A film blog by Allan Berg Nielsen & Tue Steen Müller
A film blog by Allan Berg Nielsen & Tue Steen Müller
Latvian Masters One is no longer here, another is alive and kicking: Juris Podnieks and Ivars Seleckis. Names in Latvian and world documentary history. Directors and cameramen who have formed my understanding of what a good documentary is. “Podnieks on Podnieks”…
First day of pitching. 12 projects were presented. From Belarus, Poland, Estonia, Ukraine, Latvia, Sweden, Russia, Finland, Lithuania. All countries around the Baltic Sea – apart from Belarus and Ukraine. 16-20 panelists on the screen, most of the filmmakers equally…
Onion Award for Best Film in the Main Competition: Epicentro (Austria, France)Directed by Hubert Sauper Young Onion Award for Best Film by First or Second Time Director: A Tunnel (Georgia, Germany)Directed by Nino Orjjnikide, Vano Arsenishvili Onion Seed Award for Best Student…
Hybrid Edition… How can film festivals survive? How can we adapt to the new reality of 2020? How can we re-define film festivals without crowded cinemas, without vibrant Q&A sessions with international guests, without the dialogue between filmmakers and the…
It is a post-festum post this one. I was in the jury at the Sarajevo FF, I was writing a bit about the lovely MakeDox in Skopje so I had no time to follow DokuFest in Prizren, a festival I…
BSD – Baltic Sea Docs “We express the support for the people of Belarus, who are witnessing the brutality of the failing regime. We stand for the freedom of expression, human rights, and democratic governing of the state – all…
Nordisk Panorama Film Festival celebrates the very best of Nordic docs and short films. With a focus on Nordic films produced over the last production year, the competition programme is the very core of the festival. Out of…
14 films are to be found in the competitive category “Best Nordic Documentary”, 18 in the “New Nordic Voices”, that also includes fiction and animation films. This is the focus of this post, won’t bother you with my very little…
… and what a pleasure for a huge fan of Baltic documentaries that – on the initiative of Nordisk Panorama and with the collaboration of the Baltic film institutes/centres and Baltic Sea Docs – a delegation of fine filmmakers from…
I have written several posts about the Sarajevo FF and more will follow. But let me leave it for a while to put a focus on the festival 645 km to the South, in Skopje, North Macedonia, MAKEDOX is the…
…Subtitle: Are there Good People in Terrible Times? In these unprecedented times, when it seems that the world we used to know will not exist in the future, truth-seeking and fact-checking are more important than ever. But the anxieties of…
Baltic Sea Docs (BSD) takes place from the end of August and one week into September. The industry programme involves a tutor-based workshop where the 24 selected projects are being discussed and the trailers shown and equally commented on. At…
More about what happens in Sarajevo, or rather organised online by the festival, in this case by the Cinelink, that presents the Cinelink Talks 2020 from August 15-20. In collaboration with the training programme Documentary Campus and the trade magazine Screen…
I was in Moscow last year as member of the short film jury and I have followed the festival since 2015, when I was in the online feature jury – together with – among others – Viktor Kossakovsky. I have great…
Due to greatly increased concern regarding the epidemiological situation in Sarajevo, and record cases of COVID-19 infection in the city in the past several days, we at the Sarajevo Film Festival have made the decision to conduct the 2020 edition…
For those who can travel in Denmark: I Kerteminde ligger et dejligt museum, Johannes Larsen Museet med værker af Larsen selv og Fritz Syberg og andre af Fynboerne. Dejligt sted med en have, adgang til malerens hjem hvor han boede…
First a copy paste from the press release that came to the inbox yesterday: ”We are thrilled to announce the projects selected for Nordisk Panorama Forum and wish to congratulate all who made the cut! 100 new documentary projects were submitted to the…
I knew nothing about basketball before watching ”The Last Dance”. I had never heard the name Michael Jordan before, or NBA, or Chicago Bulls. Football – and Barca – is my passion. Now I ask myself, why I – in…
A new film project by veteran documentary director and cinematographer Ivars Seleckis will be presented at the 24th edition of Baltic Sea Docs that starts on the 29th of August. The brief description goes like this: ”The documentary “The Land” will…
Riga, Latvia. 29.08 – 4.09.2020. The 24th Baltic Sea Forum for Documentaries. For “professional filmmakers from the Baltic Sea region, as well as from Eastern and Central Europe”. It started in Denmark, had some years in the Baltic capitals before…
They had no choice the good people behind the Georgian documentary film festival CinéDOC. They already had organised three summer schools, this was to be the fourth and it had to be online… the intensive workshop dedicated to promising filmmakers from Georgia,…
Nick Cunningham, brilliant interviewer and reporter for the trade magazine BusinessDocEurope, has made an interview with artistic director of IDFA Orwa Nyrabia, who as usual talks clear and precise about the situation for documentaries in these times of lockdown. I…
The first Italian online festival to draw to a close inside a cinema Biografilm celebrates both the reopening of cinemas in Italy and the winning films of the 2020 edition, which, for the first time, was accessible for free online…
16th edition, June 5-15, with Finnish Leena Pasanen as the new director for a festival that has the subtitle ”International Celebration of Lives”. There is an international competition with 12 films (with films like Danish „It Takes a Family” by…
(with the) Program extended by limited online screenings The International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA) is planning its 33rd edition. With Dutch cinemas now re-opening, IDFA is looking forward to holding the festival in theaters from November 18th to 29th, albeit with…
… and Fipresci Award Having watched all the competitive films the International Documentary Jury of the 60th Krakow Film Festival consisting of: Łukasz Żal – chairman (Poland), Renata Santoro (Italy), Tod Lending (USA), Eva Mulvad (Denmark), Martin Horyna (Czech Republic)…
This is a copy paste from the Krakow FF website of today: The 60th Krakow Film Festival invites you to screenings of award-winning films at the Pod Baranami Cinema in Krakow! The pioneering decision to organize this year’s entire Krakow…
And what are your thoughts about that? The moderator of the pitching session – sitting in her home somewhere in North America – asks the sales agent sitting in her home in Zürich Switzerland. The pitching team is from Norway, the project deals with people…
I have been brought back to thinking about the different ways films start, while watching the Krakow FF international competition of this year. I think we all agree about the importance of catching the attention of the audience from the…
60th edition! Wow! And then you have to go online! Instead of having all of us invited passionate film lovers sit and applaud one of the most important documentary festivals ever. A challenge for you but I am sure the…
Take a look at the photo above. Taken by the photographer F Fagregas: A concert with The Boss, Bruce Springsteen at Nou Camp. Where I have been several times with Joan Gonzalez, director of DocsBarcelona. Last night at the award…
Tonight the opening of the Krakow Film Festival takes place at 7pm. The festival 2020 goes online – with the same high quality in selection as always. Competition programmes, thematic sections, a Dragon Award for the master Peter Forgacs, films…
3 months ago a state of alarm forced us to leave the office from where we always produce DocsBarcelona. In this context, this edition has been prepared: looking out the window to see the few things that were happening in…
Yesterday a masterclass was held with Danish editor Niels Pagh Andersen in conversation with me. I was happy to see that almost 130 attended the class with ”the Skinny Romantic”, as he has been called by Ai WeiWei, whose ”Vivos”…
Zane Balcus wrote this essay: New features of something to come were felt in February during Berlinale. Then only a few people were seen on the streets in face masks, but hand disinfectants were regularly provided in the toilets of…
Strange feeling… DocsBarcelona opened last night, online, with the director of it all, Joan Gonzalez (the man in the middle, as toastmaster) calling upon the Head of Program and the Head of Industry to come with comments on what is…
“Krāslava bridge is the first bridge built over the river Daugava in the territory of Latvia—a gate for the Daugava river from Belarus to Latvia”, explains Laila Pakalniņa. “Every film is about time, but ours maybe a bit more than…
Organised by Núria Campreciós from the DocsBarcelona team, I had a chat with the Young Jury Reteena – who has to decide the “Award to the best film of the Reteena Itinerary, awarded by young jury Reteena, made up of…
… coming up. Grants were given by the National Film Centre. For 8 documentaries, most of them to be realised by producers and directors I have met and valued during the many years, I have followed the documentary scene in…
Agnieszka from Fine Day Promotion invited me to watch a new film by Tomasz Wolski, ”An Ordinary Country” – look at the great film poster above, which reveals the content of the film perfectly, surveillance, not of today (could it…
I met – on skype – Atahualpa and Diana Lichy last week for a conversation about ”Memorias de un Tiempo Eterno” that is selected, as one of four, for the Rough Cut Pitch at the upcoming DocsBarcelona, taking place May…
Baltic Sea Forum for Documentaries (BSD) is the most important documentary training and pitching event in the Baltic countries, taking place in Riga, Latvia. The 24th edition is scheduled to take place from 1 – 6 September. The call for…
This is a very good offer for those interested in editing. Copied from the FB of the Service: RCS – Rough Cut Service presents 5 online sessions on the art of editing from Monday to Friday May 11. – 15.…
When Anders Østergaard received the Carl T. Dreyer Award five years ago, these were accompanying words on this site: Østergaard has developed his own original and playful take on how to treat creatively the past… it was just after he and…
Just watched the one hour online discussion initiated by DocuDays ua, here is the link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gZUMw3nEwF0&feature=youtu.be&fbclid=IwAR3kxqPXIBBRRAelRQLkO-e6Fu8-sFTzXgDTQDModXkGbFPzzmV6XNphuR0 with these people taking part: Ondřej Kamenický – director of International Human Rights Documentary Film Festival One World; Melanie Iredale – deputy Director of Sheffield…
From one award ceremony to the next, thanks to Online. Two nights ago I was in Kiev for the Docudays ua, last night I was in Nyon for the ceremony of the Visions du Réel, where many awards were given…
I have been to many award ceremonies at the Docudays ua festival in Kiev. I was there again last night. Online. Which was of course different from being in a cinema hall with hundred of other film enthusiasts. Who express their…
Being on many mailing lists… these days I get bombarded with online offers for films to watch, conferences to follow, from festivals or production companies or distributors. It is indeed overwhelming, and lovely at the same time. Overwhelming, because how…
I have copy-pasted a part of the press release text about the competitive Panorama program, naming the top director names that will have their film presented in the online festival – reserved for the Spanish audience. Check the festival page…
DocsBarcelona has launched its program for the 23rd edition of a festival with an industry section. I will with other posts get back to the industry activities – conferences, masterclass, speed meetings, public pitch, rough cut session. The festival includes…