Flying is Hell
A good title for a documentary? At least a title that calls for sympathy for the one flying? And for some experience shared by other people: A man comes to the airport. He wants to check in, goes to the…
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 MoreFlying is Hell
East Beats West
A Love Affair – and a small follow-up on the review of “Blind Loves”: It all started around 1990. Even though I had been working for the National Film Board of Denmark since 1975, my knowledge was very limited when…
Juraj Lehotsky: Blind Loves
I saw this beautiful film sunday morning in Vienna during the Ex Oriente first session ( www.docuinter.net ). The director Juraj Lehotsky took the short way from Bratislava to show us a feature length, four chaptered (following the loves stories…
Journalistik eller Filmkunst: Bolden Ruller…
Åh, Niels, ikke så puritansk… det er ikke muligt at have denne meningsudveksling uden at være direkte og konkret og nævne navne. Og Dola giver da også svar på tiltale ved at understrege at hendes ambition er at udfordre Guldbrandsen…
Life in Loops – on DVD
This is a pure commercial for one of the most important documentaries from the last years. Timo Novotny’s film has been shown all over the world, it has been awarded for its innovation of the genre, it is a vision…
Filmkunst eller journalistik? Dola Bonfils svarer
DFI’s filmkonsulent Dola Bonfils svarer på mit indlæg “Filmkunst eller Journalistik” (link nedenfor). Det gør hun grundigt og klart, samtidig med at hun gør opmærkom på, at hendes tid pt forhindrer hende i at gå ind i skriftlige diskussioner om…
Catch the Moment – about Marianne Greenwood
Make extraordinary film about ordinary people, and ordinary films about extraordinary characters! It is very easy to apply this slogan to the film about Marianne Greenwood, a citizen of the world, an adventurer, a writer and photographer. A woman with…
Michael Laudrup
I know it is rather subtle but I have to express my boyish entusiasm after a football match tonite where Michael Laudrup, the best football player Denmark has ever had, made his underdog team, Getafe from Madrid play 1-1 in…
The Jørgen Leth Collection
It is a fairy tale. Could only happen in the country of Hans Christian Andersen! Danish film director, poet and journalist Jørgen Leth meets a Danish millionaire and expresses how much he would like his films to be published on…
DFI: Film Art or Journalism?
The letter below, written to film consultant Dola Bonfils from DFI (Danish Film Institute) reacts to the fact that more and more of the support from the DFI is allocated to journalists with current affairs issued to be made into…
DFI: Filmkunst eller Journalistik?
Kære Dola (Bonfils). Jeg skriver til dig, fordi jeg i lang tid har undret mig over DFI’s støttepolitik. Jeg ser det ene gode journalistiske navn efter det andet dukke op på jeres lister: Anders Riis-Hansen med Blekingegadebanden, Jakob Gottschau med…
Brian Hill: Sangfugle
To the Danish readers and tv viewers, in Danish: HUSK AT SE DR2 21.40 I AFTEN hvor “Sangfugle” bliver vist, et hit over den ganske verden. Here is an excerpt from the review written on this blog (the film is…
Torben Glarbo: Historien bag kameraet
Ved et lukket arrangement på Den danske Filmskole blev Torben Glarbos dokumentarserie, produceret for og allerede vist på DK4, vist i sin fulde længde. 6 timers dansk kort- og dokumentarfilmhistorie. En præstation, ganske simpelt, af fotografen og instruktøren, der så…
Fitna, amateur-like and clumsy
Can you write about ”Fitna” as a film? Can you separate it from all the furore the film has already created due to its content and the fear for consequences? Can you do so with a film everyone talked about…
It’s All True
Wish I were in Rio de Janeiro or Sao Paulo! For the 8th time Amir Labaki (it started yesterday) launches his documentary film festival with the provoking Orson Welles inspired name “It’s All True”. I was there years ago as…
Chris Marker: La Jetée 2
The interview that Allan Berg refers to in his Danish language article “La Jetée” is in English and is one of the very rare conversations that are printed with the enigmatic French master. The interview is wonderful reading. Here are…
EDN Prize to IDF
May sound very “internal” to many of you, and it is indeed. But you should know about the fact that Institute of Documentary Film in Prague has been rightfully honoured by its sister/brother institution European Documentary Network. I am very…
Citizen Havel cinema success
The documentary film about Vaclav Havel (directed by Pavel Koutecký and Miroslav Janek) has now been seen by 100.000 viewers in the Czech Republic. The film was released in January 2008, runs 119 minutes but can now also be seen…
Cinéma du Réel Report 5
The festival is over. The prizes have been given. It happened saturday night and the winner was Volker Koepp with his story about the children in Kaliningrad, ”Holunderblüte”. No objections, not at all, Koepp is a master and deserves to…
Cinéma du Réel Report 4
Maybe – at the end of the day – documentary festivals will be events that you travel to in big numbers as you travel to visit art exhibitions, says Allan, my co-blogger. He could be right if you consider the…
Cinéma du Réel Report 3
Saturday morning in the café. The sun is shining in Paris today. In 90 minutes we have booked the videotheque to catch up with some films in the international competition. And then a couple of films later this day. Here…
Cinéma du Réel Report 2
It is raining cats and stones in Paris. No spring feeling yet. Nevertheless the cafés are full outside as all the smokers are situated there now. No smoking inside. Full houses at the festival for the two screenings in the…
Cinema du Réel Report 1
I am sitting in the niveau -1 in the Centre Pompidou. This is where the acceuil for the Cinema du Réel is situated. As always in the Centre during the festival, it is difficult to create anything just close to…
Cinéma du Réel
Yes, for those who do not read Danish, “we” (Allan Berg Nielsen and me, Tue Steen Müller) leave for Paris tomorrow to follow the 30th edition of Cinéma du Réel, which took off with the subtitle “antropological and ethnographic films”.…
Herzog Footnote 2
Allan refers to the point 5 in the Minnesota Declaration of Werner Herzog: “5. There are deeper strata of truth in cinema, and there is such a thing as poetic, ecstatic truth. It is mysterious and elusive, and can be…
Mikhail Vartanov: Parajanov: The Last Spring
This documentary from 1992 tells about Sergei Parajanov (1924-1990), considered to be one of the masters of cinema, far too little known compared to his importance as it is said on the website www.parajanov.com that honours him, brings quotes about…
Razvan Georgescu: Testimony
The director was – in his own words – given a second chance after a brain tumor operation. The doctors gave him three years more to live and he has used these three years to – own words again –…
Herzog footnote
Allan Berg, my fellow blogger, is fascinated by Werner Herzog. And indeed, he is a great filmmaker, who has brought something new to the documentary genre. “Little Dieter Needs to Fly”, as an example, is a pure masterpiece. Allan advises…
Annie Leibovitz – Life through a Lens
I missed it when it was at cph:dox last year but the Swedish broadcaster SVT2 had it on its excellent strand KSpecial programme last night. And I was glad to see it. Not so much because of the film itself…
ZagrebDox Pitching, East Beats West
15 documentary projects were presented at the ZagrebDox pitching thursday the 28th of February. There were 9 commissioning editors around the table. 4 from the West (Arte, YLE, ORF, Jan Vrijman Fund) and 4 from the region, from the Bosnian,…
On Location 2
The new photos at the top of filmkommentaren.dk are showing, from the left, Danish director Joergen Leth and his cameraman Henning Camre on the set of Notes on Love, Werner Herzog in action – which film is that…. – and…
Joao Moreira Salles: Santiago
He wrote “The History of the Great Men”, 30.000 pages about the universal aristocracy. He wrote it in his small kitchen and he had all the pages neatly organised on a shelf in his bed room. The great men and…
DOXBOX Damascus Diary 6
Last day of festival. I have a seminar in the morning where I present the state of the art of documentary in Europe. I am trying to find the right approach to the audience which includes people, who come because…
DOXBOX Damascus Diary 5
Sometimes, actually very often, reality cheats you, or in this case the weather! While I was in safe surroundings inside the Al Kindi cinema to a session about ethics and documentaries, about the relation between the filmmaker and the person…
DOXBOX Damascus Diary 4
It is monday morning and once again I find myself with Pirjo Honkasalo and Niels Pagh Andersen, who are to talk about ”3 Rooms of Melancholia”. For four hours with 25 people in the hall. It goes very well, we…
DOXBOX Damascus Diary 3
No, they don’t know it or them, says Orwa Nyrabia, one of the DOX BOX organisers, when I doubt him stating that the audience to the seminar of French academic Martin Barbier, ”Back to Basics”, had never heard about ”Nanook…
DOXBOX Damascus Diary 2
Full house for the film of Omar Amiralay from 1982, ”The Misfortune of Some”, produced for the French channel Antenne 2, during the Lebanese war. Amiralay is the Syrian documentary filmmaker, his films have been shown all over the world,…
DOXBOX Damascus Diary 1
This is a small report from the first day of the new DOX BOX documentary festival in Damascus. At the opening yesterday there was full house in at the Al Kindi Film Theatre, where the DOX BOX team, headed by…
Beata Dzianowicz: Kites
Sneak preview of a film from Poland shot in Afghanistan by Jacek Petrycki, master in camerawork as he has shown so many times before with Kieslowski and Marcel Lozinski. Beata Dzianowicz has written and directed this film about a group…
Iikka Vehkalahti: A good documentary is
Taken from the site of IDF (Institute of Documentary Film) www.docuinter.net commissioning editor from YLE in Finland says: …something which on one level is very private to the individual. Something that touches my life, but which also has something very…
Marathon Dok in Copenhagen
What to do a loong grey saturday in February in Copenhagen? You go to watch documentaries at the Danish Film School where EDN (European Documentary Network) per tradition invites professionals and film students to attend a mini-festival with long and…
DoxBox festival in Damascus
It must be a good sign for the documentary genre that festivals are starting all over the world. And that the more established ones break their audience attendance records year after year. A Golden Age for the documentary? I think…
ZagrebDox, Puhovski and Lozinski
Nenad Puhovski is a filmmaker and film school professor and festival founder and organizer from Zagreb, Croatia. His commitment to the documentary is enormous. He has through his Factum delivered several critical films on Croatian politics and action during the…
Interdocnet
In connection with the Docsbarcelona Festival I met Pablo Morales Canedo, who is general manager of IDN, that stands for interdocnet. – a new initiative where documentaries and shorts can be watched online or be downloaded. A handful of films…
Belfast Film Festival
It is one of those ideas that is so obvious that normally noone takes it! However, Cian Smyth did and put it into practice. To make a documentary film award, and a festival, in the name of The Maysles Brothers…
Mechanical Love
The new film by Phie Ambo, another strong talent in new Danish doumentary, premieres this weekend in the cinemas in her own country after having travelled already to several festivals. We contributed on the weblog with a review, write the…
Documentaries at the Berlinale
The prestigious Berlin film festival, the Berlinale, offers a good selection of documentaries this year. 30 it is according to which is the excellent site of IDF (Institute of Documentary Film), that is based in Prague. The Berlinale takes…
Magnificent
My Danish writing blog colleague writes above, under the caption “Oscar kritik”, linking to a group of festival people, who object to the selection of films nominated for this years documentary Oscar. He proudly mentions that two Danish films are…
Thierry Garrel & Alain Cavalier
If you happen to be in Barcelona tomorrow, 1st of February, you could visit Institut Francais at 17.30 to meet two French masters in documentaries – at a masterclass open to the audience. Thierry Garrel is Head of the Documentary…
DOCSBarcelona
For four days Barcelona hosts the documentary film festival DOCSBarcelona. This second edition takes place in the Alexandra cinema situated in one of the ramblas of the beautiful city. I am writing this from my hotel room preparing for the…