A film blog by Allan Berg Nielsen & Tue Steen Müller
A film blog by Allan Berg Nielsen & Tue Steen Müller
On this site you will find lots of texts that introduce, review and report on documentaries from Lithuania. Another one comes here to tell our Danish readers that Janina Lapinskaite will show some of her films at the Danish Cinemateket…
The Brasilian documentary film festival starts March 22 and runs until April 1. Amir Labaki, director of the festival, film critic and cigar connaisseur, has again put together a programme of high quality, with competition sections and retrospectives. Among the…
Taken from the website of EDN: The EDN Award is presented to the DOX BOX initiators a day after the DOX BOX Global Day, an initiative made in response to the current political and human situation in Syria. Current conditions…
Below a Danish text about the man, who is considered to be the father of Danish documentary, Theodor Cristensen (1914-1967) This coming sunday his film ”Ella” will be shown at Cinemateket in Copenhagen introduced by his son and people, who…
This is a list of all the venues where the films of DOX BOX Globay Day for SYRIA are screened. Please note that the list is arranged as per HOST CITY and aphabetically. You can also check the nearest DOX…
On their website the organisers of Dox Box festival address us in the following way, under the headline Syria Global Day: The fifth edition of DOX BOX International Documentary Film festival in Syria this year was supposed to take place…
Syrian Documentary films will be screened around the world on March 14th, 15th and 16th, 2012: London, Berlin, Paris, NY, Prague, Tunis, Alexandria, Leipzig, Nuremberg, Marseilles, Cairo, Tangier, Marrakesh, Malmo, Copenhagen (see below, Danish readers), Montreal, Chicago, LA, Philadelphia, Vancouver,…
For our Danish readers: Gratis entré til syriske film + introduktion i solidaritet med DOX BOX torsdag den 15. marts kl. 17-19. I Husets Biograf præsenterer CPH:DOX en særvisning af to aktuelle, syriske dokumentarfilm med introduktion. En af filmene, den…
The British filmmaker Sean McAllister took part in the East European Platform event in Prague organised by IDF (Institute of Documentary Film). He ran a masterclass, where he showed clips from his many films shot in troubled areas (Iraq, Israel,…
The style of British director Broomfield is well known from many of his films. He is in the picture, he is a character himself, the journalist looking for characters, and the truth, walking in and out of doors, very often…
In this sympathetic documentary, that can be watched by kids as well, Galaa, who is a twelve years old boy from Mongolia, is attracted to hip hop music, is not really fond of going to school, makes problems for his…
A Latvian film team makes a film about a group of Danish, who suffer from sclerosis in different stages. The group is followed while they are rehearsing for the set-up of ”End Game” by Samuel Beckett, accompanied by their thoughts…
The international jury as well as the jury for the regional competition both selected short documentaries, when the members awarded their favourites. Ignoring the long documentaries the Big Stamp for the best film in the international section went to the…
Full cinema, festive atmosphere, premiere of the long awaited film by Dana Budisavljević, Croatian director and producer, and one of the founders of ZagrebDox at the time where she was working with Nenad Puhovski at Factum that stands behind the…
This came to Filmkommentaren and adresses all over the world, to us from Danish production company Magic Hour. A global online event. Respect!: Saturday March 3rd at 7.32 am (CET) GREENPEACE marks the nuclear disaster by opening a free on-line…
A wise festival person once said that it takes 8 years to build a festival. A look at the 8th edition of ZagrebDox confirms this assumption. This international documentary film festival has found itself. It is professionally organised, communicates very…
Of course ZagrebDox also has an industry section including a training workshop for 12 projects and a connected, public pitching session with 9 panelists. It took place March 1 in one of the cinemas in the Movieplex and attracted a…
Modern Times! Two films to reflect upon, both shot with a cell phone: Bosnian director Nedzad Begovic has made ”A Cell Phone Movie” (photo), and ”People I Could have Been and Maybe am” by Dutch Boris Gerrets. The latter has…
ZagrebDox is also a place to catch up on films that you missed at idfa and Nenad Puhovski, the festival director and programmer, does not hide the fact that he does a good part of the film selection for his…
This is a text for the ZagrebDox catalogue 2012: The films that you are going to watch from Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania are the finest examples from a cinema that has, from country to country, its own individuality and its…
At the Archidoc training session at the la fémis film school in Paris yesterday, where ten projects were presented to a panel of producers, broadcasters and festival representatives, two so-called hybrid documentary projects stood out as upcoming films that are…
One more festival, and one of great importance. The following text is taken from the site of IDF (Institute of Documentary Film), that stands for a huge so-called industry programme parallel to the festival. It all takes place in Prague,…
The 8th edition of a festival that has a strong programme with an international competition programme, a regional one, a retrospective with star director Jay Rosenblatt, a section with controversial documentaries like Mads Brügger’s ”The Ambassador” (photo) and Fredrik Gertten’s…
It is a good programme that the organisers of the Swedish documentary film festival has put together for ”a six-day-long documentary party” in Stockholm March 6-11. New Swedish documentaries in competition, among them Fredrik Gertten’s ”Big Boys Gone Bananas” and…
Nick Fraser, commissioning editor at BBC’s Storyville, wrote an article for The Observer (February 5), constructed as a diary from and about the Sundance Film Festival, where ” I have two films in the American competition. I am also judging…
One more text from Dox Box festival Orwa Nyrabia, who has turned war correspondent and frequently writes in English on Syria and Me – The Revolution Chronicles: Damascus: The regime’s security forces, backed by armed operatives, raided the office of…
One of the best documentaries recently is ”The Interrupters” (photo) by Steve James, who was also the man behind masterpieces as ”Hoop Dreams” and ”Stevie”. Film journalist Jennifer Merlin has interviewed James, site address below, and out of that comes…
The Cinéma du Réel has chosen its competition films for the 34th edition of the festival that takes place in the Centre Pompidou in Paris March 22 to April 3. 15 films have been taken for the International Competition and…
Our German language readers should know about the fine work done by the Stuttgart based Haus des Dokumentarfilms. Yesterday I received a ”Dokumentarfilm Newsletter” from the Haus with a link to a website – in German – that provides you…
.. detained by security forces since February 2nd. The following text is taken from Facebook: Bahraa Hijazi, was born in 1986 in Damascus, Syria. Her family is originally from Jeiroud, a city 50 kilometres from the capital. Bahraa’s father Abdul…
It is quite a challenge to choose one’s own family as the theme of one’s first feature documentary. Nevertheless this is what Carlo Guillermo Proto (1979) did with ”El Huaso”, a film that demonstrates a strong visual competence to convey…
”Your online documentary cinema”. This is how the excellent vod Doc Alliance Films characterises itself. Based in Czech Republic at the address of IDF (Institute of Documentary Film), they are doing great work. The selection of films available is indeed…
”Think Big! Is what young producer and director Ilona Bicevska has done throughout a year of participation in the Ex Oriente 2008.” This was the text posted here in October 2008. Two years later another text was posted: ” Think…
“Me in English… from Syria 2012, as frequent as possible. Orwa”, was the short sentence that came up on facebook yesterday from film producer and Dox Box festival in Damascus director Orwa Nyrabia, who has been reporting from Syria since…
Letter From Syrian novelist Khaled Khalifa to his friends around the world: My friends, writers and journalists from all over the world, in China and Russia, I would like to inform you that my people is being subjected to a…
The auditorium of the CCCB, cultural Centre of Barcelona, was full of hundreds of observers to the 15th pitching forum of DocsBarcelona. They provided the enthusiastic atmosphere for the 23 projects that were to be pitched there during two days,…
Session after session the pitch forum organisers and participants talk about the financial crisis in the European documentary market, mostly exemplified through the cutdown in budget, staff and time slots for documentaries in the public broadcasting companies. It was therefore…
The opening was fun and sweet, clever, serious and thoughtful. Alessandro Negrini (photo), director from Italy living in Northern Ireland & Tor Arne Bjerke, producer from Norway, took the auditorium by heart and brain with their ”Ballad of a Ghost…
I can not leave Barcelona and the documentary event that – on a personal note – I have been part on since its start 15 years ago, without having another personal note on football! I am lucky that I editorially…
The 15th edition of DocsBarcelona closed last night with quite a spectacular performance. After the screening of ”The Human Tower”, directed by Ram Devineni and Cano Rojas, a group went on stage to make the human tower happen in the…
A gift to filmkommentaren and its readers! Juste Eigminaite from Lithuania contacted us to offer texts from her US documentary festival tour that started at Sundance and will go on until end of June. Below you can see the lists…
The festival is over. The closing film sunday night January 29 was Whores’ Glory by Michael Glawogger, one of the most important documentarians of our time. There was almost a full house in the Sava Centre Cinema Hall, which means…
Fernand Melgar, director and Elise Schuss, assistant director and executive producer, represented ”Vol Spécial”, and hosted an extremely interesting session about how their strong social documentary came to life. And after-life: 1 year of editing, 160 hours of material, more…
The festival in Belgrade with 7 feature documentaries from Europe makes the invited directors work! All of them are obliged to lead a workshop, that has its 7 sessions of two hours. The session takes place the day after their…
Your batteries get charged at these workshops. You get to know how the filmmakers perform their craft. It is as simple as that. Some filmmakers have pedagogical skills, others need help, and indeed they receive that through Zoran Popovic, who…
Edition 8 of the Belgrade based feature length European documentary festival. The opening was last night and the audience was there again, hundreds, maybe almost 1000 spectators for each of the two films that were screened in the big hall…
Den svenske instruktør Magnus Gerttens mesterstykke “Håbets Havn“, som er anmeldt på engelsk på filmkommentaren, bliver vist på DR2 på onsdag den 25 kl. 20.30 i en én-times udgave. Og på SVT2 dagen efter, den 26, kl.20 med flere genudsendelser.…
The first tv-documentary episode of the arte (German-French) crossmedia event, presented on this site a couple of weeks ago, is online for a free preview, also for viewers outside France and Germany. The 52 mins. documentary, to be broadcast on…
An introduction taken from the synopsis of the film that had its world premiere at idfa 2011: Sociology professor Nicolae Dumitru believes strongly in true love. So strongly in fact that he has devoted his entire life to expounding his…
In Danish language as this is about primarily Danish documentaries that are sold through the online shop of the daily newspaper Information. Vi hører det tit på redaktionen: Åh, men hvor kan man få fat i alle de film, som…