A film blog by Allan Berg Nielsen & Tue Steen Müller
A film blog by Allan Berg Nielsen & Tue Steen Müller
The national award ceremony in Lithuania takes place 6th of June. With many categories and a lot of nominations attached. I take a look at the ones for Best Documentary that has a very strong line-up. I had seen four of…
The programme is out for the 25th edition of DocsBarcelona. Twenty-five editions!!! Which means that I have become 25 years older as has the founder of it all Joan Gonzalez, who back then in a workshop in Granada proposed to…
Filmed by Kimi Morev and Marusya Syroechkovskaya Edited by Qutaiba Barhamji Sweden, Norway, France, Germany, 103 mins., 2022 With the subtitle … a message from a silenced generation here is the director’s personal statement: ”On the 24th February 2022, Putin and his government…
Filmed by Kimi Morev and Marusya Syroechkovskaya Edited by Qutaiba Barhamji Sweden, Norway, France, Germany, 103 mins., 2022 Kimi passed away on the night of November 4th, 2016. He wasn’t just my lover and husband, he was also my best friend, my…
It was sunny in Prague. It was the first time for me to be able to follow the One World Festival as I have always been (with pleasure) linked to the East Doc Forum of IDF (Institute of Documentary Film)…
The East Doc Platform Award went to the Polish project The World is not (a) Mine by Natalia Koniarz about inhabitants working in inhuman conditions mining metals on the Cerro Rico mountain. The Ukrainian project Up in the Air by…
I have a lot of respect and admiration for the work of Oeke Hoogendijk. In 2020 we played “My Rembrandt” in Belgrade at the Magnificent7 Festival and five years earlier her “The New Rijksmuseum” opened the same festival. Hoogendijk has…
I know Antoine Cattin from his “The Mother» and other films he made with Pavel Kostomarov. I don’t know if the Swiss director still lives in St. Petersburg but the film that he presents at CPH:DOX takes place in the…
… She has been following Roma from meeting him on Maidan in 2014 until today, where the boy has grown to be a teenager turning 18 very soon. He was living on Maidan, he was in an orphanage, he has…
Yesterday afternoon my wife and I visited Cinemateket in Copenhagen to watch “Being a Human Person”, a portrait of Roy Andersson (made by F. Scott, 2020, 90 mins.). We have been fans of the Swedish auteur (here the French word…
The point of view of the director, Lithuanian Lina Luytė, is clear from the very beginning. A boat with refugees is approaching the coast of Lesbos, the island where the infamous refugee camp Moria is situated. The one that burned…
From the website of the film (link below): A hybrid film about life under the regime of terror in Myanmar in the aftermath of its military coup of February 1st 2021, told through personal stories by a group of anonymous…
A film about wine and greed… is the subtitle of this film that in many ways is closer to a fiction film than to a documentary. It is grandiose in its set-up and although it’s not always succesful in mixing…
I am a big fan of Ivars Zviedris, Latvian director and cinematographer. His «Documentarian» and «Latvian Coyote» are films that I think high of and now there is his new work that was awarded at the National Cinema Ceremony, where…
There are many excellent documentary film festivals in Europe. The one in Thessaloniki is one of them. It runs until March 20 with a very rich program including tributes to Latvian director Laila Pakalnina and Finnish Virpi Suutari. Voices from…
08.03.2022news The Docudays UA International Human Rights Documentary Film Festival is the largest documentary film festival in Ukraine. This year’s edition was to begin on 25 March in Kyiv. It’s no longer possible due to Russia’s brutal attack and the…
Press Release: The 2nd International Documentary Film Festival Artdocfest/Riga starts this Thursday, March 3rd. As a sign of solidarity with Ukrainian colleagues and the people of Ukraine, the festival program includes a special selection of documentaries dedicated to Ukraine and telling about…
Wolski is one of the excellent documentary film directors from Poland, together with Pawel Lozinski and Wojciech Staron and many many others. I say so from having seen ”Ordinary Country” ( now ”1970”. Poland has a long tradition for documentaries…
I have for years (decades?) benefited of having access to the Docs for Sale catalogue of IDFA to be kept up to date on new films as a programmer and first of all as one, who writes on this site,…
“This is a film reel from April 28 1945…” beautiful material, black & white… of people arriving with the “white buses” to Malmö from German concentration camps. The third film by Swedish director Gertten digging into the 35mm footage…
The festival in Helsinki is running until the 6th of February with a national and international competition, a Finnish and an international selection, a retrospective of the master Pirjo Honkasalo – it’s all very good in terms of films to…
A tour down memory lane together with important names in modern documentary history. 10 years ago – on this site – I wrote about Belgian writer, director and journalist Hugues Le Paige : ”The director of this film (Le Prince et son…
Let me start with a quote from a mail sent to me by good friend, excellent French producer Estelle Robin You, who has been working with the director for years to make this film meet the audience: ”A Thousand Fires”…
Their full names being Virginija Vareikyte and Maximilien Dejoie, a Lithuanian and an Italian, who is also the cinematographer, which makes me start by praising the camerawork for a film that is so much subject-related: It tells the story of…
”I call my method of work “Fishing in the river of time”. As life is extremely talented, we just put camera, set composition and wait. And life happens. So film happens…” From an interview with Laila Pakalnina in connection with…
The other day there was a El Classico football match: Real Madrid against FC Barcelona. Mikael Opstrup sent me a text message expressing that he did not feel fantastic before the match. He felt UNCERTAIN about the result to come,…
It’s all there: Competitions, Industry events, a focus on Benelux – and it’s all superprofessionally conveyed at the website – www.fipadoc.com Is it like any other international documentary film festival? Yes, with national and international, short and long films and the industry…
Jury words IDFA 2021 on the film: “It is not easy to bring history to life. It is even more difficult to make it thrilling, urgent, and totally enriching, to make it feel like we are living through it as…
2017, on this site: High expectations. What else can you have with a project from Slovak film director Peter Kerekes, who won a big award at the Karlovy Vary festival the other day. Let me remind you of the many innovative, entertaining…
An article by the always competent Vladan Petkovic in Cineuropa – link for the whole text below – gives me the opportunity to praise the DocAlliance platform as so many times before. Due to the pandemic, I guess, DAFilms has…
More than well done by Georgian young director Ana Barjadze and her producer Irina Gelashvili, who have now won the Adami Media Prize, ”Project Pitching Winner”. What that is you can read by clicking below – and via another link…
It was a happy and proud man I talked to the other day. A man who had been honored, and wanted to share his joy with me. So well deserved the honor! First an edited and translated version of a press…
Almost a million Rohingya refugees from Myanmar live in the biggest refugee camp in the world, Cox Bazaar in Bangla Desh… Ai WeiWei has made a film from the camp. Danish editors Niels Pagh Andersen and Charlotte Munch Bengtsen watched,…
The IDFA website intro to this remarkable hybrid documentar-fiction goes like this: ”The aftermath of the explosion that took place at the Port of Beirut in August 2020 is revealed in quiet stillnes, from the destroyed buildings and the despair…
The website intro text to the film, which was in the Envision Competition at IDFA: „As the revolution turns into war; Nidal, a Syrian filmmaker, is forced to leave the country. He locks his Damascus home door and travels with…
The winner of the IDFA Award for Best First Film and the IDFA Award for Best Cinematography. No objection from my side. Observational documentary cinema with a location so well known, the Moscow Metro. And yet a film with several…
Mr. Landsbergis wins IDFA Award for Best Film in the International Competition and Octopus wins IDFA Award for Best Film in the Envision Competition Last night, IDFA announced the winners of the competition programs during the IDFA 2021 Awards Ceremony.…
… their first names are Susana and Ansgar, well known by the editors of this site due to their films “Still Life“ and „48“, (). This new film by the Portuguese couple demonstrates again how perfectly they know how to combine…
A debutant and a veteran director, two very good films, award candidates I guess, I watched them, I give you some brief texts about them. Recommendations: Ketevan Kapanadze’s ”How the Room Felt” and Aliona van der Horst ”Turn Your Body to…
I have already posted (on FB) advertising texts about Danish editor Niels Pagh Andersen and his book launch at IDFA sunday morning through a debate with IDFA director Orwa Nyrabia. The launch was set up as a masterclass with the…
Subitled: «A book about Developing Character driven Documentary» ”I am painfully aware that this book is risky business. I am trying to rationalize the irrational, to break down the bumpy documentary film process into conscious decisions and structures, yes even…
Full house at beautiful Tuschinski last night – for a 25 year old film, a classic in world documentary history, Johan van der Keuken’s Amsterdam Global Village. 4 hours (!) plus one hour with the film’s producer Pieter van Huystee,…
… the 34th edition and this is what the IDFA staff luckily communicated the other day: ”IDFA is delighted to share that the festival continues in person next week, and cinemas remain open. Following the measures laid out by the Dutch…
White plastic chairs are being arranged in a circle in front of a palace. A show is to begin. A show with lovely people – with a twist from the Beatles text: “All the lovely people where did they all…
To safeguard the truth about us, were the words architect Richter used, when he presented his plan for a Museum of the Revolution to be built in Belgrade in 1961… Director Srdan Keca takes this – with great propaganda archive…
“Father” earns Golden Dove in International Competition at DOK Leipzig Golden Dove in the German Competition for “A Sound of My Own” | Audience jury awards “Dida” a Golden Dove The award-winning films of the 64th edition of DOK…
First some background: Since the end of the civil war in the early 1990s, the region of Abkhazia has been acting independently of Georgia. This has turned a massive dam into a border. But the hydroelectric power station also connects…
Full names: Nikola Ilić and Corina Schwingruber Ilić – I had seen (some of) their previous short works, the lovely ”Rakijada” and the aesthetical perfect ”All Inclusive”, both films that have travelled to short film festivals all over – and…
“At this year’s edition of DOK Leipzig, a total of 63,250 euros in prize money will be awarded. In addition, there are non-cash benefits worth 10,000 euros that filmmakers will be able to use in developing their films…” A quote…
25 years, still alive and kicking, young and fresh – is the impression I get from going through the website of the film festival in the Czech provincial town that is full of films, of Cinema from October 10 till…