The Market of  the International Documentary Film Festival of Guía de Isora, MiradasDoc Market, is calling audiovisual producers and investors  to meet at the first activity of Audioinvest Canarias: Canarias Inversión Audiovisual (Canaries Audiovisual Investment), an initiative of MiradasDoc and Suárez de la Dehesa Abogados which has the support of the Island Authority of Tenerife, of the Canary Islands Government and of CajaCanarias, created with the aim of boosting the investment in cinema in the Islands by means of the application of the fiscal Il Trovatore and economic advantages which govern the Canarian economic system. 

The meeting will be held at the Atlantic Centre for Modern Art (CAAM) in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria on 13th October while the Santa Cruz de Tenerife event is the following day at the Tenerife Espacio de las Artes (TEA). These meetings are the start of a cycle of talks and workshops on funding in the audiovisual sector which will culminate with the holding of an investors’ forum as part of the MiradasDoc Market on 5th November. Throughout the process, the businesspeople will get to know the particular advantages of the Canary Islands in the sphere of audiovisual investment and the audiovisual producers on the Islands, together with the details of the strategies used to present their projects to possible investors.   

The audiovisual sector in the Canaries has such fiscal incentives as a tax rate as low as 4% for Corporation Tax and reductions in the taxable base of up to 90% of profits. To these economic and fiscal advantages must be added highly-qualified human resources,  technological skills, education and surroundings which make the audiovisual a strategic sector of the economy of the Islands and an attractive alternative to reorient investment in the current economic situation.  

The aim of the event is a first contact with investors and producers, who will be told of the advantages for the two sectors to interact in such a territory as the Canary Islands, with a Fiscal and Economic Regime which has two advantages – the Canary Islands Special Zone (ZEC) and the Reserve for Investments in the Canary Islands (RIC) – which offer highly advantageous conditions for the audiovisual business. 

Subsequently, as part of the specific programming of MiradasDoc, there will be a second phase of the project, on 3rd and 4th November, which will consist of the holding of a workshop for audiovisual producers whose projects have been selected to participate in the forum. Those production companies that wish to participate with their projects in this phase can register up to 21st October. 

The selection of projects will be carried out by an expert committee selected by  Suárez de la Dehesa Abogados. On 5th November, finally, there will be a forum of selected producers and investors with the aim of initiating processes of project development. 

The Audioinvest programme also enjoys the backing of Canarias Cultura en Red, Tenerife Film Commission and the Science and Technology Park of Tenerife and the collaboration of Proexca and of the Gran Canaria Economic Promotion Agency.

A programme of the event is attached: Tenerife and Gran Canaria.

Gloria María Cossío and Luis Ángel Ramírez are the teachers responsible for imparting the workshops on Research in Documentary Cinema and on Documentary Production, subjects which are central to the training area of MiradasDoc 2010, the fifth edition of the International Documentary Film Festival which will be held between 29th October and 6th November in Guía de Isora.

Both workshops will be held between Monday 1st and Friday 5th November, in the mornings, at the headquarters of MiradasDoc in Guía de Isora and are aimed at students and professionals in the audiovisual sector. You can register from 5th October onwards on the festival website. There are twenty places available for each workshop and you can see the registration fee on the festival website from 5th October. A total of twenty hours’ instruction will be given. 

The workshop on Research in Documentary Cinema, which will be given by the Cuban  researcher, analyst and directorial assistant, Gloria María Cossío, starts with a historical introduction on the beginnings of cinema and the analysis of the film,   Nanook of the north (1922), by Robert Flaherty, which will serve to define the type of documentary which is the object of study, in which established stories are not told, “but rather the contradictions and conflicts of reality are enquired into”, as the teacher explains.   

The exhaustive examination of the experiences obtained in the research, the search for characters and the shooting will be based on three films which have in common the  sociological approach of Havana from very different aesthetic criteria via the projections of Si me comprendieras (1997) directed by Rolando Díaz, Suite Habana (2003) by Fernando Pérez, and the series recorded for the digital channel of Arte France, Havana-Miami  (2010) by Ismael Perdomo. The workshop concludes with a debate on the proposals of the participants about a hypothetical documentary to be made in their cities of origin.  

The programme of the production workshop under Luis A. Ramírez includes the following subjects:  the research and story summary for shooting; the director’s vision, the technical team and its creative integration in the documentary, the production design (general production plan, shooting plan, post-production plan), the sources of funding, the management of documentary production (permits, access to archive images, infrastructures, Back-up material, shooting and archive formats), filming, viewing material, editing image and sound, colouring and mastering and, finally, the marketing and distribution plan (festivals, institutions and windows of distribution).

Careers

The teacher of the Research in Documentary Cinema workshop, the Cuban, Gloria María Cossío, has a career stretching back over thirty years carrying out her creative work in the cinema and with great prestige in the field of Latin American cinema.   She has worked as a researcher, analyst and assistant director. She gained her degree from the University of Havana in the speciality of Latin American literature, she has also written reviews on films and has formed part of the directorial team on over fifty documentaries, foremost among which are  the full-length films, Deportivamente, by Manuel Herrera, as long ago as 1976, and more recently in Si Me Comprendieras (1999), by Rolando Díaz, selected by a number of International Festivals such as the Berlin Film Festival, the International festival in Toronto and the IDFA in Amsterdam, among others. The documentary was also honoured with an honorary Special Mention at the Havana Festival. What is more, she participated on Suite Habana (2002), by Fernando Pérez, which, among other prizes, won the Signis, at the International Donostia-San Sebastián Film Festival and the First Coral Prize at the International Festival of New Latin American Cinema, both in 2003.    

In fiction, she participated as an assistant director on Operación Fangio (2000), directed by the Argentinean, Alberto Lecchi, Lista de Espera (2003), by  Juan Carlos Tabío, and Martí: el ojo del canario (2009), by Fernando Pérez, with the added functions of historical research and casting.

Born in Bilbao, Luis Ángel Ramírez has different qualifications and courses in the fields of audiovisual communication, information and advertising.  He has wide experience working on different aspects of the cinema and television industries – as a producer,  director, scriptwriter and editor among other things, as well as his teaching experience.  He has produced abundant works of cinema including both fictional work and documentaries, fundamentally in co-production with Latin America and Europe.

The most important of his productions are El Barrio de Las Islas (2006),  the audience prize at Documenta Madrid, Unidad 25, (2007), directed by Alejo Hoijman and prize-winner as best documentary among others at the  Buenos Aires Film Festival (Bafici) and at the Guadalajara Film Festival or El último guión. Buñuel en la memoria (2008).

He has been a project evaluator at CORFO and FONDART in Chile and he was selected by the Spanish Film Institute to participate as the Spanish producer on Producers on the Move, at Cannes 2007; he teaches the MA in Production Design in Madrid, as well as seminars and a range of workshops at Nantes, Buenos Aires and Nairobi. He is co-author of the research essay Nada es lo que parece. Una aproximación al falso documental, published by the Documenta Madrid festival in 2005.

The fifth edition of the International Documentary Film Festival, MiradasDoc, which is being held between 29th October and 6th November in Guía de Isora on Tenerife (Canary Islands), will serve to bring investors and audiovisual producers closer together and to make better known to each of them the tax and economic advantages of investing in films in the Islands through the Audioinvest Canarias: Audiovisual Investment Canaries Programme, an initiative of MiradasDoc and Suárez de la Dehesa Abogados which has the support of the Island Government, the Cabildo Insular de Tenerife.

The Audioinvest Canarias Programme, which will take place within the framework of MiradasDoc, aims to promote and develop contact between businesspeople – to whom the specific features of the Canary Islands in the sphere of audiovisual investment will be explained – and producers from the Islands – to whom strategies and techniques for presenting their projects to possible investors will be set out-. 

The mayor of Guía de Isora, Pedro Martín, the Economics and Competitiveness Councillor of the Cabildo Insular de Tenerife, Carlos Alonso, and the representative of Suárez de la Dehesa Abogados, Isabel González de Vallejo, presented the programme, which was divided into three phases and which had as its first event the First Technical Conference on Investment Opportunities in the Canarian Audiovisual Sector. 

The conference, which will be held on 13th October in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria and the following day at Tenerife Espacio de las Artes (TEA) in Santa Cruz de Tenerife, has as its objective a first contact between investors and producers, to whom the advantages will be explained of both sectors interacting in a territory such as the Canary Islands, whose Fiscal and Economic Regime has two tools – the Canary Islands Special Zone (ZEC) and the Reserve for Canarian Investments (RIC)- which offer highly advantageous conditions for the audiovisual business.

Subsequently, within the specific programming of MiradasDoc, the second phase of the project will take place, on 3rd and 4th November, which consists of a workshop for the audiovisual producers whose projects have been selected to participate at the forum. According to the lawyer, Gonzalez de Vallejo, over these two days, the strategies and procedures to be followed by the producers to present their projects to possible investors will be explained in detail.

The selection of projects will be carried out by a committee  external to the festival made up of specialists in the audiovisual field in our country. On 5th November, finally, there will be a forum between selected producers and investors with the aim of initiating processes of project development.

Pedro Martín indicated, at the presentation of this initiative, that with Audioinvest Canarias it is intended that the festival should serve not only as an international forum for documentary cinema but also as a “space to do business”, as the market in this sphere is indispensable for its continuation. In this regard, he said that the Canary Islands should become a “platform for the audiovisual, a sector which generates wealth without occupying any space, with initiative, will and imagination”.

Martín reminded us that MiradasDoc has over the last four years managed to become a “forum of civilisations” where productions from such different sources as Israel and Iran are welcome, which has attracted numerous television producers from different countries, who find at the festival in Guía de Isora a first-class point of reference for purchasing top-quality documentaries. 

Fiscal advantages
For her part, González de Vallejo underlined the important advantages of the Canary Islands, with “a wide range of tax benefits” in the field of audiovisual production. However, not so many projects come to fruition as would be desirable due to the ignorance of many investors about the advantages. “The investor is accustomed to building”, she said, “but nowadays bricks and mortar are not such a good idea and audiovisuals are a good opportunity”. 

The specific Audioinvest Canarias programme will be available in the next few days at the MiradasDoc (miradasdoc.com) and Suárez de la Dehesa Abogados (sdanet.com) websites.

The fifth edition of MiradasDoc, which is being held in the south of Tenerife between 29th October and 6th November, is paying homage to the Senegalese director, Samba Sarr, a film-maker of great importance and a collaborator with the festival, who died in May at the age of 41.

The audience of the International Documentary Film Festival of Guía de Isora will be able to attend the premiere of his last film, Or vert de Saloum, recorded in 2009 and edited just before his death. Sarr takes a look at the delta of the River Saloum, in Senegal, and shows the effort of the inhabitants of their communities to overcome their harsh living conditions. Together with the projection, on 4th November, the audience will have the opportunity to attend a talk and discussion which will include Laura Remei, the partner of the film-maker and an expert on his career.

El Hadji Samba Sarr was one of the best-known African directors, who was acknowledged for his type of direct documentary cinema.  He took part in two editions of MiradasDoc and in that brief space of time, he conquered the affections of the audiences and all the organisers. His foremost works include Semillas que el mar arrastra (Graines que la mer emporte, 2008) based on an idea by David Baute, for the Enciende África forum of CajaCanarias. It is a “unique documentary, disturbing, full of humanity and realism”, according to the journalist, Juan Manuel Pardellas.

This documentary, in which Sarr tells the experience of the young people who decide to make the dangerous sea crossing to the Canary Islands, where they are held in young persons’ centres until they reach the age of eighteen, was precisely what brought him to appear at the most important international festivals.  “Sarr was surprised and moved by the experience, and his documentary is a slice of our most recent history, without plaintive shots, just pure and brutal reality, but with great sensitivity and comprehension”, states Pardellas.

His films generally deal with social matters, which enables him to reflect the problems of Africa, with his own balanced and hopeful approach. He shows us his special vision of life at the cinema: “I try to share my emotions, but above all to show the daily life of the people around me. What interests me in the cinema is humanity”, he explained on one occasion.  

Born on 18th September in Dakar, Sarr was attracted by the cinema in childhood. Self-taught, he learned his film-making in the workshops of Senegal and Burkina Faso. He perfected his techniques at the media centre in Dakar, at the Cinema School in Madrid (Spain) and Dragon Films (Belgium). He continued his learning at the Studio in Austria, at the Louis Lumière Film School (France), to concentrate on drama workshops for children in Senegal and Brazil. 

El Hadji Sarr Samba alternated between fiction and documentaries, making a total of ten films. He was a member of the first cultural caravan on co-development in Dakar, Barcelona, Madrid, Seville and Strasbourg.

Four films from the BBC are the centrepiece of the “The documentary on television” screening at the fifth edition of the International Documentary Film Festival, MiradasDoc, which will be held from 29th October to 6th November in Guía de Isora in the south of Tenerife (Canary Islands). The exhibition brings together a wide range of subjects with the high-quality treatment which characterises British television: nature, science fiction, medicine, music and politics are the subjects which will be dealt with through the perspective of such directors as David Attenborough and Gareth Edwards and such producers as Mick Jagger and Keith Richards.

The exhibition was created in 2008, to open up at MiradasDoc a space devoted to the documentaries which are made for television. The first edition of the screening showed the programme, Callejeros, from the Cuatro television station and in 2009, TVE española celebrated the 25th Anniversary of the programme, Al filo de lo imposible, at the festival, with the presence of the female mountaineer, Edurne Pasabán.
 
The documents chosen to participate at this screening are Planet Earth: From Pole to Pole, End Day, Fight for Life. Birth and Rolling Stones, Exile on Main Street. 

Directed by David Attenborough, Planet Earth: From Pole to Pole analyses the Earth as a whole, emphasising the factors which have made it into the planet we know today. In order to make the documentary, four years’ shooting were necessary in search of the wildest and most exposed animals in the world, with over 200 different locations all over the planet.

End Day is a documentary directed by Gareth Edwards, which uses science fiction to put forward four scenarios of global destruction or the end of the world inspired by scientific knowledge. In a dramatic story, the documentary recreates four catastrophic scenarios: an extraordinary tsunami originating on the island of La Palma, which reaches the eastern coast of the United States, the impact of an asteroid, which threatens the population of Berlin, a global pandemic in which a lethal virus threatens human life in Great Britain and the danger caused by a growing black hole created by a human error.

 
From the impressive documentary series, Fight for Life, MiradasDoc will project the first episode: Birth. Fight for Life shows the capacity of the human body to overcome illnesses through true stories in which patients fight for survival. An amazing technical display shows this battle for life with computer-generated images and with shots from inside the human body, thanks to the latest advances in internal medicine. The first chapter shows the dangers threatening pregnancy and the delicate moment of birth. 

Rolling Stones, Exile on Main Street is a very recent production by Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, from 2009, in which the story is told of when the British band was obliged to leave the United Kingdom in 1969, for fiscal reasons. At that time, after having split up from their manager, Alan Klein, they hired a villa on the Côte d’Azur and concentrated on a new project: Exile On Main Street, which would become the band’s legendary album. The group were joined by an extraordinary retinue of beautiful women, musicians, sound technicians, drug traffickers and French chefs. The documentary is based on recent interviews with group members and people who experienced the recording of the album and on archive footage and photographs of the time, material which offers a look back at that exuberant period of scandals and creativity of the Stones.

The films, Mundo Alas (Argentina) and Asina (Canary Islands) will be presented at the second visit of MiradasDoc to Berlin, which will take place on 8th September in the emblematic Babylon Cinema in the German Capital.  The Festival Director, Alejandro Krawietz, will be accompanied on this occasion by the Canarian film-maker, Daniel Lagares, the director of Asina, which was the prizewinning film in the Concurso Canarias at MiradasDoc in 2009.

Mundo Alas is the Argentinean production with which the fourth edition of the International Documentary Film Festival of  Guía de Isora was opened last year, where it was a convincing success with the public. Directed by Fernando Molnar, Sebastian Schindel and the Argentinean singer, León Gieco, Mundo Alas reflects a tour by a group of exceptional artists who are also handicapped together with León Gieco round a number of theatres in Argentina.

The film tells a universally human story and shows people affected by a handicap who “are not sad or depressed people, or who spend their lives complaining about their problems or the handicap that they have. They are fun and full of élan, that is why they are artists”, as Sebastián Schindel explained in Guía de Isora last year.

For its part, Asina, by Daniel Lagares Ramírez, shows us the daily life of the families from Fuerteventura dedicated to breeding goats and their wise adaptation to such an arid landscape as that of their island. 

MiradasDoc opened up a doorway in Europe in 2009 for the presentation of Latin Amercian and Canarian documentary cinema with the support of the Instituto Cervantes and the Canarian Association in Berlin. For Latin American cinema, the possibility of being presented in Europe through MiradasDoc is a great opportunity. The Festival director, explained this by saying that the film presented last year, when this initiative began, LT22 Radio La Colifata, by the Argentinean director, Carlos Larrondo, did not achieve DVD distribution in Germany until it was made known in Berlin in this manner. 

“It is a matter of offering the best of Latin American documentary cinema in Germany so as to give it projection towards the whole of Europe”, indicated Alejandro Krawietz. The quality of the programming and the general record of MiradasDoc is, precisely, one of the factors that has led the collaborating institutions to take part in this initiative.

For Canarian documentary cinema, the showing in Berlin is an opportunity to “make contact with German audiences and, also, to break through the cliché of sun and sand with which the Canary Islands are associated and a deeper image of the Islands and of our cinema is offered”, stated the festival director.
 
For MiradasDoc, this showing in Berlin “is interesting, because the festival’s image becomes internationalised”, explained Krawietz, who emphasised the importance of having the collaboration of the Instituto Cervantes and the Canary Islands Association in Berlin.

The researcher, analyst and assistant director from Cuba, Gloria María Cossío, will teach a workshop on Research in Documentary Cinema within the training section of  MiradasDoc 2010, the fifth edition of the International Documentary Film Festival of  Guía de Isora, which will be held in this borough on the island of Tenerife from 29th October to 6th November this year. The course will be offered in the mornings from Monday 1st to Friday 5th November, at the MiradasDoc venue in Guía de Isora.

The teacher at the Workshop on Research in Documentary Cinema, the Cuban, Gloria María Cossío, has had a career of more than thirty years carrying out this creative work in the cinema and has achieved very solid recognition in the sphere of Latin American cinema. She has carried out her work as a researcher, analyst and assistant director. She gained a degree from the University of Havana specialising in Latin American literature, she has also tackled cinema criticism and has formed part of the directorial team in over fifty documentaries, outstanding among which are the full-length films, Deportivamente, by Manuel Herrera, as long ago as 1976, and more recently in Si Me Comprendieras (1999), by Rolando Díaz, selected by a number of International Festivals such as the Berlin Film Festival, the Toronto International Festival and IDFA in Amsterdam, among others. This documentary was also recognised with a Special Honorary Mention  at the Havana Festival. She also participated in Suite Habana (2002), by Fernando Pérez, which, among other prizes, obtained the Signis, at the Donostia-San Sebastián International Film Festival and the First Coral Prize from the International Festival of New Latin American cinema, both in 2003.  

In fiction, her participation as an assistant director in Operación Fangio (2000), by the Argentinean, Alberto Lecchi, Lista de Espera (2003), by  Juan Carlos Tabío, and Martí: el ojo del canario (2009), by Fernando Pérez also stands out, with the added areas of historical research and casting director.

A total of 88 film projects have been presented for pitching at MiradasDoc Market, the section of the International Documentary Film Festival of Guía de Isora which specialises in stimulating the production of documentaries made by producers from countries in the southern hemisphere or of projects on the subject of north-south relations. The figure is a signal of the fact that MiradasDoc has become established as an international reference point for this kind of production as the head of the MiradasDoc Market, the film-maker, David Baute, has said.

The Market of the fifth edition of MiradasDoc will be open between 3rd and 5th November inclusive in Guía de Isora, a borough in the south of Tenerife (Canary Islands) where, in only five years, it has been possible to create a high-level meeting point for producers who are willing to finance high-quality projects.  

Latin America, with forty-one, is the region where most of the projects presented come from, with 47% of the total; those presented by Spanish production companies, with 14 titles and 16% of the total come next, to which the Canarian production companies with 9 films and 10% of the total should be added although, for statistical purposes, they are counted separately. The African participation is also notable as it comes second in the international sphere, with nine projects and 10% of the total, which is greater than the six projects from Asia (7% of the total), the rest of Europe, also six, and North America, with three (3% of the total).
 
The African participation is particularly significant if it is remembered that the number of films made is less than that of other regions of the world. These details on the number of participants, apart from the diversity of their origin (Cameroon, Ivory Coast, Congo Brazzaville, Senegal and South Africa) confirm the trend observed in 2009, when MiradasDoc was already showing signs of becoming a meeting and promotion space for African documentarians with international recognition.

A maximum of twelve of the eighty-eight projects presented will be selected to participate in the pitching, where they will be able to defend their project before a panel of  commissioning editors selected from among the distributors and Spanish and overseas television stations which habitually come to MiradasDoc Market. Those chosen in the selection process to participate in the pitching, who will be notified in the first week of September, will attend a workshop run by  the European documentary expert,  Marijke Rawie.

The registration process for commissioning editors for 2010 is still  open. At the 2009 edition,  the commissioning editors represented Coproductions RTBF (Belgium), Canal Cultura, TVE, Canal+, Al Jazeera, ITVS International (United States), Televisión de Canarias, Motion Pictures S.A. (Barcelona), J.M.T. Films Distribution & Worldwide Sales (Israel) and TV Cultura (Brasil).

The Australian film-maker, David Bradbury, is the invited director at the fifth edition of the MiradasDoc International Documentary Film Festival, which is being held between 29th October and 6th November in Guía de Isora (Tenerife). Four of his films will be shown in “Punto de vista” (Point of View), which, at the annual meeting about documentary cinema in this borough of the South of Tenerife, is devoted to taking a look at the work of an outstanding film-maker who has contributed his special way of understanding the documentary to the language of this genre of cinema.  

Bradbury is renowned for his films of a political content bringing significant matters to public notice, with a journalistic view enriched by a fresh vision of historical events and by the audaciousness of his approach, both in the content and in the circumstances of some of his films.  The Australian director goes beyond what can be seen immediately and makes an effort to reveal another reality that is hidden behind the obvious facts. David Bradbury will receive the Mirada personal prize at Guía de Isora which is given to the invited director in the Punto de Vista section of MiradasDoc.

He stands out for his way of getting to the heart of the struggles for social and political justice, environmental causes and those of the native peoples. The film-maker is one of the best-known and most successful among Australian documentary directors.  His films have won prizes on a number of occasions: he has achieved two Oscar nominations and prizes of the Australian Film Institute (AFI), the institution responsible for the development of the film industry in his country, as well as prizes from the  Sydney and Melbourne Festivals and the American Film Festival, among others. His films have been around the world at the most important Film Festivals on the screens of a number of countries and on the most outstanding overseas television channels. 
 
Four films
Punto de vista will show four films by the Australian director: Frontline (1979),  Nicaragua: No pasarán (1983), Fond Memories of Cuba (2002) and My Asian Heart (2008).

Frontline, the first film made by Bradbury after finishing his university studies in Australia (Political Science and History) and the United States (Audiovisual journalism), is a version of the Vietnam War through the work of the Australian television journalist  Neil Davies, in which the conflict is presented as a televised war, lost in the halls of the United States rather than on the field of battle. 

This first work allowed Bradbury to achieve his first nomination for an Oscar for the best documentary (1981), and to win the sought-after Grierson Prize at the American Film Festival (1981), the Hemisfilm Prize from the International Fine Arts Center of the Southwest (IFACS) (1981), the Christopher Award (1981), the Gold Athena from the Athens International Film Festival (1981), the Chris Statuette, from the Columbus Film Festival (1980), the best documentary prize from the Sydney Film Festival (1980) and also at the international film festivals in Baltimore, Chicago, Berlin and the Festival of Independent Cinema and Video in Atlanta.

Nicaragua: No pasarán is an epic story of the Sandinista Revolution, the expulsion of the dictator, Somoza, and the war imposed by the CIA in Nicaragua, a narration by the charismatic leader, Tomás Borge, as the central character.

Bradbury travelled to Cuba in the late 1990s, after the collapse of the Communist bloc, with a special commission: to obtain an optimistic vision of Cuba, with the financial support of an Australian socialist of Greek origin, Jim Mistos, an octogenarian millionaire who believed that Cuba was the place where the dream of an egalitarian society was realised. What the director found there was different from what his financier had expected and so he made a film with a kaleidoscopic vision in which the hope and admiration of Mistos is contrasted with the reality of the political, economic and social contradictions. The film is an eventful journey through the island, in which Bradbury finds some extraordinary performers and music which manage to become the centrepoint of Fond Memories of Cuba.

My Asian Heart accompanies the Australian photographer, Philip Blenkinson, on his missions in Nepal, China and Bangkok. Blenkinson belongs to a generation of photo-journalists in the classic sense, guided by the intention born in the Magnum Agency of contributing to knowledge and the improvement of humanity. In 1989, Blenkinson exchanged his work at an Australian newspaper for taking the pulse of the chaos in Asia and devoted himself to documenting life and death on the continent in all its forms, especially in the lesser-known wars.  Blenkinson’s images are brutally honest and violent. The film is difficult to digest but reminds viewers that integrity still exists in the world of photo-journalism. 

MiradasDoc Market, the market of the International Documentary Film Festival of Guía de Isora, on 25th July, opened the process of registration for producers who wish to take part in this fifth edition, which is being held in this borough on the island of Tenerife (Canary Islands) between 3rd and 5th November this year. Registration is possible up to 15th October via the festival web page, at www.miradasdoc.com (market tab).
 
MiradasDoc Market is the international market for documentary cinema professionals who are looking southwards, producers and film-makers whose films have been produced or shot in Africa, Latin America or Asia and producers from all over the world who deal with north-south relationships.

The festival market constitutes a special opportunity for producers, directors and cinema professionals in the Canary Islands, as it allows them to gain access to this global market via the Pase Vip Canario, a space where they can meet purchasers and financiers from foreign television stations, to whom they can present their projects or finished films. At the 2009 edition, a hundred or so Canarian producers benefited from this unique opportunity.

At this fifth edition, the MiradasDoc market is opening up a fresh chapter in its agenda: the Expo Audiovisual Canaria, an exhibition of the technology and the audiovisual services of the islands. This is an exclusive space located in the central part of MiradasDoc Market where representatives of new technologies and of the service and audiovisual equipment hire companies in the Islands will come together with the producers, directors, image and sound technicians and other professionals from the Canarian audiovisual sector who are already habitual visitors of the festival market and have made it an indispensable meeting point.
 

The market is an ideal space for projects in search of funding and for productions that are already complete which require distribution or exhibition. In the case of documentary cinema, and via MiradasDoc, the Canaries serve as a natural bridge between Europe, Africa and America and act as an exceptional platform for the audiovisual market.

The channels, Arte TV, Al–Jazeera, Canal Historia, Canal Odisea, Canal Plus, First Hand Films, ITVS International, RTBF, SABC, SVT Arts & Culture, Telesur, TV Cultura Brasil, YLE and TVE are just some of the purchasers and distributors interested in buying already-completed documentaries who habitually come to MiradasDoc Market. For the 2010 edition, the presence is already confirmed of representatives of Link TV (United States), Canal Odisea (Spain) and Televisión Canaria, among the group of television purchasers, as well as First Hand Films and Motion Pictures (Spain), among the distributors.

MiradasDoc Market offers other sections apart from this meeting place with purchasers, such as the Pitching, at which projects which are in search of funding can find an opportunity to identify partners for a co-production and the Video library, for  films to which purchasers and distributors interested in buying ready-made documentaries can have access.

 On 30th July, the period concludes for presenting projects which require funding through the pitching at MiradasDoc Market, the section of the market of the International Documentary Film Festival of Guía de Isora at which film-makers who have a documentary project can find support for co-financing their initiative. Registration can be carried out on the festival web page, at the address of www.miradasdoc.com (tab: market). Producers from Asia, Africa and Latin America can present projects for pitching, as well as producers from other countries whose project is going to be carried out in the so-called countries of the South or deal with subjects regarding North-South relationships.

The MiradasDoc market will be held between 3rd and 5th November this year. For the pitching, a selection will be made of a maximum of twelve projects, of which the interested parties will be informed in the first week of September. Those candidates who have been selected to take part in the pitching will also attend a workshop at which the European expert on documentaries, Marijke Rawie, will advise them so that they are capable of defending their project before a panel of commissioning editors selected from among the distributors and national and international television companies who habitually come to MiradasDoc Market.

Among the  commissioning editors who have confirmed their attendance at the fifth edition of the festival, who will subsequently be joined by others, are Carlos Wagner Messerlian, head of the department of Provision of Documentary Services and Independent Production at TV Cultura (Brazil), Wim Van Rompaey, head of Lichtpunt (Belgium), Patricia Aguilar Mendizábal  deputy head of Production at TV UNAM (Mexico) and Diana Armas Acosta, production executive of Televisión Canaria. At the 2009 edition, the commissioning editors were representatives from Coproductions RTBF (Belgium), Canal Cultura, TVE, Canal+, Al Jazeera, ITVS International (United States), Televisión de Canarias, Motion Pictures S.A. (Barcelona), J.M.T. Films Distribution & Worldwide Sales (Israel) and TV Cultura (Brasil). In 2009, 90 projects were presented for pitching, of which ten were selected, including two Canarian ones.

MiradasDoc Market is the international market for documentary film professionals who look towards the south, producers and film-makers whose films have been produced or filmed in Africa, Latin America or Asia and producers from all over the world who deal with the relationships between north and south.  

The market is an ideal space for projects in search of funding and for productions that are already complete which require distribution or exhibition. Another unusual feature of this market is where it is held.  In the case of documentary cinema and through MiradasDoc, the Canary Islands serves as a natural bridge between Europe, Africa and America and acts as a special platform for the audio-visual market.

A total of five hundred and six films were registered to take part in the official section of the fifth edition of the International Documentary Film Festival of Guía de Isora, MiradasDoc, which is being held from 29th October to 6th November 2010 in the borough of the same name in Tenerife (Canary Islands). Among the films presented, thirteen are competing in the Canarian Competition, seventy in the Spanish Competition and the remainder in the International Competition, which has the following sections: Shorts (98 documentaries registered), Full-length films (202) and First Works (123).

The documentaries are those which have been registered for the festival during the designated period, which concluded on 15th June, and over the next few weeks they will go through a double selection process by two expert committees made up of four professionals from the audio-visual sector, who will be respectively responsible for a first phase of pre-selection and a second selection phase. Subsequently, the selected films will be submitted to the judges, who will give the prizes and they will be shown throughout the week of the festival on two occasions.

In the selection process, it is also possible to select some of the films presented for the competitions so that they can be seen in the screening section, the space of the Festival Market where the producers of already-finished documentaries come together with the distribution companies or televisions so as to reach agreements for distribution or exhibition.

In the registration process, it is asked that films should have southern subjects: produced or made in the countries of the southern hemisphere or which deal with their problems and the processes which arise in these countries. The festival is open to documentaries on social subjects, in the widest sense of the term, in such a manner that they may be of a social, political, cultural, environmental, ethnological, historical or experimental content, among other possibilities.

The films may be produced anywhere in the world, “with the idea that there is a direct way of understanding, observing and making visible the social processes which take place both in the “south” and in the north of the planet and which might be traced in human society in general” as is stated in the rules of the competition.

What is more, for this year’s edition, the requirement has been added that the candidate films must only have been seen at no more than one other Spanish festival. Miradasdoc places emphasis on the view of the film-maker, on the creation of a language of his or her own when recording the processes with which the films are dealing.

A high degree of participation from the Canary Islands

At this fifth edition, the number of candidates taking part in the Canarian Competition is particularly striking as it is clearly larger than in previous editions. The productions are also dealing with an immense variety of subjects. The uniqueness of nature in the Canary Islands is the subject most dealt with by this group of documentaries, as five of the thirteen candidates are on this subject. Two more are about cultural processes, one locally, about a particular experience on Gran Canaria, and the other on a universal level.

Three productions presented for selection in the Canarian section are about visitors to the islands, from such different experiences as the travellers of the 19th Century and the immigrants of the 21st. The set is completed with a film on archaeology, another about mountaineering and a documentary which reflects an economic process regarding identity through craftwork and industrial production.

The remainder of the films presented shows an endless range of subjects and approaches and are of very diverse origins, including those that offer “the whole truth about audience measuring in Spain” and those that paint a portrait of unusual people or almost hidden processes, such as hashish trafficking, a wide range of views of the struggle of women and the ancestral resistance of the native peoples, the way of dealing with complex illnesses or memories of conflicts that are as different as the Spanish Civil War or the Korean War.  

Over the next few weeks, two expert committees will be responsible for making a selection of the best productions which will participate in the official section of Miradasdoc.

 The Fifth International Documentary Film Festival of Guía de Isora, MiradasDoc,  is opening the registration period –with the final date for registration set for 10th June – for the presentation of documentaries for the Official Competition Section in the categories of Full-length films, Shorts, First works, Spanish films and Canarian films. The registrations are to be made directly on the festival web page at miradasdoc.com.

 In its fifth edition, which is to be held between Friday 29th October and Saturday 6th November this year, MiradasDoc is going to continue to offer a wide range of documentary cinema made in the course of the previous year, with the intention of making the many, varied and complex social processes visible – in the widest sense of the term – experienced by the citizens of the five continents. A view of the world which, as on other occasions, will bring the audience closer to the real dimension of the adventure of the human being in the world, through the direct, gripping and urgent language of documentary cinema.
In this fifth edition, the documentary film market, MiradasDoc Market (which is also one of the most meaningful in relation to the southern hemisphere), the practical and theoretical workshops on this cinematographic genre, the lectures and round tables which make up the informative sections on invited countries and EnseñanDoc, documentary showings and talks for students are becoming even better established.

The head of MiradasDoc, Alejandro Krawietz, explains that “this year we must add to what we have already achieved, the fact that, almost without realising it, we are reaching a very significant moment, the fifth anniversary”. According to Krawietz, “MiradasDoc arose as a hitherto unheard of adventure in the Canary Islands, with the objective of offering an honest and different view of what is happening in the world from a borough in the deep south of Europe, close to Africa and a brother to Latin America, Guía de Isora”. And he added, “when we started out, we did not expect all our projects to become established so soon. Now, in the fifth year, we have to continue to grow and between the lines of that growth the idea of becoming established as a reference space for the distribution of African documentary cinema towards Europe and America stands out”.
The registration period closes on 10th June 2010. Until then, the documentary makers of the planet are invited to register their films at the festival website. MiradasDoc will be handing out over 40,000€ in prizes this year.

Durante tres días de la semana pasada, del martes 27 al jueves 29 de abril de 2010, el director congolés Gilbert Ndunga Nsangata he estado en Tenerife para presentar en diversos centros de secundaria del norte de la Isla para presentar a los estudiantes de bachillerato y ESO la película ‘Los niños de Inkisi’ que ganó en la IV Edición de MiradasDoc el premio al Mejor documental de Derechos Humanos.

Según explica el director del Festival Internacional de Cine Documental de Guía de Isora (Tenerife, Islas Canarias, España), Alejandro Krawietz, “desde su edición de 2007, MiradasDoc ha mantenido entre sus actividades principales EnseñanDoc, es decir, la proyección de una película documental especialmente seleccionada en compañía de su director”.

Este año, mediante la colaboración entre el Festival MiradasDoc y el Centro de Profesores (CEP) de Icod de los Vinos, se ha podido dar continuidad al proyecto a lo largo del curso escolar, de tal modo que más de cuatrocientos alumnos se han beneficiado de estas proyecciones, a las que siempre han seguido charlas con el director e intercambio de preguntas y reflexiones.

'Los niños de Inkisi' trata el tema de los niños de la calle en el Congo, pero desde una perspectiva de máximo respeto, en la que son los propios niños los que relatan su vida, el modo en que llegaron a la calle y los sueños que albergan para el futuro. De este modo, la película se convierte en la contestación a una pregunta fundamental: ¿Qué ha pasado en los países y las culturas africanas para que una tradición que hacía de los niños y la fecundidad el centro de la vida familiar permita ahora que una enorme cantidad de esos mismos niños tengan que vivir sin un techo y sin el abrigo de la familia?

GILBERT-NDUNGA NSANGATA.
Nació el 13 de mayo de 1950 en Brazzaville. Después de aprobar el bachillerato de Filosofía en Brazzaville, estudia cine, televisión y teatro en Polonia, en la Escuela Superior Nacional de Cine. En 1980 regresa a Congo y trabaja como director y realizador para la televisión de este país, colabora con la oficina nacional de escritores y actores de Congo y desarrolla una intensa actividad teatral. Niños de Inkisi es su última película.