A film blog by Allan Berg Nielsen & Tue Steen Müller
A film blog by Allan Berg Nielsen & Tue Steen Müller
The tireless organisers of the Belgrade European Feature Documentary Film Festival, Magnificent7, Svetlana and Zoran Popovic, and their many helpers, all of them filmmakers themselves, have put together a summer programme, 3 directors, who have already visited the festival (10th…
Veteran documentary director Vitaly Mansky won the main documentary prize at the festival in Karlovy Vary. This is the catalogue description of the film that had its international premiere at the festival: According to a claim made by Vladimir Putin,…
Hungarian director Diana Groó is in Jerusalem these days presenting her new film, called ”Regina” (63 mins). I have followed the talented director for years, and saw a rough cut, that impressed me. How to make a film about a…
Dagnė Vildiūnaitė is the producer behind the Lithuanian production company Just a Moment. She has for years had an international focus, and her films have had both national and international success. “Father” by Marat Sargsyan were this year awarded in…
Filmkommentaren.dk has brought reviews of three new documentaries from Slovakia during the last two weeks: New Life of a Family Album, Velvet Terrorists and Normalization (scroll down and you will find them). All fine and original works from a small…
It is not only in Denmark but also in Slovakia that something is rotten… That is the impression you sit with having watched the new film by Robert Kirchhoff, an impressive work both in terms of the research the director…
Yesterday a new Slovak documentary had its world premiere in Karlovy Vary. It will have a long life on festivals around the world. If you say to someone that they are going to watch a film about people, who fought…
Karlovy Vary International Film Festival started a couple of days ago and the documentary has a good position with an international competititon and a panorama. In the latter section you find ”Stories We Tell” by Sara Polley, ”Father’s Garden –…
Last night the Moscow International Film Festival 2013 ended with the usual grandiosity attached to the festival, led by director Nikita Mikhalkov. The competitive documentary section, set up by Sergey Miroshnichenko and Grigory Libergal, including 7 films, had Pawel Lozinski’s…
It is a bit difficult for me to verbalise precisely, what this film is about. It goes in many directions and I have to confess that I sometimes lackd a focus while watching. However, the reason you stay with the…
First a small introduction to a film that I saw in Kiev during the DocuDays festival. It was made by Dmytro Tiazhlov, who asked me to wait with any text review of the film until correct English subtitles had been…
The German Documentary Award… was given out in the framework of Dokville, a two day event organised by the Haus des Dokumentarfilms. In German a “Branchentreff Dokumentarfilm”, with a fine and inspiring website. For German-reading visitors. A text clip from…
Amazing initiative around the film by Emma Davie and Morag McKinnon, I am Breathing, a film that has been shown at festivals all over, has been praised for its cinematic quality (also here at filmkommentaren.dk where it was on the…
This is not a review. I am biased. The film is produced by my dear friends Svetlana and Zoran Popovic from Kvadrat, a (their own words) “film production and education firm, especially focused on production and promotion of documentary films”.…
The film has a very inviting and informative website that includes all you need to know about the background and motivation for the director to go to Kosovo and find out “What is it like over there”. Here is her…
Below the beginning of the speech that the new director of EDN (European Documentary Network) held in Sheffield June 11th, invited by the EBU Documentary Group. The whole analytical text – that should be read by all documentarians – is…
From BBC News online today, link to the full article below: The European Broadcasting Union (EBU) has called on the Greek government to reopen ERT. A petition signed by 51 European directors general, including the BBC’s Tony Hall, is to…
Greek documentarian and good friend Marianna Economou sent this text referring to the outrageous closure of ERT: I am sending you this letter that all of us, the Greek documentary filmmakers, wrote as a response to the sudden closure of…
Memories… of a festival on Bornholm, Balticum Film & TV Festival, that ran in the 1990’es in Gudhjem and Svaneke, and meant quite a lot for this blogger. (If you write Bornholm in ”Search” you will get numerous texts referring…
Have to confess that my knowledge of The Robert Flaherty Film Seminar was very limited until my former colleague from EDN Anita Reher got the job as executive director and put me on the mailing list for news. Frequently press…
Got an email from filmmaker Georgy Molodtsov, who is part of the team that runs the documentary programme at the upcoming MIFF in Moscow, that goes from June 20 to June 29. He informs about the selection made by the…
I watched it on my MacBook and I can’t wait to see it again on a big screen. I will save some of my many superlatives for that occasion. So what you get now is a first impression of a…
One more generous free offer from ”your online documentary cinema”, the vod DocAlliance, starts tomorrow and runs until June 23: 7 films by Nicolas Philibert, who once wrote the following about his method: ”I feel the need to create a…
In connection with the Copenhagen Photo Festival (June 6-16) The Cinematheque in Copenhagen screens a documentary on Saul Leiter, photographer and painter from New York (born 1923). Screening tuesday June 11, the director Tomas Leach will be present for a…
Vi har set mange tv-programmer om børn, der er tvangsfjernede. Vi har set masser af programmer om børn, hvis opvækst blev mere eller mindre ødelagt af deres fars eller mors, eller begges alkoholisme. I de fleste tilfælde har det været…
Redaktionen (Allan Berg og undertegnede) nåede at se Jørgen Leths film om maleren John Kørner ved sidste forevisning i Grand Teatret i København før den blev pillet af plakaten. Vi kedede os bemærkelsesværdigt. Sjældent har vi set Jørgen Leth, dansk…
On the National Day of Sweden, June 6, SVT (Swedish national public tv broadcaster) had a present for its viewers. At 8.20 in the morning a broadcast was made of the classic documentary by Jan Troell from 1988, Sagolandet (Land…
The DocsBarcelona Pitching Forum included a Greek film project, presented by Valerie Kontakos and Despina Pavlaki. The Greek women had earlier communicated their experience with a Kickstarter campaign on FB. I had read it and asked if it could go…
And the winner was… “The Act of Killing”. One of the editors of the film was Barcelona born Ariadna Fatjo-Vilas Mestre, educated at the National Film School in England. She answered like this when the question came if she could…
As programmer for a festival it is always a good idea, I would almost say it is an obligation, to go and see the films you selected on a big screen and with an audience. It is no secret that…
The job given to Michael Glawogger at DocsBarcelona was very simple: find 7 clips and talk about them in your master class. He found 6 and surprised this blogger, who thought he knew the work of the Austrian filmmaker, by…
The 16th edition of the DocsBarcelona Pitching Forum ended yesterday. The level of the 25 presentations was high, the organisation was – as always – and as it should be – professional in a warm and generous atmosphere. And the…
It was indeed a grand opening night of DocsBarcelona. A proud director, Joan Gonzalez introduced all the elements – the festival, still young, and the industry section, a teenager, 16 years, with new or young components like the InterdocsBarcelona seminar…
Ventura Durall is the director of a film that will travel the world. I write ”will travel the world” as the film is not premiered yet. It was screened in a very-close-to-final-cut version yesterday at DocsBarcelona. As in previous two…
I was lucky this year (December 2012) at idfa. The first film I saw, was the one that got the award for being the best film of that year’s festival. And it deserved to be, it did stand out, no…
Voices, yes voices it will be, communicates Philibert right from the start, before the titles appear on the screen. An hommage to the human voice as it is performed in the public radio of France. Quick sound montage, titles, the…
Ever since I saw the film in New York last December, the film has been in my head. Or rather the mad Ginger Baker has been in my head. I bought a Cream cd in New York and the music…
In Warsaw, at the Planete+ Doc Film Festival, I was asked to talk about film critic, especially the one about documentaries. I did so and together with a dozen of workshoppers, the new film of Maciej Drygas was screened. I…
In a week from now the thirteen first of 25 documentary film projects have been pitched on the first day of the pitching part of the 16th edition of DocsBarcelona. 12 others will follow the day after. The pitching filmmakers…
From one of the partners of the DocAlliance, DOKLeipzig, we have received this press release: The Portuguese documentary film Cativeiro (Captivity) by André Gil Mata is the winner of this year’s Doc Alliance Award. The Award was delivered on Monday at…
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…