A film blog by Allan Berg Nielsen & Tue Steen Müller
A film blog by Allan Berg Nielsen & Tue Steen Müller
The Helsinki Documentary Film Festival DocPoint takes place January 29 to February 4. It is as usual a festival that picks the best of the best and of course has a focus on new Finnish documentaries. But allow us to…
He died in 2016, Andrzej Wajda, 90 years old. A quote from Guardian’s obituary: ”Polish cinema burst upon the world in the 1950s with Andrzej Wajda’s war trilogy, A Generation, Kanał and Ashes and Diamonds, with the director becoming the…
Some films do not need the pressure of actuality that many broadcasters and festivals want for their audience. Many films would benefit from resting in the editing phase for the maker(s) to come back and look at the material with…
It’s a period of nominations for awards here there and everywhere. The national ones, the international ones. ”Who can bear to be forgotten”, as a line in a famous classic documentary goes. It means something to be on a list,…
… har tre instruktører: Maud Nycander, Jannike Åhlund og Kerstil Grunditz Brennan. Førstnævnte stod også bag (sammen med Kristina Lindström) filmen og tv-serien om ”Palme”, som vi roste her på bloggen, link nedenfor, for at være ”en suveræn fortalt fortælling”.…
Julén with the first name Staffan, experienced Swedish documentarian, shares the same appreciation for Svetlana Alexievich as I do. Click the link below for a text I wrote about her after reading her beautiful book ”Second-Hand Time” during the summer…
It’s not only because he is Danish… but also because it is such a good poster that reflects, what the film is about, the hard job that Chris Anker Sørensen (nickname in Danish: Oksen fra Hammel) and many others have…
“It was the last shooting for our upcoming documentary THE JUMP, starring former United States Secretary of State and National Security Advisor Dr. Henry Kissinger. It was a huge honour to have the opportunity to conduct this interview for our…
It’s a Dane writing this review. Important to say as the main character of this film, Ahmed Dualeh, is Danish, well he is born in Somalia but has been living in Denmark for 47 years – and he speaks the…
Per tradition I have gone through the texts on this site to find, what I see as the best documentaries of 2017. I stopped at 16 titles – half of them come from the Eastern part of Europe. Am I…
Marta Prus: Over the Limit Leonard Helmrich:The Long Season Talal Derki: Of Fathers and Sons Simon Lereng Wilmont: The Distant Barking of Dogs Mila Turajlic: The Other Side of Everything Mohamed Siam: Amal Mindaugas…
In the beginning of this month, December 2017, the Armenian photographer published a slate of photos and a text for ajjazeera, click the link below and you can see and read it all. Here is some of Grigoryants text: In…
The times they are a changing… Years ago I met Yulia Grigoryants several times in the Caucasus region. In Tbilisi and in her own country Armenia’s capital Jerevan. She worked with local Bars Media and was the producer of the…
Ahhh again! Someone asking you to fill in a questionnaire – were you happy with the festival, the workshop, the hotel you stayed at, the dinner you enjoyed and paid for… You know it and you don’t like it. And…
… DA standing for DocAlliance, “the creative partnership of 7 key European documentary film festivals…”. We do it again, recommend our readers to sign up for a subscription for this unique quality vod. €5 per month! “The end of the…
Got the newsletter from Czech IDF (Institute of Documentary Film) yesterday. One of the news highlighted was that Miroslav Janek has made a new film that will be released December 21. Janek is one of the heroes of filmkommentaren.dk, we…
… by 25% in 2018, according to a headline in FilmNewEurope of today. If I get it right there will be 5m€ for film in 2018 – in 2017 it was 6m€, in 2016 6,5m€. No details are put forward,…
If you are interested in photography it is always a good idea, when you are in Paris, to visit Maison Européenne de la Photographie, a building in three floors with interesting exhibitions. We were there today and apart from a…
I have only this source – The Moscow Times – but no surprise that the festival run by director Vitaly Mansky (photo) can create conflicts due to the programming of Mansky, who has also chosen to show controversial Russian films…
Wow… I fully understand that the jury of IDFA’s Docs & Kids chose this film to be the winner of the far too often overlooked genre of short documentaries, not to talk about docs for kids, who at least until…
The film was at IDFA 2017. Placed in the category Kids&Docs and Student Film Competition. Another very impressive piece of Georgian documentary: One character who has a dream and visualises it for the film. A boy who is occupied 24…
What a nice publication to have in hand: Serbian Docs 2017 There is a spirit of optimism in the catalogue, not only from the list of the many documentaries that are already out there but also from the list of…
No surprise and well deserved… the Polish documentary ”Communion” by Anna Zamecka was the winner of the documentary award of EFA, European Film Academy, announced in Berlin Saturday night. I am not a member of EFA but having talked to…
Grand exhibition at Parisian Grand Palais to be strongly recommended. Irving Penn, a photographer who was a true believer of the strenght of form and arrangement, but who also had the documentary curiosity, when he travelled for the fashion magazine…
From 170 to 15 and then on January 23 down to 5 nominations. Here are the 15 films are listed below in alphabetical order by title and director: “Abacus: Small Enough to Jail” (Steve James) “Chasing Coral” (Jeff Orlowski) “City…
”Life can seem pretty overwhelming at times, particularly when you’re growing up. And it’s not always easy to talk to your parents or friends about your problems. Fortunately, the “Kindertelefoon” (Child Helpline) in the Netherlands provides a listening ear…” That’s…
Of course the previous post about the financial cuts of the TV3, the Catalan public television makes you sad as you know that there is an audience for creative documentaries in Catalunya and Spain in general. Which makes me praise…
Below follows a translated article from the Catalan newspaper Ara´s online version written by journalist and critic Xavi Serra, who is also covering the festival DocsBarcelona. is one of the main Catalan newspapers: “During the feast of the candidates for…
It’s a pleasure to see that Serbian documentarians get international recogniiton. They deserve it. And I know what I am talking about. Since the beginning of this century I have had the privilege to go to Belgrade to help Svetlana…
Boris, I watched it two times your film, so full of rhymes I was not stressed, felt actually quite impressed I loved the voice of Iggy Pop, does that make me an intellectual snob? The cabaret music made me glad,…
Documentary director Fredrik Gertten (the two Bananas films, Bikes vs. Cars, Zlatan) left his editing room in Malmø last night to go and see Ai WeiWei’s ”Human Flow” at a preview screening – the film premieres tomorrow theatrically in Sweden.…
The location is Hnutove, Eastern Ukraine, war zone for years. A village from where – for the very same reason – many Ukrainian families have moved away. But not grandmother Alexandra and 10 year old Oleg, the main characters of…
The Copenhagen audience will next week be treated with the best of the best of documentaries next week. “Machines” by Rahul Jain will have a two week run from wednesday in Empire Bio. My review, highest marks, can be read…
The portuguese director Sérgio Tréfaut/ Serge Tréfaut () was back in Copenhagen with the film Treblinka. The screening took place at the Cinématheque at the Film House. The Cinématheque that we so often have praised on this site for its…
Happy to congratulate Mila and Srbijanka Turajlic, filmmaking daughter and main character of “The Other Side of Everything” with the IDFA Award for Best Feature-Length Documentary. As well as the many others around the film – the producer Carine Chichkowsky…
I have given high marks for 7 of the 15 films at the IDFA competition for long documentaries. There are four films that I have not seen and four I have seen but nor written about. Here follows the mini-reviews/notes…
It stands out. I can not avoid superlatives. And I can not express in words, in a language that is not mine, how I feel after having seen Talal Derki’s new film. Or how I felt while watching it. It…
Unbelievable. Modern slavery. In a country that is a member of the European Union. Shocking. It will be an audience favourite. At the begining of the film I thought “but what is the position of the filmmaker, why does she…
Helmrich is using the Single Shot Cinema technique, a style he developed and perfected himself. He chooses to actively engage with his subject rather than remaining a neutral outsider – a position that typifies Direct Cinema. He aims to record…
It was presented in the dokinkubator session in Malmø and I had met with the director in Prague, when it was still in development. I saw the finished film here at IDFA in Amsterdam with high expectations. I was not…
I am biased. I have known the director Mila Turajlic for the many years that I have taken part in the Magnificent7 festival in Belgrade. And I have shared opinions about the films, we have shown at the festival –…
Of course you – as a Dane – are sceptical, when someone wants to make a film about one of the superstars of professional bicycling. Our national hero Jørgen Leth has made, what is to say about the suffering, the…
Look at that picture from a bridge in Amsterdam, where the biggest documentary film festival is taking place these days. It was here that I ran into Ally Derks this afternoon. Are you alone here, she asked, where is your…
The day after the opening of IDFA the director of “Amal”, Egyptian Mohammed Siam met the participants of the IDFA Academy to talk about the film, which they had all seen the night before or that very same morning. Siam…
Thursday was a beautiful evening for the Lithuanian director Mindaugas Survila, who celebrated his world premiere at IDFA with a full hall in the Munt Cinema 9. He was there with his wife, as was the editor Danielius Kokanauskis, who…
It was a brilliant IDFA opening night yesterday at the amazing Royal Theater Carré in Amsterdam. Film and tribute to Ally Derks, who has stepped down from her post as director of IDFA that she co-founded 30 years ago. The…
The second print edition of the documentary magazine, MODERN TIMES REVIEW, that took over when DOX was stopped by its publisher EDN (European Documentary Network), is out. It was in the festival bags at DOK Leipzig and it will be…
Not all films can go to the competitive sections, of course not, so festivals arrange strands like Panorama and Masters, at IDFA both are there, with 32 titles in the first and 29 in the latter, where also older films…
… at the upcoming IDFA with the title ”Shifting Perspectives: The Arab World” with a clear intention: ”IDFA offers a counterbalance to Western stereotypes that ignore the complexity of the Arabic-speaking world and keep ‘the Arab’ at arm’s length, as…
… like many other festivals have done holding up a sign saying ”Free Oleg Sentsov”, the Ukrainian filmmaker who was arrested by the Russian authorities in March 2014 in Crimea and sentenced to 20 years in jail on suspicion of…