RE>CONNEXT 2021 Archives - Business Doc Europe

RE-CONNEXT 2021 extended to October 31

Nick Cunningham — Fri, 15 Oct 2021 09:24:17 +0000

Planet B by Pieter Van Eecke

The RE>CONNEXT platform is to remain open until midnight on 31 October, it was announced by Flanders Image today. The decision was taken after participants with increasingly busy October schedules requested extra time to engage with the wide range of content on offer.

Event organisers also revealed that, as of October 14, the most consulted documentary titles on the platform have been:

PROJECTS:

Mobutu (series) by Guillaume Graux (Panenka)
Carbon by Manu Riche (Menuetto)
Planet B by Pieter Van Eecke (Clin d’Oeil Films)

WORKS IN PROGRESS:

And Tomorrow, the Whole World by Louisiana Mees (Diplodokus)
Capturing the Pirate King by Lennart Stuyck (Diplodokus)
Soundtrack to a coup d’etat by Johan Grimonprez (zap-o-matik)

COMPLETED/SCREENING

Kind Hearts by Olivia Rochette, Gerard-Jan Claes (Accattone Films)
All-In by Volkan Üce (Cassette for Timescapes)
Echo by Ruben Desiere (Accattone Films)

Mystery Shoppers

The RE-CONNEXT 2021 Mystery Shoppers have voted Planet B as their Best Video pitch. The documentary is directed by Pieter Van Eecke and produced by Hanne Phlypo of Clin d’Oeil Films.

Jury citation: “A really well-presented pitch of a strong, relevant and captivating story, by both the director and the producer, with a good use of materials. We particularly loved the idea of creating a shorter version for schools and educational establishments.”

In the film, 14-year-old Bo grows up in a protected environment, where everything seems possible, but she is frightened by the dark predictions of the future. Together with her friend Lina, she decides to take up the fight against climate change. There are thousands like them, so why doesn’t anything change? Her mum Marjolein follows in the fight, and they join Extinction Rebellion. Just turned 15, they occupy factory sites and highways. They are arrested and criticised. But what is the point of going to school in a world that is dying? As Lina proposes increasingly radical actions, the more thoughtful Bo wants to find her own way. But how can she continue in a world that is eating away at her own future?

In the Best Pitch Videos – WiP category the jury gave a Special Mention to Capturing The Pirate King by Lennart Stuyck (Diplodokus)

Jury: “A Special Mention for this team for delivering a focused pitch. The story was nicely told by the director who really knows what this project is and why it works. Great use of clips and a strong teaser that tells us everything we need to know.

In the film, on 13 October 2013, the day Captain Phillips is premiering in the USA, high-ranking Somali pirate Afweyne is sitting on a flight to Brussels, on his way to a meeting about his own Hollywood deal. Sitting next to him is Tiiceey, the governor of a Somali province that has been a pirate stronghold for more than a decade. What Afweyne doesn’t know is that the movie about his life as a pirate king is a set-up by the Belgian police. As soon as the Somalis land, they are put in jail. Their subsequent trial for piracy is the first in modern times, and opens up a world in which everyone tells their own story.

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RE>CONNEXT news and deals

Nick Cunningham — Wed, 13 Oct 2021 09:25:04 +0000

The RE>CONNEXT-selected documentary ALL-IN by Volkan Üce has won Best Documentary at this year’s Antalya Golden Orange Film Festival.

The jury comprising filmmakers Didem Pekün, Pelin Esmer and Pınar Öğünç awarded “a film which stands out for its thorough exploration of the central characters, for broadening out the grind of work, the search for equality, the questioning of meaning from the world of the characters into an ultimately human issue, and for its subtle cinematic language.”

In the film Belgian filmmaker Volkan Üce places centre stage the staff of a vast, all-inclusive hotel complex on the Turkish Riviera, in particular the brooding philosopher Hakan and the shy, young Ismael.

In other news, Lagardère has signed up to handle international sales on Luc Lemaitre’s documentary series The Offensive, produced by Panenka, which was presented during last year’s event. The series is also nominated in the Social Issues documentary category, at the New York TV & Film Awards.

The series comprises a road trip through populist Europe. In all seven episodes we see a parallel montage of three stories from different EU countries covering the same theme, alternated with archive materials. Old fragments of the European dream of peace and prosperity are combined with more recent reports on the situation in Europe.

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RE>CONNEXT screening: Kind Hearts by Olivia Rochette, Gerard-Jan Claes

Nick Cunningham — Tue, 12 Oct 2021 05:26:29 +0000

The roots of Kind Hearts, screening in RE>CONNEXT, are found in the feature doc Grands travaux which Olivia Rochette and Gerard-Jan Claes directed in 2016, a film about students within a secondary vocational school in Brussels.

“In that film, which is mostly focused on school life and youngsters growing up, we also had a couple of scenes where they [the male subjects] would talk to their girlfriends,” says co-director Claes. “We thought the ‘going-together’ of these love stories and the way that we set up the mise-en-scène between the writing and improvisation [was] working so beautifully…that we wanted to make a film that was focused entirely on love and more specifically on how youngsters deal with love and the first love experience.”

So the directing pair went in search of two young characters, eventually settling on Billie and Lucas, a young Brussels couple, who are both set to leave for university, where they will face a year of momentous change, replete with existential growing pains, doubts about life and relationships and what the world expects of them.

“We did not set out to make a documentary ‘about’ love, but instead wanted to take a concrete look at a love affair, showing meeting points between the two lovers,” Claes underlines in his notes for the film. “Using their story, we deploy their semi-clichéd but also disarming vocabulary, the language young people use to voice their feelings today, thereby ‘filming’ love in a documentary. The experience of love is closely linked to the experience of narrative; in our minds, we recreate love as an adventure. This notion of love as a construction is also reflected in the form of the film, characterised by its ambivalent place between staging and documentary.”

What also fascinated the directors was “to make a film that had a certain narration [whereby] you could follow a certain love story that portrayed these fragile moments in the life of the youngsters where they are looking at adult life, but not really knowing entirely how to cope with it,” Claes adds. “It’s that moment of transition that really interested us.”

As in most documentaries or closely-observed narrative, a high degree of trust must be built on both sides given “the material that we’re working from, which is their life.”

“We film a lot. So there are in the beginning a lot of things that just don’t work. But at a certain moment, it just clicks,” Claes continues. “We found a collective way of working, them being the characters in the film – or the actors’ characters – and we as filmmakers.”

The film presents such an intimate and authoritative chronicle of young love that one is tempted to assume that there is an academic [I suggest anthropological or sociological] undertow to the exercise. Claes disagrees.

“I think we’re not so much interested in the anthropological element in such that it’s not, I think, a film that wants to say something about the youngsters in absolute terms,” he says, further emphasising how such intimate study of the film’s two youthful subjects enables audiences to wider reflect their our own lives. “I think it’s more related to our love for observation…The face of someone is almost like a landscape that you can discover in itself or that you can dissect as a spectator also.”

Which is why Claes welcomes a broad demographic for the film which is currently in post-production ahead of a Spring 2022 delivery. The RE>CONNEXT pitch notes stress a target audience of teenagers, twenty-somethings… and their parents. “I think it’s a film for everyone in that sense,” Claes underlines. “I think it’s really a film that you should just look at and watch and experience. I know that sounds general, but I think it’s also part of our filmmaking [philosophy] that film should be seen by any group.”

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RE>CONNEXT project: Carbon by Manu Riche

Nick Cunningham — Fri, 08 Oct 2021 12:50:54 +0000

Manu Riche’s new documentary will deliver a lyrical cri du coeur about fossil fuels and their corrosive effect on the planet. “The film doesn’t set out to describe the factual state of our world, nor present a numerical analysis. Instead, it explores how we got here, what caused us to reach this tipping point, the psychology and philosophy that underlie this debacle,” he says.

The €800,000 (35% in place) project is produced by Hans Everaert of Belgian production house Menuetto, whose La Civilpicked up the inaugural Audacity Prize at Cannes Un Certain Regard 2021. Supported by VAF, Carbon will be a co-production with the French-speaking Belgian Community (Thank You & Good Night Productions), France (Spectra) and Italy (Fidelio). Everaert hopes to complete financing by the middle of 2022 before shooting that summer through to winter ahead of a release during the first half of 2023, “hopefully at a big international film festival.” At RE>CONNEXT he is looking for the “the sales agent for the project, someone with experience and a network in both documentary and fiction,” he underlines.

In his pitch director Manu Riche explained both his express reason to make the film, the dilemma at its core (“a topic as hot as burning coal”) and the modus operandi he will deploy in articulating that to audiences.

“For over 200 years, fossil fuels have brought prosperity and social progress. Today, they could destroy us and turn our world into ruins,” he said. “Academics and environmentalists have put the subject high on the agenda, but do they really get to the hearts and minds of the general audience? Therefore, what better tool to explain the seriousness of the situation than by inviting the audience on a personal journey.”

“My personal history is one of coal and oil. My grandfather, Marcel, was a coal mining engineer. He started this career just after the First World War. That was the first war fueled by coal and petrol. It continued with my father who traded oil after the WW2, a period of unlimited growth and welfare. And it continues with me, a filmmaker, now that the dream starts to turn into a nightmare.”

The film will set off from Belgium to Iraq, via Ukraine and Italy. Rome is where Pier Paolo Pasolini was beaten to death before he could complete his visionary novel ‘Petrolio’, which Riche describes as “a mythical poem of what we’re living right now, when the ideology of progress stops,” and whose sentiments inform the documentary.

“Somehow Pasolini was writing about the fossil fuel civilisation and of its collapse just before his assassination in that forgotten suburb of Ostia in 1975. Today a place inhabited by the forgotten ones, the Soudanese, the Afghans, the Iraqis…the refugees of our planet,” Riche writes.

The film will then further seek to address the iniquitous role of fossil fuels through the life of fellow lenser, Iraqi Hayder Helo, a refugee whose boat arrived on a Lesbos beach in 2014. “I am the Belgian son and grandson of men whose lives and fortunes were defined by the coal and oil industry. Hayder is a filmmaker and refugee of the petroleum wars in Iraq,” he says.

“Is Carbon a story foreshadowing the end?” Riche asks. “then how does one picture the end of a civilization and still create a positive impact on the audience? The answer lies in the use of cinematic language. It’s a film for everybody because it concerns everybody. A poetic tale full of associations that might help us to accept the devastation we leave behind.”

“Today we live at a tipping point. The human species, in its relentless pursuit of growth, founded on the use of fossil fuels, has thoroughly disrupted life on this planet,” he further writes. “I want to find a form that transcends the informative, as well as the cold but necessary scientific discourse, but which also transcends The Apocalypse itself. I want to capture The End in a poetic form, which approaches reality as sharply and succinctly as possible, but which does not force the viewer, which leaves the viewer free. The End cannot be grasped…”

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RE>CONNEXT project: Seed by Dries Meddens

Geoffrey Macnab — Fri, 08 Oct 2021 06:56:28 +0000

Now in his early 50s, Dries Meddens is finally making his documentary feature debut. Seed, his film, which is pitched at RE>CONNEXT this week, is a deeply personal project with a gestation stretching back almost 20 years, to when his father was still alive. In the film, he asks why his father, who suffered from bipolar disorder, was so badly treated, both by psychiatrists and by society in general.

Meddens started filming two decades ago but then his father “got ill over and over again – and I couldn’t continue,” he says. His father died in 2004. “Over the years, it always kept on popping up in my mind that this film, one day I should make it.”

Little by little, the director believes, the relationship between psychiatry and society has changed since then. The psychiatrists have become less domineering and more sympathetic. They’ve thought more carefully about prescribing drugs. This meant that Meddens felt he could make his film far more positive in tone than it would have been had he completed it at the time of his father’s death.

After his father’s death, Meddens began to research his family history very deeply. “One of the most important things I learned is how family culture, and some incidents which happened in a branch of the family, are transferred to later generations.”

The filmmaker had feared his father’s illness might be hereditary. However, the more he explored his subject, the more he suspected that the mental problems which led to his father being institutionalised weren’t caused just by genetics. His condition deteriorated because of what he experienced in his daily life.

Meddens’ grandfather, who had a similar temperament to his bipolar son, was a wealthy man living in Rotterdam. During the First World War, he sold all his assets and moved to a tiny village in the countryside. The grandfather was founder of an international plant breeding company.

“There is a huge parallel between plant breeding and psychiatry. They connect in the pharmaceutical industry which is also the same chemical industry that makes fertilisers and all the chemicals to protect our plants,” the director notes.

The grandfather was also a keen amateur artist. He left behind a treasure trove of paintings, drawings, diaries and letters. There are even some 8mm movies. He managed to re-invent his life and find a measure of peace.

However, Meddens’ father, who was born in 1928, wasn’t so lucky. He was the youngest of 11 children. In the closed, conservative society of 1940s and 1950s Holland, he was considered an outsider. “He grew up in a society that was hostile to this sensibility,” Meddens notes.

His behaviour wasn’t accepted. “I think I have been traumatised by the way my father was treated. He was just left on his own until it went completely wrong and then he was institutionalised,” Meddens reflects. “When he needed psychiatry, the answer was pills and no therapy, no human contact.”

As a young man, Meddens had his own foibles. He was kicked out of art school because he wouldn’t follow the instructions of his teachers. “When I started art school, my mother discovered she had cancer. One and a half years later, she died,” he remembers. He decided then to use all the facilities of the art school to “make a portrait series of people in grief.” This wasn’t at all what his teachers expected or wanted him to do. At the end of the year, the director sent him down, telling him: “I have to choose between you and my teachers – and you can understand that, of course, I’ve chosen my teachers.”

For the next 10 to 15 years, Meddens made “a good living” as a woodworker, designing and making furniture for private and business clients. “I don’t feel I am very good with my hands but I like it,” he says of his time as a carpenter before he moved into the documentary world.

Now, Meddens has children of his own. He and his wife are both artists and storytellers. “The fact that we are happy to live in a different way than the common society, I am quite sure that helps them to stand up for what they feel inside and it forms their character in a different way. They know they don’t have to fit into society…I now realise that is maybe the most important reason for me to be an artist.”

The documentary is being produced by Mark Daems at Associate Directors. “This project started very small. It’s my first feature film. I’m 51 but I’m a beginner, at the start of a new career. It took me quite a while to meet Mark. I had to accept a lot of closed doors before his door was open.”

The director had been drawn to Daems and Associate Directors by their work on another film, Ellen Vermeulen’s 9999, a documentary about mentally ill criminals in Belgium.

Now, Seed is ready to grow. Dutch partner Serious Film is aboard as is broadcaster VRT, and most of the money is in place. “We have 96% [of the budget],” the director says. He is looking for a little more money to help with the sound mix which he considers a crucial part of the project. Whatever happens now, the project which he first started nurturing two decades ago is now finally coming to fruition. “Next year, at Connext, I am hoping we will have a beautiful pitch with the film finished!”

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RE>CONNEXT screening: Why We Fight by Alain Platel and Mirjam Devriendt

Nick Cunningham — Thu, 07 Oct 2021 22:16:08 +0000

The genesis of Why We Fight was Mirjam Devriendt’s attendance at Alain Platel’s production of the dance piece ‘Nicht Schlafen’, in which the level of harsh physicality among the performers, comprising a handful of men and a sole woman, reached almost dangerous heights, and was at times painful to watch.

But for Devriendt it was mesmerizing, so much so that she took a seat by the stage and recorded the performance. She sent the video to Platel who responded immediately. “We are going to make a film,” he mailed back.

But the feature-length film, produced by Flemish production company Cassette for timescapes, required more than just performance footage. Yes, Devriendt experienced a visceral response to what she saw, although she admits to hating violence. When she was a small girl seeing violent films, she would never be mollified by adults telling her it wasn’t real. She knew violence a hundred times worse was being perpetrated elsewhere in the real world, and what she was watching served as a portal that delivered her there. And she didn’t like it.

So Devriendt and Platel embarked on an odyssey to explore what it is that drives people to conflict, whether on the personal, micro level (and we see numerous examples of sickening one-to-one violence as fights are caught on CCTV or mobile camera) or as a collective on a macro scale, at times ideologically-driven, as we see in mass (bloody) demonstrations on-screen. In this, we are instructed by highly insightful talking heads, such as historian Philipp Blom and sculptor Berlinde De Bruyckere, on the sociological, historical, economic and philosophical conditions that drive our species inexorably towards violence.

But this is also a film lensed by artists, and throughout we continually return to the sumptuously physical and jaw-droppingly beautiful aesthetics of the stage as human forms enact their choreography of violence, accompanied by the music of Mahler. For Devriendt, this was always going to form the visual basis of the film.

In some ways, it is the film’s counter-intuitive observations on violence that are most instructive, such as how the dancer Samir, the French-born son of immigrant parents, felt that the physical punishment he received was given out of love, and exacted very much within a loving family. The articulate and expressive conductor Teodor Currentzis is very convincing when he expresses how there has never been one second in the history of humanity when war hasn’t been waged somewhere across the planet. War is a virus we all carry from ancient times, he stresses, and something we feel “pathologically” compelled to repeat.

Perhaps most instructive is philosopher Tinneke Beeckman’s assertion that women’s potential for violence is fantastically underestimated, as evidenced by some IS women who have taken both themselves and their children into warzones, yet still forgiven for their actions as they are mothers. “Women are also fully responsible for what they do,” she says. “The complexity is that people can be victims in one situation and perpetrators in another.”

Other reasons for why we fight are articulated in the film. We all have multiple identities but in times of crisis we focus on one, which will invariably be that of nationality or religion, which are two “axes” that affect people greatly, and can be a precursor to conflict. Elsewhere, we are told that feelings of low esteem lead to a sense that little to no respect is forthcoming. The easiest way to gain respect is through fear. Therefore when you join a violent gang “such as the Mafia or ISIS, the entire world suddenly fears you…it is a shortcut to fame.”

These pronouncements are delivered in parallel with the visually stimulating and artistic splendor of dance, during which, little by little, a sense of satisfying (and quite beautiful) resolution is achieved, even if the final sequence of the film, showing violence among Arctic wildlife, offers little by way of metaphorical comfort.

The filmmakers jointly explain their rationale: “By using various types of imagery and visual metaphors, the film analyses social change, the lack of emotional processing and the power of humanity, which always seems to balance between creating something spectacularly beautiful and something horribly cruel. Also, when you put different forms of images together it seems to us that we might create a possibility that something can happen in the mind: you create a kind of gap where an idea, an emotion, a thought can emerge.”

“In that way we try to add layers in the mind, in a way that every person can fill ’the gaps’ with his or her own thoughts,” they conclude.

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RE>CONNEXT review: Holgut by Liesbeth De Ceulaer

Kees Driessen — Thu, 07 Oct 2021 20:50:00 +0000

Many documentary lovers are familiar with Scottish film pioneer John Grierson’s famous definition of the genre as ‘the creative treatment of actuality’. Feature documentary Holgut puts a surprising twist on this, with something I can only call ‘the mythological treatment of actuality’. Normally one would consider mythology and actuality to be, if not opposites, at least extremely dissimilar. One being concerned with facts of life in the real world, the other with spiritual truths contained in fictional tales.

With Holgut director Liesbeth De Ceulaer (co-director of Victoria), manages a seemingly impossible feat by incorporating both. Concurrently, not just one after the other, and without making one subservient to the other. Mythology is not just used to contextualize current events; and actuality is not reduced to its mythological resonance. Both dreamlike and crystal-clear, Holgut is like a prehistoric skeleton, pushed to the surface of the thawing Siberian tundra, both a bearer of mythical meaning and a sign of our current times of climate crisis and transgressive science.

So, what is Holgut about? There are two main stories, which partly interweave. One is about a city kid visiting his tundra uncle, who teases him about his “women’s hands” when he struggles to pluck a duck. The uncle wants to take the curious but naive boy on a reindeer hunt to boost his confidence, but no matter how far north they go, the endless open plains are devoid of prey.

The second story is about a scientist who is looking for mammoth skeletons with traces of skin or flesh on them, so he can extract DNA for his project of cloning a living mammoth. His goal is different from the ivory hunters he encounters (a good mammoth tusk bringing in the equivalent of a common worker’s annual salary), but equally dependent on the melting of the not-so-permanently frozen permafrost.

One could imagine a documentary treating the scientist’s futuristic efforts as part of the same unbounded and megalomaniacal techno-capitalistic system that caused the permafrost and reindeer to disappear, thus opposing him to the hunters’ culture. Another option would have been the juxtaposition of inverted quests: the hunters looking for live wild reindeer that appear to have gone extinct; the scientist looking for an extinct animal he wants to bring back to life.

But Holgut does something much more interesting: it presents these three Sakha or Yakutians – from the Siberian Russian Republic of Sakha (Yakutia) – as fundamentally the same. They are all spiritual hunters, looking for elusive animals with great meaning. Animals that represent life and culture, history and dreams. For the hunters, the mammoths (like the reindeer) live on in stories, told through countless generations, that define their land and culture. We hear the young hunter, who has only just learned how to shoot a rifle, repeat a story that minutes before his uncle told him, and thereby turning it into myth, for himself and for us.

This is how layers get added to mythology, just as his own story of hunting will be told and retold – and just as the documentary itself is not just a record of this mythologizing, but part of it. The beautiful thing is that when the scientist, who is clearly deeply committed, says that he will call his cloned mammoth ‘Yana’, after the river where he grew up, he is taking – whether he realizes it or not –the same mythological stance, using the magical power of words to connect the ancient animal to his native land.

Oral history, the bedrock of mythology, weaves this documentary together. The film starts with the myth of Holgut, a mammoth left behind when all the animals gathered on a raft during a massive flood and kept alive in stories ever since. Other myths follow, always told in voice-over, mingling with everyday dialogues about reindeer and hunting, which gradually take on a mythological flavour themselves.

More and more, as the documentary progresses, vertical drone shots of landscapes of bewildering beauty and confusing scale, close-ups of drawings in a palaeontological style, dreamlike moments where reality seems to give way to our protagonists’ inner lives, and droning sounds such as an ever-falling tone, combine to form a very particular rhythm and flow, which starts to feel like the flow of history, the flow of mythology, carrying our protagonists along through something larger than this moment in time.

Did our heroes know what kind of story De Ceulaer would integrate their adventures into? I think they did. Take the scene where the scientist sits in the back seat of a van, with a deadpan expression, while we hear what I assume is traditional chanting, recalling the story of a mythical giant sleeping underground, who is woken by a soldier. It seems distinctly non-diegetic, another mythological layer added by the filmmaker – until the camera turns to the side and shows the singer sitting right next to him. Meanwhile, the scientist keeps ignoring the chanting, as if the singer’s not actually there. It’s a fun little moment, where myth, reality and the documentary’s own storytelling structure merge to make clear that in this film, it’s really not necessary, and quite simply impossible, to say where actuality ends and mythology begins.

Belgium, 2021, 73 minutes

Director Liesbeth De Ceulaer

Production Minds Meet & Stempel

Producer Tomas Leyers

International sales Filmotor

Cinematography Jonathan Wannyn

Editing Guillaume Graux

Sound design Kwinten Van Laethem

Sound Gert Verboven

With Roman Skrybykin, Kyym Skrybykin, Semyon Grigoriev

This review was first published during Visions du Réel/CPH:DOX 2021.

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RE>CONNEXT review: All-In by Volkan Üce

Mark Adams — Thu, 07 Oct 2021 20:33:00 +0000

The eternal culture clash between the haves and have-nots is perfectly encapsulated in Volkan Üce’s engaging and insightful documentary that follows two young Turkish men as they try and settle into jobs at the all-inclusive Nashira Resort, a large hotel on the Turkish Riviera where tourists from around the world come to let their hair down.

Both have arrived at the resort to escape their home life and earn some money. Their ambitions are to move on in their lives, learn English and – in an ideal world – try and find a way to escape to the United States. The film blends footage of both men trying to adjust to a life dealing with a demanding public while living a modest and at times frustrating life behind the façade of the hotel.

Hakan is 25 and the youngest of 12 children, but despite having a place at college he opted to stay at home and read. Meanwhile Ismail is 18 and has dropped out of school to earn money for his family. Both have come to the hotel to try find a new direction in their lives – Hakan is allocated work as a lifeguard (he tells the head of HR he used to live near a river), while Ismail, who dreams of becoming a hairdresser, is employed as a kitchen chef.

Both respond differently to the rather surreal work environment of the hotel, especially as the demands of the guests get more and more intense. For shy Ismail, who watches the guests from behind the buffet counter, his interest in the Western world gets more intense, but Hakan struggles to a be a ‘nobody’ at the pool whose only job seems to be to stop tourists having fun on the waterslide. He tries to discuss Pushkin and Dostoyevsky with the Russian tourists, but few want to engage with him.

The film follows them through the entire summer as they try to feel at home in the strange world of all-inclusive tourism. The pair become friends during their time there, but as the season develops it also becomes apparent they are different personalities. Ismail slowly becomes more confident and learns about cooking while Hakan feels he has lost his individuality and has become just a cog in the system.

As they sign their papers to leave the job at the end of the summer season, both are adamant they won’t be back next year. Ismail feels he has learnt enough about catering to find alternative work, while Hakan feels he has become a person without values during his time there. But can they escape the resort’s allure?

While the film charts relatively familiar territory, its gentle story of the loss of innocence and being lost in a faceless system is an engaging and often amusing one. This kind of tourism (or “uninhibited fun” as the resort’s posters claim) is a challenging one for the young Turks, but despite the challenges and their very real concerns, both men grow and subtly change.

Belgium-Netherlands-France, 2021, 80mins

Dir Volkan Üce

Production Cassette for Timescapes, Halal, Little Big Story, Magellan Films, Onomatopee Films

International sales CAT&Docs

Producers Magalie Dierick, Emmy Oost

Cinematography Joachim Philippe

Editor Els Voorspoels

Music David Boulter, Darius Timmer

This review was first published in BDE following the film’s world premiere at CPH:DOX 2021.

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RE>CONNEXT project: Louise-Marie by Daphne van den Blink

Nick Cunningham — Thu, 07 Oct 2021 15:38:10 +0000

Creative producer Sien Versteyhe is happy to admit that she has no idea where her RE>CONNEXT project Louise-Marie is going to shoot, other than on a boat on the high seas. As it is a Belgian Navy boat (the film is eponymously titled), its location will be a closely guarded secret, and as the use of mobile phones is severely restricted on the military vessel, she will have limited contact with the 4-person crew, headed up by director Daphne van den Blink.

The documentary will seek to find out what it is like for a young sailor, a new recruit, trapped on a ship, miles from home, and confronted not only with the vagaries of a potentially cruel sea but also the challenges posed by a new life within a highly structured naval community. One way to survive the ordeal (the main character is yet to be cast) is to rely upon his/her daydreams and the intensely personal conversations they will have with a moral counsellor on board. “Louise-Marie poetically and imaginatively shows how a young sailor deals with this crucial moment in his [or her] life,” reads the project’s log-line.

“Daphne is very enthusiastic and young,” says Versteyhe (Lionheart Productions). “And her heart is in the Navy, in the Marines, because her dad was there for a very long time. She’s also very patient, and I think she will really need patience to be on the ship there with her character.”

In her notes, Van den Blink explains the significance of her father to the production. “For my latest short film, the children’s documentary Dad Magnet, I delved into my father’s working environment. My father was a humanist spiritual counsellor in the army. While shooting Dad Magnet, I found out more about the formation of young sailors in the Navy,” she explains of why her father’s counterpart onboard the Louise-Marie is so important. “I decided to give the moral counsellor (or the ‘Padre’) a role in the documentary. The fact that the moral counsellor onboard is, in a certain sense, an outsider, just like us filmmakers, makes his role very interesting.”

Versteyhe knows that the success of the Dutch/French-language project depends on the casting of the central character, and therefore relishes the “challenge” of finding that perfect young recruit, whether they be male or female. “Somebody who is open enough to show the difficulties they are having during this month at sea,” she underlines.

In her notes, Van den Blink refers to the character (as yet to be cast) as Jonas, appropriately enough. “Jonas belongs to the so-called Generation Z, the first generation that grew up with the internet. On board the sailors can send messages, but most of the time they aren’t able to call or send pictures,” she explains.

“The fact that they are at the mercy of only written text can be interesting for the documentary. This generation is used to communicating with images, how do they translate the impressions of their first month at sea only in text for the home front? Due to the minimal forms of communication, the young sailors soon feel estranged from their home. As a result, feelings of loneliness are more likely to arise.”

She further describes how she intends to portray the overall sense of isolation and potential claustrophobia that her Jonas substitute may experience. “I think it’s interesting not to show the ship in its entirety and from a distance, but always to film on and in the ship. This increases the feeling of being locked up together with the sailors at sea. Within the world of routine, rituals and codes, I also want to bring out the human side.”

“I don’t want to show Jonas only as a sailor, but also his youthfulness. For this reason, I would like to work with a number of daydream scenes,” she adds. “In his daydreams, Jonas is completely free, in contrast to the limited freedom he has on the ship. I want to develop these daydream scenes in collaboration with Jonas. What does he [or she] daydream about? What does he long for? How can he escape from life on the ship? How can space be created for imagination, fantasy and youth? Through these scenes, I can really give Jonas the opportunity to express his desires. These feelings of longing for the opposite of what is on board will gain a place in the daydream scenes.”

The target audience for the 80-minute Lionheart Productions documentary is broad and catholic, ranging from adolescents and young adults to a more elderly demographic. Twenty per cent of the budget is secured and during RE>CONNEXT the production will be seeking out distributors, festivals, broadcasters and co-producers.

In conclusion, creative producer Versteyhe underlines how this is one production on which she is happy to leave her creative team all at sea.

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RE>CONNEXT project WIP: Soundtrack to a coup d’état by Johan Grimonprez

Nick Cunningham — Wed, 06 Oct 2021 07:38:54 +0000

First pitched at CPH:FORUM, Johan Grimonprez’s feature doc project fuses the promise of African decolonization in the 1960s, the rise of the US civil rights movement and the State Department’s mobilization of ‘jazz ambassadors’ for propaganda purposes. New partners on board from France, Netherlands and Sweden with much broadcast and sales interest, the producers confirm.

Since CPH:FORUM, zap-o-matik, the main producer on Soundtrack to a coup d’état, has partnered with Velvet Films in France (producers of Raoul Peck’s I am not your negro; Baldr Film in the Netherlands (who co-produced Sick, Sick, Sick by Alice Furtado, Cannes Directors Fortnight 2019, KVIFF), and SVT (Sweden) who pre-bought the film for broadcast.

“Several other broadcasters and sales agents have expressed their interest, but we haven’t made any decisions for now, as we are still working on the financing strategy,” confirms co-producer Emmy Oost of Belgian production house Cassette for timescapes.

The film covers the period of instability after the 1961 murder of Congolese PM Patrice Lumumba, the rise of Pan Africanism and the US State Department’s response to international criticism of its race policies at home by forcing diplomacy through jazz.

“[It] is about the promise of decolonization, the hope of the non-aligned movement and the dream of self-determination,” said Belgian producer Daan Milius (zap-o-matik) of the 130-minute English/French/Dutch-language creative doc when he pitched it in Copenhagen. He arrives at RE>CONNEXT having secures €205,000 (21%) of his €990,000 budget. The expected delivery date is February 2023.

“It is also about the multinational corporations working hand-in-glove with the privatized military industrial complex to smother this very dream [of self-determination],” Milius added.

The West, seeing the danger of losing access to lucrative ‘colonial riches’, were perturbed by the emerging Pan African movement that Lumumba personified. “Washington, exploiting the hiatus left by the crumbling colonial empires, cooked up a paranoid cold-war narrative to smother the African dream of sovereignty,” the film’s production notes read.

Director Johann Grimonprez added: “The film is as much about the political earthquake in the United Nations in September 1960, when 16 African countries including Congo were admitted to the General Assembly.” This caused a major shift in the balance of power whereby the African and Asian majority together with the Eastern Bloc “was actually calling the shots,” which was deemed a threat by the Western countries.

“Another [aspect of the project] is that the situation in the Congo in 1960 was the Ground Zero, and it was kind of the template for what is still going on today,” Grimonprez continued. “The corporations dictated very much what the situation would be in the Congo. And so what’s going on today in the Congo is not very different. It’s still the same corporations, with the aid of private armies, holding on to what is actually going on in the Congo. And so… this dream of self-determination was completely smothered in something that is very similar today.”

And so to jazz. “A third layer [in the film] is the connection to music, and the music in this sense becomes a protagonist, because what is going on in the Congo was sort of an inspiration for the civil rights movement and specifically to what was going on in jazz,” says producer Milius.

Racist US policies in the 1960 in the face of global interest in the civil rights movement determined that the Eisenhower administration felt compelled to act, and so turned to the likes of Louis Armstrong, who was sent to the Congo as a Jazz Ambassador “as a diversion.”

“It was a response to Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev’s allegations of hypocrisy [by] the US,” Milius told Business Doc Europe. “While there were many civil rights scandals in the US Khrushchev basically said, ‘you preach democracy worldwide, but keep on lynching black people in your own country.’”

Other musicians that were roped in as jazz ambassadors included Nina Simone, Duke Ellington, Dizzy Gillespie and Melba Liston, all of whom faced the painful dilemma of defending a country (the US) whose record on civil rights, as evidenced by its policies of segregation, was indefensible.

“[They] were sent out to those (so-called) friction zones to, in a way, sell the diplomacy and try to re-conquer the atmosphere of the non-aligned countries,” Milius added.

TV partners on the project are VRT (Belgium) and SVT (Sweden), while financial partners are listed as: Financiers Flanders Audiovisual Fund (VAF, Belgium), ZKM (Germany), The Arts Research Fund – University College, Ghent-KASK/Hogent (Belgium).

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