Ukraine Euromaidan
“There is a choice”, was the slogan expressed in connection with the DocuDays UA festival in Kiev in March 2013. I was there as member of the jury and enjoyed a very professional and committed reception from the filmmakers behind…
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 MoreUkraine Euromaidan
Sara Ishaq: The Mulberry House
It is such a good beginning of the film. A family gathered around food, eating, discussing, among other matters the usual one, you think, about man/woman, boy/girl in a society with pretty conservative traditions, seen from our part of the…
DIFF
Dubai International Film Festival is running right now. It has several documentary sections in its extensive programme even if it indeed is red-carpet festival for feature films with hommage(s) to stars of the cinema world, this year Martin Sheen (Apocalypse…
Bang & Sundstrøm: Angrebet på Shellhuset
Først tænker du, jamen det har vi jo hørt om igen og igen. Så begynder du at se filmen, som er fortalt i et klassisk dokumentarisk sprog, som du kender ud og ind fra historiske film: sort/hvid arkivmateriale, interviews med…
Jeddah Doc Workshop /1
If you want to know who I really am, go to facebook… was the comment from one of the participating filmmakers at the workshop for Saudi filmmakers in Jeddah. It was on the second and last day we spent together…
Jeddah Doc Workshop /2
Yes, ”we were blown away” as Kirsten Johnson, American filmmaker and tutor at the workshop, said on the second day, where several of the young visual reporters and artists, who took part in the workshop, presented their projects of online…
Jon Bang Carlsen: I Kærlighedens Navn
This is a Danish language review of the new film by Danish director Jon Bang Carlsen, whose work has been written about on filmkommentaren several times. ”Just the Right Amount of Violence” is a multi-layered, personal documentary in the hybrid…
The Oscar Shortlist Announced
So now the list is down to 15 films that compete for the nomination of the Oscar. Several online sources have published it, the guessing about the winner has started. The 3 films Filmkommentaren has reviewed, we have put first…
Idfa 2013/ awards/ 2
So, see below, the juries have made their choices at the idfa 2013 edition. In most of the sections nominations had been made in beforehand with 3 films competing. It is a good rule as it means something for a…
idfa 2013/ Awards
The English version of the idfa press release arrived this morning: Michael Obert won the VPRO IDFA Award for Best Feature-Length Documentary (€ 12,500) for Song from the Forest. The film focuses on American Louis Sarno, who has lived for…
The Syrian Revolution/ 19
I heard about it when at the idfa festival from Dox Box Guevara Namer, herself an excellent photographer, and now I read about it and want to share it with you: Lebanese The Daily Star brings an important article under…
Idfa 2013 /2
… the headline could also have been ”3 Days at idfa”, with the subtitle ”personal small talk”, so now you are warned about this piece, written at Schiphol airport waiting for the SAS 548 to take me home to Copenhagen.…
Talal Derki: Return to Homs
I met Talal Derki at a workshop in Athens a couple of years ago. He showed me some footage with Basset, the young revolutionary leader – and talented football goalkeeper – from Homs, fighting Bashar and his gang. What I…
Peter Wintonick and DOX 100
The news about the death of Peter Wintonick (see below) (photo) made me sit down with DOX 100 that was in the mailbox the day before. The issue is built up as conversation pieces between documentarians who talk professional matters…
Peter Wintonick
Peter Wintonick has died. FB pages, newspapers and websites are full of warm words and sadness from the documentary community. My former colleagues at EDN wrote these fine words: It is with great sorrow that we, at EDN, have received…
Claude Lanzmann: The Last of the Unjust
The film of Lanzmann is extraordinary in all aspects: The story about how the film was made and why it did not come out before now has been dealt with in numerous interviews with the author, journalist and film director…
CPH:DOX 2013 /Awards
We got this press release from Copenhagen. CPH:DOX is still running today and tomorrow, and due to a huge audience interest, the festival adds a couple of days of screenings. But awards have been distributed: On Friday, November 15th, CPH:DOX…
Håvard Bustnes: Shirley og Hinda
… English title: Two Raging Grannies. It’s easy for this reviewer to identify with Shirley (born 1923) and Hinda (1929) in their search for an answer to why we always must believe in economic growth as the answer to the…
CPH:DOX 2013 /6
Richard Misek’s film ”Rohmer in Paris” will be screened at CPH:DOX November 14th and 16th. At a certain point while watching this film I considered to call it ”Murder on Rohmer”… as the director has no reference to what was…
CPH:DOX 2013 /5
Karen Stokkendal Poulsen’s film The Agreement will be shown at CPH:DOX on the 11th, the 13th and the 17th of November. EU chief negotiator Robert Cooper (photo) is the main character of a film that follows the negociations between Kosovo, delegation…
CPH:DOX 2013 /1
The festival in Copenhagen has started. For Copenhageners it started a long time ago with prologue events, the programme newspaper in cafés, banners and posters in the streets… the organisers are masters of marketing… but now the festival programme runs…
POV: Best Documentaries of 2013
The nomination games continue as the year gets closer to its end. American POV is the next (after Cinema Eye, see below) and this is how they introduce their list of Best 10: “From Sundance to the Oscars — and…
Cinema Eye Nominations Announced
It’s a rather complicated nomination system that the Cinema Eye works with, but the people involved (taken from the website that explains all in details, link below) are all names that guarantee for quality. But what is Cinema Eye: “The…
Marina Razbezhkina: Optical Axis
Well, it did get no awards at the DOK Leipzig. The jury chose the docudrama/neo-realistic/hybrid ”Stop the Pounding Heart”, another art house film from the US. Beautifully made, but not very original as is this work of Razbezhkina, known for…
Ken Loach: The Spirit of 45
We have previously written about the documentary of Ken Loach and its impressive distribution in the UK, as well as the film’s excellent website that is a fine example of how you can interact with your audience and learn about…
Scanorama Lithuania Premieres 4 New Documentaries
Four new Lithuanian documentaries will be screened at the Scanorama Festival that runs from November 7 till 24 in the cities Vilnius, Kaunas, Klaipeda and Siaiulia. As the name of the festival indicates it has its roots in the North…
Awards DOK Leipzig 2013
This is the press release from the festival: The 56th International Leipzig Festival for Documentary and Animated Film, DOK Leipzig, culminated on Saturday night with a festive closing ceremony. Seventeen prizes totalling €69,500 were presented at the awards ceremony in…
DOK Leipzig
Well, I have to confess that I was not at the cinema this year at DOK Leipzig! Shame on you, many will think and right they are. There is nothing but sitting in a big cinema with big screen with…
Polish Documentaries
It is a tradition, and a good tradition: The Polish delegation invites for a dinner that includes an aperitif of clips from the films that take part in the DOK Leipzig (this year 12 docs and animation films) and a…
American Documentary Film Festival
You meet colleagues in Leipzig. Of course, a banality. But when do you meet a man with the first name Teddy from California, who starts to speak good Danish to you… We had been in contact before and he had…
Cinedoc Greece and Dimitra Kouzi
I was lucky to meet Greek Dimitra Kouzi again at DOK Leipzig. She is a journalist, former ERT, now in various jobs where her skills can be used, and they are many. Her love for documentaries is evident and if…
Eröffnungsrede von Claas Danielsen
DOKLeipzig director for 10 years Claas Danielsen made, as he always does, a welcome speech that went far beyond the usual thanks to sponsors and audience and guests. I have taken a couple of sequences from his German language speech:…
DocsBarcelona +Medellin/ 2
In times where festivals for documentaries aim for bigger and bigger numbers of audiences, ranging from 50.000 to more than 200.000, it is refreshing to read that much smaller numbers can make the organisers happy like the ones who stood…
Aneta Kopacz: Joanna
Yesterday midday I mailed Joanna Solecka from Wajda Studio. I have known Joanna for some years and she was the one, who sent me the link to watch their 45 minutes long documentary ”Joanna”, a film about a mother who…
Trestikova, Bang Carlsen, Susana de Sousa Dias
Some call their films author driven, some call them auteurs, all agree they make creative documentaries, are artists in the field of filmmaking. They are very different, have their own style, some would call it a hand-writing, which is personal.…
DOK Leipzig Starts Monday
… and as usual there are many interesting side programmes like this one, text taken from the site of the festival, headline “Putting the Material At a Distance”: Peter Voigt’s films reveal his special relationship to image material: He has…
Time to Celebrate Documentaries
… say the DocAlliance people, who again are advertising their vod repertory, including several films that can be streamed for free. The reason for celebration NOW is of course that two of the festivals that are part of the Alliance…
Tbilisi
I took this photo from the FB page of Jana Cisar, who was one of the tutors in Tbilisi at the DocStories Georgia workshop that ran parallel to the Cinedoc festival. Cisar has a premiere coming up of her film…
Cinedoc Tbilisi/ 6/ Awards
The 1st International Documentary Festival in the Caucasus is going towards its end. Today the awarded films – and others – are being screened and last night the award ceremony took place in the Rustaveli Cineme. I was member of…
Cinedoc Tbilisi/ 5/ Awards
The Main Award at the 1st Cinedoc Tbilisi festival went to Lina Luzyte for her ”Igrushki”. The motivation of the Jury of the International Competition THE FIRST PRIZE IS AWARDED – BY A UNANIMOUS JURY DECISION – TO A DOCUMENTARY…
Cinedoc Tbilisi/ 4/ Awards
The Special Jury Award at the 1st Cinedoc Tbilisi festival went to Pawel Kloc for his ”Phnom Penh Lullaby”. The motivation of the Jury of the International Competition: THE SPECIAL JURY AWARD GOES TO A DOCUMENTARY THAT VERY MUCH SEDUCED…
Cinedoc Tbilisi/ 3/Awards
The Jury Mention at the 1st Cinedoc Tbilisi festival went to Julia Panasenko for her “Outro”. The motivation of the Jury of the International Competition: A DOCUMENTARY THAT HITS THE VIEWER LIKE A ROCK: PUNK DOCUMENARY FILMMAKING! ONE OF THE…
Cinedoc Tbilisi/ 2
It was too much, something had to be done so I asked one of the staff members of Cinedoc here in Tbilisi to ask the audience to refrain from talking on their phone and send text messages during the screening.…
East by SouthEast
Sitting in Tbilisi I see a press release from the Danish Cinematheque that hosts a ”Festival of Central and Eastern European Film” from October 24 till November 7. Among them the feature hit from Georgia, ”In Bloom”, but also several…
Cinedoc Tbilisi/ 1
Voila, the 1st International Documentary Film Festival in the Caucasus started last night in the Rustaveli cinema in Tbilisi. Totally full was the cinema hall for the opening ceremony that included a promise from festival director Artchil Khetagouri, that a…
Piotr Stasik: A Diary of a Journey
Stasik is one of the most obvious talents in young Polish documentary. His “Last Day of Summer” is a masterpiece in cinematography and compressed storytelling. This new film from his hands, which was at the Krakow festival, and now has…
Tamara Stepanyan: Embers
”Cinema for me is a visual poem of time suspended”, says Tamara Stepanyan, according to the festival vod festivalscope. This sentence fits to characterise her fine personal film that takes its start at the grave of her (we learn) charismatic…
Idfa 2013
It’s one festival after the other publishing its programme. Lisbon, Leipzig, Amsterdam and today there is a programme party in Copenhagen for cph:dox… Idfa programme yesterday, the biggest festival in audience numbers and considered to be the most important –…
DOK Leipzig 2013
Big numbers in the press release of DOK Leipzig, sent out yesterday with an announcement of the so-called official programme. 56th edition, ” a total of 88 films from 34 countries will compete in the five competition categories. While there…
DocLisboa 2013
The programme of the 11th edition of the DocLisboa, that starts October 24 and ends November 3, was made public yesterday. Again you just have to say Respect! For the quality of the selection and for side programmes like ”Research”,…