A film blog by Allan Berg Nielsen & Tue Steen Müller
A film blog by Allan Berg Nielsen & Tue Steen Müller
Full house for the opening film of 2013 Baltic Sea Docs, “The Act of Killing”, director’s (Joshua Oppenheimer) cut (editor Niels Pagh Andersen), 158 mins. The film was screened not only in Riga but also in three other Latvian cities/towns:…
Sunshine. Wonderful view from the 11th floor of Riga’s Hotel Albert, named after a certain Einstein. ”If you don’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough”, is one the sentences that are presented in the hotel that is…
It’s September 26-27 that an important documentary conference takes place in St. Petersburg. And you can sign up NOW by clicking the link below. It is for free and you can take part in person or via the internet. If…
Sevara Pan writes this in-depth review of a film, that has become a classic within the animation doc genre. For those who are interested there is at the end of the article a link to a review written on filmkommentaren…
… is a high quality magazine on documentary and the name of a very strong strand on SVT (Swedish public television) that has published its autumn repertory, opening this week with ”Pussy Riots” by Mike Lerner. ”The Act of Killing”…
New director of EDN (European Documentary Network) Paul Pauwels blogs to his members, and to those who want to/consider become a member of a very useful and unique organisation. As former privileged director of EDN, I warmly recommend you to…
Taken from the website of the festival: Jury members were Joslyn Barnes, Writer and producer (USA), Jasmin Basic, Film historian and Curator (Switzerland), Vibeke Bryld, Director and Writer, editor of DOX Magazine (Denmark). HEART OF SARAJEVO FOR BEST DOCUMENTARY FILM:…
French producer Estelle Robin-Yu talks well and long in an interview brought and made by EDN (European Documentary Network). She talks about her background, about why and how she has been involved in international co-productions, and about the new construction…
Here are the descriptions of the five films that took part in Rough Cut Boutique session in Sarajevo: Baglar – Turkey, directors and producers Berke Bas, Melis Birder, Inhouse projects An underdog basketball team from hard scrabble Diyarbakir in Southeastern…
And here they are, the awards from the workshop for projects at a rough cut stage, text taken from the site of the festival: Sarajevo Film Festival and Balkan Documentary Center proudly announce official awards for the 3rd edition of…
Wonderful to bring good news to the table. In this case about a project that has been developed for some years – I have had the pleasure to meet it in a couple of times in workshops, first time at…
Sevara Pan writes this review: “I think, I should remove this cast and throw it away,” utters Jafar Panahi. “Do you remember film Mirror? he continues. “Mirror was my second film. It was about a little girl Mina, whose mother…
The easy solution for a blogger… to bring the brand new press release of a festival. On the other hand, this is an important festival and the attention it attracts from documentary film people around the world is significant and…
It has been shown in Rotterdam and is scheduled for the upcoming DokuFest in Kosovo, but that’s all for European screenings so far. This is at least what the website of the film tells the reader… But it will come,…
Of course the new Al Jazeera America will first of all be a news channel, when it is launched by August 20, but according to realscreen the channel also wishes to have a strong documentary profile – documentaries (my interpretation)…
It has for years been a good tradition that the Baltic Sea Pitching Forum runs a parallel film programme for the Riga citizens. You could call it a mini film festival and there is indeed high quality and in many…
English title: Blows of the Axe, which refers to the 1950s practice by Argentine distributors of chopping up film prints to prevent people from stealing and illegally projecting them (according to an interview with di Tella in Idiom, google that,…
OBS – In one week, August 15, the French-German cultural channel arte dedicates a whole day of programming to Greece! The thematic day on arte is initiated and organised by the Strasbourg based arte commissioning editor Madeleine Avramoussis with the…
Yesterday at midnight the great Swedish cultural strand K-Special of SVT showed (third run) a French production from 2012 with Jonas Mekas, who declares that ”I’m not a filmmaker, I don’t really make films, I only keep filming, I am…
Yes, that film blew me away. Actually, it did already around one and a half year ago, when its producer (and camerawoman) Irina Shatalova contacted me asking for general advice on financing and distribution, giving me a pretty dark image…
The festival in Kosovo (starts August 17) has announced its impressive programme. The artistic director Veton Nurkollari welcomes the audience in this way: “We are thrilled to present an expanded slate of competitions at DokuFest this year, with films that…
Have to confess that I have been using the term “hybrid”, whenever I have been talking about the new tendencies in the documentary genre. Without really being able to get closer to what it is, where it comes from, what…
… to its loyal documentary lovers, hope there are many, who use this exceptional vod library that now has more than 800 titles, which can be overwhelming, where to start and where to end… which is the reason why ”…
Sometimes, and maybe it happens more often with Polish short documentaries than with films from other countries, you sit after a fine film experience and say to yourself, ahhh it could have been longer, which is maybe the best compliment…
When I visited the Golden Apricot Festival in Yeravan a couple of weeks ago its was obvious that every second film project launched in the so-called industry section was meant to compete for the money that is reserved by many…
Shown at Cinema du Réel in Paris this year, awarded at Chilean Fidocs festival, selected for Yamagata at the coming October, and strongly recommended by my former EDN colleague, now at the NY based Flaherty Seminar, Anita Reher, the expectations…
Realscreen, the trade magazine on non-fiction programmes and documentaries, focused July 22nd, in its newsletter, on the TIFF (Toronto International Film Festival, September 5-15) 2013 documentary highlights. With no confirmation from the festival itself, the new film by Errol Morris,…
The festival in Sarajevo is first and foremost a festival for feature films. Big names – actors and directors – have during the years visited the city’s festival that this year can celebrate its 19th edition. However, due to hard…
… is a very well programmed and introduced film series that takes place in London at the BFI (British Film Institute) Southbank. Yes, what is the essay film that we talk about and often connect to films that we don’t…
Readers might think that I am paid to promote the vod that is run by DocAlliance – I am not, the simple reason it has so many posts on this blog is very simple: It has high quality and is…
New York Times brings a long article about “The Act of Killing”. Errol Morris, credited, as Werner Herzog, as executive producer, has these words about the film, when asked if it is a documentary: ““Of course it’s a documentary,” he…
It was the Bulgarian documentary, produced by the active, renowned with several award winning documentaries on its filmography, Agitprop, that took the main prize in Jerevan’s Golde Apricot festival, documentary competition. I have not yet seen the final film but…
You arrive in Yerevan, Armenia early morning. The taxi is taking you to the hotel, you enter the lobby and the music that meets you sounds familiar. Yes, Charles Aznavour sings La Boheme, wonderful, and a reminder of the singer…
The festival presented the Paradise-trilogy of Ulrich Seidl: Love, Hope and Faith. And the fine Golden Apricot Daily brought an interview with the director (online, see link below), from where I have taken the following: Seidl told the Daily that…
So there he was in Moscow Cinema Big Hall on a thursday evening, and it was totally packed. Artavazd Pelesjian, the Armenian director of all times. I was about to write documentary director, but has been told that he does…
Sergey Parajanov (1924-1990) experienced that a museum was being built in his honour. ”I must be the only one who is alive when a museum is set up”, he is said to have joked. The museum is there, in Yerevan,…
The tireless organisers of the Belgrade European Feature Documentary Film Festival, Magnificent7, Svetlana and Zoran Popovic, and their many helpers, all of them filmmakers themselves, have put together a summer programme, 3 directors, who have already visited the festival (10th…
Veteran documentary director Vitaly Mansky won the main documentary prize at the festival in Karlovy Vary. This is the catalogue description of the film that had its international premiere at the festival: According to a claim made by Vladimir Putin,…
Hungarian director Diana Groó is in Jerusalem these days presenting her new film, called ”Regina” (63 mins). I have followed the talented director for years, and saw a rough cut, that impressed me. How to make a film about a…
Dagnė Vildiūnaitė is the producer behind the Lithuanian production company Just a Moment. She has for years had an international focus, and her films have had both national and international success. “Father” by Marat Sargsyan were this year awarded in…
Filmkommentaren.dk has brought reviews of three new documentaries from Slovakia during the last two weeks: New Life of a Family Album, Velvet Terrorists and Normalization (scroll down and you will find them). All fine and original works from a small…
It is not only in Denmark but also in Slovakia that something is rotten… That is the impression you sit with having watched the new film by Robert Kirchhoff, an impressive work both in terms of the research the director…
Yesterday a new Slovak documentary had its world premiere in Karlovy Vary. It will have a long life on festivals around the world. If you say to someone that they are going to watch a film about people, who fought…
Karlovy Vary International Film Festival started a couple of days ago and the documentary has a good position with an international competititon and a panorama. In the latter section you find ”Stories We Tell” by Sara Polley, ”Father’s Garden –…
Last night the Moscow International Film Festival 2013 ended with the usual grandiosity attached to the festival, led by director Nikita Mikhalkov. The competitive documentary section, set up by Sergey Miroshnichenko and Grigory Libergal, including 7 films, had Pawel Lozinski’s…
Here, the first right is the right to roam. Nicolas Philibert, the acclaimed French documentary filmmaker, largely known for capturing the trivia of the closed worlds (i.e. In the Land of the Deaf, Animals – see MoMA series on his…
It is a bit difficult for me to verbalise precisely, what this film is about. It goes in many directions and I have to confess that I sometimes lackd a focus while watching. However, the reason you stay with the…
First a small introduction to a film that I saw in Kiev during the DocuDays festival. It was made by Dmytro Tiazhlov, who asked me to wait with any text review of the film until correct English subtitles had been…
The German Documentary Award… was given out in the framework of Dokville, a two day event organised by the Haus des Dokumentarfilms. In German a “Branchentreff Dokumentarfilm”, with a fine and inspiring website. For German-reading visitors. A text clip from…
Amazing initiative around the film by Emma Davie and Morag McKinnon, I am Breathing, a film that has been shown at festivals all over, has been praised for its cinematic quality (also here at filmkommentaren.dk where it was on the…