The Syrian revolution/ 14
Anatomy of a mass grave…Al Houla, Homs, Syria, Earth… today, 2012..The grave of over 100 killed today in the small town, half of which were under 10 years old. From the FB page of Orwa Nyrabia, Dox Box festival director,…
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 MoreThe Syrian revolution/ 14
Mit navn er Jørgen Leth
Redaktionen gik på udstilling i den københavnske kunstforenings fine lokaler. Allan Berg, den udstillingskyndige, blev bedt om sin vurdering. Den er generøs for nu at bruge ét af Jørgen Leths egne yndlingsudtryk, sagde Berg, da vi spiste fiskefrikadeller på Diamanten…
Carlos Klein: Where the Condors Fly
… with the subtitle: A Cinematographic Journey with Victor Kossakovsky, and indeed it is, a true pleasure to travel with the director while he is shooting his masterpiece ”Vivan las Antipodas”. The Chilean director frames the film with his own…
The Syrian Revolution/ 13
Documentation from Syria taken from FB: Since the beginning of the Annan Initiative, 1,401 martyrs have been documented by the Local Coordinating Committees of Syria (LCCS) in cooperation with the Violations and Documentation Center (VDC). Since the beginning of the…
Copenhagen Jewish Film Festival
The Danish Cinemateket in Copenhagen hosts May 20-23 the Jewish Film Festival that offers a programme of feature films, animation, short films and documentaries. I had a preview of the documentary ”Auf Wiedersehen: Til We Meet Again”, a family story…
Syria and Me – The Revolution Chronicles
Text taken from the FB page of Orwa Nyrabia, film director and producer and festival Dox Box director: “If anyone in the world, including Kofi Anan, wants us to prove with documented evidence that the regime ruling Syria is a…
Herz Frank in Riga
The exhibition space is limited but the content is excellent. The film museum in Riga, situated in the same building as the National Film Centre of Latvia, in the old town of the Latvian capital, hosts a presentation of the…
Sokurov in Barcelona
The impressive Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona is a fascinating place to spend some hours. Its collection includes paintings, photographs, and until May 20 also the so-called Military Film Series by Russian master director Aleksander Sokurov, a series that hopefully…
15 Young by Young/ Premiere
The Latvian national premiere of the 15 Young by Young documentary series – 15 short films of 15 minutes from the former Soviet republics – young filmmakers making films about young people and their lives in today’s independent countries 20…
BCN Sports Film Festival/ 4
The winning film of the festival was a local production by Carlos Sanchez-Libre and Josep Badell, ”From the Streets to the Fields”, 80 minutes long, shot at the World Cup of football in South Africa 2010, a film with many…
BCN Sports Film Festival/ 3
The Barcelona Sports Film festival is part of the FICTS, Fédération Internationale Cinema et Télévision Sporttifs. This organisation includes festivals all over the world, has its office in Milano, and has set up rules for the festivals that operate with…
BCN Sports Film Festival/ 2
It is new, it is not easy to get an audience, but it is there, said Barbara Destefanis, the driving force behind the festival and the enthusiastic and committed director of the Nikita Distribution company, that manages a sportsfilm online…
BCN Sports Film
The third edition of a Barcelona sports film festival runs the coming three days. Around 70 films dealing with sport will be presented, 25 of them in competititon, divided into different catagories, from animation films to short fiction to documentaries…
Viktor Kossakovsky: Vivan las Antipodas!
Finally! It has been and is being shown all over the world, the unique work of Viktor Kossakovsky, a generous and overwhelmingly beautiful film that also witnesses a new direction thematically, a new tone for a director whose filmography includes…
Vikram Gandhi: Kumaré
The reason for this review that ends with concrete info in Danish: The DR documentary strand Dokumania invites to a screening at the Royal Danish Library in Copenhagen of this very entertaining documentary that is produced in the US, has…
Ib Bondebjerg: Virkelighedsbilleder/ 3
In Danish – about an event in the Danish Cinemateket, where Ib Bondebjerg hosts his third session about the modern Danish documentary portrait linked to his book ”Virkelighedsbilleder”. Invited directors are Sami Saif and Jon Bang Carlsen: De to film…
The Syrian revolution/ 12
Syria has elections these days…
The Punk Syndrome in Theatres in Finland
According to this film blogger, their previous documentary “Living Room of a Nation” was one of 10 the best documentaries coming out in 2009. Now Jukka Kärkkäinen and J P Passi have done another strong film that travels from festival…
Gdansk Doc Film Festival
Poland is a big country with a strong tradition for festivals and an impressive national production of documentaries, many of them in the short format. I had never heard about it before, but reading the site there is also a…
DocAlliance Excellent Online Offers
Even today, with the existing online possibilities, many come up with the usual comment and ask the eternal question: Yes, I love documentaries but where can I see them. And those who go to festivals with hundreds of films to…
The Syrian Revolution/ 11
It goes on and on… this is what I copied from BBC this afternoon: “At least four people have been killed as security forces and militiamen raided student accommodation in Syria’s second city, Aleppo, activists say. Live ammunition was reportedly…
DOX for Short Docs
The Summer 2012 issue of the European Documentary Film Magazine DOX (number 94!) is out. The editor-in-chief Truls Lie uses his editorial to point at the values of the short documentary, which is forgotten by many. His starting point is…
Idfa Sends Sad News
The Jan Vrijman Fund, part of the many actitivities run by idfa (International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam), has supported lots of important films from countries with limited means for the creative documentary genre. For that reason it is rather sad…
Mat Hodgson: QPR: The Four Year Plan
A classical story, and a wonderful tv documentary for football freaks like this blogger. This is the text that gives the background, taken from the BBC’s programme site: ”In 2007 Queens Park Rangers Football Club, facing relegation and bankruptcy, was…
Michel Wenzer: At Night I Fly
New Folsom prison in California. A film made over several years. Literally an inside insight to a world we have no idea about existed, even if we have seen loads of prison films, most of them fiction, and many of…
Visions du Réel 2012/ 2
Another edition, the 18th, of the exclusive Visions du Réel in Nyon, Swizerland, a small festival in terms of audience, around 25.000, but important for the professionals, especially, it is being said, for the directors, is over and awards have…
Dokville
… is the name of a ”Branchentreff Dokumentarfilm” in Ludwigsburg, taking place in Ludwigsburg the coming week, May 3-4. Organised by Haus des Dokumentarfilm the event, that has the title ”vom Dokumentarfilm leben”, among other issues has its focus on…
Doc à Tunis 2012
Not bad for documentary interested people to be in the capital of Tunisia these days, where the yearly festival takes place, for the seventh time organised by the the Ness El Fen association with the support of arte France, CMCA,…
Marathon Dok 2012
… or you could call it a mini-festival, is what the EDN (European Documentary Network) arranges every year in collaboration with and at the Danish Film School. This year it takes place May 12, from 14.00 to 22.00. This is…
Ilian Metev: Sofia’s Last Ambulance
Croatian producer Sinisa Juricic mailed me yesterday with the happy news about a film that he has been co-producing. It has been been selected for the Semaine de la Critique in the upcoming Cannes Film Festival. I post you the…
Helena Třeštíková
The strength of the time consuming observational documentary, in times where many stylistically move in the area between documentary and fiction (example Glawogger, see below), is one of the most obvious thoughts that comes to one’s mind watching the films…
Michael Glawogger Retrospective in N.Y.
The IDF (Institute of Documentary Film) website informs that the first retrospective of the Austrian documentarian is taking place in New York at the Museum of Moving Images until April 29. The website of the Museum includes interesting text excerpts…
Mandagsdokumentar: El Bulli
In Danish: Den fremragende filmserie Mandagsdokumentar, som bestyres af Ebbe Preisler, viser i morgen aften i PH Caféen, Halmtorvet 9a, klokken 19.30, Gereon Wetzel’s El Bulli – Cooking in Progress fra 2010. Den unge kok Nicolai Tram, der har arbejdet…
Visions du Réel 2012
… starts tonight and runs until April 27. As usual this festival offers a big programme – Switzerland is still a rich country, untouched by the international crisis? – with a lot of competition sections (7 different juries!) and a…
Shlomi Elkabetz: Edut
Last summer I was asked to make a review of a new Israeli film that created controverse at a festival in Sderot, protests from the minister of culture, before it went to Venice Film Festival and Toronto. I saw the…
Chainsaw Massacre on Canadian Documentary
Below there is a posting on the upcoming HotDocs documentary film festival in Toronto and the budget cutdown of legendary NFB, National Film Board. Realscreen makes a follow-up on the story that also involves the broadcaster CBC’s documentary commitment as…
Herzog on Death, Danger and the End of the World
Steve Rose from The Guardian brings Saturday April 14 a very interesting article on and interview with Werner Herzog, whose ”Into the Abyss” is screened all over the world in these months. I have taken out this quote from the…
Humphrey Jennings: Listen to Britain
It is still pure pleasure to watch the 17 minutes long short masterly montaged documentary masterpiece by British Jennings, the first of his war-time trilogy. And bravo for the BFI (British Film Institute) for publishing the film, and other films…
Docaviv 2012
The international documentary festival in Tel Aviv, that takes place May 3-12, opens, like the Canadian HotDocs, with Ai WeiWei: Never Sorry by Alison Klayman, and another upcoming hit, Marley by Kevin MacDonald is also offered the Israeli audience. The…
Petr Lom: Back to the Square
Of course the director goes back to the Tahrir Square in Cairo, the symbolic location for the Egyptian revolution but one of the many qualities of this new documentary by world travelling Petr Lom – a director who in his…
Svetoslav Draganov: City of Dreams
Bulgarian documentarian Svetoslav Draganov has a special touch, when it comes to catch so-called ordinary life as it is lived in his own country, very often in provincial cities. His gift is to make people and their dreams of a…
Hot Docs 2012 – and NFB Cuts
The Canadian International Documentary Festival that takes place April 26-May 6 and that describes itself, and its selected films, as ”outspoken and outstanding”, has launched its programme and it is indeed an amazing selection of films in variety of themes…
Diane Weyermann
Hot Docs gives a Doc Mogul Award every year and there shall be no objection, not at all, on the contrary, to the choice of recipient this year. For this blogger, when he was at EDN (European Documentary Network), Diane…
Laura Poitras
Shocking reading, taken from the Indiewire Newsletter: This weekend, in a post on his popular political blog, Salon’s Glenn Greenwald posted a story about the ways that the Department of Homeland Security has routinely intimidated and violated the fourth amendment…
Making Documentaries in Israel: The External Eye
Midnight East, the Israeli online magazine “dedicated to obsessive involvement with the Israeli cultural scene”, has published a long, precise and informative article by Ayelet Dekel based on interviews with three mentors, two from the North of Europe and one…
The freedom to see
Emma Davie, Scottish filmmaker and teacher at Edinburgh College of Art, and tutor at numerous workshops for filmmakers from Europe and elsewhere, was in Ramallah at the Storydoc workshop that has previously been reported from on this site. She has…
Werner Herzog, Collected Posts on his Works
From being an arthouse feature film director known for extravagance and his work with legendary Klaus Kinski, he is now (also) a hit among documentary lovers, even if he would not accept to be a documentarian as his many joyful…
News from Paris: Awards Cinéma du réel 2012
This years Cinéma du réel is coming to an end, here is the list of awards given Saturday: Louis-Marcorelles Award: Five Broken Cameras by Emad Burnat and Guy Davidi Special mention of Louis-Marcorelles Award…
Susana de Sousa D, Collected Postings on her Works
An academic film team would normally make me, a documentary addict, shiver with fear for the outcome of 48, in this case no, for that simple reason that I had seen the team’s previous film that perfectly combined the background…
News from Paris: Cinéma du réel 2012
This years Cinéma du réel (March 22nd till April 3rd) is already more than half way through, however here is a quick overview of what the festival has to offer this year. Along with the films in competition (four categories:…