Pavel Stingl: The Baluty Ghetto
I owe Pavel Stingl an apology. I never believed that it would be possible to combine his moving story about the Czech Jews who were deported to the Lodz ghetto with the story about the people who live there today…
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 MorePavel Stingl: The Baluty Ghetto
Bartek Konopka: Rabbit a la Berlin
Yes, this is the way to make a different film for the celebration of the 20 years of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Playing masterly with the film language, wanting to surprise us. To tell us the same story…
11 Short Documentaries/1
Is it possible to make 11 short documentaries in two weeks? By film crew members from several European countries, from Spain and Bulgaria in the South to Latvia and Lithuania in the North. Young people who had never seen each…
11 Short Documentaries/2
I advocated for fun and the upcoming European filmmakers in Vilnius had fun as you can see in the film about the workshop, ”2 Weeks in 10 Minutes”, that is full of ideas and playfulness in storytelling. Time was limited…
Audrius Mickevicius: Man-Horse
In the best Lithuanian slow-pace, spiritual documentary tradition this is a film that puts total trust to the image. And to the fact that an old man and his horse living in the countryside is a story that includes sufficient…
Gucci Tribeca Documentary Fund
I read about completion funding from Gucci Tribeca. For documentaries that ”promote social change and illuminate issues in need of deeper coverage currently missing from mainstream media”. 350 submissions from 41 countries – and 7 projects received funding. A total…
Yamagata 2009
Some festivals make a selection very early. YIDFF – that stands for Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival – does so. The festival that has a strong reputation for high quality selection, and that operates only every second year, yet including…
Kieslowski’s Dekalog
A short piece of info for our Danish and Swedish language readers about the Swedish cultural tv channel Axess. In Danish: Den svenske kulturkanal Axess – som i øvrigt også er et kultur- og samfundstidsskrift og som byder på en…
Golden Apricot Yerevan
Beautiful name for a festival… this one in Armenia that started yesterday and goes on until July the 19th with an interesting documentary competition programme. Several films have been written about on filmkommentaren.dk, like ”Cash and Marry” by Atanas Georgiev,…
Jørgen Leth Tour de France Comeback
This is a brief hommage to Jørgen Leth, the Danish documentary filmmaker, who this year has made a comeback to be the TV2 Tour de France commentator. In Danish: Så sad jeg der igen det meste af søndag eftermiddag foran…
Nordic Documentaries 2009
Selection has been done for the Nordisk Panorama documentary competition that takes place in Reykjavik September 25-30. 21 documentaries compete and several can be read about on this site: Ada Bligaard Søby’s Black Heart (photo), Anders Østergaard’s Burma VJ, Nanna…
One More Slovak Documentary Triumph
On this site, not long ago, you could find a review of ”Cooking History” by Slovak director Peter Kerekes. During the last year you have had the chance to read several enthusiastic words about Slovak director Juraj Lehotsky’s ”Blind Loves”.…
Archidoc – Creative Use of Archives
Just some useful information for those of you who could be interested in following a course on the creative use of archive material in documentaries. The French film school, la femis (), runs Archidoc that is an English language three-session…
Interview
Serbian filmmaker Zeljko Mirkovic made this interview with me for a Serbian film magazine. He was so kind to have it translated into English and has offered it to sites like docuinter.net, reelisor.com, miradox.ru. Here it is for the readers…
Documentary Campus 2
Chania, Greece, the old town, very hot, should be forbidden to work in that weather, but this is what the 2009 Documentary Campus Masterchool participants have done for a week under the usual professional and warm guidance of Peter Symes,…
Documentary Campus 1
I am in Crete for a session of the Documentary (formerly Discovery) Campus. I run into Vardan Hovhannisyan with whom I have spent many fine moments around the films that he was/is producing or directing for his company in Jerevan,…
Apostolos Karakasis: National Garden
It has been done before: The filming of people in a park put together in a mosaic structure as a warm hug to people, to us all, with our joys and worries, dreams and sorrows. Polish Marcel Lozinski did it…
DR2: Quality Documentaries
Gode nyheder til danske dokumentar-seere: Summer time… and the Danish television traditionally shows fine documentaries. On the only channel worth watching in Denmark nowadays: DR2. On tuesday (7.7 8.30pm) on Dokumania, the neo-classic by Werner Herzog ”Little Dieter needs to…
Documentary in Europe
For the 13th time the small mountain town Bardonecchia in Piemonte hosts the Documentary in Europe, 4 days of market talks, case studies, film screenings, pitching, a matchmaking seminar for directors and debates around documentary matters. Dates: July 8-11. There…
Vilnius Diary 8
Finnish filmmaker and teacher at the film school Helsinki Polytechnic, Heikki Ahola, brought some student films and a couple of his own films to the summer camp. They were, as Ahola, very Finnish if I may put it like that.…
Vilnius Diary 7
Jurga Ivanauskaite is a cult figure in Lithuania. Born in 1961, the writer died young in 2007 leaving behind her a strong reputation as a writer with star quality, a writer who did not only write beautiful books and poems…
Vilnius Diary 6
I was on a tour today. A magnificent tour. To the place of a film to come, and to the people who are characters in this work under development. It may sound like a kliché film, one of many about…
Vilnius Diary 5
Screening day of Lithuanian documentaries for eventual recommendation for DOKLeipzig. 5 films to watch since my visit one year ago. Public funding for film is minimal in Lithuania at this moment. So competition is strong among the established filmmakers and…
Iranian Documentarians Protest
Statement of Iranian Documentary FilmmakersIn the Name of GodWe are documentary filmmakers. Our work is to discover and tell the truth. Truth can only be found when all aspects of reality are told. In the course of recent events in…
Vilnius Diary 4
One of the participants at the workshop, Italian Davide Mastropaolo, asked me for advice on a film that a friend had made with himself involved as co-producer. The film is about to be finished but – have you heard about…
Vilnius Diary 3
I showed a clip from ”Citizen Havel” yesterday here at the Summer Film Academy in Lithuania, as an example of how important it is to have access and to have time to follow a character, who is known widely by…
Vilnius Diary 2
Audrius Stonys made a lecture this morning. I have heard him doing so many times and have written several praising sentences on filmkommentaren.dk – about this filmmaker who is for sure to be considered as a national poet in his…
Vilnius Diary 1
I am in Vilnius for a summer film school where students from countries all over Europe have gathered to make short documentary films about or rather from the 2009 European cultural capital. 10 films are to be made, research is…
Hubert Sauper: Darwin’s Nightmare
This brief intro comes because a documentary neo-classic is broadcast on Danish television tonight, on DR2 in prime time (8.40pm). It has been in Danish cinemas, it is available from the DFI, and if you have already seen it, take…
Maziar Bahari arrested in Tehran
Well known and respected documentary filmmaker and journalist Maziar Bahari was arrested yesterday morning in Tehran according to Newsweek, that he works for. This is the start of the article of Newsweek: Among the dozens of people arrested overnight in…
Bul(garian)doc Films and Humour
… will be very much present at this year’s edition (number 20!) of the Sunny Side of the Doc. A so-called Bulgarian umbrella has been established to promote the films and projects that come from a country with several fine…
Ex Oriente 4 Directing
Stan Neumann visited the workshop and showed his 2004 production for Arte France, ”Language does not Lie”, a film based on the diaries of Victor Klemperer, who survived Das dritte Reich and whose diaries were not published before the mid…
Ex Oriente 3 Directing
Italian director Alessandro Rossetto came to Hotel Biograf to show his 1999 documentary Bibione Bye Bye One, which is a wonderful b/w 75 minutes long journey into an area and a culture that the director knows from his childhood, 100…
Ex Oriente 2 Sales
This EU MEDIA training programme, organised by IDF (Institute of Documentary Film), based in Prague, is currently holding its second session out of three in Hotel Biograf in Pisek, Czech Republic. Projects from Eastern European countries are being developed and…
Ex Oriente 1 – Production
Helge Albers represents the Flying Moon Filmproduktion based in Germany. A company that started 10 years ago and produces fiction as well as feature length documentaries. Albers gave the Ex Oriente participants a brief intro to the documentary history of…
Bananas
Swedish film director and producer Fredrik Gertten has made a film, Bananas, that has reached the headlines – before its actual release. The Malmö based Gertten, who has been enormously active internationally for many years, and who for the film…
Free Thought Documentaries in Moscow
As part of the Moscow International Film Festival (19.6-28.6) two Russian documentary gentlemen, very often present in Western documentary events, Sergey Miroshnichenko and Grigory Libergal, have put together a fine programme. This is what they say: 43 masterpieces of world…
Capturing Reality 2
The NFB (National Film Board of Canada) production on the art of documentary, featuring 33 directors from 13 countries, are being used for debates among filmmakers and with the audience. Here is a quote from a Realscreen article illustrating the…
Petr Lom: Letters to the President
Den korte udgave af Petr Loms film fra Iran bliver vist i aften på DR2 under den danske titel “Breve til præsident Ahmadinejad”. Den er fin at se, selvom jeg klart foretrækker den lange udgave, som blev anmeldt på filmkommentaren.dk…
Guth Gafa: One More Documentary Oasis
… is placed in Donegal in Ireland, an international documentary film festival it is, with a very fine international programme as well as an Irish. This is how the organisers present their festival: ”When we established the festival in 2006…
Capturing Reality
33 filmmakers, 13 countries, 1 passion: The art of documentary. This is the way that NFB, National Film Board of Canada, launches its interview-film that includes great filmmakers like Maysles, Kim Longinotto, Werner Herzog (photo), Molly Dineen, Heddy Honigmann and…
Tiananmen June 1989
I suppose that all public broadcasters have put a focus on the massacre on the Tiananmen Square in Beijing 20 years ago. A taboo in Chinese history, it is simply forbidden to mention it in Chinese media, channels like arte…
Herbert Tobias
Born in 1924 (died in 1982) German photographer Herbert Tobias was sent to the Ostfront as a soldier when only 19 years old. In the exhibition in Hamburg a series of photos documents how it was for a young man,…
De Gerlache: Magritte, le jour et la nuit
A museum for René Magritte has opened in Brussels and as the cultural channel of Europe, arte celebrates this important event. But how to make a film about an artist, whose oeuvre was huge, an artist who behaved like a…
DOKU.ART 2 – Stanley Kubrick
For lovers of Stanley Kubrick – and who is not? – the festival programmes a documentary by British Jon Ronson, made for Channel 4’s True Stories, 48 minutes long. The text about the film and its background goes like this:…
DOKU.ARTS 1
Taking place in Amsterdam June 11-14 at the Film Museum this international festival for films on art presents an exclusive selection of films, with Agnès Varda (photo) as honorary guest meeting an audience that has the possibility to watch a…
Peter Kerekes: Doc on Cosmonauts
”Cooking History” by Slovak director and producer Peter Kerekes (photo) has been praised on filmkommentaren.dk and Kerekes is again on the hunt for funders of his new film project on astronauts that he presented while participating in European Film Promotion’s…
Gideon Koppel: Sleep Furiously
I do consider the film of Gideon Koppel as one of the most important in the last couple of years. It has been written about on filmkommentaren.dk several times (use the “search” button). I saw it on dvd in Lisbon…
Sunny Side of the Doc… 20 Years!
Of course it needs to be celebrated, the 20 years of Sunny Side of the Doc, now in la Rochelle for a couple of years, before in Marseilles with a prologue in Lyon. Lots of memories for someone like me…
David Lynch
Innovative Lynch stands behind a new fascinating website film project that must appeal to all documentarians. According to RealScreen ” the online home of esteemed film director David Lynch will serve as a hub for 121 short documentary web films.…