DANISH DOCUMENTARIES DANISH FILM INSTITUTE SPECIAL IDFA AMSTERDAM ISSUE l1l FILM IS PUBLISHED BY#12 THE DANISH FILM INSTITUTE / NOVEMBER 2000 From Jesper Jargil’s film The Exhibited. Frame grabs PAGE 2 / FILM#12 / SPECIAL IDFA ISSUE DANISH FILM INSTITUTE (DFI) l1l FESTIVAL STAFF NOVEMBER 2000 #12 International focus on Danish Films is by no means limited to PUBLISHED BY: Danish Film Institute DANISH DOCUMENTARIES DANISH FILM INSTITUTE EDITORS: Agnete Dorph feature films. Every year more than SPECIAL IDFA AMSTERDAM ISSUE Susanna Neimann 150 childrens films, short films EDITORIAL TEAM: Lars Fiil-Jensen and documentaries are screened at Vicki Synnott EDITORIAL film festivals all over the world – l1l FILM IS PUBLISHED BY#12 THE DANISH FILM INSTITUTE / NOVEMBER 2000 CONSULTANTS: Kim Foss in competition and in retrospective Rumle Hammerich Loke Havn series. The festival staff are Tue Steen Müller continually developing new TRANSLATIONS: Jonathan Sydenham SUBSCRIPTIONS: Nina Caroc initiatives to strengthen the DESIGN: e–Types presence of Danish short films Photo: Kenneth Rim LAYOUT: Anne Hemp TYPE: Millton (e©) Reg.+Bold and documentaries abroad. Karolina Lidin Cendia (e©) Manager / Distribution – Shorts & Documentaries Underton (e©) DFI +45 3374 3526 PAPER: Munken Lynx 100 gr. Mobile +45 2332 1193 PRINTED BY: Holbæk Center–Tryk A/S [email protected] CIRCULATION: 8,500 ISSN: 1399–2813 COVER: The Exhibited (Frame grabs) FILM is published by the Danish Film Institute. The Danish Film Institute is the national agency There are 8 issues per year. On the occasion of responsible for supporting and encouraging film the IDFA Amsterdam International Film Festival and cinema culture and for conserving these in 2000 the DFI have produced #12 in English. the national interest. The Institute’s operations extend from participation in the development DANISH FILM INSTITUTE and production of feature films, shorts and Gothersgade 55, DK-1123 Copenhagen K documentaries, over distribution and marketing, Tel +45 3374 3400 to managing the national film archive and the Photo: Kirsten Bille Photo: Kirsten Bille E-mail [email protected] or [email protected] cinematheque. The total budget of the DFI is Annette Lønvang Anne Marie Kürstein US$ 39m. International Relations – Shorts & Documentaries International Relations – Shorts & Documentaries DFI +45 3374 3556 DFI +45 3374 3609 FILM #12 er et engelsk særnummer i anledning af den internationale dokumentarfilmfestival, Mobile +45 2342 5069 Mobile +45 3374 3609 IDFA, i Amsterdam. Deadline for #13: 11. december 2000 [email protected] [email protected] KEY FIGURES – SHORTS & DOCUMENTARIES DFI BUDGET 2000 DKK 1000s PRODUCTION & DEVELOPMENT Development 3,000 Production 26,500 Script 1,500 Workshops 500 NFTF & Eurimages 8,500 New Fiction Film Denmark 4,000 WWW.DFI.DK DISTRIBUTION AND MARKETING Promotion subsidies 1,750 Print subsidies 1,500 Acquisition of shorts & documentaries (incl. licences) 4,800 Information is constantly being fed Promotion (festivals) 1,500 into the DFI English website. Here DFI PRODUCTION 1999 DFI shorts & documentary releases 25 titles Average cost of a short & documentary 1.1 m you will find overviews on Danish Average DFI subsidy approx. 50 percent feature film releases, a selection of DFI ACTIVITIES 1999 SUBSIDIES ALLOCATED Script 52 titles shorts and documentaries, feature Development 35 titles Production 57 titles films in progress, awards, articles on Promotion 18 titles Print subsidies 5 titles Danish film, news briefs and FESTIVALS Participation in 165 events worldwide with 156 titles statistics, as well as the Cannes 2000 DISTRIBUTION UNIT: CATALOGUE Accumulation 1999 - DFI supported productions 27 titles issue of Film #09 and the Amsterdam - Danish film/video 25 titles - minor coproductions 2 titles - Danish film/video acquisitions 7 titles 2000 issue of Film #12. - Foreign film/video acquisitions 9 titles - from Short Fiction Film Denmark 14 titles - donated film/video 9 titles Catalogue (complete collection 2000) 2,196 titles DISTRIBUTION UNIT: SALES AND RENTALS Video sales 15,880 units Video rentals 26,570 units TOMAS GISLASON / STRONGER THAN REASON / IN COMPETITION / FILM#12 / PAGE 3 STRONGER THAN REASON Tómas Gislason, director. Photo: Jan Buus BY CLAUS CHRISTENSEN consciousness. We are not intended to sit back and But in Tómas Gislason’s extraordinary documentary pronounce judgement with the air of those who know we are also meant to feel the pain Stalin’s regime of With Maximum Penalty Tómas Gislason concludes better. We are meant to get a sense of the 1920’s. The terror inflicted on the people. We are meant to his trilogy on the nature of fanaticism and fear. machinery, the marches, the masses; they are meant recognize the Russian tragedy as fundamentally Gislason portrays an extreme political reality but his to tug at us the way they tugged at ordinary Russians human, relive the emotions, experience a kind of suggestive montages also penetrate deeper levels of at the time. catharsis, and thereby learn more about ourselves PAGE 4 / FILM#12 / TOMAS GISLASON / STRONGER THAN REASON / IN COMPETITION and the world about us. (Earth, 1930); and the graphic design of the film was life in the chaotic dictatorship of Haiti (Heart and The thirty-nine-year-old director aims for a film directly inspired by the lines of the joins in the giant Soul). Three years later Gislason portrayed himself idiom that is stronger than reason, and he does not poster for Eizenstein’s October (1928). He does not and his encounter with white supremacy in the US hide the fact that intuition and dreams are his most stop there. For library footage Tómas Gislason’s (The Patriots), and now he concludes his trilogy with important artistic tool. “We talk about dreams in the editor, Jacob Thuesen, draws on Russian propaganda Maximum Penalty. Three films on dangerous morning; we relate them and we try to analyze films and silent movie classics such as Eizenstein’s ideologies and political fanaticism; three films about them, but at bottom they are the emotion with Battleship Potemkin (1925), and Dziga Vertov’s The fragile, fearful people — mainly men — who feel apart which we awake. In my films I try to create strata, to Man with the Moving Camera (1929). This library from established society. Three cinematic journeys get behind waking thoughts, and to leave people footage does not appear in the customary fashion as into the heart of darkness — and back into the light. with an unformed sense that they have been given lengthy excerpts voiced over by the interviewee: it This project has proved all the more remarkable new knowledge” Gislason told me in a recent pops up in ultra brief, associative glimpses triggered because Gislason stakes his own person in the interview. “Different directors have different by individual words from the interview. process and makes no attempt to conceal the fact: “I approaches to the film medium. Do they think they have decided to portray people with whom I can will find the content via the form, or do they think THE BORDERLAND OF THE IMAGINATION identify and who are struggling with some of the they will find the form via the content? I take form It also provides comic illustration, such as in the same problems as I am. My strategy has been to try as my starting point, also for my documentaries. I street when Ole Sohn warns his Russian interpreter to break my leading characters in order to find the explore the material intuitively. I do not pose about a speeding tram and we cut to a Moscow tram point at which they recognize what it is really all intellectual questions during the actual work in the 1920’s. Or there may be more subtle about. This point is familiar in therapy.” process.” associations, such as when Ole Sohn is describing The project succeeds in the insistent, almost Claus Jensen’s Russian love affair and we cut to a explosive film about Jørgen Leth, in which Tómas A STORY OF WASTED LIVES woman throwing open her windows one early Gislason peels layer after layer from his media-aware Maximum Penalty is a documentary of many layers. morning in The Man with the Moving Camera. leading character and ends with a portrait of a On the surface it describes an investigation into the The present is confronted by the past to form a hesitant, lonely man. It is profoundly moving when mysterious disappearance of two Danish montage that does not merely tell its own story, but Lev Razgon acknowledges in Maximum Penalty that communists in the Soviet Union at the end of the also follows the principles for montage drawn up by he will never be able to forgive. 1930’s. Behind this elementarily exciting detective Eizenstein in the 1920’s. The Russian director But this therapeutic method is not without its thriller, about Claus Jensen and Arne Munch- emphasized that the camera positions in a film must pitfalls, because Gislason cannot know in advance Petersen, a larger story emerges. This involves a not flow smoothly, but collide and generate where the process will end. He plays with dangerous political dream that turned into a bloody nightmare; meaning, as happens in Maximum Penalty when we forces and penetrates deeper levels of consciousness it is the story of rulers who wanted to revolutionize jump seventy-five years from a parade of marching without the safety net fiction provides. But perhaps the world, but ended up killing their own people; of muscular men and beaming women to Lev Razgon’s the risk is worth running; because when the communists who believed in a better world, but aged features, full of impotent rage at the fateful experiment succeeds, you are left feeling that failed to see where reality was taking them. In short, ingenuity of the past — a striking political statement somebody has understood you.