Wonderful Losers on Vimeo
My dear friend, film director and producer, who if anyone is the one, who follows his film to the audience all over the world, winning audiences and awards, Arunas Matelis has posted this, a xmas gift it is: If you…
Filmkommentaren.dk
A film blog by Allan Berg Nielsen & Tue Steen Müller
Filmkommentaren.dk
A film blog by Allan Berg Nielsen & 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.
Read MoreWonderful Losers on Vimeo
Yugoslavian Architecture 1948-1980
… with the subtitle ”Toward a Concrete Utopia” is an exhibition that runs at Moma (Museum of Modern Art) until January 13. For one who has been visiting Belgrade, Zagreb, Sarajevo, Novi Sad, Pristina, Skopje, Ljubljana… it was a fine…
Oscar Shortlist Long Documentaries
3 of the European documentaries from the EFA award ceremony () are on the Oscar shortlist. The winning film about Bergman and ”A Woman Captured” – a pity – is not there. But on the list of 15 that will…
And the Winner Was Ingmar Bergman…
… at the European Film Awards yesterday, „Bergman, A Year in a Life“ by Jane Magnusson is the title of the Swedish documentary that took home the prize. Which made many angry… Here is what Krakow Film Festival director Krzysztof…
Simon Lereng Wilmont: Olegs Krig
… med undertitlen “En Barndom i Skyggen af Krigen” Freddy Neumann tager sig af pressearbejdet for The Distant Barking of Dogs, som på lørdag måske bliver kåret som Europas bedste dokumentarfilm ved European Film Academy’s ceremoni i Sevilla. Filmen er…
Cordelia Dvorák: Marceline
In the 1980’es I attended Cinéma du Réel in Paris almost every year. It was during the years, where wonderful, charismatic Suzette Glenadel was the director. And where big documentary names like Fred Wiseman and Pedro Costa were introduced to…
Fred Wiseman: Ex Libris – the NY Public Library
Oh, I enjoyed this fresh and inspirational film by the master – is Wiseman really 88 years old – when I watched it, thinking back more than 40 years when I was educated librarian and functioned for some years as…
See Ukraine – through Cinema and Art
Through documentary films, exhibitions and discussions Ukrainians from the art world travel Europe to present their country and its search for an identity. It’s “a cultural diplomacy project of HRDFF Docudays UA organized with support from the Open Society Initiative…
Wang Bing on Doc Alliance
… with the title “The Landscape of Chinese Everydayness” – An offer you can’t refuse! DocAlliance keeps on the high quality in its program policy on dafilms.com. This time with 6 of Wang Bing’s documentaries from China. They are long…
BlekendaalThe Man Who Looked Beyond the Horizon
In a way it’s an old fashioned film. In storytelling. And I mean that as a compliment. The director plays with the film medium, jumps around in time, gives references to slapstick movies, Buster Keaton and others, in the search…
Katarzyna Lesisz: Dancing for You
Get up Wiktor, says grandmother, you have to go to school. Wiktor, 12 years old, goes to a ballet school, where the teacher trains him, and when not in school he plays with a friend, or is with the caring…
IDFA Post-Festival Comments
I was in Amsterdam from Monday till Friday. 4 nights at NH Carlton Hotel, the festival centre close to everything and the place where you meet old and dear friends. Including the busy artistic director Orwa Nyrabia, whose first edition…
Three Russian Documentaries at IDFA
… which all deserve to be mentioned and noticed by other festivals. “How Big is the Galaxy” (Photo) by Ksenia Elyan (Russia, Estonia, 72 mins.), with Max Tuula and Maria Gavrilova as producers as well as late Alexander Rastorguev for…
Andrei Kutsila: Summa
I was very happy to know that the new film by Belorussian director Andreu Kutsila received – in the midlength category – the main award at IDFA for “Summa”, a Belorussian/Polish coproduction with Miroslaw Dembinski as the Polish partner. In…
Viktor Kossakovsky: Aquarela
Normally when I go to an art exhibition, I walk around alone, stop in front of the paintings, it’s silent, maybe I talk with the one who are with me, but I love this chance of stepping into a world…
IDFA at the Eye Filmmuseum Amsterdam
I went to the Eye that everyone has praised during its few years of existence. And it is really something. I crossed the water with the ferry next to the Central Station, 2 mins. it took to get to the…
Bettina Perut & Iván Osnovikoff: Los Reyes
The film was screened and there was a half hour talk afterwards. These IDFA talks, I understood, are formatted to have no questions from the audience. I sensed a disappointment in the hall, probably many would have loved to get…
Eszter Hajdú: Hungary 2018
I got a mail from the producer of this film, Sandor Mester: “Hungary 2018 is not at the IDFA Forum because it is already in the Feature Length Competition this year and it was not there last year because it…
IDFA Winners 2018
IDFA Competition for Feature-Length Documentary Anand Patwardhan won the IDFA Award for Best Feature-Length Documentary (€ 15.000) with Reason (India). The film is a broad-ranging examination of Indian society, where secular rationalists are hunted down as they attempt to stem the rising…
Dziga Vertov: Anniversary of the Revolution
Tuesday night I was back in Saint Petersburg after two days at the IDFA festival in Amsterdam. In the cinema. On screen. No, wrong – I was back in Petrograd 1918 through the outstanding film historical event organized so brilliantly…
Piter – My love
I am leaving Saint Petersburg after a few days with a conference and a re-visit of the places, where I have been during the last 20 years… That explains the headline of this post. Tomorrow – I am writing this…
Saint Petersburg Film School Conference
I was at the opening of The PiterKiT International Student Film Festival in Piter – Saint Petersburg. On Wednesday. Huge celebration, three hours with music, clips from films and speeches, maaany speeches due to the celebration of 100 years of…
IDFA Opening Words from Kaag and Nyrabia
This text is taken from the website of the IDFA festival: The 31st IDFA has just officially been opened by Minister for Foreign Trade and Development Cooperation Sigrid Kaag in Koninklijk Theater Carré with Aboozar Amini’s film Kabul, City in…
Aboozar Amini: Kabul, City in the Wind
It’s about creating the feeling of being there. To quote Richard Leacock. First time feature length director Afghan Aboozar Amini, who emigrated from the country when a teenager, was educated in Holland and in the UK, does that. Takes us…
Conference on Film Schools in Saint Petersburg
I have for years been visiting Saint Petersburg – for the Message2Man festival or for seminars/workshops organized by dear friends Ludmila Nazaruk and Viktor Skubey. In 2016 Skubey organized the conference “How to Reach the Audience”, which was filmed and…
The Five EFA Documentary Nominations
Don’t want to start arguing that this or that documentary film could also have been nominated – the five that made it are all very good films, congratulations. The winner will be announced December 15 at the ceremony in Sevilla.…
Israel: The “Loyalty in Culture” bill
… a major threat for freedom, a major threat for cinema Is the headline for at text I received from filmmaker Avi Mograbi, who wants readers/filmmakers outside Israel to know about a proposal put forward by the Minister of Culture…
DOK Leipzig
… 2018 ended. Was it good or bad? I normally watch all the films in the main international competition, the long documentaries to make my own hit list. This year it was not possible. I watched three, the winner of…
Sergey Loznitsa: The Trial
No doubt, Sergey Loznitsa is the master of making creative archive documentaries – a part of his impressive oeuvre that also includes fiction films and documentaries like “Austerlitz” – in the archive films he stands out with films like…
Sergey Loznitsa: The Trial/ 2
I started working on a film about Stalin’s show trials, which were held in the USSR in 1930s, a couple of years ago. My initial idea was to edit the footage from different trials in order to show how the…
DOK Leipzig Vitaly Mansky and Putin
You have to be careful with “vonhörensagen” but in this case it had its influence on the talk with Vitaly Mansky, that took place friday afternoon at the Polish Institute in Leipzig, a couple of hours after his film had…
DOK Leipzig 2018 Awards
A piece of the press release that came out from DOK Leipzig an hour ago, check the whole list and the jury motivations on the festival’s website, link below: “I Had a Dream” (photo) by Claudia Tosi has won the…
DOK Leipzig 2018 LBJ and Jan Palach
I would have loved to see more from the Retrospective 68 – An Open Score but I was anderswo engagiert, i.e. introducing the Lithuanian retrospective and moderating the discussions afterwards BUT I saw the last section, number 7 which was…
Viktor Kossakovsky at DOK Leipzig
I have known him for years – since back to the days of the Bornholm festival in the 90’es. He came to Leipzig for one screening of the film and for a talk. We hugged and I told him that…
Herzog´s Missing Questions…
An understatement: They were angry my friends from Lithuania, Georgia and Ukraine. After having watched Werner Herzog and André Singer’s “Meeting Gorbachev”. Nothing, absolutely nothing about the violent Soviet attacks that took place in Vilnius, in Riga, in Georgia… Did…
Werner Herzog – Ecstatic Truths
10.30 in the morning, Kupferstrasse in Leipzig. There is a line outside the Kupferhalle, where Werner Herzog is to hold his masterclass or as the DOK Leipzig organisers called it, “a conversation” with Kristina Jaspers, who knows about the director…
DOK Leipzig 2018 Opening
Full house in Cinestar, two cinemas with people ready to watch “Meeting Gorbachev” by André Singer and Werner Herzog. Two wonderfully short and good official speeches came from representatives from the city of Leipzig and from Sachsen. A longer one…
André Singer on Meeting Gorbachev
From variety.com I received a very informative interview with André Singer on his making of the documentary with Werner Herzog, written by Damon Wise. The film is to be shown at the Ji.hlava Festival and opens the DOK Leipzig tomorrow…
Martina Melilli: My Home in Libya
One year ago good friend, producer Stefano Tealdi sent me a rough cut of what is now a finished film that has been screened in Locarno, Chicago and is in the programme of DOKLeipzig, that starts next week. I found…
Rugilé Barzdžiukaitė: Acid Forest
I have been there. On the wonderful Curonian Spit in Lithuania: The dunes, the sea, the forest, a place to relax – and a place where you find drama and at the same time are invited to reflect on our…
Lithuanian Cinema Travels
Here we are – watch our films, meet our filmmakers. It seems like this is the policy of the Lithuanian Film Centre this year, where the population-wise small country celebrates its centenary. According to an article in Cineuropa – link…
IDFA Press Conference
There he was, Orwa Nyrabia, the new artistic director of IDFA, to be watched through streaming yesterday afternoon. I saw the first half of his presentation and could only nod, when he started telling us press people that documentaries are…
No Eastern European projects at IDFA Forum 2018
Here comes IDFA’s response to the question of no Eastern European projects in the selection of IDFA 2018’s Forum, sent today by the artistic director Orwa Nyrabia: The fact that there are no East European projects in IDFA’s Forum 2018…
IDFA Forum/ 2
Below you have the presentation from IDFA (International Documentary Film Festival) of the Forum, no doubt the gathering of documentary film professionals, who want funding and/or publicity of the film, that they are working on. The event has been there…
IDFA Forum/ 1
The Forum at IDFA is for documentary filmmakers the place to launch the new projects, they want the documentary community to be aware of, and eventually be interested in, eventually to invest in. Projects are presented/pitched followed by meetings. It…
ArtdocFest in Riga
Well, I should have been in Riga now, where the International Film Festival is one day old, and were it goes on until the end of the month. It is a festival with many sections: a tribute to Ingmar Bergman,…
Astra Film Festival
… in Sibiu, Romania celebrates its 25th edition. For that reason Cineuropa brings an interview with the founding director Dumitru Budrala. He looks back and makes a status on the state of the documentary art. Here is a quote –…
Meet Gorbachev at Hauptbahnhof!
… on a big screen… for free, read what DOKLeipzig has to offer its film interested audience, taken from the website, what a good idea: The East Hall of Leipzig’s Central Station is turning again into a festival cinema during…
Heather Lenz: Kusama Infinity
Det er herligt, at Camera Film har taget Kusama-filmen til Danmark. Og jeg krydser fingre for at et stort publikum vil tage godt imod filmen; jeg tænker ikke alene på de mange, som besøgte den ældre japanske dames vidunderlige udstilling…
Lithuanian Documentaries –A Poetic Look at Reality
There is a grand focus on Lithuania at DOKLeipzig this year. Festival director Leena Pasanen has since her time at the Finnish television YLE been an admirer of the small Baltic country’s impressive documentary tradition. She stands behind a uniqe…