The Syrian Revolution/ 2
How to follow what happens in Syria? Incoming shaken visual reports, amateur footage from amateur cameras or mobile phones, many people risk their lives to report to us and to have their clips put on youtube or on the sites…
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/ 2
Wiseman makes film about Crazy Horse
American documentary master Frederick Wiseman stays in France. After his “La Danse” the Parisian production company Ideale Audience and Wiseman’s own Zipporah Films Inc. has produced a film from one of the most well known entertainment attractions in the French…
Facebook Addiction – and Palestine
OK, I joined. I had asked a lot of people if I should. Many said yes, of course, if you can control the time-consuming. Others said no, it is dangerous, people have been misused on facebook, pictures of you may…
U2 Documentary to Toronto
Documentaries appear more and more on the programme schedule of big international film festivals. This summer the Moscow International Film Festival opened a competitive section for documentaries (reported on filmkommentaren.dk), below you can find the news about the premiere of…
Viktor Kossakovsky: Vivan las Antipodas!
Breaking news in the world of documentary films. The long awaited world premiere of Victor Kossakovsky’s Vivan la Antipodas! will take place at the 68th Venice Film Festival. The organisers announced friday that the film will be the second opening…
Theresa Traore Dahlberg: Taxi Sister
Produced at the Swedish film school, Dramatiska Högskolan in Stockholm, this short documentary is a warm, straightforward portrait of a strong woman, who must be a role model for the Senegalese woman in her fight for equality in a male…
City Documentaries in Belgrade
The film school (Kvadrat) and Magnificent7 film festival owners and managers, Svetlana and Zoran Popovic, offer a summer pleasure to Belgrade citizens and visitors. Starting from monday July 25, Megalopolisi na filmu, great films on cities are being screened within…
Ina Holmquist & Emelie Wallgren: Kiss Bill
There is 50 years between me and the two teenage girls; I have never heard about a German pop star called Bill from a band called Tokio Hotel; I am not sure I want to hear him play or sing,…
The Syrian Revolution
When in Corfu, we asked the Syrian documentary colleagues for a reliable information source to follow the revolution in the country. They referred to the site of LCCS, Local Coordination Committees of Syria. The site is updated daily and includes…
Storydoc Session in Corfu/ 1
Documentary film projects from 11 countries, 21 of them, were developed during 5 days at the Ionian University in the city of Corfu. From morning till evening, July 11-15, the filmmakers, directors and producers, had meetings with invited tutors –…
Storydoc Session in Corfu/ 2
Two key tutors were given the floor on the first day of the workshop. Danish Mikael Opstrup from EDN (European Documentary Network) introduced some presentation tricks to the participants before they were to communicate the content and form to their…
Storydoc Session in Corfu/ 3
Stan Neumann inspired on the second morning at the Storydoc session in Corfu. The French editor and director, born in Czekoslovakia, had been given the task to urge the filmmakers to think about form and not only content. Form, he…
Storydoc Session in Corfu/ 4
With Mediterranean projects in focus it was a natural programme choice to have a session on the situation for documentarians in the countries that have experienced or are experiencing changes that have been named ”revolution” or the ”Arab Uprising” or…
Storydoc Session in Corfu/ 5
21 projects took part in the workshop in Corfu. I have previously written about the 4 selected Palestinian projects which were selected at the Storydoc prologue session in Ramallah, Palestine. The selected projects proved their quality as did the filmmakers…
Asif Kapadia: Senna
In a report from the Moscow International Film Festival the following I wrote the following about the film about legendary Ayrton Senna: (the film) has a classical straight forward narrative, simple it is, and should be, with its focus on…
Summer Filmmaking in Lithuania
It is quite an experiment… you bring together 50 young film students from all over Europe, having grouped them in beforehand as directors, cameramen, editors, sound recorders and producers – let the directors pitch their stories and pick their collaborators,…
Mantas Kvedaravicius: Barzakh
At the Summer Media Studio in Neringa Lithuania, a European Film Student Workshop, that goes on until July 17, with editing as the theme, ending up with 10 short documentaries, it was very appropiate to show the awarded Lithuanian documentary…
Documentary in Europe Workshop
The 15th edition of Documentary in Europe in Bardonecchia, Italy starts tomorrow. It includes training, project development, pitching to a panel of commissioning editors, matchmaking between directors, producers and distributors – and screenings. (By the way, the organisers are making…
MIFF Documentary Competititon/ 2
In this text I can only speak for myself as one of three jurors at the first documentary competition at the 33st Moscow International Film festival stating that there was a clear agreement in the jury for the winner, Hell…
Danfung Dennis: Hell and Back Again
”I love my pistol”, says Sergeant Nathan Harris, the protagonist of the film about an American soldier, who gets seriously wounded in combat in Afghanistan, is taken back to the US and to his wife Ashley, who helps him recover;…
Anastasion a.o.: Redemption of General Butt Naked
Quite a shocking film it is. Protagonist: A warlord who during the Liberia civil/tribal war ran around slaughtering anyone near him, yes naked he was, surrounding himself with child soldiers ”educated” through Rambo films, has now found God, preaching reconciliation,…
Liz Garbus: Bobby Fischer against the World
Archive material, interviews and commentaries, the film has a classical build up of a story about the chess genius, American Bobby Fischer (1943-2008), whose story is one of those written out of a reality that surpasses any Hollywood fiction script.…
Moscow Film Diary/5
Yesterday I was interviewed for Voice of Russia in a radio programme edited by Donna West and Julia Reysner. This is the written introduction followed by the link, if you should want to hear a Danish person speaking his best…
Moscow Film Diary/4
”My Perestroika” is a fine documentary by Robin Hessman. It was screened the other day for an American audience on the pov – documentaries with a point of view. A trailer from the film + loads of information on the…
Moscow Film Diary/3
The question has often been asked – about the position of the Moscow International Film Festival (MIFF) in the world of festivals. In the (excellent) filmneweurope site an interview with the programme director Kirill Razalogov clarifies the situation and the…
Wim Wenders: Pina
Saw the 3D film about legendary coreographer Pina Bausch in a totally full cinema hall during Moscow International Film Festival. It was one of those unique cinema experiences you will never forget. One after one the members of her Tanztheater,…
Silverdocs Documentary Festival/2
The Washington based festival ended last night and awards were announced – all together $76.500 in cash and in-kind, as the festival site announces. The three main awards were given to (for best US feature) ”Our School” by Mona Nicoara…
Moscow Film Diary/2
Second day. Press conference in a cinema. There seems to be a huge interest in the fact that a documentary competition has been included in the MIFF (Moscow International Film Festival). I do not recall having seen so many people…
Moscow Film Diary/1
Very close to Copenhagen is Moscow and after a long drive from the airport through heavy Moscow traffic – always like that, the driver said – we landed at one of the ”seven sisters” hotels, Stalinistic architecture, impressive, totally renovated,…
Chinese Films on Docalliance
It is a pleasure – again – to be able to promote the quality vod Docalliance. Not only is the selection of films for the catalogue excellent, the prices are very low and the texts are free from normal site…
Sri Lanka’s Killing Fields
British tv Channel4 broadcast a week ago a tv-documentary on what happened during the final weeks of the 25 year long civil war between the government of Sri Lanka and the Tamil Tigers. The programme was presented by the journalist…
Docs at Moscow International Film Festival
It starts next week on June 23rd and lasts for 10 days. The MIFF is one of the classic film festivals with big names, tributes to film history, stars, red carpet and competitions. Edition number 33 it is, led by…
MIFF Documentary Competition
It is a strong line-up of international documentaries that compete in Moscow. 7 films are on the list: From Europe comes ”Czech peace” by the succesful team behind ”Czech Dream”, Filip Remunda and Vit Klusak, Austrian master director Nikolaus Geyerhalter…
MIFF Out of Competetion
The non-competitive programme has several interesting films to offer the audience in Moscow, many of them have been written about on this blog, all have been to imporant festivals often to be awarded: ”Position among the Stars” by Leonard Retel…
MIFF Free Thought Documentary Programme
I asked Georgy Molodtsov, a young filmmaker, who I met at the DoxPro in St. Petersburg, and who is working for the Documentary section at MIFF – to give some background on the festival’s documentary development. Here are clips from…
Pavel Koutecky Award/2
The winner of the award that carries the name of late Czech director, the man behind ”Citizen Havel”, is Linda Jablonska (photo), who previously (on this blog) is known for her ”Welcome to North Korea”. This text is taken from…
Mikkel Stolt: Docomedy Now
Mike Proud’s (My Avatar and Me) and Mikkel Stolt’s “random thoughts on documentary films and humour” on the blog Docomedy Now: “(Lack Of) Authenticity? … the reason for that was that we as filmmakers chose to blend different modes of filmmaking…
Edinburgh Documentary Pitch/1
There is a lot of film political commitment and competence in the activities of the SDI (Scottish Documentary Institute). The small staff (Noë Mendelle, Sonja Henrici, Flore Cosquer, Amy Hardie and Finlay Pretsell) stands behind the talent development production scheme…
Edinburgh Documentary Pitch/2
It is a public secret that most public broadcasters do not have a young audience. ”Young people do not watch television”, it is being said again and again when television people meet. They watch films, including documentaries, online, or they…
Edinburgh Documentary Pitch/3
YLE and arte, television channels – for many years leading in creative documentaries when it comes to international orientation, involved in coproductions and acquisitions of documentaries from all over the world. As an organiser of meetings where producers come to…
Edinburgh Documentary Pitch/4
”Make Docs Happen” is the slogan of the Edinburgh Pitch. If that will be the case for the 2011 pitched projects, that they will be made, will happen, remains to be seen. For sure it is that the positive comment…
Crowdfunding of Documentaries
If you come, as I do, from a country where documentary film as an art form is part of a film culture, publicly supported and included in a film law, of course you are sceptical to the new phenomenon where…
Silverdocs Documentary Festival
Where the impression of the Sheffield DocFest film selection is one of British provinsialism (see below), there is reason to say bravo to the American Silverdocs, that offers its viewers a quality programme. The Discovery Channel supports the festival but…
Sheffield Doc/Fest
… starts tomorrow. The festival and its industry activity used to be a couple of weeks in November before the idfa in Amsterdam. Now it has moved to June, presumably to have more new films without having to compete with…
Camilla Nielsson: Democrats
Danish filmmakers Camilla Nielsson (Director) and Henrik Veileborg (Producer) have been chosen as grantees of the 2011 Gucci Tribeca Documentary Fund for their documentary film project Democrats. Their film, along with eight other documentaries, was a finalist selected by the…
Doc Alliance Strikes Again
On this site the vod (video on demand) initiative Doc Alliance, run by five European film festivals, has been praised several times for its quality in film selection and presentation, and for its cheap prices not to forget. Doc Alliance…
Pavel Koutecky Award
Koutecky died tragically in 2006, 50 years old, after having completed twelve years of filming Vaclac Havel. The material was edited by his colleague Miroslav Janek and the masterpiece Citizen Havel was born. An award has been set up in…
51st Krakow Film Festival Awards
The festival ended this evening with the prize ceremony in the huge Kijew Kino. The jury, of which I was the chairman, judging 20 international documentaries, made the following decision – quoting the short motivations, reviews of three main prize…
Wojciech Staron: The Argentinian Lesson
It has a story, a point of view, a humanistic approach and a director, who is also the cameraman and who has the skills to catch magical moments as they happen in life. A decade ago the director made ”Siberian…
Markus Lindén: Regretters
I want to be seen, says one them. I want to be conventional, says the other. Both of them took a very unconventional decision, to change from being a man to being a woman. The title says that they have…