Paris, take two

Not so fresh from an early morning Air France flight, I write to update the Berlin Showroom Paris project, which has more-or-less wrapped as of yesterday. 

The Showroom itself was well received, and we managed to pick up most coverage and interviews that we planned on, with some last studio visits here in Berlin once Fritz makes his way back from the south. 

Also underway is our proper website, which I am bravely endeavoring to build myself using very basic tools such as language and images. It will not win any awards, I'm afraid, but I will certainly be proud of it when we can finally launch it and with it details of all projects in development and production, of which there are several, and all quite exciting. 

We also managed to meet up with dear friends, eat a lot, and enjoy the occasional (ahem) glass of wine. Paris remains the world's nicest, even when unseasonably cold.

Moving on

Ahoy!

Fresh from the worst flu ever, I write from the comfort of my home office in a brief interval without the incessant renovation hammering from below. Said flu kept me from the back half of the Berlinale which was particularly cruel, but Fritz managed to see everything several times and is occasionally a good storyteller. 

So, after a brief delay, things are quite busy and renewed and moving forward. Fritz has begun editing a short film from footage taken for what was intended as 60-minute television piece around the subject of performance, in particular the question of 'why' one acts, shot during the Summerworks Festival in Toronto in 2011. Incidentally, that week was the last time I had a flu so bad I thought I might need to visit the hospital. I still support this project, mind you, and here are some stills of participants:

This was the first work that Fritz shot on his own, so we're happy to make something of it at last and will post a teaser if not the full film upon completion. 

So, loose ends are being tied and major new projects are being moved forward all at once. Next weekend, to Paris. At some point I will even build our website.

DOC MEETS, intellectual flexibility, honesty in documentary

SO, the first grand weekend of the 63. Berlinale is behind us, and some films have been seen, and some places have been been, and so and so. The DOC MEETS events coproduced by IFP and EDN at the EFM have proven surprisingly informative, at least in terms of framing our own ideas of how we compose and propose our own ideas for market. 

Short story: the European market as a primary node is not appealing, particularly from the perspective of intellectual independence and flexibility. Of course we knew this before, but it was heartening (and horrifying) to have these visceral responses validated (if sidewise and/or unintentionally) by documentary producers regularly engaged with the byzantine broadcast hierarchy/mafia here. 

All the while, the listserv of AG DOK has been losing its shit in the most unflattering way over the fallout from last Friday's symposium. Basically, they have not, after all these years, found the answer to the question best posed by the supergroup WAR, "Why Can't We Be Friends?" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yFJapPwmY_0 (I chose this version, of course, because I am Canadian). Fritz and I have been enjoying comparing and contrasting the tones of the listservs of AG DOK and DOC. 

Shock of shocks, the Canadian listserv is warm and helpful and human and the German is, well, well... I'm not sure what I can say, but it's most certainly none of those adjectives. I also worry about those people a bit, you know? Cold and alone and huddling away, back home in Kassel, or Regensburg, or Magdeburg, or Karlsruhe, full of rage and utterly beside themselves with... I don't really know, actually, but utterly beside themselves with something. Perhaps with being alone. We might very well attempt a documentary about this. 

This evening we attended the premiere of our friend Ramon Zürcher's film THE STRANGE LITTLE CAT. That was nice. His command of choreography and performance is formidable. He will make really lovely things in the future. Take note! 

Yesterday Fritz saw a documentary which I also saw today which filled me with a variety of rage about dishonesty in filmmaking. It certainly doesn't relate to us directly, but it was something of an affront to the form, which would also be an affront to the form of filmmaking in general. I regret that the Berlinale programmed it, though I suppose they were swayed by the profusion of male prostitutes and (poorly composed) shots of supposedly luxurious European cities. Utter rot. Thoroughly dishonest. Potentially the most inauthentic piece of filmmaking I've ever seen. 

Yahtzee! That's what one says before setting the alarm for 6:30 to acquire tickets for the following day at the Berlinale... kuss kuss kuss und bis später.

For images, I offer this gorgeous fragment of a rug from the early days of the Ottoman empire, seen at the Pergamon Museum this morning when I was turned away from a screening that I wasn't particularly interested in anyway. I wouldn't mind this much in our flat.

German Documentaries 2013, AG DOK AGM Berlinale

Day two of the Berlinale was taken up largely by the annual general meeting of the German Documentary Association (AG DOK) at the strange pseudo-embassy of the German state of Hessen, a relatively elegant glass building tucked in behind the Hotel Adlon and... the site of Hitler's bunker. Fritz was particularly taken by the china his coffee was served in ("very 1930s" he said); I was particularly taken by the bunny rabbit that hopped behind us in the backyard whilst I struggled to follow along with the shorthand-laden German of our 'colleagues'. 

Much is at stake with German broadcasters for the documentary community here, and the guest for the afternoon session was Lutz Marmor, head of NDR and ARD. Basically, he did not have a very pleasant afternoon. 

That's him in the centre with his head down. Poor guy. I suppose he felt like he had no choice but to attend. Still, he might have made his afternoon more pleasant by promising a raft of new cash and guaranteed commissions to all manner of obscure projects proposed by attendees rather than summarily dismissing the idea of establishing a separate documentary channel (by no means a radical move for a state broadcaster) or referring to certifiably middlebrow nonfiction programming as 'controversial'. That said, this is probably why he got the job.

Anyway, most notable of today is that it marked the release of the German Documentaries 2013 catalogue, which is published in English as a project of German Films, AG DOK and German Documentaries, and LEHMBRUCKSTRASSE, FRIEDRICHSHAIN, BERLIN is in it. The catalogue looks like this (the teal colour is, admittedly, regrettable):

and the entry looks like this:

You can likely find a copy of it at the Goethe-Institut/film festival national promotional agency lounge of your choosing. It's not a big deal, but we do like having things in print.

We also saw an amusingly predictable feature from the Netherlands in which the entire Dutch dairy industry was revealed to be a coven of closeted homosexual activity, and a documentary about the efforts of the PM of the Palestinian Authority to bring their bid for statehood to the UN. We have no tickets for tomorrow. 

A TALE

This past weekend we did a pickup shoot for A TALE, an experimental short documentary film directed by noted photographer Katrin Thomas with video and image artist Mark Pennock as DoP. A few stills from the shoot and a BTS trailer:

BERLIN Showroom Paris

We are about halfway through shooting our first feature-length reportage-style (i.e. for television broadcast) documentary, BERLIN A LA MODE (working title). The film uses the development and creation of the first-ever Berlin Showroom at the Paris Women's Fashion Week in late February-early March. The Showroom is an initiative of the Berlin Senate and is being organized by Arne Eberle Press+Sales, a Berlin fashion PR and sales firm representing a carefully curated stable of primarily Berlin-based designers. 

We followed PR+Sales Manager Judith Guckler to Paris in late November in search of a venue and have since been lurking about design studios and both backstage and front at the tent at the Mercedes Benz Berlin Fashion Week at the end of January. 

We're primarily interested in the Senate's involvement in promoting the Berlin fashion industry as a commercial node equal to that of other major-minor fashion centres such as London, whose fashion scene has been represented for some years in Paris by a highly successful showroom of their own. 

LEHMBRUCKSTRASSE, FRIEDRICHSHAIN, BERLIN

Our first short documentary, LEHMBRUCKSTRASSE, FRIEDRICHSHAIN, BERLIN, continues along the festival circuit, most recently screening at the 26th Stuttgarter Filmwinter in the Rahmenprogramm "Echte Handarbeit", which I will translate to the 'Surrounding programme, True Handiwork' or 'Handicraft' or something of the sort. 

It premiered in competition at the 6th Abu Dhabi Film Festival in October 2012 and Fritz Polzer won the Jury Prize for Best Documentary at the London Underground Film Festival in December 2012. 

Watch the trailer here:

We are currently developing a feature-length documentary exploring similar ideas with a circle of lifelong Berliners close to us who revisit landmarks of their childhood with the working title ORTSBEGEHUNGEN. We can't agree on the English working title for this, but literally it would be "SITE VISITS" or "PRESERVED PLACES". Production should begin in the coming months.