A film blog by Allan Berg Nielsen & Tue Steen Müller
A film blog by Allan Berg Nielsen & Tue Steen Müller
Great to see that documentary festivals not only grow in Europe. For the second time an international documentary festival will take place in Agadir in Marocco November 10-14. For long documentaries, i.e. film that are longer than 52 minutes produced…
Readers of filmkommentaren.dk will know that I consider the international documentary festival in the capital of Portugal as one of the leading when it comes to quality in selection and side programme policy. The programme for 2009, the festival takes…
Latvian Herz Frank, a master in the history of documentary, with works like “Ten Minutes Older”, “There were Seven Simeons”, “The Song of Songs” and “Flashback”: In front of me on my work table is the central fragment from Raphael’s…
The film about the Indian boy Bilal has previously been reviewed on filmkommentaren.dk The idfa festival and the connected Jan Virjman Fund has followed “the carreer” of the film and has posted this small sunshine story about a film, its…
For those who read Russian there is a very fine new website to visit that includes good and relevant info on what is going on in Russia in the field of non-fiction and documentary. The site is independent and is…
Kim Longinotto is an amazingly productive film director, who has a slate of important films in her filmography (among them masterpieces like ”Divorce Iranian Style”, ”Runaway”, ”Gaea Girls”, ”Sisters in Law”), and she is a director that with her subjects…
The film was reviewed in August 2007, now we repeat the review for those Danish people who watched it on DR2’s new tuesday night documentary strand ”Dokumania”. The Danish language review went like this: Darfur. Vi har hørt om det,…
The festival in Warsaw is over and the many prizes have been awarded. The following films awarded at Planete Doc Review are to be found reviewed or noted on filmkommentaren.dk: Geoffrey Smith: The English Surgeon. Anders Østergaard: Burma VJ. Peter…
OBS til danske læsere: Se denne smukke og gribende krimidokumentar om opklaringen af to justitsmord begået mod en handicappet mand, som sad i fængsel i over 18 år for to kvindemord, han ikke havde begået. Det er en krimi med…
Danish born Henning Albert Boilesen was a succesful businessman during the military dictatorship in Brazil in the 60’es. He went to the top, had close contact to the rulers of the country, and as many other industrialists in Sao Paulo,…
The title of the film is actually ”Pale Peko Bantu Mambo Ayikosake” which in swahili means ”Where there are people there will be problems”. And problems there are in Katanga, the location of this fresh and direct film that manages…
For readers of Swedish language there is a fine service provided from Lars Säfström, documentary head of svt Malmö. Säfström writes about what he has seen and about the discussions at the public broadcaster’s yearly gathering that this year takes…
Film History – The Finnish film critic and historian Peter von Bagh is the artistic director of this exciting week in June: Il Cinema Ritrovato, the festival sponsored by the Mostra Internazionale del Cinema Libero and the Cineteca del Comune…
Ahmadinejad, president of Iran, receives 10 million letters per year and 76% of them are answered! This is stated by an employee from the administration that takes care of this personal contact between the president and the population. Ahmadinejad, a…
For a documentary veteran viewer it is pure pleasure, when you watch a film that gives you surprises you in structure, narration and content. I knew that Slovak/Hungarian Peter Kerekes after his wonderful ”66 Seasons” was working on a big…
Osh in Kyrgyzstan. Not a place that we have heard much about. The same goes for the people who live there. Who fall in love as everyone (hopefully) does all over the world. However, the problem for the two protagonists,…
“The life, demolition and reconstruction of the Kopaszi dam between 1998 and 2007. A mostly black & white 35mm documentary shot over ten years in a forgotten landscape in the center of Budapest. People living in houseboats and wooden houses,…
I have known the works of Viktor Asliuk for many years, small universal stories about people and what they do in their lives, conveyed with a lot of warmth, with ”We are Living on the edge” as a masterpiece that…
Georgian director. Saw one of her previous works last year, ”Their Helicopter”, written about on this site. And praised at the same time her on-going film project, ”Restaurant Bakhmaro and Those Who Work There”, that is now with the director…
OBS! Especially for Danish and Swedish readers : On this site the great film of Dragan Nikolic has often been mentioned and praised (go to “search” and write the title). Here is another piece of promotion on the occasion of…
Best international feature Documentary at the Hot Docs was announced yesterday night and the winner was the Lebanese filmmaker Simon El Habre with this ”The One Man Village”, well deserved for a charming and well constructed film. Here is the…
It is one of those films where you are attracted by the visual and the tone of the film and the words, in other words by the film, and still feel like you want to watch and listen again. Because…
This is a clip from a text made by the director, to be found on his website in full length: … I myself have systematically collected aphorisms for the last ten years. Whenever I wonder why I am still living…
For the 6th time this international documentary film festival takes place in Warsaw at the Kinoteka. The programme is overwhelming in volume AND quality. No wonder that the festival two days ago received The Main Award at the Polish Film…
Honour your master… this is what four young Polish filmmakers do. They have all come out of the Andrzej Wajda Master School in Warsaw, and their names are already known outside their own countries in festival circles and as participants…
The festival includes no less than 6 competition sections with the Millenium Award as the main one. 19 films compete for the 6000€, several of them known to readers of filmkommentaren.dk. Like ”Kites” (photo) by Polish Beata Dzianowicz, ”Burma vj”…
Flemish language broadcasting company Lichtpunt in Belgium introduces itself like this: ”The aim of Lichtpunt is creating informative programmes on subjects from a humanistic point of view. Above all we attempt to approach our television viewers as being open minded…
The big international documentary festival in Toronto is running now and until May 10 and they do a wonderful promotion and information work for the audience and for us who are not there. Annotations on the film, written interviews, it’s…
Football is creative! When Barcelona plays like they did tonite. In Madrid, against Real. No, not creative. Artistic. Pure pleasure. As they write on the website of FC Barcelona: Now that’s what you call football! (2-6). Barça have won at…
The Documentary Film Centre at the University of Westminster in London arranges in May 5 screenings and filmmaking discussions under the headline: The Factual and the Fictive: A series of screenings/talks exploring hybrid fiction/documentary film-making. One session is dedicated to…
1989 will be remembered in festivals and on tv. And documentaries will be a strong visual element to show the changes that took place when the Berlin Wall went down, followed by the decline of the USSR. The following text…
472 pages. Full of illustrations – still from films, photos from award ceremonies at festivals all over the world, the 45th edition of the International Film Guide is available. With ”Directors of the Year”, a ”World Survey”, info/reports/highlights country by…
Wow, they deserve it! Atanas Georgiev, director and his team, who can add one more acknowledgement to the one they got at ZagrebDox some months ago at the world premiere: Last night they were awarded the ”Regards Neufs Prize” at…
The Danish Film Institute invited national documentarians to take part in a one day meeting at the Danish Film House. This yearly meeting took place monday this week and served to create a forum for a dialogue between the film…
More than 700 million people are voting in India from April 16 till May 13. The vote goes for the election of members to the Lok Sabha, the lower house of the Parliament of India. The French-German cultural channel has…
The Danish Film House in Copenhagen and its excellent Cinemateket puts a focus on British documentary through 8 programmes in the month of May. There is a selection of the classics from the 30’es (Night Mail, Listen to Britain, O…
Lars Gehrmann, film student at Zelig in Bolzano, has, on his blog, made the following reference from a new short film “Immersion”, produced by the New York Times, to a documentary classic: 1978 Latvian film maker Herz Frank did a…
Look at that photo. Something is wrong. Yes, it is our beloved Jacques Tati on his Solex, as we remember him as M. Hulot. But he has something strange in his mouth. Not the usual pipe but one of those…
Produced 20 years ago, this masterpiece of Nicolas Philibert is as fresh as on the day of release. It is a fascinating look at what happens behind the scene at the magnificent museum in Paris. At the end of the…
Morgane turns 18. She lives with her father and brother. Her mother lives somewhere else. Morgane still keeps her teddy bears lined up at her bed, but she is also the young girl on her way to adulthood caring about…
The camera work is brilliant. It is a constant caress of the protagonist of this short documentary from Georgia. Her name is Altzaney and she is the one who is trusted to solve problems in the local community in the…
Still photos from a prostitution environment, without any persons pictured, accompany the words from a witness statement to the police. It is a alarming declaration read by a male voice, straight forward and neutral without any attempt to touch the…
A minimalistic film school diploma work, full of tension and importance, with a terrifying story told through staged interviews with the director’s parents, a sister and a boyfriend. Intertwined to these fragments of words that carry the narrative – about…
20 years have gone since the architect I.M. Pei could show his Louvre pyramid to the public. Heavily discussed back then, but now in general considered as an architectural masterpiece of our time, one of the many monuments decided by…
The film was released in December 2006 but I did not get to see it before this saturday afternoon, thanks to SVT, Swedish Television: The story about John Lennon being harrassed by the American authorities during the Nixon administration. He…
A piece of promotion for a serious and competent publishing house with an excellent newsletter with links to events (conferences like the one below about Pasolini and Fassbinder, and festivals) and first of all info on new books on the…
A conference called ”Pasolini and Fassbinder: the European legacy between Utopia and nihilism” is to be held at Cardiff University, April 25-26. The interesting programme is to be found via the link below. Here is an excerpt from the introductory…
URTI stands for Université Radiophonique et Télévisuelle Internationale, and for the 28th time the organisation will give an award, the International Grand Prix for Author’s Documentaries (what is equivalent to ”creative documentaries” or ”author driven documentaries, ed.) in connection with…
A new Congo-film by Thierry Michel (photo) opened in French cinemas today. And gets a fine review in “le monde”. I visited the film’s web site, which is extraordinarily well constructed with trailer, extracts from the film, extracts from the…
The ECCOS (European Cultural Capital On Screen) organised by Belgian Associate Directors has this year a focus on Lithuanian documentaries to celebrate that Vilnius is Cultural Capital of Europe. In connection with the filmfestival Open Doek in Antwerp a masterclass…