Three to see at LFF 2014 if you like ... documentaries

The new film from an established director …

Maidan

Maidan (2014)

What’s it about?

This film is a chronicle of the civil uprising against the regime of Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych that took place in Kiev in the winter of 2013/14. It follows the progress of the revolution in the three months from December 2013 to February 2014, from peaceful, half a million strong rallies in Kiev’s Maidan Nezalezhnosti (translated as Independence Square) to the bloody street battles between protesters and riot police, culminating in a powerful declaration of national identity.

Who made it?

Sergei Loznitsa was born in Belarus (or Byelorussian SSR as it was then). He studied feature filmmaking at VGIK (Moscow’s national film school), graduating in 1996. To date he has won 17 international awards for his films, both short and feature-length, fiction and documentary, including the FIPRESCI Prize at Cannes 2012 for In the Fog. He has stated in interviews that his documentaries influence his fiction features and vice versa, and that he intends to continue working in both genres. Maidan is his first feature-length documentary for six years and premiered at the 2014 Cannes Film Festival.

What’s special about it?

From the opening shot of the massed crowd singing Ukraine’s national anthem, the film conveys a strong sense of historically significant events taking place before our eyes. Loznitsa eschews the standard documentary conventions of talking heads, voiceover and individual protagonists to construct the narrative. Instead, the crowd is the key participant and the protest’s evolution from peaceful protest to violent confrontation is seen through a series of locked-off, entirely static shots, the fixed camera positions immersing us in the chaos.

We watch people milling about the square, we see sandwiches being prepared, we hear patriotic songs being sung and speeches being made; we witness the action unfolding, slowly at first but gathering pace as black-clad, shield-bearing riot police enter the frame and violence ensues.

This is documentary in its purest form. It demands patience from its audience, but if its demands are met the rewards are rich indeed.

Buy tickets for Maidan, screening in the Documentary Competition

The breakthrough …

Ne me quitte pas

Ne me quitte pas (2013)

What’s it about?

In a rural Belgian village, Bob and Marcel lead lives of quiet desperation, sharing their solitude, sense of humour and love of alcohol. When Marcel’s marriage ends, he leans heavily on his widower best friend for support. Together they hang flypaper, chop wood and have long conversations – Marcel speaking of his broken marriage, Bob lamenting that his son has not visited him for years – while drowning their sorrows in vast quantities of beer, wine and rum. Their co-dependence is threatened when Marcel decides to stop drinking but Bob refuses to join him in rehab. Can their friendship survive?

Who made it?

Sabine Lubbe Bakker is a Dutch filmmaker raised in Belgium. She started making short documentaries while living in Syria; her first feature Shout was shot there with co-director Ester Gould and premiered at Movies That Matter Festival in 2010. Sabine has also directed short documentaries for Dutch public broadcaster VPRO, including Power to the People (2012) and Hotel Europe (2013).

Niels van Koevorden is also Dutch and spent his childhood in Belgium. He returned to the Netherlands to study at the Dutch Film Academy, graduating in 2010; his graduation film won a VPRO award. His second film By Her Side won several awards including the jury award for best short at Full Frame Documentary Festival in 2013.

Ne me quitte pas is Niels’ first feature and Sabine’s second. It won the best documentary editing award at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival and the special jury prize at Little Rock Film Festival.

What’s special about it?

Directors Sabine Lubbe Bakker and Niels van Koevorden spent two years with the lead characters, gathering footage to tell their story, and the resulting film illustrates a great universal truth: there is more humour and humanity in failure than in success. Using a fly-on-the-wall vérité style, the filmmakers have made an unforgettably tragicomic portrait of two co-dependent alcoholic men in the grip of midlife crisis. The interaction between Bob and Marcel is seamlessly captured in a number of magical exchanges on life and its disappointments during epic drinking bouts, delivered with a deadpan humour that is as touching as it is infectious.

As much a buddy movie as a meditation on alcoholism, the film takes its name from the Jacques Brel song ‘Ne me quitte pas’ (‘Don’t Leave Me’), which perfectly captures the mutual dependence at the heart of Bob and Marcel’s relationship. Beautifully shot and structured like an arthouse fiction film, the result is a sensitive but unsentimental, melancholy and hilarious portrait of male friendship.

Buy tickets for Ne me quitte pas, screening in the Documentary Competition

The wild card …

The Creator of the Jungle (Sobre la marxa)

The Creator of the Jungle (2014)

What’s it about?

Near the Catalan village of Argelaguer, a man has spent 45 years building spectacular jungle structures, tree houses, waterfalls and labyrinths with his bare hands, destroying and reconstructing them time after time throughout the decades. His name is Garrell but he is also known as ‘Tarzan from Argelaguer’, and his sole purpose in completing these incredible feats of engineering is to create his own fantasy world in which to play, free from the constraints of the civilised world.

Who made it?

Jordi Morató is a graduate of the Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF) in Barcelona, which he left in 2013; he has also studied at Fundación Universidad del Cine in Buenos Aires. The Creator of the Jungle was his graduation project at UPF and has won awards at the Malaga International Festival, Trento Film Festival and Rome’s MedFilm Festival.

What’s special about it?

Morató has stated that the work of Werner Herzog is one of his biggest influences, and this comes across strongly in his choice of subject for this fascinating film. There are echoes of Timothy Treadwell (of Grizzly Man, 2005) in his protagonist Garrell, a loner who chooses to exist physically and mentally on the outskirts of civilisation. Garrell has made himself the star of the film of his imaginary life – a brave but childlike, self-mythologising man creating his own world stick by stick and stone by stone. The physical structures he creates, tears down and reconstructs are truly jaw-dropping; Morató combines Garrell’s own home movies of his Tarzan fantasies alongside his footage of these amazing constructions, including some superb aerial photography.

By eschewing interviews with Garrell’s family, friends and fellow townsfolk, he enables us to enter untrammelled into Garrell’s imaginary world in all its wonder and see it through his eyes. It’s a fascinating study of a true original, an ode to the creative urge and a tribute to the spirit of play, and it speaks to the child in all of us.