Nisimazine Helsinki 2008#5

Sunday, January 27, 2008

NISI MAZINE 5 A Magazine Created By Nisi Masa, European Network Of Young CinemA

helsinki

Gibellina Iranian struggles Jörn Donner In cooperation with:

Ulrich Seidl © Photo by Pavlovskaya

NISIMAZINE HELSINKI

Editorial

Sunday 27 January 2008/ # 5

A

ll over the world, monumental pieces of art define the way we view our cities.

Not only do they serve to decorate public spaces, or commemorate past events and people, but they have also become global trademark images for the cities themselves.

The Eiffel Tower in Paris, the Statue of Liberty in New York and more recently the Guggenheim in Bilbao, were created not only for aesthetic reasons but to create an urban identity. In The Gates, one of the monuments of New York city, Central Park, gets a new identity during the two weeks for which a piece of landscape art is displayed there. Although only a temporary exhibition, it brings new attention to the park and inspires the inhabitants of the city.

Film festivals can have the same effect on a city’s image. Festivals like Cannes, Rotterdam, Berlin, Venice and Sodankylä have made their hosting cities household names, but most importantly they give the opportunity for filmmakers and audiences to get together and share ideas. In Gibellina we can see a similar situation, as artists come year after year to create new works of art in a town that was once destroyed by an earthquake.

During the festival we have had the opportunity to share our views on the films that have been screened. Today is the last day of the festival and of our magazine. During the five issues that we published we aimed to express diverse critical approaches to films. Apart from this we also had the possibility to see a very good selection of films and talk to the filmmakers. This was very inspiring for us.

Orkun Şahin The participants of the Nisimazine project would like to thank the team of the Docpoint Helsinki Documentary Film Festival for their cooperation with us

A magazine published by the associations NISI MASA and Euphoria Borealis in cooperation with the DocPoint - Helsinki Documentary Film Festival and with the support of the ‘Europe for Citizens’ programme of the EU EDITORIAL STAFF (NM) Editor-in-chief Matthieu Darras Secretary of the editorial Jude Lister Layout Emilie Padellec English corrections Jude Lister Contributors to this issue Maartje Alders, Zsuzsanna Kiràly, Thierry Lebas, Itxaso Elosua Ramírez Atso Pärnänen, Natasha Pavlovskaia, Christian Ruthner, Orkun Şahin, Balázs Simonyi, Silvia Taborelli COORDINATOR (EB) Lasse Lecklin ORGANISERS (EB) Eero Erkamo, Johanna Kinnari, Helena Mielonen, Atso Pärnänen, Kati Pietarinen, Euphoria Borealis ry Vaasankatu 20 a B 35 00500 Helsinki +358 41 5251131 euphoria.borealis@welho.com www.euphoriaborealis.net NISI MASA 10 rue de l’Echiquier, 75010, Paris, France. + 33 (0)6 32 61 70 26 europe@nisimasa.com www.nisimasa.com

CINE-TRAIN CALL FOR APPLICATIONS

AND

A three-week international documentary workshop which will take place in September 2008 on the train going from Moscow to Vladivostok.

Six crews of young filmmakers will explore their skills along the way on the mythic Trans-Siberian railroad.

PRESENT

The films will be screened at the Vladivostok International Film Festival ‘Pacific Meridian’ Application deadline March 31st 2008

For more detailed information, please visit our websites http://moviement.livejournal.com/ www.nisimasa.com

Council of Europe

Nisimazine Helsinki ~ 27. 01. 2008 # 5

Film of the day Gibellina - Il terremoto

By Joerg Burger (Austria, 2007)

© sixpackfilm 2007

Impressive editing work reproduces this particular situation: the choice is often to separate sound and image, with an on/off-screen interplay.

In the midst of fields of sheep, Consagra, Burri, Pomodoro and many others artists have built their sculptures and installations here.

I

taly as seen by… an Austrian director. Luckily nothing to do with Italian clichés but an effective photography of a very special place.

As in another recent Austrian documentary (Il Palazzo, by Katharina Copony), it’s a kind of “nowhere” (‘‘non luogo’’ in Italian) which catches the attention of the director. Places where architecture and art are faced with real life: Il Palazzo examined Rome’s suburbs, for Joerg Burger it’s the story of Gibellina, a small village in Sicily which was completely rebuilt after an earthquake in the sixties.

A documentary which is artistic, poetic and informative all at the same time, the film is made up of postcards from Gibellina’s past and present, a village with a higher number of works of art than citizens. Modernity and tradition, an ancient world re-founded after an earthquake as an occasion to think about urbanism, social life and cultural renewal.

What comes out is a surreal atmosphere.

Modern art is compared to everyday life: old men seated in the central square one of the most traditional scenes in the South of Italy - talk about a strange clock that is replacing the normal bells.

An enlightened and yet often criticised man is behind this process: Ludovico Corrao, mayor of the city for 25 years. His idealistic vision is now facing the economic difficulties of a city where only the elderly are left and only chemists and barbers work.

An open-sky museum, an artistic experiment, is today surrounded by a desolate village, underlined by the director using fixed establishing shots and uncut scenes: a gallery of silences, sounds, emptiness. One of the last well-shot images shows swings moved by the wind.

The documentary, with an involved curiosity, tells of a courageous dream and the problem of the distance between art and life in a land where people still have to emigrate to find a job and personal well-being.

Silvia Taborelli

Review

The Gates

By Antonio Ferrara & Albert Maysles (USA, 2007)

N

o mere recording of the creation of landscape art for New York’s Central Park by famous artist Christo and his wife Jean Claude, The Gates is a documentary which symbolises the general public’s perception of art. Passing through a period of 26 years, it narrates the bureaucracy and narrow-mindedness the artists had to face to be able to complete the finished piece; a two-week display of 7500 saffron coloured gates located over the park’s walkways. A project that cost around 20 million US Dollars, and was funded by the artists themselves.

What, everybody wants to know, is its purpose? “Why don’t you use that money to feed people?” and “the park is a piece of landscape art! To place another piece of landscape art on top of it would be like asking Picasso to paint the Guernica on the surface of The Last Supper!”. Then, in 2005, they finally get the green light. Hidden behind trees, people reluctantly watch as the first steel gates are erected in their beloved park, whilst muttering and complaining to the camera crew. Yet all this ceases the moment The Gates are unveiled; at first the park turns into a theatre,

with great crowds of enthusiastic onlookers, then into a mystical place where the wind blows the fabric attached to the steel into beautiful saffron-coloured waves, framing the parks’ vistas and reinvigorating a space that everybody took for granted. As one of the park’s inhabitants, a homeless man, states: “People think why don’t you use the money for something else, like feeding them and shit. Something like this, the money is well spent! I think it feeds the soul.” He should know.

Itxaso Elosua Ramírez

Nisimazine Helsinki ~ 27. 01. 2008 # 5

Review

Pests

By Katja Lautamatti & Mina Laamo (Finland, 2007)

A

voiding a strictly scientific approach to its subject (which is, as the title suggest, pests) the film presents itself as an interesting and challenging exploration of both the human mind and human society through a confrontation with what cannot be seen by the bare eye but which is all the same time omnipresent and alive. Even if the film’s basic premise laid out this way could easily serve as a metaphor for wider issues, the authors never impose this kind of interpretation nor preoccupy themselves with larger-than-life ideas and judgments about the topic of their concerns. They merely try to introduce various angles of the same problem and leave the rest to us, the viewers. They never suggest a good guy/bad guy type of positioning, they just outline people’s behaviors, thoughts and fears - be they pest victims, scientists or exterminators.

So although the object of the film’s interest lies in nature, its standpoint is more related to human nature. The raw and sometimes brutal honesty of the spoken confessions mean that the film never slips into exaggeration. On the contrary, they give the viewer a feeling of utterly tangible discomfort, the kind of itching and scratching which pests are known to cause, marking thus a successful bonding of content and form.

Interview Stefan Grissemann

The music and disquieting photography are also smartly used in this sense, so that all the elements engage with one another in a film which could be, at least in terms of atmosphere, cited as a documentary counterpart to what Cronenberg represents in fiction: a kind of shifted reality which is actually our own.

Jasna Žmak

?????

> Austrian film critic Stefan Grissemann has completed the first published study on Ulrich Seidl, “Sündenfall”*.

What is Ulrich Seidl’s connection with the characters he presents in his films?

He loves the people he shows and spends weeks and months with them before the shooting. Seidl does not want to “exploit” anybody, which he sometimes gets accused of.

That is actually a delicate issue, because there will always be voyeurism in cinema. You cannot escape that problem: whatever you are looking at with your camera, you are using it for your own purposes.

H

ow do you see your book?

I interspersed my text with original statements from Seidl, which do not always go along with my opinion.

Within two years I made twenty interviews with him for the book. There were no other interferences from him: you cannot write a discerning study about a director if you share the script. There was even a period in which I panned his work. I do not like some of his movies so much. Ulrich Seidl does not fault criticism. He actually draws energy from conflicting opinions.

In his films he often uses amateurs.

Big parts are portrayed by professional actors, but he also uses amateurs, who are playing themselves to a certain degree. Naturally he tests them carefully in his castings, to see if they can provide the style he wants. There’s a lot of preparation work as well: you will find a costume person and set designers, whose work will change any location. It is all staged, but still shows a lot of reality. That is probably why the audience is so fascinated by his work.

Why do we find such strong reactions to his work?

Seidl is looking for the point where it starts to hurt, he shows cases of social hardship or the process of dying – nobody is eager to look at these things. No one really wants to see what people at the end of their life look like, and where we will all end up.

Zsuzsanna Kiràly & Christian Ruthner

* Stefan Grissemann, Sündenfall. Die Grenzüberschreitungen des Filmemachers Ulrich Seidl, Sonderzahl-Verlag, Vienna, 2007 (German only); ISBN 978 3 85449 279 5

Nisimazine Helsinki ~ 27. 01. 2008 # 5

Work in progress Looking for Loopholes: Iranian struggles

A

man is leaning against a wall, behind him in a different room some men are stirring something in a large pan. In the background a Persian recitation accompanied by music can be heard. The man’s shoulders start to shake and he hides his face in his hands. When another man passes him, he briefly looks up, pretending to be just standing. Behind him the soup is stirred and beside him people listen to the music. He grieves for his dead son. Life goes on around him. This is just one of the many scenes in The Faces on the Wall by Costes and Anquetil that expose personal struggles. Struggles with the past, with emotions, with social status and against forgetting. The film centres on three martyrs and how they slowly slip away in time, despite heartfelt attempts from their family and former neighbourhood to keep their memory alive. Their faces are painted on walls, their names given to streets and their personal belongings put on display in glass closets, to give them back a little of their lost presence in the physical world.

© ‘‘Our Times’’ by Rakhshan Bani-Etemad (2002)

Personal struggle is one thing that stands out in the wave of new documentary films coming from Iran. Small, compelling stories paint portraits of men and women who all want just a little space to live life in a way they feel comfortable with. They keep bumping into the barriers that society has built to keep them within the lines of its ideological framework. We see them having to find holes in the fence, not always succeeding to climb through - or when they do manage, discovering another enclosure behind the first one. Nevertheless, sometimes there is a little corner that escapes society’s watchful eye. With The Ladies’, director Mahnaz Afzali shows a public bathroom in a park in Tehran that has become a place for women from all backgrounds to take a moment to catch their breath. In the course of one day several stories float by, of survival in an outside world that demands resourcefulness and imagination. Just behind the two metal bathroom doors lie corruption, violence, injustice, rape and suicide, a world we never actually get to see in the film. Beneath the women’s vulnerability, strength sometimes shines through, if only just reflected in a smudgy mirror.

Another film that focuses on women’s restrictions is Our Times by Rakhshan Bani-Etemad, a double portrait of young women trying to claim their places in the 2001 elections. The second half, about Bayat, is the one that sticks in the mind. Living almost like a pariah in a world that doesn’t accept single mothers, she has put herself forward as a presidential candidate even though she doesn’t stand a chance. She discloses, while sitting on a park bench after not getting a single vote, that just being in the elections has given her a voice, even if it was only for a moment. The fact that she was heard gave her the little respect she wanted so badly. Sometimes, being recognised is as important as achieving your goal. A struggle may seem endless but can turn out to be rewarding when small pieces are dealt with one at a time.

This is proven by Zinat. Zinat, One Special Day by Ebrahim Mokhtari tells her story, first of taking off her ‘boregheh’ (a traditional mask worn by married women on the island of Queshm), then of becoming a healthcare worker, and finally getting elected for the city council.

A film that takes a completely different road, but which is also on a certain level about personal struggle is Tehran Has No More Pomegranates! by director Massoud Bakhshi. Himself quite prominently present in image as well as in voiceover, he addresses the difficulty one encounters when putting together a film, and his confusion about trying to get a grip on his city’s blurry past and present. Many of the films from Iran are self-reflexive in that they deal with the boundaries of contemporary Iranian society as well as Iranian filmmaking. This makes Iranian cinema something to stand up and take notice of, as it provides an insight into the way these new visions are structured and moreover, gives a different perspective on a country that is usually perceived to be out of sight.

Maartje Alders

Nisimazine Helsinki ~ 27. 01. 2008 # 5

Young Visions Paper Cannot Wrap Up Embers

By Rithy Panh (France, 2006)

A

timeworn building in Phnom Penh. Women are waiting for their next client, and death. Rithy Panh’s camera will give them the opportunity to leave their trace on a situation as well-known as it is rarely portrayed.

The director of S21, The Khmer Rouge Death Machine gives us another documentary which is neither historical nor didactical. No dates, no archives pictures, only human beings; actors and subjects of their own distress. Rithy Panh accompanies and directs, with reserve, the situation of these women who have given up. Words thus take his place in the film, with incredible sentences: “Whoever sleeps with me sleeps with a dead woman.” But Rithy Panh is above all a director of the body.

He works with the flesh, the gesture and its inner violence. We‘ll never see any client or any pimp, only the prostitutes imitating the scenes they endure every day. This reinterpretation is characteristic of the filmmaker who asked the executioners of S21 to re-enact scenes of torture.

© Les Acacias

Rithy Panh is in no way a passive filmmaker. He is the Paper Cannot Wrap Embers follows a similar direction to The Actors of companion, the scribe, the ultimate witness for the the Burned Theatre, which means the never-ending question of the trail, speech of these women who are dying in silence. the imprint. This cinematographic questioning par excellence takes on its full meaning when the prostitutes create an ephemeral print of their Thierry Lebas red lips on the concrete wall.

PICTURE OF THE DAY

© Photo by Pavlovskaya

Nisimazine Helsinki ~ 27. 01. 2008 # 5

Portrait

Jörn Donner

Atso Pärnänen

N

ot a week goes by without some article regarding the prolific writer, director and producer Jörn Donner. Perhaps this is an overstatement, but the fact is that for decades he has spoken out - and been listened to. Of course there is the Donner of headlines and scandals and then there is something more interesting, more valid and important, because in search of Donner one is confronted by multiple paths and crossroads.

His work as an author, journalist, politician, and Academy Award-winning producer can lead us down different routes, which perhaps end up, perhaps not, in the same place. The list of credits can be as surprising as it is long. He has worked as Director of both Swedish and Finnish film institutes, been a member of the European Parliament, and in the meantime found time to make films and write dozens of books.

Perhaps the key, the most interesting aspect of his work, is in these multiple books. Amongst them are a landmark study of Ingmar Bergman and 3 travel books on the state of Europe and the world during the Cold War (Report from Berlin, The Donau Report, The Worldbook). Donner proves himself to be a thinker with substantial knowledge of history and politics, and a skill for distanced analysis - this being something that he has always been willing to put himself through as well.

The difference between the newspaper headlines and the thoughts expressed in his partly autobiographical books (e.g.

Sommaren av Kärlek och Sorg) is often a remarkable one.

Whether it be reports on the state of the world or novels like Marina Maria, wherein a 24-year old secretary is searching for a father for the child she doesn’t have, the themes in his literature circle around the same subject matter as his films.

The 11 books on the Anders follow the life and times of a middle-class entrepreneurial family caught in the turmoil of Finnish history. In the same way as in his feature films, Donner captures a changing society and the obstacles and temptations that individuals meet within it.

In his Swedish film Rooftree, a concentration camp survivor encounters the smug attitude of a country that has not fought a war for hundreds of years. In Men Can’t be Raped a rape victim wants her payback in a society where even the officials do not believe a man could be raped.

Photo: Balázs Simonyi In Black on White Donner himself plays a married sales executive who falls in love with his co-worker and faces a troubled relationship. In 1984 he directed one of the Anders books in a film called Dirty Story - he has usually written the screenplays for his films himself. As David Thomson remarks in his entry regarding Donner in the Biographical Dictionary of the Cinema: “There is an interesting sense of the whole man being involved”. He then goes on to point out that “it is a threatening posture, for Donner implies that film might be used in the way that people once kept journals or diaries to observe themselves.”

The film Portraits of Women can perhaps best be understood as an ironic commentary regarding the prejudice that Donner must have felt from people when he returned to Finland surely a depressing place to make films after having started his feature film career in Sweden and won an award at the Venice Film Festival with his first feature. For years Donner was the filmmaker with contacts abroad in a country where too many were filming with Sovcolor instead of Kodak. In documentary, Donner’s approach has been as personal as in his fictional works. As a producer he has played a role in establishing new filmmakers from the Kaurismäki brothers to documentary filmmakers. His latest feature production Raja 1918 is based on his own original idea. In order to really cover Donner multiple articles would be needed, more time and thought given, but even the surface can offer a glimpse into his many lives. Besides, without him Bergman’s Fanny and Alexander would never have been made. Luckily, it was.

REALITY CHECK. Director Antonio Ferrera is present at the screening of The Gates in Bio Rex at 3 pm.

DocPoint Masterclass with Ulrich Seidl DocPoint closes today with a Masterclass by internationally acclaimed filmmaker Ulrich Seidl.

The event is moderated by filmmaker and film critic Constantin Wulff. In his lecture Seidl will tackle the entire filmmaking process from the idea to the final result. One of the main topics of the event is the treatment of boundaries between fact and fiction.

DocPoint Masterclass at Mediakeskus Lume.

The event is for registered participants only. Registration for Masterclass is now closed.

Director Antonio Ferrera Visits DocPoint with The Gates In 1979 the artist couple Christo and Jeanne-Claude started negotiating an art project in Central Park with New York city council.

David and Albert Maysles began filming the artists’ visits to city council meetings. The permission to construct the piece, consisting of orange gates in Central Park, was not granted until 26 years later. The Gates portrays the numerous stages involved in completing a Christo and Jeanne-Claude installation.

Antonio Ferrera, co-director of The Gates, visits DocPoint and is present at tonight’s screening.

The Gates, 3 pm, Bio Rex

Extra Screenings on Sunday Extra screenings of two of the most popular films at this year’s DocPoint programme are arranged today. You will have a second chance to catch It Happened Just Before by Anja Salomonowitz and Import/Export by Ulrich Seidl.

It Happened Just Before, 5 pm, Maxim, Import/Export, 9 pm, Maxim

ATENEUM

BIO REX

MAXIM 1

13:00 DONNER 4: Jörn Donner: AAMUA KAUPUNGISSA, 8’ NÄINÄ PÄIVINÄ, 8’ YHDEKSÄN TAPAA LÄHESTYÄ HELSINKIÄ, 61’

13:00 Jean-Gabriel Périot: EVEN IF SHE HAD BEEN A CRIMINAL..., 10’, K-18 Gellner & Draschan: LA MÉMOIRE DES ENFANTS, 74’, K-18

13:00 Katja Lautamatti & Mina Laamo: TUHOLAISET, 39’ Katja Gauriloff: HUUTO TUULEEN, 55’

15:00 Kimmo Jaatinen: KOLMENKYMPIN KRIISI, 3’ Iiris Härmä: ELÄÄ JA PALAA, 69’

15:00 Antonio Ferrara & Albert Maysles: THE GATES, 87’

16:30 DONNER 5: Jörn Donner: VETTÄ, 10’ ISÄNI JALANJÄLJILLÄ, 52’

17:00 Maher Abi Samra: MERELY A SMELL, 10’ Tucker & Epperlein: THE PRISONER OR: HOW I PLANNED TO KILL TONY BLAIR,72’, K-18

15:00 Florian Borchmeyer & Matthias Hentschler: HAVANA – THE NEW ART OF MAKING RUINS, 88’

19:00 Andrey Paounov: THE MOSQUITO PROBLEM & OTHER STORIES, 100’ 21:00 Gonzalo Arijon: STRANDED, 130’

17:00 RERUN Anja Salomonowitz: IT HAPPENED JUST BEFORE, 73’ 19:15 Rithy Panh: PAPER CANNOT WRAP UP EMBERS, 86’, K-18 21:00 RERUN Ulrich Seidl: IMPORT EXPORT, 135’, K-18

MAXIM 2

KIASMA

13:00 Peter Schreiner: BELLAVISTA, 117’ 15:30 Rostislav Aalto: MUOVISOTILAS, 2’ Mia Halme: ISO POIKA, 50’ 17:00 Daniela Rusnoková: SOÑA AND HER FAMILY, 37’ Suvi Andrea Helminen: ON THE WAY TO PARADISE, 58’ 19:00 Mohammad Rasoulof: TWILIGHT (GAGOOMAN), 83’

13:00 STUDENT FILMS 3: Katja Pällijeff: AINA KUNNOLLINEN, 20’ Oliwia Tonteri: LILLI, 26’ Iris Olsson: KESÄN LAPSI, 60’ 15:00 Joerg Burger: GIBELLINA – IL TERREMOTO, 72’ 17:00 Behnam Behzadi: HIDE YOUR WORDS, 27’ Rakhshan Bani-Etemad: OUR TIMES, 75’

19:00 Pavel Kostomarov & 20:45 Mehrdad Oskouei: IT’S Antoine Cattin: ALWAYS LATE FOR FREEDOM, THE MOTHER, 80’ 52’ Mahnaz Afzali: THE LADIES’, 55’

w w w. doc po int.info