The flowering of European documentaries is in clear evidence at this year’s AFI-Discovery Channel Silverdocs Documentary Festival. With what have been strong local funding support and the financial involvement of state-run television, documentarians have been able to take advantage of a wealth of resources to produce works that are not only intriguing but artistically inventive. Of course, the completed films on view here this week were committed to before the current pressure on the European Community. Austerity measures across the continent are slashing cultural budgets and film funding is among its biggest casualties. How European filmmakers will cope is still an open question but for the moment, at least, we have a bumper crop of films to relish and enjoy.
Silverdocs offers a competition for strictly non-American films, and many of the strongest Euro docs are to be seen in the Sterling World Features section. A number of the films examine the tension and resilience of family bonds, as well as relationships that endure beyond simple blood ties. Acclaimed Polish director and cameraman Wojciech Staron captures the experiences of his family during a one year stay in Argentina in the nuanced film ARGENTINIAN LESSON. Family connections are also explored in PRIVATE UNIVERSE, a richly detailed Czech film by Helena Trestikova that explores the intimate evolution of a family over four decades of change. While they are not related by blood, octogenarian best friends Bella and Regina share a lifetime of intimacy, a passion for cooking and a shared memory of surviving the Holocaust in the spirited OMA AND BELLA by German director Alexa Karolinski. Also creating a family out of friendship are the mentally challenged punk rockers who revel in their roles as social outcasts in the Finnish film THE PUNK SYNDROME by the directorial team of Jukka Karkkainen and JP Passi. Attempting to pierce the closed society of evangelical Christians in the United States, the Swiss/German/French co-production VIRGIN TALES by director Mirjam Von Arx looks at the phenomenon of Purity Balls, a ritual in which young girls pledge their pre-marital virginity. Bringing light to injustice or changing social patterns are among the themes of the other Euro docs in the section. In SPECIAL FLIGHT, Swiss director Fernand Melgar explores the legal limbo of illegal immigrants in his country who are entrapped in a system of detention, even after living there for more than a decade. Belgian director Jerome Le Maire focuses on the societal upheaval in a small mountain village in Morocco where new technology and the building of a major dam project harbor unwelcome changes in TEA OR ELECTRICITY. In the unusually broad-based eco-documentary VIVAN LAS ANTIPODAS, acclaimed Russian director Victor Kossakovsky reveals the kinetic and visual splendor of some of the most remote corners of the planet, all of which are undergoing rapid changes due to overpopulation and climate change.