A film blog by Allan Berg Nielsen & Tue Steen Müller
A film blog by Allan Berg Nielsen & Tue Steen Müller
“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…
William Klein (born 1928), American filmmaker and photographer, who has great reputation for his many photo books, especially those dealing with cities like New York, Paris and Rome, and who has made films on Muhammad Ali and who has been…
A couple of days after the death of Vaclav Havel, you sit down and watch a documentary on the French president Nicolas Sarkozy – what a quality step down – set up through a mix of archive material and comments…
The Afghanistan documentary by Danfung Dennis, awarded at many festivals opens today in Paris. The daily Libération has an interview with Dennis, link below. Here is a re-post of the review of the important documentary: I love my pistol”, says…
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…
… 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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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,…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…