Archive for the 'Film festivals' Category
Dutch filmmaker Heddy Honigmann will be the recipient of this year’s Outstanding Achievement Award at the Canadian documentary film festival HOTDOCS (April 19-29, 2007, Toronto). The programme will feature many of her films, including the most recent, “Forever“, on the famous Paris cemetery, Père Lachaise.
Elegant, effortless and intimate, Honigmann’s non-fiction films have addressed the role that art, and most often music, plays in our lives and memory. Her work has been described as “infused with the quietly transcendent beauty, sadness, loss and humour of being human”, and her subjects have included a rich range - from cab drivers in Peru to Iranian ex-pats in Paris.
“Forever” portrays Père Lachaise through documenting stories of lonely visitors who open up to share their stories of connection to the graves. The film focuses on some famous graves (Chopin, Proust, and Maria Callas among others) but also covers others. One of the visitors is a Japanese girl who loves Chopin’s music so much she moved to Paris to study the piano, and another is a woman who comes to visit the love of her life, who died tragically soon after they got married.
Continue reading ‘HOTDOCS to honour Heddy Honigmann’
To the astonishment of the documentary festival organisers behind IDFA, the Dutch government has cut off funding for the Jan Vrijman Fund, a key source for documentary filmmakers in non-EU and developing countries. IDFA founded the Jan Vrijman Fund in 1998 to encourage the documentary climate in developing countries by supporting local documentary projects, filmmakers and festivals.
Over the past years, hundreds of projects and films were supported and many were screened at IDFA, Berlin, Locarno and Sundance, and on TV networks across the globe. The fund has also been the backbone of an international documentary network, bringing together filmmakers from developing countries and the rest of the world.
IDFA is shocked at the prospect of losing two-thirds of its budget, but other funders - such as Foundation DOEN and the Hivos-NDCO Culture Fund - continue to be on board, and have increased their contribution for 2007. Owing to this support, the fund can remain operational for the time being and the first selection round in February can go ahead as planned. Meanwhile, the fund actively looks for new partners, and will decide in April whether the second selection round can take place in June.
Read more on the Fund’s homepage.
The UK’s largest international documentary film festival kicked off today, with screenings in Oxford, Milton Keynes and London. The OXDOX festival showcases over 120 fresh documentaries and Q&A sessions with over 70 directors.
In April, the festival will move to the Barbican in London, before embarking on an international tour to Paris, New York, Sydney and China. Among the films are UK premieres, Oscar-winning productions, as well as the first-ever simultaneous round-the-world screening of the environmental film, “The Planet”. Festival themes include the environment, human rights, China, the mafia, art, music politics and urban existence.
Also a major highlight has been a topical strand of premiere films focusing on women and Islam, including stories from Pakistan, Malaysia, Oman, Indonesia, Algeria, Egypt, Iran, Palestine, Turkey and Yemen.
A German documentary on globalisation, “Losers and Winners” by Ulrike Franke and Michael Loeken, has won the main award at the 9th One World international human rights documentary film festival in Prague. The documentary follows 400 Chinese workers as they pull down a coke factory in Germany’s Ruhr Valley and ship the parts for re-assembly in China.
The Best Director award went to the “Cemetery Club” from Israel, a film about elderly people, directed by Tali Shemesh. The jury also awarded a special mention to a Danish documentary on human courage, “Enemies of Happiness” by Eva Mulvad. Meanwhile, Russian film-maker Svetlana Gannushkina was presented with the Homo Homini award for an outstanding achievement in human rights.
This year’s festival, which has offered some 120 documentaries from 40 countries, has attracted a record high number of 35,000 viewers. For more info, visit the One World website, or see our previous item on One World.
OneWorld.net carries an interesting interview with John H. Biaggi, deputy director of the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival, who says that the recent boom in documentaries has caused a drop in quality.
“With so many human rights films being made, what I see is a lot of poorly produced and/or poorly conceived films. The actual percentage of each year’s films that are really good has not moved up at all. In fact, I might venture to say, it has gone down. Really strong documentaries take time and skill and tremendous effort and follow-through.”
“All of these are in shorter and shorter supply every year. The squeeze on funding sources, on people’s time and ability to tell these stories, and the frantic siren calls of festivals and television (with their deadlines and premiere demands) make it increasingly difficult for any aspiring filmmaker to actually allow the film to unfold in its true nature, in a proper length of time.”
Continue reading ‘More documentaries are made, but quality is dubious’
Films from 20 countries feature in this year’s programme: Afghanistan, Algeria, Belarus, Burma, Chile, DR Congo, Costa Rica, France, Germany, Guatemala, India, Iraq, Israel, Nepal, Nicaragua, Nigeria, Mexico, Palestine, Romania and USA. For more info, check the HRW film festival website.
Last week’s screening of the documentary “Moskva Pride ’06” at the Berlinale trigerred a major security alert after festival organizers received threats prior to the first screening. Russian director Vladimir Ivanov’s film chronicles the story of Moscow’s first gay pride parade in May 2006, in which protesters clashed with gay activists after the march was banned by the authorities. The filmmakers commented that the threats were a grim reminder of intolerance even in places like Berlin. The film’s producer, Nikolai Alekseev, told the Berlinale audience he doubts that the documentary will ever be shown on Russian television. “We expect that the film will be screened at other film festivals in different countries and after that we will release it on DVD.” 
