Perhaps only some fake docs were missing from the programme, although I’m not sure whether the Dutch opt for this genre too much – they believe that reality is already stunning, especially if the films are made shed light at special segments of life, our subconscious, and desires. Some of the pieces screened were like fiction, but no doubt about the genre set in on your mind. To find particular segments of the real world is not a sin – what is more, it provides more excitement in everyday life.
Who would believe that a kidney patient dwarf, having an incurable disease that means constant pain and hospital care, instead of becoming hopelessly desperate, establishes the most popular Dutch TV channel and becomes a star for his short life. That may sound like a fairy-tale, but you can actually check every detail of Bikkel, Leo de Boer’s adventure documentary about Bart de Graaf. Let’s accept that love of life is an organic part of human nature, as are wit and humour natural attributes to pain (and that even a tiny little man can become a hero or an ideal). In his film entitled Calling E.T., Prosper de Roos made interviews on a scale starting in Holland and ending in Russia, with people who still believe in fairy-tales and perhaps in good old Däniken, or American films, and they thus are expecting the signs of alien civilisations. In the meantime, you are provided with intriguing information about the mental state of our civilisation, too. There are many wonders, and none is more crazy than man. An unknown, seemingly distant and cultural segment of the Serbian war (the conflict that for a while meant only some fiction or a media story to Europe, is presented in Jack, the Balkans, and I, Sergey Kreso’s film, through the life of Congolese-Belgian musician Jack Roskam. He is like someone who, having dropped out of a UFO on Serbian soil, starts to play rock music, and that lasts until his friends become nationalistic rockers on the Serbian side, and he holds the Kalashnikov on the Croatian one. Now he is back to see the past. The story is more that human.
Jos de Putter ‘s Beyond the Game is set in another galaxy, in the world of cyber kids who are masters in Warcraft, the online game. The story of the current and the former (Chinese and Dutch) champions turns War of the Worlds into a small-scale, traditional war tale.
A small country offers great documentary films. The situation is similar in Hungary, perhaps we are more reserved when approaching mood, reach, and the natural sense of wondering.