WIND FROM THE NORTH
When director Henri Seng started the Nordic Documentary Film Festival Beijing two years ago, he had no specific agenda-only to bring a collection of good documentaries to Beijing. Now going on its third year, the festival continues the influx of quality film making. Taking place this year at the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art（UCCA）in 798, the festival will feature a collection of ten documentaries made by directors and products from the Nordic region.
The filmmakers collectively hail from a handful of countries with a total population not much larger than Beijing’s, but when it comes to content, this year’s films target a smorgasbord of locations around the globe, and present a line-up of some of the most compelling cinema classifiable under this year’s theme of “International News Stories.” The selection for this year’s festival began at Sweden’s Tempo Documentary Film Festival, where Seng served as a member of the festival’s jury. “We tried to stay away from the made-for-TV style of documentary, with lots of narration and interviews,”says Anouchka van Driel, who runs Nordox with Seng.
Among the selection is the hauntingly poetic Paradise: Three Journeys in the World, a film separated into three stories telling of African emigration to Europe, each of which rip apart the fantasy of seeking out the better life abroad. The film juxtapose the two continents and creates a striking contrast between the different landscapes and cultures, vividly portraying the hardships borne by Africans who look towards Europe for a way out of poverty. One story follows the lives of illegal immigrants who sleep on the streets while working at a farm in Spain picking tomatoes to sell on European markets, while another documents the life of a man who tried to swim to Spain from Morocco, is captured, driven hours into the middle of the desert and abandoned.
The focus of these films is certainly on international news-for example, USA vs Al-Arian calls attention to the unjust detainment of terrorist suspects in the United States, and Belarussian Waltz tells of a single Belarus activist’s lone protests against the government. But Seng’s personal top pick of the festival, Sanctuary, is cut from a different cloth：Hardcore punk musician David Sandström goes home to Sweden after the dramatic breakup of Refused, his legendary straight-edge-hard-core punk band. In the film，Sandström’s grandmother gives him the books of Sara Lidman and the photographs of Sune Jonsson, which become an integral element of the film. Words and photos are weaved together with Sandström’s music to present an Introspective journey home from an unusual angle — one that begins in the hardcore underground punk clubs of the United States and ends in a quiet Swedish countryside, where Sandström grew up. “It has a very new style of editing” Seng remarks.
The selection will also include some lighthearted films; To China on a Shoestring, for instance, is about two Norwegian backpackers who hitchhike to China across Europe, Turkey, Iran and Pakistan，and how they are able to do it without carrying any money. The film bridges the 10,000km wide geographical gap by showing the strangers they befriend along the way-itself exactly the cultural gap the festival is trying to cross.
The global scope of these film is, each in its own way, very local and human. Though they may involve people and places on the other side of the planet, “stories like these can happen anywhere in the world” van Driel states. “That’s the good thing about film art,” says Seng, “you can tell a story in so many different ways.”
Mary X.Dennis “The Beijinger” October 2008
