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…
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 MorePOV: Best Documentaries of 2013
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”,…
Sofia Biting Docs Festival
It is not only in Colombia – see below – that festival organisers play with the word closeness between docs and dogs, when a new fest is to be launched. Look at the logo for a festival that starts today…
DocsBarcelona+Medellin
… which (Medellin) is a city in Colombia that October 15-20 will have its first documentary festival, built on the DocsBarcelona model with film screenings and industry activities, all thought out by Joan Gonzalez from Parallel40 in the Catalan capital,…
Mohammad Rasoulof can not leave Iran
The following text was sent to filmkommentaren.dk by the organisers of Doclisboa’13: Iranian director Mohammad Rasoulof is barred from leaving his country, he will not be able to attend Doclisboa’13. Mohammad Rasoulof has been invited to chair the Jury of…
Cinedoc Tbilisi
The 1st international documentary film festival in the Caucasus runs from 15-20 October. The organiser is the Noosfera Foundation supported by – among others – the Idfa Bertha Fund and Georgian National Film Center. The festival has an International Competititon…
Action: Dangerous Guidelines for Documentaries
in the EU… I write ”dangerous” instead of ”stupid” and continue by saying ”here we go again” with the EU. One thing is that it has been decided to put the well established brand MEDIA into a new scheme under…
IDFA Academy Calls European Talents
The IDFA Academy which I can highly recommend – I attended as observer last year – has asked me to help find young talents, who could qualify for their 2013 training programme. Here is the text, I am sure that…
Awards and Good News from Lithuania
The Vilnius Documentary Film Festival ended Saturday night and the jury headed by Leonard Helmrich, whose films were shown in a retrospective series, gave out the awards in the Baltic documentary competition, this year with a very strong line-up of…
St. Petersburg Diary/ 3
But why don’t we know about it, one of the Russian directors said on the second and last day of the Conference in Hotel Vedensky in St. Petersburg, DoxPro, on financing of international creative documentaries. He referred to the ”Farewell…
St. Petersburg Diary/ 2
First day of the Conference in Vedensky Hotel in St. Petersburg running parallel to the Message to Man festival. Theme of the meeting: Financing of International Creative Documentary Projects in the Northern Dimension Area: Cutting Edge and Trends. The opening…
St. Petersburg Diary/ 1
It took 90 minutes to fly from Copenhagen to St. Petersburg and another 90 minutes to reach the hotel from the airport. Moskva Prospekt is veery long but I had good company in Viktor Skubey, producer and together with Ludmila…
The Act of Killing Wins at Nordisk Panorama
No surprise in Malmø where the The Best Nordic Documentary Award was given last night to ”The Act of Killing”. Here is the motivation of the jury (Christian Bonke (director), Cara Cusumano (Tribeca Film Festival), and Kate Townsend (BBC Storyville)):…
Nordisk Panorama Documentary Competition
Voilà, there you are in Malmø so close to Copenhagen, the home city of your correspondent, who after a good half hour of train trip took the escalators up from the deep Triangle Station to be at a square named…
Message to Man Saint-Petersburg/3
I asked film director Mikhail Zheleznikov to explain to me what lies behind the section In Silico at the festival, for which he works. He answered like this: About In Silico. It’s the newest competition at Message to Man, and…
Message to Man Saint-Petersburg /2
Scroll down some days of this blog and you will find a general presentation of the film programme at the festival in St. Petersburg that starts this coming Saturday. The festival has a fresh look, as you can see on…
“Teaching Documentary” Symposium
It is my impression that many readers of filmkommentaren.dk are filmmakers or – consultants or academics, who teach documentaries at various places. This is the reason why I with pleasure forward this text to you from John Burgan, who together…
Festivals 1: Nordisk Panorama
15 documentaries, long ones, 3 from each country, selected by national committees… that’s the new scheme for the Nordisk Panorama that this year has found its home in Malmö, Sweden for its 24th edition, September 20-25. This democratic approach will…
Festivals 2: Astra Film Festival
I was there last year, in Sibiu, where the Astra Film Festival this year can celebrate its 20th edition from October 14-20. The international competitive section of 9 films includes ”Leviathan” by Castaing-Taylor and Paravel, Marc Schmidt’s ”Matthews Laws”, Philibert’s…
Festivals 3: Vilnius Documentary Film Festival
I was there two years ago and was impressed of a good programme and had it not clashed with other obligations, I would have enjoyed to go to wonderful Vilnius for some days during the festival, that runs from September…
Daniel Dencik: Moon Rider
Danish director Daniel Dencik’s exciting documentary “Moon Rider” will have its Danish tv-premiere in Dokumania Tuesday September 17th one year after its cinema release through DoxBio. Here is the review of filmkommentaren.dk written in Danish: Det er sjældent, at en…
Message to Man Saint-Petersburg
It is festival time – September, October and November – all over the world and it is a good time for the documentary genre. Gianfranco Rosi won the main award in Venice with his ”Sacro Gra” in competition with feature…
Awards and Catalan Screenings of Infiltrators
Palestinian artist and documentary filmmaker Khaled Jarrar received the Jury Documentary Award at the Malmö Arab Film Festival that ended a couple of days ago. More important, in terms of audience, is it maybe that the film has been chosen…