Thessaloniki doc fest returns with tribute to Austrian, Romanian filmmakers

By Harry van Versendaal

Hubert Sauper and Alexandru Solomon are but a couple of the filmmakers heading to this year's Thessaloniki Documentary Festival (TDF), according to organizers as they unveiled the lineup of tributes to be screened at the annual international festival in the northern port city, this year from March 13 to 22.

Ten years after his Oscar-nominated "Darwin's Nightmare," a riveting film on the fishing industry in Tanzania's Lake Victoria, Sauper last year returned with another political work. In "We Come as Friends," the 49-year-old Austrian filmmaker takes a look at the neocolonialist exploitation of South Sudan in the wake of independence - and does so flying in his homemade aircraft.

"I think that if you were to make a film about the state of our times, it would be about nothing more than economics," the France-based director, writer and actor has said in an interview with Issue Magazine.

"Before it was more about the ideas, Marxism, etc. Now the bottom line is always the dollar. All human relations have been reduced to this sort of game, 'I give to you, you give to me,'" said Sauper, who teaches film in Europe and the USA.

The Sauper tribute features three more works: Shot in 1993, "On the Road with Emil" tells the story of an old circus director as he travels with his troupe through the wintry Austrian landscape. "Kisangani Diary" documents the 1997 massacre of Rwanda refugees at the hands of the so-called liberating rebel army of the new "Democratic Republic of Congo." The movie was released in 1998, four years before "Alone with Our Stories," a collection of testimonies by female victims of domestic violence in France.

The Austrian will be joined in Thessaloniki by his colleague...