A film blog by Allan Berg Nielsen & Tue Steen Müller
A film blog by Allan Berg Nielsen & Tue Steen Müller
A wise festival person once said that it takes 8 years to build a festival. A look at the 8th edition of ZagrebDox confirms this assumption. This international documentary film festival has found itself. It is professionally organised, communicates very…
Of course ZagrebDox also has an industry section including a training workshop for 12 projects and a connected, public pitching session with 9 panelists. It took place March 1 in one of the cinemas in the Movieplex and attracted a…
Modern Times! Two films to reflect upon, both shot with a cell phone: Bosnian director Nedzad Begovic has made ”A Cell Phone Movie” (photo), and ”People I Could have Been and Maybe am” by Dutch Boris Gerrets. The latter has…
ZagrebDox is also a place to catch up on films that you missed at idfa and Nenad Puhovski, the festival director and programmer, does not hide the fact that he does a good part of the film selection for his…
This stunning film is a very appealing story about glaciers that are melting globally. A well-known photographer James Balog who has photographed nature (for National Geographic among others) for many years, had a deep concern of glaciers melting way faster…
This is a text for the ZagrebDox catalogue 2012: The films that you are going to watch from Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania are the finest examples from a cinema that has, from country to country, its own individuality and its…
At the Archidoc training session at the la fémis film school in Paris yesterday, where ten projects were presented to a panel of producers, broadcasters and festival representatives, two so-called hybrid documentary projects stood out as upcoming films that are…
One more festival, and one of great importance. The following text is taken from the site of IDF (Institute of Documentary Film), that stands for a huge so-called industry programme parallel to the festival. It all takes place in Prague,…
The 8th edition of a festival that has a strong programme with an international competition programme, a regional one, a retrospective with star director Jay Rosenblatt, a section with controversial documentaries like Mads Brügger’s ”The Ambassador” (photo) and Fredrik Gertten’s…
It is a good programme that the organisers of the Swedish documentary film festival has put together for ”a six-day-long documentary party” in Stockholm March 6-11. New Swedish documentaries in competition, among them Fredrik Gertten’s ”Big Boys Gone Bananas” and…
Nick Fraser, commissioning editor at BBC’s Storyville, wrote an article for The Observer (February 5), constructed as a diary from and about the Sundance Film Festival, where ” I have two films in the American competition. I am also judging…
One more text from Dox Box festival Orwa Nyrabia, who has turned war correspondent and frequently writes in English on Syria and Me – The Revolution Chronicles: Damascus: The regime’s security forces, backed by armed operatives, raided the office of…
One of the best documentaries recently is ”The Interrupters” (photo) by Steve James, who was also the man behind masterpieces as ”Hoop Dreams” and ”Stevie”. Film journalist Jennifer Merlin has interviewed James, site address below, and out of that comes…
The Cinéma du Réel has chosen its competition films for the 34th edition of the festival that takes place in the Centre Pompidou in Paris March 22 to April 3. 15 films have been taken for the International Competition and…
Our German language readers should know about the fine work done by the Stuttgart based Haus des Dokumentarfilms. Yesterday I received a ”Dokumentarfilm Newsletter” from the Haus with a link to a website – in German – that provides you…
.. detained by security forces since February 2nd. The following text is taken from Facebook: Bahraa Hijazi, was born in 1986 in Damascus, Syria. Her family is originally from Jeiroud, a city 50 kilometres from the capital. Bahraa’s father Abdul…
It is quite a challenge to choose one’s own family as the theme of one’s first feature documentary. Nevertheless this is what Carlo Guillermo Proto (1979) did with ”El Huaso”, a film that demonstrates a strong visual competence to convey…
”Your online documentary cinema”. This is how the excellent vod Doc Alliance Films characterises itself. Based in Czech Republic at the address of IDF (Institute of Documentary Film), they are doing great work. The selection of films available is indeed…
”Think Big! Is what young producer and director Ilona Bicevska has done throughout a year of participation in the Ex Oriente 2008.” This was the text posted here in October 2008. Two years later another text was posted: ” Think…
Joyce McKinney was hot stuff in the British tabloids back in the 1970’es and the case known as the “Mormon sex in chains case” started out when McKinney allegedly kidnapped her Mormon husband-to-be and forced him to have a good…
This film is about American healthcare system and its severe problems. Americans spend around 300 billion U.S. dollars a year on pharmaceutical drugs. That is almost as much as the rest of the world combined. Healthcare throughout years became a…
“Me in English… from Syria 2012, as frequent as possible. Orwa”, was the short sentence that came up on facebook yesterday from film producer and Dox Box festival in Damascus director Orwa Nyrabia, who has been reporting from Syria since…
Letter From Syrian novelist Khaled Khalifa to his friends around the world: My friends, writers and journalists from all over the world, in China and Russia, I would like to inform you that my people is being subjected to a…
The auditorium of the CCCB, cultural Centre of Barcelona, was full of hundreds of observers to the 15th pitching forum of DocsBarcelona. They provided the enthusiastic atmosphere for the 23 projects that were to be pitched there during two days,…
Session after session the pitch forum organisers and participants talk about the financial crisis in the European documentary market, mostly exemplified through the cutdown in budget, staff and time slots for documentaries in the public broadcasting companies. It was therefore…
The opening was fun and sweet, clever, serious and thoughtful. Alessandro Negrini (photo), director from Italy living in Northern Ireland & Tor Arne Bjerke, producer from Norway, took the auditorium by heart and brain with their ”Ballad of a Ghost…
I can not leave Barcelona and the documentary event that – on a personal note – I have been part on since its start 15 years ago, without having another personal note on football! I am lucky that I editorially…
The 15th edition of DocsBarcelona closed last night with quite a spectacular performance. After the screening of ”The Human Tower”, directed by Ram Devineni and Cano Rojas, a group went on stage to make the human tower happen in the…
I have quit my job, suspended my studies at KU, left my apartment in Copenhagen and moved away to USA for 8 months to do what I enjoy the most – to watch documentary films. I learned that watching film…
The festival is over. The closing film sunday night January 29 was Whores’ Glory by Michael Glawogger, one of the most important documentarians of our time. There was almost a full house in the Sava Centre Cinema Hall, which means…
Fernand Melgar, director and Elise Schuss, assistant director and executive producer, represented ”Vol Spécial”, and hosted an extremely interesting session about how their strong social documentary came to life. And after-life: 1 year of editing, 160 hours of material, more…
The festival in Belgrade with 7 feature documentaries from Europe makes the invited directors work! All of them are obliged to lead a workshop, that has its 7 sessions of two hours. The session takes place the day after their…
Your batteries get charged at these workshops. You get to know how the filmmakers perform their craft. It is as simple as that. Some filmmakers have pedagogical skills, others need help, and indeed they receive that through Zoran Popovic, who…
Edition 8 of the Belgrade based feature length European documentary festival. The opening was last night and the audience was there again, hundreds, maybe almost 1000 spectators for each of the two films that were screened in the big hall…
Den svenske instruktør Magnus Gerttens mesterstykke “Håbets Havn“, som er anmeldt på engelsk på filmkommentaren, bliver vist på DR2 på onsdag den 25 kl. 20.30 i en én-times udgave. Og på SVT2 dagen efter, den 26, kl.20 med flere genudsendelser.…
The first tv-documentary episode of the arte (German-French) crossmedia event, presented on this site a couple of weeks ago, is online for a free preview, also for viewers outside France and Germany. The 52 mins. documentary, to be broadcast on…
An introduction taken from the synopsis of the film that had its world premiere at idfa 2011: Sociology professor Nicolae Dumitru believes strongly in true love. So strongly in fact that he has devoted his entire life to expounding his…
It’s been a while ago since a text has been posted about the Arab Spring and specifically the Syrian Revolution. Not that nothing happens, on the contrary, the brutality and killings continue in Syria. I do, as many others I…
The programme of the upcoming documentary festival in Barcelona, January 31-February 5, has been published. The selection is rich in quality and variety, and as usual the festival has its categories and for the second year the festival is competitive.…
The following (edited) text about good times for documentaries in cinemas is taken from the Realscreen site: The British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) is reintroducing an award category for best documentary, “in recognition of the number of…
DOCAlliance, the vod of six quality documentary film festivals (FID Marseilles has just joined cph:dox, Visions du Réel Nyon, DOK Leipzig, Planete Doc Review Warsaw and Jihlava IDFF) is very appealing for documentary lovers. Their selection is excellent, their texts…
The world’s best film? No doubt for me, Marcel Carné’s ”Les Enfants du Paradis” from 1945, shot during the German occupation, script by Jacques Prévert with the best of best of French actors like Pierre Brasseur, Pierre Renoit and Jean-Louis…
Danish producer Lise Lense-Møller passed on this great news asking if it could be interesting for our readers. Absolutely! Below quotes from emails from yesterday from Joshua to the producer, her team and the director Anders Østergaard: “Dear All, I…
Countdown for the 8th edition of the European Feature Documentary Film Festival, always an adventurous experience for this documentary consultant and co-selector of the 7 films together with Svetlana and Zoran Popovic. It takes place in Belgrade January 25-29, in…
Vi forbinder bestemte historiske begivenheder med bestemte personer, de er vores hovedpersoner før, filmene gør dem til det. Dobbelt betydningsbærende. De tre stills i Filmkommentarens hoved kunne være de to bloggeres personlige bud på tre sådanne scener med tre særlige…
Of course it is a scoop to get close to the inner circles of Putin’s youth movement Nashi through Masha Drokova. And to come out with this film now, when things are moving in Russia. It deserves to be seen…
Twenty years ago. The fall of the empire, USSR and the communist regimes in the East bloc. Time to look back. And time to use different media to approach the huge overall theme from many angles and with many eye-witnesses…
It is going well for Danish documentaries, and it is not only we Danes who say so in the general halleluja-how-good-we-are atmosphere that often reign here. The Swedish say so (9 documentaries to be shown at the upcoming Gothenburg International…
Once you get the bit heavy narrative rythm under your skin, this film opens beautifully its theme, finds its calmness and develops the characteristics of its protagonists. It is a family film with a son, who by the way just…
For the English readers: The Danish documentary strand Dokumania, that broadcasts on DR2, starts the new year with high quality films: Oscar-winner ”Inside Job” by Charles Ferguson, continued the week after by ”The Interrupters” by Steve James (to be remembered…