NISIMAZINE amsterdam

Tuesday 25 November 2008

A Magazine Published By Nisi Masa, European Network Of Young CinemA

Flying on One EngineThe Ancestral Pantheon of Telematic Egos Nikolaus Geyrhalter

#6

Cov

er: N

ikol

aus G

eyrh

alte

r dur

ing

the

shoo

ting

of 7

915

km ©

200

8 Ph

ilipp

Hor

ak

NISIMAZINE AMSTERDAM

Tuesday 25 November 2008/# 6A magazine published by the NISI MASA and

MeccaPANZA associations in cooperation with

IDFA - International Documentary Film Festival

Amsterdam and with the support of

the ‘Youth in Action’ programme of the EU and

SNS Reaal Fonds EDITORIAL STAFF

Director of Publication Matthieu Darras Editor-in-Chief Jude Lister Itxaso Elosua Ramírez

Editorial Secretary Maartje AldersLayout Maartje Alders, Nina Henke

Contributors to this issue

Anamaria Chioveanu, Esra DemirkıranAlbert Figurt, Jessica Hartman

Nina Henke, Evrim KayaRares Kövesdi, Selma Sevkli

Coordinators Nina Henke, Ilona MulderAlex Tirajoh, Tania Ramón CasasMeccaPANZA Bestevaerstraat 198-4

1055 TS Amsterdam

+358 41 5251131

mail@meccapanza.eu

www.meccapanza.eu

NISI MASA 10 rue de l’Echiquier,

75010, Paris, France.

+ 33 (0)6 32 61 70 26

europe@nisimasa.com

www.nisimasa.com

Editorial

P I C T U R E O F T H E DAY

PHO

TO B

Y R

ares

Kö

vesd

i

Documentaries are like time machines and spaceships, transporting audiences to unknown, exotic, friendly, eccentric or terrifying worlds through the experiences they create.

An international documentary festival has a double effect on its audience; within its movie theatres it contains the universal world of documentary but on the streets there is a physical universality created by the presence of guests from all over the world. For the traveller each new adventure created by a film is another motive based on the main theme.

It can be the story of the Far East, the peculiar spicy culture of India or the calm landscapes of the old Europe; the rapid rhythm of fluttering fabrics, or the memories of a cold prison. Good documentaries report to us from far away and tell about the ‘different’. Yet there are always happy coincidences, like when guests meet the familiar in an unguarded moment. As is the case with me, recognizing familiar faces and languages during a screening in the freezing cold Netherlands: Kurdish children on the way to school.

In many senses the so-called “universal experience” consists of finding familiarity in the unfamiliar – a face or a sound, maybe a gesture, a touch or a look. But it comes in many forms, and as a surprise it sometimes appears on the face of the unknown. That’s the magic of interna-tional festivals: Meeting the same familiarity, whether it is from a camera placed in a faraway country or in your hometown, that is universal humanity itself.

Evrim Kaya

,

«There is only one IDFA»

“I hired 30 members of a South Korean Army, special forces unit. (...), we all went to North Korea together, parachuted into Pyon-

gyang, and killed Kim Yong-il. The country was extremely happy.”

This is a dream that Jung Sung San once had. In Yodok Stories, the theatre director recounts his escape from North Korea, a country in which - according to the film- between 200 000 and 300 000 people are locked up in concentration camps. Because it’s nearly impossible to film these atrocities, Sung San directed a musical about them in South Korea in order to inform the public.

Tragic recollections of seven North Korean refugees contribute to the making of this spectacle. Despite the fact that we do not actually see any of the crimes in the camps, we understand their violent na-ture from the refugees’ descriptions and intermittent footage of the musical. Since they need to be envisaged, their impact and extent may become even more vivid and this can leave you a little dazed.

Ultimately, the poignant realization is that this is still happe-ning today.

The only thing that Sung San and the others can do now is get their voices heard and let it be known what is going on in North Korea.

An old man getting closer to the end of the road, and thousands of

children who just started their journey... One side enjoys the only thing he likes doing – performing surgery to heal the disfigured, the other side cries, barely knowing what is going on.

Flying on One Engine is the story of a 76-year-old Indian-American plastic surgeon who takes a trip to India every year to operate on children’s facial deformations, mainly cleft lips. The film starts with a baby crying, and Dr. Dicksheet starts to speak about his life. After going through one major car accident, cancer and a heart attack, the doctor is losing his joy for life

while suffering from his own medical condition. Director Joshua Weinstein allows the audience to understand Dicksheet’s eccentric personality and the past experiences which led him to do an impressive 500 free surgeries per year in India. While he tells his story, we see his humble, messy Brooklyn apartment. A kind of melancholic feeling comes from Dicksheet, transmitted to the audience through close-ups and sad music. When we see the children with terrible facial deformations, it feels too heavy to take in for a moment.

Morning comes after night and both Dicksheet and the film become more joyful as we follow him to India: He

Review Yodok StoriesAndrzej Fidyk (Poland/Norway, 2008)

Film of the day Flying on One EngineJoshua Weinstein (India/USA, 2008)

complains about women still hitting on him and Liz Tyler getting too fat. Even though people in India treat him as a god, we see a human being with different dimensions. He doesn’t expect anything from what he is doing, except the Nobel Prize: He complains about Mother Theresa getting it without doing much (according to his standards), and him still not having one after doing 140 000 surgeries gets him a bit upset. Unlike Dr. Dicksheet, the children’s families do not seem depressed even though they experience such difficult conditions. Weinstein shows us their lives, beliefs and hopes. We witness interesting slang like “sisterfucker” among the medical team, moments of parent-child affection both for the doctor and the families in India, and images that we maybe tend to avoid in our daily lives.

The film gives factual information on many different subjects in a short time, and conveys well the feelings from the people filmed in order to help the audience digest the heavy experience. It is an inspiring story from a talented director who makes his point clearly without too much agitation. Get ready for the feelings of ‘what could I do?’

Jessica Hartman

© P

iray

a Fi

lm

Nisimazine Amsterdam ~ 25. 11. 2008 # 6

© W

eins

tein

Film

Pro

duct

ion

Selma Şevkli

«There is only one IDFA»

Two of this year’s International Student Competition films tell the story of siblings: The Ladies (Christina Voros) and

Brothers (Isabel Grünwald). Both young female directors chose a pair of elderly siblings as the focus of their modest stories.

The Ladies shows, in snapshots, the everyday lives of Mimi and Vali, two Hungarian costume designers. Both tell a bittersweet story in broken English: Times have changed; young people don’t need tailors anymore and their regular (elderly) customers can’t leave their houses as often as they used to. Like most old people, their past is something they hold onto at home in the form of clothes, pictures, and dusty objects.

They have vivid memories of the glory days as well as little conflicts, jealousies and sorrows, but it’s all in the past and now all they have is each other. Voros meets them in their messy little home, lets them talk about their dreams and disappointments, and listens to them comparing themselves and complaining about each other. Within a few minutes this film shows us love, companionship and the human condition itself in a very gentle way.

Based on the everyday life of two old brothers on their farm, Brothers is almost a dark counterpart to The Ladies.

Fritz and Heiner Zuber have to share the farm after their mother’s death, dividing labour as if they were a traditional married couple: Fritz cooks and does the housework while Heiner takes care of the farmland. Meanwhile, their mutual dislike is obvious; they don’t have a word to say to one another anymore. Grünwald manages to capture their solitude visually; the empty landscape outside mirrors the huge distance between them on a small coffee table.

Nothing is closer to the visualization of the Doppelganger myth than similar-looking siblings. A Doppelganger is a sign of bad luck, in literature as well as popular culture; it foreshadows the death of the person who sees it. Interestingly enough, Doppelgangers are always male. Is this perhaps the curse of the brothers; that they recognize approaching death in each other’s faces?

The Ladies / Brothers

Young Visions

©M

igra

nt T

urtle

Film

s

Evrim Kaya

Nisimazine Amsterdam ~ 25. 11. 2008 # 6

You can read al l the Nis imazine IDFA issues onl ine at:

WWW.NISIMASA.COM

Christina Voros (USA, 2007)

Isabel Grünwald (Italy/Germany, 2007)

Interview

Orhan Eskiköy : On the Way to School

Phot

o by

Rar

es K

öves

di

Orhan Eskiköy (right) is co-director (with Özgür Doğan, left) of On the Way to School, which is in the Joris Ivens Com-

petition. They followed a Turkish teacher who teaches Kurdish students, who don’t speak Turkish, in Demirci, a remote village near Urfa in South-Eastern Turkey.

On the Way to School is the story of a people with one geo-graphy and two different languages. In this perspective the film is about a break in communication. What do you think about the disconnection between East and West in Turkey?In Turkey, the lack of communication between people of the West and the East makes them have prejudices. Since they don’t speak the same language and don’t try to learn about each other, the only way they are informed about the other’s culture and lifestyle is through TV. On TV Kurds are mostly presented either as terrorists or people needing pity. But, their need is to be understood by the rest of the country. Our film aims to show the audience (mainly a Turkish audience) what the Kurds’ reality is.

Could you tell us about the production process of the film?We started the research on the film five years ago, when Özgür and I were both students. But we couldn’t find a village or a teacher. Three years ago, we applied for a workshop at the Documentary Filmmakers’ Association (BSB) in Turkey. There, we met European professionals like Leena Passenen and Massimo Arvat who believed in our project so much. In 2007, we applied for the Greenhouse Documentary Development Workshop and our project was selected as the best pitch. Then we got support from different institutes like Sundance and the Jan Vrijman Fund.

So how did you find your main character, teacher Emre?During research, we saw that the story of Emre is being lived by a lot of first-time teachers. When we met him, he was very pessimistic and questioning why he was there. Compared to other teachers, he looked so typically like a Turkish man from the West. He fitted our story!

At some points, Emre seems exhausted from teaching Turkish to children who speak Kurdish. What difficulties did you encounter while following him for one year?Following one character for a long time is hard. Emre changed his mind so often: one day he liked the village, and then he gave up. In the beginning, he had strong self-confidence to teach Turkish. In time, when he recognized that it was not that easy, he lost hope. We were afraid of him cancelling the filming. Eventually, that didn’t happen. But he was not so co-operative with us; by not answering some calls or not informing us about big changes in the village, etc.

In the film, there are details about the education system in Turkey and a strong feeling of periphery. On the one hand we watch the strength of the system, and, on the other, the teacher had to teach Turkish before the curri-culum. What do you think about the solution he found by himself?In developing countries like Turkey, some groups have privileges; some have no advantages at all. This makes a big gap. Rules are meaningful and can work only if all people have the same opportunities. The state has to consider and respect the diversity within the country. Of course for unity in education, the same curriculum should be followed. But, as in our film, a teacher cannot teach lessons to students who are not speaking the same language. I think it is a kind of violence against teachers and students.

Although you were invisible in the film as directors, your view was not an ‘outsider’ one. How could you define your documentary-making style? We try to observe the life of real characters in their real stories and real locations. This is the formula of our style. In observational documentary, you have to be with your characters at the right moment. If you manage to capture the feelings and true life, it is enjoyable. Otherwise, this style makes the filmmaker nervous.

Nisimazine Amsterdam ~ 25. 11. 2008 # 6

Esra Demirkıran

See better by bike

MacBike offers rentals, repairs and a free bike roadmap of Amsterdam.We also sell bicycles and accessories. We created 10 unique cycle routes for you.

MacBike bicycle rentals: Weteringschans 2 (Waterlooplein), Mr. Visserplein 2 (Leidseplein) and Central Station. Open daily from 9.00 - 17.45 hrs. www.macbike.nl

3008adMacBnisimag.indd 1 13-11-2008 16:15:45

Let’s talk about images.

If you look at the coupled-frame sTRIP below, the first thing you’ll notice is some kind of remote symmetry, maybe even continuity. The man in the little monitor on the left is Professor Ashoke kr. Datta, one of the earliest voices of India’s computer engineering (back in the 50s!) and father of Anirban Datta – who directed the documentary which the shot belongs to, .In for Motion. On the right-hand monitor (apparently a regular TV) we have Albert Hofmann, the Swiss scientist who turned to philosophical alchemy after discovering and synthesizing LSD in 1943; this shot belongs to Gambling, Gods and LSD by Peter Mettler, one of the Nikolaus Geyrhalter’s Top 10.

Both of the talking-head, split-screen windows are surrounded by what we can define as emerging inner-structural elements. These components are messy and discrete on the left, arranged and serial on the right: their only (but crucial) shared function is the possibility to be endlessly rearranged, recombined and thus rediscovered as a whole. The professor’s cathodic alter-ego is overlooking a bunch of hard-drives and integrated circuits; alphabetical components of his job and of all digitally-derived technologies - including the video camera used to create this very image. The psychedelic master’s simulacrum is instead standing close to a grid of trembling post-its; each one a film’s topic note, so that the group becomes a metaphor for the director’s stream of consciousness or the editor’s choices - as well as a reference to the analogical device involved in this case, the 35mm celluloid.

In focus

The Ancestral Pantheon of Telematic Egos

Albert Figurt

Nisimazine Amsterdam ~ 25. 11. 2008 # 6

© M

axim

age

Gm

bh

Now, let’s go a little bit deeper into our two mirrored sources.

.In for Motion is a short, evocative, essay-like documentary; an attempt to analyze contemporary India, where Information Technologies are spreading quicker than anywhere else in Asia. Shifting virtual identities, online poetry collectives and chat-based relationships are on the one side, call centre-oriented businesses and de-located software companies - using qualified but very cheap local labourers - on the other. Everything appears so new, pervasive and a bit unusual for a country that almost completely skipped the Industrial Revolution. But we should try to raise the veil and look further (as the Hindu doctrine also suggests). What if the so called third-eye, the circle of karma and the multiple arms of Kalì (just to quote some of the most common stereotypes related to Indian religiosity) were stunning telematical prophecies of webcams, hypertextual interfaces and multi-tasking? After all, nothing is closer to the state of our 2.0 days (real-time interactivity, millions of brains simultaneously cooperating on an intangible platform) than the concept of Brahman (literally “the immanent and transcendent reality which is the Divine Ground of all Matter and to which all the Souls belong”).

“Man is a pleasure-seeking machine”, states a heroin-addict in God, Gambling and LSD. From Las Vegas zombie-players to fanatic evangelists in a forgotten American airport, Mettler’s film is a 3 hour travelogue, desperately searching for divinity and/or happiness in the ordinary alienation of the western society. Then, just before the unexpected final, here’s the twist: a relaxed brainstorming in the peaceful Switzerland, homeland of the director and of the hallucinogen’s father - reflecting on chemistry and joy while being reflected himself by a screen. In the final chapter, smiling, exotic people worship multilayered divinities deeply rooted in nature. We’re in India, where you don’t need to go LOOKING FOR something “extra”. After all, you’re a harmonic slice of a breathing universe: you’re simply LOOKING - and the picture contains you, too.

© A

nim

agin

eer

Nik

olau

s G

eyrh

alte

r Portrait

from

791

5km

© 2

008

NG

F

Nina Henke

Nikolaus Geyrhalter prefers to keep himself out of the picture, allowing audiences to draw

their own interpretations from his films. It felt all the more special then to attend his IDFA master class, and get an idea of his working methods. Accompanied by his editor Wolfgang Widerhofer, the director seemed a little quiet at first, but once the debate got underway he was more than open to explain his personal view on his career.

Coming from a background in photography, Geyrhalter started his documentary career at the age of 22 with Washed Ashore (1994). In this film one can already discover his typical preference for shooting his “pro-tagonists” with a wide angle lens - to keep a certain distance and present them in their normal environ-ment. Interviews are really important for his work, as his films are all – with the exception of Our Daily Bread (2005) – oriented towards portraits. He tries to explain the dimension of the whole film to the interviewees so that the conversation automatically drifts in this specific direction. Thus, the subjects are often like real actors on a stage: they deliver a real exposé which is translated to Geyrhalter by several entrusted interpreters. While he is still shooting the film, his editor already starts working with the material at home in Vienna. “It is really challenging to find the balance between Nikolaus’ unique photographic moments and the narration of the film”, he admits.

Widerhofer explains that the director always choo-ses characters who are outsiders to society. Gey-rhalter adds that films are a mirror of our society but that he prefers to present views from one of its corners. One can find in his work a strong histori-cal interest, which often serves often as a starting point. The Austrian film maker is more interes-ted in the big events (mostly catastrophes) which are already behind us. He wants to preserve these decisive moments as a kind of archive for future generations.

For this reason, and also due to his photography ex-perience, he likes to shoot in black & white to indicate that something already belongs to history. This is the case for his film Pripyat (1999), about the city of the same name, which is situated near to the Chernobyl reactor. Amazingly, after the catastrophe in 1986, the work in the plant went on until the total shut-off in 2000. The film team stayed three months in Pripyat and got to be part of the village which was abandoned by most of its inhabitants. This aim of giving space to people forgotten by the media can also be found in The Year After Dayton (1997), a documentary about the post-war period in Yugoslavia. Geyrhalter is again into personal portraits, not mentioning to which of the enemy sides they belong. He explained this facility to approach the people by the fact that the team was very young, not very professional and that they didn’t act as journalists. Generally, there is no real script for the films because he wants to be open for development during the shooting. In his opinion, for documentaries only limited research is possible: one can look for the places and the history, but not always for the people. Given that some producers don’t accept this “free” working style, Geyrhalter decided to found his own production company in 1994. This allows him to edit as long as he needs to, choose the scenes he wants to include, and select topics he is truly interested in.

One of the places he was always interested in was Africa. During the last years, he shot 7915km (2008). Originally it was a film about the Paris-Dakar rally, but it turned more and more into a portrait of the people living beside the tracks. After the European Premiere at IDFA, one of the spectators criticised that the film is superficial. Geyrhalter didn’t take it amiss at all but agreed in saying that he can’t present the complexity of the African continent in one film. His aim was to sensitise the public for a specific subject. In my case, he succeeded, not only in this film but also in his previous works screened during the master class.