Magnificent7 Diary/ 4

The workshop connected to the Magnificent7 festival in Belgrade attracts more participants than ever. 70 young film students and first time filmmakers have registered to hear about the documentary filmmaking in the presence of the filmmakers, whose work have been shown the night before.

Saturday morning Mahdi Fleifel was the one. His film ”A World not Ours” had been overwhelmingly well received in the cinema and the director, with his own words, ”gave his cv” to the workshop participants. ”A World not Ours” is the first professional work of the director, who right now lives in a suitcase, travelling to festivals with his film – next venue is the Berlinale, where he will present a sequel to ”A World not Ours”. For the Dane, who writes these lines, it was great to hear about Fleifel’s fascination of the documentaries of Jon Bang Carlsen – ”Hotel of the Stars” and the two Irish works ”It’s Now or Never” and ”How to invent Reality”, commissioned by me when I was film consultant at the National Film Board of Denmark (Statens Filmcentral).

Woody Allen is a source of inspiration for the director, who at his office in London has a banner saying ”what would Stanley do” referring to Stanley Kubrick. Fleifel went to NFTS, the National film school in England, and what really pushed him to make the film from the refugee camp was watching Ross McElwee’s ”Shermans March”.

He talked about the technical side of the making of the film, where Danish filmmaker and cameraman Jesper Jargil had given him the necessary advice on what camera to buy for the job.

Sunday night’s film is ”La Maison de la Radio” by French Nicolas Philibert.

http://www.magnificent7festival.org/pages/Program_eng.html 

Share your love
Tue Steen Müller
Tue Steen Müller

Müller, Tue Steen
Documentary Consultant and Critic, DENMARK

Worked with documentary films for more than 20 years at the Danish Film Board, as press officer, festival representative and film consultant/commissioner. Co-founder of Balticum Film and TV Festival, Filmkontakt Nord, Documentary of the EU and EDN (European Documentary Network).
Awards: 2004 the Danish Roos Prize for his contribution to the Danish and European documentary culture. 2006 an award for promoting Portuguese documentaries. 2014 he received the EDN Award “for an outstanding contribution to the development of the European documentary culture”. 2016 The Cross of the Knight of the Order for Merits to Lithuania. 2019 a Big Stamp at the 15th edition of ZagrebDox. 2021 receipt of the highest state decoration, Order of the Three Stars, Fourth Class, for the significant contribution to the development and promotion of Latvian documentary cinema outside Latvia. In 2022 he received an honorary award at DocsBarcelona’s 25th edition having served as organizer and programmer since the start of the festival.
From 1996 until 2005 he was the first director of EDN (European Documentary Network). From 2006 a freelance consultant and teacher in workshops like Ex Oriente, DocsBarcelona, Archidoc, Documentary Campus, Storydoc, Baltic Sea Forum, Black Sea DocStories, Caucadoc, CinéDOC Tbilisi, Docudays Kiev, Dealing With the Past Sarajevo FF as well as programme consultant for the festivals Magnificent7 in Belgrade, DOCSBarcelona, Verzio Budapest, Message2Man in St. Petersburg and DOKLeipzig. Teaches at the Zelig Documentary School in Bolzano Italy.

Articles: 3932