A film blog by Allan Berg Nielsen & Tue Steen Müller
A film blog by Allan Berg Nielsen & Tue Steen Müller
Amdocs distributed several awards on the final evening of the festival. I was involved in the pitch competition and a juror for the Best American Feature Documentary. For that reason they come first on the list with some comments from…
As some other documentary festivals, DOKLeipzig is an example, Amdocs screens animation films. A good choice I thought after having attended a programme of 8 short ones from Germany, mostly from the film school in Baden-Württemberg. Puppet animation with beautiful…
Press release from IDFA, know several of the projects and people, great choices: For the February selection round of 2014, the IDFA Bertha Fund (previously Jan Vrijman Fund) considered around 300 projects from more than 65 different countries. In total,…
Festivals would not be able to function without volunteers. People who help without being paid. The American Documentary Film Festival in Palm Springs is no exception. In its third edition the help you get from local people who support the…
Opening night in Palm Springs: Julie Cohen’s ”I Live to Sing”, or in xhosa language: Ndiphilela Ukucula. A warm film with three black, young upcoming opera stars from South Africa, who tell their stories, which are sad and uplifting at…
The Danish Cinemateket celebrates the founder of Danish documentary Theodor Christensen from May 1st with an exhibition and a retrospective. In Danish: Ja, ham ville jeg gerne have mødt og røget en cigar med… Men han døde allerede i 1967,…
A short trip to Thessaloniki it was, but I managed to attend a Docs in Progress session at the Olympion Cinema as well as the first 7-8 projects which were pitched at the Docs in Thessaloniki Forum, arranged by the…
I have just returned from Thessaloniki Documentary Film Festival after a (far too) quick visit for the following reason – thank you so much! – this is the press release of the festival: The European Documentary Network (EDN) award, which…
Dimitri Eipides, founder and director of the Thessaloniki Documentary Festival, had made the obvious choice to present two tributes at the festival, one for the late Peter Wintonick, who came to the festival so many times to pass his wisdom…
The organisers of the festival in Kiev has this text on their website: 11th Docudays UA International Human Rights Documentary Film Festival opens on March 21 at 7 p.m. with Euromaidan chronicles: Three months of revolution. From indignant protest to…
In Copenhagen, starting March 27, running until March 30, the first of its kind, an ambitious set-up with discussion, tours around Copenhagen, and films, more than 80, new and old from all over the world. It is indeed an impressive…
6 3D documentaries by Wim Wenders, Michael Glawogger, Michael Madsen, Robert Redford, Margreth Olin and Karim Ainouz. Executive producer: Wim Wenders. Each film is 26 mins. long. Subtitle: ”If Buildings Could Talk” and this is where the overall problem lies…
… is a yearly seminar day dedicated to the documentary film, open for participation by Danish filmmakers, producers, film school students, television people with a relationship to the genre, consultants etc. from the Danish Film Institute (DFI), that is the…
Yes, it does, wish you all the best, you are so brave and clever and thoughtful as this text documents, taken from the website of the festival: Three times I started writing an address on behalf of the Docudays UA…
What a wonderful surprise, and well deserved it is, that the Russian documentary Linar opened the festival in Thessaloniki Greece. Here is the text from the newsletter of the festival that always has a highly professional communication activity. A deeply…
What a treat I got last Friday during the music film festival in Copenhagen: To be able to watch this old Tom Waits-film on the big screen again. It’s from a time in his career when he had almost redefined…
I just discovered that it is 20 years ago that I met Alexandru Solomon in Bucharest. My wife worked at DR (Danish Public Broadcaster) and I was at the National Film Board of Denmark. We bought two of his visual…
The Brazilian documentarian, who died tragically on the 2nd of February, 80 years old, is the obvious subject for an homage at the upcoming Cinéma du Réel in Paris (March 20-30), where ”Cabra Marcado Para Morrer” (119 mins.), said to…
“Mette’s Voice” is reviewed below by Allan Berg, who praises the film. The film is available in an English subtitled version and could definitely be interesting for festival selectors. Here is the synopsis: Denmark is supposed to be a country…
For me the best English language newspaper critiques and general film coverage is to be found in The Guardian and New York Times. It was therefore with great pleasure that The Guardian, in their first Film Awards, placed The Act…
Normally we don’t advertise training programmes but as we know that this one is NOT limited to EUrope and we have many talented documentary filmmakers as readers… “The IDFAcademy Summer School is open to: • Directors making their first or…
It was one of these pleasant surprises. Last summer I got a FB message from a Teddy Grouya, who invited me to come to his festival in California. The surprise was double as he wrote to me in Danish (well…
Danish veteran documentarians Katia Forbert Petersen and Annette Mari Olsen premiered yesterday their new documentary, that has the English title ”Mission Rape – A Tool of War”, a film that will travel not only to the foreign broadcasters involved but…
… and the winner is ”Twenty Feet from Stardom” by Morgan Neville, in the category Feature Length Documentary. ”So Hollywood is Still Hollywood”, wrote Niels Pagh Andersen on FB. The editor of ”The Act of Killing” expressed indirectly what many…
I have copy pasted the list of winners from the website of the festival, that cleverly brings forward the jury motivations as well. The following films have been written about/reviewed on filmkommentaren: The Last Station, Return to Homs, Ne Me…
Tomorrow night is Oscar night. On filmkommentaren.dk all five contenders in the feature length catagory have been reviewed, the latest watched in Zagreb the other day: ”Twenty Feet from Stardom”, an entertaining film, about which I wrote ”but the film…
Of course there had to be a meeting in Zagreb about the EU supported programme ”Creative Europe”, that runs from 2014 till 2020 and has two sub-programmes: MEDIA and Culture. The MEDIA Desk Croatia, Martina Petrovic, hosted the meeting in…
Does she wants too much, Tatjana Bozic? From Life and from the Film, she has made and in which she is the main character? A film about a woman looking back at her love life to find out what went…
OK, this film represents everything that I dislike about a certain kind of documentaries: It is – to quote the description in the site of the festival here in Zagreb – ”eye-popping”, ”stunning” and I could add sentimental over-the-limit of…
We have very often been informed about the terrible conditions for the inmates in Russian prisons. The released Pussy Riot members were the last ones to point out that something needs to be changed… to use an understatement. This film,…
This Oscar-nominated documentary is very entertaining because of its interesting characters, who are full of life and memories about their lives as back-up singers – and about their attempt to get to the foreground as lead singers. People like Sting…
ZagrebDox places the film in the ”Happy Dox” category. Here is some background on theme and on story from the idfa catalogue synopsis 2013: Bhutan is one of the least developed countries in the world. There is barely any industry,…
Croatian director (b.1972) Damir Cucic “opened” my 2014 ZagrebDox screening schedule, and thanks for that. The festival had very rightly arranged a small retrospective of the work of a director, who deserves much more international attention that he gets at…
ZagrebDox 2014 is running. I have watched several films, reviews and reports will follow. Here are some memories which are published in the catalogue of the festival. A look back to the first edition of ZagrebDox Pro: In 2005 ZagrebDox…
For new readers: “The Flaherty is a nonprofit organization dedicated to the proposition that independent media can illuminate the human spirit. Its mission is to foster exploration, dialogue, and introspection about the art and craft of all forms of the…
There you sit in your comfortable armchair. You watch, you listen, you read about Ukraine, feeling shocked and hopeless… December seems far away, at that time I posted a text about the Docudays festival people taking active part in the…
… arranged by EDN (European Documentary Network) in Copenhagen, read more from the website: ”Marathon Dok is a looooong day full of funny, fascinating and fantastic documentaries. This one-day screening program brings new international high quality documentaries to the big…
Always dedicated Hanka Kastelicová, executive producer of documentaries at HBO Europe, handed me the dvd of the director Kowalski, who with his first documentary work has made one of those many Polish documentaries that shine of professionalism in camerawork, editing…
Sunday 23rd of February ZagrebDox International Documentary Festival takes off for the 10th time in the Croatian capital – in the Cineplexx, Centar Kapitol cinemas. I have been to the festival several times, from the first edition as a juror,…
Before Scottish/Yemenite Sara Ishaq directed the personal, wonderful “The Mulberry House”, she made this 26 mins. long documentary that is nominated for an Oscar in the Documentary Short Subject category. It is extremely tough and shocking to watch because the…
Remember the days where content of conferences ended up in big reports that ended up on shelves to be very seldom looked into after the event? I would argue that it is much more attractive to look at a video…
”A World not Ours” was in Belgrade for the Magnificent7 festival – and was met with enthusiasm. The director told us that a follow-up short film had been selected for the Berlinale short film competition. The first public screening takes…
The vod that calls itself “your online documentary cinema”, and very right so, always high quality has this time chosen to present 11 films by a real auteur, Peter Liechti, for free until February16. The text that introduces the director…
Shit happens… Det var min hensigt at anmelde, og anmelde positivt om denne fine film, produceret af Hollands fremragende dokumentarproducent Pieter van Huystee. Jeg så den i Amsterdam, hvor den var nomineret til den store pris, men ikke vandt, men…
Take a look at the photo. It is taken at the oldest Belgrade kafana that has the name ? It is situated next to Saboma Church (The Cathedral) where the four of us always go. From left Zoran Popovic, then…
Director and main character Petri Luukkainen accompanied by cinematographer Jesse Jokinen came to the stage after the screening of their film ”My Stuff” to receive a diploma and 1000€ from local BelMedic Clinic as a recognition of a ”healthy” film,…
The Magnificent 7 directors Svetlana and Zoran Popovic write about the film: A grand cinematic spectacle! A documentary that takes us into the world of religious cults of India – the place where the rivers Ganges and Yamuna join with…
The Riahi Brothers had visited the festival before. Arash presented his ”Exile Family Movie” in 2007 in which his younger brother Arman is an important character as the film (the title says it all) deals with a family that meets…
The Magnificent 7 directors Svetlana and Zoran Popovic write about the film: What do we really need in life? How much do the things we are surrounded by fulfill us, and how much do they enslave us? In a moment…
Last night was the screening of Nicolas Philibert’s ”La Maison de la Radio”. The director went on stage with festival director Zoran Popovic, for the second time in the history of the 10 year old festival. In 2011 he presented…