A film blog by Allan Berg Nielsen & Tue Steen Müller
A film blog by Allan Berg Nielsen & Tue Steen Müller
Below the beginning of the speech that the new director of EDN (European Documentary Network) held in Sheffield June 11th, invited by the EBU Documentary Group. The whole analytical text – that should be read by all documentarians – is…
From BBC News online today, link to the full article below: The European Broadcasting Union (EBU) has called on the Greek government to reopen ERT. A petition signed by 51 European directors general, including the BBC’s Tony Hall, is to…
Greek documentarian and good friend Marianna Economou sent this text referring to the outrageous closure of ERT: I am sending you this letter that all of us, the Greek documentary filmmakers, wrote as a response to the sudden closure of…
Memories… of a festival on Bornholm, Balticum Film & TV Festival, that ran in the 1990’es in Gudhjem and Svaneke, and meant quite a lot for this blogger. (If you write Bornholm in ”Search” you will get numerous texts referring…
Have to confess that my knowledge of The Robert Flaherty Film Seminar was very limited until my former colleague from EDN Anita Reher got the job as executive director and put me on the mailing list for news. Frequently press…
Got an email from filmmaker Georgy Molodtsov, who is part of the team that runs the documentary programme at the upcoming MIFF in Moscow, that goes from June 20 to June 29. He informs about the selection made by the…
I watched it on my MacBook and I can’t wait to see it again on a big screen. I will save some of my many superlatives for that occasion. So what you get now is a first impression of a…
In connection with the Copenhagen Photo Festival (June 6-16) The Cinematheque in Copenhagen screens a documentary on Saul Leiter, photographer and painter from New York (born 1923). Screening tuesday June 11, the director Tomas Leach will be present for a…
On the National Day of Sweden, June 6, SVT (Swedish national public tv broadcaster) had a present for its viewers. At 8.20 in the morning a broadcast was made of the classic documentary by Jan Troell from 1988, Sagolandet (Land…
The DocsBarcelona Pitching Forum included a Greek film project, presented by Valerie Kontakos and Despina Pavlaki. The Greek women had earlier communicated their experience with a Kickstarter campaign on FB. I had read it and asked if it could go…
And the winner was… “The Act of Killing”. One of the editors of the film was Barcelona born Ariadna Fatjo-Vilas Mestre, educated at the National Film School in England. She answered like this when the question came if she could…
As programmer for a festival it is always a good idea, I would almost say it is an obligation, to go and see the films you selected on a big screen and with an audience. It is no secret that…
The job given to Michael Glawogger at DocsBarcelona was very simple: find 7 clips and talk about them in your master class. He found 6 and surprised this blogger, who thought he knew the work of the Austrian filmmaker, by…
The 16th edition of the DocsBarcelona Pitching Forum ended yesterday. The level of the 25 presentations was high, the organisation was – as always – and as it should be – professional in a warm and generous atmosphere. And the…
It was indeed a grand opening night of DocsBarcelona. A proud director, Joan Gonzalez introduced all the elements – the festival, still young, and the industry section, a teenager, 16 years, with new or young components like the InterdocsBarcelona seminar…
Ventura Durall is the director of a film that will travel the world. I write ”will travel the world” as the film is not premiered yet. It was screened in a very-close-to-final-cut version yesterday at DocsBarcelona. As in previous two…
I was lucky this year (December 2012) at idfa. The first film I saw, was the one that got the award for being the best film of that year’s festival. And it deserved to be, it did stand out, no…
Voices, yes voices it will be, communicates Philibert right from the start, before the titles appear on the screen. An hommage to the human voice as it is performed in the public radio of France. Quick sound montage, titles, the…
Ever since I saw the film in New York last December, the film has been in my head. Or rather the mad Ginger Baker has been in my head. I bought a Cream cd in New York and the music…
In Warsaw, at the Planete+ Doc Film Festival, I was asked to talk about film critic, especially the one about documentaries. I did so and together with a dozen of workshoppers, the new film of Maciej Drygas was screened. I…
In a week from now the thirteen first of 25 documentary film projects have been pitched on the first day of the pitching part of the 16th edition of DocsBarcelona. 12 others will follow the day after. The pitching filmmakers…
From one of the partners of the DocAlliance, DOKLeipzig, we have received this press release: The Portuguese documentary film Cativeiro (Captivity) by André Gil Mata is the winner of this year’s Doc Alliance Award. The Award was delivered on Monday at…
The trade magazine Screen Daily has a long article (May 20) on the big presence of documentaries in Cannes. The article, written by Melanie Goodfellow, mentions films to be shown and sold as well as statements from people who sell…
Artur Liebhart, festival director of Planete Doc Film Festival, had planned the closing ceremony of his festival in an excellent way. Well, he could not know it but Danish director Andreas Koefoed was as the first award winner called to…
I was invited to the Warsaw festival to talk about film critic, which I did last saturday morning with a general introduction followed by a screening of Maciej Drygas ”Abu Haraz” and a discussion of which points should be dealt…
“For heaven’s sake – what a question!” utters Hedi as her son starts the conversation that they had avoided for decades. Father’s Garden – The Love of My Parents is a new documentary film by Swiss director Peter Liechti that…
Veteran Polish director Maciej Drygas gives the audience an absolutely fascinating opening of his new film shot in North Sudan. Meditative music accompanies the camera, that circles slowly and softly around trees from the point of view of a man…
The Guardian published a very interesting article Tuesday May 14. Agnès Poirier had seen the new film by legendary Claude Lanzmann about Benjamin Murmelstein, who collaborated with the Nazis as the last Jewish Council President in Theresienstadt. Poirier talks to…
The Guardian to-day: MICHAEL HANN: “Meeting Ginger Baker: an experience to forget. How an onstage Q&A with the great drummer turned into a professional horror show”: Link to guardian.co.uk/music On Jay Bulgers film “Beware of Mr. Baker“.
On the night where FC Barcelona stars travel their city in an open bus, to celebrate the championship with their fans, it is the 22nd league title for the one and only club, this blogger follows on Danish television, whenever…
7 films on one disc – four ”With Russian Eyes on Sweden” and three ”With Swedish Eyes on Russia”. I will write about the latter, the Swedish documentaries. The dvd was given to me by PeÅ Holmquist, veteran Swedish documentarian…
”The EDN Executive Committee has appointed Paul Pauwels as the new Director of the organization. The appointment will be effective from May 15th, when Pauwels take over the strategic planning and future development of the international documentary network with over…
Normally we do not do promotion for training programmes but there are exceptions. As this one, the Ex Oriente Film workshop based in Prague, that enters a new decade, after – this is how the organisers, led by Veronika Liskova…
… starts its programme tomorrow May 10 and runs until May 19. The selection is rich – take a look at the website’s ”Film Sections”, link below, and you will notice that the director Artur Liebhart and his team do…
The festival has announced the winners at the 20th edition of the big North American documentary festival. Debra Zimmermann was the Doc Mogul Award winner of this year, of course well deserved for her great work within Women Make Movies.…
It was a film, a photo exhibition and a book of postcards that I experienced when in Kiev for the DocuDays a month ago. I have the book of postcards in front of me, The Roma Album it is called…
Realscreen newsletter of yesterday presents interesting news from NFB, National Film Board of Canada, the pioneer film institution in the world, set up in 1939 (parallel to the Danish equivalent, I want you to remember…) and now very much active…
For free until May 5 are the new films of two contemporary film artists who have always gone non-mainstream with their own voice and approach. The films of Liechti and Mograbi can be watched on DocAlliance, that has picked them…
We hear soft piano music, projector clicking… “My family came to America fleeing persecution. […] As children, my brothers and I were taught that we were the lucky ones who made it out. But with that luck came responsibility. “Never…
The DocAlliance does now include 7 festivals with the inclusion of DocLisboa in the group. A welcome gift from Portugal is given to the users of DocAlliance, the vod that calls itself: Your online documentary cinema. The so-called Carnation Revolution,…
Winners were announced last night at the closure of the festival in Nyon, Switzerland. The Grand Prix for the best feature documentary was given to Ramon Giger and Jan Gassmann from the hosting country for their ”Karma Shadub”. The catalogue…
“Audrius Stonys deserves much praise for his ”Ramin”, a film about an old man in Georgia, his daily life, his attachment to his late mother, his looking for a woman he knew in his youth… the story is told in…
… well, not played in Sevilla but watched by a film blogger in a tapas bar the last two nights, both matches performed in Germany, both with German teams as the winners, in the first of two matches in the…
Another film that premieres in Nyon (April 25 & 26) (see below), and another film that has been a long time on its way. And another film that gave high expectations that for me who has followed the film from…
World Premiere in Nyon today of a film that was on its way for a long time. I have not yet seen the final result but clips on its way to completion give high expectations. The text below is taken…
The following text in Danish is praising the Copenhagen Cinemateket, part of the Danish Film Institute, for its programme for May and June. A real treat for film lovers, film history with the giants Luchino Visconti and Satyajit Ray in…
The FIDADOC festival (the only one in the country with a focus on documentaries) has announced the programme for the 5th edition to take place in Agadir, Morocco. The festival, that was set up by Nouzha Drissi, who died tragically…
Romanian director Florin Iepan has – according to his Facebook page with a lot of links from the press coverage – shown a rough cut version of the film ”Odessa” in Bucharest on the 8th of April. I have known…
Normally festivals award films and film directors, but festivals can also be awarded, and the Danish documentary festival CPH:DOX has received two recognitions lately, the most important (also important for future funding one can hope, sorry for being so materialistic)…
A week ago the French newspaper Le Monde brought an interesting article about the national launch of the Oscar winner Searching for Sugarman theatrically. Released in cinemas by December 26 2012, the film is now running in around 70 cinemas,…