FIRST STEPS: Best Documentary

FIRST STEPS Award 2010 in the Documentary category was awarded yesterday evening:

“Ein Sommer voller Türen” (A Summer Full of Doors) directed by Stefan Ludwig, from the Hochschule für Fernsehen und Film in Munich.

The jury’s comments: The camera is reserved but gets in close to the young people who collect money for a charity organization by doing door to door ‘charity mugging’. The film follows them as they convince an embittered and ill-tempered pensioner to donate money and end up ripping him off. Some of the kids are proud and satisfied with themselves when they get people to give them money. While some of the kids are self-critical and doubtful about the ties between collecting money and earning money. The film addresses the subject without making any moral commentary. In the end, it’s the relentlessly neutral camera that prompts questions about what this money grabbing means for the kids’ lives and for our society as a whole when the manager of the sales team praises his sellers because their work keeps a large part of our social system alive. The film deals intimately with these questions without forcing the characters to do the talking for it.

CALL FOR ENTRIES: Second German-Chinese Dok-Film-Forum at the Goethe-Institut Shanghai

Audio-visual festival with a broad aesthetic variety of documentaries, discussed among documentary filmmakers, sociologists and the cross-cultural audience

(at) Home

To be at home, to feel like home, being in your home country are different perceptions of “home”. You can make yourself at home in many places. Sooner or later, you will adapt your own habits to the regional specifics. Formerly alien faces and places will soon look familiar. You get accustomed to a place and consider it your new home. But is “feeling home” the same as being at home? Is it the same feeling, as you would have in your home country? Home is something unique, something deeply rooted in your memory and emotions. Maybe, it is a place we only discover after we left home and start to miss it dearly. (more…)

realsoccer: Ultras #1

Confession to make: One of the company’s co-owner’s is a soccer nut. That’s me. Die hard fan (and member) of soccer’s finest Eintracht Braunschweig, supporting soccer dad of nine-year-old daughter playing the Philipp-Lahm-position at Berlin club Türkiyemspor’s E-girl-team.

Confession #2: I like to mingle with the ultras in the stadium. Ultras - for those few readers unaware - are committed fans rejecting soccer’s general move into commercialism and transforming fans into customers. Ultras can be easily spotted in each stadium forming a tightly knitted mass of chanting, jumping, flag-waving bodies, mostly male&young. And that’s 90 min. plus half-time-break plus before and after the game (especially ‘after’ as we’re often the last ones being allowed to leave the cage designated for us and monitored by uniformed authority). (more…)

Lutz Dammbeck at the Sprengel Museum

Re_Re-Education

is the title of the exhibition at the Sprengel Museum in Hanover, Germany. Dammbeck’s films will also be screened during this exhibition. Among them is THE NET, available here on realeyz.tv.

Lutz Dammbeck (born 1948) came to film from the fine arts and discovered animation as a means of expression and source of experimentation in the early 1970’s. In 1982 he began making the ‘Herakles Konzept’ in which he incorporates diverse media such as pictures, text passages, body language and dance in a permanently evolving art work. He continues to work on the ‘Herakles Konzept’ today. (more…)

A Talk With Micha X. Peled - Director of CHINA BLUE and STORE WARS

A talk with Micha X. Peled, the director of the realeyz.tv films CHINA BLUE. And Store Wars: When Wal-Mart Comes to Town .

Why did you want to make a film about sweatshops in China?

I made this film because I believe that globalization is the most important issue facing all of us right now. My rage is what helps me get out of bed in the mornings. Multinational corporations who care about profit and profit alone gain ever more control over our lives. Because they also control the media, that make sure that in-depth analyses of the way they work get seen. For me, the only appropriate response is to make films that show what they don’t want us to see. (more…)