The jury nominated three documentaries for the second Dirk Vandersypen Award. In random order these are:
Rerum Novarum from Sebastian Schindel (Argentina)
The Rerum Novarum music band is composed of former workers of the Flandria cotton plant. Despite the shut down of the factory, the band continues playing nowadays. The old musicians gather to enjoy their friendship in the celebration of the 63th anniversary of the band, while they fight against the ghosts of the economical crisis and the social desintegration.
www.rerumnovarum.com.ar
The jury on 'Rerum Novarum'
Rerum Novarum. A film by Sebastian Schindel, Nicolas Batlle and Fernando Molnar. Not exactly brilliantly told, but the story is so beautiful, the personages so charming, the warmth and the camaraderie so sincere and warm. We are in Argentina, in Lujān, not far from the capital Buenos Aires. There in 1937 the Fleming Jules Steverlinck started the cotton plantation Flandria. Jules very quickly earned esteem of his employees, who called him Don Julio. He built a sanatorium, a swimming pool and even a few schools. Don Julio paid his staff double the average wage in those days. Flandria blossomed and acquired widespread fame. In the 1960s even King Boudewijn of Belgium and later the Pope visited Steverlynck. But the film focuses on Rerum Novarum, the name of the fanfare that Steverlynck founded. According to Catholic tradition, workers were obliged to spend their spare time preferably in meaningful activities. Rerum Novarum is a beautiful but ultimately sad story. The film is bathed in a rather surrealist atmosphere. The musicians in those days, plucky eighty-year-olds by now, want to maintain the memory of a great past. They do that against their better judgement and while everything around them is dilapidated, falling apart. But music softens morality; making music is a salve against the pain of the present. The film caused a furore in Argentina because it was deemed symptomatic of that country’s trauma. Rerum Novarum showed in Buenos Aires in 2001 for four months. In 2003 it is back on the programme there once again.
Coca Mama from Jan Thielen (Argentina)
A documentary about the consequences of the US War On Drugs in South America. Coca has been grown by Indian peasants for centuries on the lower slopes of the Andes. Lawyers, addicts, farmers and anti-narcotics policemen talk about the drug and what it means in their lives.
The jury on 'Coca Mama'
Coca Mama is Jan Thielen’s clear and well-told story of the coca farmers in Latin America. In order to prevent farmers cultivating coca, under the guise of the War On Drugs, round-ups against them are organised. Their harvest is burned. But only coca brings in enough for them to survive. They are encouraged to start other crops, but those who do so are truly down and out in no time at all. Through the mosaic of the film we are introduced to a few families and their daily battle against poverty. A perverse network grows rampant around them. The army joins in, and local and international politics and commerce turn the life of these people into a living hell. Coca Mama leaves you with a feeling of indignation, over the supposed and in Coca Mama rock-hard display of hypocrisy behind the American War on Drugs, indignation about the total lack of ethics among all the parties involved except the farmers. Coca Mama gives food for thought and contributes sensibly to the discussion on a different type of globalisation.
Labyrinth of Truth from Nitza Kakoseos (Sweden)
When the left-wing Marxist revolutionary Sandinist guerrilla overthrew Somoza's hard core right-wing dictatorship in 1979, Sofia Montenegro and her family were forced to flee the country to the US. Her father was arrested and eventually executed. Still today, Sofia regards her father as a hero and she decided to go back to Nicaragua twenty years later to discover what really happened.
www.electramedia.net/kill/index.html
The jury on 'Labyrinth of Truth'
Labyrinth of Truth is a documentary by the Swede Nitza Kakoseos. “The Labyrinth of Truth” is about the courageous quest of Sofia Montenegro to establish the circumstances around the murder of her father Enrico, some 20 years ago. Enrico Montenegro was a high-ranking soldier in Nicaragua during Somosa’s extreme-right dictatorial regime. His favourite sister, Sofia’s aunt, was a leading activist with the Marxist Sandinist guerrilla movement. This contrast tore the Montenegro family apart. Labyrinth of Truth strikes one, here and there, perhaps as somewhat too American, but apart from that it is a brilliant film about fundamental political choices and the consequences of these choices, about a daughter’s great love, despite everything, for her father, of a sister for her brother. Nitza Kakoseos shows very contradictory emotions in her story: the subdued disgust for a father who has made himself guilty of acts of cruelty and at the same time the love for the same father. Labyrinth of Truth is a film about two women, Sofia and her aunt and their two quests. They seek and they find: they find each other. Le cœur et la raison… the heart versus the reason of any political persuasion.
