A film blog by Allan Berg Nielsen & Tue Steen Müller
A film blog by Allan Berg Nielsen & Tue Steen Müller
A couple of months ago filmkommentaren posted three texts about the prestigious Japanese film festival (link 1, link 2, link 3). One text started like this: ”Facing reality, what is to be done?” is the headline of the introductory text of the…
It’s European doc festival time and documentarians like Koen Suidgeest (see below) will go to Leipzig in Germany, Jihlava in Czech Republic, DocLisboa in Portugal and idfa in Amsterdam – maybe asking themselves “what am I doing here” OR “great…
… a good question, put by Koen Suidgeest, who has been extremely busy in the promotion of his important humanistic documentary, “Karla’s Arrival”, that right now also is launched through a kickstarter campaign to collect money to get the film…
This international renowned film by Swiss Antoine Cattin and Pavel Kostomarov reaches Danish Television (DR/TV) on tuesday October 11 as part of the strand Dokumania and under the Danish title, ”Den russiske mor”. The film was at the Magnificent7 European…
From the press release of IDFA today: The 24th International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA) will open on November 16 in Pathé Tuschinski with The Ambassador by Danish filmmaker and journalist Mads Brügger Cortzen. In this documentary, Brügger Cortzen exposes…
Filmkommentaren was invited to look at the new feature length documentary by Danish Mads Brügger (selected for the upcoming idfa festival competition in Amsterdam) and watched the film together with students at the documentary film school Zelig in Bolzano, Italy.…
This is unfortunately another text from the never ending news story to be brought from Syria. This time about a dear colleague from the team of the Dox Box festival. The text below is copy-pasted from the facebook, where his…
The small film festival with the fine programme of international documentaries ends today sunday October 2. The awards for the Baltic Documentary Competition were given out last night. 12 films were in the programme, three received awards – diplomas and…
After the award ceremony of the 8th Vilnius Documentary Film Festival , a new Lithuanian documentary had its premiere in Vilnius. ”The Field of Magic” has been on its way for years and premieres in a version that is full…
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…