British-Danish cinematographer Anthony Dodd Mantle received the "Golden Camera 300" for lifetime achievement at the 43rd edition of the Manaki Brothers festival. Film critic Blagoja Kunovski - Dore will say about Mantle's oeuvre that it is enriched with dozens more films and TV series, which are also his specialty (among the more striking, thematically and as a portrait of the controversial Putin, "Interviews with Putin" directed by the American Oliver Stone).

Born in 1955 in Witney, Oxford, UK, where he attended high school, Mantle says that even though he lives in Denmark, he still wakes up feeling English. But instead of studying in Oxford or Cambridge, from 1985 to 1989 he studied camera at the National Film School in Copenhagen, when he began to live and work in Denmark, thus becoming a naturalized Dane of British origin, explains Kunovski.

After his studies, he begins his collaboration with several Danish directors - bearers of the new Danish film wave, the most significant of which is the Dogme period, and becomes one of its creators. In 1998, he will shoot the first dogma film "Family Celebration", which brings director Thomas Vinterberg world fame. Kunovski explains that with his filming work, Dodd Mantle will draw attention, because the essence of the dogma expression and its ascetic rules were based on the method - how each dogma film will be shot (mainly using a hand-held camera) and obtaining a film photograph without artificial lighting. sources, but natural.

In 1999, Mantle's third dogma film follows, the contemporary social drama "Mifune" by Seren Craig Jacobsen, and in the same year, the American independent author, the young Harmony Korine, seeks the cooperation of the experienced Mantle, with whom he realizes the first American dogma film - "Julien the donkey", a participant in the competition of the 21st "Manaki Brothers" in 2000, adds Kunovski.

Collaboration with the main initiator and founder of the Dogme movement - Lars Von Trier, from the two films of the provocative trilogy about America: "City of Dogs" (2003) and "Manderlay" (2005), to the later, also a Cannes participant, is also inevitable. the more controversial "Antichrist" (2009), in which Mantle demonstrates his supreme cinematographic mastery.

After studying, he collaborated with the Danish director Lone Scherfig in "The Birthday Trip", and later in "Just Like Home" (2007). In 2003, he also returned to director Thomas Vinterberg as cinematographer on his film All About Love, with Sean Penn, Joaquin Phoenix and Claire Danes.

Mantle extends the collaboration beyond the dogma circle, creating several landmark films, such as Danny Boyle's "127 Hours" (2010), with James Franco in the role of an authentic mountaineer, who is stuck between rocks for 127 hours, struggling to survive in the environment in a canyon in Utah.

In "The Last King of Scotland", Mantle portrays the actor Forest Whitaker, in the person of the notorious African dictator Idi Amin, and in "They killed my father first" (2017), with the director Angelina Jolie, they reconstruct the shocking authentic events of the drama of a Cambodian freedom activist who survived the horrors of the deadly Khmer Rouge regime, says Kunovski.

The triumph of Mantle's career is in 2009, when he won one of the eight Oscars for "The Poor Millionaire", directed by Danny Boyle. The film won eight Oscars, including for best cinematographer and director, as well as for best film, adds Kunovski, concluding: This is how the tandem collaboration with Boyle, with whom in 2001 they filmed "Completely Naked Exhalation in Paradise" and "Whore", was crowned. . This was followed by 28 Days Later (2002) and Millions (2004).

(The text was published in the TV and Film Press on August 19, 2022 in the newspaper "Sloboden Pechat")