JUST TALKING 16/3
The different paths followed by each director searching for his inspiration was the focus of “Just Talking”, which took place on Monday, March 16 at the Excelsior room of the Electra Palace hotel, as part of the sidebar events of the 11th Thessaloniki Documentary Festival - Images of the 21st Century.
The participants were: Diego Rivera Kohn (Ex-Voto For Three Souls – Mexican Docs), Tom Van Zantvoort (A Blooming Business – Human Rights), Ozgur Dogan (On The Way To School – Vies of the World) Fabio Wuytack (Persona Non Grata – Recordings of Memory) and Sandra Lohr (Figuring Out Father – Austrian Docs). Peter Wintonick, the notable Canadian director moderated the discussion. Two of his films are being screened during the 11th edition. Also participating was Ally Derks, Director of the International Amsterdam Documentary Festival (IDFA).
In Ex-Voto For Three Souls, which describes the wait of three religious Mexicans for a miracle, Diego Rivera Kohn expresses himself using, as he says “the essence of cinema, that is space, time and light. With this documentary I wanted to connect with all those who hope something will happen. A personal experience was the reason I made this project. I had done a reportage for French television on an icon maker and I was in editing when I had a serious car accident. Ironically, the artist gave me a voto [an object used by people praying for a miracle] so that I would get well. Since then, I have been fascinated by these things”.
Miracles, or even the hope for one, are absent from Tom Van Zantvoort’s A Blooming Business. The horrific working conditions of women working on the vast flower-cultivation fields in Kenya are exposed in this film. “I was in Kenya in 2003, working on another project, and I lived the harsh reality of these women who have to work endless hours leaving their children alone and at the mercy of unscrupulous people. In spite of this, none of them dared speak openly about what she was going through. It took many meetings and discussions with them in order to get them to share their stories”.
For Ozgur Dogan, who co-directed On The Way To School with Orhan Eskikoy, the story of a Turkish teacher assigned to a remote village in Kurdistan where the students don’t speak Turkish, contained quite a few autobiographical elements. “I am also Kurdish, and I learned to speak Turkish at the age of 7. But the idea for the film came when a friend of ours, a teacher, started telling us hilarious stories about his experiences in a Kurdish village, from which he couldn’t wait to get away”.
Fabio Wuytack, in Persona Non Grata, records the mark left by his father, a priest, on the poor neighborhoods of Caracas, Venezuela. The popular priest, who was also an activist and a rebel, was finally exiled by the authorities, only able to return thirty years later. “The return to Venezuela was also the reason I turned to directing. I was 18 years old when we got the repatriation authorization and as soon as I saw the crowd waiting for my father at the airport I thought that this is so fantastic, I had to make a film about it.” He added: “In our home in Belgium we didn’t have a television, this was my mother’s choice. To balance things out a bit, we went to the movies very often. But I never thought that some day I would be behind the camera, making films”.
Finally, Sandra Lohr, who began her career in journalism and turned to filmmaking in order to record the story of Sophie Templer – Kuh, daughter of Austrian anarchist and psychoanalyst Otto Gross, said about her first film, Figuring Out Father: “I had published an article about her in 2003, and after many meetings with her I realized that a documentary would be much better than any text. For me, the focus is her story and not that of Otto Gross”.
