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Let’s keep up this documentary trend!

• Last Party 2000 (US, 2001): a documentary featuring Philip Seymour Hoffman hitting the road and watching what’s going on in the months before the American elections of year 2000 (Al Gore vs. Bush). Many interesting things: seeing the film after seven years gave me the picture that is has been a loooong time ago and the world has really changed. People claiming that Al Gore is not a friend of the environment. Then you see a Michael Moore strongly supporting Ralph Nader, the independent candidate. Still about Moore: he has good points in his films, but in his later productions it seems to me he has become more and more biased as money flows more and more in his pockets. It’s nice to see Hoffman leading this documentary unpretentiously, that is, just trying to understand why things are going so crazy on the other side of the Ocean.

Now it’s time for a documentary that was shown tonight on YLE2:

• Bloody Cartoons: what happened after the cartoons depicting the Islamic prophet Muhammad were published on a Danish newspaper? This documentary is based on the journey of a Danish journalist in several countries in Europe and the Middle East, interviewing the key people involved in the aftermath of the publication, and mainly trying to find an answer to the question: were the riots spontaneous, or was is a scapegoat to just inflaming the rage of Islamic extremists? And furthermore, is it really forbidden to depict the face of Muhammad in the Islamic culture?
  I wish these documentaries could have a better marketing, but I’m afraid a few people will have the chance to see it.
  However, I hope Why Democracy? (the documentary series, which Bloody Cartoons belongs to) will have a broader audience thanks to the interesting issues that are taken into consideration.

I really, really can’t complain of the quality of films I have seen recently!

• The Lives of Others (Das Leben der Anderen, Germany, 2006): an Oscar-winning film telling the story of a cold Stasi agent, back in the eighties in East Berlin, spying the life of a theatre dramatist, suspected of conspiring against the DDR.
  But the spy’s coldness gets really hurt as he gets deeper into the lives of the people he is following by listening their conversations through the microphones and cameras installed in the dramatist’s house.
  Well, it is a long film (over two hours), but I noticed that just when the lights went on: I got really involved and, as the film goes on, I realised that, while the spy gets deeper into the lives of others, I became myself a spy, looking at the lives of the people in the film. Wonderful experience. If more films were like this one!

And here we are with the films I’ve seen at Rakkautta ja Anarkiaa, the Helsinki International Film Festival 2007:

• The Boss of it All: a comedy by the CCDFD (completely crazy Danish film director) Lars von Trier. The situation takes place in an IT company, where an actor is asked to act as the director of the company, as nobody knows him, since the employees were told he lives in the States. It made me laugh. Really. Von Trier is crazy. I still wonder how he can still hang around.
• Terror’s Advocate: ever heard of Jacques Vergès? You haven’t? And what about Magdalena Kopp? Nothing? And Carlos the Jackal?
  Well this documentary is a long interwiew to the controversial French lawyer Jacques Vergès, who has been working in several critical environments, starting from the Algerian war
• Dasepo Naughty Girls: a South Korean musical/comedy film about naughty girls. One reason more to say I will never understand Far-East films
• The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema: nothing pervert, this is a long documentary about the psychoanalysis of films. The Slovenian sociologist Slavoj Žižek explains in a very intriguing way how films catch our attention, and what is the psychology behind it. Spanning from old films to newer ones, showing bits of them, he gets straight into how the human being behaves and reacts. Have to see it again, really full of good knowledge
• Smiley Face: an American comedy about a (really) stoned girl. A non-pretentious low-budget film. Just a good laugh.
  

And here is my film of the week:

• The Fog of War (2003): a documentary about the United States at war (and of the other countries involved) through the account of Robert McNamara, who has been in the US Army Air Forces during WWII and later served as the United States Secretary of Defense during part of the Vietnam war (1961-1968).

No matter you do good or bad things, and even assuming good faith, power is very dangerous:

[...] In the Cuban Missile Crisis, at the end, I think we did put ourselves in the skin of the Soviets.

In the case of Vietnam, we didn’t know them well enough to empathize. And there was total misundersunding as a result.

They believed that we had simply replaced the French as a colonial power and we were seeking to subject South and North Vietnam to our colonial interests, which was absolutely absurd.

And we, we saw Vietnam as an element of the Cold War. Nor what they saw it as, a civil war.

Robert McNamara

Here’s another good film I just found by chance in a video rental shop (marked as "documentary"!). Why is it so hard to see these films on TV?

• Osama: during the Taliban domination in Afghanistan, a 12-year-old girl, daugher of a widowed mother, has to cut her hair and dress as a boy to find a job to survive. Amazing recitation, woderful shooting. First full-length film shot in Afghanistan after the Taliban rule.

I have seen really nice films this year at the Espoo Ciné Film Festival:

• The Secret Life of Words: A film about tortured people and the way they restart life after everything is over. You can also have a look at the International Rehabilitation Council for Torture Victims
• Chrigu: a documentary about a young Swiss guy, Christian (who is also the director of the film), during his final journey fighting against cancer. Christian died during the shooting
• The 11th hour: a documentary about global heating and how to change the world using renewable energies
• Le Lièvre de Vatanen (Vatanen’s Hare): an adaptation of the famous book by Arto Paasilinna, placed in nowadays world
• Den nya människan (The New Man): a film about the practice of forced sterilisation in Sweden during the 50ties
• La sconosciuta (The Unknown): an Italian film picturing the life of a troubled Ukranian woman

I just saw on YLE1 a very good Norwegian documentary about Iran called Forbidden Future.

It was shot in between 2005 and 2006 in Tehran, and it tells the life of three persons: Ali, the singer and guitarist of the death metal band Scourge (now called ArtimotH); Sanam, a freestyle skier who has participated in international competitions; Shahram, a painter who, just during the shooting of the documentary, received a death sentence for having used naked models to do his paintings.

By now I know it has been released in Norway, Denmark, Sweden, Finland and Australia. Check out if it’ll be released in your country.

I’ve just got back from Tromsø. It’s the third time I go there to attend the Tromsø International Film Festival (TIFF). As I already said for the 2003 and 2004 edition, I love this tiny-but-extremely-lively town of the far north (it takes still 700 km to get there from Oulu), and the film festival is a good occasion to visit it. Since my passion for film festivals is growing more and more as time goes by, I decided to list the films I have seen with a small comment, in case someone else had the chance to see them.

Attended screenings at the Tromsø International Film Festival 2005