Magnificent 7 Belgrade – Day 2/3
”I was asked to do that film”, Oeke Hoogendijk said at the Q&A session after the opening screening of ”The New Rijksmuseum – the Film” friday night January 30 at the Sava Centre in Belgrade. The hall was full, more…
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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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Læs mereMagnificent 7 Belgrade – Day 2/3
Magnificent 7 Belgrade – Day 1
I warn you – it is my intention to report from the Magnificent7 festival in Belgrade that starts tonight with the screening of ”The New Rijksmuseum – the Film” by Oeke Hoogendijk. The reporting will include a lot about films,…
Bringing Truths to Life – at Sundance
Realscreen reports from the ongoing Sundance festival. And documentaries are shown and discussed. Last saturday a panel of three directors were talking about ”the blurring lines between journalism and non-fiction storytelling”. Laura Poitras (Citizen Four etc.) (Photo): “It’s not a…
Flaherty: The Scent of Places
The Flaherty has announced its 2015 seminar, June 13-19 at the Colgate University, Hamilton NY. The programmer is Laura U. Marks. There is a focus on Arab film artists – you can read much more about the event by clicking…
Carl Th. Dreyer Award to Anders Østergaard
Of course we Danes must have an award carrying the name of Dreyer: “Every year on Dreyer’s birthday, the Carl Th. Dreyer Memorial Fund awards a prize primarily to a young film director, or other artist working in film, in…
André Singer: Night Will Fall
Jeg har ikke tid til at skrive en egentlig anmeldelse af André Singers imponerende og vigtige film, som jeg så på SVT i går aftes. Allan Berg vil muligvis stå for den. Men filmen er som historisk dokument naturligvis unik,…
Ai Weiwei: On The Table
If you happen to be in Barcelona this week, it is a must to visit the exhibition at La Virreina Image Centre, La Rambla 99. It is the last week of an exhibition that I was lucky to see in…
Scorsese & Tedeschi: The 50 Year Argument
”Cinematekets egne premiere-dokumentarer – håndplukkede historier fra virkeligheden”, sådan præsenteres et fint initiativ, som også kaldes ”månedens dokumentar”, som vises i Filmhuset ved 6 forevisninger, således også januar måneds bemærkelsesværdige ”The 50 Year Argument”, der vises i sin originalversion og…
Bories and Chagnard: Rules of the Game
Svetlana and Zoran Popovic, directors of the Magnificent7 Festival in Belgrade present ”Rules of the Game” that will be screened February 5th as the closing film of the festival. The text also includes words from the director: There’s a rumour…
Virpi Suutari: Garden Lovers
Svetlana and Zoran Popovic, directors of the Magnificent7 Festival in Belgrade present ”Garden Lovers” that will be screened February 4th at the festival. The text also includes words from the director: One of the most important Finnish and European documentary…
Viktor Kossakovsky Online Retrospective
Yes, of course it is the unique Doc Alliance that brings to us – FOR FREE – seven of Kossakovsky’s film online – UNTIL FEBRUARY 1ST. It is “the first time that they enter the virtual online world and thus…
Jorge Pelicano: Suddenly My Thoughts Halt
Svetlana and Zoran Popovic, directors of the Magnificent7 Festival in Belgrade present ”Suddenly My Thoughts Halt” that will be screened February 3rd at the festival. The text also includes words from the director: Outstanding photography takes us into the space…
Camilla Nielsson: Democrats
Svetlana and Zoran Popovic, directors of the Magnificent7 Festival in Belgrade present ”Democrats” that will be screened February 2nd at the festival. The text also includes words from the director: One of the best Danish documentaries in past several years…
Álex de la Iglesia: Messi
Svetlana and Zoran Popovic, directors of the Magnificent7 Festival in Belgrade present ”Messi” that will be screened February 1st at the festival. The text also includes words from the director: When one of the most important Spanish directors, Alex de…
Orlando von Einsiedel: Virunga
Svetlana and Zoran Popovic, directors of the Magnificent7 Festival in Belgrade presents the Oscar-nominated ”Virunga” that will be screened January 31 at the festival. The text also includes words from the director: Depicting the best and the worst in human…
Controversial Catalan Documentary Raises Debate
This morning Joan Gonzalez, director of DocsBarcelona, sent me this message from his iPhone conveying hope for what documentaries can do in Catalonia: “Last 24 hours has been very explosive in doc terms. Yesterday the documentary “Ciutat Morta” (corruption, police,…
Oeke Hoogendijk: The New Rijksmuseum – The Film
Svetlana and Zoran Popovic, directors of the Magnificent7 Festival in Belgrade presents ”The New Rijksmuseum” that will be screened January 30 as the opening film of the festival. The text also includes words from the director: In 2003, the Rijksmuseum…
Werner Herzog: Dicta
Mens jeg fortumlet tænker videre over alt det, som skete i mig ved at lytte til de to dages samtale mellem Joshua Oppenheimer og Werner Herzog på Den danske Filmskole for en uge siden, hjælper kollega Tue Steen Müller mig ved at hitte dette…
Magnificent7 Festival Belgrade 2015
The 11th edition of the Magnificent7 Festival for European feature length documentaries takes off January 30 and continues until February 5. As in previous years filmkommentaren publishes the introduction to the 7 films written by Svetlana and Zoran Popovic. That…
Oscar Nominations for Documentaries
… and for the rest of course, but let’s focus on the nominees in the documentary feauture, the first mentioned is/are directors, the names that follow are producers: The favourite unique document ”Citizen Four” (photo) (Laura Poitras (dir.), Mathilde Bonnefoy…
Documentaries in Trieste
Trieste – the city of Claudio Magris – still miss a creative documentary on this magnificent author – hosts a fine festival that starts tomorrow January 16th and runs until January 22nd. The documentary programme has quality and is also…
Chile Doc on DocAlliance
For those of us travelling to festivals like DOKLeipzig and idfa it has been obvious that something good is happening with documentaries in Chile. Good fims are made and delegations arrive to the festivals to launch films through the ChileDoc,…
Hommage Documentaire à ”Charlie Hebdo”
The excellent French language ”Le blog documentaire” posted today a text with the headline above. The editor C.Mal has listed (some with links to clips/trailers) films made on some of killed cartoonists (like Cabu, photo) or on the satirical cartoon…
Big Award for Best Nordic Documentary
From the website of Göteborg Film Festival (January 23 – February 2): French sadomasochism, Canadian social workers and an American free zone for convicted pedophiles are all found in the eight films nominated for the Dragon Award Best Nordic Documentary…
East Beats West
I know it looks stupid and tabloid, but I have been using that headline so many times and I do believe that there is a lot of documentary talent and originality to be found in the Eastern European countries. More…
News from Paris: René Vautier 1928-2015
Grand old man and enfant terrible of French militant cinema René Vautier died Sunday January 4th in his home in Cancale, Brittany, at the age of 86. Originally from Brittany, René Vautier fought the Germans as a very young member…
Miroslav Janek’s ”Olga” on DocAlliance
DocAlliance starts its new year with a present to its (hopefully) many viewers: ”Olga” by Miroslav Janek is available for free viewing until January 11. It is a film that was on my Best of 2014 – here is a…
Pasolini in Rome in Berlin
On the way to the Zelig film school in Bolzano a stop was made in Berlin for some days. Apart from enjoying oysters in KaDeWee or la Fayette the city’s many good restaurants often have Kalbsleber in its classic version…
Online is Great/Don’t Forget the Quality DVD
First text of 2015. Happy New Year to all our readers! I sit in the armchair of my room, the place to be when football is to be watched on the small tv screen, or documentaries on the computer via…
Danish Documentaries 2014
It was almost ”business as usual”, when the DFI (Danish Film Institute) proudly could announce that 15 Danish documentaries were selected to be screened at IDFA, for most documentarians the festival for films that have been categorized to be a…
Michael Haneke
Back to film blogging after holidays. Michael Haneke is the right one for a comeback. In the Paris Review winter 2014 issue there is a small excerpt from an interview with the director – if you want to read the…
2014 – Best Documentaries Intro
Here we go again. A year has passed. I have seen films at festivals and in cinemas around Europe and in the US. I have seen films at home via links sent to me, thanks to many for their generosity.…
2014 – Best Documentaries
Alphabetical order: 1989 by Anders Østergaard and Erzsebet Racz, Denmark/Hungary 20,000 Days on Earth by Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard, UK Alentejo Alentejo by Sergio Tréfaut, Portugal Citizen Four by Laura Poitras, Germany/US Democrats by Camilla Nielsson, Denmark Garden Lovers…
Silvered Water, Syria Self-Portrait/ 2
Shame on me that I in my turbulence after the screening did not remember the beautiful review that Sara Thelle wrote when she had watched the film in connection with cph:dox. I repeat two paragraphs here: … I (Sara Thelle)…
Silvered Water, Syria Self-Portrait
by Wiam Simav Bedirxan & Ossama Mohammed. It premiered at the Cannes Film Festival and has been to major festivals like Toronto, cph:dox and idfa. Two days ago it had a theatrical release in 30 cinemas in France, where the…
Zdeněk Miler: Krtek
I love them all, the three year old grandchild Henry said, referring to the Krtek films made by Czech Zdeněk Miler. Even if he runs around saying Ninja Turtle all the time, his best moments are those with the animation…
Stephen Smith & Julia Szucs: Vanishing Point
Stephen Smith, one of the directors of “Vanishing Point”, wrote to me a couple of months ago. He asked if I would care to watch his film, produced by the National Film Board of Canada. Apart from a very fine…
Rain of Awards in Riga
There has been quite a film party going on in the Latvian capital. Not only has the city, as Cultural Capital of Europe, hosted the EFA Awards – films have been shown at the Riga International Film Festival that ran…
Tiazhlov & Shtyka (eds.) Ukraine_Voices
A couple of months ago I wrote a text about the upcoming second edition of the Cinedoc festival in Tbilibi, Georgia. The festival included a section called Ukranian Voices with several films, also one that I had not heard about,…
Carmen Cobos: Imperfect Harmony/ 2
Got this mail from Carmen Cobos this morning referring to a screening in Aarhus, Denmark tomorrow; “IMPERFECT HARMONY – my debut film as director will be shown in your country this Thursday, maybe you care to see it” – the…
Festival dei Popoli Firenze/ Winners
Sergei Loznitsa was awarded one more time for his ”Maidan” (photo) at the festival in Firenze. The brief jury motivation goes like this: Timely in this current passage of History, the filmmaker calmly and masterfully engages in the unfolding of…
Mehran Tamadon: Iranian
After a long career at festivals (winning the Grand Prix at Cinéma du Réel 2014) the feature length documentary by Mehran Tamadon opened in cinemas in Paris December 3. In many cinemas in the French capital, that is still unique…
Kristof Bilsen: Elephant’s Dream
Is it wrong to characterize a film as lovely? Well, the young woman on the still photo is wonderful to be with, and she has been made lovely through the approach of a director, who dares to leave the main…
Ivette Löcker: When it Blinds, Open Your Eyes
Zhanna, Lyosha and Maria. St. Petersburg 2013. Small apartment. Full of smoke from the cigarettes of Zhanna and Lyosha. Maria is the mother of Lyosha. She provides the two junkies with food – and love. She works, they do not…
Covi/Frimmel:Photographer In Front of the Camera
Erich Lessing, born 1923, Austrian reportage and art photographer, associated to Magnum, famous for photos from Hungary 1956 and for photos of art in museums. And probably for much more – which is not the theme of this film that…
Frederick Wiseman: National Gallery
The other day I visited the National Gallery in London. I was there for three hours, generously being introduced to the fabulous collection by skilled art historians, who took me and others to watch and learn. We stood in front…
DocsBarcelona Starts Documentary Film School
Normally, there is no reason to bring a photo of two men signing a contract but in this case I want to honour my dear friend and colleague Joan Gonzalez (right) for making one more of his many dreams come…
Festival dei Popoli Firenze
The 55th edition of the Firenze based documentary Festival dei Popoli is running now – until December 5. A rich programme and it’s all very professionally presented on the website. And I liked the welcoming words of the festival director,…
Kosmorama: Body Language in the Moving Image
Denmark’s oldest film journal Kosmorama (first issue in 1954) presents a slate of articles (online and in English as well) that could interest the true film buffs among our readers. The articles are written by film historians and academics. The…
Sergey Loznitsa Retrospective Online
Got this press release from Andrea Pruchová from DocAlliance this morning – concerning an early super-generous xmas gift to all of us documentary fans: His films tend to attract general attention. While festival juries churn out awards, as seen in…