DocsBarcelona: Talal Derki
The Syrian director was not at the closing ceremony of DocsBarcelona Sunday night so I did not have the chance to thank him for three meetings we had during the festival: Two times talks with him and the audience after…
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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 MoreDocsBarcelona: Talal Derki
DocsBarcelona: Children
Sunday morning I took a walk in the Eixample of Barcelona, where my home has been since the beginning of the festival. Lots of parents were in the street with their kids. Happy moments for boys and girls to be…
DocsBarcelona: Ouaga Girls
It’s one of those documentaries that makes you smile through the whole film, Ouaga Girls by Swedish Theresa Traore Dahlberg. It was shown yesterday at DocsBarcelona at the Aribau Club cinema followed by a Q&A with the French coproducer Estelle…
DocsBarcelona: When Directors Meet the Audience
Aribau Club Cinemas in Barcelona. Two cinema halls, one bigger than the other. The home of DocsBarcelona for four days, yesterday the first where I had the privilege to introduce and moderate three films in the competitive Panorama section. With…
DocsBarcelona Rough Cut Sessions
It’s become an institution, the rough cut sessions of DocsBarcelona and I am proud to be the one, who has chosen the projects and the one playing the ball to the panelists, who sit in comfortable sofas in a living…
DocsBarcelona: Audience & Form
On the way back to Vilnius after two succesful screenings of “Wonderful Losers” at DocsBarcelona, Lithuanian Arunas and Alge Matelis met Joan Gonzalez, director of the festival who was happy to tell them that 210 students in Granollers, a city…
Visca Barca, Visca Catalunya
A small break from DocsBarcelona. To experience a historical moment. The end of an era. The last match of Andres Iniesta for FCBarcelona. And the celebration of winning the championship and the Copa del Rey. I was there thanks to…
Pep Martín & Xavi Campreciós: Mies on Scene
… with the subtitle ”Barcelona in Two Acts” was premiered yesterday at the CCCB theatre in Barcelona within the DocsBarcelona festival. Full house for a film about the architectural gem of the city, the Pavilion set up by Mies van…
Oleg Sentsov on Hungerstrike
Since 2015 we have again and again written about the Ukrainian film director Oleg Sentsov, who is in prison in Russia. At numerous festivals the message has been sent to the Russian authorities “Release Oleg Sentsov” and Askold Kurov has…
Abend & Loeff: La Flor de la Vida
DocsBarcelona 2018: Lovely film by Claudia Abend and Adriana Loeff, who in promotion of the film use this phrase as a logline, so precise it is: What happens when Life lasts longer than Love? Take a look at the photo,…
Catalan Rumba Opens DocsBarcelona
… and it did so with a full cinema of spectators, who expressed their enthusiasm over the sweet film about the sweeet and charismatic man on the screen and in the cinema, where he got standing ovations. The film is…
Srbenka Wins DAS Award 2018
Doc Alliance is a creative partnership of seven key European festivals. One of its activities, Doc Alliance Selection (DAS) Award, celebrates its 11th edition. Each festival nominates one documentary film which is evaluated by a jury of seven film critics…
Cinédoc-Tbilisi Awards 2018
… were many and you can read whoi got what via the link below. My positive comments are that the winners also here were made by directors from or dealing with Eastern and Central Europe. Serbian Mila Turajlic’s “The Other…
Parajanov in Tbilisi
Anna Dziapshipa, a true friend, great photographer and organiser through SAKDOC in Tbilisi, in preparation for a film, took me for a tour down to Old Tbilisi as I wanted to see the monument of Parajanov – see previous post.…
Harry Tamrazian: Sergei Parajanov
“Everyone knows that I have three Motherlands. I was born in Georgia, worked in Ukraine and I’m going to die in Armenia.” A quote from an interview with Sergei Parajanov, this master of Cinema, whose life – with interviews, clips…
Cinedoc: Cinema Mon Amour
The festival here in Tbilisi has a country focus on Romania. One of the films selected is “Cinema, Mon Amour” by Alexandru Belc from 2015 that has gone around to festivals like IDFA and DOKLeipzig, a Romanian-Czech coproduction, an HBO…
Cinedoc Tbilisi Opening Night
Yes, this is how an opening night should be – presentation of the program through trailers, a speech from the Minister of Culture and Sport, some words from your correspondent and from the director of the festival, Artchil Khetagouri. Most…
No Voice Over, No Music in Docs Please
Ukrainian Darya Bassel, part of the DocuDays team and producer of My Father is my Mother’s Brother, is at HotDocs in Toronto and writes on FB: “I think there’s one really important thing. We have to ban voice over and…
Cinedoc Tbilisi Starts Tonight
Arriving to Rustaveli Palace Hotel in Tbilisi this morning after two flights from Copenhagen. Five hours of sleep and then out to re-discover lovely Tbilisi ending up with a cappuccino and a chacha outside the Marco Polo restaurant, where Current…
Copenhagen Architecture Festival
It’s the third of the kind and it takes place not only in Copenhagen but also in Aarhus, Aalborg and Odense in Denmark from May 3rd till 16th. And it’s brilliant in thought and program. From the website, here is…
Robert Frank: Me and My Brother/ 2
In the blogpost below you find a text of what Allan Berg and I did the other day: Watched the film by Robert Frank from 1968, with a quote from the text of Sara Thelle, when she saw the film…
Robert Frank: Me and My Brother
The editors of this site, Tue Steen Müller and Allan Berg, met in Randers where Berg lives. It is a tradition that we watch films together, when we meet and as Berg had a fine script publication of Robert Frank’s…
DOK Leipzig 2018
Demand the Impossible! is the motto of this year’s edition of DOK Leipzig (October 29 – November 4). In 2018, the festival’s Special Programmes will revolve around films that seek to bring about changes or depict processes of transformation, with…
The Baltic Cinematic Miracle/ 2
Nedenfor fortælles om den store retrospektive serie, som filmfestivalen i Karlovy Vary afvikler i anledning af 100-året for de tre baltiske landes selvstændighed. Mindre kan gøre det og med vanlig sans for kvalitet arrangerer Cinemateket i København, i samarbejde med…
The Baltic Cinematic Miracle/ 1
The headline is a quote from the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival director Karel Och. The festival celebrates beautifully the 100th anniversary of independence of the three Baltic countries. The following is a copy-paste of the website text that accompanies…
Cinedoc Tbilisi 2018
The sixth edition of the documentary festival in Tbilisi takes place May 3-8. I am going there again. Why? Because I am impressed of what good people are doing to improve the conditions for the documentary in the country. Building…
Sergey Dvortsevoy in Cannes
In 2010, at DOKLeipzig, I attended a masterclass with the director, whose documentaries I have always adored and still do. One of the true masters of modern documentary. I knew him from the 1990’es, where his ”Paradise” was shown on…
DocsBarcelona 2018
DocsBarcelona has existed for more than 20 years. As an industry event, a market, where documentary projects are developed and pitched, where professionals meet to exchange ideas and push films further. The DocsBarcelona as a festival, however, started small scale…
Elvira Lind: Bobbi Jene/ 2
Med mere end 50 filmfestivaler på sit cv – og flere i vente bl.a. Ciné-doc i Tbilisi og DocsBarcelona i maj måned – får den fremragende danske dokumentarfilm ”Bobbi Jene” af Elvira Lind biografpremiere i Danmark den 19. April. I…
Veronika Kaserer: Überall wo wir sind/ 2
Veronika Kaserer graduated from the Zelig school in Bolzano/Bozen in Italy in 2010. Since then she has done many non-film activities and some shorter works. At the Berlinale she came with the feature duration documentary that won the festival’s Compass-Perspektive-Award.…
Camilla Magid: Land of the Free
Time, yes, again Time means everything for many documentaries. And the other big T, Talent. And of course the most important quality for the documentarian, who cares… curiosity and compassion, maybe that is a big word, but in this case…
Visions du Réel Starts Tomorrow
… and seems to keep the high quality for ”auteur” documentaries that was the profile created by Luciano Barisone. The festival, in Nyon Switzerland, now with Emilie Bujès as artistic director, goes on until April 21, and announces on its…
FilmHotel und FilmUni Konrad Wolf
I live for several days at the Hotel am Griebnitzsee, which is wonderfully situated – as the name indicates – and the last two day I have been breakfasting in the terrasse of the hotel. Frühling is hier – in…
Martovski Festival Awards Andrijana Stojkovic
Two days ago Martovski Festival = The March Festival, 65th edition = Belgrade Documentary and Short Film Festival gave the main award for Best Long Documentary to Andrijana Stojkovic for “Wongar”. If you click below you can read what I…
Film History/ France
From Ukraine to Paris where the festival ”L’Europe autour de l’Europe” with a program of European films took place from March 14 till yesterday April 1. A celebration of the author film it is, the film d’auteur, with hommages to…
Film History/ Ukraine
Exciting it was to visit Dovzhenko Film Studios in Kiev, originating from 1927, carrying the name of Alexander Dovzhenko (1894-1956). And sad as well as the buildings stand alone (apart from a couple of sound studios and a fantastic store…
Civil Pitch Winners at Docudays
I had the privilege to moderate the final pitch session of the Civil Pitch at Docudays festival in Kiev Ukraine. 8 projects were presented to a panel of documentary producers, festival people and distributors. Projects which were quite young but…
Arunas Matelis – Class with a Master
Confession: I insisted to be the one to talk to Lithuanian Arunas Matelis in the class that the organisers of Docudays in Kiev had set up to celebrate the director and his work for the last 25 years with his…
New Top Portraits
After a long time with three male directors, three female directors go to the top of the filmkommentaren.dk: Maite Alberti, Agnès Varda, Giedre Zickyte. Maite Alberdi, Chilean director, is known for her warm-hearted films, to be mentioned ”Tea Time” from…
Docudays – TV and Documentaries
Angelina Kariakina from Hromadske (google it, interesting online channel) was the moderator and she did a good job, keeping the panel engaged: Olga Zakharova from Media Group Ukraine that includes a big commercial tv channel, Ivan Bukreev from NLO TV…
Docudays: Looking for Lenin
Up, up, up the slippery street Andriyivskyy Uzviz to the fine Triptych Gallery together with Da’rya Averchenko and Roman Bondarchuk to watch the exhibition ”Looking for Lenin”, Da’rya chose the photo to accompany the text: Gagarin, Stalin and Lenin watching…
Warscape Winner Work-in Progress
At Docudays 2017 the winner of the Warscape competition was a film project with Valeriya Treshchova as the director. A film about herself living in Kiev with her father and mother living in Donetsk. In other words, in the war…
Last Men in Aleppo..in Kiev
I have just come back from giving an introduction to a screening of “Last Men in Aleppo”, written and directed by Feras Fayyad, produced by Kareem Abeed and Søren Steen Jespersen Larm Film Denmark, co-directed by Steen Johannessen. A screening in…
CPH:DOX 2018/ 12 Days
RAYMOND DEPARDON: 12 DAYS Wow – Raymond Depardon’s latest film 12 Days made a deep impression. It is simple, powerful, sober and precise. In France, a citizen who is involuntarily committed to psychiatric treatment has, within 12 days, the right…
DocuDays Kiev Ukraine: Equality/ 2
Look at the photo, an elderly couple studying the program waiting for the opening of the 15th edition of DocuDays UA. My wife, Ellen, and I have been here several times, the hospitality is always warm and generous and the…
Awards at CPH:DOX
The winner of Dox:Award 2018 is ‘The Raft’ ( PHOTO) by the Swedish director Marcus Lindeen, which tells the story of one of the strangest social experiments of all times – told by those who took part in it. The…
CPH:DOX 2018/ Dreaming Murakami
NITESH ANJAAN: DREAMING MURAKAMI As a writer and film maker who is quite interested in (and even feel an affinity for) the Japanese author Haruki Murakami, I felt almost obliged to be disappointed and a bit bitter after watching this…
CPH:DOX 2018/ Giants…
ALEXANDER RYNÉUS, MALLA GRAPENGIESSER, PER BIFROST: GIANTS AND THE MORNING AFTER I saw a clip of this Swedish documentary in Malmø at the DocIncubator presentation of new projects in connection with the Nordisk Panorama. Promising it was and I was…
Doker Moscow Russia
In a break of the Danish television 3 hour long coverage of the re-election of President Putin – instead of falling asleep – I checked facebook and saw that the organisers of the independent documentary festival in Moscow had chosen…
Marie-Clémence Andriamonta Paes: Fahavalo
”I’ll try to tell you the story”, says the weak old man in a blue shirt with a hat on his head. He is adressing the camera crew. ”I was 22 in 1947”, the year that is the focus of…