A film blog by Allan Berg Nielsen & Tue Steen Müller
A film blog by Allan Berg Nielsen & Tue Steen Müller
National Film Board of Canada/Office National du film du Canada is the oldest national film institution in the world, as far as I know. It started in 1939, and is being celebrated in and outside its own country because of…
Young directors, fresh views and interpretations of the world today, resistance movements, new ways of storytelling – it is a golden age of the documentary and that is strongly reflected in the programme that the DocsBarcelona festival has just published!…
Det var en herlig tirsdag eftermiddag på Den danske Filmskole. Niels Jensen var tilbage i rollen som den inspirerende, vidende og altid veloplagte filmpædagog og –historiker. Her er historien: ”Indtil sin død (december 2010, red.) arbejdede Niels Jensen på et…
Citat fra pressematerialet: Essensen i Bayaka kultur er deres ældgamle polyfoniske sang. Louis Sarno har gennem sine indspilninger af Bayaka folkets musik sikret en af verdens vigtige kulturarve; i 2003 fik Bayaka folkets musik UNESCO World Heritage Status. Louis Sarno…
This new film by Latvian film and opera director Kairiss will have its international premiere tomorrow at Visions du Réel in Nyon. Here is an article I wrote for the promotion of the film: The first film work I met…
The EDN website is a rich source of general information for documentarians around the world. Available, even if you are not a member – which you definitely should be to get all the service provided by the organisation. For instance…
”A World of Troubled Beauty…” HEADLINE NY Times brought the most precise headline to an article about the films of Austrian filmmaker Michael Glawogger’s impressive work: A World of Troubled Beauty – referring to his…
Shocking news – Michael Glawogger has died from malaria during the shooting of a film in Africa. So young! My deepest condolences to family and the many, who were close to him. In June last year I had the privilege…
Is this a wise decision, I wondered, when i read a text on “Film New Europe” a couple of weeks ago: Governmental bodies in both Latvia and Lithuania have banned broadcasts of Russian state TV channels. A three month ban…
Danish DR/Dokumania shows tomorrow the American tv (NBC) documentary “Erasing Hate”. I got a link to watch it for a review, I could go through the first third of the film then the link went on strike. So no points…
Louis Andriessen, charismatic Dutch composer, and Mariss Jansons, charismatic Latvian chief conductor of the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra in Amsterdam. The two characters in the fascinating observational documentary drama, which is very well told, interesting and entertaining. The drama evolves as…
It is rough. It is provoking. It is touching, poetic and shocking because you experience the difficulties of a man’s aim to come to terms with himself and life as it goes on in his head and around him in…
A mail came in today with the headline: Good News in Bad Times! It came from Orwa Nyrabia from Syrian Proaction Film, together with French Films d’Ici the producer of ”Silvered Water. Syria, An Auto-Portrait”. Orwa Nyrabia: It is with…
… with the subtitle ”Caught in Between”. ”An Animated Documentary” it is said in the press material, and indeed it is, including all kind of animation techniques that I don’t have knowledge enough to characterise correctly. But what I can…
It’s gonna be a bit personal/sentimental as I worked with Danish short films and documentaries for 20 years. At the Danish Statens Filmcentral, where the distribution on 16mm was huge to the whole non-theatrical sector – schools, community groups and…
Today I got this emotional FB message from Sevara Pan, who has written many reviews for filmkommentaren, including one on “In My Father’s Garden”, an absolute highlight in modern documentary: Dearest Tue, I hope my email finds you well. I…
A bit late, but you should know… taken from the website of the festival: 11th International documentary films about human rights festival has ended in Kyiv. The awards ceremony was held On March 27 in Cinema House in Kyiv. Hosts…
At the end of the film photos of old Chinese ladies come up on the screen. They have had the same experience in their lives: They were captured by the Japanese during the war and kept as prisoners in a…
Amdocs distributed several awards on the final evening of the festival. I was involved in the pitch competition and a juror for the Best American Feature Documentary. For that reason they come first on the list with some comments from…
As some other documentary festivals, DOKLeipzig is an example, Amdocs screens animation films. A good choice I thought after having attended a programme of 8 short ones from Germany, mostly from the film school in Baden-Württemberg. Puppet animation with beautiful…
Press release from IDFA, know several of the projects and people, great choices: For the February selection round of 2014, the IDFA Bertha Fund (previously Jan Vrijman Fund) considered around 300 projects from more than 65 different countries. In total,…
Festivals would not be able to function without volunteers. People who help without being paid. The American Documentary Film Festival in Palm Springs is no exception. In its third edition the help you get from local people who support the…
Opening night in Palm Springs: Julie Cohen’s ”I Live to Sing”, or in xhosa language: Ndiphilela Ukucula. A warm film with three black, young upcoming opera stars from South Africa, who tell their stories, which are sad and uplifting at…
Cinemateket har tre af Jørgen Vestergaards dokumentarfilm, omtalt her under overskriften ”Ritualer”, på programmet den 19. April i anledning af instruktørens 75 års dag. Instruktøren er selv til stede for at tale om sine film og ikke blot de tre…
The Danish Cinemateket celebrates the founder of Danish documentary Theodor Christensen from May 1st with an exhibition and a retrospective. In Danish: Ja, ham ville jeg gerne have mødt og røget en cigar med… Men han døde allerede i 1967,…
A short trip to Thessaloniki it was, but I managed to attend a Docs in Progress session at the Olympion Cinema as well as the first 7-8 projects which were pitched at the Docs in Thessaloniki Forum, arranged by the…
I have just returned from Thessaloniki Documentary Film Festival after a (far too) quick visit for the following reason – thank you so much! – this is the press release of the festival: The European Documentary Network (EDN) award, which…
Dimitri Eipides, founder and director of the Thessaloniki Documentary Festival, had made the obvious choice to present two tributes at the festival, one for the late Peter Wintonick, who came to the festival so many times to pass his wisdom…
The organisers of the festival in Kiev has this text on their website: 11th Docudays UA International Human Rights Documentary Film Festival opens on March 21 at 7 p.m. with Euromaidan chronicles: Three months of revolution. From indignant protest to…
In Copenhagen, starting March 27, running until March 30, the first of its kind, an ambitious set-up with discussion, tours around Copenhagen, and films, more than 80, new and old from all over the world. It is indeed an impressive…
6 3D documentaries by Wim Wenders, Michael Glawogger, Michael Madsen, Robert Redford, Margreth Olin and Karim Ainouz. Executive producer: Wim Wenders. Each film is 26 mins. long. Subtitle: ”If Buildings Could Talk” and this is where the overall problem lies…
… is a yearly seminar day dedicated to the documentary film, open for participation by Danish filmmakers, producers, film school students, television people with a relationship to the genre, consultants etc. from the Danish Film Institute (DFI), that is the…
Yes, it does, wish you all the best, you are so brave and clever and thoughtful as this text documents, taken from the website of the festival: Three times I started writing an address on behalf of the Docudays UA…
What a wonderful surprise, and well deserved it is, that the Russian documentary Linar opened the festival in Thessaloniki Greece. Here is the text from the newsletter of the festival that always has a highly professional communication activity. A deeply…
I just discovered that it is 20 years ago that I met Alexandru Solomon in Bucharest. My wife worked at DR (Danish Public Broadcaster) and I was at the National Film Board of Denmark. We bought two of his visual…
The Brazilian documentarian, who died tragically on the 2nd of February, 80 years old, is the obvious subject for an homage at the upcoming Cinéma du Réel in Paris (March 20-30), where ”Cabra Marcado Para Morrer” (119 mins.), said to…
“Mette’s Voice” is reviewed below by Allan Berg, who praises the film. The film is available in an English subtitled version and could definitely be interesting for festival selectors. Here is the synopsis: Denmark is supposed to be a country…
For me the best English language newspaper critiques and general film coverage is to be found in The Guardian and New York Times. It was therefore with great pleasure that The Guardian, in their first Film Awards, placed The Act…
Normally we don’t advertise training programmes but as we know that this one is NOT limited to EUrope and we have many talented documentary filmmakers as readers… “The IDFAcademy Summer School is open to: • Directors making their first or…
It was one of these pleasant surprises. Last summer I got a FB message from a Teddy Grouya, who invited me to come to his festival in California. The surprise was double as he wrote to me in Danish (well…
Danish veteran documentarians Katia Forbert Petersen and Annette Mari Olsen premiered yesterday their new documentary, that has the English title ”Mission Rape – A Tool of War”, a film that will travel not only to the foreign broadcasters involved but…
… and the winner is ”Twenty Feet from Stardom” by Morgan Neville, in the category Feature Length Documentary. ”So Hollywood is Still Hollywood”, wrote Niels Pagh Andersen on FB. The editor of ”The Act of Killing” expressed indirectly what many…
I have copy pasted the list of winners from the website of the festival, that cleverly brings forward the jury motivations as well. The following films have been written about/reviewed on filmkommentaren: The Last Station, Return to Homs, Ne Me…
Tomorrow night is Oscar night. On filmkommentaren.dk all five contenders in the feature length catagory have been reviewed, the latest watched in Zagreb the other day: ”Twenty Feet from Stardom”, an entertaining film, about which I wrote ”but the film…
Of course there had to be a meeting in Zagreb about the EU supported programme ”Creative Europe”, that runs from 2014 till 2020 and has two sub-programmes: MEDIA and Culture. The MEDIA Desk Croatia, Martina Petrovic, hosted the meeting in…
Does she wants too much, Tatjana Bozic? From Life and from the Film, she has made and in which she is the main character? A film about a woman looking back at her love life to find out what went…
OK, this film represents everything that I dislike about a certain kind of documentaries: It is – to quote the description in the site of the festival here in Zagreb – ”eye-popping”, ”stunning” and I could add sentimental over-the-limit of…
We have very often been informed about the terrible conditions for the inmates in Russian prisons. The released Pussy Riot members were the last ones to point out that something needs to be changed… to use an understatement. This film,…
This Oscar-nominated documentary is very entertaining because of its interesting characters, who are full of life and memories about their lives as back-up singers – and about their attempt to get to the foreground as lead singers. People like Sting…
ZagrebDox places the film in the ”Happy Dox” category. Here is some background on theme and on story from the idfa catalogue synopsis 2013: Bhutan is one of the least developed countries in the world. There is barely any industry,…