A film blog by Allan Berg Nielsen & Tue Steen Müller
A film blog by Allan Berg Nielsen & Tue Steen Müller
What a pleasure to listen to Peter Entell at the masterclass in Belgrade in connection with the Magnificent7 festival. Well prepared he showed clips from his previous films, talked about them and about his way of filmmaking, especially related to…
You might say that the films should be able to stand on their own. And right you are. You should be able to understand and sense a film without any introduction or comment or explanation. To watch it on your…
Look at the picture. This couple, Svetlana and Zoran Popovic, stands behind the Magnificent7 festival in Belgrade. I have known them for years and have had the privilege to work with them for five years on the selection for the…
We experience right now the golden age of documentary. There has never been such a huge interest from an audience that age-wise mostly is young and has given up on television! And there have never been such an amount of…
It is such an adventure to go to the cinema for four days to watch 7 films that are received with enthusiasm and emotion by the most wonderful audience I know, the one in Belgrade. You can not overestimate the…
Step by step the DOCSBarcelona has grown into an international documentary event of great importance in the city that right now hosts the best football team in the world. It is now a festival and a pitching forum. The organiser…
Earlier I wrote about Picasso and Manet, one of several parts of the exhibition ”Picasso et les maitres”. Now, back in Paris for some days, Louvre was the location to visit to see the master’s variation of the Delacroix painting…
They were queueing outside the cinema at Odéon in Paris. To get in to watch the new international hit directed by Danny Boyle, ”Slumdog Millionaire”, which is not going to be reviewed here, it has been all over, and touching…
Special service for our Danish readers as the film opens in cinemas in Denmark tomorrow – I made a review 4 months ago on filmkommentaren. Go to search and write James Marsh: Man on Wire. Here are some words of…
Starting today the film festival for independent film, running in Park City, Utah, goes on until January 25. The website tells it all – films, panel discussions, and the documentary sections are growing in strength, as is the Sundance Institute…
The European Feature Documentary Film Festival in Belgrade, organised by Svetlana and Zoran Popovic from the Kvadrat Film School and in collaboration with the Sava Center, has published the 2009 programme: read here As I have had the privilege to…
A review of a good film can be repeated. That is the case for this documentary that got the Swedish Guldbaggen award as best documentary of 2008, at the ceremoney where most of the prizes very much deserved went to…
It is one of those films that is a must for documentary addicts like me, and why not for people who in general are interested in the examination of the relationship between the filmmaker and his/her victims, their protagonists, their…
Yesterday commercials disappeared from French public television from 8pm in the evening until 6am next morning. Tomorrow the French Senate starts the examination of the text for a reform of “l’audiovisuel public”, initiated by president Sarkozy. The French independent producers…
The Finnish documentary festival celebrates Broomfield and Leacock. It points in the direction of a selection policy that respects the old masters, which is furthermore stressed by the latest news from festival director Erkko Lyytinen on the dokblog of YLE.…
Hvilken brilliant idé – og det manglede bare! Cinemateket viser i januar Tegnedrengene’s to mesterværker ”Eventyret om den vidunderlige kartoffel” (1984) og ”Eventyret om den vidunderlige musik” (1990). Det gøres i forbindelse med serien af animerede dokumentarfilm, og det er…
Maj Wechselmann har en imponerende filmografi, se hendes hjemmeside, hvor filmene også kan bestilles. Jeg havde lejlighed til at se hendes sidste udgivelse i går på SVT1, en film om Barbro Alving, journalist og verdensborger, som Maj Wechselmann politisk engageret,…
I am not going to nominate the 10 Best, even if I like these kind of games. If you browse through filmkommentaren.dk, click ”Articles/Reviews ENGLISH”, you will find the priorities of mine. When I again and again have written ”East…
Below you will find a couple of brief status articles on Danish documentaries in the year that is about to finish, 2008. Nothing sensational, nothing quality-wise to be compared to ”The Monastery”, the Danish documentary from the last years but…
Det begyndte med en klump i halsen og en lille tåre i øjenkrogen, da 1500 tilskuere klappede i et par minutter efter at have set Pernille Rose Grønkjærs mesterværk ”The Monastery”. Instruktøren var på scenen i Beograds store koncertsal, hvor…
Her på redaktionen prøvede vi at starte en debat om DFI’s støtte- og distributionspolitik. Jeg prøvede at sige, at DFI forsømmer at udvikle FilmKunsten til fordel for den journalistiske dokumentar – og såvel kollega Allan Berg og jeg havde indlæg…
From le monde 16.12.08, a clip from the review of Jean-Luc Douin, for our French reading readers, about a film that previously was praised briefly by my colleague Allan Berg: ”Toute mémoire est en désordre, toute sensation difficile à capturer,…
The highly estimated film magazine Sight & Sound has made its hit list for 2008, to be published in the January 09 issue. Winner is Steve McQueen’s Hunger. This is a clip from what the editor Steve James wrote about…
Bilal is a boy, whose parents are blind and have a hard life in a poor area of Calcutta. For a year the director has followed the little boy stumbling into the world as any other child does, who is…
… har undertitlen ”en film om forfatteren Leif Hasle”, om hvem filmen sig drejer, en sympatisk og beskeden ældre herre, som instruktøren lader komme til orde, og han har mange kloge reflektioner at byde på, først på en rejse tilbage…
This documentary is an inspiration for people, who deal with, work with or like to watch a photographer at work and listen to his thoughts about what he is doing and why and how. The documentary has for me too…
An envelope arrived with a dvd. Posted in Lithuania by Volha Nikalaichyk, a woman from Belarus, producer of documentary films, and many times a participant in workshops in Eastern Europe, outside her own country, where I also met her once,…
… yes, you can buy that in the streets of Berlin, ready for the xmas holidays as this wonderful city is, markets all over, too many sausages for my taste but also glühwein and chocolate and marzipan and beer, economic…
… is the name of the hyper active French president, very much disliked by the French film people I know, for his law proposal, his ”réforme de l’audiovisuel” that (according to le Monde 18.12) now has passed through the Parliament…
March 11 2004, the bombings in Madrid. 191 people died, more than 2000 were wounded, when trains were exploded in the early morning. Two young males stood behind the crime, Jamal and Sarhane, a criminal and an islamic extremist, both…
The British Dochouse at the Riverside Studios in London does a lot for the creation of a documentary culture in the UK… but is apparently not only promoting films within the UK but also outside. I found this very interesting…
It is still fascinating and entertaining to watch Andy Warhol exhibitions: ”If you want to know all about AW, just look at the surface of my paintings and films and me, and there I am. There´s nothing behind it”. Sounds…
Many other sites have already informed about this. Now we do so as well, even if personalia is not our stuff. BUT Mikael Opstrup has published his documentary poetics on filmkommentaren.dk, in Danish and English, just search ”Mikael Opstrup…”. Here…
Trying to understand what is going on in the world takes a lot of time. These banal but wise words come from the old reindeer herder, who is the character of this visually strong reflection on time in an isolated…
Le Monde (11.12.08) includes an interview with Werner Herzog to announce the big retrospective of the German master and his around 50 films. The series run from December 10 to March 2 2009. He says nothing specific new in this…
… that has the subtitle, ”reporting from a closed country” is content-wise a totally shocking experience. There you are in the middle of a military brutality that is filmed by courageous video journalists, who know that a documentation like this…
Am I just an object of study for you, René asks Helena, the director of the film, in one of their numerous conversations during the 20 years, she has followed the child/the youngster/theman René, who spends most of his life…
Sergey Dvortsevoy thinks it is important to reflect on WHY you make documentaries, well film in general. He started late as a filmmaker, he made ”Paradise”, ”Bread Day”, ”Highway”, ”In the Dark” and now ”Tulpan”, the latter a film with…
Below – in Danish – a critical text about yesterday’s broadcast produced by DR, our public broadcaster in Denmark. Today I met some of the participants at the party for European films, organised by European Film Academy, EFA. They had…
Jeg vidste jo godt, at det ville være umuligt for DR/TV at hylde europæisk film på en værdig måde. Jeg vidste, at Mikael Bertelsen ville være mindre plat end de sædvanlige presenters, og han havde også flere fine indslag, som…
Sometimes it is easy to express your opinion. Like in this case where I found a text from the film critic at The Guardian, Nick Bradshaw (November 28), that precisely and in much better English than I can perform –…
Der er mulighed for søde gensyn og nyopdagelser i Cinematekets december-program. Under overskriften ”Den etnografiske dokumentar” er der Basil Wright (”Song of Ceylon”), flere gange Jean Rouch, inklusiv foredrag om ham, den fremragende Vietnamfilm af Trinh T. Minh-ha fra 1989…
Utrættelige Jørgen Vestergaard har lavet en film om ”Kirsten Kjær og hendes museum” i Langvad ved Frøstrup. Den varer 33 minutter og lader kunstnerens nevø, Harald Fuglsang (billede), fortælle historien om en farverig og kontroversiel personlighed, hvis mange portrætmalerier kan…
Taken from the idfa site: The VPRO Joris Ivens Award was presented to Anders Østergaard for Burma VJ – Reporting From a Closed Country. The film consists almost completely of material filmed in secret by a group of reporters during…
This review has been written by Georg Bocher, direction student at the Zelig Documentary film School in Bolzano: The first two minutes leaves no doubt about the scope of this documentary. It is between the most private family life and…
You wonder why it is interesting to watch a man, who sits at his desk browsing through a newspaper for more than a minute. It is. There is no computer at that desk, the governor of Uppsala uses a pen…
The Kurdish in Turkey – a long and complicated story about a people being suppressed. We have seen loads of news reports and some political documentaries about a conflict full of blood, and also for that reason it is nice…
The last day of the Forum at idfa in Amsterdam. For those who have never heard about it, let this text be the introduction, taken from the site of idfa: ”The FORUM is Europe’s largest gathering of filmmakers, television commissioning…
It is without any doubt absolutely fantastic to see all these documentary professionals gather in one room to exchange ideas, catch up from the last gathering, offer new projects, comment on the last films which have been watched or broadcast…
I know that I am biased in the following – working for the Institute for Documentary Films (IDF) in Prague that organises the Ex Oriente Film training Programme and the East European Forum in Jihlava – but I have to…