A film blog by Allan Berg Nielsen & Tue Steen Müller
A film blog by Allan Berg Nielsen & Tue Steen Müller
… subtitle: The Robinson of Manhattan Island… The Happy Woman and the Sad Man… that’s how the couple Güngõr and Ilhan Mimaroğlu has been characterised, tells the son of Güngõr, Rüstem Batum. He says so in the third and last…
I will try to avoid too many superlatives in this review of a brilliant documentary that is currently being shown at the online Visions du Réel festival in Nyon. So I have chosen to start with a copy-paste of the…
It’s been a week since I posted on this site. My Mac needed a new battery. But in between the privileged isolation in our garden in Copenhagen with lovely weather and visit of the grandchildren before they today returned to school (which, alas,…
English title: The Building – Excellent film. A work on constructivism that is superbly constructed… Soviet history. Architecture. With lovely portraits of and episodes with Ukrainians of today, who work in The Building in Kharkiv that was meant to the…
Summer camps for kids. Indoctrination performed by charismatic leaders. Sometimes with abuse of minors. A well known theme for many documentaries. With traumas carried into adulthood like it was for Hungarian Judit Oláh, who is the director of this well…
Positive message from the Kiev festival, DocuDays, as always with clever thoughts and energy: This year, due to the quarantine, we have decided to hold the 17th Docudays UA online. On 24 April through 3 May, we will present…
The Krakow Festival – that runs its 60th edition online – announces its intl. documentary competition programme. I have taken bits and pieces from the press release: ”In this difficult time of quarantine the documentary competition will be your window to…
… and today came the news from Barcelona: With regards to the health emergency caused by COVID-19 and the uncertainty of its evolution, DocsBarcelona changes its format to guarantee the health of its participants, the continuity of its team, the…
It’s an understatement to say that I was shocked watching this film, that was part of the CPH:DOX Online program, that you can access until Sunday. Content-wise I don’t recall having been presented with so much hate and intolerance in…
It was expected… alas… but cheers to the festival team and the filmmakers that the festival will take place… online. I had expected – in my selfnishness – with my wife – to have celebrated our silver wedding in Krakow…
First the short synopsis of the film, explaining the title and introducing…”Noura and Machi (who) search for answers about their loved ones – Bassel Safadi and Paolo Dall’Oglio, who are among the over 100,000 forcibly disappeared in Syria. Faced with…
Musa Hadid is the mayor in Ramallah. A busy man, who goes around in his city, talks to his citizens, tries to solve smaller and bigger problems. With a focus on the smaller. He wants the city to be welcoming foreigners…
Just watched the online award ceremony of CPH:DOX, very well performed with the festival director Tine Fischer and the two programmers Mads Mikkelsen and Niklas Engstrøm guiding the viewer from one competition category to another, with juries giving their motivations…
Copy-Paste of a press release from a couple of days ago, written so well by Petra Blaskovic, who also worked for IDFA 2019. Here we go: Hungarian project Queen of Chess by Bernadett Tuza-Ritter won the HBO Europe Award, the Al Jazeera…
I remember when it was pitched at the Baltic Sea Forum in Riga. My positive reaction was with a smile of surprise. And expectation to what the director would get out of it in the final film. Now the film is…
Dilya. That’s her name, the protagonist who has given the title to the film. She does not give up in her fight to get Iskandar, her brother, out of prison in Uzbekistan. The prison is Jaslyk. He was sent to this…
I needed a break from watching new documentaries and through the Swiss https://www.artfilm.ch/de/dokumentarfilme (many films for free streaming) I was brought to watch this Swiss classic from 1990. The title was familiar but I could not remember if I had seen it…
”I will not let Kais feel my sadness”. Words from the father in this small gem of a film. Father and son. From Syria. Coming to Norway for a new beginning. But we, the audience, feel the sadness of Rabeea.…
This fine – in aesthetics as well as in content – documentary won The Dragon Award for Best Nordic Documentary at the Göteborg Film Festival beginning of February this year. The jury‘s motivation is so precise and well written that…
I was at the DokuFest(ival) in Prizren in 2016. Great experience with good films and an atmosphere of generosity in a beautiful place. Since then I have followed the program set up through the fine communication from the organisers. In that respect…
There is a lot of recommendations for the Cph:Dox Online Festival. Here are some more – from my viewing at home yesterday. In English, as many non-Danish film lovers follow what goes on in the digital documentary festival world –…
The initiative of the CPH:DOX to put documentaries online for the audience in Denmark can only be described as IMPRESSIVE, FANTASTIC, BRAVO – support it by buying tickets, there are so many fine films to watch until March 29. The…
The Filmkommentaren posts about this film goes back to 2010, where Dana B., the Croatian director of the film, presented the project at the Greek Storydoc. I was part of the Ex Oriente 2011, when Dana took part, searching for…
«Attention! The cinema belongs to all of us. Please help us maintain the cinema by taking care of it. Keep it clean…” Cinema Pameer is in Kabul, Afghanistan. “Come on in, the film is about to start”. Two voices, two different employees…
Acclaimed Ukranian director Serhiy Bukovsky has made a film that invites me – and an audience – to meet the composer Valentyn Silvestrov. I knew the name but not the person and just a little about his quite impressive work. When…
It’s not even a year ago Agnès Varda passed away after a long and productive film-life. This film, from 2019, has been called her swan song and indeed it is a beautiful hommage to the director and what she has…
Tamara Stepanyan films her characters with warmth, asks questions with respect and out of curiosity… words picked from the review of ”Embers” written more than 6 years ago on this site, link below. A true documentarian she is. Her latest…
A follow-up copy paste from the site of the festival in Kiev: The RIGHTS NOW! award is given to creative documentary films which explore the contemporary world and make a significant contribution to the discussion of human dignity, freedom and…
I was invited to come back to Kiev to one of the festivals that I have loved to attend – but I can’t make it this year. I will miss the atmosphere created by a team of committed and knowledgeable…
It’s become a nice tradition that I praise the ZagrebDox for its programme put together, as always, with Nenad Puhovski as director. Having seen the selection for the 16th edition, 112 films to be shown between the 15th and 22nd…
Absolutely no objctions to this choice of the Krakow Film Festival that will take place on May 31 – June 7, 2020: “Every year, the Krakow Film Foundation Programme Council grants the Dragon of Dragons award for the exceptional contribution to the…
Some of the best new documentaries are in competition at the big One World Festival in Prague, that has this subtitle “international human rights film festival” and takes place March 5-14. Let me mention Alexander Nanau’s ”Collective » (PHOTO) and « The…
March 18-29 – are the dates for the CPH:DOX festival programme, that was announced today. I am copy-pasting from the newsletter I received. It is amazing. I will ”dig in” as the organisers write and come back with comments. Website, see link…
A new film is on its way by Swedish master director Roy Andersson. ”About Endlessness” will be premiered this year, maybe at Cannes? The director has said that this will be his last film. Alas. Until then there is a chance…
It is an emotional journey that director and writer Iryna Tsilyk takes the viewer on. For 74 minutes. One full of beauty. Very much because of the mother in the film, Anna, the protagonist, whose face expresses, what it means…
A quick copy-paste (almost) note on the fact that the wonderful Krakow Film Festival, in its celebration of its 60th edition (!), dedicates its special section to documentaries from Denmark. The programme director of the festival, Barbara Orlicz-Szczypula, has this…
The Oscar event is over – and we can be happy that all five documentaries nominated this year were of high quality in cinematic terms, and dealt with important themes of our time. Let’s leave the glamour and the red…
The IndieWire brings a fine article yesterday about Tabitha Jackson, who at Sundance «will replace John Cooper as festival director, bringing 25 years of experience in the arts and non-fiction film to the position». Read the whole article (written by…
You never know what to expect from Latvian director Laila Pakalnina. She makes short films, she makes fiction and she makes documentaries, which are far from mainstream, with quite their own language and definitely Cinema. Like this one, ”Spoon”, she…
Vitaly Mansky: Putin’s Witnesses … A good point I think, Mansky masters the personal commentary and it is nothing but a scoop that he is using material he made at the beginning of Putin’s period as president, where he, Putin…
”Today truth is being more and more frequently questioned when it comes to news and the constant stream of information. This makes the dissemination of research-based knowledge more important than ever in order to separate the wheat from the chaff,…
Sooo, here they are the five nominated in the category for long documentaries, director(s) and producer(s) mentioned. The links will bring you to the reviews on the filmkommentaren site: American Factory (Steven Bognar, Julia Reichert and and Jeff Reichert) –…
and Nordic films, is the headline for an interview brought by the Nordisk Film & TV Fond, link for the whole text below. Kim Foss, director of the art house cinema Grand in Copenhagen since 2006, AND through the associated…
Filmens åbning er formidabel. Intet mindre. For øjne og øre. Fra krigens helvede på jord, fra billedet af den ene ødelæggende bombe-eksplosion efter den anden i syriske Ghouta. Til kameraet bringer tilskueren ned og atter ned i én glidende bevægelse,…
On this last day of 2019, and of a decade, Filmkommentaren wishes you all the best in the new year. It’s been a pleasure for us to give you news and opinions about the (mostly) documentary world. We intend to…
Thomas Heise: Heimat is a Space in Time Alexander Nanau: Collective Tamara Kotevska & Ljubomir Stefanov: Honeyland Artemio Benki: Solo Sergey Loznitsa: A State Funeral Feras Fayyad: The Cave Review with top marks will…
The other day I read that Ingmar Bergman had returned his Oscar Nomination Certificate for ”Smultronsstället”. He apparently did not like the competitive circus. Nor did Francois Truffaut when he expressed no interest in sitting in film juries. To judge…
”It’s exactly one week until el clásico and, like all fans, I am already counting down the days until the big date of December 18. A clásico is always a special match, and in the weeks before the game it…
To read critic Richard Brody is always a pleasure. In this article – link below – he brings forward his Best Films of the year, 35, whereas 11 of them have NOT been theatrically released, which brings him to reflect…
In November I was at the Zelig Film School in Bolzano to meet the new students. I organised a small game: Which three words come to your mind, when I say DOCUMENTARY. We put the words on the whiteboard: Freedom…