A film blog by Allan Berg Nielsen & Tue Steen Müller
A film blog by Allan Berg Nielsen & Tue Steen Müller
It’s no surprise that Andreas Dalsgaard’s fine film from Colombia ”Life is Sacred” did well at the DocsBarcelona festival in May, where Colombians living in the Catalan capital with tears in eyes talked about the main character Antanas Mockus, ”an…
There is 416 km from Prizren and the Dokufest to Sarajevo, where the film festival is going on right now and until August 22. Not long. But there is quite a difference in the set-up of the documentary & short…
It’s too much to mention all the winners of the Dokufest Prizren 2015, that ended last night – you can find them all on the website, including the jury statements, that in general are very good, which is not always…
I have followed the festival in Kosovo from long-distance, it has been easy to do as the level of FB information (text and pictures) distributed from Dokufest is high and competent, as is the website and the press release that…
Two Polish documentaries taking part in the prestigious Semaine de la Critique at the Locarno Film festival took the main awards. No surprise that Wojciech Staron was praised for his ”Brothers” – I had the privilege to get a sneak…
A very nice email came in yesterday from New York from Laura Israel, who I met at IDFA in Amsterdam years ago. She told me that – as for decades editor and close collaborator of Robert Frank, and a director…
Some additional good news about the film programme in Riga. The Danish film about the newspaper Ekstra Bladet, “The Newsroom – Off the Record” (photo), directed by Mikala Krogh, is not only screened as the opening film on September 2…
CopyPaste of press release from DocAlliance and when I have the hours (close to 6 hours is the two-part documentary) there will be a review of the film on this site: Homeland (Iraq Year Zero) by Abbas Fahdel has won…
It’s a tradition that there are films screenings to accompany the professional training and pitching workshop of the Baltic Sea Docs. On FB the programme was anounced yesterday, introduced in the following way: The 19th edition of the Baltic Sea…
Subtitle: ”Faroese Cinematic Narratives”, that I enjoyed the great pleasure to be with the whole (yester)day. True pleasure indeed and admiration for the work of Ulla Boje Rasmusen and Andreas Fischer-Hansen to have done the fundraising to have a new…
I watched some of the mountain stages at the Tour de France this year, they were boring as nobody really tried anything. Froome was in total control. It was not like that when Marco Pantani was riding, when he reached…
He is on his own, McAllister, alone with his camera, which is constantly moving to be able to catch what is going on. I have to confess that this shaky style with little aesthetic consideration irritated me in the beginning…
Portuguese film director Catarina Mouráo pitched the film as a project back in Prague March 2013 at the Archidoc workshop with a brilliant trailer. I was there to moderate the session. I knew Catarina from workshops in Lisbon, she was…
One more well made film historical biography, this time on Robert Altman (1925-2006), interestingly made and enjoyable to watch. The director, Canadian Ron Mann, got the great idea to chapter the film by asking people who have worked with Altman…
It’s nice when a text is free of conventional promotion clichés, is well written and has an interesting point of view and an inviting programme. As the one below, copy-pasted from the Flaherty Newsletter, with Sukhdev Sandhu (more about him…
”It would be a major lapse to have a documentary that doesn’t contain the full reality. I wouldn’t want to be associated. This is not only your film”, legendary film critic Roger Ebert e-mails to Steve James during his making…
Jeg skrev om Helmut Berger, som Luchino Visconti gjorde til stjerne med ”Ludwig”, skuespilleren som blev kaldt for verdens smukkeste mand. Og så åbner jeg det danske Cinematekets katalog for august og september og ser en anden Visconti-skuespiller på forsiden,…
The film opened theatrically in New York, but had its premiere beginning of this year at the Sundance Festival. Reviews below, click and get them in full length. Many superlatives but if you read the full review from NY Times,…
To continue some name dropping after receiving today’s realscreen newsletter that announces ”the slate of docs” to be screened at the Venice International Film Festival, edition 72nd! World class name Frederick Wiseman presents ”In Jackson Heights”, which was pitched at…
Some name dropping on a tuesday evening, tabloid maybe, but I expect all three films to be of quality… Realscreen anounces today that a new film by Michael Moore is to premiere at the TIFF, the festival in Toronto that…
I have before on this site nominated my colleague at DocsBarcelona Joan Gonzalez as a true documentary pioneer – and he is unstoppable making quality documentaries be seen in Latin America, where he has been since June 28, doing a…
The Danish Cinemateket re-opens in August with – as usual – a fine programme, including a retrospective of films by Peter Bogdanovich, mentioned in the post below and in reports from the Amdocs festival in Palm Springs in March. A…
Before I went to Amdocs (American Documentary Film Festival) in Palm Springs end of March this year I would have shaken my head if anyone had said to me that I should revisit some of the films by John Ford.…
This is a sneak preview review of a film that has its premiere beginning af August at the Locarno Film Festival written by an admirer of Polish cinematographer and director Wojciech Staron, an admirer who happily once more (after the…
… and there are tributes to film and film history at the Dokufest in Prizren. The film star on the photo needs no further introduction, ”Ingrid Bergman, in Her Own Words”, a film that premiered at the Cannes festival this…
One more addition to the slate of posts on the premiere of ”Beyond the Fear” by Herz Frank and Maria Kravchenko, again from the Haaretz and again by Nirit Anderman, who wrote a competent review of the film. This time…
Teddy Grouya, festival leader of Amdocs, the American Documentary Film Festival in Palm Springs, teamed up with Dokufest leader Veton Nurkollari and voilá a collaboration exists, where ”Amdocs at Dokufest” is one of the…
Yesterday the Dokufest festival in Prizren, Kosovo announced its programme for the festival that runs August 8-16. It is inviting and extremely well edited and both timely in its connection to the world we live in with MIGRATION as main…
Here is the press release of the DocAlliance in its (almost) full length – clicking the links will bring you to more information: “Join us at our online trip towards discovering young film talents! What is contemporary documentary like according…
… because it ”opens” (as the Americans say) ”over there”, today friday, another well deserved distribution triumph for (as the Americans write) Mr. Oppenheimer and his Danish produced documentary. You should read the whole review by A.O. Scott, here is…
In thematic terms a follow-up on the Armenian ”One, Two, Three”, this Korean documentary, shot over a period of 15 months, documents what the Armenian old people are missing and looking for: Love. This is what the couple in the…
7 films are selected to be screened at Festival del Film Locarno in the Semaine de la Critique that takes place August 7-14. They are world or international premieres. I know about three of them, have watched two and am…
Mikhail is 80 years old, he has never been married, he has no children and he lives in a small appartment full of clothes in bags and whatever he has collected, making it impossible for him to move around. He…
… for the 19th time under the headline Baltic Sea Docs (previously Forum), a development workshop and pitching forum for 25 projects from 13 countries, organized by the National Film Centre of Latvia with the two women on the photo,…
Take a look at the photo – it’s a festival award, the main one at the Pärnu Film Festival, characteristic for the originality with which Mark Soosaar runs his festival, this one being the 29th. And the winner was –…
Finally an Israeli competent, reflective review of the film by Herz Frank and Maria Kravchenko, written by Nirit Anderman in Haaretz yesterday July 12th. The introduction goes like this: “If you hoped to find out why a married mother of…
The film festival in Yerevan that starts today and runs until the 19th is a true red-carpet festival with film stars, glorious receptions, tributes to local hero Charles Azanavour – but also with a fine selection of documentaries to take…
The film by Herz Frank and Maria Kravchenko was shown on the 8th of July, the day before the official opening of the Jerusalem Film Festival, whose leaders felt they had to play according to the rules of the Israeli…
… is a popular event within the Karlovy Vary festival with the Jihlava International Documentary Film Festival as organiser. Even if you are not there the website (link below) gives you good news about what kind of quality films you…
The Kosovo festival that runs from August 8-16 has already announced that it will have a Tribute to Albert Maysles, who died earlier this year – as says artistic director of the festival Veton Nurkollari about Maysles (photo), “Curious and…
Yes, it is a tradition to pay tribute to the festival in Pärnu Estonia that runs now and until July 19th – and let me repeat the introductory text from last year: ”the Pärnu International Documentary and Anthropology Film Festival…
… it also has the title ”The March of the White Elephants” written on the screen… is a well made tv-journalistic documentary about the incredible money sucking world football organisation FIFA that hopefully now will be re-born with a new…
Got this email from Syrian Diana el Jeiroudi, now based in Berlin. An excellent offer that I pass on with pleasure: I (Diana) hope you can forward this to documentary filmmakers, video activists and artists who you know are working on interesting…
It’s on Dokumania (Danish DR’s prime time slot for documentaries) tonight and it is definitely worth seeing, the Oscar 2013 winner – the year where many of us had hoped for ”The Act of Killing” – but the well crafted…
Normally we do not not advertise, but rules are there to be broken… It’s last chance today if you want to take part in the EDN workshop in Turin called Outreach and Distribution – ”a three-day workshop where producers and…
I read somewhere that NYTimes plans to cut down in their movie reviews policy that so far has been working in the way that ALL films released theatrically in NY are reviewed. What that means remains to be seen, but…
Still waiting for Israeli film critics having watched and evaluated the film by Herz Frank and Maria Kravchenko – that is to be screened in Jerusalem July 8, the day before the Jerusalem Film Festival officially starts but still as…
A newsletter arrived presenting an impressive selection of films to be broadcast in Africa… A year ago we wrote about the Afridocs initiative taken by the Steps foundation in Cape Town, which is run by Don Edkins, who initiated Steps…
The 37th edition of the Moscow International Film Festival ended two days ago and the winner in the documentary competition was American “Cartel Land” by Matthew Heinemann. According to the festival’s main communicator, filmmaker and festival programmer, Georgy Molodtsov: “Overall,…
Years ago, when in Israel as a tutor for the documentary CoPro event organised by Orna Yarmut, I visited the Jerusalem Cinematheque. I was there with Herz Frank, whose favourite cinema of his home town it was. Herz was proud…