Film Is What Stays

The documentary year 2014 has entered its second half and everybody is expectant about the films to be discovered by the fall festival season. The richer the first half of the year in terms of new film titles, the more it has struck the documentary history, which has paid its last respects to several respected and talented filmmakers.

The documentary year 2014 has entered its second half and everybody is expectant about the films to be discovered by the fall festival season. The richer the first half of the year in terms of new film titles, the more it has struck the documentary history, which has paid its last respects to several respected and talented filmmakers.

“Rewrite history!” Such call is not heard very often. However, in case of the global documentary scene, it has hovered above the first half of 2014 way too much. In April, the world’s festival stages, cinema auditoriums and personal recollections have turned to two unique and original filmmakers who have managed to offer a new dimension of film and the society they have depicted to global audiences; Peter Liechti and Michael Glawogger. Remember their works via DAFilms.com.

A tireless search for new forms of storytelling composed as brilliant crystals reflecting the beauty of film images, music rhythms and literary texts; that is how Swiss filmmaker and visual artist Peter Liechti conceived his art career. His works have earned him international awards, with one of his latest films The Sound of Insects: Report of a Mummy standing out the most. In 2009, it has won Prix Arte, Europe’s key documentary award. The selection of 11 films by the filmmaker, including his early renowned titles Kick the Habit, Martha’s Garden as well as the more recent Namibia Crossings, can all be found in the recently presented online retrospective.

He could switch between film genres as quickly and naturally as he physically travelled towards film images literally across the world. Michael Glawogger, an Austrian filmmaker whose nomadic documentary life has brought him both to the most colourful and the darkest places in today’s world, has offered the viewers a most recent insight into modern global society. In his iconic film Megacities, made in the form of a mosaic of 12 chapters telling about the life of 4 world metropolises (Bombay, Mexico City, Moscow and New York City), he has opened up a space for the extraordinary stories of ordinary people, who are sharing a dream of a better life in the middle of the city tumult. This film, too, as well as the global essay Working Man’s Death with a similar atmosphere, is part of the DAFilms catalogue. You can be drawn into the filmmaking process and the filmmaker’s original world view in his master class from 2012.

In the second half of the year, the documentary history is being rewritten by the departures of other key filmmakers as well. These weeks, the memories of viewers, film professionals and the general cultural public go to socially engaged and visionary filmmaker Harun Farocki and founder of now classic genre cinéma vérité Robert Drew. Let us hope that the awaited fall festival season will bring new talents and names to go down in the tirelessly working history in a similarly unforgettable way.

DAFilms.com is powered by Doc Alliance, a creative partnership of 7 key European documentary film festivals. Our aim is to advance the documentary genre, support its diversity and promote quality creative documentary films.

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