12th THESSALONIKI DOCUMENTARY FESTIVAL
Images of the 21st Century
MARCH 12 – 21, 2010
TRIBUTES AND SPOTLIGHTS
The main tributes and spotlights of the 12th Thessaloniki Documentary Festival are: a focus on the Polish documentary –highlighting both its past and present– and a tribute to Dutch director Joris Ivens.
The Polish focus is spearheaded by a tribute to Krzysztof Kieslowski, which will showcase the Polish director’s impressive documentary oeuvre, a thematic and aesthetic precursor to his later fiction work. A spotlight to Andrzej Fidyk explores some of the Polish filmmaker’s work, which focuses mainly on the repression of human rights; and a Polish Docs Spotlight will present the most contemporary and relevant documentary work coming out of the country.
The tribute to the work of Joris Ivens, one of the most important documentary filmmakers of the 20th century, will present films from all the stages of his career and shed light into an exceptionally valuable and innovative body of work.
Tribute Krzysztof Kieslowski
Despite being primarily famous for his fiction work, director Krzysztof Kieslowski started his filmmaking career by making a large number of documentaries.
Kieslowski’s documentary period took place throughout the 1960s and the 1970s, predominantly an era of political changes and unrest, and consequently of defiant filmmaking that exercised social critique.
For his graduation from the Lodz Film School in 1969, Kieslowski wrote a thesis entitled “Reality and the Documentary Film”, which proposed that reality was stranger—and much more dramatic—than fiction. Viewed in its entirety, Kieslowski’s own documentary work is both political and deeply humanistic.
18 of Kieslowski’s documentaries will be screened during the 12th TDF, some of which are:
The Legend. The finished version of Kieslowski’s unfinished documentary about celebrated Polish writer Stefan Zeromski will hold its international premiere in Thessaloniki, thus presenting an exceptional cinematic opportunity to the Festival’s audiences and guests.
From the City of Lodz, 1969. The director’s graduation project for film school, the documentary is a black and white portrait of the industrial and rather dilapidated city of Lodz; it marks his first (and thereafter frequent) collaboration with the Documentary Film Studio in Warsaw.
Factory, 1970. Lively factory sequences, portraying the daily routines of workers, are juxtaposed with monotonous and time-consuming talks between factory operatives and administrators; the historical association being that the film was shot during violent workers' strikes in the Baltic ports.
Before the Rally, 1971. As with many of Kieslowski’s documentaries, this film serves as an allegory for the state of Poland at the time. It depicts the ten days of preparation of two Polish drivers for the Monte Carlo rally and their struggle with the Polish Fiat 125 and its mechanical problems; in the end, the drivers fail to finish the race.
Workers’71, 1972. Perhaps Kieslowski’s most political film, Workers ’71, was censored and not allowed to screen in Poland at the time, as it consisted of interviews of workers about their harsh lives and needs and exposed the ruling class as callous and exploitative.
First Love, 1974. Originally (and ambitiously) planned to be a documentary that would follow a newborn baby throughout her life, it actually became the record of seven months in the life of a married couple until two months after their child was born. While making the film Kieslowski actually persuaded the authorities to provide the couple with a brand new apartment.
From the Point of View of a Night Porter, 1977. A disturbing -yet devoid of judgement- portrait of a factory porter, this short documentary presents a man who is dutiful, yet extremely rigid in his various professional duties, as well as his opinions. The porter talks about his support of capital punishment, of the silencing of government critics and his enjoyment in rule-enforcement, thus presenting the case of a man shaped exactly as the totalitarian authorities want him to.
Talking Heads, 1980. Several people of various ages, professions and backgrounds answer Kieslowski’s questions: “Who are you?”, “When were you born?” and “What is important for you?”. Their honest views about their lives are edited in such a manner as to conclude that that people’s individual freedoms and happiness are not sufficient, if they do not live under a democratic regime.
Tribute Joris Ivens
Dutch documentary master Joris Ivens, who died in 1989, lived an extraordinary life and made a multitude of films all over the globe, which can be viewed in their entirety as testimony and history of a large part of the 20th century and its remarkable changes.
He shot his first projects in the late 1920s, working alone with a hand-held 35 mm camera, and made his last one a year before his death. In the beginning of his career, Ivens was commissioned by Dutch unions to make films on a variety of professions, such as that of builders and factory workers (his most notable, avant-garde films from the period are The Bridge and Philips Radio). After a tour of the USSR with his work, Ivens started to change his ideas about the process, as well as his filmmaking practices and aesthetics; also, the social and political engagement he will show in his oeuvre makes itself strongly apparent during this period.
Ivens won numerous prestigious awards, such as the World Peace Prize (1955), the Cannes Palm d’ Or for The Seine Meets Paris (1957) and the Venice Golden Lion for the entirety of his work (1988). As film critic and Ivens expert Jose Manuel Costa wrote, the Dutch filmmaker used documentary “as a way of forcing reality to reveal its inner sense through a confrontation with it[self]”.
Approximately 20 of Ivens’ documentaries will be screened during the 12th TDF, some of which are:
The Bridge, 1928. His first complete film, it was immediately hailed as an avant-garde work of genius; it is a formalistic study of a Rotterdam vertical lift-bridge, which the director called a “laboratory of movements, tints, forms, contrasts, rhythms”.
The Spanish Earth, 1937. With an imposing narration by Ernest Hemingway, this is one of Ivens’ most important works, as well as one of the foremost documentaries on the Spanish Civil War. Ivens filmed in Fuenteduena, near Madrid, on the front of the republican armies and struck a balance between the actual war and the millions of lives affected by it.
Indonesia Calling, 1946. Appointed by the Dutch government as Film Commissioner of the East Indies, Joris Ivens was meant to film the liberation of Indonesia. When he realized that the Dutch had no plans to free Indonesia, he resigned and made this film, shot in the Sydney harbours, where port workers’ unions boycotted Dutch ships filled with military supplies.
…A Valparaiso, 1963. When in 1962 Ivens was invited to Chile to teach filmmaking, he made this film with the collaboration of his students. It is a poetic portrait of the city -built on 42 hills-, recording the day and night life of its people and drawing contrasts between its past and present.
A Tale of Wind, 1988. Co-directed with his wife, Marceline Loridan, this is Ivens' last film and it is more an autobiographical testament than a documentary. Shot between 1984 and 1988, it often features the imposing figure of the director himself as the protagonist of various fantastical scenes, taking place from the Gobi Desert to a rocket that goes to a Georges Melies-like moon. It is his creative and poetic farewell to the world.
Spotlight Andrzej Fidyk
Andrzej Fidyk is a multi award-winning Polish documentary filmmaker and producer. He first started working for television in 1980 and since then he has made over 40 documentary films. After working at the BBC from 1991 to 1996, he returned to Polish television as Head of Documentaries, where he practically reinvented the TV documentary genre in his country and created a successful department from which a large number of documentaries originated.
His own films, shot in various countries, are overtly political, but in a humanitarian sense; they focus on people’s stories and the violations of human rights taking place all over the world.
Some of Fidyk’s documentaries that will be screened during the 12th TDF are:
Battu’s Bioscope, 1998. Mr. Battu’s livelihood is a travelling movie theatre traversing the arid roads of midland India. His lifelong dream –to show a film to people who have never seen one before- is about to come true and Fidyk’s crew accompanies him in his travels through fishing villages, snake hunters’ settlements and numerous remote areas.
Belarusian Waltz, 2007. Since 1994, Belarus’ dictator Alexander Lukashenko has ruled the ex-Soviet republic in a tyrannical manner, silencing his critics and jailing members of the opposition. The film focuses on Belarusian performance artist Alexander Pushkin, whose comical street-theatre routine protests the dictatorship in its own unique style.
Yodok Stories, 2008. 36-year-old North Korean defector Jung Sung San, who has escaped to South Korea, organizes a controversial theatre musical about his life as a prisoner in the Yodok concentration camp in his country. Eight other refugees join him in this play, despite death threats and various problems, while Fidyk films both their artistic exploits and their gripping testimonies.
Spotlight Polish Docs
An unofficial “companion” to the Krzysztof Kieslowski and Andrzej Fidyk Tributes, this spotlight will present the most contemporary and freshest documentaries to come out of Poland (year of production: 2009 and 2010). These documentaries explore a variety of themes and stories; they all, however, share a common focus and interest in the limitless circumstances of the human condition and present them with subtlety and compassion.
Some of the films that will be screened as part of the Polish Docs Spotlight are:
Andrzej Wajda: Let’s Shoot! by Maciej Cuske, Marcin Sauter, Piotr Stasik and Thierry Paladino. Four students of the Andrzej Wajda Master School of Film Directing and of the celebrated filmmaker himself followed him to the location shoot of his film Katyn in 2006 and 2007. They shot constantly for four months and the result makes not only for a fascinating making-of, but also for a multi-layered, complex portrait of one of the most important filmmakers of the 20th century.
Chemo by Pawel Lozinski (Prix Europe 2009 for Best TV Documentary). Multi-award winning documentary Chemo was shot in an oncology clinic, where several cancer sufferers gather daily to receive chemotherapy for various types of cancer. The film only shows the patients’ perspective on disease, life and death, as no medical staff participates. Usually in close-up, the camera observes them; they form bonds and friendships and allow the filmmakers to listen in their conversations, and in this way accomplish a very intimate portrait.
Six Weeks by Marcin Janos Krawczyk. Another personal and anthropocentric film, Six Weeks explores the fate of newborn babies of disadvantaged families (or single mothers) in Poland. The title refers to the period in which parents may decide if they want to give up their child for adoption; the film itself explores this timeframe of 6 weeks in a lyrical manner, aiming to show the dramatic effect that this short period has on several lives: those of the mothers who have to give up their baby, the helpless newborns themselves and, on occasion, the joyful adoptive parents who finally can have a child.
