sometimes red, loads of oysters - hard to watch! – looong looong takes from the streets of Paris in different seasons, rainy, a bit of snow but also sunshine, and also shootings from his hotel room(s) and from the windows of his hotel room, the roofs of Paris, but also the old man climbing stairs to get up to look at Paris from above.

I celebrate what I see, he says, and he celebrates Guillaume Apollinaire and the futuristic movement – and all the time in a charming, mild and generous way. To be honest it is nice when Mekas once in a while refrains from the shaky and abrupt camera movements, and indeed, even for Paris lovers, the film is too long, could have lived with less toasts, but then suddenly there is Jonas Mekas alone in his hotel room in January 2009 talking to us, or rather expressing true emotions having heard about the election of Obama in January 2009. Moment of beauty.

Tomorrow Jonas Mekas will be 90, a true artist, a multi-artist, an icon for the independent cinema. Congratulations.   

http://anthologyfilmarchives.org/

http://jonasmekasfilms.com/diary/

Maysles Cinema

Oops, suddenly you stand in front of a small cinema with the name Maysles Cinema. In the window there is a poster for ”5 Broken Cameras” that runs the same night with a skype Q & A with one of the directors. Another poster promotes ”The House I Live in” by Eugene Jarecki to be screened in January.

We enter the small lobby, have a photo taken next to the poster of the Maysles Brothers masterpiece ”Grey Gardens” (1975) and have a small chat with a female staff member, who tells us that the cinema has been here in Harlem on Malcolm X Boulevard for five years with screenings and debates, and a lot fo classes for kids and grown-ups related to film and theatre.

Taken from the very informative webiste of the Maysles Institute: ... The Cinema is committed to a democratic experience, one where filmmakers are asked to attend the screenings of their work, and audiences have the opportunity to actively engage the films and each other in post-screening forums. Coupled with its scheduled series, we encourage the programming participation of local social and cultural organizations and citizen-activists to deepen community involvement and provide exposure for under-represented social issues and overlooked artists and their work.

And a quote from the old master himself (he celebrated his 86th birthday December 6!) from an interview made by David Noh for Film Journal International: In Harlem you walk down the street and people talk to each other, and loud enough so that you hear their conversation. We wanted to be a part of it and we wanted to have a theatre where we could show documentaries exclusively and also teach local kids how to make their own movies. These movies have been good enough that three of twelve of our kids got their films on TV."

Photo: Poul Rude.

http://www.mayslesinstitute.org/

http://www.filmjournal.com/filmjournal/content_display/news-and-features/features/movies/e3i4b2ffa510200a21144528fd62cf7dd91

Pop in TV and the Movies

The well composed and entertaining exhibition on Whitney in New York runs until March 2013. It has the title ”Dark and Deadpan: Pop in TV and the Movies” and invites you to a dark room with a dozen of screens in different sizes with moving images from the 1960’es. You walk into the room and get the sound – a true cacaphony – from the screens around you, the sound of dialogues, music, speeches, monologues like the one from Andy Warhol, who is eating a burger in the film by Jørgen Leth and Ole John, ”66 Scenes from America” (1981).

That for me very well known clip from the Danish documentary classic is placed on one of the four walls close to a tv screen on the floor showing Warhol’s ice cream commercial for Schrafft’s restaurants. Next to that a clip (by Ger van Elk, 1970) of a cactus being shaved!... Also in the playful genre is George Kuchar’s ”Hold Me While I am Naked” (1961), said to be loosely autobiographical, very funny to watch today as is David Lynch ”The Alphabet” (1968) by imb characterised as ”a woman's dark and absurdist nightmare vision comprising a continuous recitation of the alphabet and bizarre living representations of each letter.” You dare say so, playful yes, as is the video close by not - that presents numbered photos of soldiers who died in Vietnam.

Pop art is also Godard, isn’t it? Wonderful to see the original trailer of “A Bout de Souffle”, Jean Seberg and Jean-Paul Belmondo, a revolver, the pretty girl, the bad boy etc.

There is a lot of creativity and naivity in this room (forgot to write that in the more informational end the landing on the moon (July 20 1969) was also in the room, as well as presidential promotion clips for Johnson and Nixon), which is balanced in the room next door with pop art of a more sinister approach. You are really reminded how great an artist Andy Warhol was, when you see his “Nine Jackies” (1964), three times three Jacqueline Kennedy, just before and just after her husband had been shot (November 1963), and in deep grief – and his series “Electric Chair” (1971).

Most of the mentioned films/tv clips you can find on youtube. 

Photo:Sherman Price (active 1960s), still from The Imp-Probable Mr. Weegee, 1966. 35mm film transferred to high-definition video, color, sound; 75 min. Image courtesy Something Weird Video (from the site of Whitney, below). Totally humorous short film about a photographer taking pictures of women and big boobs in Paris.   

http://whitney.org/Exhibitions/DarkAndDeadpan

Vurdering:

POV – Visiting Simon Kilmurry

I have during the last years tried my best to understand the organisation of the POV, that had its 25th season in 2012. I have – as many others – always been impressed by the commitment of Simon Kilmurry, Executive director and producer of American Documentary (independent non-profit media company) that produces the strand POV – documentaries with a Point of View. Kilmurry has attended workshops and pitching events all over, this year I have met him in Barcelona, Edinburgh (he is Scottish born), Leipzig and Amsterdam, and before that in Buenos Aires. In the last two years of the idfa forum, he has received the so-called Cuban Hat as the best commissioning editor around the table. For his constant support to creative authored documentaries, I would add.

So, being in New York anyway, I was welcomed in the Brooklyn office by Kilmurry to get more information and knowledge. In the beginning I have found POV very different from what we know about in Europe – and it is when it comes to financing – but basically there are many similariities to what we have and had in Europe. POV is much more than broadcasting one to four times, POV organises screenings locally, POV publishes and facilitates debates around the themes of the films, POV offers interviews with the filmmakers online, POV has a catalogue of short films, a lending library... and so on so forth. A cultural institution, we would say in Europe.

In other words POV is like a European film institute, take as an example the Danish Film Institute that has a film political role to play – documentary films should play a role in society, raise debate. At POV it is put like this: ”Since

Jean-Louis Trintignant

Michael Haneke’s ”Amour” has Jean-Louis Trigtignant in the leading male role. In connection with the opening of that film in New York, the art cinema house Film Forum is running a retrospective of films with the actor. A unique chance to study a great actor, just one masterpiece after the other, here are some of the titles:

”Il conformista” (Bertolucci), ”Red” (Kieslowski), ”Z” (Costa-Gavras), ”Un homme et une femme” (Lelouch), ”Ma nuit chez Maude” (Rohmer), ”Les biches” (Chabrol)...

An inspiration for cinematheques around the world to do a retrospective as well?

About ”Amour” Trintignant said in a quote from New York Times: “I’ve worked in more than 135 films, and to me Michael Haneke is the greatest director in the world working today,” Mr. Trintignant said in a telephone interview from Europe. “I choose what films I will work in on the basis not of the script but of the director, and he has the most complete mastery of the cinematic discipline, from technical aspects like sound and photography to the way he handles actors. This film deals with themes that are very dark, but I’ve never enjoyed working with a director as much as I have with him.”

PS. By the way it is his birthday today, born December 11 1931.

http://www.filmforum.org/movies/more/trintignant

Michael Apted: 56 UP

Does it need an introduction this magnificent achievement in the history of documentary cinema and television? Lucky you who have not seen the series that started in 1964, when the children were 7 and have continued every 7 years until now when they are 56 years old. Half a century with Jackie, Suzy, Neil, Nick, Tony, Charles and the rest of them – and Michael Apted (born 1941) intends to continue, ”as long as I am above ground” as he has stated it.

And lucky us who have followed them, and have been able to mirror ourselves and our lives in these characters, who came from different places in society and took different roads in life. Some did what they said they wanted to do when 7 or 14, others – luckily – broke the pattern, for good or worse.

What you can say about 56 Up is that not much has changed since 49, it is like that, is it not? And yet there are illnesses, and there is the society around you and its politics. Neil is trying to change things through involvement in the local community but he is still a person, you sense suffers a lot. Jackie gets a grandchild but is not able to work and is surrounded by illness. Tony (the one on the poster) still has this huge appetite for life but has had his downs. Bruce is camping with his sons and wife and seems to have settled after years abroad. And, great move by Apted, Suzy and Nick, who got friends through the series, talk to each other about being in this film series. ”I hate it”, says Suzy, ”but I guess I feel a kind of loyalty to it.. it is like reading a bad book, but you see it through”. Nick contemplates on the little you can achieve by filming people for 7 days every 7 years. ”It is not about me but about somebody”, he says, and right he is if he by that means that it could be you and me, at least there are so many identification points for all of us when watching.

A link below refers to an article in Guardian, where three of the kids who are now 56 talk about what it has meant to take part in the Up series. 

56 UP, already broadcast on British tv, will open at New York’s IFC Center on Friday January 4th, 2013 with a national theatrical run to follow. The film will have its US broadcast on POV in Fall 2013. Amazone has a dvd box available.

England, 2012, 140 minutes

http://www.guardian.co.uk/tv-and-radio/2012/may/07/56-up-its-like-having-another-family

Vurdering:

Jonas Mekas Turns 90!

Legendary underground filmmaker and tireless defender of the independent cinema Jonas Mekas turns 90 years old and is of course celebrated in New York in the Anthology Film Archives with a small retrospective that runs December 17-23. Here are some words from the site:

This December marks the 90th birthday of Jonas Mekas – renowned filmmaker, critic, and co-founder of many of the foundational institutions of the NY underground film movement (the Film-Maker’s Coop, the Film-Makers’ Cinematheque, Film Culture Magazine, and Anthology itself). To mark this momentous occasion we’ve assembled a series showcasing lesser-known and more rarely-screened works from Jonas’s long and varied filmmaking career. For more than 50 years Jonas has pioneered the ‘film diary’ form, chronicled many of the most important events, scenes, and figures of his time (including John Lennon, Jackie Onassis, Allen Ginsberg, Andy Warhol, and many others), and made dozens of film and videos lasting anywhere from a couple minutes to almost 5 hours in length.

... Of particular interest is the NYC premiere of his 2005 video documenting Martin Scorsese at work, and his most recent feature opus, MY PARIS MOVIE.

http://anthologyfilmarchives.org/film_screenings/series/40226

http://jonasmekasfilms.com/diary/

South African Apartheid Documentary Exhibition

The Treason Trial 1956-61 (photo), The Sharpville Massacre 1960, the Soweto Uprising 1976… it is all in its immense brutality very well documented in ICP (International Center of Photography) in New York – runs until January 6 2013 - there are photos from the lives of the white oppressors and the black oppressed in Rise and Fall of Apartheid: Photography and the Bureaucracy of Everyday Life, the title of the exhibition that “includes nearly 500 photographs, films, books, magazines, newspapers, and assorted archival documents and covers more than 60 years of powerful photographic and visual production that forms part of the historical record of South Africa.”

Nelson Mandela in a short interview with BBC in 1960, the last one before he was imprisoned for 27 years (1963-1990), we all know about it and have seen it before and yet it brings tears to the eyes to watch him walking hand in hand with Winnie after the release. There are many film and tv clips in this amazing exhibition, where – of course – the classic “Come Back Africa” by Lionel Rogosin (1959) is also to be seen, with wonderful Miriam Makeba. Martin Scorcese once said that it is “a film of terrible beauty”.

However, what the exhibition first of all does is what is stated on the site: (it..) proposes a complex understanding of photography and the aesthetic power of the documentary form and honors the exceptional achievement of South African photographers.

http://www.icp.org/museum/exhibitions/apartheid

http://comebackafrica.com/

Vurdering:

Picasso in New York

118 black and white works by Picasso at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. The exhibition runs until January 23 and is highly recommended. As the curators put it on the site of Guggenheim: the first exhibition to explore the remarkable use of black and white throughout the Spanish artist’s prolific career. Claiming that color weakens, Pablo Picasso purged it from his work in order to highlight the formal structure and autonomy of form inherent in his art. His repeated minimal palette correlates to his obsessive interest in line and form, drawing, and monochromatic and tonal values, while developing a complex language of pictorial and sculptural signs...

In the basement cinema hall of the building of Frank Lloyd Wright the classic art documentary of Henri-Georges Clouzot, ”Le Mystère de Picasso”, is shown, filmed in the 1950'es with the energetic Picasso in shorts painting on glass. The American distributor Milestone Films describes the film precisely as such:

In 1955, Clouzot joined forces with his friend Picasso to make an entirely new kind of art film — a film that could capture the moment and the mystery of creativity. Together, they devised an innovative technique — the filmmaker placed his camera behind a semi-transparent surface on which the artist drew with special inks that bled through. Clouzot thus captured a perfect reverse image of Picasso’s brushstrokes and the motion picture screen itself becomes the artist’s canvas. Here, the master creates, and sometimes obliterates, 20 works (most of them, in fact, destroyed after the shoot), ranging from playful black-and-white sketches to Cinemascope color murals — artworks which evolve in minutes through the magic of stop-motion animation. Unavailable for more than a decade, The Mystery of Picasso is exhilarating, mesmerizing, enchanting and unforgettable. It is simply one of the greatest documentaries on art ever made. The French government agreed — in 1984 it declared the film a national treasure. Indeed a classic in the art documentary genre.

France, 1956, 78 mins.

http://www.guggenheim.org/

Link to: http://cdn.shopify.com

DFP 10 Years Celebration

DFP stands for Sundance Institute Documentary Film Program and Fund and has existed for 10 years which is the reason that realscreen, the fine trade magazine that calls itself ”the best in non-fiction”, brings an interview with the director Cara Mertes (photo) in its daily newsletter.

There are far too few international funds for documentary support, there should be more as the importance of the public broadcasters in connection with creative documentaries is strongly decreasing, so it is important to know about the activitites and ambition of the Sundance DFP. Here is what Cara Mertes says:

“[We've] also developed a third area that I call international creative partnerships, and they’re really about increasing resources for documentary filmmakers around the world.” Those partnerships include the Skoll Foundation on Stories of Change, which brings social entrepreneurs and storytellers together at the Sundance Film Festival and the Skoll World Forum; the Channel 4/Britdoc Foundation partnership, which created the Good Pitch in North America, where NGOs, philanthropic, corporate and individual investors are brought together to support films; the Arab Fund for Arts and Culture to support Arab documentaries; and CNEX, a Beijing-based not-for-profit, to run labs and design funding protocols.”

… “DFP has supported films and filmmakers from around the world, through the Sundance Documentary Funds, which grant between US$1 million and $2 million per year in development, production and post-production categories; creative documentary labs; Sundance Creative Producers Summit, and more”. Titles include Lixin Fan’s Last Train Home, Mahmoud al Massad’s Recycle, Ra’anan Alexandrowicz’s The Law in These Parts and U.S. films The Island President, directed by Jon Shenk, and Detropia from Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady, along with Laura Poitras’s My Country, My Country and The Oath.

Read more: http://realscreen.com/2012/12/07/institutional-thinking-sundance-documentary-film-program-wraps-10th-year/#ixzz2EPxDkBxp

Nikolaus Geyerhalter at DocAlliance

Pleased to recommend a new offer from the vod DocAlliance, this time related to Austrian documentarian Geyerhalter. Here is a slightly edited version of the promotion text from the vod site:

We offer a selection of the best films by Geyerhalter in the period December 7-9, for a small fee. Scenes from the life of animals in mass-production shown in Our Daily Bread (photo) represents one of the most powerful visual depictions of the food-processing industry. The director alternates between sequences of shots of machines in operation with images of workers during breaks captured alone and without words which would, in any case, be drowned in the never-ending humming of the machines. All is clean, hygienic and synchronized, including the slaughters of mass-produced animals.

An apparent similarity with the impersonal mass-production processes can be found in Abendland. An observation of the European continent at night shows crowds of people partying, protesting as well as impersonal crews of workers at conveyor belts, for example burning coffins in a crematorium. Besides, scenes of employees of a help line, nurses and medical staff are also observed through absolutely unbiased, cold and distant lens. The impartiality and detachment of the camera constantly merge in CCTV supervision or permanent police controls.

In 7915 km, Nikolaus Geyrhalter follows the route of the Dakar Rally race. He shows the ordinary world of ordinary people living along the route of the race at the moments when the track is free of vehicles. The substantially different characters portrayed in this documentary share their experience with the competitors who are passing through. Their experience is mainly reduced to the roar of motors and whirling clouds of dust. The film presents variations on the idea of the West speeding through countries which would prefer the world to slow down and pay attention to the problems their inhabitants have to cope with.

http://dafilms.com/

Cinema Komunisto Success

It was one of those nights – the premiere of Mila Turajlic’s ”Cinema Komunisto” – that will be remembered. A totally packed Sava Centre in Belgrade were present for the closing film of Magnificent7 Festival 2011. Standing ovations. It was late January 2011 and now almost 2 years later, the film, first of all thanks to the incredible energy and skills of the director herself, the film is still travelling the world after lots of festival screenings and several awards.

”This exhaustively researched and elegantly edited documentary...”, writes the critic of The Times after the theatrical premiere in the UK a week ago. Other reviews, including one from celebrity critic Philip French in Guardian, are equally positive as you can see through the links below.

The film, that was also screened at idfa, comes out on dvd today in Serbia, is said to have a theatrical premiere in Paris... well, you can’t stop great films and talented directors.

http://www.cinemakomunisto.com/about/

http://www.magnificent7festival.org/home.html

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2012/nov/25/cinema-komunisto-review

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2012/nov/22/cinema-komunisto-review

http://www.totalfilm.com/reviews/cinema/cinema-komunisto

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/arts/film/reviews/article3608922.ece

Janus Metz, samlede blogindlæg om hans film

Janus Metz and Lars Skree seek and succeed perfectly, from a humanistic point of view, to bring us into a world that we could not imagine existed in the way it is documented and interpreted here. Even the most horrendous words coming out of the mouth of Rasmus, the platoon commander, or from Ølby, the tattooed constantly joking warrior, are put forward with a no-finger-pointing, non-moralisinggentleness... (Tue Steen Müller)

Janus Metz er månedens instruktør i landets nok mindste og måske også mest forvænte filmklub, FILMKLUB FOF i Randers. Det er anledningen til at samle, hvad vi har skrevet om hans film gennem årene og placere dem under overskriften DIRECTORS, som vi lidt efter lidt udbygger med instruktører, hvis film har optaget os og stadig optager os særlig meget.

FRA THAILAND TIL THY / FRA THY TIL THAILAND (2007 / 2008)

af Allan Berg Nielsen

Stedet introduceres i smukt fotografi, Lars Skree og Henrik Bohn Ipsen er fotograferne. Der er myndighed over disse billeder. Et jysk landskab, som er meget, meget mere end et vindblæst hjørne af Danmark. Det er en egn og en befolkning med en særegen livsstil og en stor værdighed og en bevaret integritet, bekræfter fotografiet for mit blik, som er dannet tilbage i romantikken. Og kvinden, det til en begyndelse handler om, introduceres tilsvarende smukt og sikkert. Hun er egentlig fremmed her, men er så integreret, som det har været mulig at blive her, når man ser anderledes ud og er fra den anden side af Jorden. Og så begynder fortællingen, det er som det skal være, jeg er tryg. Fra dokumentarens begyndelse, i del 1, Fra Thailand til Thy. Og jeg skal bestemt nok blive ved den, det mærker jeg fra første begyndelse. For der er jo en ægte historie derfra, en kærlighedshistorie. Som fortsætter og finder sin afslutning i del 2, Fra Thy til Thailand.

IDFA Opening

The opening ceremony of the 25th edition of idfa took place in the Tuschinski theatre close to Rembrandtsplein in Amsterdam. The mother of the festival, as she is called, flamboyant Ally Derks made the opening speech full of passion and proudness for what she and her team have been doing in the 25 years that have passed – my comment: built up the most important yearly meeting point for professionals from all over the world and succeeded to create a huge audience that in the coming 10 days will fight to get tickets for the screenings of which many are already sold out.

BUT, and there was a big BUT that was coming back again and again in the speech of Derks – the government’s announcement of cuts in funding for documentaries through Mediafonds (The Dutch Cultural Media Fund) and the broadcasters IKON and Human TV.

“These cuts are very, very serious. They de-stabilize the whole industrial structure. The jobs, the suppliers, the families they support. All will be lost. Clearly 80 percent of all the Dutch films we are showing at IDFA have been supported by the Mediafonds. Where will this lead? To dark screens for Dutch documentary?”. The plan of the government is to close the fund by 2017 and to let the broadcasters do the support!

(Facts about the The Dutch Cultural Media Fund: This Fund currently provides approximately €16 million annually for documentary, fiction, digital projects, radio and talent development. Of this, €8 million is devoted to documentary. 40 titles at this year’s IDFA were made with the Fund’s support, among them the opening film Wrong Time Wrong Place by John Appel. In all, the Fund backs around 70 documentaries a year.)

Back to the speech: “You know, films are a lot like flowers. There are many people who love tulips. Others like roses. Some even like weeds. But you can

Jørgen Leth Collected Texts on his Works

…the Danish director, who has been an inspiration for generations of Danish filmmakers. With Lars von Trier as number one as readers will know from the film”The Five Obstructions”. (Tue Steen Müller)

Mid wednes(day) off from Copenhagen with troubled SAS to Amsterdam to attend the 25th idfa (International Documentary Film Festival). On board is also Jørgen Leth on his way to idfa as several times before. This year to be in the main jury with (among others) Michael Glawogger, and to attend his own ”My Name is Jørgen Leth” exhibition that is part of the idfa ”Expanding Documentary” that opens at 7pm tomorrow November 15th at De Brakke Grond here in Amsterdam.

The exhibition that ran succesfully in Copenhagen – arranged by Danish curator Michael Thouber at the Kunstforeningen Gl. Strand in Copenhagen – gives the visitors the chance to watch (some of) Leth’s films, photos, notebooks as well as listening to his commentating bicycling races like Tour de France. One of the many characteristics of the director, who in the car from Schiphol to the hotel immediately fell into discussions about this one of many passions of the Danish director, who has been an inspiration for generations of Danish filmmakers. With Lars von Trier as number one as readers will know from the film ”The Five Obstructions”.

Which leads to the most important information: You can watch 7 of Jørgen Leth’s films for free on the vod Docalliance (link below), a – too use one of the director’s favourite words – generous offer to film lovers all over to see ”A Sunday in Hell” (Paris-Roubaix race) (PHOTO), ”Moments of Play”, ”Good and Evil”, ”Notes of Love”, ”66 Scenes from America”, ”Haiti Untitled” and ”The Perfect Human”. A small festival in itself with the usual high quality text intros from the Docalliance people. For free until November 25. A must for all film students! And cinéphiles of course!

http://www.idfa.nl/industry.aspx

www.lethfilm.dk

http://dafilms.com/

JØRGEN LETH – MASTER OF DOX

This is how Danish veteran Leth is characterised on the site of ZagrebDox (February 27 – March 6, 2011) in a quite interesting intro text, that also has a greeting to what is called Danish puritans:

“Can ‘eroticism’ be measured? Can it be limited or defined? In his latest film, one of the most significant documentary filmmakers of today, 73-year-old Jørgen Leth (‘The Perfect Human’, ‘The Five Obstructions’) travelled from North Africa to Rio in order to register the form and sense of eroticism, refusing to accept it as a part of the dominant currents of new Puritanism and/or commercialised video-style eroticism of ‘fake breasts and backsides’.

Quite predictably, Leth’s sensual, poetic and unbiased exploration of human eroticism, created during the course of ten years, was harshly criticised by reviewers (The Variety describes Leth’s accomplishment as shameful) and Danish puritans, calling the author ‘controversial’. Another unfavourable element was the fact that Leth, as an honorary ambassador to Haiti, was involved in an intimate relationship with his cook’s under-age daughter, describing the episode in his memoirs ‘Imperfect Man’ and causing great controversy in Denmark.” (Tue Steen Müller 13-02-2011)

Jørgen Leth

Mid wednes(day) off from Copenhagen with troubled SAS to Amsterdam to attend the 25th idfa (International Documentary Film Festival). On board is also Jørgen Leth on his way to idfa as several times before. This year to be in the main jury with (among others) Michael Glawogger, and to attend his own ”My Name is Jørgen Leth” exhibition that is part of the idfa ”Expanding Documentary” that opens at 7pm tomorrow November 15th at De Brakke Grond here in Amsterdam.

The exhibition that ran succesfully in Copenhagen – arranged by Danish curator Michael Thouber at the Kunstforeningen Gl. Strand in Copenhagen – gives the visitors the chance to watch (some of) Leth’s films, photos, notebooks as well as listening to his commentating bicycling races like Tour de France. One of the many characteristics of the director, who in the car from Schiphol to the hotel immediately fell into discussions about this one of many passions of the Danish director, who has been an inspiration for generations of Danish filmmakers. With Lars von Trier as number one as readers will know from the film ”The Five Obstructions”.

Which leads to the most important information: You can watch 7 of Jørgen Leth’s films for free on the vod Docalliance (link below), a – too use one of the director’s favourite words – generous offer to film lovers all over to see ”A Sunday in Hell” (Paris-Roubaix race) (PHOTO), ”Moments of Play”, ”Good and Evil”, ”Notes of Love”, ”66 Scenes from America”, ”Haiti Untitled” and ”The Perfect Human”. A small festival in itself with the usual high quality text intros from the Docalliance people. For free until November 25. A must for all film students! And cinéphiles of course!

http://www.idfa.nl/industry.aspx

www.lethfilm.dk

http://dafilms.com/

Grierson

”Celebrating 40 Years” is the title of the 3 mins. montage done by Peter Symes and Mandy Chang. A montage because of the 40 years since the death of John Grierson, the father of documentary, and the setting up of a series of awards in his name.

Go to the link below and check how many of the films you can recognise. Peter Symes asked me to do so, and I regret to say that it was only a handful. At the second and third view more came to my mind.

Anyway, what The Grierson Trust has been doing over the years is precisely a fine, non-commercial celebration of the documentary and if you look at the films awarded this year, you will find ”Hell and Back Again” (photo) by Dennis Danfung, Phil Cox ”The Bengali Detective” and Liz Garbus ”Bobby Fischer Against the World”. Kevin Macdonald (among others ”One Day in September”) received the Grierson Trustees’ Award, which before has been given to Michael Apted (SevenUp-series), Molly Dineen, BBC’s Nick Fraser, Paul Watson (”Rain in My Heart”), Penny Woolcock and John Pilger, to mention the names I know.

Back to the montage, listen to the voice under the images of ”Night Mail”, the voice of John Grierson. And click on the photos to see clips of winning films of this year – or the years before. Pure joy! Film history!

http://www.griersontrust.org/video-gallery.html

Jørgen Vestergaard, alle blogindlæg om hans film

Præsten i Vrensted, Karsten Erbs havde forleden, torsdag den 11. oktober inviteret pensionistforeningen og alle ældre til en eftermiddag i præstegården. Han skriver på sognets hjemmeside, at noget særligt var på færde: ”Vi havde bagt boller og lavet lagkage. Og det blev et rigtig godt kaffebord, men eftermiddagen blev rigtig god også fordi jeg viste to små film af Jørgen Vestergaard om Hanstholm. De to film var Vagt ved Havet (1965) og Havnen (1967). To meget fine dokumentarfilm. Det er instruktøren på billedet under optagelserne i 1965 (FOTO, red.). Og naturligvis så vi billeder fra vores bustur til Hjerl Hede.”

Ja, det er nemlig to meget fine dokumentarfilm, og det er stærkt, at de stadigvæk formidles og ses og netop som de er lavet, med den dybt rodfæstede indsigt i egn, og folk og sprog og selvforståelse, udfordre og bekræfte et publikum med så udbygget konsekvensekspertice som den ved kaffebordet i Vrensted i torsdags. Vestergaards film lever og godkendes hver eneste gang.

SOMMERHESTE (1964) og LANDSBYEN LEVER (1990) 

Det er så godt, at Jørgen Vestergaard sørger for at få sine mange vigtige film fra en lang og i ordets forstand enestående produktion ud på dvd. For disse film har alle årene været noget helt for sig selv, og de vil blive stående som enestående. Som en særlig filmkultur, han er alene om. I hvert fald på det niveau. En kultur i landets midte, som journalister og politikere for tiden kalder nationens udkant.

New Executive Director of Flaherty

This blogger worked with Anita Reher for a decade at EDN (European Documentary Network) in Copenhagen, now she has a quite an important job in the US, carrying the name of one of the founders of the documentary genre, Bravo:

New York, NY (October 2, 2012) Presenter of the Robert Flaherty Film Seminar - the longest-running film exhibition event in the US - The Flaherty has named Anita Reher as Executive Director.    
 
Anita Reher was formerly the co-founder of the European Documentary Network (EDN), a membership-based association created in 1996 with more than 1000 members from 60 different countries. Reher helped build this non-profit service organization into the premiere resource for documentary filmmakers in Europe. As Head of International Relations for EDN, she developed strategies, set priorities, and created more than 50 workshop programs around the world.

"My experiences stem from two decades of working across borders, cultures and languages. Film is, in my opinion, a language that connects people and connecting film 

Documentary Pearls at Copenhagen Cinematheque

From the site: “The Cinematheque in the heart of Copenhagen offers a rich programme of more than 60 films every month, many of which are in English or with English subtitles. In October, we present roadmovies, East by Southeast, women's lives in the Middle East, MIX Copenhagen Film Festival, Hollywood shorts, and much more.”

… and documentaries of high quality, indeed, which is the reason for this promotional text that also offers our readers to see what we previously have written about a couple of the films:

In the series “East by Southeast” you find Andrey Paounov’s “The Boy Who Was a King” about King Simeon, who in 2001 came back to Bulgaria to be elected prime minister. Paounov is an original film talent, which he has shown several times, among others with the wonderful “Mosquito Problems and other Stories”. Equally to be seen is Lithuanian “Barzakh” (photo) by Mantas Kvedaravicius about whom a colleague said to me: ”He is not a film director, he is a thinker”, who made the film over a period of years, now completing his PhD (and a book) on the affects of pain. And the film is about pain, about people in Chechnya, families whose members disappear or have undergone torture.

As the monthly documentary, the Cinematheque presents a gift to its audience. Seven screenings are set up of Viktor Kossakovsky’s “Vivan las Antipodas”, for this blogger maybe the most important and visionary documentary being published for years.

Finally, the “SønDok” (documentary on a Sunday including a debate with the

Sergey Miroshnichenko: Born in the USSR: 28 Up 1-2

Based on the original idea of Michael Apted – the 7UP series – Sergey Miroshnichenko has filmed a group of Russian kids when they were 7, 14, 21 and now 28 years old. The two-part series (each of them around 100 mins. long) presented at the Message to Man festival in St. Petersburg is an impressive piece of work that you just take in piece by piece = person by person, amazed to experience how much history has played a role in their lives, that started when USSR existed and took a completely different direction when the empire fell apart.

As in the work of Michael Apted (who now films kids who are in the 50’es!) Miroshnichenko cuts back and forward in time to let us see the 7 year old innocent having hopes for the future, the 14 year old having discovered more of the world including the opposite sex, the 21 year old who has already had the first child, and changed work several times and the 28 year old who divorced or has moved to another country – and did, in most cases, not have their child hopes fulfilled. There is drama, there is sadness but also happiness, and there are critical comments to Russian politics or religious commitments or... yes, they are like you and me, but their lives have definitely been destined by the outer circumstances. Like the Georgians, like the Lithuanians who lived in the same country when they were born but in independent republics when they were 7.

However, what comes out strongest in the films – where the director goes from person to person, with in-between-montage sequences that have a group of them comment on the same theme – is the emotions conveyed to us like (first part) the small boy Andrey, who when 7 do not have his parents, who get adopted to one family abroad and then to another one in the US, a boy marked by his past, and a young man who sits down as a 28 year old saying that he does not want to be filmed any longer. For personal reasons that he does not talk about. Heartbreaking as many of the stories are at the same time as you are impressed by the reflections that they make as kids or as grown-ups. Or (second part) the twins from St. Petersburg with their gamin faces constantly in trouble in opposition to each other, desparate to have a good life but not achieving a lot of what they hoped for. Fun and sad at the same time.

It is difficult to make a film with so many characters but Miroshnichenko succeeds to have the narrative go in a smooth rythm, and in a warm tone, with fine associative ”bridges” and with a voice-over that glues it together when necessary. You learn so much about Russia, well about life watching this work.  

http://message2man.com/eng/program_english/id/2/block/17

Vurdering:

RIDM 2012

A press release from Montréal, where the RIDM Festival resides, this year from November 7-18. The festival has chosen to celebrate its 15^th edition with a “special anniversary program, 15 Years, 15 All-Time Favourites”... "to mark our first 15 years, we invited 15 major figures from the film world to program their all-time favourite documentary. The result: 15 personal choices that add up to a unique subjective history of the first cinematic genre, presented together as a special program.”

The guest programmers and their picks: Lou Reed chose Visions of Light (Arnold Glassman, Todd McCarthy, Stuart Samuels) 
Barbet Schroeder chose Capturing the Friedmans (Andrew Jarecki) 
Agnès Varda chose La France qui se lève tôt (Hugo Chesnard) 
Frederick Wiseman chose Hôtel Terminus (Marcel Ophüls) 
Philippe Falardeau chose Une délégation de très haut niveau (Philippe Dutilleul) 
Gael García Bernal chose Megacities (Michael Glawogger) (PHOTO) 
Philip Glass chose The Color of the Prism, the Mechanics of Time (Jacqueline Caux) 
Patrizio Guzmán chose Arcana (Cristóbal Vicente) 
Gilles Jacob chose L'homme à la caméra (Dziga Vertov) 
Naomi Kawase chose Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania (Jonas Mekas) 
Kim Longinotto chose Into the Abyss (Werner Herzog) 
Samira Makhmalbaf chose Afghan Alphabet (Mohsen Makhmalbaf) 
Alanis Obomsawin chose Reel Injun (Catherine Bainbridge, Neil Diamond, Jeremiah Hayes) 
Laura Poitras chose Blowjob (Andy Warhol) et Crossroads (Bruce Conner) 
Jia Zhang Ke chose El cielo gira (Mercedes Álvarez).

http://www.ridm.qc.ca/fr

DOK Leipzig

Crisis... maybe, but films are made, just received this press release from DOK Leipzig: Some 2,850 films from 77 countries were submitted to this year's International Leipzig Festival for Documentary and Animated Film, among them 2,200 documentaries and 650 animated films. The number of entries is down slightly from last years, when DOK Leipzig received a record 3,012 entries. The 55th edition of DOK Leipzig will take place from 29 October to 4 November 2012.

Around 75 films will be selected from among the entries to compete for the Golden Dove awards in the five competition sections. In all, DOK Leipzig will showcase around 200 documentaries and 150 short animated films. In addition, the festival will present a number of special programs and tributes. This year's retrospective will be on the German-Russian film studio Mezhrabpom, whose films in the 1920s and '30s inspired the entire European film avant-garde. The traditional country focus will be devoted to the young documentary cinema of Spanish-speaking Latin America. Awaiting animation enthusiasts at DOK Leipzig will be a journey of discovery through a century of Polish puppet anima- tion. Shortly before the presidential election in the United States, the festival will pay tribute with its special program on democracy to the U.S. documentary showcase "POV" ("Point of View"), which is celebrating its 25th anniversary this year. Photo: Patricio Guzman, previous guest at the festival, for sure an inspiration for the young Latin American filmmakers coming to Leipzig.

www.dok-leipzig.de

Message to Man St. Petersburg

There are 11 feature length documentaries in the international competition of the Message to Man festival that takes place September 22-29. There are well known festival hits and winners like ”Bad Weather” (Giovanni Giommi), ”The Collaborator and His Family” (Adi Barash and Ruthie Shatz), ”Planet of Snails” (Seung-Jun Yi) and ”Bakhmaro” (Salome Jashi), but also a bordercrossing (between fiction and documentary) film like ”Summer of Giacomo” by Italian Alessandro Comodin. And this film blogger, who was in the jury of the festival two years ago, looks forward to watch Jerome Lemaire’s documentary from Marocco, ”Tea or Electricity”, as well as ”Miner’s Hymns” by Bill Morrison and Antoine Cattin/Pavel Kostomarov ”Playback”.

The festival includes several sections with short films, animation/fiction/documentary and has a national documentary competition, ”Gateway to Russia”, 23 films, long and short. Sergey Miroshnichenko presents his much awaited ”Born in the USSR: 28 UP”, built on the concept that was introduced by Michael Apted with ”7 UP”. The audience will also have the chance to watch talented Sergey Kachin’s ”On the Way Home”.

The festival has special programmes that are intriguing, like a chance to see films by the pioneer Vladislav Starevich, a section called ”nuclear propaganda” and a true film historical focus, the Oberhausen manifest that was made 50 years ago:

"The old film is dead. We believe in the new one." On 28 February 1962, at the 8th West German Short Film Festival in Oberhausen, 26 West German filmmakers proclaimed the Oberhausen Manifesto. This moment marked a milestone in the development of German cinema – never before, and never again, would a break with existing production conditions be demanded, and induced, with such vehemence. On the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the Oberhausen Manifesto, the project "Provoking Reality – 50 Years of the Oberhausen Manifesto" provides a concrete basis for addressing this proclamation and related 1960s movements aiming at cinematic, cultural and political renewal in Germany.

http://message2man.com/eng/

Viktor Kossakovsky: My Top 10

Every year the film festival in Amsterdam, idfa, asks well known filmmakers to pick their favourites. This year Viktor Kossakovsky has made his choice. This is a text taken from the website of idfa:

According to Kossakovsky, the films in his Top 10 are films that challenged him when he first saw them, and again on revisiting them recently. They are films which, instead of trying to tell you something, try to show you something. According to Kossakovsky, if you were to add up all the new elements these films have added to the language of cinema, you would have the perfect documentary alphabet.

Look at the Face by Pavel Kogan (Russia, 1968)

Man of Aran by Robert Flaherty (United Kingdom, 1931)

Man with a Movie Camera by Dziga Vertov (Ukraine, 1929)

Our Mother is a Hero by Nikolai Obukhovich (Russia, 1979)

Position Among the Stars by Leonard Retel Helmrich (the Netherlands, 2010)

Seasons of the Year by Artavazd Pelechian (Armenia, 1975)

Spiritual Voices by Alexander Sokurov (Russia, 1995)

Ten Minutes Older by Herz Frank (Latvia, 1987) (Photo)

A Tram Runs Through the City by Ludmila Stanukinas (Russia, 1973)

Workingman’s Death by Michael Glawogger (Germany/Austria, 2005)

... how many of them did you see?

Baltic Sea Forum 2012/ 1

It is the third day of the Baltic Sea Forum 2012. A workshop goes on during the day, where 24 projects are being evaluated, trailers and teasers are being adjusted, wordings discussed – in order to have the filmmakers be focused on the pitching of their projects. Saturday and sunday a panel of 12 broadcasters and distributors will comment on what they hear and see. It is the 16th edition of the Forum, the format is well known and for many of the filmmakers this is the first step into a documentary market that is full of declining budgets and slots when it comes to television.

These were the words used by Charlie Phillips from Sheffield DocFest, who made a brilliant lecture this friday afternoon in the Cinema K. Suns. Phillips gave ”a overview of the documentary life on new platforms, recent developments and some succesful case studies”. The most interesting for me, who for Phillips is part of ”the old world”, 35+ (!), that is full of ”frustrated distributors and audiences” and only offer ”linear stories”, was his listing of online distribution platforms and examples of interactive projects, that – no surprise – included a couple of high class from National Film Board of Canada (NFB): ”Bears” and ”Welcome to Pinepoint”. ”Who pays” was the headline of one of the last pages Phillips put on screen – maybe it should have been ”who should pay?” because this is where the problem lies: The new fascinating and in perspective very important new ways for the documentary, both in terms of distribution and storytelling, do not yet have business models that can help the producers. Apart from some examples within arte, the NFB and funds like the Tribeca New Media Fund.

The day today also gave time to pay a visit to the cemetery where Juris Podnieks (photo) is buried. The perestroika director (”Is it Easy to be Young?”, ”Homeland”, ”Hello do You Hear Us?”...) died 20 years ago, June 23 1992. A couple of months before he attended the Baltic Film & TV Festival on the island of Bornholm, he gave an excellent masterclass and expressed the ambition to make personal films, ”no more political films”, he said. Audrius Stonys, Lithuanian director and I were at the masterclass on Bornholm and at Podnieks grave today brought there by Antra Cilinska, Podnieks colleague, producer, director and editor, who is today running Juris Podnieks Studio.

http://www.mediadesklatvia.eu/baltic-sea-forum-for-documentaries-2012/

Fatima Varhos: Bergmans video 3. afsnit

OK, det er et tv-program, og jeg finder mig i rammerne, når jeg får disse interviews, disse møder med instruktørerne rundt om i verden så generøst. Og heldigvis i samlede blokke, én ad gangen, så jeg lige kan nå at være til stede i samværet. Man kan jo bare vælge. Og jeg vælger Zhang Yimou, som han sidder der bag sit bord i Peking som Bergman dengang sad bag sit på Fårö. Disse ryddede bordplader. I det kinesiske selskab kunne jeg gerne være blevet meget længere. Så fremragende medvirkende redder enhver film og tv-program, dygtighed kan ikke holdes nede. Zhang Yimou talte faktisk også om Bergman og skal lige citeres for bemærkningen om, at Bergman ikke forenklede, han gjorde det modsatte, løftede meneskelivet med problemerne, vi alle har, til et åndeligt niveau. Der kunne det ses og måske forstås i sin helhed. Bergmans antropologi.

Og jeg vælger Francis Ford Coppola, som han sidder der i sin vingård og fortæller om at flytte hjem, eksistens og kunstnerisk arbejde fra filmbyens voldsomme økonomiske omklamring til friheden sammen med vennerne og de overskuelige projekter med mindre film, artfilm, som han, som de selv styrer. Et eksil i vinmarker på et vinslot fyldt med samlinger af bøger og videoer som hos Bergman på Fårö.  

Fatima Varhos: Bergmans video, Sverige 2012. Seks tv-programmer i serie. En række interviews ved Jane Magnusson og Hynek Pallas. 3. afsnit set på SVT1 i onsdags. Afsnit 1-3 kan i nogen tid ses på SVT hjemmeside 4. afsnit sendes 12. september 21:00.

Vurdering:

Fatima Varhos: Bergmans video 2. afsnit

Så er Alejandro González Iñárritu (Babel og Biutiful) igen kommet til Fårö, som for ham er et af filmhistoriens vigtigste valfartssteder, ja, for netop ham, tror jeg, det allervigtigste. Her er han på stranden, location for Persona, og han er grebet af situationen, og da han er en ukunstlet, helt igennem autentisk medvirkende i Bergmanseriens afsnit 2, gribes jeg pludselig også. 

Iñárritu har forsøgt at finde Bergmans hus engang tidligere. Det mislykkedes, for når han spurgte om vej, ledte de lokale ham på vildspor. Med ét var det gået op for ham, at de beskyttede deres nabo, passede på Bergman. Anekdoten er jo smuk, fordi den på én gang fortæller troværdigt om Bergman og hans forhold til de nærmeste og om denne empatisk ekspressive mexikanske filminstruktør, som har krop og intelligens til at fylde rollen som gæst på Bergmans sted, i hans stuer, blandt hans bøger og så denne videosamling. Han har valgt at besøge huset om natten, han går omkring og kigger, men forsigtigere end den forrige gæst. Høfligere. Ærbødig måske. Han tager sit pendul frem, og ja, det begynder at svinge. Bergman er til stede.

Og sådan er det, Iñárritu ved vist nok meget om Bergman, holder fokus (hvis det er filmens fokus?) og taler om Bergman og om døden, som i del 2 er temaet. Forinden har Woody Allen i sit interview talt om Bergman hele tiden. Og det styrker i mine øjne projektet, som har det diskutable udgangspunkt, at når en instruktørs værk er repræsenteret i Bergmans videosamling, er dette værk og dets instruktør interessant for Bergmanforståelsen. Man har vel tænkt på den måde indirekte at skrive et nyt filmhistorisk essay om Bergmans værk. Men de to andre medvirkende Gus van Sant (Elephant, 2003) og Agnieszka Holland (The Wire, 2004-08) taler, så vidt jeg bagefter huske, kun om deres egne film og så om døden, som de skal. Og de er bestemt spændende bekendtskaber, og så er det jeg kommer på den tanke, at Fatima Varhos idé med sin tv-serie er at skildre samtidens filmkunst internationalt i en række enkeltstudier alene holdt sammen af det forhold, at de (måske tilfældigt) står på videoreolen i Fåröhuset? Altså tredobbelt fokus? Jeg er forvirret, for opmærksomheden skifter, uanfægtet ser det ud til, mellem Bergmanstudium, tema (komedie sidst, døden nu) og de medvirkende instruktørers film.

Imidlertid var det i aftes interessante møder med interessante personer, og de bevæger serien mod et ok for mig. Men der er ikke meget nyt føjet til billedet af den store svenske instruktør, som lægger hus til.

Fatima Varhos: Bergmans video, Sverige 2012. Seks tv-programmer i serie. En række interviews ved Jane Magnusson og Hynek Pallas. 2. afsnit set på SVT1 i aftes. Kan ses på http://www.svt.se/bergmans-video/ 3. afsnit sendes 5. september 21:00.

Vurdering:

Jean Rouch Tribute

Icarus Films in New York has a strong, high quality catalogue, including several works by Chris Marker, who died end of July this year. This week the company pulished the good news that it has acquired North American distribution rights to six films by “legendary French filmmaker and ethnographer Jean Rouch”.

The press release, that gives a gives a first intro to the filmmaker goes like this:

A founder of cinéma vérité, Rouch is widely recognized as one of the world’s most significant documentary filmmakers, but much of his filmography has long been unavailable in the United States. The six titles Icarus Films has acquired number among his most highly regarded productions: two shorts, LES MAÎTRES FOUS (1955) and MAMMY WATER (1956), and four features: MOI, UN NOIR (1957), THE LION HUNTERS (LE CHASSE AU LION A L’ARC) (1965), JAGUAR (1967), and LITTLE BY LITTLE (PETIT À PETIT) (1969).

Between 1946, when he made his first film in Niger, and his death in 2004, Rouch produced more than 100 films, most of them on African subjects. From his position as a researcher at France’s National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS), he became “one of the most creative forces in ethnographic film and one of its most vigorous challengers.” (Pat Aufderheide, Documentary Film: A Very Short Introduction) “No one”, Gilles Deleuze said of Rouch, “has done so much…to break with a cinema of ethnology.”

The period in which Rouch produced the six films Icarus has acquired represents the most sustained flourishing of his practice of “shared anthropology,” a process of collaboration with his subjects that he described as a “type of participatory research,” which he said, “appears to me to be the only morally and scientifically feasible anthropological attitude today.”

Among this group are Rouch’s two best-known films: LES MAÎTRES FOUS,

Theodor Christensen: Det gælder din frihed

Theodor. Han blev aldrig kaldt andet, manden der optræder i enhver dansk filmhistorisk fremstilling som den danske filmiske dokumentarismes store teoretiker, manden bag besættelsestidens mesterlige modstandsfilm ”Det gælder din frihed”. Theodor, som Cinemateket har kredset om ved et par lejligheder og nu gør det igen i denne måned på mærkedagen 29. August. Dette står at læse som introduktion på hjemmesiden:

”'Det gælder din frihed' er en både poetisk og polemisk beretning om Danmark under krigen – og ikke mindst en hudfletning af samarbejdspolitikken, som magthavere både dengang og siden har prøvet at nedtone.

Filmen brød med skolemester-traditionen. Karl Roos’ titeldigt reciteres med lavmælt intensitet, billeder af tomme statsgemakker bliver brugt metaforisk, og alt i alt er det en af de mest filmiske og langtidsholdbare dokumentarer, der er skabt herhjemme. Den blev søgt omformet af Staten, boykottet af biografer og kaldt propagandistisk af Ekstra Bladet. Men Theodor Christensen kæmpede som besat og stod fast på sit projekt. Det gjaldt hans kunstneriske frihed, som det gjaldt danskernes politiske.

Den 29. august, på årsdagen for "det mest forsinkede nej i danmarkshistorien", nemlig samarbejdspolitikkens officielle ophør, vil filmforsker Lars-Martin Sørensen introducere filmen.”

Og så lige et citat fra Theodor selv, fra 1948, stadig aktuelt, ikke sandt: Ved at nævne navnet dokumentarisk i flæng på 117 forskellige filmformer har man skabt kaotisk forvirring. Ikke mindst for de mange nye i den hastigt voksende dokumentariske filmstab er det desorienterende.

Danmark, 1946, 107 mins.

www.dfi.dk 

MandagsDokumentaren 10 år

Se, hvad turisten ser,
den navnløse by, 
strømmen, som bærer København og dens ry, 
de tusind cykelpi’er,
et brus af nikkelstyr, 
sikke pi’er, 
tag og kys dem alle fra mig!
- Poul Henningsen, Cykelsangen (1935)

Jo, det er den herlige sang fra PH’s Danmarksfilm, som er den oplagte fødselsdagsfilm for det enestående initiativ, som Ebbe Preisler satte i gang for 10 år siden med PH Caféen på Vesterbro i København som den biograf, hvor et væld af vigtige kort- og dokumentarfilm, danske og udenlandske, er blevet vist, altid med tilstedeværelse af instruktør eller anden til film eller emne knyttet person.

Danmarksfilmen, fra 1935, ofte omtalt som den første egentlige danske dokumentarfilm, bliver vist mandag den 3. September med et indledende fødselsdagsprogram, der også omfatter biografdirektør Preisler, der fylder 70.

Tillykke!

www.mandagsdokumentar.dk

Glawogger Visits Copenhagen

NY Times brought the most precise headline to an article about the films of Austrian filmmaker Michael Glawogger’s impressive work: A World of Troubled Beauty – referring to his trilogy ”Megacities”, ”Workingman’s Death” and ”Whore’s Glory”.

The latter, ”Whore’s Glory” – in the presence of the director – having met him on similar occasions I can guarantee an interesting debate and a clever insight to what filmmaking is – is screened in Copenhagen in Cinemateket August 24.

I can only say, buy yourself a ticket and if you want to know more, use the links below.

http://www.whoresglory.com/

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/15/movies/a-look-inside-the-films-of-michael-glawogger.html

http://www.dfi.dk/Filmhuset/Arrangementer/Arrangementer-i-Filmhuset/2012/August-2012/Moed-Michael-Glawogger.aspx

Georges Franju

A great director, not very well known today, but for this film blogger his “Le Sang des betes” (1949, 22 mins.) from a slaughterhouse in the Parisian suburb, is a unique  masterpiece in the history of documentary films. The film can be bought through Aamazon or watched in different language version on YouTube. If you happen to be in Donostia late September, you will able to see more of Franju’s oeuvre. This is taken from the site of the festival in San Sebastian:

French filmmaker Georges Franju is to be the subject of one the retrospectives programmed for the 60th San Sebastian Festival to take place from 21-29 September 2012.

Georges Franju (12-4-1912 / 5-11-1987) was an enormously influential figure in French film culture. In 1936 he founded the Cinémathèque Française with Henri Langlois. His career as a director began in 1949 with documentaries, a field to which he contributed some of the greatest titles ever in the genre. His early works - Le Sang des bêtes, Hôtel des Invalides and En passant par la Lorraine – already demonstrated his particular talent for filming reality from unexpected angles, a trait leading in these testimonial films to a sensitivity akin to surrealism and expressionism.

Franju’s obsession with putting his finger on the inexpressible poetry of things through his lens stayed with him as he moved on to feature films with La Tête contre les murs (Head Against the Wall,1958), followed by Les Yeux sans visage (Eyes Without a Face,1959), considered to be a masterpiece of fantasy film. His fascination with popular culture, with the feuilleton soap-operas and silent film serials, is clearly visible in movies like Pleins feux sur l’assassin (1960), Judex (1963) and Nuits rouges (1974), true exercises in style striving to recover the innocence of those old narrations of intrigue and mystery in an obvious vindication of film as visual, narrative pleasure. But Franju was also known for his skilful adaptations of classic literary works on which he unfailingly left his personal stamp: François Mauriac (Thérèse Desqueyroux / Therese, 1962), Émile Zola (La faute de l’Abbé Mouret / The Demise of Father Mouret, 1970), Joseph Conrad (La Ligne d’ombre, 1973) and Jean Cocteau (Thomas l’imposteur / Thomas the Imposter, 1964). Today unjustly forgotten, Franju’s work enjoyed great critical acclaim in its time and earned him the admiration of the young filmmakers of the nouvelle vague.

http://www.sansebastianfestival.com/in/

Chris Marker (1921-2012)

Chris Marker died today, filmkommentaren has written far too little about him, but here is a quote from the obituary of today in Guardian, please read the whole article and below also two links to what we have written about him, in English and Danish:

"The essay film, a form pitched between documentary and personal reflection, exploring the subjectivity of the cinematic perspective, has now become an accepted genre. Jean-Marie Straub, Danièle Huillet,Jean-Luc Godard, Errol Morris and Michael Moore are among its main recent exponents, but Chris Marker, who has died aged 91, was credited with inventing the form.

Marker's creative use of sound, images and text in his poetic, political and philosophical documentaries made him one of the most inventive of film-makers. They looked forward to what is called "the new documentary", but also looked back to the literary essay in the tradition of Michel de Montaigne. Marker's interests lay in transitional societies – "life in the process of becoming history," as he put it. How do various cultures perceive and sustain themselves and each other in the increasingly intermingled modern world?"

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2012/jul/30/chris-marker

http://www.filmkommentaren.dk/blog/blogpost/234/

http://www.filmkommentaren.dk/blog/blogpost/231/

Kevin Macdonald: One Day in September

Den er fra 1999, den er en klassiker i dag, og den vil blive stående som klassiker i filmlitteraturen i fremtiden. Som sådan er den altid aktuel, ikke kun fordi der nu er olympiade (den foregår som bekendt under olympiaden i München 1972), men fordi den handler om grusom vold af den slags, nogle kalder terror, andre kalder krig, og om troskyldighedens nederlag med sin manglende professionalisme i den forbindelse.

Jeg så på Dokumania i tirsdags, at den film i sine centrale dele holder styrken efter tretten år, med langsomheden frem for hastværket, med koncentrationen frem for overfladiskheden, med fremstillingens ro midt i begivenhedernes forvirring, som den skildrer. Altså især i konstruktionens og fortællingens centrale elementer. Der er for mig at se disse fire:

Der er den kronologiske beretning (vældig støttet af Michael Douglas’ fortællerstemme) af selve begivenhedsforløbet fra gidseltagningens forberedelse over dens pinefulde faser til til det forfærdende slutspil i lufthavnen, fortalt som en nedtælling minut for minut.

Der er det store gennemgående interview med en af gidseltagerne (formodentlig den eneste overlevende), som ser aktionen, som han kalder det, som en krigshandling.

Der er her overfor interviewet med chefen for den israelske efterretningstjeneste, som må se magtesløs til, mens han nøgternt noterer sig alle de fejl, de tyske politifolk begår fra øverst til nederst, fra først til sidst.

Og der er endelig heroverfor igen den tyske general, som kynisk erindrer det samme, han, som derefter fik til opgave at udvikle et fuldt ud professionelt tysk antiterrorkorps.

Dette er filmens umistelige kerne. Dens overflødige og sentimentale rammeværk vil blive glemt, og det gør ikke noget. Dramaets detaljer og de tre interviews’ nøgterne sagkundskab inden for det fag bliver i sindet al tid – som klassisk filmkunst.

Tue Steen Müller har her på siden dels refereret et interview med den meget flittige instruktør Kevin Macdonald i hans syn på dokumentarfilms udvidede muligheder i dag dels nævnt ham i forbindelse med en lang række festvals, hvor hans film har været vist, senest festivalen i Tel Aviv, april i år, hvor hans helt nye Marley var den ene af to åbningsfilm. Andre film bør nævnes: Touching the Void, 2005, My Enemy's Enemy, 2007, som kan ses på filmstriben.dk og Life in a Day, 2010, filmen han taler om i det nævnte interview.

Vurdering:

Emmanuel Laurent: Two in the Wave

A tour down memory lane. And can’t help it – It still brings a tear to the eye to watch Jean-Pierre Léaud run towards the sea, stop and look at us in the end scene of ”The 400 Blows”, the first long film of Truffaut from 1959. As it brings a smile to watch Jean-Paul Belmondo do his Bogart face imitation in ”Breathless” by Godard from 1960. Or see Jean Seberg stand in front of a poster of a painting by Renoir. It was in the 60’es I got my film education and La Nouvelle Vague with Truffaut and Godard were my heroes followed by Agnès Varda, Eric Rohmer, Jacques Rivette (later) and Claude Chabrol. So this film by Emmanuel Laurent could only be pure pleasure, and it was.

The idea of the film is to give us the story of two friends, who met each other in 1949, worked together for years, wrote critiques in Cahiers du Cinema, had their heroes (Truffaut: Hitchcock, Godard: Rossellini and Lang), fought  against the dismissal of Langlois at the Cinématheque, and were on the barricades at the festival in Cannes in 1968 as well as in the streets of Paris in May the same year. And then the break came with the famous letters – Godard who attacked Truffaut in connection with ”Day for Night” (La Nuit Américaine) for being a liar, getting back a 20 page letter against Godard turning political. (The letters can be read on the French website below).

As film history, with clips from the films, with a lot of archive interviews with both of them, it is all there and well put together. Whereas the core/red thread of the story with Jean-Pierre Léaud as the kid and young man with two fathers, not only being the ”petit frère” of Truffaut, the Antoine Doinel, but also the marxist agitator in several of Godard’s political works, is not really convincingly integrated in the narrative, even if it is a brilliant and more than relevant approach. Another detail that does not work is the presence of a young female director of today, who walks around ”discovering” what happened then. Could have done without that in a film that otherwise calls for another view and is a Must-See for all film students. And thanks for the end:

Jean-Pierre Léaud at the casting for the role in ”The 400 Blows”.   

France, 2010, 93 mins.

http://www.boxoffice.com/articles/2010-05-emmanuel-laurent-talks-two-in-the-wave

http://coulissesdelaculture.wordpress.com/2011/01/18/«-deux-de-la-vague-»-cinema-politique-et-le-desamour-artistique-de-godard-et-truffaut/

Vurdering:

Patricio Guzman: The Power of Memory

The BFI (British Film Institute) has been running a retrospective (ends July 26) with films by Patricio Guzman, having ”Nostalgia for the Light” as the recent highlight of the Chilean master director. In an article to be read on the website of the BFI, critic Geoff Andrew writes:

A couple of years ago, at the Cannes Film Festival, I fell in love. The object of my affections was a film – Nostalgia for the Light (Nostalgia de la luz), by Patricio Guzmán, the exiled Chilean documentarist famous for the three-part 1970s epic The Battle of Chile (La batalla de Chile) – and my desire was to programme it in an extended run at BFI Southbank. It took a while, but my dream came true, thanks to the UK distributor New Wave Films; not only that, but we’re accompanying the run with a retrospective of Guzmán’s earlier work and welcoming the director on-stage for an interview with the season’s curator, Michael Chanan. What, you may ask, were the characteristics that gave rise to this love at first sight? My first response, admittedly somewhat predictably, would be ‘beauty’; visually, Nostalgia for the Light is quite wonderful to behold. But rest assured that its beauty is more than skin-deep; it is notable for its quiet, deeply compassionate humanity. Still, many films are beautiful, and I don’t fall in love with each and every one of them. The real reason for my ardour, I suspect, was the fact that the film stood out from the crowd, from its mysterious opening scene to its profoundly moving ending; in short, it immediately struck me as unique. That’s extremely rare in an artform as genre-oriented as the cinema. And what more could one possibly ask of a love-object?...

Guzman is often considered as a political filmmaker but in connection with the release of ”Nostalgia for the Light”, he writes: "I'm not a sociologist. Neither am I a politician. I make films that are metaphorical and poetic; I interpret reality through my own personal way of looking."

http://www.bfi.org.uk/news/falling-nostalgia-light

Ravello Observations

Classic Italian town: Piazza Duomo, with the dome on the main square surrounded by cafés, meeting points for locals (only 3000 outside the season) and in July tourists like us, who enjoy the overwhelmingly bella vista to the Amalfi Coast. In a few days you slow down and find your routine of walking to the square in the still bearable morning temperature, have your cappucino and brioche to sit down and greet by-passers, who fall in love with the blond, blue-eyed nine month old baby, who is here with his parents, one of them the niece of my wife, who has invited the four of us to celebrate her birthday. Back to the holiday appartments and the swimming pool, equipped with the pink La Gazetta Sportiva, just one of the daily newspapers totally dedicated to sport, mostly gossip about the transfers of Italian soccers teams, the big issue these days being the possible move of Zlatan Ibrahimovic from Milan to PSG Germain in Paris. The 40 page newspaper is about sport all over including 4-6 pages about the world around us like the constant massacres in Syria!

Siesta... and then the fabulous cooler evenings of finding a good outside restaurant to have a dinner, an espresso and a grappa.

Back to the square that in 1953 housed John Huston and his film team – according to a plaquette on the wall of a house in Viale Wagner (yes, the composer was here) – during their planning and shooting of ”Beat the Devil” casting Humphrey Bogart, Jennifer Jones, Gina Lollobrigida and Peter Lorre in a film that had Truman Capote as co-scriptwriter, a film that Wikipeaks notes was made out of a script fabricated from day to day with a doutable end result – you can watch the film in its entire duration online. It has been declared ”public domaine”.

Danish poster to the film, title: Fuld af løgn.

Magnificent7 Summer Edition 2012

On the 9th, 10th and 11th of July the Belgrade feature documentary film festival Magnificent7 organises a high quality programme of music documentary films. This is how it is announced on the website:

”“The Magnificent Seven” at BELEF is an exclusive summer edition of the modern theatrical documentary anthology as a special festival’s presentation within Belgrade summer art festival BELEF 2012 – THE FESTIVAL OF FESTIVALS. The festival’s program is always made up of contrasting creations, without limitations regarding theme and style, where only high artistic criteria plays a role. But for “The Magnificent Seven” at BELEF we have created a selection framework - films that in different ways deal with the phenomenon of music. Music documentary is one of the most evolved forms of documentary filmmaking and some of the greatest film directors like Wim Wenders and Martin Scorsese have given their contribution to this genre. Our intent is to present those films which explore the complicated role music plays in our individual and collective life from a sociological, psychological, and anthropological standpoint, films which in surprising manner confirm the exquisite importance of music in contemporary and traditional culture.

Before each projection begins the audience will be given details about the film, it’s topic and the authors. There will be no entrance fee for any of the programs.

Among the films are neo-classics like “Saudade do Futuro” (2000) by Marie-Clémence and César Paës and “Lagrimas Negras” (1998, PHOTO) by Sonia Herman Dolz, the latter that for this blogger is a much better artistic film about Cuban music than the one of Wim Wenders. Also to be screened are the two Dutch “The Sound of Bandoneon” (Jiska Rikels, 2011) and “About Canto” (Ramón Gieling, 2011).

magnificent7festival.org

Sunny Side 2012: Yves Jeanneau Interview

The excellent French-language Le Blog Documentaire (more about that on a later occasion) has published an interesting interview (this time in English) with the director of the Sunny Side of the Doc that opened yesterday in la Rochelle:

Here is a clip from the opening of the talk with Jeanneau’s answer to why he chose the theme ”Resistances, support the power of documentary” for 2012:

Sunny Side’s point of view is neither French nor european, it is international. Everybody noticed that last year was marked by major upheavals, particulary in the Arab world. Resistances, in plural, because we are living in a word in crisis, particularly in the Middle East. Resistances are, for me, one of the ontological characteristics of documentary film – its rebellious side. In every crisis, or almost, we see a renewal of the international community of documentary film. A new responsibility appears.

During the Arab spring, we saw new players appear, making documentaries as they had never been made before. They used their mobile phone because no other means was available. In cities, in the countryside, people started making films very quickly, sometime broadcast on cobbled-together channels, sometime shown in festivals. This movement provoked new meetings, discussions and exchanges. In this way, documentary film can be seen to play a very real role in resistance. Today these film makers are uniting, coming together to form a new middle-eastern community, which is worth following.

Read the interview on

http://cinemadocumentaire.wordpress.com/sunny-side-2012-an-interview-with-yves-jeanneau/

The Guardian: Destination Docs

The British newspaper, always strong on cinema, has launched a series of (sponsored) articles named “Destination Docs”, published in connection with the Sheffield DocFest. The headline goes like this, “Despite new documentary formats, traditional fact-based films still attract impressive audiences – and offer value for money”. The series reminds you of the constant documentary dominance in the UK of the broadcasting companies, contrary to the rest of Europe, it is good reading, even more so when the floor is given to one of the best documentarians of today, Molly Dineen:

“Bafta-winning documentary maker Molly Dineen believes Channel 4 has shown bravery in the past with its factual shows, but has a word of caution to all the broadcasters. "Channel 4 is still very cool for factual, but it needs to be stretched by the subject matter. There's a risk that all channels are suffering an unhealthy pressure for docs to become more light, sexy, cheap and overly dramatic.

"The adventure has got to be in tackling issues that need to be tackled, that could be expensive and unpopular. Filming real-life is expensive; structured reality is not," warns Dineen.

Channel 4 also risks losing out to competition from the web, she says. "There needs to be collusion between the mainstream and what young filmmakers are shooting [for the web] and their motivation." Dineen adds: "If C4 let too much of the genuine political underbelly of documentary move to the web, then they could be sunk because telly will then just be advertising and titillation, and the serious look at life will end up on the web."

Molly Dineen's documentaries will be out on dvd thanks to the British Film Institute: a three-volume collection. The first volume, out on 25 April, contains Home from the Hill, My African Farm, Heart of the Angel and In the Company of Men, her three-part examination of Welsh Guardsmen on a final tour of duty in pre-ceasefire Belfast.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2012/jun/11/factuals-big-fat-viewing-figures

Moscow Exhibition of Film and Art

As part of the upcoming MIFF (Moscow International Film Festival) that runs from June 21 – 30 and again this year includes a competiton programme of documentaries as well as Panorama documentary section, you can go to Moscow to attend a Media Forum that looks quite interesting and intriguing.

The curator and founder of the programme, Olga Shishko, explains: "The Media Forum is a programme at the Moscow Film Festival which has been created especially to expand the familiar borders of cinema and to show that it can vary not only both in content and artistic construction of the text, but also from the formal point of view, the technology of its making and the viewing situation. The language that Media Forum uses to talk to its audience belongs to both cinematic and artistic principles, enriching them both equally…”

At the Ekaterina Cultural Foundation (June 22 – August 19) this is what is going on, a text taken from the site of the Forum:

Exhibition "The Immersions. Towards the Tactile Cinema" consists of several sections each belonging to a certain type of director’s approach to working with screen and viewer. The first section, Pure Cinema, is a reaction to art for art’ sake. Here screen is used as a canvas, actually presenting cinema as an apotheosis of painting. Works by Kazimir Malevich, Mikhail Matyushin, Nam June Paik, Ken Jacobs, Paul Clipson, Hans Richter, Konstantin Adzher, Oleg and Olda Ponomarev are presented.

Attractions’ Montage, the second section, is based on the “4D cinema” concept invented initially by Sergei Eisenstein and presents his followers: Pia Tikka, Herz Frank (photo from “10 Minutes Older, 1968, camera Juris Podnieks), Alexei Isaev and Elena Gorbacheva.

The third section, Tactile Cinema, is about films that can be “watched with hands”, starting with Salvador Dali’s ideas. While working with Luis Bunuel, Dali had quite another vision of the Chien Andalou realization. This is followed by Peter Weibel’s and VALIE EXPORT’s “gripping watching” (beside which works by the TOT-ART group, Valery Ayzenberg, Ekaterina Pavlova and Constantin Semin are presented).

The forth section explores the Machine vision idea by Woody and Steina Vasulkas — a device that can replace both the film director and the viewer, supplanting individual and inaccurate human vision by an objective gaze of the camera itself. Here Ken Jacobs, Dina Karaman and Alexandra Kuznetsova are also presented.

The Interactive Cinema that unfolds with viewers’ participation is the fifth section comprised of works by Zbigniew Rybczyński, Chris Hales, Boris Debackere, Perry Bard, Mark Amerika and Olga Kisseleva.

http://mediaforum.mediaartlab.ru/en/about/

http://moscowfilmfestival.ru/miff34/eng

Photography and Photographers

Copenhagen Photo Festival runs until June 17 with exhibitions all around the city. The Danish Film Institute joins the event with an offer to access 6 fine films online – if you are living in Denmark. Therefore this change to Danish language:

Og det er en flot lille samling som DFI tilbyder københavnerne at se gratis i Filmhusets videotek (åbent tirsdag og torsdag 12-19, onsdag og fredag 12-16) eller via filmstriben (spørg om dette på dit lokale bibliotek, hvis du ikke kender ordningen):

DFI kalder serien for ”Nærvær/ om fotografer og fotografi” med brug af titlen, ”Nærvær”, på svenske Jan Troells smukke film om sin ven og kollega Georg Oddner, en film som allle dokumentarister bør se, dels på grund af dens kvalitet, dels fordi Oddner siger så mange vigtige og inspirerende ting om sin métier.

Steen Møller Rasmussen, selv en fremragende fotograf, serverer 33 intense minutter med sin ”Fotografi” (2006), hvor han lader publikum møde Keld Helmer Petersen, Per Bak Jensen, Krass Clement og Kirsten Klein. Det er så stramt og præcist, som kun Møller Rasmussen kan gøre det. Uden ligegyldige omsvøb.

Omsvøb, i form af veloplagte og velfortalte anekdoter, er der til gengæld i Jørgen Roos 13 minutter lange kortfilmklassiker om hans elskede H.C. Andersen, en film der baserer sig på ca. 160 forskellige billeder taget af digteren fra han var 45 år.  

Robert Fox ”Flash of a Dream” (2002) giver os historien om Jacob A. Riis, Kai Michelsen lavede sammen med Ole Brage fra DR ”Et andet København 1870-1910” (1980), en uvurderlig ikonografisk dokumentar bygget på fotografier fra Københavns bymuseum, og som endnu en gave til et fotointeresseret publikum kan man se Troells spillefilm ”Maria Larssons evige øjeblik”, hvor Jesper Christensen spiller fotograf Pedersen. Herligt!

Foto af Georg Oddner fra Jan Troells film "Nærvær".

http://www.dfi.dk/FaktaOmFilm/Film-til-biblioteker/Filmtemaer/Naervaer.aspx

25 Best Documentaries - American View

It is old news, but still interesting to look at, as it lists the 25 films that the 3000 members of the IDA (International Documentary Association) announced as the best documentaries ever in connection with the celebration of the association's 25 years in 2007. Here it goes, they are all good films, you should definitely watch them if you have not done so already, but where are the European films – apart from a few – where is “Shoah”, where is a film by Sokurov, Herz Frank, Dvortsevoy, Kossakovsky, Patricio Guzman, Pierre Perrault, Jean Rouch and so on, so forth. The members of IDA chose the 25 from a list of 700.

1. "Hoop Dreams," (photo) directed by Steve James, Peter Gilbert and Frederick Marx 
2. "The Thin Blue Line," directed by Errol Morris
 3. "Bowling for Columbine," directed by Michael Moore
 4. "Spellbound," directed by Jeffery Blitz
 5. "Harlan County USA," directed by Barbara Kopple
 6. "An Inconvenient Truth," directed by Davis Guggenheim
 7. "Crumb," directed by Terry Zwigoff's Crumb 
8. "Gimme Shelter," directed by Albert and David Maysles and Charlotte Zwerin
 9. "The Fog of War," directed by Errol Morris
 10. "Roger and Me," directed by Michael Moore
11. "Super Size Me," directed by Morgan Spurlock 
12. "Don't Look Back," directed by DA Pennebaker
 13. "Salesman," directed by Albert and David Maysles 
14. "Koyaanisqatsi: Life Out of Balance," directed by Godfrey Reggio 
15. "Sherman's March," directed by Ross McElwee 
16. "Grey Gardens," directed by Albert and David Maysles, Ellen Hovde and Muffie Meyer 
17. "Capturing the Friedmans," directed by Andrew Jarecki
 18. "Born into Brothels," directed by Ross Kauffman and Zana Briski
19. "Titticut Follies," directed by Frederick Wiseman 
20. "Buena Vista Social Club," directed by Wim Wenders 
21. "Fahrenheit 9/11," directed by Michael Moore 
22. "Winged Migration," directed by Jacques Perrin 
23. "Grizzly Man," directed by Werner Herzog
 24. "Night and Fog," directed by Alain Resnais
 25. "Woodstock," directed by Michael Wadleigh.

http://www.documentary.org/

link to www.indiewire.com

Lee Miller

The Danish Øregård Museum in the North of Copenhagen hosts currently an exhibition of works of legendary model, surrealist and war photographer Lee Miller (1907-77).

Her role is known as part of the surrealist movement in the Parisian Montparnasse period, she was the muse of Man Ray and a photo documentarian of all the gurus of the art revolution of the 19020'es, like Dali, Max Ernst and Picasso. But she was also a war photographer, who documented, what she saw when the concentration camps were freed by the allied forces. Horrible pictures of piled up corpses, of SS-men beaten up or killed, very strong pictures which stand in contrast to the picture of Lee Miller in the bathtub of Hitler in Munich, a picture taken by American photographer David Scherman, who takes part in the documentary, see below, made in 1995. ”She was always for the extraordinary”, says Scherman, who thinks she was best in pictures that included arrangements, more than she was a classic war correspondent. Take a look!

OBS: For the Danish and/or visitors to Copenhagen – the exhibition is open until June 20. The DR K has shown a tv documentary made by Helle Retbøll Carl, based on an interview with the son of Lee Miller and Ronald Penrose, the surrealist painter who died in 1984. On the same channel, that often schedules re-runs, the very good documentary by Sylvain Roumette has been shown, see below.

Photo: Lee Miller: David Scherman Dressed for War. ©Lee Miller Archives, England. All Rights Reserved.

Sylvain Roumette: The Mirror Crossing, France, 1995,55 mins.

Released on DVD by ARTE VIDEO.

http://www.leemiller.co.uk/

http://arttattler.com/designleemiller.html

http://oremus.dk/frontpage/exhibitions/current

Herz Frank in Riga

The exhibition space is limited but the content is excellent. The film museum in Riga, situated in the same building as the National Film Centre of Latvia, in the old town of the Latvian capital, hosts a presentation of the life and work of Herz Frank, a filmmaker so often written about on this site.

Frank himself took part in the construction of the exhibition that includes photos and texts and clips from his work, plus the possibility to see in full duration ”Ten Minutes Older” (1978) and ”Flashback” (2002), just two of the master’s documentaries.

The exhibition, I was told, is running at least until this autumn.

http://www.kinomuzejs.lv/majaslapa/?lng=en

Sokurov in Barcelona

The impressive Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona is a fascinating place to spend some hours. Its collection includes paintings, photographs, and until May 20 also the so-called Military Film Series by Russian master director Aleksander Sokurov, a series that hopefully will be presented in other museums around the world. Here is a small text clip from the museum site:

”In the late nineties, Sokurov made Soldier's Dream, 1995, Spiritual Voices, 1995, and Confession, 1998, the three films that make up the so-called Military Series. These three titles, which became part of the MACBA Collection in 2004, are shown on this occasion together with Elegy of a Voyage, 2001, conceived as a journey that takes us from Siberia to the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam. This last title, which in the context of the exhibition is seen as an epilogue to the Military Series, is Sokurov's first production commissioned by a museum. The four films share a new documentary aesthetic that combines the empirical experience of place with a sombre and spiritual lyricism. Soldier's Dream (a short 10-minute piece extracted from the third chapter of Spiritual Voices), and the five chapters comprised in Spiritual Voices (lasting five hours and 43 minutes), relate a prolonged stay at a frontier military post between Tajikistan and Afghanistan. The omission of factual information, of the type that is common in the media, and the long sequences representing the soldiers' routines, face the viewer with an enigmatic chain of events. Not even the news on the war in Afghanistan, persistently broadcast, can attenuate the power of these images with which Sokurov tries to create a new event – which is no other than the one that takes place during the contemplation of the film”.


http://www.macba.cat/en/index

Viktor Kossakovsky: Vivan las Antipodas!

Finally! It has been and is being shown all over the world, the unique work of Viktor Kossakovsky, a generous and overwhelmingly beautiful film that also witnesses a new direction thematically, a new tone for a director whose filmography includes films that you want to see again and again, from ”Belovs” to ”Svyato” and ”Tishe”.

Finally, the film gets the first prize at an international festival. Not in Leipzig, where it was in competition, not in Barcelona where it was in competition – both places I had the impression that the juries thought that ”Kossakovsky has already been awarded so many times” – but in Trento, at the 60th edition of a festival that deals with films about nature, especially mountains. The jury phrased their motivation precisely:

The international jury had no doubts in assigning the Golden Gentian – City of Trento Grand Prize to this film, which is an unforgettable homage to the diversity, magnificence and antiquity of Mother Nature. The jury appreciated above all the ingenuity of the idea, the artistic quality and the technical brilliance of the film.

http://www.trentofestival.it/en/news/news25966.htm

Ib Bondebjerg: Virkelighedsbilleder/ 3

In Danish – about an event in the Danish Cinemateket, where Ib Bondebjerg hosts his third session about the modern Danish documentary portrait linked to his book ”Virkelighedsbilleder”. Invited directors are Sami Saif and Jon Bang Carlsen:

De to film af Saif og Bang Carlsen er ”Family” (2001) og ”Livet vil leves – breve fra en mor” (1993) (foto), begge fremragende film, den første er vel de fleste bekendt som en både underholdende og gribende film om en ung mand, der leder efter sin far, hvorimod ”Livet vil leves” endnu ikke har fået den opmærksomhed, som et personligt, billedmæssigt originalt fortalt, tekstmæssigt smukt (Bodil Kjer lægger stemme til!) mesterværk af vor vigtigste nulevende danske dokumentarist. Her er teksten, som introducerer filmens visning i Cinemateket

Torsdag den 10. Maj kl. 19

Det føles forkert, at mødre kan dø. Men det gør de – reflekterer filminstruktøren Jon Bang Carlsen i slutningen af sit filmdigt til sin mor. Moren var altid i bevægelse, var bange for stilstand, for døden, men forblev hele livet i den lille landsby ved Vesterhavet, mens Jon Bang Carlsen flygtede fra landsbyen og rejste ud på en Amerikarejse. Mod erkendelse og modning. Men hele tiden var de i kontakt, og trods afstandene fandtes en nærhed og samhørighed. Moderen er nu død. Men hendes breve og tanker er tilbage - og Jon Bang Carlsens minder om hende.

http://www.dfi.dk/Filmhuset/Cinemateket/Billetter-og-program/Film.aspx?filmID=v1014734

DocAlliance Excellent Online Offers

Even today, with the existing online possibilities, many come up with the usual comment and ask the eternal question: Yes, I love documentaries but where can I see them. And those who go to festivals with hundreds of films to choose from, often come back saying – I missed this or that masterpiece.

If you subscribe to the newsletter of the best vod for creative documentaries, the Doc Alliance, you will be helped to make your choices. Today the ”Events of the Months” was published and it shows perfectly the editorial skills of the Doc Alliance people.

From May 7 – 13 the theme is ”True Stories from Russia” including a slate of quality films like ”Mother” by Antoine Cattin and Pavel Kostomarov, and Nino Kirtadze’s "Durakovo – the Village of Fools". The week after (May 14 - 20) the distributor Taskovski Films generously offers three masterpieces for free: Bulgarian Andrey Paounov’s ”The Mosquito Problems and Other Stories”, ”Bahrtalo!” by Robert Lakatos and Serbian Aleksander Manic ”The Shutka Book of Records”. The headline is ”Trip to the Balkans” and there is wonderful humour in these storytellingwise original, non-mainstream documentaries.

The highlight, however, is that DocAlliance gives us the chance to watch, in the right order and in one two or three days, as you like, the Indonesian trilogy of Leonard Retel Helmrich, a strong humanistic work to be compared to Satayit Ray’s Pather Panchali work from India. ”The Eye of the Day” (2001), followed by ”Shape of the Moon” (2004) (photo) and ”Position Among the Stars” (2010) are the titles of Helmrich’s so-called ”Single Shot Cinema”. Watch it!

Again, I can only repeat a Bravo to what DocAlliance does for the artistic documentary!

http://dafilms.com/newsletter/view/6Fb7ayvHIY/

DOX for Short Docs

The Summer 2012 issue of the European Documentary Film Magazine DOX (number 94!) is out. The editor-in-chief Truls Lie uses his editorial to point at the values of the short documentary, which is forgotten by many. His starting point is his position as a juror at ZagrebDox, where the first prize was given to the Polish 7 minutes long “Returns” (photo) by Krzysztof Kadlubowski. In the same competition category with films with a duration around and over an hour. A good decision and a fine way of pointing at a film genre that was born with the Lumière Brothers and had its prime period when short films were screened in cinemas before the feature film. All big names in film history have made short films and many also short documentaries – Alain Resnais, Luis Bunuel, Antonioni etc. – not to mention the stars of the genre itself like Richard Leacock, Johan van der Keuken, Wolf Koenig and Roman Kroitor, Colin Low etc.

Today you can watch short documentaries in festivals, many of them are excellent works from film schools, and in very few tv stations. The latter is very difficult to understand as the short film has an immediate appeal to a young audience, which is the target of the public broadcasters, who complain that the average audience is 50+ or 60+. Is it too optimistic to believe that the commitment that the most innovative broadcasters make to include short films in their repertoire (like POV, arte) could spread to others for online distribution? The Latvian 15YoungByYoung, that includes 15 short documentaries from the former Soviet republics, as well as the upcoming series of shorts to be produced by the Why Poverty initiative are just two examples of subject orientated “packages” of short films, where also a creative element is sought.

Back to the editor and his editorial in DOX, where Truls Lie expresses his fatigue of long films – 8 out of 10 feature-length could be shorter, less than an hour, he states… well, maybe that is a bit exagerrated, of course it is, and less than an hour means tv-duration, 52-58 mins. Which for me is the most stupid decision on duration taken by the broadcasting companies, dictated solely by schedule thinking. Anyway, DOX deserves praise for this approach that also means that the buyers and subscribers receive a dvd with the magazine, this time with 7 short documentaries chosen by the editor. Bravo! In the magazine there are two articles about short documentaries, so yes, DOX is an edited magazine. Next time, to tease the editor a bit, the list in the back of “noteworthy film” could maybe also include shorts. This time there is more than 30 feature length documentaries mentioned.

http://whypoverty.net/

http://www.15youngbyyoung.com/

www.edn.dk

Michael Glawogger Retrospective in N.Y.

The IDF (Institute of Documentary Film) website informs that the first retrospective of the Austrian documentarian is taking place in New York at the Museum of Moving Images until April 29. The website of the Museum includes interesting text excerpts from a soon to be published book on Glawogger. Here comes the series intro by the museum:

One of the most versatile and original talents in contemporary world cinema, the Austrian filmmaker Michael Glawogger has made an art of crossing boundaries, both geographic and formal. He spans diverse, far-flung locations within a single film, often dealing with ambiguous notions of home and foreignness, and moves back and forth between fiction and documentary, sometimes combining and subverting both modes. Glawogger’s career resists classification at every turn, but whether set on the margins of the developing world or in precincts of privilege, his surprising, beautifully photographed films are testaments to his own boundless curiosity and to the endless complexity of the human condition. This retrospective, his first in the United States, includes his widely acclaimed and much debated documentary trilogy on harsh working environments, as well as a selection of fiction features and experimental short films. Photo from Whore's Glory.

http://www.dokweb.net/en/documentary-network/articles/michael-glawogger-retrospective-in-nyc-2083/?

http://www.movingimage.us/

Chainsaw Massacre on Canadian Documentary

Below there is a posting on the upcoming HotDocs documentary film festival in Toronto and the budget cutdown of legendary NFB, National Film Board. Realscreen makes a follow-up on the story that also involves the broadcaster CBC’s documentary commitment as well as the Telefilm Canada, the federaæ agency for support of Theatrical documentaries. In the Realscreen article – written by Adam Benzine – read the whole article, link below, the director John Kastner expresses the anger like this:

““Canadian documentaries are on the critical list these days, as one broadcaster after another retreats from the documentary business. What was desperately needed here was the most delicate surgery to resuscitate a great Canadian art form, one that is hemorrhaging badly. What we got was the ‘Tory Chainsaw Massacre.’

“Why should the Canadian public care? Canadians face a challenge unique in the world: the overpowering cultural influence of U.S. television and movies. Perhaps no other country’s national identity is threatened this way as we are. The danger posed by the cutbacks is not just that broadcasters will air fewer Canadian TV shows and the NFB make fewer Canadian films, it is that our children will end up behaving increasingly like Americans because American life is mostly what they will see on our TV and movie screens.”

It is kind of back to the start of the NFB that was set up to make films on Canada for the Canadians. And which brought us great works by Pierre Perrault, Michel Brault, Colin Low, Roman Kroitor and Wolf Koenig. Photo from "Lonely Boy" (about Paul Anka) by Kroitor & Koenig.

http://realscreen.com/2012/04/18/canadian-doc-makers-slam-cutbacks-we-are-dropping-like-flies/#ixzz1sPdagKOG

Humphrey Jennings: Listen to Britain

It is still pure pleasure to watch the 17 minutes long short masterly montaged documentary masterpiece by British Jennings, the first of his war-time trilogy. And bravo for the BFI (British Film Institute) for publishing the film, and other films by the director in a double dvd, where the second comes out the 23rd of April.

And also bravo for the Guardian that often brings knowledge about film historical issues to the knowledge of its readers. This is what they wrote as intro to the small clip from the film:

Humphrey Jennings's work for the Crown Film Unit in the 1940s gives us a fascinating insight into Britain during wartime. Here, in a clip from his 1942 short film Listen to Britain, we get a glimpse of his talent for picking out the details in the lives of ordinary people that was acclaimed by the likes of Lindsay Anderson and Kevin Macdonald.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film

http://filmstore.bfi.org.uk/acatalog/info_20521.html

Susana de Sousa D, Collected Postings on her Works

An academic film team would normally make me, a documentary addict, shiver with fear for the outcome of 48, in this case no, for that simple reason that I had seen the team’s previous film that perfectly combined the background of aesthetics, philosophy, history and music with a creative intention… (Tue Steen Müller)

Susana de Sousa Dias at Cinéma du réel 2012 

48 THE REVIEW 2010

by Tue Steen Müller

This is gonna be a bit longer blog text than usual. Simply because this is an extraordinary film that calls for more than an ordinary review. My co-blogger Allan Berg wrote – in Danish and after having seen 30 minutes of the film – that this would probably be the film experience of his festival viewing. It was definitely what it became for me. My hope is that the following will inspire festivals to introduce a totally different approach to writing history. To deal with memories. To seek a new minimalistic film language. And work with music and sound in a new way.

First an introduction to the team behind the film; the info is taken from their website: The director Susana de Sousa Dias - completed a thesis in Aesthetics and Art Philosophy and holds University degrees both in Painting (Lisbon University) and Cinema (National School of Theatre and Cinema). She studied music at the National Conservatory of Music and is currently preparing a PhD in Aesthetics, Art Science and Technology (University Paris 8). The producer Ansgar Schaefer - graduated in German Language and Literature and Political Science. Works as a historian and university professor. The sound designer António de Sousa Dias - composer, Ph.D. in Musicology (Paris VIII) sponsored by the Portuguese Scientific Foundation FCT. Is currently developing a research work on CAC - Université Paris VIII / MSH Paris Nord in the field of music creation and virtual environments.

An academic film team would normally make me, a documentary addict, shiver with fear for the outcome of 48, in this case no, for that simple reason that I had seen the team’s previous film that perfectly combined the background of aesthetics, philosophy, history and music with a creative intention.

And with a sense for image and sound, and the putting the two together. To convey with Still Life. Faces of a Dictatorship (2005) the traumatic past of Portugal under Salazar. The film is 77 mins. long without any narration, built on archive from the 48 years between 1926 and till 1974, when the carnation revolution happened. The archive includes news, war footage from the colonies, propaganda films and photos of political prisoners. The musical score for this film, by António de Sousa Dias, is exceptional, first you wonder why but then you see what it does to the images, making a reflective distance and opens for a new both intellectual and emotional interpretation.

Michael Christoffersen, alle tekster om hans film

De fire film set under ét udgør en samlet journalistisk og dokumentarisk erfaring om international ret lagt ned i ét vældigt værk, som filmet på location disse tidlige år vil bevare sin enestående status som skildring af denne ambition om et samlet retssystem...

LAW OF THE JUNGLE

af Allan Berg Nielsen

Den flotte unge indianerhøvding José Fachin Ruiz er den seneste i rækken af Christoffersens helte, alle jurister på arbejde for et internationalt retssystem. Han her er i en central scene i filmen på vej fra en demonstration langt inde i Perus jungle, værdig, stolt og rank, men, opdager vi, lige nu arresteret og på vej til bank og måneders fængsel og flere mishandlinger, inidlertid også på vej til en erkendelse af, at undertrykkelsen og volden og torturen, forsvindingerne og henrettelserne må bekæmpes i seje og tålmodige juridiske argumentationer i internationalt overvågede retssager på et stadigt udbygget og sikret grundlag af international ret, i hans tilfælde internationale rettigheder for oprindelige folk. Han er jæger og familiefar og leder af en gruppe unge indianere, som har sat sig op mod olieselskabet Pluspetrols metodiske ødelæggelse af deres land. Han hedder José Facin Ruiz, og han læser i dag jura på universitetet i Lima. Den kendsgerning er den lykkelige udgang på Michael Christoffersens film om de forfærdelige forbrydelser i Perus Amazonland under Pluspetrols regime.

Som jeg prøvede at forklare, da jeg i sin tid skrev om Christoffersens Saving Saddam, har jeg det sådan med hans film, at dengang the crime of crimes og det historisk set nye internationale retssystem om disse sager og nu et spirende internationalt juridisk system omkring oprindelige folks krav på ret til jord og søer og vandløb og naturressourcer i de nu fire film er og bliver selve emnet og kernen. I hver film vokser fortællingen og en karismatisk hovedperson sammen med forståelsen af denne jura, denne etik, som altså effektivt kropsliggøres i en smuk bue fra den blide og tænksomme Aspegren i Genocide, over den

Nicolas Philibert, Collected Postings on his Works

I can not think of any European documentarist who has this sense of making beauty out of everyday life as it is being lived by us ordinary people... (Tue Steen Müller)

LA VILLE DE LOUVRE (1989)

by Tue Steen Müller

Produced 20 years ago, this masterpiece of Nicolas Philibert is as fresh as on the day of release. It is a fascinating look at what happens behind the scene at the magnificent museum in Paris. At the end of the film Philibert summarises what was his intention, by showing a long sequence of faces of some of the people, the viewer meets in the film. Yes, he is after people and what people do in an adventurous and sometimes mysterious place like Louvre where he (also) takes us underground to all the art works that wait to be exhibited or never reaches the exhibition area. It is transport, cleaning, restoring and conserving, and guarding, and playing boule on Rue de Rivoli next to the museum, measuring, planning the placement of the paintings in a room before the opening. And so on and so forth, several magical moments, lots of humour, all born by a fascination from the side of the film team. And you sense the director’s écriture right away, as you know it from La Moindre des Choses, Le pays des sourds, Etre et Avoir...

Philibert wast originally only hired to film one of the complicated transports, but stayed in the museum for another 3 weeks filming without any permission before getting this, and a producer and financing... I wanted to avoid bureaucracy, Philibert says in the bonus interview on the dvd (Éditions Montparnasse). Nobody actually had problems with us hanging around, as they already knew us. The film is a beauty because of the constant thinking in images, and the total concentration, as he also says is needed, to be ready to catch important moments, and film small stories that in the final film is cut in the way that you leave a theme and some people to come back to them later.

The film will be shown saturday April 25 on ARTE in connection with the Theme Day dedicated to the 20 years of the Louvre pyramid. (Blogpost April 23 2009)

LA MOINDRE DES CHOSES (1995)

by Tue Steen Müller

Nicholas Philibert is here. Three films have been shown, Le Pays des Sourds, Retour en Normandie and La moindre des choses. Last year the Syrian audience could enjoy Être et Avoir. Philibert did a master class, denied to be called a master, talked for two hours with a lot of charm and commitment, especially about "La moindre des choses", which is for sure a Master's Piece. Shot in 1995, the director went to the psychiatric clinic called la Borde, filmed the people in the institution, staff and patients, and followed the rehearsals and staging of a theatre piece by Polish Witold Gombrowicz. What comes out of it is a beautiful hymn to life

Janina Lapinskaite in Copenhagen

On this site you will find lots of texts that introduce, review and report on documentaries from Lithuania. Another one comes here to tell our Danish readers that Janina Lapinskaite will show some of her films at the Danish Cinemateket tonight thursday 22nd of March and on sunday 24th of March.

I write this having a lot of sweet memories in mind. Lapinskaite was one of the filmmakers who most often visited the Balticum Film & TV Festival on the island of Bornholm, in the middle of the Baltic Sea. The festival that took place 1990-2000 and took back some prizes. ”From the Life of the Elves” (1996) (photo with director) is a fairy tale documentary presenting three grown up dwarfs living in the countryside in their own little world guarded by an old lady. The film that later was bought for distribution at the National Film Board of Denmark (at that time Statens Filmcentral, now the Danish Film Institute) and for Danish DR/TV introduces the special style of Lapinskaite, who later made films like ”Venus with a Cat” (1997) that reconstructs the painting of Manet, ”The Luncheon on the Grass” and ” The Life of Venecijus and the Death of Caesar” (2002) about a man and his pig, not to forget the 2009 work ”The Train stops for Five Minutes”.

Lapinskaite, who is principal of the Lithuanian film school, The Academy of Music, and has acted in fiction films of her husband, Aligimantas Puipa, is as her colleagues Audrius Stonys and Arunas Matelis, a true representative of what has been called the Lithuanian school of poetic documentary, with a focus on outsiders, artists of life you could say, in her country.

www.cinemateket.dk

Theodor

Below a Danish text about the man, who is considered to be the father of Danish documentary, Theodor Cristensen (1914-1967) This coming sunday his film ”Ella” will be shown at Cinemateket in Copenhagen introduced by his son and people, who like Theodor loves Cuba and documentary films.

Theodor. Han blev aldrig kaldt andet, manden der optræder i enhver dansk filmhistorisk fremstilling som den danske filmiske dokumentarismes store teoretiker og som manden bag besættelsestidens mesterlige modstandsfilm ”Det gælder din frihed”. Men det var måske Cuba, der kom til at fylde mest i hans liv. Det var her han underviste, det er her han stadig omtales med stor respekt af ældre cubanske filmfolk, og det var Cuba, som blev ”hans kunstneriske og menneskelige redning”. Det er udgangspunktet for en to timer lang forestilling i Cinemateket på søndag den 18. Klokken 16.30, hvor Theodors søn fortæller om sin far, hvor filmforskeren Palle Bøgelund Petersen fortæller ”om de mindre kendte sider af Theodors liv og virke”, og hvor instruktør og fotograf Steen Dalin kommer ind på Theodors betydning for cubansk film med klip fra optagelser, som Dalin har foretaget i landet. Efterfulgt af filmen om cubanske kvinder, ”Ella”, fra 1964.

Hvis nye læsere vil vide mere om Theodor, så lån John Ernst: Theodor Christensen – om en handling i billeder, en herlig bog fra 1974, som sikkert også kan anskaffes antikvarisk.

I øvrigt forlyder det at Ole Roos arbejder på en stor film om Theodor Christensen, hvis kompagnon i de tidlige år var Ole's far Karl, hvis lillebror var Jørgen Roos, dansk dokumentarfilms vigtigste instruktør, som filmede Karl og Theodor på Københavns Hovedbanegård da de tog til England for at vise John Grierson et co. "Her er banerne" (1948). Men det er en helt anden historie fra den herlige danske dokumentarfilmiske barndom.

(Og er det en dansk eller en cubansk cigar, Theodor holder på billedet, forhåbentlig det sidste, måske en Montecristo eller en Partagas?)

 www.cinemateket.dk

Baltic Documentaries at ZagrebDox

This is a text for the ZagrebDox catalogue 2012: The films that you are going to watch from Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania are the finest examples from a cinema that has, from country to country, its own individuality and its own individuals. You will meet films by young and old talents, some with quite a track record, nationally and internationally. Directors with a vision, both in terms of theme and aesthetics.

The selection for this retrospective programme of documentaries from the three Baltic countries have been done with a focus on the last 10 years, omitting not only films from the last century but also films from 2010 and 2011 – some from these years were already shown at ZagrebDox.

Allow me to be personal to say that the relation between me and the Baltic documentary is a pure love story, which started in the year 1990 when the Soviet empire was falling apart. In Denmark we started a film festival on the island of Bornholm where filmmakers from the countries surrounding the Baltic Sea came to present their works. The festival went on for 10 years and we travelled to Tallinn, Riga and Vilnius to select the film. In this century I have continued to visit the countries to scout for films other festivals and to take part in the Baltic Sea Forum, where new film projects are being pitched.

What we met way back in 1990, was of course a documentary tradition that was based on the Soviet tradition – and on its way to break with the very same. In Estonia the leading figure was Mark Soosaar (whose beautiful, personal film ”The Home for Butterflies” is part of the retrospective), in Latvia the names were Juris Podnieks, Ivars Seleckis and Herz Frank, in Lithuania

Haus des Dokumentarfilms

Our German language readers should know about the fine work done by the Stuttgart based Haus des Dokumentarfilms. Yesterday I received a ”Dokumentarfilm Newsletter” from the Haus with a link to a website – in German – that provides you with a lot of information, on new docs in German cinemas, support that thas been given, documentaries on television, new dvd releases and so on.

The mission of the Haus: ”Unser Haus dient der Förderung, Forschung und der Sammlung des Dokumentarfilms. Wir wollen Filmemacher, Redakteure, Produzenten und am Dokumentarfilm Interessierte zusammenbringen.”

Long and good articles about films are to be found on the website, and of course there is information about the ongoing Berlinale, as well as info on the work of the German ag-dok, the strong association for documentarians.

The photo is from Cyril Tuschi impressive documentary about Khodorkovsky. It runs in German cinemas.

http://www.dokumentarfilm.info/

Film History for Free

”Your online documentary cinema”. This is how the excellent vod Doc Alliance Films characterises itself. Based in Czech Republic at the address of IDF (Institute of Documentary Film), they are doing great work. The selection of films available is indeed a feast for the documentary lover. Newly added titles are ”Cave of Forgotten Dreams” by Werner Herzog, ”Avenge, but one of my Two Eyes” by Avi Mograbi and ”The Arrivals” by Claudine Bories and Patrice Chagnard.

However, this week, Doc Alliance goes royal to celebrate the sixty year rule of her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II (!) by offering classic British documentaries for free. So here you go, take a lesson in film history, start by reading this very fine introduction from the Doc Alliance site:

The two most significant periods of British documentary film to enter the world’s history of cinematography are the British Documentary Movement and the Free Cinema movement. Financed by state institutions as well as big private corporations, the filmmakers of the British Documentary Movement conceived their work as public service. They were choosing among the wide range of themes resonating inthe British society, focusing primarily on the changes the society and its various strata were undergoing at that time. The film methods they employed varied greatly. Although their works are associated with the term of documentary film, today they would rather fit the docudrama genre (a documentary genre making use of stage-managed situations, reconstructions of real events). However, their works primarily shared the immense interest in the depicted subject accompanied by an attractive and intelligent film form. That is what secured them a constant attention of their spectatorship.The DAFilms portal introduces the following famous films of the British documentary school: Night Mail with the score by Benjamin Britten and verses by W.H. Auden; Drifters by ideologist of the British school John Grierson; Industrial Britain by legend of the documentary genre Robert Flaherty; and Fires Were Started filmed in the heavily bombed London in the middle of the war by Humphrey Jennings. In the Docalliance selection, the Free Cinema movement is represented by the “swinging” Mama Don’t Allow by Tony Richardson and Czech-born “Winton’s child” Karel Reisz. Richardson as well as Reisz are significant representatives of the movement who later became famous for their fiction films, some of them further developing the Free Cinema principles. From the works by Karel Reisz, we further present We Are Lambeth Boys, a portrait of everyday life of youth from London’s working class Lambeth borough situated on the Southern bank of the Thames. Both films belong among the significant short documentaries made at the very beginning of the movement.

http://dafilms.com/

15 Young by Young Finished

”Think Big! Is what young producer and director Ilona Bicevska has done throughout a year of participation in the Ex Oriente 2008.” This was the text posted here in October 2008. Two years later another text was posted: ” Think Big! Is what Ilona Bicevska is doing. For a couple of years she has been pitching a project that I have praised on this site with a simple Bravo! Now the potential directors have been invited to come to Latvia, to Sigulda 50 kilometers from Riga, from where I write these words. A development workshop goes on, discussions, clips are being watched, coffee is being drunk – and harder stuff as well.”

Now the series is finished, has its industry screening at the Berlinale and is being screened on arte February 6-24 at 10.30pm, 15 films around 15 minutes long, from the 15 ex-Soviet republics about young people and their lives. In her long journey Bicevska succeeded – among many other funders in Latvia and abroad, including the MEDIA Programme -  to get arte on board with Serge Godrey from Alegria as co-producer.

I remember talking to many experienced producers during this process . They all said that this is not possible, this is too difficult, but the energy of Ilona Bicevska was second-to-none as were the attitude of the young directors, who now get the chance to have their works and their talent exposed on the international scene. You will see these films on festivals and tv in the coming years, as a whole series or individually – and a 90 minutes version is being made as well.

I repeat my Bravo and Congratulations to all 15 young filmmakers, who are going to have a 12 (why not 15?) hour party at the Berlinale! Enjoy!

http://www.15youngbyyoung.com/

http://www.arte.tv/fr/15-vies-a-l-Est---tous-les-films/6341372,CmC=6339420.html

Dokumentarer til Salg

In Danish language as this is about primarily Danish documentaries that are sold through the online shop of the daily newspaper Information.

Vi hører det tit på redaktionen: Åh, men hvor kan man få fat i alle de film, som I skriver om. Svaret er enkelt, søg på nettet, gå til amazon, gå til de mange fremragende vod (video on demand) udbydere, som der er, bestil hos de internationale distributører eller gå ned i videobutikken og bestil, der er flere og flere dokumentarfilm på hykderne. Jo, man skal gøre noget selv for at fat på kvalitet.

Det er ikke svært, hvis I vil have fat i danske dokumentarer, ihvertfald af nyere dato. Mange produktionsselskaber sælger selv deres film, Cinematekets boghandel i København har en fin hjemmeside, hvorfra der kan bestilles, og så er der jo filmstriben, der samarbejder med lokale biblioteker.

Men for at gøre en lang historie kort: Nu har dagbladet Information endelig oppet sig og fået udvidet sit sortiment. 40 gode dokumentarfilm er nu til at bestille, de fleste danske med Anne Wivels smukke Svend som flagskibet, men også med Ada Søbys visuelle essay Naked of Saint Petersburg, Max Kestners roste Drømme i København (foto), Janus Metz dobbelte Fra Thailand til Thy/Fra Thy til Thailand, Vibe Mogensens gribende Min Fars Sind, som blev klippet af Nanna Frank Møller, hvis egen Someone Like You også kan købes.

”Læg i kurven”, hedder det på internet’sk, og så kunne man jo også lige tage Leonard Cohen: I’m Your Man med, 49 kroner!

http://ishop.information.dk/dokumentarfilm-2/

Avi Mograbi on DocAlliance

DOCAlliance, the vod of six quality documentary film festivals (FID Marseilles has just joined cph:dox, Visions du Réel Nyon, DOK Leipzig, Planete Doc Review Warsaw and Jihlava IDFF) is very appealing for documentary lovers. Their selection is excellent, their texts about the films are as well, and to get more people to watch, DOCAlliance launches some offers you can’t refuse.

Like now with five films of world class Israeli director Avi Mograbi, very well known by readers of filmkommentaren.dk. The films of Mograbi which are now available, and can be streamed for free TODAY, and after that be watched for very low prices, are:

How I Learned to Overcome my Fear (1997), Happy Birthday, Mr Mograbi (1999), August (photo) (2002), Avenge, but One of my Two Eyes (2005) and Z32 (2008).

http://dafilms.com/

Julie Bonan: Il était.. Les enfants du Paradis

The world’s best film? No doubt for me, Marcel Carné’s ”Les Enfants du Paradis” from 1945, shot during the German occupation, script by Jacques Prévert with the best of best of French actors like Pierre Brasseur, Pierre Renoit and Jean-Louis Barrault AND the star over all stars, Arletty.

Pure pleasure it could only be to watch this tv-documentary that takes us behind the scenes with archive interviews to meet Prévert, Arletty and Carné, a story guided by, among others, director Bertrand Tavernier, photos from the shooting, a lot of anecdotes, and the sad story about Arletty, who had a love affair with a German office, went to prison, and thus could not be there for the premiere of the film in 1945 because of her ”collaboration”. A film that at the same time became a symbol of the French liberation!

Garance and Baptiste, Arletty and Barrault. Carné and Prévert, touching it is to see the latter, in an interview from 1969, say that all films are actually documentaries, Arletty is performing in a film that is about herself. Prévert wrote the role to her as well as the lines.

Lucky you, who have not yet seen ”Les Enfants du Paradis”, and lucky us who can see it gain and again.... and thanks to the digital channel of DR/K, who showed the documentary about the masterpiece on a grey monday morning.

2009, 50 mins., made for France 5

Burma VJ

Danish producer Lise Lense-Møller passed on this great news asking if it could be interesting for our readers. Absolutely! Below quotes from emails from yesterday from Joshua to the producer, her team and the director Anders Østergaard:

“Dear All, I am writing this to share one of the most wonderful news for us. Myanmar government released 651 political prisoners and "all our VJs have been included in this amnesty." Everybody who took part in making of Burma VJ are freed now and in good health and spirit. I believe you deserve to share our joy. 

I am now seriously thinking whether it is a good time to go back and start making more documentaries about Burma. I will write more later about it. This mail is just to thank you for all your efforts in making of Burma VJ, which played a significant role in changing the situation in Burma.”

… and further on in another mail:

“I called to four of the VJs today and they say thanks to you all. They said they heard a lot about the success of Burma VJ since they were in prison. One of them is called "Oscar" by his jailmates because of nomination news (for an Academy Award, ed.). Ko Maung joked that "One thing that upsets him is that we didn't hire a handsome guy such as Brat Pitt to play his role." We had Big LOL. :). But he said he was so pleased to know that someone could use the footage he has sacrificed for in a very effective way. This time, he is serious and no joking. :) 

He will support Aung San Suu Kyi's works whenever he can. Someone is going to share Burma VJ DVDs to all of them and they will have chance to see a documentary about them in a few days time.  They all are really happy now.”

www.magichourfilms.dk

Top Stills

Vi forbinder bestemte historiske begivenheder med bestemte personer, de er vores hovedpersoner før, filmene gør dem til det. Dobbelt betydningsbærende. De tre stills i Filmkommentarens hoved kunne være de to bloggeres personlige bud på tre sådanne scener med tre særlige medvirkende i tre uomgængelige film. / The three stills above are from films strongly appreciated by the two bloggers, in important scenes and with main characters in the films as well as in specific periods of our history.

1) Vietnamkrigen erindret af Robert McNamara under sindrigt pres i Errol Morris: The Fog of War (2003). ”Det er måske Morris’ berømte spejlarrangement ved interviews, som gør det. McNamaras blik, fortælling og tolkning plus hans intensitet former uafrysteligt min opfattelse af verdenshistorien den sidste halvdel af 1900-tallet.” (Allan Berg Nielsen i filmkommentaren.dk) / The Vietnam War as it was recalled by Robert McNamara, pushed by Errol Morris in "The Fog of War" (2003). "Maybe it is the famous mirror arrangement at the interviews that does it. The glance of McNamara, his storytelling, his interpretation plus his intensity shakes completely my look at world history during the last half of the 20th century.”

2) Militærkuppets fly mod præsidentpaladset iagttaget af Salvador Allende omgivet af livvagter i Patricio Guzman: The Battle of Chile (1975-1979). / The attack on La Moneda watched by Salvador Allende surrounded by his guards in Patricio Guzman's "The Battle of Chile" (1975-79). "How could a team of five - some with no previous film experience - working with one Éclair camera, one Nagra sound recorder, two vehicles and a package of black-and-white film stock sent to them by the French documentarian Chris Marker produce a work of this magnitude?” (Pauline Kael in The New Yorker).

3) Den nye tjekkiske politiske kultur levet af Vaclav Havel i blot en af utallige værtshusdiskussioner i Pavel Koutecký og Miroslav Janek: Citizen Havel (2008). ”I 12 år fulgte Pavel Koutecký og hans hold Havel, i det offentlige og i det private rum og ud af det er kommet en helt vidunderlig, morsom og gribende fortælling om en helt vidunderlig mand, der hele vejen igennem beholder sin integritet og viser at den ærlige og kærlige mand naturligvis ikke kan undgå at løbe ind i problemer, når han skal have med politik at gøre.” (Tue Steen Müller i filmkommentaren.dk) / The new Czech political culture as it was lived by Vaclav Havel in one of many café discussions in Pavel Koutecky and Miroslav Janek's Citizen Havel (2008). "For 12 years Pavel Koutecky and his crew followed Havel, in public and privately, and from that material a wonderful film has been made, funny and touching it is about a fine man, who keeps his integrity and shows that an honest and loveable man of course must run into problems when he enters politics."

Danish Documentaries

It is going well for Danish documentaries, and it is not only we Danes who say so in the general halleluja-how-good-we-are atmosphere that often reign here. The Swedish say so (9 documentaries to be shown at the upcoming Gothenburg International Film Festival) as well as the Americans, according to the number of docs to be shown at the coming Sundance festival, 3 out of 4 Danish titles. Idfa, the biggest festival for the genre in the world, had ”The Ambassador” as the opening film and so on so forth.

And back home the documentary is now being acknowledged. The national Bodil Awards, which constitute the major Danish film awards given by Denmark's National Association of Film Critics, to be distributed in March, include now a nomination of five documentaries, for the first time in the history of the awards. The nominees are: The Will (Testamentet), Christian Sønderby. The Ambassador (Ambassadøren), Mads Brügger. Svend, Anne Regitze Wivel. ½ Revolution, Karim El Hakim og Omar Shargawi. The President (Præsidenten), Christoffer Guldbrandsen. On a personal note: This is really good news, I still remember the lobbying for this to happen that we were many who performed occasionally during the 20 years I worked at the National Film Board of Denmark (Statens Filmcentral). Without result. Were the documentaries worse back in the 70’es, 80’es, 90’es? No. Was the visibility for documentaries in the general opinion worse? Absolutely! Has the documentary genre developed along with the technical development going from film to video? For sure!

Which is also evident when you look at a press release that reached us today from the DoxBio: Proudly it is announced that the number of tickets sold for documentaries through DoxBio theatrical distribution to the Danish cinemas in 2011 had grown from around 20.000 to 77.078. The bestseller is Svend (photo) about the late socialdemocratic politician Svend Auken which reached 40.542 with The Ambassador as number 2 with 18.326 and Eva Mulvad’s The Good Life with 10.879. 42 cinemas take part in DoxBio. Still, these numbers do not at all compete with the 135.000 tickets sold for Janus Metz Armadillo a couple of years ago.

www.dfi.dk

Dokumania January 2012

For the English readers: The Danish documentary strand Dokumania, that broadcasts on DR2, starts the new year with high quality films: Oscar-winner ”Inside Job” by Charles Ferguson, continued the week after by ”The Interrupters” by Steve James (to be remembered for his masterpiece ”Hoop Dreams”, staying in the US to celebrate Mohammed Ali’s 70th year birthday on January 17th, ending with Palestinian/Danish Omar Shargawi’s Cairo documentary ”1/2 Revolution”.

For the Danish readers:  Der er grund til at holde øje med Dokumania i januar måned. Det starter godt med den oskar-belønnede ”Wall Street Indefra” (”The Inside Job”) af Charles Ferguson, fortsætter med ”Chicagos Gadeengle” ( The Interrupters”), som jeg personligt glæder mig til at se efter spaltevis af rosende omtale af Steve James’ film – det var ham med basketballfilmen ”Hoop Dreams” – så fejres Mohammed Ali’s 70 år på dagen, den 17. Januar,  med canadiske ”Mohammad Ali – den største”, og som sidste film i januar vises ”1/2 Revolution” (foto) af Omar Shargawi, som der bl.a. blev skrevet følgende om på dette site:

The quality of this film lies with the fact that the Palestinian/Danish director succeeds to personalize the story. He and his friends lived in the centre of Cairo, close to the Tahir Square. From their windows they could follow the violent clashes between police and demonstrators, from hour to hour, in a flat where there was also a baby stumbling around among grown-ups like the director himself, who have family outside he country and who of course worry about what could happen to their dear ones. It does indeed gives the situation another perspective, and the film a tension different from the youtube uploaded clip documentations from the fights in the streets…

På dansk igen: Dokumania’s hjemmeside er generelt udmærket, denne gang er der dog sjusket – “The Interrupters” er krediteret med Nanna Frank Møller som instruktør (!) og I forbindelse med trailer-henvisninger er der gået kuk I linkningen fra filmen om Mohammad Ali med henvisninger til to andre film. Når det er sagt, læg så også mærke til at (nogle af de) gamle udsendelser kan ses tredive dage efter – bla. Göran Olssons fremragende Black Panther-arkiv film. 

http://www.dr.dk/dr2/dokumania#/26130

http://interrupters.kartemquin.com/

http://www.facingalimovie.com/

William Klein Exhibition in Paris

William Klein (born 1928), American filmmaker and photographer, who has great reputation for his many photo books, especially those dealing with cities like New York, Paris and Rome, and who has made films on Muhammad Ali and who has been active in artistic protests against American policy, is exhibiting a selection of his photos in Paris, they are from Rome, taken 1956-1960, when the young Klein went to Rome to become an assistant of Fellini, who, however, had enough assistants, wherefore Klein went to the streets to take photos with his newly acquired camera.

It is a joyful exhibition (runs until January 8) at the great Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris, a must-see-place for fans of photography and documentary or should I say, and documentation as many exhibitions also aims at documenting a country or period or a special period of our times.

Klein went to the street, caught the moments and the atmosphere, went (also) for celebrities like Sophia Loren, arranged some situations, and found Rossellini and Fellini in conversation woith each other at Cinecitta.

For copyright reasons I dare not publish any of the photos, but go to the site of the museum or google Klein and you will find his unique talent demonstrated.

Rome is a movie and Klein did it, said Federico Fellini. Klein's book with photos from Rome can still be bought on Amazon,

http://www.mep-fr.org/expo_1.htm

Vaclav Havel on Film

It seems strange that on the day of the death of Vaclav Havel, I posted several texts on the high quality of the IDF (Institute of Film) website (see below) and now I do it again to make you know the text published there to remember Vaclav Havel, and the many films he took part in. Read here:

Former Czech President, dissident, prolific playwright, essayist, and film director Václav Havel (October 5, 1936 - December 18, 2011) appeared in countless documentary films that closely traced both his political moves and moments from his personal life. Here are just some of them...

In 2003, David Remnick of the The New Yorker described Václav Havel's last day in office as follows: "On Sunday night, February 2nd, Czech radio and television broadcast Havel's farewell address. He took pains to thank his wife and his supporters. To all those who felt disappointed "or have simply found me hateful, I sincerely apologize and trust that you will forgive me." Havel flashed his country the peace sign and his work was done." [David Remnick, "Exit Havel", The New Yorker, 10 February 2003].

Havel's work and role were incredibly difficult, crucial and irreplaceable, as any of these documentary films attest. Although he was never too comfortable in front of the camera - probably much happier when staging his own scenes in Leaving - many of the films give a good idea of his warm and charismatic personality, doing away with the myth of a shy, awkward president and revealing instead his calm yet strong-willed determination.

Screened at Visions du réel, Crossing Europe, Hot Docs, DOK Leipzig, Berlinale's Forum and other festivals, Citizen Havel (2008) may be the best-known film on Havel. Shot over the span of 13 years, it was originally helmed by Pavel Koutecký who made a number of other Havel-themed docs. After Koutecký's death in 2006, the project was taken up by director and cinematographer Míra Janek.

Please watch them if you get a chance, Václav Havel, Prague - Castle can be streamed in East Silver's video library; many of them are available on the VOD portal Doc Alliance Films.

http://www.dokweb.net/en/