“The seminar concentrates on strong examples (not quantity) and on film language, rather than on production or distribution issues. It comes out of the need to interrogate the state of documentary film in a period when its obvious momentum carries out new contradictions. It aims to look into the documentary potential to renew the whole cinema practice, as well as to its resistance to the recent corset of standardization. And it looks into documentary not so much as a genre itself, but as a large territory of crucial representation issues present in all modern film.
The 2002 edition features a special dialogue with Eastern Asia film directors, following the Doc’ Kingdom seminar journey included at last year’s Yamagata film festival.
Also as a new feature, the seminar incorporates two thematic lectures/ debates, one on the Japanese documentary film and one on the present issues and challenges of documentary production in the world. In parallel to Doc’s Kingdom 2002 a special public program dedicated to the local audience will also be presented.”
“It’s always like the frescos in Pisa’s Campo Santo, where one can clearly see an arm and the piece next to it, representing the head, has fallen. I see the images one after the other, very neatly, but in a shape they take only for me. Furthermore, I only see this shape thanks to the memory of the effect they have had on me.” – Stendhal, in The Life of Henry Brulard
In this film a surprising visual language of great philosophical intensity is developed. A writer, caught between reality and fiction, is confronted with the big question: how to be happy in life?
This film tells us about the relationship between the creator and the creation and their mutual affect. It is about the connection between the universe in which the work exists and the reality of the artist’s daily life.
For seven days, a film crew shot the daily life of the residents of the ‘Master Building’, located in Copacabana, on the corner of the beach. The building has 12 floors and 23 apartments per floor – 276 apartments in total, where about 500 people live. Thirty-seven of them are characters of this film.
“Through this film I made my own personal discovery of John Cage. The way Cage tells his stories whilst also setting them to music, how he regards the everyday, banal material as musical material, how he counts on accident, how he integrates accidents into his concerts, different disturbances, how he makes rooms for disruptions, all that impressed me a great deal. But it is important to stress that this was not being carried out by an amateur, but by a considerable craftsman who has a real understanding of his trade.” – Klaus Wildenhahn
Through the preparation of homemade sake, the filmmaker explores the complex relations between the members of his family, and in particular his parents, who are separated.
Imamura Hanako is a twenty-two-year-old girl with severe autism who lives in Yamasaki, Kyoto prefecture. Once a week she attends a painting class, where she paints bold paintings in oils. In another vein, though, every evening after dinner she also continues to create works that her mother, Chisa, has named ‘food art’.
24 Horas e Outra Terra is a documentary shot in September in Malhada, Ferreira do Alentejo, resulting from 24 hours spent with a group of nomadic Portuguese gypsies that live off tomato picking and move from one town to the next according to the harvesting calendar in the South of Portugal.
Shot in a small village in the south of Spain, Fuente Álamo deals with time: moments spent conscientiously, time flowing lazily, indulgently, like a peaceful river. This flow is far from adrenaline overdose and urban spleen, it has a bright and innocent feel. The camera falls in love with the characters, the landscape and the objects, and settles down lazily, unhurriedly, inpired by the village life, watching them go in and out of its bounds.
This story is about two Ukrainians, Sergey and Eduard, who are illegal immigrants in Portugal. They work as construction workers in the suburbs of Lisbon. The two of them share a converted garage with three other illegal Ukrainian immigrants. Their life in the garage is very basic and dull, but their inner life is full of contradictory feelings and nostalgia. The film describes their final months in voluntary exile, when the yearning for home becomes more acute while the question of prolonging their stay also arises. Finally, they leave Portugal and the film follows their first days back in their own country.
A documentary filmmaker decides to film during the month of August. He is convinced this month is a metaphor of everything that is hateful about the State of Israel. While doing so, he himself becomes August.
Em Volta is a film about Vicente, a photographer (played by Diogo Laço) and his journey to Cairo. There, he meets Maria (Beatriz Batarda). Egypt becomes the starting point of a journey, both physical and psychological, where the protagonist questions those he meets about love.
António Carlos works in a real estate agency, he is constantly pressured by his superiors to close deals and bring profit to the company. Joana is a single mother moving to a new house in hope of a different life. Mr. Pinto has an old-fashioned moving company. His days are spent waiting for the phone to ring, but there isn’t much business and when work finally shows it doesn’t always go as he would like it to. Three stories about people, houses, and restless lives in the city of Oporto.
Four armed police soldiers have ended their term of service working as guards for an embassy in Beijing. These four young men, ranging in age from 20 to 25, all worked as film projectionists for the squad. After a final outdoor screening, each soldier says godbye in a personal way.
In Northern France, Ben, a blind man, evaluates his life. He was an immigrant in France, managed to set up a successful business despite many setbacks, and married a French woman who bore him a child. But what did these achievements really mean for him? He ended up losing everything, even his sight.
Near the Osnabrück-Bremen railway a new silo is coming to shape. All the builders, blacksmiths – construction workers in general – are clandestine, living far from their homeland and families. They work 12 to 14 hours per day and their free time is spent watching tv, playing cards, talking about women, sleeping. In the end, order decays. The worker gets drunk and the bodies meet in confrontration. Everything is forgivable.
En Construcción is a remarkable portrait of a community in Barcelona’s Barrio Chino whose life is afected by the construction of a building on a street just off the busy Ramblas. Fragments of the inhabitants’ daily routines are delicately juxtaposed with the tasks of the construction team who painstakingly erects the building.
In the village school of Koker, in Northeastern Iran, Mohamed Reda Nematzadeh has neglected to do his homework. The teacher tells him that if he repeats this he will be punished. That evening, his friend Ahmed takes home Nematzadeh’s exercise book by mistake. Ahmed goes looking for his friend’s house in the neighbouring village of Poshteh, in order to return the book. He is not helped by adults, who either ignore or lecture him.
Debates based on the films by Catarina Mourão, Zhong Hua and Ivo Ferreira
DocLisboa: Festival Internacional de Cinema Documental de Lisboa, Festival Internacional de Cinema Documental de Yamagata, O Lírio Roxo - Associação Cultural
Israeli filmmaker and video artist born in 1956 in Tel Aviv, where he lives and works to this day. Having studied art and philosophy, he gained his first production experiences working as an assistant director on commercials and feature films, while his own filmmaking career began in 1989. Since 1999, he has taught documentary and experimental film at Tel Aviv University and the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem. Mograbi, one of Israel’s most distinguished filmmakers, is known for his unwavering commitment to social, cultural and political justice in the Middle East, as well as his experimentalism and innovative contribution to cinematic language.
Catarina Mourão was born in Lisbon in 1969. She studied Music, Law and Film (MA at the University of Bristol and PhD at the University of Edinburgh, with an FCT scholarship for both). Founder of AporDoc (Portuguese Documentary Association). She has been teaching Film and Documentary since 1998 in different Graduate and Masters programs. She is currently teaching on the MA in Arts and Multimedia at FBAUL. In 2000 she founded Laranja Azul, an independent film production company, with Catarina Alves Costa. She has directed several award-winning films. Her main areas of research are documentary, memory, dreams, archives and autobiography.
Gert de Graaff was born on 9 October 1957 in Amsterdam, Noord-Holland, Netherlands. He is an editor and cinematographer, known for De zee die denkt (2000), Twee (1986) and Poet in Power (1985).
Filmmaker born in Lisbon in 1975. He began his technical and artistic training in Lisbon and, before moving to China, attended the London Film School and the University of Budapest. In addition to short films and documentaries, his first two feature-length fiction films were presented at international festivals.
Jean Breschand made several short films and documentaries before writing his first fiction feature, La Papesse Jeanne, released in 2017.
He was born in Mozambique in 1962, in the province of Mocuba (Zambézia). He was a Physical Education teacher in the city of Quelimane, where he grew up and lived until 1987. He is a cinematographer and film director. In 1979 he was invited to work at the INC – National Film Institute in Maputo. He gave up his teaching career to devote himself to cinema. At INC he worked in distribution, exhibition, film archiving and production, becoming Production Coordinator in 1990, when he left INC to study film in Cuba, specialising in film and television directing. He also studied production at the International Film and Television School – EICTC.
José Filipe Costa (1970) has a PhD from the Royal College of Art, London. He has written and directed several short films: “A Rua” (2008), “Chapa 23” (2006), “Domingo” (2005) and “Undo” (2004), and the documentaries “Linha Vermelha” (2011), “Entre Muros” (2002) and “Senhorinha” (2001), which have been shown at international film festivals. He was the screenwriter and director of the science series “Histórias da Vida na Terra” (Stories of Life on Earth) (2008). He was a visiting professor at the State University of Rio de Janeiro (2013) and has taught at IADE, ETIC, the Polytechnic Institute of Tomar and on the DocNomads, Documentary Film Directing Erasmus Mundus course.
Hajime KAWAGUCHI was born in Tokyo in 1967. He began making films in 1987. He has been teaching at Yamagata University since 1993 and has made over 30 films.
An important German documentary filmmaker born in 1930. Wildenhahn was one of the greatest figures in European direct cinema, which he embraced under the influence of Richard Leacock. He worked for public television NDR and dedicated part of his documentary work to musical and choreographic creation, with works focusing on John Cage, Jimmie Smith or Merce Cunningham and Pina Bausch. He was also a documentary film theorist. He passed away in 2018.
Born in Yokohama in 1977. After graduating from Rissho University, where he studied psychology, studied filmmaking at the Image Forum Institute of the Moving Image. Danchizake (Homemade Sake) is his graduation piece, and received an award at the screening of the 2001 graduation works.
He was born in Barcelona in 1970 and has worked on several films as director of photography. Pablo García directed, among others, the short film Alicia Retratada (2002) and the feature films Fuente Álamo, la Caricia del Tiempo (2001), Bolboreta, Papallona, Mariposa (2007) and Tchindas (2015).
Born in 1957. Majored in Philosophy at Tokyo University. After serving as assistant director for Innocent Sea: Minamata (Dir: Naotaka Katori) in 1981, he began living in 1988 in the mountains of Niigata with a shooting staff of seven to make Living on the River Agano (1992), which he directed. That film won numerous prizes including the Minister of Education’s New Artist Award. After that he produced, directed and edited a wide variety of films and television programs including Artists in Wonderland. His final film, Out of Place: Memories of Edward Said (2005), has been released on DVD in the US. Sato passed away in 2007.