Agnès Varda Online Festival
What a feast! And don’t say you can not afford it – it is for free! And it lasts until February 17! I am referring to another generous offer from ”your online documentary cinema” provider DocAlliance. 17 films of Agnès…
Filmkommentaren.dk
A film blog by Allan Berg Nielsen & Tue Steen Müller
Filmkommentaren.dk
A film blog by Allan Berg Nielsen & Tue Steen Müller
Articles/Reviews ENGLISH
Read MoreAgnès Varda Online Festival
Best Nordic Documentary/2
A short follow-up – Mika Ronkainen got his well-deserved Dragon Award Best Nordic Documentary at the Göteborg International Film festival. The jury motivated the award to ”Finnish Blood, Swedish Heart” (photo) with these words: … a touching story of inner…
Magnificent7 2013/6
The 9th edition of the European Feature Documentary Film Festival ended Sunday night at the big hall of the Belgrade Sava Centre. Manuel von Stürler presented his ”Winter Nomads” followed by Helena Trestikova’s ”Private Universe”. For the first film, that…
Magnificent7 2013/5
Magic evening in the Sava Centre last night. 8-900 people had decided to spend their saturday night out in the company of Finnish artist Kimmo Pohjonen. It was a good choice you could hear from the reactions during and after…
Magnificent 7 2013/4
Ilian Metev, director of ”Sofia’s Last Ambulance”, started his friday masterclass at Magnificent7 festival in Belgrade playing Bach on his violin, quite a generous gift to the workshoppers from the young Bulgarian artist, who had a career as a violinist,…
Magnificent7 2013/3
The festival in Belgrade enters into its third day, and the response from the audience has been, yes, magnificent! On the opening wednesday night the film by Swedish Malik Bendjelloul ”Searching for Sugarman” was met by great enthusiasm by the…
Doucet: Afghanistan-The Unknown Country
Two weeks ago after reviewing the documentary on Afghanistan by Murphy and MediaStorm, I came across a film on the subject matter, which exposes yet another face of this wonderful country. Therefore this review: For over a decade, Afghanistan has…
Best Nordic Documentary?
Guest writer at filmkommentaren, Danish Mikkel Stolt watched Finnish Mika Ronkainen’s latest work ”Finnish Blood, Swedish Heart” (photo) at the Nordisk Panorama in September. The original, non-mainstream hybrid documentary made a big impression on Stolt, who concluded – referring to…
Dragan Wende West Berlin
Two important prizes for a film by Lena Müller and Dragan von Petrovic, co-directed and filmed by Vuk Maksimovic, whose uncle is the protagonist of a film that the team itself – on the site of the film – calls…
Op-Docs
The New York Times runs a series of short documentaries that are quite interesting. OP stands for Opinion and here is how the newspaper (you can get a monthly online subscription for 1$) presents its strand: ”Op-Docs is The New…
Sundance Shows Living Room Documentaries
A very interesting critique of (some of) the selected documentaries for the Sundance Film Festival comes from Anthony Kaufmann, who has written for NY Times, Village Voice, Variety among others. I dare to make a long quote from the beginning…
Nicolas Philibert with Film on Radio France
For this blogger Nicolas Philibert is one of the most important documentary directors of out time. Filmkommentaren has written about his films frequently, below you have a link that will take you to ”collected posts” about the French director, who…
Godard, Pennebaker & Leacock
… and 7 wonderful minutes with Jefferson Airplane performing from a roof in New York Midtown in 1968. Yes, it is film and music history at its best as Richard Brody, cinema editor at The New Yorker, wrote yesterday urging…
Magnificent7 2013/2
On Wednesday January 30 at 7pm the opening of the 9th edition of the EuropeanFeature Documentary Film Festival, Magnificent7 will be announcedby the lady, who represents the festival venue, the biggest theatre in the region, the Sava Center in Belgrade.…
Magnificent7 2013/1
This text is written for the catalogue of Magnificent7 2013: I am writing this from New York, a metropole of mainstream entertainment cinema, but also the place to be for two veterans of independent cinema, the 86 years old Albert…
IDFA Statistics and Info
It is a good idea to get on the mailing list for the idfa newsletter. The one from January 18 includes statistics on the 25th edition of the festival last November and communicates deadlines for the IDFA Bertha Fund (before…
P.P.P.
Taken from a newsletter from FID, the International Film Festival in Marseille (July 3-8), where a passionate director Jean-Pierre Rehm writes: Concerning our upcoming 24th edition… a retrospective will be devoted to Pier Paolo Pasolini. A Mediterranean figure, certainly, since…
Documentary Fortnight 2013
A press release in an edited version: Moma, the Museum of Modern art in New York organizes February 15–March 4 “Documentary Fortnight 2013: MoMA’s International Festival of Nonfiction Film and Media”, the 12th annual two-week showcase of recent documentary films…
Murphy/ MediaStorm:A Darkness Visible: Afghanistan
In a quest for taking a viewer beyond the headlines, Seamus Murphy embarks on a journey through Afghanistan, the land he has grown to love and its culture and people that never ceased to amaze. A long-term project by acclaimed…
Dror Moreh: The Gatekeepers
This Academy Award Nominee 2013 – and it was also nominated for the main prize at idfa in November 2012 – has troubled my mind for days since I watched it. Which I did a couple of times. Why? Because…
DocPoint Helsinki
The programme of the Finnish documentary film festival reflects again that the festival selectors know what they are doing – and they should in a country that has such a high standard in documentary culture. From January 22-27 more than…
Oscar Nominations January 10/2
So, the nominations have been announced. For the Best Feature Documentary. We will know the winner by February 24. Apart from ”5 Broken Cameras” with Burnat and Davidi, the nominees (= names) will be determined later. The names here are…
Cinema Eye Honors 2013
Awards are being lined up to be distributed these days. The Oscar nominees will be announced in a couple of hours and in three days the Golde Globe comes up. Good for cinema with all this artificial competition?, maybe, good…
Oscar Nominations January 10
At the beginning of December 2012 15 documentary flms were shortlisted. Tomorrow (I am writing this January 9 late evening) 15 will become 5. Originally there were 126 official submissions, that were taken down to these 15: Alison Klayman’S “Ai…
Sevara Pan
Sevara Pan is the name of our first 2013 guest writer. She is of Uzbek-Korean origin, was born in Siberia (Russia) back in the 1980’s. She was raised in Central Asia in the post-Soviet period and moved to Germany where…
Apted & Miroshnichenko: The Up Series
As the 56Up landmark documentary has started to roll out in US theaters past weekend, it might be just the right time to take a look at its Russian equivalent that was broadcast on ARTE in winter of 2012. Inspired by the UK-based…
Dongnan & Doran: The Sound of Vision
“I wasn’t sure if I felt special or left out”, Frank Senior reflects on a moment of realization of being blind. Thought-provoking and insightful, this 8-minute documentary, conceived as part of the International Documentary Challenge, captures a glimpse of a…
Norwegian Documentary – a Critique
DOX editor and documentarian Truls Lie has written an article for the Norwegian Le Monde Diplomatique, in Norwegian and now also printed in the film magazine Rushprint. Lie attended a documentary meeting for the Norwegian documentary film community in December,…
Big Boys Gone Bananas
They are proud, and they, the filmmakers, have all reason to be. Both because the Swedish film around the banana company Dole trying to block the US showing of Bananas (reviewed and praised here in Danish by Allan Berg), a…
Elías Léon Siminiani: Mapa
I had seen ”Mapa” pitched in DocsBarcelona and at idfa. With verbal passion and with a teaser that was totally out-of-the-box for how trailers should be according to us ”pitch doctors”. A Film-Film teaser, a brilliant piece of montage with…
Sugar Man
More Sugar Man (this is what they call the film in France), where a twitter on Le Blog Documentaire calls it a ”véritable scandale du cinema” that the film is released in only 3 ”salles”! On the same Blog there…
Danish and Swedish Award Nominations
The last couple of days the nominations for the Danish Bodil (named after the legendary actresses Ipsen and Kjer) and the Swedish Guldbaggen (the Golden Beetle) have been announced. Documentaries are very much present. The international best known of the…
DOX Winter 2012/13
Beginning of January, no markets or festivals or workshops. Time to read the European Documentary Film Magazine, number 96. And time for a review of a magazine that has a strong and good focus on reviewing documentaries (critiques it is…
2012 Documentaries
Yes, it was again a good year for the documentaries. New forms, hybrid, personal, came up with the classical engaged and committed Film still going strong in times of crisis. Yes, Film with a capital F. Yes, most of the…
2012 – Best Documentaries
Alan Berliner: First Cousin First Removed (USA) Catalina Vergara: Last Station (Chile) (Photo) Emma Davie & Morag McKinnon: Breathing (Scotland) Helena Trestikova: Private Universe (Czech Republic) Ilian Metev: Sofia’s Last Ambulance (Bulgaria, Croatia) Joshua Oppenheimer: Act of Killing (USA, Denmark)…
2012 – Talents
Camilla Magid: White Black Boy (Denmark) Carlo Guillermo Proto: El Huaso (Canada/Chile) Chico Pereira: Pablo’s Winter (Scotland) Dana Budisavljević: Family Meals (Croatia) Khaled Jarrar: Infiltrators (Palestine) Nahed Awwad: Gaza Calling (Palestine) Namir Abdel Messeeh:The Virgin, the Copts and Me (France)…
DOCAlliance Offers Free Streaming
Again the excellent vod DOCAlliance – calls itself very rightly ”your online documentary cinema” with over 700 quality films – invites (documentary) film lovers to watch films for free, this time its 11 most watched documentaries of 2012. From December…
Morimoto: Omakase
You have the feeling of being in a theatre behind the curtain. You are very close to the players with their elegant quick and professional use of their tools. In their white dresses and with their Japanese smiling politeness they…
Russian Documentary Films Rating 2012
Super-active young Russian director Georgy Molodtsov has before provided information to filmkommentaren. This time he informs us about a new activity that he is involved in as one of the newly elected members of Russian Guild of Documentary Film and…
The Machine Which Makes Everything Disappear
It is quite a daring storytelling format that Georgian Tinatin Gurchiani has chosen for her first feature length documentary. She has invited (mostly) young people, some of them kids, for a film casting, where she from behind the camera asks…
Petra Costa: Elena
There is so much to say about this first feature documentary by young Brazilian director Petra Costa. So much positive because of its visual brilliance and so much because of the way it treats its painful theme. Not to talk…
Jonas Mekas: My Paris Movie
Jonas Mekas loves Paris. So does this blogger and his wife. We were there in December last year. Funny to sit in New York, the home of Mekas, one year later, in his Anthology Archives cinema, in the hall named…
Sarah Polley: Stories We Tell
Some Danish film professionals adviced me to watch Canadian Sarah Polley’s Stories We Tell. They saw it at cph:dox, where it did not get the attention it deserved, it was all about ”Act of Killing” at that festival. I watched…
Maysles Cinema
Oops, suddenly you stand in front of a small cinema with the name Maysles Cinema. In the window there is a poster for ”5 Broken Cameras” that runs the same night with a skype Q & A with one of…
Pop in TV and the Movies
The well composed and entertaining exhibition on Whitney in New York runs until March 2013. It has the title ”Dark and Deadpan: Pop in TV and the Movies” and invites you to a dark room with a dozen of screens…
Khaled Jarrar: Infiltrators
I can not write a review as I have not seen the final edit of the film, and as I have seen material shot by Khaled Jarrar as well as cuts during sessions of the Storydoc programme, I would definitely…
POV – Visiting Simon Kilmurry
I have during the last years tried my best to understand the organisation of the POV, that had its 25th season in 2012. I have – as many others – always been impressed by the commitment of Simon Kilmurry, Executive…
Orwa Nyrabia and Ali Farzat Honoured
Read and enjoy the following – so well deserved and chapeau also for DR’s Horisont (the Danes can watch it online), which dedicated their whole monday programme to tell about the two Syrians and their meeting with the regime’s brutality.…
Greek Television Fires Kostas Spyropoulos
The film project “Kismet” was presented at the idfa forum in Amsterdam last month. A behind-the-scene documentary which is described like this at the website of the Greek production company, Anemon, that stands behind several professional, internationally distributed works: “Turkish…
Kostomarov Got Visit from Investigators
Max Tuula and Maria Gavrilova from Marx Film in Estonia sent this important report: We address you because this situation does not only concern Russia and Russian politics, but also the freedom of expression and the rights of the artist…