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From without and from within the cinema is dying, if not already dead. You shoot a dinosaur in the head on a Monday but the goddamned animal is so big and clumsy and stupid it will not roll over till…

It is huge in content and very professional in communication. The festival in Toronto gets closer as does the parallel TDF, Toronto Documentary Forum: April 30-May 10 for the festival, May 6-7 for the forum. A newsletter comes out for…

Be careful if you are German, has made a good documentary and wants it to go to DOK Leipzig 2009. New regulations have been introduced, read this press release: Starting in 2009, all films screened in DOK Leipzig’s German Competition…

It is not very often that jury motivations are useful to read. This one is, from the documentary competition at the Belfast Film Festival, named after the Maysles Brothers. The members were Karolina Lidin, Charlie Philips and Ben Kempas. Here…

Documentary festivals flourish. For the 4th time ”Doc a Tunis” takes place, April 1st to 5th. A lot of films are shown from the host country, and from Marocco, Algeria and Libanon, and from Syria comes the film ”Dolls. A…

The Idfa based Jan Vrijman Fund, named after the late Dutch documentarian, who made several great films, including one about the COBRA painter Karel Appel, has finished the first round selection for 2009, second round deadline June 1st. The fund…

The excellent “One World Human Rights Film Festival” in Prague is over and awards have been distributed. One of the awards not only carry the name of Vaclac Havel but when I was there years ago, I was told that…

The annual EDN award for 2009 goes to Nenad Puhovski and his ZagrebDox. The motivation goes like this: ZagrebDox is a documentary event initiated by Nenad Puhovski, consisting of a weeklong festival and a financing forum entitled ZagrebDox Pro. Within…

”Six Ordinary Stories” by Syrian director Meyar Al Roumi is a quite refreshing report on six ordinary taxi drivers and their work and life in Damascus. Ordinary, well also extraordinarily open they are as well as critical to the life…

Another fine new initiative from DoxBox 2009 is the “Point of View” festival newsletter. Editor-in-chief is Danish Ulla Jacobsen, who by this year decided to leave the post of the DOX Magazine after more than a decade as the brilliant…

The writing workshop is over. An amazing development from Day 1 to Day 3. 5 documentary projects are ready to be piitched internationally. Projects with quality and passion. The doors should be opened for these filmmakers to proceed to the…

Second day of a workshop organised by DoxBox that really has put an emphasis on establishing a so-called industry section of the two year old festival. Mikael Opstrup and I tutor 6 filmmakers with projects and 6 with no projects.…

Nicholas Philibert is here. Three films have been shown, “Le Pays des Sourds”, “Retour en Normandie” and “La moindre des choses”. Last year the Syrian audience could enjoy “Etre et Avoir”. Philibert did a master class, denied to be called…

It is sometimes difficult to understand the mechanisms of censorship. I saw the funny, maybe a bit repetitive documentary by Massoud Bakhshi, “Tehran has no more Pomegranates”, a playful and well made film about the big city, using wonderful archive,…

It is one of those minimalistic films that subject-wise has been seen so many times: Man lives alone outside the cities, big house, animals – cows, chicken, horses, cats and dogs – he has retired from the noisy world full…

Orwa Nyrabia, together with Diana el-Jeiroudi the founder and director of the festival: We considered 300 films. 90 of them we requested for the selection. 100 passed for the selection committee, 6 people, and out came the around 40 films…

Second edition. Second time that Damascus has an international documentary film festival. The programme is enlarged, there is an industry section, sidebar retrospectives, it is all there. Impressive it is to be back. Full house at the opening film, “China…

Second edition of the documentary festival in Damascus, Tartous and Homs in Syria. Reports from the 1st edition can be found on filmkommentaren.dk. I dont have the programme schedule yet but have seen the list of films and guests who…

It is the fourth time the programmer Cian Smyth organises the documentary festival ”within” the Belfast Film Festival, March 26- April 4. And again it is a pleasure to see a varied selection of high quality films, 44 in all,…

Awards were given out tonite at ZagrebDOX. The regional awards are the ones to be noticed signaling strongly the current high quality. All 3 films have or will have a well deserved international recognition. The two first have been written…

It took some time for director Atanas Georgiev (Macedonia), his producer Sinisha Juricic (Croatia) and coproducer Ralph Wiser (Austria) to make and finish ”Cash and Marry”, which will be a hit at festivals in the coming year. As it very…

12 projects from the region. I can not mention them all but again I must say that the validity of the argument, so often expressed on this place, that originality and creativeness in documentaries come from the Eastern part of…

The ZagrebPro is the training and pitching session of the festival. 12 projects from the region were presented to 8 committed panelists, who contributed with critical, constructive and encouraging comments to the directors and producers present: Veteran Franz Grabner from…

“Man on Wire” as best long documentary, several times mentioned on this place. Here is a clip and some links: … the filmmaker – as the red thread of the narrative – builds up a suspense story in a montage…

The CMCA (Centre Méditerranéen de la Communication Audiovisuelle), based in Marseilles, provides very useful information about what happens in the region through a free monthly newsletter in French ”Méditerranée Audiovisuelle” that is also available in an English version. The organisation…

Success story: DocsBarcelona 2009 closed (10 days ago) with a room full of people to watch Brett Gaylor’s “RIP: A Remix Manifesto”. The film brought to the end six days of activities meant to encourage the creation and interest in…

There he is, festival director, producer and teacher Nenad Puhovski, who now for the 5th time launches a documentary festival in Croatia, and thus welcomes the world of documentaries in the heart of Zagreb. A clip from the welcome text…

Within the festival ZagrebDOX, see above, a project development and pitching session has taken place for several years and will take place again in 2009, where 13 projects have been chosen. Cecilia Lidin from EDN and I have the privilige…

Good access news. Festivals help each other, we are not used to that, and establish a vod. Says the IDF site docuinter.net: On February 10, 2009 Berlinale hosts a special presentation. Doc Alliance, an association of Europe’s five key documentary…

At DOCSBarcelona Israeli director Avi Mograbi had two screenings of his latest film, ”Z 32”, a film that I have praised several times on filmkommentaren.dk On top of that the director performed a three hour masterclass for 180 people according…