A film blog by Allan Berg Nielsen & Tue Steen Müller
A film blog by Allan Berg Nielsen & Tue Steen Müller
They know how to remember and honour their artists in Lithuania, including the documentary filmmakers, I was reminded again today at the Vilnius Documentary Film Festival. Talking to directors Giedre Beinoriute and Audrius Stonys, they told me that a film…
Sunny and peaceful Vilnius hosts for the 8th time a documentary festival, full of fine international documentaries, as well as a competitive Baltic section with 12 films. I am here for the latter to be a juror together with filmmaker…
It was the fifth edition of DOC Meeting Argentina that took place this last week. A workshop for pitch preparation of 24 projects was arranged September 19-21, the pitching forum took place the two following days, September 22 & 23,…
In the ”conferencias”, three broadcasters in a row: History Channel Latin America, ORF Austria, ZDF Three different profiles. And three different ways of presentation. Miguel Brailovsky from History Channel Latin America used power point as the presentation tool, when he…
Stories, stories, stories… a pitching forum like this in Argentina is in a way one long learning process for someone from the North, who has some, but still a pretty limited knowledge about Latin American history, art and culture, religion,…
The most applauded film projects were connected to blindness. The young director Argimiro Wanadi Siso Saldivia (what a name!) from Venezuela presented ”The Labyrinth of the Possible”, which seems to become a strong documentary about the charismatic Sonia Soberats, a…
A film festival is threatened, Punto de Vista in Spain, an important fest for the artistic documentary. A petition has been established, see below. And here are some texts taken from the website of the prestigious festival: The International Documentary…
Press release from DOK Leipzig: In its focus on the Arab world, DOK Leipzig features films from Tunisia and Egypt. The upheaval in the Arab world is far from over, yet the 54th DOK Leipzig will be presenting the first…
Lithuanian producer Dagne Vildziunaite writes after the Baltic Sea Forum in Riga – a perfect follow-up to the doc-discussion on this site: I usually say it was nice to meet you again. But this time I want to say a…
This blog has followed with great interest the popular uprising in the Arab world, the good news and the bad news. Coming home to Paris after the vacation, the first results of how the situation translates into films are starting…
Facebook is a very important tool for us to achieve information about what happens in Syria. Filmmaking friends are bloggers, who constantly convey the hard facts about the daily atrocities – while other media give space for analyses connected to…
So, no more pitching sessions, the young distributor said to me during the Baltic Sea Forum for Documentaries in Riga? She had followed the Doc Discussion on this blog, and had read the many skeptical texts from filmmakers, who saw…
It was the 15th edition of the Baltic Sea Forum for Documentaries that ended in Riga yesterday with the presentation of a new project by Herz Frank, ”Without Fear”, to be co-directed by the master himself and Maria Kravchenko, with…
Mikael Opstrup writes: Dear Louise, Thanks a lot for your thoughts on the future for documentary. I think you are pointing out the right issues, I will try to address a few of them. For me this debate started with…
Louise Rosen, who started this Doc Discussion writes: Dear Mikael (Opstrup), Reading the posts is uncomfortable – the humiliation and frustration of the filmmakers, the sense from the CEs/funders of being overwhelmed and likewise frustrated. I feel both sets of…
Charlie Phillips writes: Tue has kindly given us an opportunity to respond to some critical comments about Sheffield Doc/Fest in the last few months on his blog. We think this blog is brilliant, especially with the recent discussions over the…
Documentary filmmakers from the Baltic countries, Russia, Poland, Norway and Sweden gather this week in Riga, Latvia. For the 15th time the Forum, that started on the Danish island of Bornholm, organises a meeting between those who have ideas for…
A film about an ordinary couple, Aleksay and Valya, it could be a story from everywhere… she sits at home in the house far away from big cities, she knits and sews and waits for the husband to call and…
Comments on the Doc Discussion have been posted on facebook as well. They take different directions. Producers Marie Olesen, Scotland and Sinisa Juricic, Croatia characterise the pitching as “a fool’s game” and “a showcase of big ego’s from the other…
Iikka Vehkalahti writes: Dear Tue and others. I am delighted, that Louise and Mikael took the cat on the table (or how do you say in it real English?). Anyway, now after one month out from the position of a…
Doug Aubrey writes: Hi Tue, here are some personal comments that I would like to share with you… I’m glad to see that some of the more – shall we call them – mature protagonists are addressing the issue of…
Philippe Van Meerbeeck writes: Dear friends, My heart bleeds when I read your lines. They talk about a past that will not come back. ‘Television is dead but doesn’t know it’: when I said this in 2005 to a room…
Jorge Yetano writes: I was reading the posts from Louise Rosen and Mikael Opstrup, and I must say, I have been reflecting on the subject myself for some time now, like most of us, just trying to guess which way…
If you surf around on websites announcing workshops and pitching fora you might very easily get the impression that everything is fine with documentary financing and coproductions between the countries. It is not, and it should be discussed. This is…
Louise Rosen writes: Dear Tue and Mikael It was a pleasure working with you again at Storydoc this year. Wonderful that we had a really diverse representation from all over the southern Mediterranean and could spend a day on the…
Mikael Opstrup writes: Dear Louise Thanks for your raising the issue about independent, feature docs. It’s of course a key issue, as you point out. I see it like this: 15 years ago the establishing of a ‘preproduction TV-market’ with…
A profile photo was changed on facebook…
This story has been brought in some Western media… a quote from storyful.com below, more can be read on the site where also the cartoonist’s regime critical works can be watched: Famous cartoonist and scathing critic of Syria’s Ba’athist regime,…
Well, it was a revisit to one of the best – some say the best – music festival documentary. And you are again totally seduced by the power of music and by the superb camera work performed by a team…
140 minutes with the subtitle ”The Reverse Side of ”Stalker””. Watched in one shot, you feel exhausted afterwards, and more than happy having experienced the company of Russian artists at their best in a drama put together in a demanding…
Taken from the voice-off subtitles of the film, Rerberg reads the following: The process of creating a shot, is determined by the life position of an artist, which is determined by the time and country he lives in, the cultural…
Filmen om den markante islandske familie Thor og dens rejse i fire generationer gennem landets økonomiske op- og nedgange har været længe undervejs. I årevis har den omhyggelige dokumentarist Ulla Boje Rasmussen på rejse efter rejse samlet stof sideløbende med, at…
How long will it last? How long can the Western world watch this massacre on civilians that go on in Syria? Syrian filmmaker posted this text on facebook 20 minutes ago: Today, a UN envoy arrived to the Syrian city…
A small text on good times for the documentary in cinemas and media coverage in Denmark. More films in cinemas, much more press than before, reviews in daily newspapers of dvd’s Jo, det ser godt ud for dokumentaren. Ihvertfald var…
Under titlen ”En Feminin Dreng” viser DR2’s Dokumania en af de væsentligste, nye danske dokumentarfilm, som har vakt berettiget opsigt både inden- som udenlands under sin originaltitel, ”Let’s Be Together”. Her er anmeldelsen, som vi bragte, da filmen blev vist…
Our Paris correspondent Sara Thelle links on her facebook page to the development in Tripoli, take a look at the photo documentation brought by aljazeera. Text for the photo: Tens of thousands of Libyans celebrated what the rebels claim to…
This one hour portrait of Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971), shot and edited by Leacock in 1966, and made in collaboration with Swiss composer and music administrator Rolf Liebermann, lives because of the close-up’s of the face of Stravinsky, a face always…
Facebook gives a lot of updates on the situation in Syria. Every day new horror stories. And stories about the difficulties in performing your profession. This is what a photographer friend wrote to me yesterday: I can’t take any photos…
Danish filmmaker Mikkel Stolt made the comment (in Danish) that he had seen “You’ve Been Trumped” at the wonderful Irish festival Guth Gafa International Film Festival. We asked him to write a text about the festival. Here it is: A…
It opens this coming thursday and will have 10 screenings at the Copenhagen Cinemateket as part of the excellent initiative “Documentary of the Month”. Here is a rerun of the filmkommentaren review: Stories from Life. Stories brought to the screen…
… is the title of a new film by Scottish director Anthony Baxter (photo), who is being interviewed on the website of the European Documentary Network (EDN) that with this new initiative again stresses its own importance not only as…
”Facing reality, what is to be done?” is the headline of the introductory text of the site of the bi-annual, reputed documentary film festival in Yamagata, Japan. In March this year the earth quake in Japan followed by the Fukushima…
15 films take part in the international competition of the festival. There are (for Filmkommentaren readers) well known titles like Armadillo (Janus Metz), Nenette (Nicholas Philibert), Nostalgia for the Light (Patricio Guzman) and Position among the Stars (Leonard Helmrich) – …
A Richard Leacock mini-retrospective series took off last night (August 11) at the Danish Cinemateket in Copenhagen. The series includes not only masterpieces like ”Primary” and ”Crisis” but also less known works like ”Toby in the Tall Corn” and ”Happy…
Via facebook you get references to sources within Syria that documents from a country, where the violence of the regime escalates from day to day. Film people are among those who communicate on facebook and other social media from hour…
“Teenage mother Sujeylin Aguilar raises her newborn on the same streets she herself grew up in. Set in Managua, Nicaragua, the film explores the universal issue of second generation of street children.” This is the brief presentation that is given…
The following is a praise of Danish journalist Mikael Bertelsen, who has made several socially orientated, excellent tv and radio programmes for DR (Danish Broadcasting Corporation). Here – in Danish language – some words about his newest radio documentary, in…
… a question, as you can see on the YouTube clip, where Broomfield in his best shape, as an elegantly dressed British gentleman, shouts his question from the way back seat in a hall full of Palin supporters and hand-picked…
The Macedonian documentary festival, MakeDox, is on tour (2.8-11.8) and reports warmly from their stop in Vevchani, population 2500, during summer 3500-4000. Classical way of meeting an audience, here are some quotes from their newsletter: We set up the screen…
With the subtitle ”in the prison of latitudes”, this detailed, autobiographical film is quite an achievement in terms of research into the complicated life of the Russian poet (born 1940), not to talk about the archive material that the director…