9th International Baltic Sea Documentary Forum. Screening Programme

 

Capitalism creates both progress and regress. In one hand the economic competition accelerates fulfilling the needs of people. In the other hand the struggle for existence creates humans with abnormal perspective in life. The countries in prosperity soften this dilemma by intervening nationally. Severely capitalistic countries consider this situation being inevitable. The New Estonia as severely capitalistic country comprehends the danger of aggressiveness and narcotics. We have naive hope that improving circumstances will keep us away from these dangers. According to people’s political preferences they suppose to seek for more human friendly society but so far it is preferred to restrict with personal and economic wellbeing.

 

The film describes current situation and should induce people to think about the future of Estonia’s society. State’s concern about depopulation is pharisee. Truth is - there are too many people.

 

 

 

Emotional and stylistically consequent documentary musical depicting the staging of Bernstein’s West Side Story with deaf youths.

 

The dramatic material of this film is intertwined among life and the emotional scenes of the musical; it creates a distinctive choreography, which is a statement of the deaf people’s craving to love this world and to be open.

 

Reciting to music, which is the way of singing of the deaf, is the strongest and most unexpected witness of the realities of their world.

 

Reciting to music can be characterized as a performance where a person, wholly or partly without hearing, although able to perceive the vibration of the sounds of music, “sings” the text in choreographic and rhythmical language of signs. It is accompanied by the phonogram of the song so that we, the keen of hearing, can hear the text of the song and see its interpretation in the language of signs.

 

 

Vulkanovka. After the Grand Cinéma (screening: September 7th. 6.30 pm and 9.00 pm)

 

Vulkanovka is a poor village in Crimean steppe, as local people say, forgotten by God and by people. Nonetheless that place came very much alive when famous Lithuanian film director Sharunas Bartas crew stayed here for almost two years filming Seven Invisible Men. Most of local people helped filmmakers a good deal. But the Grand Cinéma left and probably won’t come back. So the life of Vulkanovka returned to its usual routine. But it’s not for everyone.

Film director Giedre Beinoriute with her crew came to Vulkanovka nine months later. In her documentary people speak about their “cinematographic” experience with great enthusiasm. They tell about how it was and how it was different from their earlier understanding about filmmaking.

Some of course agree to speak for two roubles. Women and girls miss the shooting process a lot and could gladly repeat everything once again. These moods and people’s openness are interwoven into daily life of Vulkanovka with its rituals of caws’ feeding, shopping in the only shop “Produkty”, collecting metal etc.

A Family (screening: September 8th 9.00 pm.)

The documentary A FAMILY  is dedicated to Ida – a team-leader of the Tallinn-Moscow-Tallinn express train crew, Natasha’s and Larissa’s mother, the wife of Fyodor Vassilyevitch.

The film follows the life of this family within three years. This period covers both joyful and sad moments, love, birth and death.

The heroes of this film are more open than usual; this openness touches us in a specific way. The fact is that all of us have our roots in a FAMILY.

 

Dream Land (screening: September 8th 9.00 pm.)

 

There are places that we don’t want to know anything about, places that we would rather pretend don’t exist at all. One such place is a dumpsite. From the humans’ point of view, it is a ghastly place, a stinking desert of trash. But it’s a desert that is teaming with life. The astounding profusion of insects, reptiles, birds and mammals, all intertwined in an existential life-death relationship imparts to it with some strangely alluring dream-like quality.

 

Old sculptor,  gays, major of  the city -  they are all the members of still developing Lithuanian civil society. They all seek the same goal – tolerance and harmony with the environment. And it’s not important at all that their understanding of harmony is different.

Only the main characters of the film –two bronze workers– are not deprived of tolerance or, to be more exact, indifference. They do not care what people passing by along the bridge think about them. They look into the distance with hope, like all of us do…

 

A Very English Village: Going for the Kill (screening: September 9th. 4.00 pm and 6.00 pm.)

Gary Lee and his brother Mark run a large farm in the Sussex Downs, close to Ditchling. Gary is also Master of the local South Down and Eridge Hunt. Across Europe, farming faces a crisis and February 2005 marked the controversial end, throughout England, of hunting with hounds. Filmed over two years, this is a dramatic, first-person account of how one family struggles to cope with economic forces they barely comprehend and over which they have no control. Remarkable access to the invariably closed and wary hunting fraternity, offers an unusually frank account of the very traditional English sport of fox hunting.

Going for the Kill tells the inside story of Gary’s final fox hunting season.  We accompany Gary and his two sons, as they visit the kennels, where 84 hounds are prepared for the Autumn Season; we join him on an angry demonstration in Parliament Square, London, on the eve of a vital House of Commons vote to ban the hunt. We follow him through the farming calendar, planting, lambing, harvesting – and hunting. The film offers graphic details of the fate of one fox that is dug from its earth. But it also asks whether the law is not too blunt an instrument with which to curtail a minority activity - one that features no more cruelty than is routinely encountered in modern farming. It also explores the idea that there is very little that is ‘natural’ about the English landscape, a landscape forged and fashioned by centuries of farming and hunting. The end of the fox hunt probably means that, at least for the rural fox, the game is also up. With no reason to maintain a fox population, farmers and gamekeepers have already started to wipe them out. The film is likely to provoke lively debate.

 

 

Five films for BBC ‘Storyville’ – set in and around Ditchling, the small East Sussex village that has been home to Series Director Luke Holland and his family, for the past decade. Ditchling is the typical, even archetypal Downland village, just a few miles from the Sussex coast. Its traditional architecture of brick, flint and hanging tile, is matched by more contemporary materials, as new buildings re-define Ditchling's ancient boundaries and large gardens are given over to new housing. The tensions provoked by the pressures of development are palpable. With a population of just 1600, it boasts no fewer than 44 village societies – including the world’s oldest village horticultural society.  Ditchling was home for much of the 20th Century to a remarkable community of artists, founded by maverick arts and crafts genius Eric Gill. Celebrity residents include Dame Vera Lynne. The village was once the childhood home of Camilla Parker Bowles. Ditchling is full of surprises. Dolly the sheep was once a resident too.