Riga Diary 4
The Boy from Riga: Sergei Eisenstein. Born in 1898, son of Mikhail and Julia. Lives in the city until 1915 where he goes to St. Petersburg to study. His father becomes the architect of beautiful Jugendstil buildings that are still…
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 MoreRiga Diary 4
Riga Diary 3
Salome Jashi is from Georgia. She is here for the Baltic Sea Forum. She has an interesting documentary project called ”Restaurant Bakhmaro and Those Who Work There” that is to be pitched in this coming weekend to television editors and film…
Riga Diary 2
Guard dog or lap dog? Seems to be a very actual and relevant question that journalists in Belarus (and other countries as well) have to ask themselves. In the country of Lukashenko no criticism of the President and his regime…
Riga Diary 1
I am writing this in my room on the 8th floor at Hotel Albert (Einstein) in Riga, where the Baltic Sea Forum and the ”Is it Easy to be Different” mini festival starts today. Yesterday I had time to take…
Doc Air Impressive Online Catalogue
If you want to make your own festival, faced in front of your computer, Doc Air offers you quality. Check it yourself, and be aware that here you find an excellent selection of Czech directors to be carefully studied –…
Documentaries in Riga
Riga hosts two important documentary events this coming week. On wednesday, September 3rd, a small festival opens for everyone under the title: “Is it Easy to be Different”, a reference to the Juris Podnieks perestroika classic, “Is it Easy to…
Cinemateket September 2008
Nick Broomfield besøger Cinemateket den 12. og 13. September i forbindelse med at 10 af hans film vises i Filmhuset i København. Flot. Jeg skrev her på bloggen en kritik af Cinematekets trykte program. De svage tekster og det falske…
Gary Hustwit: Helvetica
Why is it that I – without really reflecting upon it – always choose helvetica as my font when I write emails or write a text on this site? Why don’t I take Lucida Bright or TrueOfficinaSansBooKItalic or Times New…
Anne Andreu: Isabelle Huppert
Normally documentaries about actors are built around anecdotes, told by the actor in question him/herself or by people with whom the actor has been working. With Isabelle Huppert it is different. She says herself in this tv documentary that she…
Odense Film Fest Documentary Prizes
The festival has finished and prizes have been given:Grand Prix: “Milosevic on trial” by Michael Christoffersen.Best Danish Documentary: “Kun med hjertet kan man rigtigt se” by Ulla Boye.Audience Award: “Fra Thailand til Thy” af Janus Metz. All three films have…
Yang Fudong
I went to an art exhibition in Copenhagen. It was a wonderful, surprising experience. I am normally not into video installations but here I met an artist, who has entered film and photography from painting with a subtle sense of…
Ben Kempas:Upstream Battle:The Story
This is one of those films that you can only appreciate: It takes you to a place in the world that you (I) don’t know anything about. It has some charismatic characters who fight for a cause. You get to…
MandagsDokumentar – turné
Vi har tidligere rost Ebbe Preisler og hans formidlingsinitiativ, forevisningerne af nye og gamle dokumentar- og kortfilm i PH Caféen i København. Vi vil gerne fortsætte i samme spor og gøre opmærksom på det flotte tilbud, som Preisler videregiver: at…
Sally Mann
Copenhagen, The Royal Library, The Black Diamond: I went to see the exhibition with photographs by Sally Mann. Wonderful experience. Made me think about her approach to her work. I found an article by Richard Woodward from NYTimes, who calls…
Kites 3
If you search “Kites” on this site, you will find both a salute to a very fine film and a warm congratulation because of the selection to take part in the prestigious Locarno Film Festival – that has just ended.…
Odense Film Festival Anmeldelser/Reviews
Hvis du er interesseret i at læse flere anmeldelser af danske dokumentarfilm fra Odense Film Festivals program, så kan du søge følgende titler på denne hjemmeside. De har alle været bragt i årets løb: If you find interest in reading…
Paradise
Three Danish male directors stand behind this reflecting impressionistic collage on Life and Death, joy and pain, sorrow and happiness. The background is Denmark in this beginning of a new century, a country that is at war in Iraq, a…
New Wave of British Feature Documentaries?
A week ago British newspaper The Independent brought an interesting optimistic article about the return of feature lenght documentaries to the cinemas. Read yourself the article that I found through the website of the Sheffield Doc Fest: https://sheffdocfest.com/ under “Latest…
Enemies of Happiness
At the tv festival in Copenhagen, organised by Danish Producers, there was again a prize for “Enemies of Happiness”, directed by Eva Mulvad. We have before pointed to the excellent dvd sales site initiative of directors Mulvad, Pernille Grønkjær and…
Solange on Love
They have the same name. One lives in Santiago, the other in Valparaiso at the coast. One has a hard life as a parking guide in the big city, with a drug addicted husband and two small children totally dependent…
Gonzo
Wow, that sounds exciting, a film about the reporter legend Hunter S. Thompson (1937–2005). Has been released, at least in connection with the Sundance festival, link below. I met it on the fine film website of Guardian, where the director…
The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema 1,2,3
… presented by Slavoj Zizek, Slovenian philosopher and psychoanalyst, is simply a gift to all film teachers. In three parts Zizek takes us on a Freudian, but not only, trip through wonderful clips that he comments on from his point…
Danish Documentary Issues
Just a brief on the Danish language articles below, three of them, dealing 1) with a cine-essay series at the Cinemateket in the Film House in the middle of Copenhagen. Lovely programme with films by Joris Ivens and Chris Marker…
Mandagsdokumentaren
Ebbe Preisler er en af utrættelige slidere i dansk dokumentarfilm. Han var den fremtrædende producent i midten af 1970’erne, da jeg startede i Statens Filmcentral. Han stod i 1990 bag oprettelsen af Documentary, som var MEDIAprogrammets første kontor, som blev…
Filminstituttet under kraftig privatisering
Ebbe Preislers indsats for dokumentarfilmen i Danmark er omtalt under Mandagsdokumentaren. At han ikke er bange for at tage bladet fra munden viser følgende klip fra hans forord til programmet. Vi tilslutter os helt hans nødråb vedr. udenlandske kort- og…
Cine-essays i Cinemateket
Det er herligt at få at vide at Cinemateket i København i denne måned ”begynder en længere rundtur i dokumentarfilmens mangfoldighed” med film af bl.a. Franju, Alain Resnais, Bert Haanstra, Joris Ivens (hans vidunderlige Kina-film), Chris Marker (fra hvem begrebet…
Swedish short documentaries
At the Odense Film Festival one of the special programmes is very much welcomed. It is a selection of short documentaries, a genre that is very rarely seen. Read what Cecilia Lidin, festival director of Odense Film Festival writes on…
Odense Film Festival
If you want a qualified overview of what has happened in Danish documentary, short fiction, animation and children film during the last year – you should go to the 23rd Odense Film Festival that takes place next week, August 19-24,…
Redaktionen på ferie
Forleden hyldede vi os selv i anledning af ét års fødselsdagen for filmkommentaren. På skrift. Samme aften blev der sagt skål i Haut-Médoc og i Vecchia Romagna hjemtaget fra Italien. Det blev vådt og langt her i Allinge, hvor redaktionen…
Happy Birthday / Tillykke
www.filmkommentaren.dk has today been alive and kicking for one year. What started as an idea in the head of Allan, has now become a regular “con amore” passion for the two of us. We are proud and happy to have…
Georg Misch: A Road to Mecca
… with the subtitle, The Journey of Muhammad Asad. Who was originally Leopold Weiss, Jewish, born in Austria, but converted to islam in the 1920’s and became, as said by a Palestinian on the West Bank, ”an enlightened Islamic thinker,…
Bazzoli/Lelong:Amour,Sexe & Mobylette
What a charming film, full of Life and Love! Taking place in a small town in Burkina Faso, it is built as a film for cinema release with several parallel stories circling around the St. Valentine´s Day. Old people´s love,…
Lithuanian Classics
I write this in a summer house on Bornholm. On this island I met – for ten consecutive years – Henrikas Sablevicius, the godfather of the so-called poetic Lithuanian documentary. I never spoke directly to him (no English from his…
Masterpieces with Children
3 new photos on the title page of www.filmkommentaren.dk. All with children, all from masterpieces that have been written about: From left “Ten Minutes Older” by Herz Frank (USSR/Latvia), “Before Flying Back to the Earth” by Arunas Matelis (Lithuania) and…
Svetoslav Draganov: Tell me What is the Universe
A short piece of observation that was done by one of Bulgaria´s most talented young documentary directors – in connection with the shooting of a feature film by Stephan Komandarev. The characters are extras from the film, the village is…
HYPE The Obama Effect
Some documentaries get a lot of publicity even before they are ready to be seen. Not surprisingly a film about Barack Obama made by a producer, who is characterised as the direct opposite of Michael Moore, is talked about on…
Radovan Karadzic and BBC
Just a brief note on this day where Karadzic has been flown to the Hague Tribunal. Actually just a link to the BBC website where you can see not only yesterday’s images from the Belgrade protests against the catch of…
Baltic Tour: Lithuania
I have just left Vilnius, this beautiful spiritual capital of Lithuania. I had two nights at the Shakespeare Hotel, which I would like to (an exception on this blog) recommend to everyone. Anyway, I can report to you that the…
Baltic Tour: Latvia
Riga, the city where came to life so many great documentaries during Soviet times and around the fall of the empire. I was invited to teach at the Discovery Campus session that was held at the coast, 40 minutes from…
Baltic Tour: Estonia
I went to Tallinn, Estonia to update my almost 20 year long love story with Baltic documentary. And to watch films for DOK Leipzig. I saw more than a dozen from last year’s Estonian documentary production at the premises of…
Brook Lapping: The Blair Decade
This two part series is made by the famous British company Brook Lapping that has made countless high-budget series for television, broadcast all over the world. About the Vietnam war, about the crisis in the Middle East, about many other…
Jeremy Isaacs: A World at War
My co-blogger Allan Berg has for weeks followed the re-run of the classic documentary series, A World at War – on Danish television. The series is available in great dvd-editions – buy it as I will do and throw away…
East Beats West Sneak Preview
This blog has constantly – through my writing – stressed that originality and creativity in documentary filmmaking of today mostly is to be found in the Eastern part of Europe. When it comes to films for 2008/2009 there are many…
Milena Holzknecht: What makes a documentarian?
Food for thought: What makes a documentary filmmaker? This German text is written by a student from the Zelig Film School for Documentary at the exam in June after one year of the three year long studies. Milena Holzknecht has…
Philipp Griess: Documentaries of today
Food for thought: This text is written by a student from the Zelig Film School for Documentary at the exam in June after one year of the three year long studies. Philipp Griess has chosen camera for his further studies.…
Beata Dzianowicz: Kites 2
A brief and warm salute to the director of the film from Afghanistan that we sneak-reviewed on this blog almost half a year ago. It will have its international premiere at the prestigious Locarno film festival, see site below. A…
De kongelige på cykel…
… var ét af de filmklip jeg morede mig over ved at bevæge mig rundt på nedenstående hjemmeside. Filmen er 1903 og det er naturligvis Peter Elfelt, der står bag. Her er et klip fra DFI’s egen introduktion til dette…
DOKS 100
De hundrede mest bevaringsværdige danske dokumentarfilm… den opgave blev stillet undertegnede og Niels Jensen for nogle år tilbage. Og den liste kan diskuteres, naturligvis, og I skal vide, hvis I kigger os nærmere i kortene, at når Jørgen Roos, Jørgen…
Danmarks Nationalfilmografi
… er et uundværligt redskab for den, der vil søge tilbage i den danske filmhistorie. Jeg gider ikke beklage mig over at dokumentarfilmen ikke får samme opmærksomhed som spillefilmen, jeg vil hellere glæde mig over den nemme tilgængelighed, der nu…
János Richter: Documentaries of Today
Food for thought. This text is written by a student from the Zelig Film School for Documentary at the exam in June after one year of the three year long studies. János Richter has chosen direction for his further studies:…