The opening ceremony in the Grand Theater started with a video presentation with the epic soundtrack from the The Last of the Mohicans celebrating with a montage the work of Italian cinematographer Dante Spinotti and his Lifetime Achievement Award at this edition.

The ceremony carried on with several awards to Allan Starsky as production designer, Thelma Schoonmaker as editor, Terry Gilliam as a director with unique visual sensitivity, Darius Wolski as cinematographer, Richard Zanuck as producer, Vittorio Storaro and Carlos Saura s director duo, Terry Sanders as documentary director, Volker Schlöndorff as director. Different guests introduced these awards, in light and entertaining way, like Bill Murray presenting a student award named after his friend László Kovács, Michael Ballhaus, Nicola Pecorini and John de Borman. A video message with the talking head of David Lynch against a thick red curtain appeared on the screen too! And one from Johnny Depp remembering Heath Ledger and his help to complete The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus.

The list of films that I manged to see during the festival starts with the opening one:

Get Low: I really liked the work of the cinematographer David Boyd.
Departures: An interesting insight into Japanese culture and good framing.
Dark House: An interesting Polish story told through nice images. Winner of the Silver Frog.
Oxygen: A Russian film structured around 10 music tracks like a visual CD album, framed inside a blue line around the screen, interesting visual experiment.
Rabbit à la Berlin: A very creative way for a documentary to describe the Berlin wall story through the life of rabbits, brilliant!
Bloody Mondays & Strawberry Pies: A documentary offering a nice observation of boredom, time and lives of five characters in different places and situations in the world.
A Single Man: A visually impeccable 60′s stylish story, interesting solutions in using transitions between warm and desaturated sequences. At times looked like a continuous fashion photo shoot.
Taking Woodstock: A funny and lighthearted version of the days of Woodstock from Ang Lee.
An Education: A good independent British film with a good period look accuracy from dop John de Borman.
Lebanon: Powerful, claustrophobic, dark “inside tank” cinematography. The winner of the Golden Frog.
The Solitary Life of Cranes: Brilliant images of London from the point of view of cranes operators. I loved this documentary.
Salt: The photographer Murray Fredericks does everything nicely in his personal documentary. Great timelapses, landscapes solitary travel introspection and captivating images of a salt desert in Australia.
Poste Restante: A great poetic documentary again, about undelivered post, by Marcel Łoziński who made my favorite 89mm from Europe.
I, Don Giovanni: A very flat theater like framing film, about Lorenzo da Ponte, from the duo Storaro and Saura.

I also attended nearly all the available workshops which started with a late night chat with Chris Doyle, I liked that he said:”I’m here because of you, not you because of me.”, to the audience, which was an interesting change of perspective. I also appreciated his ideas and thoughts about the role of the cinematographer and the importance of a place of and a space. Being at the same time within the space for inspirations and detached from it for “another view”, which has a lot to do with the tradition in the past and now of many cinematographers working outside their countries, me included, so I agreed to something I already felt.

Dante Spinotti also did an interesting hands on workshop for a couple of days. Vilmos Zsigmond gave a very interesting and inspiring masterclass going through stories, techniques and ideas of his greatest films.

Oliver Stapleton did a fantastic workshop, in my opinion the best for me in the festival, about arranging, lighting and framing car scenes in studio, night and day. He was very good in involving people in taking initiative and offering solutions. An Arri D21 was used as camera and projected on big screen, so that everyone could see live the effect of every decision and change.


David Boyd and Aaron Schneider, director of Get Low with a career as cinematographer before his first film, did a good workshops at Lodz Film School. They provide good examples of communication between the dop and the director and quick and efficient solutions.

Donald McAlpine offered a good lesson about past Australian cinema, of which I wasn’t aware of, and showed us many clips and examples. I like to remember one of his quotes: “…some directors are visually illiterate, but literally proficient.”

Finally I also had the chance to have a look for the third time at the BSC Film and Digital Image Evaluation just to be convinced further than skin tone and film are a difficult link to be broken by digital images, but this is another long story!

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