TV festival Northern Character is opened
On November 16th in Murmansk a festive opening of the third International festival of documentary films and television programs took place. More than seventy journalists, documentary professionals and producers from five countries came to Murmansk. Members of International jury headed by Bernt Viklund, a prominent Swedish journalist and producer, has watched 75 documentary and story films, television programmes and short reports.
Pictures: Sari Pöyhönen
Competition between maestros and beginners
The festival will be held till 19 November. The programme includes watching films by all the participants and presentating the most part of the festival works to the viewers from Murmansk and Monchegorsk.
By estimates, there will be a tough competition for the prize in the nominations “Documentary film” and “Programme about culture”. Here are presented such works of famous documentary professionals like Gunilla Bresky (Sweden), Knut Erik Jensen (Norway), Aleksey Pogrebnoy (Russia) and also the works of young producers and film-makers from four countries of Barents region, Canada, Germany and the Netherlands.
Arctic in objective
On the third day of the festival there will be a traditional Media-forum. It will be opened with the film by the Norwegian documentary professional and jury member Ola Flym “Arctic: border conflicts”. The topic of the discussion in which there will be involved the representative of different countries is “Arctic in objectives: patriotic and professional duty”.
Opportunity to get to know something new
As a part of the festival there will be several master-classes. With the assistance of Northern countries journalism center Barents Press hold a master-class of the Danish representative of the International association for documentary professionals (EDN) Mikael Opstrup (Denmark): “Documentary film industry for the international market”. Mikael will also present the Danish documentary film “Armadillo”, which has won this year a prize “The week of criticism” in Cannes. Also there will be master-classes on the topic “How could we shoot a film about those, who are not with us…”, director Gunilla Bresky (Sweden) and “The role of music in films”, producer Pal Jackman (Norway).
Winners will be announced on Thursday
On the final day of the festival work, November 18th, there will be the winners’ award ceremony. BPI will tell about it later.
Elena Larionova
Translated by Irina Bykova
