The young festival team at Jihlava offered us an insight into what the Czech past and reconstructions of their inheritances have to offer today. The programme included films from the period of the Nazi Protectorate of 1939-45, and reflected upon the values of the later generations.
The people who described the concentration camps during the second world war were referred to as “screamers”. This referred to the fact that they did manage to get their message heard, but only for an hour, before, as the Hungarian Arthur Koestler pointed out, “their mental half-defence begins to work, and in a week the shrug of incredulity has returned.”
“Crude” tells its story with devastating understatement, wrapping the central plot of corporate negligence. But justice is not swift when Big Oil is your target.
Karnit Goldwasser is the young wife of Ehud Goldwasser, one of two Israeli soldiers kidnapped by Hezbollah in 2006, an action that launched the second Lebanon war. Through interviews and vérité footage shot over roughly 18 months, Nirit Kedar crafts a complex story about one woman’s dogged determination to find out whether her husband is alive. She interviews Karnit, family members and friends, a media strategist, a former secret service man, military experts and many others.
Brügger and his travel companions deliver a ballsy theatrical spectacle in a regime of terror. In the opening scene of his latest documentary, “The Red Chapel”, director Mads Brügger lies in bed in his North Korean hotel, dressed in robe and slippers and buried in a book by the Dear Leader, Dictator Kim Jung II.
Timoner wins the Sundance Grand Jury Prize with a haunting depiction of the extremities of our online existence.
Two films explore the boundaries between art and porn, sexual spectacle and exploitation.
Remembering the past is what inspires reappropriation. With both their films, Backès and Bense give us work that has reproduced the essence of one man’s history into a documented artistic journey.
In July, Karlovy Vary International Film Festival’s annual presentation of up-coming Eastern European documentaries showcased a lexicon of lifestyles – works-in-progress.