Masterclass Bill Morrison: Consider the Source

On a hot summer day in a courtyard in Split, a game between a man and a boy reflects the contrast between life and decay that plays out around them. The banality of the act of killing and the naked female body represent levels of being that are paralleled by the use of space. Age, sexuality, and spatial elevation are combined and juxtaposed, inspiring a sense of estrangement from their structure. The play of light and shadow embodies and accepts the irrationality pointed out through the suggestive questions read in the background by the old woman.Detail:- “Kill it! Kill it! Kill it!”- “Put it away, put it away! Is it young?”- “It’s old, come on, kill it!”

An engaging appreciation of the work and personal life of British director and proponent of kitchen sink realism Ken Loach. This BBC documentary on the director’s life work and the ideological roots of his social dramas and stories of ordinary people in the English suburbs is interwoven with scenes from his films.

It’s difficult to imagine two more different places to live than Brasil’s Entre Rios and Shanghai in China. Despite this, they have something in common - they are antipodes - two places connected by a straight line through the centre of the earth. Using contrasting images from these geographically and culturally opposite countries, the filmmaker turns our views of the world upside-down. “You need your brain both before and after filming, but don’t use your brain during filming. Just film using your instinct and intuition.”Victor Kossakovsky

Croatian director Lordan Zafranović, a representative of the Yugoslavian Black Wave, graduated from FAMU, where he studied under Elmar Klos. He was living in Prague when he made his documentary The Decline of the Century: Testament L. Z. (1994). His latest work is the documentary cycle Tito – Last Witnesses of the Testament (2012). In 2013, he was a jury member for the Between the Seas section. Zafranović believes that the soul of film exists in each filmmaker’s inimitably original form. This form, made up of time, space and the various key film materials, establishes the basis that brings all of the film elements into harmony. He compares filmmaking with music. In his masterclass, Zafranović will focus on how film works are composed and the origination and acceptance of new film forms.

A sophisticated game of cat and mouse in which the constantly moving camera is the hunter and the young woman wandering the streets of Ljubljana to the sounds of jazz music is the prey. The film spent fifty years hidden under the bed of one of the filmmakers and was first screened at a meeting of Slovenian amateur filmmakers.„All my films have certain message and only important thing for me is and was to catch a spirit of time.“ K. Godina

After 16 years the Russian documentarian Victor Kossakovsky, who is undoubtedly one of the most outstanding contemporary filmmakers, will be returning to Jihlava as the leader of the Ex Oriente Film Workshop and as a jury member for the festival’s competitive Opus Bonum section. This director gained international renown thanks to his film The Belovs (1993), which has since achieved cult status. He has the justifiable reputation as a filmmaker who not only is able to capture mundane situations with subtle transcendental poetic visual and audio elements but also has an innate talent for composition, internal rhythm, and drama within individual scenes. In his open Masterclass, Kossakovsky will give the participants insight into the principles of his work and sources of inspiration, which, in addition to the magic of everyday life, he also finds in the visual arts, poetry and classical literature. The lecture will be preceded by a screening of his film ¡Vivan las Antipodas! (2011).

Helmut Berger, a star in the European acting world, gave brilliant performances in the films made by the Italian director Luchino Visconti. This documentary portrait takes a look at the life of this elderly eccentric man, who lives in a flat overflowing with trinkets from the past. The director used interviews to try and discover who Helmut is – and thanks to him, Helmut could act again.„This film is also about the impossibility of really getting to know somebody, the question of what methods you can use to move towards an individualʼs core. Iʼm not sure that interviews are the best method.“ A. Horvath

A European in a suit and tie comes to Africa, allegedly to open a match factory. In actuality, however, he is planning to illegally mine for gemstones. In even more actual actuality, he is journalist Mads Brügger, who is filming a documentary about the world of diplomacy, in which two approaches meet – “advanced” and “primitive” cultures, which have one thing in common: money. The film shows that the world of politics is not about the representation of national identity, but that it can be an ideal place for a rogue, represented by the strong euro.

Slovak filmmaker Martin Kollár graduated from the Academy of Performing Arts in Bratislava and focuses primarily on photography and cinematography. He has worked on, among others, the documentaries 66 Seasons, Velvet Terrorists, and the festival success Goat. He has exhibited his work in Paris, China, Thessaloniki, and other cities. At this director’s masterclass, he presents his feature-length directorial debut 5 October (2016), the protagonist of which is his own brother. Prior to undergoing a difficult, dangerous operation, they set off together on a several months’ long cycling tour.

In his master class organized by the Jihlava IDFF and the Institute of Documentary Film, renowned award-winning Polish cinematographer and director Wojciech Staroń will present his view of visuality and visual style in documentary film. How can the camera capture a topic, a setting and the film’s protagonists in such a way so that the image supports the story to the maximum possible extent? The master class will be preceded by a screening of two of Staroń’s films – The Siberian Lesson (1998) and The Argentinian Lesson (2011).The Siberian Lesson58 min, Poland, 1998The Argentinian Lesson59 min, Poland, 2011

This documentary comedy proves that even environmental activism can be carried out with insight and humor. A duo of seasoned agitators infiltrate conferences and, using hoaxes, fake press releases and various declarations, draw attention to themselves so that they can point out the callousness and arrogance of large corporations and government organizations.“All of these actions could’ve been YouTube videos and that’s the end of it, but we wanted to tell a more complex story about what it also means to be an activist over time.” (Andy Bichlbaum)

Icelandic filmmaker Fridrik Thór Fridrikssonis best known for his fiction film Children of Nature (1991), which earned him an Oscar nomination. In the 1980s, he founded his home country’s most important production company, The Icelandic Film Corporation, which closely collaborates with Denmark’s Zentropa. At his directing master class, he will present his latest documentary film Horizon – a portrait of Icelandic landscape painter Georg Guðni, in which Fridriksson explores the relationship between the artist, his work, reality, and the viewer.