BELLUM – THE DAEMON OF WAR In Swedish cinemas DECEMBER 3!
“a visually stunning, provocative and lyrical essay” Business Doc Europe
After a very exciting and successful festival tour around the world, BELLUM is finally coming home! Read more about the film and book your tickets here.
PRESS AGENT: Sara Henrikson sara@smakpr.se
WORLD SALES: Deckert Distribution Liselot Verbrugge liselot@deckert-distribution.com
INTERNATIONAL FESTIVAL DISTRIBUTION: Deckert Distribution Hanne Biermann hanne@deckert-distribution.com
We are very happy to announce that our long term friend and director Simón Mesa Soto’s debut feature AMPARO will world premiere in Semaine de la Critique in Cannes in July 2021!!
This is our second collaboration with Simón Mesa Soto, after MADRE which was nominated for Palme d’Or in 2016.
Synopsis After a long night’s shift, Amparo, a single mother of two, returns home to find her children are not there. She soon finds out that her son has been drafted during an army raid and will be sent to the front in a notorious war zone near the border. His fate seems sealed. With only a single day left until his departure, Amparo manages to contact a man who offers to alter Elias’ files and get him out. With nothing much on her side, she embarks on a race against time to free her son in a society ruled by corruption.
We are proud to announce that the documentary “Bellum – The Daemon Of War” by David Herdies and Georg Götmark will have its world premiere at Visions du Réel in the main competition 2021.
Bellum – The Daemon of War is a film of lenses: In the telescope that points towards the stars, in the viewfinder on a photographer’s camera, in the telescopic sight on an assault rifle, and in the cold and calculating eye of a drone as it flies lifeless overhead. Some are lenses that help us to better understand humanity, while others seem built to take that humanity out of the equation. This is the dilemma that lies at the heart of this documentary, in both its content and its creation, a triptych of stories about the ways in which Western nations choose to cope with war, write the narratives of war, the different ways they find to profit from it, and how they film it. Opening on Robert Oppenheimer’s immortal quoting of Hindu scripture following the first nucleartest bombings (those that would lead to the horrors in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945), Bellum – The Daemon of War moves forward to tell a story of war in the present day. A documentary in three parts, it takes us from the bored war veterans of Indian Springs, an air force base for drone pilots just outside Las Vegas; to a photojournalist shooting images in Afghanistan, pictures of trauma to be glanced at later in cozy galleries; to the Swedish engineer developing AI technology for the defense industry, a digital realm that will ultimately encroach on the biological with the most terrible consequences. In an increasingly technocratic world, war has never been so abstracted. Bellum is a documentary that attempts to zoom in from those distant vantage points of silicon and lines of code to the psychological and physical front lines, all the while pondering the question of who, if not everyone, is complicit? It is a question that will ultimately, inevitably, be asked of the filmmakers themselves.
Last year, in spite of the terrible pandemic, we premiered the film at Tribeca FF and managed to do a theatrical release in over 113 cinemas around the world. This year we are very excited to announce that the film is available for streaming worldwide from TODAY!
A big congratulations to the great Dogborn-team for winning Best Project Award during the pitch at the Nordic Co-Production Market at Haugesund!
From the jury’s motivation: “We were impressed by the pitch itself, especially the director’s passionate and personal explanation of her connection to the story.”
Dogborn is directed by Isabella Carbonelli, and produced by David Herdies, Farima Karami and Erik Andersson.
