A film blog by Allan Berg Nielsen & Tue Steen Müller
A film blog by Allan Berg Nielsen & Tue Steen Müller
On the 9th, 10th and 11th of July the Belgrade feature documentary film festival Magnificent7 organises a high quality programme of music documentary films. This is how it is announced on the website: ”“The Magnificent Seven” at BELEF is an…
Legendary Estonian documentarian, artist, politician etc. Mark Soosaar lives in Pärnu at the Baltic Sea, and has since 1987 been, he calls himself so, “the chief” of Pärnu Int. Documentary Film Festival, the oldest film festival in Estonia. According to…
Two of his films have been reviewed on this site (”I will Marry the Whole Village” and ”The Long Road Through Balkan History”). I have known him for a decade, admired his commitment and seen his strong development as a…
The excellent French-language Le Blog Documentaire (more about that on a later occasion) has published an interesting interview (this time in English) with the director of the Sunny Side of the Doc that opened yesterday in la Rochelle: Here is…
If you happen to be in Edinburgh today read what you should do to watch films, have a drink, eat some takeaway and go to tango nuevo… If you are not in Edinburgh, well enjoy the tone of this text…
The innovative festival in Skopje is over and awards have been distributed. Apart from two of the films, frequent readers of filmkommentaren.dk will know the winning films very well from reviews and notes. Here you are, and below you get…
June 26-29, la Rochelle, the 23rd edition of an event that used to be in Marseilles but now has moved to the Bay of the Bascay on the Atlantic Coast. Among professionals it has been stated that the Sheffield DocFest…
Miff stands for Moscow International Film Festival that started its 34th edition last night, again with a strong documentary element. For the second year the MIFF has a documentary competition programme with 7 films plus a section with 18 long…
A small afterthought to the fine pitching session in Edinburgh, see below, related to comments to one of the films presented on this occasion. Comments from a panel with good people from good tv stations and distribution companies. But also…
”Make Docs Happen” on the catalogue and on the posters surrounding the theatre where the pitch of 11 projects from all over Europe – to a panel of 11 broadcasters and distributors – took place. And make docs happen is…
It is the third edition, it takes place in Skopje, it goes on until June 22nd, it is a festival with its own, original profile and a special communication strategy – subscribe to its free newsletter, from where the following…
The work of the Polish master of documentary (born 1940) is being very well introduced in an article by Katerina Surmanová on the website of IDF (Institute of Documentary Film). And for newcomers to the impressive filmography of Lozinski it…
Emanuela Macchniz, student at Zelig School for Documentary, Television and New Media, placed in Bolzano Italy sent this report to filmkommentaren.dk: Last April (25 – 30) the Association Ness El Fen organized for the seventh year the new documentary film…
The British newspaper, always strong on cinema, has launched a series of (sponsored) articles named “Destination Docs”, published in connection with the Sheffield DocFest. The headline goes like this, “Despite new documentary formats, traditional fact-based films still attract impressive audiences…
As part of the upcoming MIFF (Moscow International Film Festival) that runs from June 21 – 30 and again this year includes a competiton programme of documentaries as well as Panorama documentary section, you can go to Moscow to attend…
Copenhagen Photo Festival runs until June 17 with exhibitions all around the city. The Danish Film Institute joins the event with an offer to access 6 fine films online – if you are living in Denmark. Therefore this change to…
Football starts tonight, will try NOT to write too much about it unless there are real great creative moments documented, but I could not resist this wonderful piece of Irish humour taken from facebook. Enjoy that and some fine matches,…
It has always been important for a documentary to be screened at the International Film Festival in Karlovy Vary that this year runs from June 29 to July 7 with a strong programme that was announced two days ago. There…
It is old news, but still interesting to look at, as it lists the 25 films that the 3000 members of the IDA (International Documentary Association) announced as the best documentaries ever in connection with the celebration of the association’s…
If all goes wrong, you can always turn to Mother, which is what the director of the film does in the film, when his producer no longer wants to support him. This storytelling tool, including the making of the film…
You should know that I am totally biased, as I work for the company, Parallel 40, that among other initiatives stand behind DocsBarcelona, nevertheless I find it important to post a congratulation greeting to visionary Joan Gonzalez (photo) and his…
The Danish Øregård Museum in the North of Copenhagen hosts currently an exhibition of works of legendary model, surrealist and war photographer Lee Miller (1907-77). Her role is known as part of the surrealist movement in the Parisian Montparnasse period,…
Danish Cinemateket presents 8 films in a retrospective of the Russian master Aleksandr Sokurov. Even if 8 is not a lot when you take a look at the impressive, huge filmography of the director, whose latest work ”Faust” received the…
Below, in Danish, in connection with the national premiere on June 6, a review of the new film of Phie Ambo, who brillliantly invites her audience on a both emotional and informational journey into the traumatised lives of two American…
Du bliver grebet om hjertet fra første øjeblik. En lille dreng er rædselslagen ved tanken om at skulle ind I en elevator. Det er den tanke og følelse, der skal ændres hos Will, der lider af ADHD og ofte hamrer…
Vi er på vej ind i en ny æra, – en renæssance hvor alting bliver vendt på hovedet. På alle niveauer opdager videnskaben nye sammenhænge, som betyder at vores verdensopfattelse hele tiden ændres og intet er længere er, som vi…
It has so many layers this Israeli documentary about a man, who lives in the middle of Tel Aviv and suffers from the noisy surroundings, to the point where he goes bananas, and into an action with surveillance cameras and…
Filmmaker and DoxBox Campus organiser Diana el Jeiroudi posted this text on facebook one hour ago: “I lost a dear friend and colleague. Syria lost Syrian Filmmaker Bassel Shihadeh who was killed by a mortar grenade in Homs this evening.…
Anatomy of a mass grave…Al Houla, Homs, Syria, Earth… today, 2012..The grave of over 100 killed today in the small town, half of which were under 10 years old. From the FB page of Orwa Nyrabia, Dox Box festival director,…
Redaktionen gik på udstilling i den københavnske kunstforenings fine lokaler. Allan Berg, den udstillingskyndige, blev bedt om sin vurdering. Den er generøs for nu at bruge ét af Jørgen Leths egne yndlingsudtryk, sagde Berg, da vi spiste fiskefrikadeller på Diamanten…
… with the subtitle: A Cinematographic Journey with Victor Kossakovsky, and indeed it is, a true pleasure to travel with the director while he is shooting his masterpiece ”Vivan las Antipodas”. The Chilean director frames the film with his own…
Documentation from Syria taken from FB: Since the beginning of the Annan Initiative, 1,401 martyrs have been documented by the Local Coordinating Committees of Syria (LCCS) in cooperation with the Violations and Documentation Center (VDC). Since the beginning of the…
The Danish Cinemateket in Copenhagen hosts May 20-23 the Jewish Film Festival that offers a programme of feature films, animation, short films and documentaries. I had a preview of the documentary ”Auf Wiedersehen: Til We Meet Again”, a family story…
Text taken from the FB page of Orwa Nyrabia, film director and producer and festival Dox Box director: “If anyone in the world, including Kofi Anan, wants us to prove with documented evidence that the regime ruling Syria is a…
The exhibition space is limited but the content is excellent. The film museum in Riga, situated in the same building as the National Film Centre of Latvia, in the old town of the Latvian capital, hosts a presentation of the…
The impressive Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona is a fascinating place to spend some hours. Its collection includes paintings, photographs, and until May 20 also the so-called Military Film Series by Russian master director Aleksander Sokurov, a series that hopefully…
The Latvian national premiere of the 15 Young by Young documentary series – 15 short films of 15 minutes from the former Soviet republics – young filmmakers making films about young people and their lives in today’s independent countries 20…
The winning film of the festival was a local production by Carlos Sanchez-Libre and Josep Badell, ”From the Streets to the Fields”, 80 minutes long, shot at the World Cup of football in South Africa 2010, a film with many…
The Barcelona Sports Film festival is part of the FICTS, Fédération Internationale Cinema et Télévision Sporttifs. This organisation includes festivals all over the world, has its office in Milano, and has set up rules for the festivals that operate with…
It is new, it is not easy to get an audience, but it is there, said Barbara Destefanis, the driving force behind the festival and the enthusiastic and committed director of the Nikita Distribution company, that manages a sportsfilm online…
The third edition of a Barcelona sports film festival runs the coming three days. Around 70 films dealing with sport will be presented, 25 of them in competititon, divided into different catagories, from animation films to short fiction to documentaries…
Finally! It has been and is being shown all over the world, the unique work of Viktor Kossakovsky, a generous and overwhelmingly beautiful film that also witnesses a new direction thematically, a new tone for a director whose filmography includes…
The reason for this review that ends with concrete info in Danish: The DR documentary strand Dokumania invites to a screening at the Royal Danish Library in Copenhagen of this very entertaining documentary that is produced in the US, has…
In Danish – about an event in the Danish Cinemateket, where Ib Bondebjerg hosts his third session about the modern Danish documentary portrait linked to his book ”Virkelighedsbilleder”. Invited directors are Sami Saif and Jon Bang Carlsen: De to film…
Syria has elections these days…
According to this film blogger, their previous documentary “Living Room of a Nation” was one of 10 the best documentaries coming out in 2009. Now Jukka Kärkkäinen and J P Passi have done another strong film that travels from festival…
Poland is a big country with a strong tradition for festivals and an impressive national production of documentaries, many of them in the short format. I had never heard about it before, but reading the site there is also a…
Even today, with the existing online possibilities, many come up with the usual comment and ask the eternal question: Yes, I love documentaries but where can I see them. And those who go to festivals with hundreds of films to…
It goes on and on… this is what I copied from BBC this afternoon: “At least four people have been killed as security forces and militiamen raided student accommodation in Syria’s second city, Aleppo, activists say. Live ammunition was reportedly…
The Summer 2012 issue of the European Documentary Film Magazine DOX (number 94!) is out. The editor-in-chief Truls Lie uses his editorial to point at the values of the short documentary, which is forgotten by many. His starting point is…