A film blog by Allan Berg Nielsen & Tue Steen Müller
A film blog by Allan Berg Nielsen & Tue Steen Müller
It is an obvious story- to go to the amusement park in Vienna, the Prater, famous also for the Harry Lime tune, Orson Welles and Joseph Cotten, but in this case it is a documentary that brings us stories about…
If you happen to be around Nyon in Switzerland on tuesday April 28, you should go and meet one of the few real stars in documentary cinema, Russian director Sergey Dvortsevoy. He has been invited to Visions du Réel and…
Here is a call for help from Belarussian Lyceum Headmaster and documentary director Uladzimir Kolas (see picture). Kolaz, who recently made the fine festival touring documentary ”Ada Gallery” is setting up a film education in his lyceum that is the…
Finally the succesful Danish cinema will be celebrated. By the Danes themselves. In the park next to the Film House in Copenhagen an Arc de Triomph will be raised that should be minimum 24 meter high. And have three dimensions…
Yves Jeanneau, well known character in French documentary, ex-television editor and ex-producer at Films d’Ici, now producer and CEO of the Sunny Side of the Docs, was interviewed by le Monde (March 29-30). One of the questions went like this:…
German public channel Das Erste (”The First”) currently runs a four part series (of each 45 minutes) about and with war (WW2) children. The series made through the MDR, that is based in Leipzig, and produced by local company LE…
In Kolin where the 1st session of the Ex Oriente MEDIA supported training programme takes place, we had a fruitful visit of the German cameraman Lars Barthel. He showed us the new film of Helga Reidemeister, ”War and Love in…
The direct cinema or call it the observational is still alive and strong. I thought about that yesterday here in Kolin in Czech Republic, where director and editor Erez Laufer showed the film of Laura Poitras from 2006, ”My Country,…
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…
For 70 years, the National Film Board of Canada has been breaking ground in socially-engaged documentary, auteur animation, alternative drama and more! This is how the NFB/ONF (Office National du Film du Canada) modestly, in small letters, celebrates itself on…
”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,…
… stands for the excellent, weekly electronic newsletter published by the MEDIA Desk France & Antennes Media Strasbourg & Grand Sud. Editor Christine Mazerau. Excellent, because it is so rich in information, goes far beyond the promotion and information on…
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 very active news service provided by Cinéma du Réel informs about an upcoming retrospective series of Joris Ivens at the Cinémathèque française (51 rue de Bercy, 75012 Paris) from March 5th to April 5th. The text goes like this:…
I have written several times about the new film of Avi Mograbi, and about this very important documentary filmmaker. I do it with pleasure again by quoting the review of renowned critique Jacques Mandelbaum, just published in connection with the…
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…
I’ve been photographed enough, she answers, when Maximilian Schell asks her, why she does not want to appear visually in his documentary. Indeed she had and it does not matter as Schell makes a point out of this, organises a…
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…
Total respect for the 20 year old Czech director, who has completed her first feature length documentary and got it into cinemas where it still runs after a month. And even more respect for her choice of own childhood experience…
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…
Prestigious BAFTA (British Academy of Film and Television Arts) ceremony in London had Slumdog Millionaire nominated in 11 categories. It won in seven, including Best Cinematography, which gives us another chance to say bravo to Anthony Dod Mantle, about whom…
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…
Hanoi, Vietnam. A legendary bridge. People, people, people. Working, walking, exercising, motorbiking, repairing, waiting, cleaning, haircutting, cell phoning, water, steel, construction, trains from inside and outside. No dialogue, no interviews, pure observation, no arrangement, small sequences, small human interactions, small…
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…
Danish director Nils Vest offers his controversial Palestine film, shot in a refugee camp in Southern Lebaning in 1974, to be watched online for free, or to be bought at his company. His contact details are mentioned below. Utrættelige Nils…
Team Productions forsynede mig venligt med en kopi af den helt nye danske version (release 1. december) af filmen, så jeg på Den Skandinaviske Designskole i aftes kunne vise den sammen med Eva Mulvads “Vores lykkes fjender” fra 2006 for…
It is not very often you feel like praising the programming of a public broadcaster when it comes to documentaries. But what DR, the Danish public broadcaster, has done by introduction of the prime time slot (8.40pm every tuesday) Dokumania…
At a ceremony saturday February 1st the Danish Film Academy Robert Awards 2009 were given, including documentaries in a short and long category. The winners were for the Best Short Documentary “Little Miss Grown-Up” (photo), director Anders Gustafsson and Patrik…
Better late than never they seem to think in Czech Republic, a country with a fine documentary tradition. This is what is reported from the IDF (Institute of Documentary Film) Headquarter in Prague, from one of the best written and…
What a pleasure to listen to Peter Entell at the masterclass in Belgrade in connection with the Magnificent7 festival. Well prepared he showed clips from his previous films, talked about them and about his way of filmmaking, especially related to…
Katia Forbert Petersen’s & Annette Mari Olsen’s film has a theatrical screening at the Louisiana Museet in Humlebæk, Denmark, february, 10th at 19:30. Tue Steen Müller wrote an interview with the directors published in FILM’s IDFA edition nov. 2008. Read here Katia Forbert…
You might say that the films should be able to stand on their own. And right you are. You should be able to understand and sense a film without any introduction or comment or explanation. To watch it on your…