PARADISE LOST

Ferenc Moldoványi: Another Planet

The new work by Ferenc Moldoványi who has also directed “Children, Kosovo 2000”, presented and awarded at several festivals, is also about the lives of children and it is not only a large-scale enterprise but at the same time a film with a global message and a great-impact film essay. The film follows the lives and hardships of exploited, enslaved and worked to the extreme children, seven lives altogether, on three continents (South America, Africa, South-East Asia) in four countries (Ecuador, Mexico, Congo and Cambodia).

The little cigarette and chewing-gum vendor girl in Ecuador, the shoeshine boy sharing the same fate, the street urchin in Congo, the child-prostitute, the child-soldiers, the painfully young workers in a brick factory in Cambodia and those earning a dollar per day by sifting the rubbish on a huge dump all depicted by Ferenc Moldoványi are at times much rougher and harrowing than some investigative reportage (it is shocking for example when the underage African prostitute gives an account of how she was raped by four policemen with total apathy on her face and in her voice but it is equally chilling to listen to the account of child-soldiers in Congo telling about killing and raping of women).

The filmmaker however goes well beyond mere depiction and places the lives of his child characters into a much higher context moulding them to convey a global and so to say cosmic message. The most important means of achieving this, besides Tibor Máthé’s images and Tibor Szemző’s music, is the fictional framing story, in which the documentary sequences are inlayed. At the very beginning of “Another Planet” we can see the wise magician of a North American Indian tribe (the Tarahumaras) together with a baby girl and her mother in a wonderfully beautiful landscape. We return to this idyllic and paradisical situation several times during the film.

In this respect the film recalls the French nature film titled “Genesis” (in which an old African magician tells the story of the birth of living creatures on the Earth) on the other hand the fictional parts of the work are in an obvious and extremely dramatic juxtaposition with the shocking and moving documentary dramas. It may also come to the mind and needs to be contemplated that all the horrors seen are only visions, or nightmares of the little girl and shaman. The opposition of two worlds, Nature and Civilization is expressed in the double reference of the title: Another Planet may mean that another , happier more idealistic world does exist beyond the misery and exploitation but it may also refer to this 21st century Planet with its enslaved children, which is indeed another planet but not ours because it is absolutely impossible to identify with it.

There is however, a passage and even a link between these two markedly different worlds: it is the Tarahumaras (and their shaman with his magical powers) living in unspoiled, untouched and ancestral nature – the ancestral and magical trait lives on hidden in the children living in a destructive civilization on the brink of destruction itself. The children talking about misery, exploitation and enslavement also mention their dreams as if by chance (in which apocalyptic visions, hell itself, ancient superstitions appear as well as biblical elements) or they talk about being accused of witchcraft (the street urchins in Congo end up living in the street because their family brands them as “child witches” and chases them from home). Merveille the child-prostitute’s name means miracle – see the interview with Ferenc Moldoványi in the article of film.hu – moreover Luz’s, the little street vendor girl’s, name means light.

Presuming that we agree that films applying the power of montage, rhythm and music in their sequences of documentary images achieve a higher level of filmic art - for example Godfrey Reggio’s qatsi trilogy (Koyaanisqatsi, Powaqqatsi, Naqoyqatsi), Baraka or Bodysong - and we call these film-poetry or image-poetry then by the same token applying a definitely unusual if not unique method we can surely call “Another Planet” a film-essay, where the stark and naked presentation of reality and the ambition of achieving an artistic effect are both employed and required.

Why exactly children? It is not the first time that Ferenc Moldoványi has worked with children (see the above mentioned documentary, “Children, Kosovo 2000” ) but this time the young ones, besides representing their own person and story, seem to gain, if possible, some further significance and meaning as their personal fate becomes symbolic. As they are exploited and abused in spite of their innocence they become the absolute representation of total subjection. “ One can grasp the essence of defencelessness through the lives of these children.” – the director commented, following the screening of his film, who summing it all up wishes to send out a global message about the moral crisis of our Planet.

The lives of these children and what they represent is fiercely shocking, exasperating leaving one bitter and disillusioned. It is a fact that “the income of the two richest men in the world equals the GDP of more than 40 countries in the world or that out of the 6 billion people living on our Planet 3 billion subsist on less than 1 USD per day..” Not all is lost however until films like that of Ferenc Moldoványi’s are made, maybe...

Judit Vajda

“…By far, the most impressive competition entry at Mannheim-Heidelberg was Ferenc Moldovanyi’s Masik bolygo (Another Planet), awarded the Special Jury Prize. The only documentary contending for top honors, Another Planet was seven years in planning and four years in making. Together with ace cinematographer Tibor Mathé, Ferenc Moldovanyi chronicles the “hidden face of our planet” – namely, the plight of children in Ecuador, Cambodia, and the Congo, whose lives are badly scarred by circumstances beyond their control. As much fiction as documentary, the film’s power is generated from recorded testimony with the children, which is then used as overtalk in depicting their deplorable fate as soldiers, laborers, and prostitutes.” Ron Holloway- KINO

“...Few things can more delight festival and film directors than full houses on the Saturday for such diverse selections, such as Another Planet, Ferenc Moldovanyi's docu-poem on the suffering little children in some not-so-remote corners of our world, a production lovingly crafted  over five years which brought tears to the eyes of some viewers, watching the piteous spectacle of under-age prostitutes or tiny-but not  at all toy-soldiers conscripted in the Congo, somehow facing up to their fates with an unsettling  matter-of.-factness. The Budapest-based director was returning to Mannheim after presenting a short film here  a number of years ago, with a rare documentary selected for the International Competition and which was shot literally around the globe. It topped the poll of the critics published in the bi-lingual festival paper. Welcomed back as additional festival venues this year were the lovely period art-house Atlantis, as well as the smaller Quadrat kino, while in Heidelberg, besides the purpose-built Unizelt, two other permanent cinemas were in use by the festival. Admissions seem likely to surpass last year's total of 60,000 by the end of this 11-day filmic wonder. “ Phillip Bergson – Festival21.com

“A disquieting sense of shame pervades the cinema following the screening of Ferenc Moldoványi’s extraordinary film titled “Another Planet”, which guides us through the unspeakably hellish everyday life of little boys and girls, living in various parts of the world, in a way that there is not one single shot less or no sequence of narration more than necessary: a small cigarette vendor girl suffering from the cold nights and loneliness in the street being treated as a slave at home too, the little shoeshine boy, another one fabricating bricks for efficiency wages and then another boy whose stepfather threw him into the street, on the pretext of the accusation that he was a witch following the death of his mother, a little girl who is raped at the age of eight and then is forced into prostitution, other small girls who are condemned to sift through rubbish for bits of plastic and aluminium on a garbage dump just to earn few dollars for food, child-soldiers … The stories follow each-other on the screen like a nightmare with no end. What we see is not an imaginary planet born in the sick mind of some monster. It is our planet and our times. Only such masterly and moderate kind of film direction can move the audience to introspection and set them thinking instead of feeling nausea. Moldoványi is able to make a sublime film out of the raw-material of horror and he raises his documentary to the heights of an essay when inserting a Tarahumara ceremony into his film performed in honour of a new-born child to whom the shaman wishes that God bless him with many a good days to come.” Rafael Vega - Norte Castilla

Ferenc Moldoványi: Another Planet/CPH:DOX 14

Skrevet den 12-11-2008 09:09:53 af Tue Steen Müller

Monday, September 01, 2008

Another Planet (Másik Bolygó) (World Film Festival, Montréal)

Ferenc Moldoványi's documentary Another Planet is a jolting, quotidian examination of the harsh realities facing child labourers in Cambodia, Congo and Ecuador. One sells cigarettes in the street at night, others work in scrap yards with dangerous machinery, some fight in wars, pick through garbage all day, or prostitute themselves, to make ends meet. If you're searching for a film which provides living, breathing representatives of the humanistic articles occasionally featured in magazines such as National Geographic, representatives who stoically endure spiritual, cultural, familial, and social helplessness, with the patience of Job, and the resignation of Hephaestus, Another Planet is mandatory viewing, a stunning, cinematic triumph, whose existence is the product of Moldoványi's unwavering commitment. The footage is exceptional and as impressive as Herzog's best work in terms of seemingly insurmountable production obstacles overcome. Flames surround these children constantly, and they can't stop in order to spot their source, nor seek political means which would see them doused. My favourite scene shows a shoe shine boy gently holding a pigeon, taking a break, resting.

posted by Kermode at 11:51 PM 0 comments links to this post

WHERE EVEN DREAMS ARE MADE OF GARBAGE

by László Szabó G.

31. August 2008. , Sunday, 06:50

Street vendors at night. Young whores with tears in their eyes. Scavengers on a rubbish-dump. Armed soldiers. All of them are children though. Aged eight, nine or ten. In Congo, Cambodia and Ecuador. Where are you UNICEF? In which part of the world are you if not here? Are these little night-lights spying on us? The stars shake with astonishment and fear. They are at a loss to understand how this world of ours, so ardently bent upon its own annihilation, goes on being alive.”

Eduardo Galeano’s words are attached by the director – Ferenc Moldoványi - to this 95-minute colour documentary, to this painful but true, harrowing but honest, depressing but not sentimental, humane nevertheless humiliating opus “Another Planet”.

If one should think that he knows about everything - has seen and heard of the destitute of our times, of the poverty-stricken countries like Africa, Asia and South-America, of children who are so hungry that they do not care for their dignity any longer and who will not necessarily reach the threshold of adulthood - then I am sending them a message with this chilling drama: the worst is yet to come. It is a completely different matter to see a three-minute report or read about something that is incomprehensible for our mind anyway and it makes all the difference when we witness the lives of others and see it unfold right in front of our eyes and we are faced with what is going on in the world now following the turn of the second millennium. Ferenc Moldoványi is like a secular monk, documenting the world, and Tibor Máthé is a cinematographer of great empathy presenting the moral crisis of a world, through various situations of defencelessness, which has come unhinged.

The protagonists of “Another Planet” do not think ahead two days as the next day is already far enough in the future because they do not have anything to eat, they have no clean clothes, in fact a pair of shoes are really seen close-up by the shoe-shine boy only. This world is another world. This is another planet no planet for children and no place really for adults either. This world does not hide its bleak visage holding out no hope. Moreover it thrusts itself forward, slings itself into our face that even dream are made of garbage here, you may dig and search in it all day long but luck never comes this way.

The figure of a little Indian girl links and moulds the episodes, faraway nevertheless so near, into a whole. She walks there on the shore of the lake, which swallows up children’s souls. The souls of children who have such force of character, putting adults to shame, that they try and wade through the muck, the void, the merciless hell of depravity. The souls of children who stand with their goods attached to their neck in the street at night only to sell a packet of cigarettes or a box of matches because they cannot return home without money otherwise their mother will beat them badly. Other children are gold-diggers on immense garbage dumps or they carry the clay, bone-thin and exhausted, in a brick factory pushing the cart heaped higher than these eight or nine-year-old children. One girl tells her story in the film who was not even ten when an American tourist took her virginity. In another part of the world a young teenage boy is looking for a client to clean his expensive shoes. (His hands are bruised but there is still hope in his eyes that one day his miserable life will change for the better.) In the last sequence of the film child-soldiers are doing a drill, crawling with a gun on their shoulders, which is maybe heavier than them. Child-slaves. The defenceless victims of the pig-faced master, the lord of consumption.

Ferenc Moldoványi follows the surreal stages of defencelessness with his young, under-age protagonists who do not rebel but yield to their fate with eyes wide open though. In the Spring of 2000 the director made a harrowing film about Albanian and Serb children in Kosovo. With “Another Planet” he went further, geographically and morally as well. It is hard to disregard the film and Tibor Máthé the cinematographer and Tibor Szemző the composer of the soundtrack both have an important role in this. They present us with a film free of false effects but full of questions and of great power, which contradicts all, which we had in our minds about the humane mentality so far.

Source: http://ujszo.com/online/kultura/2008/08/31/ahol-az-alom-is-szemetbol-van

FILMVILÁG 2008/5 52.o

NO LAND FOR CHILDREN

by Anikó Górácz

Prostitute, soldier, rag-picker: lives too brutal even for an adult. The protagonists of “Another Planet” are children who face such lives.

Ferenc Moldoványi’s film “Another Planet” paints a dramatic picture of a world where even the 21st century is not the century of the children, on the contrary our consumption-centred world is speeding towards its own destruction and like a steamroller it tramples down impoverished countries and the young generations fall victim first. The “pig-headed master” (by our poet Endre Ady referring to the omnipotence of capital and money) forces children to work and poverty is enough justification for the parents to exploit their children.

South America, Africa and Asia are the poverty-stricken locations of “Another Planet” where the roles of adults and children are switched. The parents depraved of their childhood behave like children as they have never learned to act responsibly as adults and consequently they are unable to look after their children, to love them, educate and protect them. The children however are forced to behave like adults, they soon learn how to make decisions instead of their parents, how to protect themselves and their own interests, how to support their family by hard physical labour, how to harden their souls against emotional emptiness and against various physical and emotional abuse. These children who have no trust in adults and grow up prematurely are depraved of the very chance to ever become adults by this upside-down society consequently the problem is carried from generation to the other.

The director having chosen the global problem of child-labour as the theme for his film is inevitably walking the narrow path between cliché and sentimentality. We Europeans could easily brand it as cliché because we think that we know about this topic, we have read about it, have seen UNICEF advertisements and we may even have given donations and that is it we cannot do any more, we are powerless against this. It is a different matter though to know about something versus getting to know the lives and personal fate of people as without it, it is easier to turn our backs on children’s problems living in another part of the world. Moldoványi is not shy, he shows even the cruellest stories but he steers well clear of cheap effects. We can meet familiar children stories though: “the little match-seller girl”, the shoe-shine boy from “Boys Behind Bars”, “Iska” of the garbage-dump in Cambodia and even the Maugli of Blaha Lujza square is evoked by the street urchins in Congo. Despite of this the stories are all unique and shocking  because “Another Planet” applies the most subjective narrator of all the narrative arts, who is a child. The separate episodes are moulded into one by the symbolic figure of a little Indian girl who - walking by the shore of a lake, which swallows up the spirit of children – conjures up the various stories in a way.

The stakes become even higher when the children talk about their dreams which takes us to such a surreal dimension in which child abuse can be taken in by our mind educated on Freud, Cole and Jenő Ranschburg. In our part of the world where most children would give all their Lego toys just to become witches and sorcerers at an establishment called Roxfort it is nearly incomprehensible that children in Congo have to be terrified from being chased away from home accused of being witches. How could a world feel like home for a child in which they are afraid to go home even in their dreams because in their dream their mother beats them for not bringing enough money.

The dramatic power of the stories is taken to the limit by the stoicism, maturity and sometimes indifference when the children telling about their life, comment on their misery while the viewer sees sequences from their dreary, hopeless everyday life. The stories become increasingly tragic and we are taken from the protective Indian community to the apocalyptic world of child prostitutes and soldiers in Congo.

Director Ferenc Moldoványi, cinematographer Tibor Máthé and composer Tibor Szemző rely on the most noble traditions of docu-fiction making moreover they open up new dimensions for the genre.  The great merit of “Another Planet” is that it is sound in its ideology but it stands strong as a film too. It is hard to escape its influence because it may tell faraway stories we cannot escape self-examination. If we look deep into ourselves it turns out   that this another planet is not so distant as we thought as the so-called welfare-societies also produce their own climate harmful to children proven by the increasing number of shootings at schools and child-suicides. Quoting Ellen Key from “The Century of the Child”: “We have to bravely admit that there are numerous possibilities in which we can harm our children.”

THERE IS NO OTHER

by  Kipke Tamás

Hardly a month has passed since an odd film appeared on the programme of the cinemas – how much longer will it be shown I wonder. It is to be feared that only few have seen it so far and in this case another one will come instead a newer, over-advertised work featuring stars and the director’s private-life scandals, which is more than enough (naturally some heavy media presence added on) to draw the attention of the public to it. The forgettable work is made forgotten by the next forgettable opus and so on. To forget the above mentioned film though would be mortal and murderous sin to forget and a great loss not to see.

The title is “Another Planet” that is “A másik bolygó” in Hungarian. It is like watching a foreign film with foreign main credits and text although this special film is the work of a Hungarian director and cinematographer: it is a peculiar mixture of documentary and fiction film, which present seven different but basically quite similar stories about the defencelessness of children. The lives of a little match-seller girl, a shoe-shine boy, another believed to be a witch, young drug-addict prostitutes, children toiling in a brick factory which reminds of a labour-camp and children sifting rubbish on an enormous dump can be seen by the viewer.

The viewer is shocked and tries to protect himself against this spectacle. He pushes away such lives –“ yes, there are lives like this but it is not typical”. Obviously the title of the film refers to this because it shows a world, which could only exist on another planet. It is here though some borders or maybe   an ocean away. Distance is no problem these days due to the new technical inventions. How fast Coca Cola has reached all parts of the world! Mass unemployment has also reached us ever so fast and how about the business of sending out orphans, previously smuggled across the border, to beg in the street. We can find a Hungarian (Slovak, German or Italian) settlement which has an immense, stinking waste-dump on its outskirts very much like the on in Cambodia. If we peer through the window of a basement flat in the eighth district in Budapest or a Hamburg suburb we can see similar misery and defencelessness and the filmmaker could have shot the sequences about child-prostitution practically anywhere in the developed countries in Europe.

Ferenc Moldoványi’s film is not about the misery and the dangers threatening another planet. This chilling thing is here on Earth its “scouts” are next door. It can prove fatal self-deception if we tried to convince ourselves that what we see in the film, maybe not in the same dramatic dimensions but also around us, is something social progress or the all-regulating free-market has not managed to solve so far. What is seen in this film is exactly the result of the battle of classes and profiteering. The income of the two richest men in the world equals the GDP of some forty countries in the world Three billion people out of six live on less than one dollars per day on Earth. “All these data are given true meaning thus making them shocking and painful by the lives of these children” – says director

What will happen to the children of these children? Where does all this lead? What could be done? A couple of us, adults and children, discussed these matters drinking beer and coke. We did not come to a solution. Our drinks, the price of which, if we convert it, is more than a dollar did not taste too well either. Let us not forget: this is the sum they haye to survive a day….

http://portal.ujember.hu:8080/hetilap/080511/11/kipke

«Another Planet», a documentary that has earned numerous awards throughout the world is a kind of “meditative-essayist” drama of a civilisation approaching its end. The film commences with the cosmic surrender of Tarahumara shaman (a ritual dedicated to the birth of a new life and the dream of an Indian who enters the forest to warn her children of “losing the soul” juxtaposed with the fates of children workers, “prisoners of development”, minors forced into prostitution, killings, rape, recycling, survival. The apocalyptic sight of the photography by Tibor Mathe, the disturbing soundtrack by Tibor Szemzo, the hypnotic rhythm based on the narrative core on exploiting children in Ecuador, Mexico, Congo and Cambodia, are only few of the attributes that describe the exceptional work of Ferenc Moldovanyi who has shaped „Another Planet“ for several years. It is a film whose atmosphere takes over the spectators, the conscience is thrown on its knees towards the screen, while sights are projected of the “secret face of the planet” where half of its inhabitants live with less that 1$ per day. 

Poverty, exploitation, abuse, desperation, humiliation, human shame, unhidden hypocrisy of global politics of deregulation, the planetary senseless fight for the “millennium goals” (OSCE in its report from October of last year has confirmed that “the economic growth in the past decades has contributed more to the enrichment of the wealthy rather than the poor»!?), that is what the Hungarian author symbolically places into the voices of the children who share their fates, while those watching them remain to ponder on the triumph of cinematography and the defeat of humanity

FERENC MOLDOVÁNYI – ANOTHER PLANET

Nóra Szabó 04.02.2008

Our brief conversation following the screening of “Another Planet” made it clear that the aim of the director was to take his film to a much higher level of interpretation than that of the newsreels and reportages dealing with global problems. Mission fulfilled. “Another Planet” is similar to Koyaanisqatsi, Baraka and Iska’s Journey all rolled into one regarding its theme and effect. It is similar to the first two in respect of the imagery of nature sequences and presenting global problems and it is akin to the third one because of the kind of children’s lives it presents, the kind which we do not really want to know about.

Moldoványi’s film like Alföldi’s balances between two genres, that is between documentary and fiction film.

The difference between the balancing of the two films is that Moldoványi does it without any shakiness. His film documents with simplicity recording reality in wonderfully photographed images possessing extremely strong atmosphere. There is no extra commentary. The crew travelled various continents but the viewer only vaguely knows where. Besides Tibor Szemző’s ethereal music lending a surreal quality to the film, it is this geographical uncertainty, as we do not exactly know where we are, which tilts the genre of “Another Planet” rather towards the fictional.

Moldoványi’s film is a chain of episodes. Some are shorter the others longer but all linked by the misery and defencelessness of their child characters. It also needs to be pointed out that all the children in the film are underage and their lives are very similar: they are struggling to stay alive and also for the lives of their brothers and sisters, their family, and they will not recoil from the most humiliating or inhumane means to do that. Moreover, they consider it natural and accept their fate. In a better case they sell sweets in the street and in a worse they sell their bodies from the age of eight or ten and show a condom if asked for their id. You will see little boys doing the washing up in the market, hauling bricks, clean shoes in the street but also serving in the army. There is a lump in the throat when seeing these images but apart from watching the children doing their daily activities they are also asked about their dreams. Well, it all becomes clear at this point. A little girl, of about five years of age, for example cries desperately talking about her fear to go home as she has not collected enough metal and plastic on the rubbish dump that day.

Ferenc Moldoványi’s work belongs to the category of important films. It is the kind of work that is important both locally and globally and it talks clearly to all the people on our Planet crossing all cultural borders. It will not draw conclusions instead of the viewer and it will not judge. It “only” shows.

In THE JAWS OF DEATH, NEAR TO GOD

Ferenc Moldoványi’s film titled “Another Planet” present the lives of seven children in their harshness and irrationality in for countries of South America, Africa and South-East Asia. The little match-seller girl in Ecuador, the street urchins, child prostitutes and child soldiers in Congo, brick-factory workers and rubbish sifting minors in Cambodia living under inhuman conditions, defenceless, in the jaws of death but somehow near to God.

It is not the first time that Debrecen-born director Ferenc Moldoványi deals with the theme of children living under inhumane conditions. Following “Children, Kosovo 2000” he returns to the subject of children who are completely powerless concerning their fate and live an utterly cruel life.  “Another Planet”, shot on three continents, was screened at the 39^th Hungarian Film Week in the creative documentary section. The crew worked in four countries of South America, Africa and South-East Asia. The film presents the cruel lives of child labourers, child prostitutes and child soldiers in Cambodia, Ecuador, Mexico and Congo. The work does not wish to pass judgement on these countries merely unveils the ugly reality, there is no narration, nobody makes comments and there are no opinion declared.

Moldoványi does not think in terms of clichés, he does not either palliate or distort, he does not aim at being more shocking or more dramatic with created scenes or hunting for effect with editing. He prefers to leave it up to the faces, to word spoken, to its intonation for effect and this is exactly why it is the children themselves who talk about their everyday life. They recall their most determinant dreams, which is mostly about some primeval destruction or an encounter with God or just the opposite the failure of it. Some have visions of the end of the world others talk about a desire to sit with the apostles of Jesus. They seem to possess some kind of ancestral knowledge that their earthly existence is mainly a life of day to day, without hope followed by purification and the encounter with the Father of the Universe.

The film starts with the rituals of and Indian shaman followed by the story of a little match-seller girl in Ecuador who has nearly apocalyptic visions of the destruction of the Earth in her dreams. After brief sequences about her life,  we meet the shoeshine boy  who spends most of his days giving great concentration and humility to cleaning the shoes of passers-by. Moldoványi’s film also gives us insight into the hopelessly miserable world of street urchins in Congo where only a red football brings some joy.

The story of the young girl who became a prostitute at the age of eight is also harrowing as she talks about how she was raped and by how many people. She considers it a course of the nature that instead of her papers she shows a condom to the policemen who have already raped her several times before. Defencelessness of the body and the soul is strongly present in the life of the child labourers in a brick factory in Cambodia as well who silently carry the immense weights without a word of complaint or even a sigh doing physical work that is extremely strenuous for adults too. A welcome pause is brought on by an unexpected shower of rain when the playful splashing is the most joyful moment of their lives.

An existence that no human being deserves is especially poignant in the lives of the little girls sifting rubbish for metal and plastic on ahuge rubbish dump. They earn a living for their families and if they have a good day they might earn a dollar, which just about covers the expense of food. The most fearsome reality is presented in the life of child soldiers in Congo who are completely concentrated on their weapons who truly live in the jaws of death so near to extinction.

Despite of all the horrors the symbols of hell and heaven weave through the film. Earthly existence is often like hell for these children but they know that there is another dimension beyond this life there is the Saviour and purification. The shockingly honest impact of the film can also be attributed to Tibor Máthé’s images and Tibor Szemző’s music.

It is often said about Moldoványi’s film that it intends to express a global message about the moral crisis of our Planet. However, this is only partly true because while it shows the harrowing lives of children close-up and without glossing-over at the same time it does not pass wise judgement or draw conclusions it does not want the viewer to be scandalized. The title of the film is “Another Planet” and though we know that it is symbolic we are nevertheless appalled that the planet Moldoványi shows us is the same where we live.

Enfance - DOCUMENTAIRES

Les damnés de la Terre
Hubert Heyrendt

Mis en ligne le 20/11/2008
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Sans parole, sinon celle de ceux qu’il filme, "Another Planet"  dresse un état des lieux accablant de l’enfance maltraitée.
Un documentaire brillant signé Ferenc Moldovanyi.
A découvrir ce soir sur La une à 22 h 00.

Si ce jeudi 20 novembre est la Journée internationale des droits de l’enfant, 2008 est l’année de la Terre. Ferenc Moldovanyi parvient à mȇler les deux thématiques dans "Another Planet", brillant documentaire tourné aux quatre coins de la planète durant deux ans, de 2005 à 2007. A travers sept histoires, narrées par leurs jeunes protagonistes, le film dresse un constat accablant de l’état du monde en ce début de XXIesiècle, et en particulier du sort réservé aux enfants dès que l’on sort du confort de l’Occident.

Sept visages, sept enfants, vivant au Congo-Brazzaville, en Equateur ou au Cambodge, différents et pourtant réunis par un mȇme mal, celui d’une enfance bafouée, d’une innocence écrasée. Les rȇves de ces filles et de ces garçons n’ont rien à voir avec ceux de nos chères petites tȇtes blondes; les leurs ressemblent à des cauchemars. Ainsi cette petite Indienne qui raconte avoir rȇvé que la Terre s’enflammait et qu’elle devait sans cesse courir en avant pour dénicher un refuge. Refuge qu’elle ne peut espérer trouver auprès de sa mère, dormant du matin au soir et lui imposant non seulement toutes les tâches ménagères mais aussi d’aller vendre chewing-gums et cigarettes dans la rue une fois la nuit tombée. Réduite au rang d’esclave, la gamine apparaît résignée.

Cette résignation est sans doute ce qui réunit l’ensemble de ces enfants. Qu’ils fouillent des montagnes de déchets pour un dollar par jour, qu’ils soient enfants-soldats ou filles des rues (oů prostitution et viol se confondent), tous n’ont d’autre choix que d’accepter leur sort pour survivre dans leur environnement hostile. Ces histoires, on les connaît toutes. Pourtant, le film se révèle bouleversant par sa capacité à conserver leur dignité à ses témoins.

La grande réussite de "Another Planet" est en effet de nous faire vivre ces destins tragiques sans jamais tomber dans le voyeurisme. Sans voix off, le documentaire se contente de donner la parole à ses personnages. Leur parole se suffit à elle-mȇme, se passant de tout commentaire. D’autant que le documentariste hongrois, issu de l’univers du 7e Art, confère à son film une dimension cinématographique apportant une distance nécessaire, sans jamais pour autant réduire l’impact de l’émotion. La lumière étudiée, les images magnifiques et souvent saisissantes du directeur photo Tibor Mathé illustrent le propos des enfants, nous plongeant dans leur quotidien, souvent sordide. Tandis que le compositeur Tibor Szemzö propose une partition tout en finesse, aux notes cuivrées, conférant à l’ensemble une dimension de profondeur et de gravité.

Par son esthétique travaillée, par son propos sobre et universel, "Another Planet" ne se contente pas de livrer un cri d’alarme, il acquiert une dimension spirituelle, poussant le spectateur à réfléchir à un état de fait inacceptable, à regarder en face l’état de la condition humaine en 2008.

http://www.lalibre.be/culture/mediastele/article/461273/les-damnes-de-la-terre.html

ANOTHER PLANET –OTRO PLANETA

Seminci: What can the audience find in "Másik Bolygó"?

Ferenc Moldoványi: “Another Planet” (Másik Bolygó) presents seven shocking stories of children’s lives, which were shot in those parts of the world where everyday subsistence becomes a daily struggle where children have to do hard physical labour for about one dollar a day or have to sell their body constantly threatened by violence. In the seven stories framed by a metaphorical one shot among the Tarahumara in North Mexico we can meet Luz the little street-vendor girl who is a victim of parental violence and lives a live difficult even for an adult. Following a hard day’s work at night she is in the street in Quito selling chewing gum and cigarettes to earn a living for the family. In the capital of Ecuador we also meet the lonely shoe-shine boy. In Kinshasa, Congo we can meet a group of street-children who were thrown into the street by their families who accused them of being witches. Jonathan who wants to be a priest was accused of killing his own mother using witchcraft. Jonathan and his friends learned soon enough how to live their lives in the street and how to do hard work.

Also in the capital of Congo we get to know Merveille’s story who became a prostitute at the age of eight, who works in the street at night selling her body for a few dollars often attacked and raped by soldiers or policemen. On the border of Rwanda and Congo the film presents the story of child-soldiers who were trained to become killers by adults and spent more than six years on the frontline. In Asia a mere ten kilometres from the capital of Cambodia, a brick-factory, which is very much like a forced-labour camp, we can see the everyday life of child-labourers being worked as slaves living on location in barracks. In the heart of Phnom Penh we meet three little girls toiling sorting the rubbish on the immense garbage-dump to earn a few dollars to feed their families.

These stories, shot on four continents, outline a Planet struggling with a very serious crisis and the film intends to point to the fact that this situation cannot be sustained, that it is unacceptable and is not to be tolerated. More than half of the population of our Planet earn less than two dollars for their daily subsistence, suffering from epidemics, civil-wars and famine.

I believe that we have reached critical times, the threatening signs of which can be felt every day.  We live on a Planet where the mindless consumption of a very unstable so-called modern world exhausts and loots human and natural resources.

Meanwhile the so-called modern world does not take any real steps and has no strategy to put an end to this injustice or find any kind of remedy for it.

In our film the audience can see beautiful children with very sad eyes, telling all about their lives, the beauty of nature on our Planet is in serious contrast with the social environment these children are forced to live in. Can it be that the beauty of nature is a metaphor of paradise lost?

S.: - What has impressed you most from those year when you went around shooting in black Africa?

F.M.: - We started to shoot in black Africa in the autumn of 2005 (as a matter of fact the shoot of the film itself took two years). We had a very difficult shoot in a chaotic, anarchistic country after the civil-war. At that time the soldiers have not received a salary for over a year and remained in the army only to loot and rape women using their authority. At the same time we also met some very kind, helpful, warm-hearted people. We also felt helpless with anger and frustration as we knew that we could not really help or change the situation. During the preparation and the shoot we got to know many children and their lives, who the crew became very friendly with and a trustful relationship evolved during this time. There were some very difficult experiences too, which seriously endangered our personal safety. We had to escape from the East part of the country following the shoot of the child-soldiers for example.

On the whole and in spite of all this Africa and its people are in my heart and it has been a great experience I shall never forget.

S.: -  How do those children cope with daily living? What do their families say?

F.M.: Most of these children do not live with their families like Merveille, Jonathan or the child-soldiers or even the child-labourers in the brick factory. As it can be seen in the film they work very hard just to live. The children who are surrounded by adults like the girls working on the dump or Luz working in the streets of Quito are usually seriously exploited by their parents and quite often suffer abuse from them.

S.: -  Can the developed world change the situation in the Third World?

F.M: - As I have mentioned above the unjust distribution of wealth is unsustainable and the irresponsible indifference risks the future of our Planet. An overall strategy involving true and real help needs to be worked out without delay. Let us not forget that many wealthy and modern countries have amassed their wealth and became powerful by using and looting the resources of their colonies such as that of black African countries. I believe that the modern world is responsible for the fate of developing countries and it cannot be shaken off moreover it needs to be faced up to.  I think we are at the last moment or even past it.

Done for the 53^rd Valladolid International Film Festival