A film blog by Allan Berg Nielsen & Tue Steen Müller
A film blog by Allan Berg Nielsen & Tue Steen Müller
The trade magazine Screen Daily has a long article (May 20) on the big presence of documentaries in Cannes. The article, written by Melanie Goodfellow, mentions films to be shown and sold as well as statements from people who sell…
Artur Liebhart, festival director of Planete Doc Film Festival, had planned the closing ceremony of his festival in an excellent way. Well, he could not know it but Danish director Andreas Koefoed was as the first award winner called to…
I was invited to the Warsaw festival to talk about film critic, which I did last saturday morning with a general introduction followed by a screening of Maciej Drygas ”Abu Haraz” and a discussion of which points should be dealt…
Veteran Polish director Maciej Drygas gives the audience an absolutely fascinating opening of his new film shot in North Sudan. Meditative music accompanies the camera, that circles slowly and softly around trees from the point of view of a man…
The Guardian published a very interesting article Tuesday May 14. Agnès Poirier had seen the new film by legendary Claude Lanzmann about Benjamin Murmelstein, who collaborated with the Nazis as the last Jewish Council President in Theresienstadt. Poirier talks to…
On the night where FC Barcelona stars travel their city in an open bus, to celebrate the championship with their fans, it is the 22nd league title for the one and only club, this blogger follows on Danish television, whenever…
As you can see in the post below I have been to Stockholm, invited by filmmaker PeÅ Holmquist to tutor his graduating students for a week before they leave the Stockholm Dramatiska Högskola, English name: Stockholm Academy of Dramatic Arts.…
7 films on one disc – four ”With Russian Eyes on Sweden” and three ”With Swedish Eyes on Russia”. I will write about the latter, the Swedish documentaries. The dvd was given to me by PeÅ Holmquist, veteran Swedish documentarian…
”The EDN Executive Committee has appointed Paul Pauwels as the new Director of the organization. The appointment will be effective from May 15th, when Pauwels take over the strategic planning and future development of the international documentary network with over…
Normally we do not do promotion for training programmes but there are exceptions. As this one, the Ex Oriente Film workshop based in Prague, that enters a new decade, after – this is how the organisers, led by Veronika Liskova…
… starts its programme tomorrow May 10 and runs until May 19. The selection is rich – take a look at the website’s ”Film Sections”, link below, and you will notice that the director Artur Liebhart and his team do…
The festival has announced the winners at the 20th edition of the big North American documentary festival. Debra Zimmermann was the Doc Mogul Award winner of this year, of course well deserved for her great work within Women Make Movies.…
It was a film, a photo exhibition and a book of postcards that I experienced when in Kiev for the DocuDays a month ago. I have the book of postcards in front of me, The Roma Album it is called…
Realscreen newsletter of yesterday presents interesting news from NFB, National Film Board of Canada, the pioneer film institution in the world, set up in 1939 (parallel to the Danish equivalent, I want you to remember…) and now very much active…
For free until May 5 are the new films of two contemporary film artists who have always gone non-mainstream with their own voice and approach. The films of Liechti and Mograbi can be watched on DocAlliance, that has picked them…
The DocAlliance does now include 7 festivals with the inclusion of DocLisboa in the group. A welcome gift from Portugal is given to the users of DocAlliance, the vod that calls itself: Your online documentary cinema. The so-called Carnation Revolution,…
Winners were announced last night at the closure of the festival in Nyon, Switzerland. The Grand Prix for the best feature documentary was given to Ramon Giger and Jan Gassmann from the hosting country for their ”Karma Shadub”. The catalogue…
“Audrius Stonys deserves much praise for his ”Ramin”, a film about an old man in Georgia, his daily life, his attachment to his late mother, his looking for a woman he knew in his youth… the story is told in…
… well, not played in Sevilla but watched by a film blogger in a tapas bar the last two nights, both matches performed in Germany, both with German teams as the winners, in the first of two matches in the…
Another film that premieres in Nyon (April 25 & 26) (see below), and another film that has been a long time on its way. And another film that gave high expectations that for me who has followed the film from…
World Premiere in Nyon today of a film that was on its way for a long time. I have not yet seen the final result but clips on its way to completion give high expectations. The text below is taken…
The following text in Danish is praising the Copenhagen Cinemateket, part of the Danish Film Institute, for its programme for May and June. A real treat for film lovers, film history with the giants Luchino Visconti and Satyajit Ray in…
The FIDADOC festival (the only one in the country with a focus on documentaries) has announced the programme for the 5th edition to take place in Agadir, Morocco. The festival, that was set up by Nouzha Drissi, who died tragically…
Romanian director Florin Iepan has – according to his Facebook page with a lot of links from the press coverage – shown a rough cut version of the film ”Odessa” in Bucharest on the 8th of April. I have known…
Normally festivals award films and film directors, but festivals can also be awarded, and the Danish documentary festival CPH:DOX has received two recognitions lately, the most important (also important for future funding one can hope, sorry for being so materialistic)…
A week ago the French newspaper Le Monde brought an interesting article about the national launch of the Oscar winner Searching for Sugarman theatrically. Released in cinemas by December 26 2012, the film is now running in around 70 cinemas,…
You can easily spend some hours at the Parisian Musée d’art et d’histoire du Judaisme with the excellent exhibition of works of the three photo documentarians Capa, Taro and Chim (open until June 30), also called photo journalists, also called…
Amir Labaki, director of the It’s All True festival in Brazil (Sao Paolo, Rio, Brasilia, Campinas – from April 4-23), is a man, who loves film history and knows how to celebrate it, as he does this year with a…
With the subtitle… and all political prisoners, an addition that Angela Davis, the person in question, the hero of the film, the charismatic icon of the Black Power movement, imprisoned in 1970 for involvement in the killing of a judge,…
Parisian museum Jeu de Paume runs (until May 12) a fascinating exhibition with the Albanian artist Adrian Paci, who lives in Italy. On tv screens, on big screens, with paintings – Paci circles around the theme, as he has expressed…
The programme of the 44th (!) edition of the documentary festival (April 19 to 26) in Nyon, Switzerland has been published. The festival includes ” a total of 110 films in competition from 45 countries, including 24 Swiss films. For…
First in Danish and then in English: Sarah Polleys film er mesterlig. Jeg satte den på min liste over de bedste dokumentarfilm i 2012. Den er elegant fortalt, underholdende og gribende, en familiefilm eller rettere en film om en familie…
Let me pass on some words from the Aleksei German obituary in Guardian February 26 (written by Ronald Bergan) – he died 74 year old after he … for more than 10 years, (German) had been struggling to complete History…
Kubasov is one of the directors behind ”Winter, Go Home”, a graduate from the school of Marina Razbezhkina. This film, I can see from the end titles, comes from the same source and deals with the writer Evgeny Alekhin (photo),…
The festival is over, awards were given last night, again the Red Hall in the Cinema House in Kiev was packed with primarily a young audience full of enthusiasm. You may have head-shaking opinions about the architecture of the Cinema…
I dare the risk of being called a grumpy old man, but why the f… does the audience, quite a good part of it, here in Kiev, at the Docu Days festival, behave so disrespectful to the films being screened,…
In June 2012 the football championship UEFA Euro took place in Poland and Ukraine. And of course some films came out of that. An Ukranian premiere was arranged at the Docu Days festival. 10 films were collected as a Youth…
Through reliable sources filmkommentaren.dk has succeeded to get hold of a translated version of the official document read from the stage at the opening of Docudays festival here in Kiev. As earlier announced negociations were held immediately that secured that…
Friday night two old boys in the documentary community, Italian Stefano Tealdi and Catalan Joan Gonzàlez got the EDN Award 2013. I allow myself this characterisation of dear friends, who were there, when EDN (European Documentary Network) started and who…
Below you can read about the snow storm in Kiev outside the Cinema House, where the festival ceremony took place last night, March 22nd. But compared to what happened inside that was nothing. The nicely dressed presenters on the stage…
Childhood memories! Snow, snow, snow. Well, we had it in Denmark the last week but not dramatic in the Copenhagen area and no problem in taking off from Copenhagen airport friday morning or to go by the connecting flight from…
A good advice – go to the trailer of this film which is to be found on the website of the upcoming festival in Kiev, Ukraine DocuDays UA. Click below. It will give you a fine introduction to a documentary…
And there you are – hello, nice to meet you and you are the one with which project? A situation many documentary tutor colleagues will recognise from the extraordinary many documentary workshops in and outside Europe, set up for local…
Got a mail from Koen Suidgeest, whose touching film “Karla’s Arrival” has gone all over the world due to the director’s constant commitment and energy. Here it is, and here is the generous invitation to watch the film for free,…
They are doing important work for the documentary at AFAC (Arab Fund for Arts and Culture). I have been privileged to be tutoring at two of their workshops, the last one in Beirut late February. Rima Mismar is the woman…
Here is an offer you can’t refuse, taken from the EDN website: EDN is happy to announce that all members, who are part of the organization on April 12, will get free access to over 700 documentaries at Doc Alliance…
… is a project initiated by the film festival DoxBox in Damascus where the festival for obvious reasons do not take place. Instead Syrain films have been shown all over the world – and there has been a “soirée thématique”…
The 15th edition of the Thessaloniki Documentary Film Festival started two days ago and runs until the 24th of March. The programme is as always impressive – as is the communication from the festival that in a classical journaistic form…
A new film by Ken Loach, this time a documentary. The director (born 1936) looks into ”the spirit of 45” in England, the post-war time where a welfare state was built on social and human values which are difficult to…
We have previously praised the work of the vod DocAlliance, its special collaboration with the IDF (Institute of Documentary Film) in Prague and what this institution is doing to promote films from Central and Eastern Europe. Today a mail came…