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Yes, it is tonight that DocsBarcelona opens with the screening of “Aquarela” by Viktor Kossakovsky, a dear friend of the festival and a true master of cinema. The festival runs until the 25th with films in the CCCB, cultural centre,…

International Competition Best Film –The Disappearance of My Mother (Photo) – by Beniamino Barrese Jury statement – “This film openly talks about respect, dignity, beauty and honesty. The film makes us think about how we treat privacy and who has…

Csilla Kato, member of the Caucasus Jury at Cinédoc Tbilisi wrote this longer version of motivation for the winner: Earthquake shakes our basic security feeling and the basic assumption, belief, that we can accommodate comfortable life on a supporting and…

10 projects were part of the Civil Pitch in Tbilisi, one of the activities of the Industry section of Cinédoc Tbilisi festival in the capital of Georgia. After a couple of days of training led by Daniel Abma and Brigid…

… in the Capital of Georgia. It was an unpretentious presentation with two skilled presenters and – unlike many international festivals – it happened in both Georgian and English language. With clips from all competitive sections (for the young, the…

DocsBarcelona starts in 10 days. I have written about the upcoming festival, link below. But DocsBarcelona has many other rooms. One of them is the Documentary of the Month that includes one film being shown at 75 venues in Spain…

… ”goes tailor-made, expands cross-media Market for 2019”, the festival announced yesterday, April 30, talking about pitch setups needed in a ”rapidly changing documentary industry”. In the text, click below and read it all in details, it is stressed that…

… is the title of the wonderful film by Ksenia Elyan, who won  the Best Feature Documentary Award at the Doker Festival in Moscow. I have seen it pitched on several occasions and the promises planted on these occasions were…

Let me leave the floor to this very inviting and good festival itself with this quote from the website: KFF is one of the oldest events in Europe dedicated to documentary, animated and short feature films. Its core consists of…

In terms of number of films DocsBarcelona is a small festival. 30. Where other documentary festivals invite the audience to choose between 100 or even more films, we make it easier, as we have already made a strong selection among…

May 8 – 13 in Georgia’s capital Tbilisi, the seventh edition of the documentary festival that I visited the first time at the opening edition as a juror , where the main awards were given to Lithuanian Lina Luzyte for…

The documentary festival in Belgrade with more than 100 films, and a full-bodied industry program starts in 17 days. The website is not totally up and running – ”coming soon” it says many places – and a lot is in…

Ten days after the Doker International Documentary Festival () ended, there are more documentaries to enjoy for the Moscow audience. Where the Doker festival is sailing under the flag of being independent, the official Moscow Film Festival operates (quoted from…

Of course it was a scoop for us at the Magnificent7 Festival to have Nikolaus Geyerhalter’s masterpiece as the closing film of the festival. A couple of months after its premiere at the Berlinale. A fine gesture from the director,…

… is the title that festival directors Svetlana and Zoran Popovic use, much better they say than the English title “Gods of Molenbeek”, right they are, but the film is the same beautiful piece of poetry by first time feature…

… indeed there is and it was also a woman, who was the first to say thank you for the selection of Claudia Tosi’s „I had A Dream” last night, Srbijanka Turajlic, the protagonist, the political activist and mother of…

I have just said goodbye to the Macedonian cameraman Samir Ljuma, who expressed his joy to have been here at the Magnificent7 Festival, where 1300 spectators were totally enthusiastic about ”Honeyland”, the opening film tuesday night. Yes, I said, this…

It was a very pleasant festival to attend, the DOKer in Moscow. That ended last night. You sense immediately that the organisers are filmmakers, who spread their enthusiasm for the genre and want invited guests, fellow filmmakers to have a…

Motivation for the Winning Film For its ability to create atmosphere through a clear aesthetical choice, through its expressive language using methaphors to convey a personally experienced childhood trauma, the jury has chosen to award SANATORIUM by Masha Osipova Motivation…

Is there something wrong in saying that a film is perfect. For me No. What I mean is that it has the right rythm, is balanced in the treatment of in this case a difficult subject, attracts you emotionally, has…

Less than 24 hours after she arrived in Moscow Italian documentarian Claudia Tosi (“I had a Dream”, DOKLeipzig winner 2018, ) ran into trouble… We were having lunch in the Tretyakov Gallery, dumplings, preparing for watching world class art. Tosi…

Getting into the October cinema from the noisy boulevard with the constant traffic jam in Moscow is a blessing. Again a lot of people were there to watch the first competition program of short films, and they were not disappointed.…

… which means Copenhagen Architecture Festival that includes a lot of interesting documentary films, two of them can be seen at the art house cinema Grand Teatret in the centre of the Danish capital. Both have been reviewed on this…

… was full of sunshine from early morning in Moscow. I walked from the hotel accompanied by director Tatyana Soboleva. I had asked her to take me to the Pushkin Museum to have a look at the exhibition of Francis…

I am off to Moscow tuesday to visit the DOKer festival, to be correct the Moscow International Documentary Film Festival, to be a juror for the short film festival. To be honest I pushed for this invitation. In the first…

DOX:AWARD: ‘Ridge’ by John Skoog (Sweden)“We would like to honor a film that takes formal virtuosity to new heights, yet never loses sight of the human experience. If Tarkovsky had played video games and was a Swedish farmer, this might…

Look at the photo, the awards which were distributed in Kiev on March 28 – the two last days of the festival, that stops today, are called Audience Days, where films from the festival will go to locations i.e. ”cinemas…

So there it is, the program of the 15th edition of the European Feature Documentary Film Festival that takes place from April 9 to April 15 in the Kombank Hall cinema in the centre of the capital of Serbia. As…

During the next year(s) you will see several Ukrainian documentaries at international festivals. It’s moving in the right direction for the country’s filmmakers, who want to express themselves in this film genre. There are – although limited from a Western…

Of course, sadly, the opening of the DocuDays UA International Human Rights Documentary Film Festival could only start with the yearly declaration of solidarity with filmmaker Oleg Sentsov and the other Ukrainians held in Russian prisons. But there was also…

I det kæmpeprogram som CPH:DOX præsenterer netop nu, er denne film én, som fortjener et ekstra skub frem: den skal I se, I der er interesseret i den mellemøstlige historie, i Palæstina, i forholdet mellem Arafat og Abu Nidal Organisationen,…

Sherin Khankan, 44 year old mother of four, divorced, is a well known name in Danish media for her brave fight for equal opportunities for man and woman within the islam community. She is the founder of the organisation Femimam,…

The winners of this year’s One World Festival in Prague have been announced. A total of seven prizes were awarded by juries in the categories of International Competition, The Right to Know, and Czech Competition. New this year is the…

It was much appreciated and welcomed that the main winner yesterday, after the East Doc Forum at the East Doc Platform, was the Serbian/Croatian project “Museum of the Revolution” that has Srdan Keca as director and Vanja Jambrovic as producer.…

„Bringing the Past to Life“ was the theme of a masterclass with Stan Neumann and Mila Turajlic, directors I have known for years and whose works I have seen and appreciated. Both work with archive as the title of the…

I had the pleasure of introducing 7 new Czech documentaries at the Institut Francais Tuesday afternoon. The last in line was legendary Karel Vachek, teacher at the FAMU film school, a man who was exiled after 1968, by some called…

EDP (East Doc Platform) characterises itself as the largest industry platform for Central and Eastern European documentaries. From my experience touring documentary meetings in the vast region, I agree. And can add that with the parallel running huge One World…

Here comes a list of films from this year´s CPH:DOX that has already been reviewed on filmkommentaren.dk. As the policy for our independent and self-funded blog-site is that we only review and comment (almost) positively, you can consider these links…

It is indeed overwhelming the program of CPH:DOX. Films, now also with a section for fiction films, concerts, the CPH:Forum with 33 projects, including well-known directors being present like Petra Costa, Victor Kossakovsky, Guido Hendrickx, Mila Turajlic, Shaul Schwarz and…