Vaclav Havel on Film
It seems strange that on the day of the death of Vaclav Havel, I posted several texts on the high quality of the IDF (Institute of Film) website (see below) and now I do it again to make you know…
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 MoreVaclav Havel on Film
Vaclav Havel Died Today
… and what a loss it is! Luckily – in terms of films, we have a lot of material that documents who he was and how he performed as a writer, a politician and, simply, a human being. I go…
Agnès Varda on Arte
Tomorrow – and the rest of the week – French/German channel arte invites documentary lovers on what seems to be a wonderful lighthearted journey with Agnès Varda, entitled ”Agnès de ci, de là Varda”. On the site of arte, see…
2012 Documentary Preview/ 1
One day when she was travelling in Belarus, Lithuanian film director Lina Luzyte woke up in her train, that had stopped at a station in the town of Zhlobin. She looked out the window and saw a lot of people…
DOKWeb from Institute of Documentary Film
Among the many websites of documentary organisations (EDN, Documentary Campus, Eurodoc etc.) the one provided by the Prague based Institute of Documentary Film (IDF) stands out, when it comes to deal withfilmmaking. Apart from the information that the active organisation…
Czech Documentaries in Cinemas
A total of 44 Czech films have been released in cinemas this year, including 19 documentaries. The number of theatrical releases has been steadily rising in recent years. This positive trend is both due to the technical and financial availability…
Best Documentaries 2011
Playing the-best-of list game, here is what I consider as the best documentaries of 2011. This time I have not mentioned the countries of origin as the documentary film language is not bound to borders. Nevertheless, contrary to the American…
Documentary Talents 2011
Whatever talk there is about financial crisis and difficulties in getting funding for creative, non-formatted documentaries, new talents enter the scene with their stories, visions and original and/or personal way of expressing themselves. Many others could have been mentioned, the…
The Syrian Revolution/ 10
It goes on and on, when will it stop or be stopped, the brutality in Syria? Today is friday, the day where many will be killed, as we know it from many weeks and months. And people opposed to the…
Peter Bradshaw: Best Documentaries 2011
The film critic of The Guardian has made his contribution to the yearly stupid, popular and funny tradition of making your favourite list of films from the year that goes towards its end. Here it is, tomorrow I will make…
Documentaries in Paris
That Paris is the best cinema city in Europe is known by every film buff. Not only do all important new films arrive to the screen, but there are also ”reprises” and ”festivals”, so you can always enjoy Fritz Lang,…
Storydoc in Athens Greece
The second seminar of the Athens based documentary project development Storydoc took place during the last three days of November 2011. After a prologue in Ramallah, which was a training session for around 20 Palestinian filmmakers, the first session with…
Storydoc – Inspirators and Informators
Below you will find texts about some of the presentations at the Storydoc in Athens. But there was much more to take from the seminar It was only natural to have Syrian Diana el Jeiroudi make a follow-up of her…
The Greek Crisis – Storydoc
How to interpret and convey the Greek crisis in a documentary? How to go from the reportage and the news clip to an understanding of how the population sees and feels the dramatic development in the country where stood the…
Cross-Media Public Service – Storydoc
With the support of the Culture Programme of the European Union and the European Commission the documentary production company that is most active internationally in Greece, Anemon, led by Rea Apostolides and Yuri Averof, presented at Storydoc what they are…
The Film Essay – Storydoc
Truls Lie, editor of DOX and filmmaker, made a fine inspirational introduction to what is the film essay. He stressed the characteristics of the genre and showed great classic clips from masters like Jean-Luc Godard (photo) (”L´Histoire du Cinema”, Chris…
Nahed Awwad: Gaza Calling
This is what was written after I attended the Storydoc session in Ramallah, Palestine in March 2011: Nahed Awwad (PHOTO) showed us unique material from her 28 minutes long, scene divided disc. She presented what is to be an observational…
IDA Documentary Awards 2011
The American (LA) based member organisation IDA, International Documentary Association, holds its annual ”IDA Documentary Awards 11” December 2nd with a big show – the American way with sponsors, of course. The IDA has definitely an international perspective, as it…
Barcelona Calling
This is not a neutral text. I have been part of the DOCSBarcelona team from the very beginning, and have seen how Joan Gonzalez and his team at Parallel 40 over a period of 15 years has built up a…
IDFA Awards
From press release of IDFA: The winners of the various IDFA competition programs were announced Friday, November 25 in Escape, during the awards ceremony of the 24th IDFA. Seung-Jun Yi’s Planet of Snail (South Korea) won the VPRO IDFA Award for…
RIDM Awards
The documentary film festival in Montréal RIDM sums up its activities and awards like this, with the DOKLeipzig winner “The Tiniest Place” again very much presented. More information, and trailers to be watched, by clicking on the titles below. To…
Idfa – film about Michaël Meshke
This is what is (also) nice about going to idfa – you meet directors and producers, whose work you have seen and appreciated before. Viktoria Szymanska made the wonderful “Themerson & Themerson” (photo) about the magic work of this British…
Idfa – Weijun Chen
Breakfast meetings in the hotel. This morning I was lucky to meet Chinese Weijun Chen, the director behind the international successes “I Will Vote for You” (photo) and “The Biggest Chinese Restaurant in the World”. He was in Amsterdam to…
Idfa 2011
It is a bombardment of impressions to be at the biggest documentary film festival in the world. Films, meetings, receptions, ”hello, how are you”, ”nice to see you again”, people with badges walking in the streets around Rembrandtsplein, the square…
Wajda Studio celebrates 10 Year
The Polish tradition for high quality documentaries is very much kept alive by the Wajda Studio, which formerly was called The Andrzej Wajda Master School of Film Directing. Especially the short documentary has had and has a strong home at…
Anonymous: The Weather Balloon
What constitutes a documentary film? When is a documentary most trustworthy and/or true to actual facts? Can we depict reality without interfering? Do we WANT to depict reality without interfering? We will never stop argue about these things, but allow…
IDFA – Watch Films for Free
The 24th International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA) started two days ago and runs until November 27th. If you are not there, you have the chance to watch a fine selection of films, primarily from previous editions, offered for free…
A New Wave for Arab Cinema?
17th floor of the Hotel Africa in the capital of Tunisia. Early morning, the city prepares for a new day. Sunshine. To the right the beautiful clock with the sea behind it, to the left a look down the Avenue…
Vinylmania – They Made It!
Filmkommentaren.dk has followed the ”kickstarter V for Vinylmania” initiative, where Turin-based film company Stefilm called for help through a crowdfunding campaign and succeeded to collect $37.173 from 395 backers. The money will be used to make an international version by…
Werner Herzog: Cave of Forgotten Dreams
What does a cave being enclosed for thousands of years sound like? Or smell like? This film actually tries to tell us, but first of all it shows us what it looks like. Or to be more precise, it shows…
Documenting the Revolution/ 1
The cph:dox festival deserves credit for (also) putting a focus on the changes in the Arab world. With the support of IMS (International Media Support, Danish state supported organisation), no less than a dozen screenings and debates, entitled ”Free Radical”,…
Documenting the Revolution/ 2
Two films at cph:dox dealt with the revolution in Egypt and Tunisia: Omar Shargawi and Karim El Hakim’s “1/2 Revolution” and Elyes Baccar’s “Rouge Parole”. The latter about Tunisia, the first shot in Egypt. “1/2 Revolution” (PHOTO) was made by…
cph:dox Awards
Awards were given at the cph:dox festival in Copenhagen and juries motivated their choices, this is the press release from the festival: In the main competition, DOX:AWARD, Ben Rivers’ ‘Two Years at Sea’ was awarded for its convincing depiction of…
Pedro Urano & Joana Traub Csekö: Hu Enigma
I like it when a film slowly seems to get a hold of itself before your very eyes. Like it’s getting smarter as it goes along. That’s how I felt watching this depiction of a huge hospital complex in Rio…
Fia-Stina Sandlund: She’s Blonde Like Me
CPH:DOX on a November afternoon. I am watching a filmmaker’s film about her filmmaking and herself. Afterwards, I watch the filmmaker telling us about her film about herself and her filmmaking. I’m always interested in the creative process so I’m…
The Syrian Revolution/ 9
Text taken from Facebook, announced publicly in Copenhagen yesterday at the cph:dox festival by film producer and festival director Orwa Nyrabia from Damascus: Syrian filmmaker Nidal Hassan disappeared in Damascus on Thursday 3-11-2011, no information about him has come to…
Greek Festival Opening in Moment of Crisis
The 52nd edition of the Thessaloniki International Film Festival has started and runs until the 13th of November. In a newsletter issued by the festival, under the headline “a modest ceremony raised the curtain of the festival”, the festival director…
Nelson Pereira: The Music According To Tom Jobim
The opening is splendid: Old b/w footage from the 50’s of an aircraft flying into Rio de Janeiro and an orchestral rendition of “Garota de Ipanema” on the soundtrack. I want to go to Rio and I want to see…
Boycott Iranian Cinema Vérité Festival
IDFA (the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam) put a text on its website the other day with an appeal to ilmmakers with a film selected for the Cinema Verité Festival to seriously consider withdrawing their film and decline any invitation…
Vinylmania – Support the Campaign
Help, there is only 7 days to go to reach our goal. These are the words from filmmaker Paolo Campana in Turin, Italy. It is all or nothing, he says, as it is with the crowdfunding done through Kickstarter. I…
Omar Amiralay: Everyday Life in a Syrian Village
In Danish as this is about getting Danes to come and watch the forbidden masterpiece of Omar Amarilay, Syria’s most important documentary filmmaker, who died this year in February, a month before the Syrian revolution started: Tabet af den syriske…
Bonke & Koefoed: Ballroom Dancer
Cph:dox opened with an entertaining documentary with Russian Slavik Kryklyvyy, Latin American dancer, as the main character, who tries to make his way back to the top, where he was the best in the world – 10 years ago. The…
CineDoc in Athens
When noone else does anything to bring good documentaries to Athens, you have to do it yourselves! This is what three film people, all women, decided to do and if you have a look at their programme, you can only…
Danfung Dennis: Hell and Back Again
Dokumania, DR’s flagskib for dokumentarfilm, hver tirsdag på DR2, i morgen kl. 21, viser den prisbelønnede amerikanske dokumentarfilm “Helvede tur-retur”, som har vundet flere første-priser og er med i køen til at blive Oscar-nomineret. Helt fortjent. Jeg var i juryen…
Awards at Jihlava 2011
… at the International Documentary Film Festival was given out last night. Twelve awards. The best World Documentary, Opus Bonum, given by a one person jury, James T. Hong, was ”Lost Land” by Belgian director Pierre.Yves Vandeweerd, whereas ”Bakhmaro” by…
East Silver Awards 2011
Alina Rudnitskaya is a very talented filmmaker from Saint Petersburg. Her newest 25 minutes long documentary from this year, ”I will forget this Day” (photo) has already been awarded at several festivals for its stylistically strong vision of women and…
Shatz & Barash: The Collaborator and his Family
It is quite an achievement by the filmmakers to establish and keep a tension the whole way through a feature length film, where actually nothing happens in a classical action sense. And yet a lot happens, small banal events and…
Magnus Gertten: Harbour of Hope
One thing is that the launch of this Swedish film has been more than noticeable with constant updates on screenings and screening events, links to history, funding campaigns and much more – look at the Facebook link below – but…
RIDM Edition 14
RIDM… stands for Rencontres Internationales du Documentaire de Montreal… its 14th edition takes off November 9 and runs until November 20. A small festival compared to the ones in Europe right now (Leipzig, idfa, cph:dox) and to HotDocs in Toronto,…
ITVS
stands for The Independent Television Service’s (ITVS). It supports documentary projects for broadcast in the US – subject-wise from all over the world. 8 films have been supported out of ITVS International Call for 2011, where 476 submissions were received…