It’s the penultimate day of the festival and I still have a long list of films to work my way through. There is also a very interesting Documentary Campus happening over the weekend called Virtually Yours!, which is looking at digital storytelling and promotion using the good old interweb. With a solid list of guest speakers talking about new strategies for pitching, funding and distributing docs (or any other kind of indie movie for that matter), it was tempting to go along. However, even at a very reasonable €70 for the two days, including meals, it was still out of my budget, and although I did consider invoking my press privileges to get in, in the end I opted for Polish Filmmakers Association panel, which wasn’t such a clever idea, as it turned out.

The previous day’s Israeli panel offered headsets with interpretation for those who needed it, although it was held in English, so I assumed the same service would be available for this panel, but into English. Wrong! But I was there, and after meeting Edyta from the SFP (Polish Filmmakers Association) she said she would let me know the gist of what was said. The first part of the talk was self-evident as it involved a PowerPoint presentation with lots of dates and figures. From then on the discussion got more passionate and vocal, with strong opinions being expressed. Even without understanding a word, it was pretty clear there were grievances, which turned out to be the lack of funding for drama, documentaries and animation especially from the TV stations. As Edyta was explaining this to me over yet another substantial lunch, she said how lucky we were in the UK to have the BBC and companies like Film4, because in Poland the TV stations were now making more, cheap entertainment shows instead. I had to smile to myself because it sounded like the same rhetoric as UK filmmakers are engaged in. And yet, judging by the quality and quantity of Polish films being shown here at the festival, the industry appears to be in good shape. Or is that filmmakers all over the world feel they are hard done by by their governments? I suggested the solution could be that governments should be made to spend the same amount on the arts and culture as they do on military expenditure, which would either bring an end to war, or a massive renaissance in the arts.

After lunch, which I felt I earned having sat for over two hours like “a Jew in a mosque” (as the Polish expression goes), it was time for some movies in the videotheque. I am always surprised every time I go there how under used it is, at least compared with the other festivals I regularly attend, where you have to book in advance and get a limited time slot. Working my way through the catalogue in alphabetical order by country, today’s viewing was a lot more satisfactory than the previous day’s. First up was an Israeli doc called The Worst Company in the World (dir: Regev Contes), which I missed seeing at Thessaloniki Doc Fest. The title is a bit exaggerated because, although they may be inefficient, completely dispelling the idea than Jews are good at business, companies such as Goldman Sachs, Shell, BP, Nestlé etc are far more deserving of the title, at least terms of ethics and not profit-making. Basically, the film is about two brothers and a friend, all in their late fifties, who “run” an insurance agency, but they much prefer pottering their home-office and having a laugh than chasing money, and when they do try to conduct business they invariably mess it up. The film is made by the son of one of the brothers and he tries to introduce some order and acumen into the business to save them from going bankrupt, but the old guys are happy in their ways.

I did a quick backtrack to a French short called Alice au Pays S’Émerveille (Alice in Modernland) (dir: Marie-Eve Signeyrole), a totally surreal film about a French policeman who forces his pregnant wife and his mistress, Alice, into his old police car and drives them to the snowy frontiers of Serbia, where they get stuck behind a car at a stop sign. The film is made up of dream logic and bodies keep falling from the sky. While still in an off-kilter mood I watched Kaszel Umarlaka (Dead Man’s Coughing) (dir: Krzysztof Borowka), a Polish short about politics, local witches and love spells, drowning men and kissing pigs. Sticking with the bizarre was Brzytwa (The Razor) (dir: Grzegorz Koncewicz) a bit of animated madness about a man going to a barber for a shave.

On a completely different tack was one of my favourites so far, Beats of Freedom (dir: Wojciech Slota, Leszek Gnoinski), a documentary about Polish rock music and its influence on the struggle for freedom in Poland during the ‘70s and ‘80s. Subversion and rock music – what’s not to like? It certainly put a new perspective on this country I’m visiting for the first time. Using interviews with musicians who were at the forefront at the time, along with archival footage of political events and concerts it made a strong impression on me. However, I couldn’t help noticing that despite all the political and economic oppression, the youth at the time were still allowed to attend rock gigs - there was even a long-running rock festival set up without opposition from (and even support of) the government. Also, the youth didn’t look any different to the punks and other counterculture groups in the UK or anywhere else in Western Europe at the time. The other thing that occurred to me was; would the British rise up in the way the Poles did at the time, if we were put under such a regime  – although some might argue that we have been for quite a few years now but haven’t noticed – or would we just form a Facebook group? There were the (successful) Poll Tax riots, and the less successful demo against the Iraq War, which led the UK government to further infringe on our civil liberties in a very quiet way. 

Still on political unrest in ‘70s’ Europe, was a Swedish short animated doc called Tussilago (dir: Jonas Odell) about the sometime girlfriend of a Red Army Faction leader, Norbert Kröcher. After more than 30 years, most of it spent in psychosis, she recounts the events surrounding the attempt to kidnap a Swedish government minister. A moving story with great, stylised cut-and-paste animation.

Two short docs from the UK about asylum seekers, both predominantly in monochrome were next. All Shades of Grey (dir: Minou Norouzi) is interviews with two teenage girls from Eritrea who were brought into the UK and abandoned, but it’s not as grim as it sounds. 1000 Voices (dir: Tim Travers Hawkins) is animated, opening with a bit of satire that sounds more like Daily Mail editorial, then made up of visual interpretations by different animators of recordings of phone conversations with asylum seekers stuck in indefinite detention, which is another blight on the UK’s human rights record.

After all that I had to finish on some comedy, which came from Zürich, Switzerland of all places – not somewhere renowned for humour. Las Pelotas (dir: Chris Niemeyer) is actually set in Latin America where two proud fathers are disappointed after their sons aren’t picked by a football scout. After the scout suggests the boys combine their skills the dads hatch a plan to make the perfect players, based on a grandmother’s success with breeding prize-winning cows, but it involves the co-operation of their wives.

All in all a very satisfactory afternoon’s viewing. Still more to see and do, and the closing night awards ceremony and banquet, which sounds much more impressive than a party.

By 10 o’clock the rain had stopped so I made my way down to the festival centre to check my e-mail and post the first two day’s report online. It turns out that it is not just the hotel, but the whole surrounding area has lost its internet connection because of the rain. With the website updated, I scuttled off to the first event of the day, the Focus on Israel discussion panel, made up of six film professionals, mostly from the funding and distribution part of the industry, apart from filmmaker Barak Heymann, the solitary male on the panel, apart from the moderator Jan Naszewski. After an introduction from the Israeli Cultural Attaché each of the panellists gave a brief outline of what they did. Most of the emphasis was documentary films. Ruth Diskin (Ruth Films) spoke on international sales and distribution; Riki Zaks from the New Israeli Foundation for Cinema & TV, spoke about raising funding from the public sector; Philippa Kowarsky (Cinephil) also spoke about funding but from private sources as well as crowd sourcing; Ilana Tsur, founder and director of DocAviv, spoke about the place of festivals in promoting cinema, particularly in Israel. The session was rounded off by filmmaker Heymann, giving his perspective on getting a film funded and distributed.

After the coffee break, Orna Yarmut, initiator and director of CoPro-Documentary Marketing Foundation spoke about the recent International Coproduction Market in Tel Aviv, with a focus on Polish filmmakers. She also spoke about a film treaty that is being instigated between with Israel and Poland. This lead into a general discussion amongst the panellists about the state of Israeli filmmaking at the moment and what types of films are being made. The upshot being that well-made films with interesting stories will get funding, but documentaries won’t make much, if any, money but are all about passion for the subject. Hardly groundbreaking revelations and more a confirmation that filmmaking is universal and faces the same obstacles wherever you are.

This was followed by a brief Q&A. After all the talk about co-productions with Europe and the US, I was curious to find out if they ever partnered with any of their Middle Eastern neighbours. Of course, aware of the political situation I didn’t expect a positive answer because of the Islamic states' views of Israel, but I thought it would generate some interesting debate. What was encouraging was the fact that although a lot of the films funded by Israel focus on the recurrent issues of the holocaust, the intifada and the West Bank conflict, filmmakers in general are very much opposed to the political situation in their homeland and want to see a peaceful resolution, and some of them, at great risk, are showing films from Islamic countries in a quiet underground movement because they understand that, apart from obvious propaganda films, cinema is a universal language that can transcend politics, or be used as a tool to promote better understanding of the world’s diverse cultures.

After the discussion finished it was down to the serious business of lunch and for want of a better phrase “networking”.

With plenty of food for thought, and for my belly, it was time for some serious film watching, although not necessarily watching serious films. Having gone through the catalogue and marked off a lot films, I settled myself down in the videotheque and started working through the shorts. There is no doubt that all of the films were projects of “passion”, and some were made with great technical expertise, and some a little less so. Without wanting to name specific films, most of the films, and the animations in particular, were a bit to abstract and self-indulgent. However, the two stand-out films for me were MEETING LAURA, where a group of young people from all over Europe, individually recount their meeting with the mysterious and enigmatic Laura. Shot on monochrome against white background it is cut in such a way that all the different stories become a single dialogue. Engrossing, funny and beautifully shot, even if it did have the slight visual flavour of a Gap or Calvin Klein ad. The other one was The Kinematograph, a Polish animation about an inventor obsessed with his world-changing invention of creating moving pictures that could be projected onto a wall. However, his obsession has disastrous consequences. Although it is a CGI animation, stylistically it resembles Eastern European stop-frame such as that by Jiri Trnka.

Although I had an invite to the HBO party, I decided (unsurprisingly) not to go. Having the solitude to write is such a rare thing for me I didn’t want to pass it up.