A film blog by Allan Berg Nielsen & Tue Steen Müller
A film blog by Allan Berg Nielsen & Tue Steen Müller
Respect! All right, we can get no official support due to the economical crisis, but we will make the festival anyway. We will finance it out of own pocket. This was the thought of a group of independent Russian filmmakers,…
So, there it is, the film about the Lithuanian photographer Vitas Luckus (1943-1987), his life, his art and first of all his love story with muse and wife, Tatyana. It is made by Giedre Zickyte, who has been working on…
… and the winner is, was the headline of the e-mail I received from Francesca Scalisi today. She sums up the experience with the Flying Film Festival, that she was initiating, like this: It went so well that probably we…
I have to go to words from literature, as we normally do when writing about films. This Ukrainian documentary is prose and poetry and essay at the same time. It is informative and emotional. You learn from it as you…
Newsletter from DocAlliance with generous offers to watch films FOR FREE in the month of May. Strong recommendation from me to (re)watch Jørgen Leth and Ole John’s ”66 Scenes from America” (photo: Andy Warhol and Jørgen Leth). This classic was…
Subtitled The Tel Aviv International Documentary Film Festival, DocAviv, 7-16.5.15, has launched its programme and it looks well thought and categorized in themes, that apart from the traditional Israeli and International competition are ”Art and Culture”, ”Art” and ”Depth of…
Simon Kilmurry will be missed in pitching sessions around the world. He has several times been nominated as the best commissioning editor at idfa in Amsterdam. Personally I have had the pleasure to moderate sessions, where he was a panelist…
She is nine years old, lives with her grandmother, her mother is ill and her father, she does not see a lot. This is the background that you pick up gradually as this sensitive, well-made and cleverly thought film goes…
I have to confess that I have no idea of what the young physicist Konstantin talks about to himself, when he sits writing his equations in his datcha or when he tries to make his students interested in physics at…
This is the kind of portrait documentary, where you learn a lot. In this case you watch the film with open mouth whispering to yourself, ”this can’t be true” even if you know from other media that this kind of…
Synopsis from director: This film tells the story of the previous year, that for me began, when Maidan had started and maybe didn’t end yet. The whole year we have lived in the atmosphere of revolution, then war. Whatever you…
A press release came in this morning from Andrea Pruchová, Doc Alliance. As usual well written and precise in information. Easy to quote from. As a true fan of Doc Alliance I hurry to bring you the newest from the…
This article is brought now because the film has its international premiere at HotDocs in Toronto , tomorrow, April 25. A long prologue: On this site Herz Frank (1926 – 2013) has an iconic status. Co-editor Allan Berg and I…
Thanks to a Cineuropa website (very actual, well written and edited, covering also a lot of documentary events and films) and a link from the article, I got to know about the Play-Doc 2015 festival (Festival Internacional de Documentals) that…
The 46th (!) edition of Visions du Réel is going on with still a couple of days left. Before the festival Doc Alliance brought an interview with the festival director for some years, Luciano Barisone, a man who is not…
The 30th edition of the DOK.fest in Munich invites the audience to watch five of the Israeili documentary master Avi Mograbi’s films. Mograbi travels apparently from one (well deserved) homage to the other, last one was in Paris at the…
At the beginning of March I posted a text about a great initiative taken by young filmmakers – Francesca Scalisi and Mark Olexa – both graduated years ago from the Zelig Film School in Bolzano: ”The festival will start beginning…
… at DOK Leipzig, a press release announces from the festival. Like American presidents the new director of the important festival has chosen to reveal her changes after her first 100 days in office! Here comes most of the press…
Of course IDF (Institute of Documentary Film) stands behind this wonderful initiative, it calls itself “Project Father and Mother”, but there are other well-known partners – One World Romania Association (Bucharest, Romania), Restart (Zagreb, Croatia), Mozinet (Budapest, Hungary) and Filmtopia…
Apropos the sad news about the Avala Studio in Belgrade, here is a written flashback to a night at the Sava Center at the closing night of the Magnificent7 2011: It was one of those evenings that you will never…
Dear friends, guests and colleagues of MAGNIFICENT 7 Festival, we’ve got a terribly important issue to share with you, hoping you will react, sign the petition and spread the word about the unthinkable events that are about to take place…
It’s not because he says something new, Iikka Vehkalahti, who is now out of YLE, Finnish public television, active as always with different international activities, one of them being the rough cut service that he has set up together with…
In my sculpture, I attempt to detach myself from the subject. Although my earlier works were rather expressionistic with oubursts against war, crime and violence in general, I now find my most successful pieces are less topical and idiographic. They…
In documentary workshops and film schools all over I have forbidden the participants to use the term ”poetic” talking about films. It’s banal, over-used and what does it really mean? Nevertheless this is the only word to be used for…
After five days of watching documentaries on a big screen in Palm Springs, USA, back to the MacBook Pro screen to promote another fine offer from the unique DocAlliance, this time linked to the Swiss documentary festival Visions du Réel…
Marseille. The city of Zinedine Zidane. A multicultural melting pot with areas/quartiers, where violence is a daily menu with gangs operating, murders and huge social problems. If Zidane is an icon for football fans, Yvan Sorel is it for practioners…
Esther’s father married and divorced 5 times. Why? And how might that influence my life, the director wants to find out and makes a film that ends with footage from her own marriage, where she is walking the aisle with…
Peter Bogdanovich joked about himself, ”I master the namedrop”, he said, referring to his enormous knowledge of films and film stars, actors and directors. What I am about to do now is precisely the same, namedropping, films and directors, which…
Sunday morning in the Camelot Theatres in Palm Springs. The headline of the morning discussion in the festival’s panel series is ”The Mating of Documentary & Narrative Cinematography”. And the panelists are ”Award winning D.P.’s Haskell Wexler ASC, Joan Churchill…
A morning seminar moderated by English film critic Neil Young. Subject: International Film Festivals. What to remember if you go to them as an American documentarian. 20 people listening, asking questions. Basic information was given, especially from Neil Young, who…
Ohhh, film history and personal history for me as for many others, I am sure. Let’s get the last matter settled first: When I was studying at the Library school in Copenhagen in the beginning of the 1970’es, my teacher…
Had they pitched this project in Europe, producers and financiers would have hesitated committing themselves as the brothers are debutants. And would have continued ”don’t start before you have all the money”. In this respect there is a difference between…
So there he was, Peter Bogdanovich, conceived in Serbia, born in the US – as he has put it himself – 75 years old, still a great storyteller and imitator of voices, which was proven when he gave us in…
It all started at 10am Wednesday March 26 with the Film Fund Competition (with around 15.000$ awards to be distributed) in the Camelot Theatres, the main venue for the festival. Moderated by Teddy Gruyoa, festival director, 12 projects were presented…
After 10 hours and 40 minutes of flight Copenhagen to Los Angeles and a good night’s hotel sleep off to Palm Springs for the fourth edition of the American Documentary Film Festival that opens tomorrow March 26 and goes on…
You must have a passport or an id, the woman at the desk said. Mikael Opstrup from EDN and I were at the entrance of the Palace of Parliament in Bucharest an early morning and we wanted to enter to…
We normally do not promote individual film projects on this site but exceptions were invented to be done… Yesterday in Bucharest, Adrian Pirvu, at the One World Romania’s “Cooking a Doc” went on stage to present (photo by Adi Marineci)…
Went to watch ”Queen of Silence”, full house, a film directed by Polish Agnieszka Zwiefka, her first film, produced by Heino Deckert and shown at this festival as one of four films in a well deserved homage to Deckert as…
I arrived a couple of days ago to Bucharest for the One World Romania. Together with EDN’s Mikael Opstrup we were taken to the hotel, I was given one of those rooms, where you can not open the window so…
Realscreen News publishes today (editor Manori Ravindran) a tribute to Albert Maysles, who passed away on March 5. We take the liberty to bring to you what colleague and cinema vérité pioneer as well D.A. Pennebaker wrote: “I was on…
In the middle of all (the necessary) documentary films about wars and conflicts, going on now and/or some decades ago, it is nice to receive a newsletter from the Thessaloniki Documentary Festival, with a report from a press conference on…
“May you live in interesting times.” This Chinese curse pops up in my mind when I think about you, Ukrainians. To a documentary filmmaker, times like these are not only a curse, but also an opportunity. After all, we are…
For those of us who were not able to visit the documentary film festival in Amsterdam, the good news is that the festival (link below) is bringing out videos from the festival. You can watch the opening and closing ceremonies…
Why not? Yes, why not activate us frequent flyers and all the others, who sit up there in the air for hours? Why not give us passengers quality (short) documentary and animation to watch and ask us to vote. Three…
Voilá – 5 films for free taken from the upcoming festival programme of One World Romania (see post below)… words from the site of DocAlliance: …For the eighth time, the international festival One World Romania brings a critical voice as…
… or to take the long version: One World Romania International Human Rights Documentary Film Festival, taking place March 16-22. 35 films in 10 categories – like ”Agents of Change” (with films like ”Citizenfour”, ”Euromaidan.Rough Cut” and ”Iranian”, ”Comrade Capitalism”…
The press releases from the festival in Prague are comprehensive and informative so here is a copy-paste of the one about the awards to be given at… the closing ceremony of the festival in the Lucerna cinema in Prague on…
It is with great sadness that we announce the passing of our founder, legendary filmmaker Albert Maysles. Albert was a loving husband, father, brother and friend to many. For more than five decades, Albert created groundbreaking films, inspired filmmakers and…
The French love the Israeli film artist Avi Mograbi – and do so this film blogger, who has followed his carreer with great enthusiasm. From March 14 the prestigious museum Jeu de Paume has invited Mograbi to meet the audience,…
The following is a text excerpt from the site of Human Rights in Ukraine: In a wonderful show of solidarity, members of the Polish Film Academy have called on Russia to release Crimean film director Oleg Sentsov and have promised…