Vilnius Diary 4
One of the participants at the workshop, Italian Davide Mastropaolo, asked me for advice on a film that a friend had made with himself involved as co-producer. The film is about to be finished but – have you heard about…
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 MoreVilnius Diary 4
Vilnius Diary 3
I showed a clip from ”Citizen Havel” yesterday here at the Summer Film Academy in Lithuania, as an example of how important it is to have access and to have time to follow a character, who is known widely by…
Vilnius Diary 2
Audrius Stonys made a lecture this morning. I have heard him doing so many times and have written several praising sentences on filmkommentaren.dk – about this filmmaker who is for sure to be considered as a national poet in his…
Vilnius Diary 1
I am in Vilnius for a summer film school where students from countries all over Europe have gathered to make short documentary films about or rather from the 2009 European cultural capital. 10 films are to be made, research is…
Hubert Sauper: Darwin’s Nightmare
This brief intro comes because a documentary neo-classic is broadcast on Danish television tonight, on DR2 in prime time (8.40pm). It has been in Danish cinemas, it is available from the DFI, and if you have already seen it, take…
Maziar Bahari arrested in Tehran
Well known and respected documentary filmmaker and journalist Maziar Bahari was arrested yesterday morning in Tehran according to Newsweek, that he works for. This is the start of the article of Newsweek: Among the dozens of people arrested overnight in…
Bul(garian)doc Films and Humour
… will be very much present at this year’s edition (number 20!) of the Sunny Side of the Doc. A so-called Bulgarian umbrella has been established to promote the films and projects that come from a country with several fine…
Ex Oriente 4 Directing
Stan Neumann visited the workshop and showed his 2004 production for Arte France, ”Language does not Lie”, a film based on the diaries of Victor Klemperer, who survived Das dritte Reich and whose diaries were not published before the mid…
Ex Oriente 3 Directing
Italian director Alessandro Rossetto came to Hotel Biograf to show his 1999 documentary Bibione Bye Bye One, which is a wonderful b/w 75 minutes long journey into an area and a culture that the director knows from his childhood, 100…
Ex Oriente 2 Sales
This EU MEDIA training programme, organised by IDF (Institute of Documentary Film), based in Prague, is currently holding its second session out of three in Hotel Biograf in Pisek, Czech Republic. Projects from Eastern European countries are being developed and…
Ex Oriente 1 – Production
Helge Albers represents the Flying Moon Filmproduktion based in Germany. A company that started 10 years ago and produces fiction as well as feature length documentaries. Albers gave the Ex Oriente participants a brief intro to the documentary history of…
Bananas
Swedish film director and producer Fredrik Gertten has made a film, Bananas, that has reached the headlines – before its actual release. The Malmö based Gertten, who has been enormously active internationally for many years, and who for the film…
Free Thought Documentaries in Moscow
As part of the Moscow International Film Festival (19.6-28.6) two Russian documentary gentlemen, very often present in Western documentary events, Sergey Miroshnichenko and Grigory Libergal, have put together a fine programme. This is what they say: 43 masterpieces of world…
Capturing Reality 2
The NFB (National Film Board of Canada) production on the art of documentary, featuring 33 directors from 13 countries, are being used for debates among filmmakers and with the audience. Here is a quote from a Realscreen article illustrating the…
Petr Lom: Letters to the President
Den korte udgave af Petr Loms film fra Iran bliver vist i aften på DR2 under den danske titel “Breve til præsident Ahmadinejad”. Den er fin at se, selvom jeg klart foretrækker den lange udgave, som blev anmeldt på filmkommentaren.dk…
Guth Gafa: One More Documentary Oasis
… is placed in Donegal in Ireland, an international documentary film festival it is, with a very fine international programme as well as an Irish. This is how the organisers present their festival: ”When we established the festival in 2006…
Capturing Reality
33 filmmakers, 13 countries, 1 passion: The art of documentary. This is the way that NFB, National Film Board of Canada, launches its interview-film that includes great filmmakers like Maysles, Kim Longinotto, Werner Herzog (photo), Molly Dineen, Heddy Honigmann and…
Tiananmen June 1989
I suppose that all public broadcasters have put a focus on the massacre on the Tiananmen Square in Beijing 20 years ago. A taboo in Chinese history, it is simply forbidden to mention it in Chinese media, channels like arte…
Herbert Tobias
Born in 1924 (died in 1982) German photographer Herbert Tobias was sent to the Ostfront as a soldier when only 19 years old. In the exhibition in Hamburg a series of photos documents how it was for a young man,…
De Gerlache: Magritte, le jour et la nuit
A museum for René Magritte has opened in Brussels and as the cultural channel of Europe, arte celebrates this important event. But how to make a film about an artist, whose oeuvre was huge, an artist who behaved like a…
DOKU.ART 2 – Stanley Kubrick
For lovers of Stanley Kubrick – and who is not? – the festival programmes a documentary by British Jon Ronson, made for Channel 4’s True Stories, 48 minutes long. The text about the film and its background goes like this:…
DOKU.ARTS 1
Taking place in Amsterdam June 11-14 at the Film Museum this international festival for films on art presents an exclusive selection of films, with Agnès Varda (photo) as honorary guest meeting an audience that has the possibility to watch a…
Peter Kerekes: Doc on Cosmonauts
”Cooking History” by Slovak director and producer Peter Kerekes (photo) has been praised on filmkommentaren.dk and Kerekes is again on the hunt for funders of his new film project on astronauts that he presented while participating in European Film Promotion’s…
Gideon Koppel: Sleep Furiously
I do consider the film of Gideon Koppel as one of the most important in the last couple of years. It has been written about on filmkommentaren.dk several times (use the “search” button). I saw it on dvd in Lisbon…
Sunny Side of the Doc… 20 Years!
Of course it needs to be celebrated, the 20 years of Sunny Side of the Doc, now in la Rochelle for a couple of years, before in Marseilles with a prologue in Lyon. Lots of memories for someone like me…
David Lynch
Innovative Lynch stands behind a new fascinating website film project that must appeal to all documentarians. According to RealScreen ” the online home of esteemed film director David Lynch will serve as a hub for 121 short documentary web films.…
FIDADOC 2009
Great to see that documentary festivals not only grow in Europe. For the second time an international documentary festival will take place in Agadir in Marocco November 10-14. For long documentaries, i.e. film that are longer than 52 minutes produced…
Doclisboa 2009
Readers of filmkommentaren.dk will know that I consider the international documentary festival in the capital of Portugal as one of the leading when it comes to quality in selection and side programme policy. The programme for 2009, the festival takes…
Herz Frank on Documentaries
Latvian Herz Frank, a master in the history of documentary, with works like “Ten Minutes Older”, “There were Seven Simeons”, “The Song of Songs” and “Flashback”: In front of me on my work table is the central fragment from Raphael’s…
Sourav Sarangi: Bilal 2
The film about the Indian boy Bilal has previously been reviewed on filmkommentaren.dk The idfa festival and the connected Jan Virjman Fund has followed “the carreer” of the film and has posted this small sunshine story about a film, its…
New Russian Documentary Site
For those who read Russian there is a very fine new website to visit that includes good and relevant info on what is going on in Russia in the field of non-fiction and documentary. The site is independent and is…
Kim Longinotto: Rough Aunties
Kim Longinotto is an amazingly productive film director, who has a slate of important films in her filmography (among them masterpieces like ”Divorce Iranian Style”, ”Runaway”, ”Gaea Girls”, ”Sisters in Law”), and she is a director that with her subjects…
Annie Sundberg & Rickie Stern: The Devil came on H
The film was reviewed in August 2007, now we repeat the review for those Danish people who watched it on DR2’s new tuesday night documentary strand ”Dokumania”. The Danish language review went like this: Darfur. Vi har hørt om det,…
Planete Doc Review 4
The festival in Warsaw is over and the many prizes have been awarded. The following films awarded at Planete Doc Review are to be found reviewed or noted on filmkommentaren.dk: Geoffrey Smith: The English Surgeon. Anders Østergaard: Burma VJ. Peter…
Erlend E. Mo: Sandhedsjæger
OBS til danske læsere: Se denne smukke og gribende krimidokumentar om opklaringen af to justitsmord begået mod en handicappet mand, som sad i fængsel i over 18 år for to kvindemord, han ikke havde begået. Det er en krimi med…
Chaim Litewski: Citizen Boilesen
Danish born Henning Albert Boilesen was a succesful businessman during the military dictatorship in Brazil in the 60’es. He went to the top, had close contact to the rulers of the country, and as many other industrialists in Sao Paulo,…
Bram Van Paesschen: Pale…
The title of the film is actually ”Pale Peko Bantu Mambo Ayikosake” which in swahili means ”Where there are people there will be problems”. And problems there are in Katanga, the location of this fresh and direct film that manages…
Input 2009/svt
For readers of Swedish language there is a fine service provided from Lars Säfström, documentary head of svt Malmö. Säfström writes about what he has seen and about the discussions at the public broadcaster’s yearly gathering that this year takes…
Cinephilia!
Film History – The Finnish film critic and historian Peter von Bagh is the artistic director of this exciting week in June: Il Cinema Ritrovato, the festival sponsored by the Mostra Internazionale del Cinema Libero and the Cineteca del Comune…
Petr Lom: Letters to the President
Ahmadinejad, president of Iran, receives 10 million letters per year and 76% of them are answered! This is stated by an employee from the administration that takes care of this personal contact between the president and the population. Ahmadinejad, a…
Peter Kerekes: Cooking History
For a documentary veteran viewer it is pure pleasure, when you watch a film that gives you surprises you in structure, narration and content. I knew that Slovak/Hungarian Peter Kerekes after his wonderful ”66 Seasons” was working on a big…
Jönsson & Gertten: Long Distance Love
Osh in Kyrgyzstan. Not a place that we have heard much about. The same goes for the people who live there. Who fall in love as everyone (hopefully) does all over the world. However, the problem for the two protagonists,…
Guyla Nemes: Lost World
“The life, demolition and reconstruction of the Kopaszi dam between 1998 and 2007. A mostly black & white 35mm documentary shot over ten years in a forgotten landscape in the center of Budapest. People living in houseboats and wooden houses,…
Viktor Asliuk: Waltz
I have known the works of Viktor Asliuk for many years, small universal stories about people and what they do in their lives, conveyed with a lot of warmth, with ”We are Living on the edge” as a masterpiece that…
Salome Jashi: Speechless
Georgian director. Saw one of her previous works last year, ”Their Helicopter”, written about on this site. And praised at the same time her on-going film project, ”Restaurant Bakhmaro and Those Who Work There”, that is now with the director…
Brügger og Bertelsen: Quatraro Mysteriet 2
Ud fra et dokumentar-synspunkt er serien om Quatraro (for sagen som sådan se tidligere indlæg) et tv-program, som viser to journalisters research. Man kunne så være fræk og spørge, hvorfor pokker vi skal se researchen og ikke en velturneret undersøgende…
Svt Tonight : The Caviar Connection
OBS! Especially for Danish and Swedish readers : On this site the great film of Dragan Nikolic has often been mentioned and praised (go to “search” and write the title). Here is another piece of promotion on the occasion of…
Simon El Habre: The One Man Village
Best international feature Documentary at the Hot Docs was announced yesterday night and the winner was the Lebanese filmmaker Simon El Habre with this ”The One Man Village”, well deserved for a charming and well constructed film. Here is the…
Boris Mitic: Goodbye, How are You? 1
It is one of those films where you are attracted by the visual and the tone of the film and the words, in other words by the film, and still feel like you want to watch and listen again. Because…
Boris Mitic: Goodbye How are You? 2
This is a clip from a text made by the director, to be found on his website in full length: … I myself have systematically collected aphorisms for the last ten years. Whenever I wonder why I am still living…