Press Release #2 / 2008
Press screening and press conference
Friday May 30, 12.30 until 17.00, Filmmuseum Vondelpark 3, Amsterdam
All press and other media are welcome to attend the press screening of two films that have a prominent place in the Doku.Arts programme.
The first film, Edgard Varèse: A Visionary in Sound, by Frank Scheffer, will officially open Doku.Arts on June 4 at 20.00. Scheffer’s latest film on the famous composer whose influence can even be noticed in popular DJ’s uses archive footage from the collection of the Filmmuseum.
At 15.15, after the screening of the film Maurice Pialat - l’Amour Existe, festival director Andreas Lewin, Sandra den Hamer, director of the Filmmuseum, and Hans Maarten van den Brink, director of the Dutch Cultural Broadcasting Fund, will speak about Doku.Arts. This year’s programme will feature creative documentaries on art and artists, in the form of artists’ portraits, filmic essays, inventive compilations and tributes. New in this year’s line-up are films from the Filmmuseum archive, and new productions that are ‘IN PROGRESS’.
The programme on Friday May 30 reads as follows:
12.30-13.30: Edgard Varèse: A Visionary in Sound
(Frank Scheffer, The Netherlands, 2008, 60', English spoken, Dutch subtitles)
Described by Henry Miller as "the stratospheric colossus of sound", the French composer Edgard Varèse (1883-1965) emancipated percussion and sound in music. His rhythmic adventures inspired composers like John Cage, Elliot Carter and Pierre Boulez. Even today, 40 years after his death, he is immensely popular in the DJ scene. Scheffer masterfully integrates music and images to create a poetic journey through Varèse compositions and catches the pulse of this beautiful, muscular music.
13.30-13.45: short break
13.45 - 15.15: Maurice Pialat - Love Exists
(Jean-Pierre Devillers, Anne-Marie Faux, France, 2007, 90', French spoken, English subtitles)
“La Nouvelle Vague missed everything, because they didn’t show real life. Those were hard times! What they showed was false.” A veteran outsider in French Cinema, Maurice Pialat looks back on his difficult development within the French film industry. In film history, he is one of the few filmmakers (like John Cassavetes), who managed to make films and work with actors as close as one can get to the truth of life in the moment: intense, contradicting and disturbing. While receiving the “Palm d’Or” at the Cannes Film Festival, Maurice Pialat (1925-2003) responded to the shouts of a protesting crowd with: “I don’t like you as well”. This film sketches a ‘self-portrait’ of this great director using his own words. Pialat never forgot how it was to be a child, remaining uncompromising, vulnerable, even ruthless; knowing that love exists.
15.15: Press conference
With festival director Andreas Lewin, Sandra den Hamer, director of the Filmmuseum, and Hans Maarten van den Brink, director of the Dutch Cultural Broadcasting Fund.
16.15: drinks