Director/producer Zohar Wagner together with Brigid O’Shea and Laura Kloeckner
Seven new feature projects looking for festival premieres, gap financing and distribution partners, and developed in collaboration with top training initiatives from across Europe and international partner markets, were presented during DOK Industry this week. The session was moderated by DOX BOX’s Laura Kloeckner and DAE topper Brigid O’Shea.
Cannes Film Market Docs-in-Progress Award-winner Cent’anni, directed by Maja Doroteja Prelog and produced by Rok Biček (Cvinger Film, Slovenia), tells the difficult story of how, after a traumatic experience, a filmmaker and her partner try to move forward in life but she realizes she is trying to get back to something that no longer exists. The project’s supporting training initiative is Docu Rough Cut Boutique.
The starting point of the film is particularly difficult. When director Maja’s boyfriend was diagnosed with leukaemia four years ago he underwent heavy chemo therapy for two years, all the time looked after by her. After the successful treatment he decides to go on a personal Giro d’Italia cycling odyssey to celebrate his recovery and to move forward in life, accompanied by Maja.
“Initially we went on this trip to celebrate life and our love,” says Maja. “However, it turned out that it was only a trigger for a past issues to surface.”
“With this trip, I wanted back what we used to have, to be totally in love again, just like we were when we first met, but the journey that we made, wasn’t what I was hoping for. In fact, it was a brutal eye-opener. I was pretending I’m okay,” she explained during her pitch. “But I lost touch with who I really am. If I’m not his caretaker or his partner, being a film director seemed like a safe role for me to hold onto. So I used it to look into myself and my relationship. And when I sat in the editing room, I had this dreadful feeling that for the first time in our 15 years of history together, I want something else for us, something completely different, because we have changed.”
And so, the pair must discover if love can resurface from the dying embers of their relationship.
Cent’anni is a Slovenian, Polish, Italian co-production in need of extra funding to complete the post-production and therefore “finalize on the highest possible level,” said producer Biček. They are on “rough cut volume two,” explained director Prelog with a premiere date of Spring 2022. The team is also looking for “a strategic partnership with a sales agent.”
The project Savoy by director/producer Zohar Wagner was nominated by CoPro Israel and concerns a notorious incident in 1975 when Palestinian guerrillas stormed a day-use Savoy hotel and took as hostage the married Kochava Levi, who was there meeting her lover. “To save her life and honour, she transformed herself through the night into a heroine. However, by dawn, she was left with only shame,” reads the project’s logline.
“What attracted me the most were the two testimonies Kochava gave after the event, they were utterly contradictory and included blank lies in her police testimony,” said director Wagner. “She [first] told how naive the Palestinians were and that they came for peace. But at the trial of the sole surviving Palestinians Kochava changed her narrative. She presented the whole squad as blood thirsty rapists. Changing her narrative intrigued me. Could it be linked to the fact that she was mistaken for being a prostitute?…Or was it because the Israelis fear pro-Arab views. Kochava saw the Palestinians as human beings with a different agenda, but the Israeli authorities did not want to hear her truth.”
“After her death I discovered her diary,” Wagner adds of what motivated her to shoot re-enactments for the project. “I have found that no matter what Kochava said in court, her diaries tell her inner truth.” Another reason why some of the film is dramatized is due to the shortage of archive footage of Kochava.
Wagner confirmed that she needs to raise a further €150k towards the total €600k and at DOK Indutsry is looking for festival, pre-sales and sales representation on the project that will be ready early 2022.
The doc project Loving Martha is a story that is very personal to director Daniela Alejandra López Osorio. In her project notes she says how, “after 39 years of being married to an abusive man, my grandmother Martha gave me a journal and four tapes, containing the painful moments of abuse she lived next to my grandfather Amando. In doing so, she has only one purpose: that I do not repeat her story.”
Despite filing for divorce from her husband Amando almost two decades previously, he continues as if they were still married, a state of affairs exacerbated during family gatherings as the former couple are herded together for group photographs and forced to spend time with each other. But then she decides to write a formal letter to her ex-husband which she presents at one of the family gatherings.
“In the letter, she asked him to stop treating her like his wife. After this, Amando tore the letter and became distant from my grandmother. He stopped calling her and sits alone in a corner during family gatherings. Even though they divorced 17 years ago, this is the first time Amanda felt Martha had broken up with him,” explains the director. “She wanted them to be reminded of what she had lived with and acknowledge her struggle to separate from him. This way it seems my grandmother managed to break what she has called a chain of domestic abuse in the family.”
“I’m interested in intertwining the footage I’ve taken with archive, like the journal, the letters, the audio tapes, the pictures and homemade videos. I’m interested in taking care of the aesthetic approach of this dialogue. Not only because of formal matters, but to enhance [its] meaning,” she added.
Nominated by Doc Montevideo, producer Sara Nanclares (Ruido Audiovisual, Colombia) confirmed that Loving Martha is a co-production with Argentinian Maravillacine (Paula Zyngierman). The total budget is $165,000 US of which 88% secured. The project was also developed at the IDFAcademy Summer School and BAM. The team hopes to release the film in early 2023.
The Romanian project Too Close, directed by Botond Püsök and produced by Irina Malcea (Luna Film) is another highly necessary and urgent project, telling how Andrea’s life turns into every mother’s worst nightmare when her 9-year-old daughter finds the courage to share her darkest secret with her. Andrea must then fight “to build a safe new life for her children out of the ashes of her past.”
In post-production ahead of a planned premiere in January 2022, the project was nominated by dok.incubator and Ex Oriente (East Doc Forum).
“I’ve known my main character, Andrea, for almost a decade and now we are friends,” explained director Püsök. “One day she decided she was sharing a dark secret from her past with me about which she and her daughter really felt the need to talk about, to get it out into the world. Both Andrea and her daughter are determined to break the taboo of abuse. This is how we started making our film and the camera actually became part of their healing journey.”
The perpetrator, who came from a respectable religious background, was Andrea’s then-partner and as the crimes were being committed Andrea was pregnant by him. He served time in prison but now he is out, back in the community and, to make matters even more dreadful, demanding custody of his child. “How can you heal from such a trauma when the past keeps coming back?” asks Püsök.
“Andrea and her daughter chose to be brave,” underlines the project’s producer Malcea. “They chose to become a voice for all the women, for all the mothers, for all the silent victims who cannot talk or are not being heard. That’s why we strongly believe that their story is able to cross the borders and create emotional bridges. And for all of these reasons, we need to bring Andrea’s and her daughter’s story into the world.”
Remember My Name, directed by Spanish Elena Molina and exec-produced by Montse Pujol Solá (Boogaloo Films) tells the story of a group of unaccompanied migrant minors who cross the Melilla Fence dividing Spain and Morocco and join the nana Dance group.
“I fell totally in love with them, with their energy, with their power, but especially with their stories, which were something totally different,” says director Molina of her adolescent characters. “We Follow the daily life of Hamsa, Mounia, Asia and the other little dancers during the dance rehearsals but also the reception centre where they live, focusing on their coming of age process, their dreams, their hopes, their fears, and the contradiction that means living between two worlds.”
“When the incredible news about their selection [for a TV show] arrives, it looks like a magical solution for their situation, but nothing could be farther from reality,” she continues. “It’s also a preparation for adulthood, which is the main subject of the film. Hamsa is turning 18 after the TV premier. That means that he must leave the reception centre and the dance company, and start from scratch alone, again.”
The project marks Boogaloo Films’ third co-production with Les Films d’Ici (France). 60% of the financing is in place, confirmed exec-producer Montse Pujol Solá, and the team is in Leipzig looking for broadcasters, sales agents and “international funding opportunities.”
“We strongly believe in Remember My Name because it addresses a social issue that is on the media agenda nowadays of unaccompanied minors,” she stressed of the ESoDoc project which is at rough cut stage ahead of a planned February 2022 premiere. “And because it will allows the audience to get to know Hamsa, Mounia and Asia by their names and not by their stigmatised acronym ‘menas’ (menor extranjero no acompañado(s).”
The Senegal/South Africa/Spain project Doxandem, The Dream Chasers tells the story of a man, Mamadou, who, together with his Spanish wife Laura, returns to his native Senegalese village to be a positive force for his community. He plans to build the Utopia as imagined in the book he wrote while away in Spain.
Nominated by Durban FilmMart, the project is directed by Saliou Waa Guendoum Sarr and produced by Yanis Gaye (Gorée Island Cinema). The doc is currently in production ahead of a mooted Spring 2022 premiere.
Doxandem means ‘wonder,’ director Saliou explains, adding how the film is a polyphonic song of solo voices and a choir. Mamadou’s is the first voice. Laura’s is the second. A third voice “makes the bridge between Mamadou and the traditional village” while another is the collective voice of the villagers.
As integral to the story is Spanish Lara who is migrating to Senegal. “She worked in Senegal, met Mamadou here, they married and she decided to commit to his project. What does it mean for her to integrate without disintegrating herself? How does it impact on her and on her children, and on them as a couple?”
Producer Yanis Gaye explained that they are approximately 40% of the way towards the overall production budget, and their core intent at Leipzig was to find both financial partners and broadcasters to deliver the story to audiences. “We believe this story, this tale of the fragility of a return and the dreams that holds every migration, has such a human element and is capable of captivating audiences everywhere, from Africa to Europe and onwards. We hope we’ll have everything that we need to be able to tell this beautiful story of the fragility of human beings.”
Gaye added: “The story of Laura is the story of a migrant from Spain to Senegal. Most of the time in African countries, when people come from Europe, we call them expats. When we come into Europe, they call us migrants.”
Sasha Kulak’s pitch for A Hawk as Big as a Horse generated a spontaneous round of applause across the Leipzig auditorium as she explained her audacious tale of the Russian bi-gender Lydia who wants to recreate the ‘Twin Peaks’ universe in her home near the woods on the outskirts of Moscow.
“Lydia has devoted her entire life to making her fantasies come true,” said Kulak of the project produced by Louis Beaudemont of Les Steppes Production and nominated by Heino Deckert, representing EURODOC. “She’s creating a new reality where she can bend the rules to fit herself and her surroundings, starting with her own gender transformation to now reconstructing David Lynch’s universe in her own home. This story, like my own, may not fit the mainstream but I think the world deserves to see it. Working with Lydia I became so fascinated with her desire to control reality that I became a part of it.”
She continues: “She [first] introduced herself as Sergei and was still teaching at the university. She made such a strong impression on me that I instantly decided I will make a movie about this person. I asked her what she dreamed off and she said, without any doubt, to recreate ‘Twin Peaks.’ So I offered her a deal. I will help you remake the film version of the ‘Twin Peaks’ universe that you always dreamt of and in exchange I’ll have my movie. The film process took up so much of time, and of myself, that I started questioning my intentions and why I was so involved in Lydia’s story. I realized that although we seem very different, Lydia and I share a similar streak, the desire to control our narrative and to create a fairy tale reality to escape to.”
Budgeted at €250,000 and supported by the Sundance Institute, the film is being edited at the moment ahead of Summer 2022 delivery. Producer Beaudemont is looking to raise more finance in Leipzig. “In addition to theatrical and broadcast releases, we’re hoping that Lydia’s world can come to life in galleries and museums. We’re already looking to create some exhibitions with the making of digital artworks.”
