Forum 2002: 1.Red Satin Orginal Titel: Satin Rouge Tunis/France 2002, 90 min Regie: Raja Amari Biographies: Raja Amari, born. 1971 in Tunis. Romanistik/Arthistory study in the university of Tunis. Filmstudy in the Paris Filmacademie FEMIS. Filme: Avril (1998), Un soir de juillet (2000).
Present day Tunis. As far as anyone is concerned, Lilia is a respectable woman and an attentive mother. She believes her daughter Salma is having an affair with Chokri, a musician in the Red Satin cabaret. Having suppressed her own desires, she’s unable to understand her daughter’s. To save her daughter from this “dangerous liason,“ Lilia goes to the cabaret. A new world opens up to her, a world repugnant yet at the same time tantalizing. A world of the night, dancing, blasé bar girls and pleasure- seeking men. Lilia can’t stop herself from returning and discovering, through dancing, those desires she has stifled during all those years of responsibility. Raja Amari: “Perhaps this film is about the flight of time, or perhaps about the changeable character of woman. Lilia discovers her body, that body she’s always buried under layers of shapeless clothes, that body she’s never shown any interest in. But through dancing, specifically in a cabaret, a place of exhibition par excellence, the change will occur. Chokri’s love will allow her to live a reality that she’s never experienced other than through procreation, indolently prostrate in front of the television. From this point Lilia only listens to her desire. This desire instigates the evolution of her character, and it’s only in recognizing defeat that she accepts her daughter’s marriage. Lilia settles down to normality, and this time ‘plays’ the role of a mother. This hypocrisy of character, which submits itself, fits in place with society’s hypocrisy.“
2.Mothers of Life Orginal Titel: Elämän äidit Finnland 2002, 74 min. Regie: A. Lapsui, Markku Lehmuskallio Biographies: Anastasia Lapsui, born in 1944 in Yar Sale/UdSSR. At first Radio-und newspaper reporter. 1990 first dramatague. Markku Lehmuskallio, born in 1938. from 1974 Films im Berlinale Forum in 1999 and 2000.
Mothers of Life tells about the destinies of Nubetya Yaptik’s nomadic family on the Yamal Peninsula, in eastern Siberia. In 1992 and 1993, we shot the film Paradise Lost. In that film we followed the everyday nomadic life of Nubetya Yaptik’s family. Over the years we received messages from the Yaptik family, about hardships. We searched for the women of the family in the tundra and asked for permission to shoot another film about the family. The women said yes. In Mothers of Life we used both colour material shot for the film Paradise Lost as well as black-and-white material shot in 2000 and 2001. In the beginning of the film, Nubetya, the father of the family, tells the story of a murder committed by an ancestor. The ancestor had to flee with his family in a closed boat. After drifting for some time on the sea, they came ashore in the area where their descendants now live. From the forefather we proceed to the present day, the harsh realities of today. Little by little, the family falls apart and eventually loses all their possessions, including all their reindeer. Mothers of Life is a film about a mother and daughter, Myusena and Tatyana, two strong women who wander from one hut to another, from people to people, searching for their rightful place. Finally, Tatyana ends up working at a stateowned farm. Myusena, her mother, follows her daughter. They are no longer independent, they have become servants.
3.On the Road to Emmaus Orginal Titel: Emmauksen tiellä Finnland 2002, 77 min Regie: Markku Pölönen Biographien / Biographies Markku Pölönen, born in 1957. Film from 1984: Onnen maa/Land of Happiness (1993), Kivenpyörittäjän kylä/The Last Wedding (1995), Kuningasjätkä/A Summer by the River (1998).
Real-estate agent Rane Koskivuo has returned to the countryside, which he left over 20 years ago, to sever the last remaining threads of his umbilical attachment to his home village. The purpose of his visit is to sell his house quickly and return to Helsinki. However, the unknown laws of the weird and the strange force Rane to walk the entire length of the road through the village once more. On his journey, Rane has to face a gallery of horrors. People, childhood figures, they all give an appearance as twisted images of their fate. Little by little, walking along the village road causes Rane to wake up to reality. At the jouney’s end, Rane has transformed into an altruist ready to sacrifice himself for others. Rane is the cynicism-plated soul who is turned inside out. On the Road to Emmaus is a burlesque comedy with an ending that is, nevertheless, a happy one. Markku Pölönen was almost all by himself responsible for restoring the viewers’ faith during the most testing times of Finnish cinema in the early 1990’s. On the Road to Emmaus, however, is designed to target the laugh nerve in the first instance. “It effectively unblocks the intestinal obstructions of your country nostalgia.” (Pölönen) No previous film-maker has proclaimed having made a dogma film in Finland. Pölönen’s On the Road to Emmaus is now considered Finland’s closest attempt to identify with the genre. This is true when it comes to the technique of expression but thanks to this film, somebody has already called Pölönen “Fellini of the woods” . 4.Lola Canada 2001, 97 min. Regie: Carl Bessai Biographies Carl Bessai, born in 1965 in Edmonton (Canada). Regie Study. Films from 1999: Out of Orbit (Dokumentarfilm), Johnny, Bang! (2000), Indie Truth – An Inquiry into the Documentary (2001).
Lola is an eccentric woman in her 30s who lives in a daze of girlish expectations, not knowing what to believe, or what to expect from life, and never clear about where things are heading. Her relationship is in a constant state of confusion, mostly because her husband Mike behaves more like her father than like a partner. He is short-tempered and egoistical, with little tolerance for her indecisiveness, so the two coexist in a lavish environment of sterility and tension. Lola’s life takes a sudden turn when she saves the life of a mysterious woman. Sandra is everything Lola wants to be: co-fident, outspoken, in control of her destiny. But the promise of a relationship between the two women is cut short when Sandra’s dark past catches up with her. On the run from this fateful encounter, but too scared to return home, Lola goes on the road to fulfill the destiny of a woman she barely knows. As she moves through the landscape toward Sandra’s childhood home, she slowly starts to absorb her friend’s identity. “The evocative use of the Canadian landscape, both urban and rural, echoes the film’s thematic concerns regarding the authenticity of identity. At first, Lola stum-bles obliviously through the claustrophobic, rain-slicked, neon-soaked streets of Vancouver’s downtown core; later, as she moves toward her own self-discovery, the B.C. interior opens up a stark and beautiful world of opportunity.“ Andrew McIntosh
5.One Night the Moon Australia 2001, 54 min Regie: Rachel Perkins Biographies Rachel Perkins, born. 1969 in Canberra (Australia). Job at Imparja Television. Films from 1993 as produzent und Regie.
One night, in the Australian Outback in the early 1930s, a young girl steps out of her bedroom window – entranced by the beautiful, beaming moon. When her parents go to check on her, she is nowhere to be found. The mother and father, recent settlers in the rugged landscape, spend the night looking for her, but to no avail. By early morning, the father turns to the local police for help. The sergeant suggests that Allman and their very best man, Aboriginal tracker Albert, set out to find her. But the father revolts – insisting, “No black fella is to set foot on my land.“ Instead, he gathers together as many white men as he can find, and conducts a line search across the desolate plains in search of the child. Albert watches helplessly as her every trace is stamped to dust. Sometime later, the mother makes a decision to take responsibility into her own hands, to reconcile the loss of her child. She goes to find Albert... Integrating the musical and the visual aspects became an exciting new process for everybody involved. “It is an interesting project because the musical has been dead for such a long time,“ says Rachel Perkins, “but considering a contemporary comparison to the musical is the music clip, we approached it by pushing the boundaries of what you would normally do in a drama, with the style, the design, and also the camera.“
6.A Lucky Day Original Titel: Un día de suerte Argentinien 2002, 94 Min Regie: Sandra Gogliotta Biographies Sandra Gugliotta, born. in Buenos Aires. Filmstudy at CERC and in spain. From 1996: Picado Fino (Regie: Esteban Sapir, Forum 1996). Film: Noches Aticas (short-film, 1995), Un día de suerte (2002).
The scene is present-day Buenos Aires in the throes of social unrest over unemployment, poverty and political corruption. Twenty-five-year-old Elsa struggles to make ends meet with casual work. But just like tens of thousands of Argentineans, she would rather leave the country, fleeing the hopelessness and going as far away as possible, ideally to the man she fell in love with years ago and who now lives in Italy. It is also the country of her ancestors. Her grandfather, an Italian anarchist who emigrated from Sicily to Argentina in search of a better life, tells Elsa about the country he left and strengthens her political awareness, but also her dream of one day going to Italy. Together with her friends Laura, Walter and Toni, Elsa wanders around, always looking out for ways of making some money, even on the black market, if necessary. Walter, with whom she has a kind of love affair, finally finds a way for her to travel to Europe. But Italy turns out to be very different from the country of her dreams. Sandra Gugliotta’s debut feature film is a work of great authenticity and direct relevance to the political and economic catastrophe her country is currently experiencing. Like the old anarchists, she refers to ideal values that have little in common with the social reality of present-day Argentina.
Forum 2001: 7.Children (Kosovo 2000) Hungery 2001, 90 min Regie: Ferenc Moldovanyi Ferenc Moldoványi, born. 1960 in Debrecen, Hungery. Regieassistent in den Pannonia Filmstudios. Philosophiestudium in Budapest, from 1987 to 1990 at the Budapester Theater- und Filmacademie. Filme from 1987: On the Samizdat (1988), Hotel West (1992), Market Development Foundation (1993), If We Eat a Beaver… The Cinema and… I-XIV (1995), The Way (1997).
Kosovo in the spring of 2000. Winter is over but in a meteorological sense only. Ruins and pain. The marks of devastation in the sunny landscape. Wounds that never heal, the hesitating, vague gestures of a new beginning. Paradoxes. In black and white, with the broken images of memory imprints in colour. Two words: deza and fëmijët, they mean children in Serb and Albanian. These expressions have no place in the irrational dictionary of war. It is the children, though, who are the most defenceless victims of this war governed by mad hatred. Their suffering has become an indelible chapter of the chronicle at the end of the century, the dawn of the new millenium. Besarta, Violeta, Edmond and Valdrim, Miljana and Jelena are Albanian and Serb children, the film tells their story in black and white with colour Super 8 images shot by the children themselves.
Forum 2000: 8.Kumar Talkies Indien 1999, 76 min Regie: Pankaj Rishi Kumar Biofilmography Pankaj Rishi Kumar, born. 1967 in Delhi. Study in the University Delhi, Filmstudying at ‘Film and Television Institute of India’ in Poona, Filmschnitt.
‘Kumar Talkies’ is the only cinema in Kalpi, a town in northern India. It is not much more than a derelict shed in the poorest area of town. Every day a few people come to see the film being screened there, irrespective of what it is. ‘Kumar Talkies’ doesn’t have any hits or flops; the principle of supply and demand doesn’t apply here. The documentary Kumar Talkies juxtaposes the real world of Kalpi, where the economic crisis has made life very uncertain, with the imaginary world of the silver screen, a world of romance and rebellion, where the impossible is made possible: imaginary images that have started to form part of the collective consciousness of Kalpi. Everyday life in town takes shape in interviews with the inhabitants and their interaction with the crew. In a cinéma-vérité style, the village comes to life: quarrels for the best seat in the cinema, conversations after the film, political debates in the bazaar. Kumar Talkies does not just look at the meaning of the cinema for the town, but also at the status of cinema in India, and especially the relationship between the major Bollywood productions and their audience. But the film also tells the story of the director’s own relationship with the cinema: it was his father who thirty years ago turned an old factory he had inherited into ‘Kumar Talkies’.
9.Cinema Verite: Defining the Moment Canada 1999, 102 min Regie: Peter Wintonick Biofilmography Peter Wintonick, Produzent, Regie, Autor, Cutter, Internetprogrammierer. Films from 1982, Produktion in Forum: The Journey: A Film for Peace (R: Peter Watkins, 1986), A Rustling of Leaves (R: Nettie Wild 1988), Manufacturing Consent (Co-Regie Mark Achbar, 1991).
"Cinéma vérité" explains the history and development of documentary cinema, which has changed the way we see. A feature documentary about documentary, Cinéma Verité: Defining the Moment is a major retrospective of some of the century’s finest non-fiction films, and a celebration of the contemporary legacy of the cinéma vérité revolution of the late fifties and early sixties. The revolution had many names: Free Cinema, Direct Cinema, Candid Eye, Cinéma Vérité. And it broke out simultaneously in England, France, the US and Canada. Wherever it appeared, the form marked a completely new way of understanding film, the audience, and the world. Part road movie, part history, part celebration, part nod to the future, the film travels across North America and Europe in search of the greats who changed the way we see the world – and changed the world we see. We follow director Peter Wintonick and his crew on their own quest for truth: the truth of what really happened during the vérité revolution. The world of cinéma vérité filmmaking was created by a group of driven, dedicated rebels. All the key players, including Robert Drew, Richard Leacock, Al Maysles, Donn Pennebaker, Hope Ryden, Wolf Koenig, Jean Rouch and Michel Brault, are featured in this film.Their use of lightweight, hand-held cameras and portable sound equipment, along with their unfailing commitment to recording reality as they saw it, revolutionised not only the documentary, but all forms of movie-making.
Forum 1999: 10.Killer.berlin.doc Germany 1999, 74 min Regie: Bettina Ellerkamp, Jörg Heitmann Biofilmographies Bettina Ellerkamp was born in 1966. She studied journalism and film at the Free University in Berlin. Since 1986 she has worked with film and video. She is co-founder of the interdisciplinary project 'Botschaft e.V.' and the production company 'dogfilm'. Apart from making films she organizes film and video events. Jörg Heitmann was born in 1965. He studied film and journalism at the Free University in Berlin. He co-founded the interdisciplinary project 'Botschaft e.V.' and the production company 'dogfilm'. He works as a free-lance camera man, but also makes his own videos and films. Films / Filme 1988: Os Jümmer. 1989: Freie Fahrt für Freie Bürger. 1992: Kulturzentrum Bethanien. 1993: Reklame; Asyl (4 Min.); Vereinigte Farben (4 Min.); Geheim (4 Min.). 1994: NS-Filme als Kauf-Cassetten (7 Min.); Energie treibt uns alle an (4 Min.); Kabinenfieber (4 Min.); Eurovision (4 Min.); Soap (4 Min.); Sauber (4 Min.); Vertical Reality (4 Min.); Buchenwald (4 Min.); Gipfeltreffen (4 Min.); heute (4 Min.); E.T.P. (4 Min.). 1995: Synonym AIDS (7 Min.); Try to survive till 2005 (60 Min.); Juristische Körper -corporate identity projects (49 Min.); Out of Body (26 Min.). 1996: Geschlossene Gesellschaft (7 Min.). 1996/97: Soap oder Das Leben ist eine Seifenoper (195 Min.). 1998: killer.berlin.doc
In May 1998, ten people, wanting to talk about their lives in a changing city, decide to turn their lives in Berlin into fiction. They play ‘killer’, a game in which no one knows of the others, each one is culprit as well as victim. The task is to find a person, designated but unknown to the player, and to plan the perfect murder for the victim. Knowing that yet another person is searching for him or her, the player looks for the designated victim. The players create a web across the city, the paths they take, the places they visit and the encounters with people all draw a subjective sketch of contemporary life in Berlin in the meantime… “killer.berlin.doc is a documentary with many fissures and fictive elements, a subjective artists’ portrait, an unusually beautiful architectural film, a diary with many voices focusing on two weeks in May 1998. The filmmaker collective combines different techniques successfully and in an aesthetically convincing style (subjective S8 in diary-style, video sequences of players, their ‘own’ sequences). The innovative structuring of images is extraordinary and unique, the flowing transitions between documentary and ficticious elements repeat emotional insecurity on a formal level, an insecurity experienced not only by the players during the game. Berlin is at the same time a dreamscape tinted in blue, a projection of a multitude of desires, an agglomeration of very diverse architectural styles. An aseptic Potsdamer Platz designed on the computer is placed next to the waste land close to the location of the former wall.” Detlef Kuhlbrodt
1.Red Satin
Orginal Titel: Satin Rouge
Tunis/France 2002, 90 min
Regie: Raja Amari
Biographies:
Raja Amari, born. 1971 in Tunis. Romanistik/Arthistory study in the university of Tunis. Filmstudy in the Paris Filmacademie FEMIS.
Filme: Avril (1998), Un soir de juillet (2000).
Present day Tunis. As far as anyone is concerned, Lilia is a respectable woman and an attentive mother. She believes her daughter Salma is having an affair with Chokri, a musician in the Red Satin cabaret. Having suppressed her own desires, she’s unable to understand her daughter’s. To save her daughter from this “dangerous liason,“ Lilia goes to the cabaret. A new world opens up to her, a world repugnant yet at the same time tantalizing. A world of the night, dancing, blasé bar girls and pleasure- seeking men. Lilia can’t stop herself from returning and discovering, through dancing, those desires she has stifled during all those years of responsibility. Raja Amari: “Perhaps this film is about the flight of time, or perhaps about the changeable character of woman. Lilia discovers her body, that body she’s always buried under layers of shapeless clothes, that body she’s never shown any interest in. But through dancing, specifically in a cabaret, a place of exhibition par excellence, the change will occur. Chokri’s love will allow her to live a reality that she’s never experienced other than through procreation, indolently prostrate in front of the television. From this point Lilia only listens to her desire. This desire instigates the evolution of her character, and it’s only in recognizing defeat that she accepts her daughter’s marriage. Lilia settles down to normality, and this time ‘plays’ the role of a mother. This hypocrisy of character, which submits itself, fits in place with society’s hypocrisy.“
2.Mothers of Life
Orginal Titel: Elämän äidit
Finnland 2002, 74 min.
Regie: A. Lapsui, Markku Lehmuskallio
Biographies:
Anastasia Lapsui, born in 1944 in Yar Sale/UdSSR. At first Radio-und newspaper reporter. 1990 first dramatague. Markku Lehmuskallio, born in 1938. from 1974 Films im Berlinale Forum in 1999 and 2000.
Mothers of Life tells about the destinies of Nubetya Yaptik’s nomadic family on the Yamal Peninsula, in eastern Siberia. In 1992 and 1993, we shot the film Paradise Lost. In that film we followed the everyday nomadic life of Nubetya Yaptik’s family. Over the years we received messages from the Yaptik family, about hardships. We searched for the women of the family in the tundra and asked for permission to shoot another film about the family. The women said yes. In Mothers of Life we used both colour material shot for the film Paradise Lost as well as black-and-white material shot in 2000 and 2001. In the beginning of the film, Nubetya, the father of the family, tells the story of a murder committed by an ancestor. The ancestor had to flee with his family in a closed boat. After drifting for some time on the sea, they came ashore in the area where their descendants now live. From the forefather we proceed to the present day, the harsh realities of today. Little by little, the family falls apart and eventually loses all their possessions, including all their reindeer. Mothers of Life is a film about a mother and daughter, Myusena and Tatyana, two strong women who wander from one hut to another, from people to people, searching for their rightful place. Finally, Tatyana ends up working at a stateowned farm. Myusena, her mother, follows her daughter. They are no longer independent, they have become servants.
3.On the Road to Emmaus
Orginal Titel: Emmauksen tiellä
Finnland 2002, 77 min
Regie: Markku Pölönen
Biographien / Biographies
Markku Pölönen, born in 1957. Film from 1984: Onnen maa/Land of Happiness (1993), Kivenpyörittäjän kylä/The Last Wedding (1995), Kuningasjätkä/A Summer by the River (1998).
Real-estate agent Rane Koskivuo has returned to the countryside, which he left over 20 years ago, to sever the last remaining threads of his umbilical attachment to his home village. The purpose of his visit is to sell his house quickly and return to Helsinki. However, the unknown laws of the weird and the strange force Rane to walk the entire length of the road through the village once more. On his journey, Rane has to face a gallery of horrors. People, childhood figures, they all give an appearance as twisted images of their fate. Little by little, walking along the village road causes Rane to wake up to reality. At the jouney’s end, Rane has transformed into an altruist ready to sacrifice himself for others. Rane is the cynicism-plated soul who is turned inside out. On the Road to Emmaus is a burlesque comedy with an ending that is, nevertheless, a happy one. Markku Pölönen was almost all by himself responsible for restoring the viewers’ faith during the most testing times of Finnish cinema in the early 1990’s. On the Road to Emmaus, however, is designed to target the laugh nerve in the first instance. “It effectively unblocks the intestinal obstructions of your country nostalgia.” (Pölönen) No previous film-maker has proclaimed having made a dogma film in Finland. Pölönen’s On the Road to Emmaus is now considered Finland’s closest attempt to identify with the genre. This is true when it comes to the technique of expression but thanks to this film, somebody has already called Pölönen “Fellini of the woods” .
4.Lola
Canada 2001, 97 min.
Regie: Carl Bessai
Biographies
Carl Bessai, born in 1965 in Edmonton (Canada). Regie Study. Films from 1999: Out of Orbit (Dokumentarfilm), Johnny, Bang! (2000), Indie Truth – An Inquiry into the Documentary (2001).
Lola is an eccentric woman in her 30s who lives in a daze of girlish expectations, not knowing what to believe, or what to expect from life, and never clear about where things are heading. Her relationship is in a constant state of confusion, mostly because her husband Mike behaves more like her father than like a partner. He is short-tempered and egoistical, with little tolerance for her indecisiveness, so the two coexist in a lavish environment of sterility and tension. Lola’s life takes a sudden turn when she saves the life of a mysterious woman. Sandra is everything Lola wants to be: co-fident, outspoken, in control of her destiny. But the promise of a relationship between the two women is cut short when Sandra’s dark past catches up with her. On the run from this fateful encounter, but too scared to return home, Lola goes on the road to fulfill the destiny of a woman she barely knows. As she moves through the landscape toward Sandra’s childhood home, she slowly starts to absorb her friend’s identity. “The evocative use of the Canadian landscape, both urban and rural, echoes the film’s thematic concerns regarding the authenticity of identity. At first, Lola stum-bles obliviously through the claustrophobic, rain-slicked, neon-soaked streets of Vancouver’s downtown core; later, as she moves toward her own self-discovery, the B.C. interior opens up a stark and beautiful world of opportunity.“ Andrew McIntosh
5.One Night the Moon
Australia 2001, 54 min
Regie: Rachel Perkins
Biographies
Rachel Perkins, born. 1969 in Canberra (Australia). Job at Imparja Television. Films from 1993 as produzent und Regie.
One night, in the Australian Outback in the early 1930s, a young girl steps out of her bedroom window – entranced by the beautiful, beaming moon. When her parents go to check on her, she is nowhere to be found. The mother and father, recent settlers in the rugged landscape, spend the night looking for her, but to no avail. By early morning, the father turns to the local police for help. The sergeant suggests that Allman and their very best man, Aboriginal tracker Albert, set out to find her. But the father revolts – insisting, “No black fella is to set foot on my land.“ Instead, he gathers together as many white men as he can find, and conducts a line search across the desolate plains in search of the child. Albert watches helplessly as her every trace is stamped to dust. Sometime later, the mother makes a decision to take responsibility into her own hands, to reconcile the loss of her child. She goes to find Albert... Integrating the musical and the visual aspects became an exciting new process for everybody involved. “It is an interesting project because the musical has been dead for such a long time,“ says Rachel Perkins, “but considering a contemporary comparison to the musical is the music clip, we approached it by pushing the boundaries of what you would normally do in a drama, with the style, the design, and also the camera.“
6.A Lucky Day
Original Titel: Un día de suerte
Argentinien 2002, 94 Min
Regie: Sandra Gogliotta
Biographies
Sandra Gugliotta, born. in Buenos Aires. Filmstudy at CERC and in spain. From 1996: Picado Fino (Regie: Esteban Sapir, Forum 1996). Film: Noches Aticas (short-film, 1995), Un día de suerte (2002).
The scene is present-day Buenos Aires in the throes of social unrest over unemployment, poverty and political corruption. Twenty-five-year-old Elsa struggles to make ends meet with casual work. But just like tens of thousands of Argentineans, she would rather leave the country, fleeing the hopelessness and going as far away as possible, ideally to the man she fell in love with years ago and who now lives in Italy. It is also the country of her ancestors. Her grandfather, an Italian anarchist who emigrated from Sicily to Argentina in search of a better life, tells Elsa about the country he left and strengthens her political awareness, but also her dream of one day going to Italy. Together with her friends Laura, Walter and Toni, Elsa wanders around, always looking out for ways of making some money, even on the black market, if necessary. Walter, with whom she has a kind of love affair, finally finds a way for her to travel to Europe. But Italy turns out to be very different from the country of her dreams. Sandra Gugliotta’s debut feature film is a work of great authenticity and direct relevance to the political and economic catastrophe her country is currently experiencing. Like the old anarchists, she refers to ideal values that have little in common with the social reality of present-day Argentina.
Forum 2001:
7.Children (Kosovo 2000)
Hungery 2001, 90 min
Regie: Ferenc Moldovanyi
Ferenc Moldoványi, born. 1960 in Debrecen, Hungery. Regieassistent in den Pannonia Filmstudios. Philosophiestudium in Budapest, from 1987 to 1990 at the Budapester Theater- und Filmacademie. Filme from 1987: On the Samizdat (1988), Hotel West (1992), Market Development Foundation (1993), If We Eat a Beaver… The Cinema and… I-XIV (1995), The Way (1997).
Kosovo in the spring of 2000. Winter is over but in a meteorological sense only. Ruins and pain. The marks of devastation in the sunny landscape. Wounds that never heal, the hesitating, vague gestures of a new beginning. Paradoxes. In black and white, with the broken images of memory imprints in colour.
Two words: deza and fëmijët, they mean children in Serb and Albanian. These expressions have no place in the irrational dictionary of war. It is the children, though, who are the most defenceless victims of this war governed by mad hatred. Their suffering has become an indelible chapter of the chronicle at the end of the century, the dawn of the new millenium.
Besarta, Violeta, Edmond and Valdrim, Miljana and Jelena are Albanian and Serb children, the film tells their story in black and white with colour Super 8 images shot by the children themselves.
Forum 2000:
8.Kumar Talkies
Indien 1999, 76 min
Regie: Pankaj Rishi Kumar
Biofilmography
Pankaj Rishi Kumar, born. 1967 in Delhi. Study in the University Delhi, Filmstudying at ‘Film and Television Institute of India’ in Poona, Filmschnitt.
‘Kumar Talkies’ is the only cinema in Kalpi, a town in northern India. It is not much more than a derelict shed in the poorest area of town. Every day a few people come to see the film being screened there, irrespective of what it is. ‘Kumar Talkies’ doesn’t have any hits or flops; the principle of supply and demand doesn’t apply here.
The documentary Kumar Talkies juxtaposes the real world of Kalpi, where the economic crisis has made life very uncertain, with the imaginary world of the silver screen, a world of romance and rebellion, where the impossible is made possible: imaginary images that have started to form part of the collective consciousness of Kalpi. Everyday life in town takes shape in interviews with the inhabitants and their interaction with the crew. In a cinéma-vérité style, the village comes to life: quarrels for the best seat in the cinema, conversations after the film, political debates in the bazaar.
Kumar Talkies does not just look at the meaning of the cinema for the town, but also at the status of cinema in India, and especially the relationship between the major Bollywood productions and their audience. But the film also tells the story of the director’s own relationship with the cinema: it was his father who thirty years ago turned an old factory he had inherited into ‘Kumar Talkies’.
9.Cinema Verite: Defining the Moment
Canada 1999, 102 min
Regie: Peter Wintonick
Biofilmography
Peter Wintonick, Produzent, Regie, Autor, Cutter, Internetprogrammierer. Films from 1982, Produktion in Forum: The Journey: A Film for Peace (R: Peter Watkins, 1986), A Rustling of Leaves (R: Nettie Wild 1988), Manufacturing Consent (Co-Regie Mark Achbar, 1991).
"Cinéma vérité" explains the history and development of documentary cinema, which has changed the way we see. A feature documentary about documentary, Cinéma Verité: Defining the Moment is a major retrospective of some of the century’s finest non-fiction films, and a celebration of the contemporary legacy of the cinéma vérité revolution of the late fifties and early sixties. The revolution had many names: Free Cinema, Direct Cinema, Candid Eye, Cinéma Vérité. And it broke out simultaneously in England, France, the US and Canada. Wherever it appeared, the form marked a completely new way of understanding film, the audience, and the world.
Part road movie, part history, part celebration, part nod to the future, the film travels across North America and Europe in search of the greats who changed the way we see the world – and changed the world we see. We follow director Peter Wintonick and his crew on their own quest for truth: the truth of what really happened during the vérité revolution. The world of cinéma vérité filmmaking was created by a group of driven, dedicated rebels. All the key players, including Robert Drew, Richard Leacock, Al Maysles, Donn Pennebaker, Hope Ryden, Wolf Koenig, Jean Rouch and Michel Brault, are featured in this film.Their use of lightweight, hand-held cameras and portable sound equipment, along with their unfailing commitment to recording reality as they saw it, revolutionised not only the documentary, but all forms of movie-making.
Forum 1999:
10.Killer.berlin.doc
Germany 1999, 74 min
Regie: Bettina Ellerkamp, Jörg Heitmann
Biofilmographies
Bettina Ellerkamp was born in 1966. She studied journalism and film at the Free University in Berlin. Since 1986 she has worked with film and video. She is co-founder of the interdisciplinary project 'Botschaft e.V.' and the production company 'dogfilm'. Apart from making films she organizes film and video events.
Jörg Heitmann was born in 1965. He studied film and journalism at the Free University in Berlin. He co-founded the interdisciplinary project 'Botschaft e.V.' and the production company 'dogfilm'. He works as a free-lance camera man, but also makes his own videos and films.
Films / Filme
1988: Os Jümmer. 1989: Freie Fahrt für Freie Bürger. 1992: Kulturzentrum Bethanien. 1993: Reklame; Asyl (4 Min.); Vereinigte Farben (4 Min.); Geheim (4 Min.). 1994: NS-Filme als Kauf-Cassetten (7 Min.); Energie treibt uns alle an (4 Min.); Kabinenfieber (4 Min.); Eurovision (4 Min.); Soap (4 Min.); Sauber (4 Min.); Vertical Reality (4 Min.); Buchenwald (4 Min.); Gipfeltreffen (4 Min.); heute (4 Min.); E.T.P. (4 Min.). 1995: Synonym AIDS (7 Min.); Try to survive till 2005 (60 Min.); Juristische Körper -corporate identity projects (49 Min.); Out of Body (26 Min.). 1996: Geschlossene Gesellschaft (7 Min.). 1996/97: Soap oder Das Leben ist eine Seifenoper (195 Min.). 1998: killer.berlin.doc
In May 1998, ten people, wanting to talk about their lives in a changing city, decide to turn their lives in Berlin into fiction. They play ‘killer’, a game in which no one knows of the others, each one is culprit as well as victim. The task is to find a person, designated but unknown to the player, and to plan the perfect murder for the victim. Knowing that yet another person is searching for him or her, the player looks for the designated victim. The players create a web across the city, the paths they take, the places they visit and the encounters with people all draw a subjective sketch of contemporary life in Berlin in the meantime… “killer.berlin.doc is a documentary with many fissures and fictive elements, a subjective artists’ portrait, an unusually beautiful architectural film, a diary with many voices focusing on two weeks in May 1998. The filmmaker collective combines different techniques successfully and in an aesthetically convincing style (subjective S8 in diary-style, video sequences of players, their ‘own’ sequences). The innovative structuring of images is extraordinary and unique, the flowing transitions between documentary and ficticious elements repeat emotional insecurity on a formal level, an insecurity experienced not only by the players during the game. Berlin is at the same time a dreamscape tinted in blue, a projection of a multitude of desires, an agglomeration of very diverse architectural styles. An aseptic Potsdamer Platz designed on the computer is placed next to the waste land close to the location of the former wall.” Detlef Kuhlbrodt