Jonas Mekas 1922-2019
Audrius Stonys: Jonas left us. With the same lightness as he used to live. Silently and gently as if he didn’t want to disturb the image of life. We first met in 1990, when he invited us, 10 young filmmakers…
Filmkommentaren.dk
A film blog by Allan Berg Nielsen & Tue Steen Müller
Filmkommentaren.dk
A film blog by Allan Berg Nielsen & Tue Steen Müller
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Read MoreJonas Mekas 1922-2019
Film Masterpiece found under Daughter´s Bed!
This afternoon an important mail reached me – attached with the photo you see above. It came from Latvian producer Uldis Cekulis and film director Kristine Briede, who took the photo. It went like this : « Dear Tue and Audrius (Stonys),…
Oscar Nominations Feature Documentaries
Happy for Talal Derki and his “Of Fathers and Sons”, the only non-American of the five nominations for an Oscar. Hope that the promotion made for short-listed films like “The Distant Barking of Dogs” and “Communion” will make it easier…
Emir Kusturica: El Pepe, Una Vida Suprema
They are sitting outside the house of the former president of Uruguay José Pepe Mujica. Pepe and Kusturica. The film director lights his cohiba cigar, Pepe is preparing his mate, spitting out the first tasting, too strong it always is.…
Nicolas Philibert
Filmkommentaren has written much about Nicolas Philibert, French master of documentaries. () I missed his new film at IDFA, but I will catch up asap with a review. In the meantime I have enjoyed reading an interview with the director…
DocsBarcelona The War Room
Well, it was quite friendly but of course there were – and should be – discussions about which films should be taken for the DocsBarcelona 2019 edition in May. On the photo you see the selection group except for the…
Nikolaus Geyrhalter: The Border Fence
This review is written by Georg Zeller, film director & cameraman, Bolzano Italy. I start my review with a spoiler, the last scene of Nikolaus Geyrhalter’s newest documentary: A group of policemen opens a container full of rolls of wire…
Messi 400
I was there when Andres Iniesta stopped at FC Barcelona, last year – and I was there when Leo Messi made his goal number 400 for Barca. Yesterday. At Camp Nou. The first one, his first goal, was made at…
Danish Bodil Nominations
The Danish film critics have made their choice and nominated the Best Danish film, the best male and female performance etc. etc. AND nominated five documentaries for that category. On filmkommentaren we have reviewed 4 of them, links attached Bobbi…
DOCS & TALKS 2019 / PROGRAMME
THE DANISH INSTITUTE FOR INTERNATIONAL STUDIES (DIIS) AND CINEMATEKET PRESENT DOCS & TALKS – FILM AND RESEARCH DAYS, JANUARY 31st – FEBRUARY 6th, 2019 Daughters of foreign fighters from Georgia, flood-affected islanders in Kiribati and Australia’s hermetically sealed asylum centres.…
Viviane Candas: A Possible Algeria
TODAY, NOW… Viviane Candas: A Possible Algeria by Allan Berg Nielsen / Filmkommentaren, le 4.2.2018 / Docs & Talks 2018 / translation into English: Sara Thelle 1. The film is built upon the voice, the director of the film’s own voice. It…
Dostojevskijs Idioten i Cinemateket med mere…
… i et arrangement, som med rette blev kaldt for et maraton, visning af en russisk tv-serie bygget over romanen fra 2003 – 10 afsnit af en længde på 50 minutter. Publikum – vi – sad lørdag i Cinemateket fra…
True Stories Market Research Funding
Quote from filmkommentaren post in August: … thinking of the many documentary adventures I take with me from the Sarajevo Film Festival: To be part of the training team of representatives from ngo’s and human rights organizations was the experience…
Faces and Places 2018
Taking the title of Agnès Varda and JR’s wonderful film as headline, I look back at festivals, pitching sessions, film schools… that I had the privilege to attend in 2018. Privilege is the right word to use, when you board…
The Best Documentaries 2018 – Intro
Per tradition – in the post below you find 16 documentaries listed that I found to be Best of 2018. With links attached to what has been written about them. A choice made after many festival visits, links sent to…
The Best Documentaries 2018
Viktor Kossakovsky: Aquarela Kristine Briede & Audrius Stonys. Bridges of Time Vitalyi Mansky: Putin’s Witnesses Ivars Seleckis: To be Continued Nebojša Slijepčević: Srbenka Anja Kofmel: Chris the Swiss Sergey Loznitsa: The Trial Bernadett…
Viktor Kossakovsky – Collected Posts on his Works
The courage to address the world with ambiguity never stooping to easy answers, can also be attributed to the Russian filmmaker, Victor Kossakovsky, who never tires of reminding us that film is an emotionally charged medium, and even when it…
Wonderful Losers on Vimeo
My dear friend, film director and producer, who if anyone is the one, who follows his film to the audience all over the world, winning audiences and awards, Arunas Matelis has posted this, a xmas gift it is: If you…
Yugoslavian Architecture 1948-1980
… with the subtitle ”Toward a Concrete Utopia” is an exhibition that runs at Moma (Museum of Modern Art) until January 13. For one who has been visiting Belgrade, Zagreb, Sarajevo, Novi Sad, Pristina, Skopje, Ljubljana… it was a fine…
Oscar Shortlist Long Documentaries
3 of the European documentaries from the EFA award ceremony () are on the Oscar shortlist. The winning film about Bergman and ”A Woman Captured” – a pity – is not there. But on the list of 15 that will…
And the Winner Was Ingmar Bergman…
… at the European Film Awards yesterday, „Bergman, A Year in a Life“ by Jane Magnusson is the title of the Swedish documentary that took home the prize. Which made many angry… Here is what Krakow Film Festival director Krzysztof…
Cordelia Dvorák: Marceline
In the 1980’es I attended Cinéma du Réel in Paris almost every year. It was during the years, where wonderful, charismatic Suzette Glenadel was the director. And where big documentary names like Fred Wiseman and Pedro Costa were introduced to…
Fred Wiseman: Ex Libris – the NY Public Library
Oh, I enjoyed this fresh and inspirational film by the master – is Wiseman really 88 years old – when I watched it, thinking back more than 40 years when I was educated librarian and functioned for some years as…
See Ukraine – through Cinema and Art
Through documentary films, exhibitions and discussions Ukrainians from the art world travel Europe to present their country and its search for an identity. It’s “a cultural diplomacy project of HRDFF Docudays UA organized with support from the Open Society Initiative…
Wang Bing on Doc Alliance
… with the title “The Landscape of Chinese Everydayness” – An offer you can’t refuse! DocAlliance keeps on the high quality in its program policy on dafilms.com. This time with 6 of Wang Bing’s documentaries from China. They are long…
BlekendaalThe Man Who Looked Beyond the Horizon
In a way it’s an old fashioned film. In storytelling. And I mean that as a compliment. The director plays with the film medium, jumps around in time, gives references to slapstick movies, Buster Keaton and others, in the search…
Katarzyna Lesisz: Dancing for You
Get up Wiktor, says grandmother, you have to go to school. Wiktor, 12 years old, goes to a ballet school, where the teacher trains him, and when not in school he plays with a friend, or is with the caring…
IDFA Post-Festival Comments
I was in Amsterdam from Monday till Friday. 4 nights at NH Carlton Hotel, the festival centre close to everything and the place where you meet old and dear friends. Including the busy artistic director Orwa Nyrabia, whose first edition…
Three Russian Documentaries at IDFA
… which all deserve to be mentioned and noticed by other festivals. “How Big is the Galaxy” (Photo) by Ksenia Elyan (Russia, Estonia, 72 mins.), with Max Tuula and Maria Gavrilova as producers as well as late Alexander Rastorguev for…
Andrei Kutsila: Summa
I was very happy to know that the new film by Belorussian director Andreu Kutsila received – in the midlength category – the main award at IDFA for “Summa”, a Belorussian/Polish coproduction with Miroslaw Dembinski as the Polish partner. In…
Viktor Kossakovsky: Aquarela
Normally when I go to an art exhibition, I walk around alone, stop in front of the paintings, it’s silent, maybe I talk with the one who are with me, but I love this chance of stepping into a world…
IDFA at the Eye Filmmuseum Amsterdam
I went to the Eye that everyone has praised during its few years of existence. And it is really something. I crossed the water with the ferry next to the Central Station, 2 mins. it took to get to the…
Bettina Perut & Iván Osnovikoff: Los Reyes
The film was screened and there was a half hour talk afterwards. These IDFA talks, I understood, are formatted to have no questions from the audience. I sensed a disappointment in the hall, probably many would have loved to get…
Eszter Hajdú: Hungary 2018
I got a mail from the producer of this film, Sandor Mester: “Hungary 2018 is not at the IDFA Forum because it is already in the Feature Length Competition this year and it was not there last year because it…
IDFA Winners 2018
IDFA Competition for Feature-Length Documentary Anand Patwardhan won the IDFA Award for Best Feature-Length Documentary (€ 15.000) with Reason (India). The film is a broad-ranging examination of Indian society, where secular rationalists are hunted down as they attempt to stem the rising…
Dziga Vertov: Anniversary of the Revolution
Tuesday night I was back in Saint Petersburg after two days at the IDFA festival in Amsterdam. In the cinema. On screen. No, wrong – I was back in Petrograd 1918 through the outstanding film historical event organized so brilliantly…
Piter – My love
I am leaving Saint Petersburg after a few days with a conference and a re-visit of the places, where I have been during the last 20 years… That explains the headline of this post. Tomorrow – I am writing this…
Saint Petersburg Film School Conference
I was at the opening of The PiterKiT International Student Film Festival in Piter – Saint Petersburg. On Wednesday. Huge celebration, three hours with music, clips from films and speeches, maaany speeches due to the celebration of 100 years of…
IDFA Opening Words from Kaag and Nyrabia
This text is taken from the website of the IDFA festival: The 31st IDFA has just officially been opened by Minister for Foreign Trade and Development Cooperation Sigrid Kaag in Koninklijk Theater Carré with Aboozar Amini’s film Kabul, City in…
Aboozar Amini: Kabul, City in the Wind
It’s about creating the feeling of being there. To quote Richard Leacock. First time feature length director Afghan Aboozar Amini, who emigrated from the country when a teenager, was educated in Holland and in the UK, does that. Takes us…
Conference on Film Schools in Saint Petersburg
I have for years been visiting Saint Petersburg – for the Message2Man festival or for seminars/workshops organized by dear friends Ludmila Nazaruk and Viktor Skubey. In 2016 Skubey organized the conference “How to Reach the Audience”, which was filmed and…
The Five EFA Documentary Nominations
Don’t want to start arguing that this or that documentary film could also have been nominated – the five that made it are all very good films, congratulations. The winner will be announced December 15 at the ceremony in Sevilla.…
Israel: The “Loyalty in Culture” bill
… a major threat for freedom, a major threat for cinema Is the headline for at text I received from filmmaker Avi Mograbi, who wants readers/filmmakers outside Israel to know about a proposal put forward by the Minister of Culture…
DOK Leipzig
… 2018 ended. Was it good or bad? I normally watch all the films in the main international competition, the long documentaries to make my own hit list. This year it was not possible. I watched three, the winner of…
Sergey Loznitsa: The Trial
No doubt, Sergey Loznitsa is the master of making creative archive documentaries – a part of his impressive oeuvre that also includes fiction films and documentaries like “Austerlitz” – in the archive films he stands out with films like…
Sergey Loznitsa: The Trial/ 2
I started working on a film about Stalin’s show trials, which were held in the USSR in 1930s, a couple of years ago. My initial idea was to edit the footage from different trials in order to show how the…
DOK Leipzig Vitaly Mansky and Putin
You have to be careful with “vonhörensagen” but in this case it had its influence on the talk with Vitaly Mansky, that took place friday afternoon at the Polish Institute in Leipzig, a couple of hours after his film had…
DOK Leipzig 2018 Awards
A piece of the press release that came out from DOK Leipzig an hour ago, check the whole list and the jury motivations on the festival’s website, link below: “I Had a Dream” (photo) by Claudia Tosi has won the…
DOK Leipzig 2018 LBJ and Jan Palach
I would have loved to see more from the Retrospective 68 – An Open Score but I was anderswo engagiert, i.e. introducing the Lithuanian retrospective and moderating the discussions afterwards BUT I saw the last section, number 7 which was…
Viktor Kossakovsky at DOK Leipzig
I have known him for years – since back to the days of the Bornholm festival in the 90’es. He came to Leipzig for one screening of the film and for a talk. We hugged and I told him that…