NOMINATIONS 2011
European Film Academy Documentary – Prix ARTE
A panel of EFA Members and documentary experts select three nominees for the Prix ARTE for European Documentary. The films have either screened at an EFA-approved festival or have been released theatrically in at least one European country after July 1, 2010
PINA (Germany) Dir Wim Wenders Pina Bausch was a celebrated dancer and chore- ographer who, over the course of her career, was garlanded with accolades such as a Laurence Olivier award and the Kyoto prize. She died sud- denly in 2009 while in the middle of final prepa- rations with her old friend Wim Wenders for a dance film observing her at work. Wenders was forced to rethink the film, and the result is Pina. The feature-length dance film was shot in 3D
with Bausch’s famous dance company, the Wup- pertal Dance Theatre. Wenders made use of extensive archive material. It was produced by Wenders and Gian-Piero Ringel. Pina includes excerpts from four of Bausch’s
dances, which Bausch and Wenders had already chosen together: Café Müller, which was first performed in 1978, The Rite Of Spring from 1975, Full Moon from 2006 and Kontakthof from 1978. The film sees them performed on stage at the
Wuppertal theatre, as well as outside in the town of Wuppertal, at traffic intersections and swim- ming pools, in parks and disused factories and on escalators. “The two-dimensional cinema screen is just not capable of capturing Pina Bausch’s work, either emotionally or aesthetically,” said Wenders during the shoot. Billed as the first 3D arthouse film, Pina
debuted in competition at the Berlinale this year and has gone on to become one of the most suc- cessful arthouse releases of the year at the Euro- pean box office. It won the best documentary prize at the German Film Awards this year.
POSITION AMONG THE STARS (Stand Van De Sterren) (The Netherlands) Dir Leonard Retel Helmrich Position Among The Stars is the third film in Helmrich’s trilogy of films on Indonesia, follow- ing The Eye Of The Day and Shape Of The Moon. (The latter won the grand jury prize for best doc- umentary at the Sundance Film Festival in 2005.) They all follow the Shamsuddin family, providing an absorbing, affecting and amusing glimpse into the life of a modest but striving family in modern-day Indonesia over the past decade and a half. Position Among The Stars follows grandmother
Rumidjah, a Christian, as she moves from her rural village home to live in the Jakarta slums with her son Bakti, his Muslim wife Sri, and their niece Tari, who it is hoped Rumidjah will help persuade to go to university. The film made its world premiere at the Inter-
national Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA) in November 2010. It won the festival’s VPRO IDFA award for best feature-length docu- mentary and the Dioraphte IDFA award for best Dutch documentary. Helmrich, who is of Indonesian heritage, shot
Position Among The Stars in the style of single- shot cinema, based on film theories of the 1950s French film critic André Bazin. He chose to eschew a voiceover or any direct-to-camera interviews. It is produced by Hetty Naaijkens- Retel Helmrich for Scarabeefilms, and was released in its home territory by Cinema Delica- tessen in March.
¡VIVAN LAS ANTIPODAS! (Germany-The Netherlands- Argentina-Chile) Dir Victor Kossakovsky This visually stunning and exuberant film observes the differences and parallels between poles or antipodes — four pairs of locations on opposite sides of the globe to each other. Camera acrobatics add to the visual flair. Entre Rios, Argentina, is compared with down-
town Shanghai, as Kossakovsky simply shows, without voiceover, the contrast between the bus- tling city and two bantering Argentinian toll col- lectors on a seldom-used ferry. Two other antipodes, Lake Baikal in Russia and Patagonia in Chile are visually similar to a degree, and yet anthropologically very different; a Chilean shep- herd deals with a varied flock that includes cats and dogs, while on the other side of the world a Russian woman visits her daughter. The Kilauea volcano region in Hawaii is compared with the village of Kubu in Botswana to great effect, for example playing on the similarities between vol- canic rock and elephant hide. The final pair of poles is a rocky spot in Miraflores, Spain, and the beach at Castlepoint, New Zealand, where a beached whale meets an unfortunate end. St Petersburg-born Kossakovsky, who studied
scriptwriting and directing at the Moscow Film School, specialises in documentaries and has won many awards over his career. His 2003 documen- tary Hush! was nominated at the European Film Awards. ¡Vivan Las Antipodas! was produced by Heino Deckert for Germany’s
ma.ja.de, with co- producers including Lemming Film, Gema Films and Producciones Aplaplac.
42 n European Film Awards 2011
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