DOC Discussion/ 6
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…
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
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DOC Discussion/ 5
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…
Doc Discussion/ 4
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…
Doc Discussion/ 1
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…
Doc Discussion/ 2
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…
Doc Discussion/ 3
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…
The Syrian Revolution/ 6
A profile photo was changed on facebook…
The Syrian Revolution/ 5
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,…
D.A. Pennebaker: Monterey Pop
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…
Igor Mayboroda: Rerberg and Tarkovsky
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…
Igor Mayboroda: Rerberg and Tarkovsky/ 2
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…
Ulla Boje Rasmussen: Thors Saga
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…
The Syrian Revolution/ 4
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…
Det går godt for Dokumentarfilmen
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…
Nanna Frank Møller: Let’s Be Together
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…
The Battle for Tripoli
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…
Richard Leacock: Stravinsky
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…
Solidarity with Syrian Protesters
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…
Guth Gafa
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…
Steam of Life premieres in Copenhagen
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…
You’ve Been Trumped
… 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…
Yamagata Int. Documentary Film Festival/ 1
”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…
Yamagata Int. Documentary Film Festival/ 2
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) – …
Richard Leacock i Cinemateket København
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…
The Syrian Revolution/ 3
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…
Koen Suidgeest: Karla’s Arrival
“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…
Mikael Bertelsen på plejehjem
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…
Nick Broomfield Tries to Ask Sarah Palin
… 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…
MakeDox Travelling Cinema
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…
Jan Andrews: Joseph Brodsky
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…
Lichtpunt: Claudio Magris
Intelligent television. A talk with a writer, one of the best, for many years and still a candidate to receive the Nobel Prize of Literature, Italian or should one say European Claudio Magris, interviewed in his flat in Trieste by…
Artavadz Pelešjan
… is the name of one of the greatest auteurs in documentary history. A film has been made about him that will premiere at the Venice Film Festival (August 31 – September 10). Emanuele Vernillo (filmmaker and didactic tutor at…
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…
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…