Magnificent7 2009/3
Look at the picture. This couple, Svetlana and Zoran Popovic, stands behind the Magnificent7 festival in Belgrade. I have known them for years and have had the privilege to work with them for five years on the selection for the…
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 MoreMagnificent7 2009/3
Magnificent7 2009/2
We experience right now the golden age of documentary. There has never been such a huge interest from an audience that age-wise mostly is young and has given up on television! And there have never been such an amount of…
Magnificent7 2009/1
It is such an adventure to go to the cinema for four days to watch 7 films that are received with enthusiasm and emotion by the most wonderful audience I know, the one in Belgrade. You can not overestimate the…
DOCSBarcelona 2009
Step by step the DOCSBarcelona has grown into an international documentary event of great importance in the city that right now hosts the best football team in the world. It is now a festival and a pitching forum. The organiser…
Picasso and Delacroix
Earlier I wrote about Picasso and Manet, one of several parts of the exhibition ”Picasso et les maitres”. Now, back in Paris for some days, Louvre was the location to visit to see the master’s variation of the Delacroix painting…
Anthony Dod Mantle
They were queueing outside the cinema at Odéon in Paris. To get in to watch the new international hit directed by Danny Boyle, ”Slumdog Millionaire”, which is not going to be reviewed here, it has been all over, and touching…
James Marsh: Man on Wire (2)
Special service for our Danish readers as the film opens in cinemas in Denmark tomorrow – I made a review 4 months ago on filmkommentaren. Go to search and write James Marsh: Man on Wire. Here are some words of…
Premiere: Den bevægede jord
Jeg husker med begejstring Lars Becker-Larsens energiske film “Teorien om alting” med den karismatiske teoretiske fysiker Holger Bech Nielsen, som dengang i 1997 blændende indførte os i højenergifysikken og gjorde status over arbejdet med at nå en “ultimativ, sammenfattende beskrivelse…
Magnificent7 2009
The European Feature Documentary Film Festival in Belgrade, organised by Svetlana and Zoran Popovic from the Kvadrat Film School and in collaboration with the Sava Center, has published the 2009 programme: read here As I have had the privilege to…
Hammarsberg m.fl.: Maggie/Guldbaggen
A review of a good film can be repeated. That is the case for this documentary that got the Swedish Guldbaggen award as best documentary of 2008, at the ceremoney where most of the prizes very much deserved went to…
Joao Moreira Salles: Santiago
It is one of those films that is a must for documentary addicts like me, and why not for people who in general are interested in the examination of the relationship between the filmmaker and his/her victims, their protagonists, their…
Sarkozy (2) and French Television
Yesterday commercials disappeared from French public television from 8pm in the evening until 6am next morning. Tomorrow the French Senate starts the examination of the text for a reform of “l’audiovisuel public”, initiated by president Sarkozy. The French independent producers…
Docpoint 2009
The Finnish documentary festival celebrates Broomfield and Leacock. It points in the direction of a selection policy that respects the old masters, which is furthermore stressed by the latest news from festival director Erkko Lyytinen on the dokblog of YLE.…
World Documentary 2008
I am not going to nominate the 10 Best, even if I like these kind of games. If you browse through filmkommentaren.dk, click ”Articles/Reviews ENGLISH”, you will find the priorities of mine. When I again and again have written ”East…
Danish Documentary 2008
Below you will find a couple of brief status articles on Danish documentaries in the year that is about to finish, 2008. Nothing sensational, nothing quality-wise to be compared to ”The Monastery”, the Danish documentary from the last years but…
Agnes Varda: Les Plages d’Agnès
From le monde 16.12.08, a clip from the review of Jean-Luc Douin, for our French reading readers, about a film that previously was praised briefly by my colleague Allan Berg: ”Toute mémoire est en désordre, toute sensation difficile à capturer,…
Sight and Sound: The Best of 2008
The highly estimated film magazine Sight & Sound has made its hit list for 2008, to be published in the January 09 issue. Winner is Steve McQueen’s Hunger. This is a clip from what the editor Steve James wrote about…
Sourav Sarangi: Bilal
Bilal is a boy, whose parents are blind and have a hard life in a poor area of Calcutta. For a year the director has followed the little boy stumbling into the world as any other child does, who is…
D. Taylor Black: David Farrell’s Elusive Moments
This documentary is an inspiration for people, who deal with, work with or like to watch a photographer at work and listen to his thoughts about what he is doing and why and how. The documentary has for me too…
Volha Nikalaichyk: Khash
An envelope arrived with a dvd. Posted in Lithuania by Volha Nikalaichyk, a woman from Belarus, producer of documentary films, and many times a participant in workshops in Eastern Europe, outside her own country, where I also met her once,…
1/2 Meter of Berliner Bratwurst
… yes, you can buy that in the streets of Berlin, ready for the xmas holidays as this wonderful city is, markets all over, too many sausages for my taste but also glühwein and chocolate and marzipan and beer, economic…
Sarkozy (1)
… is the name of the hyper active French president, very much disliked by the French film people I know, for his law proposal, his ”réforme de l’audiovisuel” that (according to le Monde 18.12) now has passed through the Parliament…
Justin Webster: The Madrid Connection
March 11 2004, the bombings in Madrid. 191 people died, more than 2000 were wounded, when trains were exploded in the early morning. Two young males stood behind the crime, Jamal and Sarhane, a criminal and an islamic extremist, both…
Docpoint Celebrates Documentary Legends
The British Dochouse at the Riverside Studios in London does a lot for the creation of a documentary culture in the UK… but is apparently not only promoting films within the UK but also outside. I found this very interesting…
Warhol in Berlin
It is still fascinating and entertaining to watch Andy Warhol exhibitions: ”If you want to know all about AW, just look at the surface of my paintings and films and me, and there I am. There´s nothing behind it”. Sounds…
EDN new chairman
Many other sites have already informed about this. Now we do so as well, even if personalia is not our stuff. BUT Mikael Opstrup has published his documentary poetics on filmkommentaren.dk, in Danish and English, just search ”Mikael Opstrup…”. Here…
Dainis Klava: Aigi (Time)
Trying to understand what is going on in the world takes a lot of time. These banal but wise words come from the old reindeer herder, who is the character of this visually strong reflection on time in an isolated…
Werner Herzog Retro in Paris
Le Monde (11.12.08) includes an interview with Werner Herzog to announce the big retrospective of the German master and his around 50 films. The series run from December 10 to March 2 2009. He says nothing specific new in this…
Katrine Østlund Jacobsen: Aftaler med Gud
Filmen er en af nyhederne på Filmstriben.dk og den blev vist i MandagsDokumentaren for nogen tid siden. Ebbe Preisler noterede efter visningen i sine meddelelser, at publikum stillede instruktøren en lang række spørgsmål om hendes “meget rene og ukunstlede film”, som netop er “langt…
Anders Østergaard: Burma-VJ
… that has the subtitle, ”reporting from a closed country” is content-wise a totally shocking experience. There you are in the middle of a military brutality that is filmed by courageous video journalists, who know that a documentation like this…
Helena Trestikova: René
Am I just an object of study for you, René asks Helena, the director of the film, in one of their numerous conversations during the 20 years, she has followed the child/the youngster/theman René, who spends most of his life…
EFA – Sergey Dvortsevoy, Documentary
Sergey Dvortsevoy thinks it is important to reflect on WHY you make documentaries, well film in general. He started late as a filmmaker, he made ”Paradise”, ”Bread Day”, ”Highway”, ”In the Dark” and now ”Tulpan”, the latter a film with…
EFA and Copenhagen and Documentary
Below – in Danish – a critical text about yesterday’s broadcast produced by DR, our public broadcaster in Denmark. Today I met some of the participants at the party for European films, organised by European Film Academy, EFA. They had…
Eva Weber: The Solitary Life of Cranes
Sometimes it is easy to express your opinion. Like in this case where I found a text from the film critic at The Guardian, Nick Bradshaw (November 28), that precisely and in much better English than I can perform –…
Cinemateket: Den etnografiske dokumentar
Der er mulighed for søde gensyn og nyopdagelser i Cinematekets december-program. Under overskriften ”Den etnografiske dokumentar” er der Basil Wright (”Song of Ceylon”), flere gange Jean Rouch, inklusiv foredrag om ham, den fremragende Vietnamfilm af Trinh T. Minh-ha fra 1989…
IDFA Awards
Taken from the idfa site: The VPRO Joris Ivens Award was presented to Anders Østergaard for Burma VJ – Reporting From a Closed Country. The film consists almost completely of material filmed in secret by a group of reporters during…
Laura Poitras: My Country My Country
This review has been written by Georg Bocher, direction student at the Zelig Documentary film School in Bolzano: The first two minutes leaves no doubt about the scope of this documentary. It is between the most private family life and…
Måns Månsson: Mr. Governor
You wonder why it is interesting to watch a man, who sits at his desk browsing through a newspaper for more than a minute. It is. There is no computer at that desk, the governor of Uppsala uses a pen…
Dogan & Eskikoy: On the Way to School
The Kurdish in Turkey – a long and complicated story about a people being suppressed. We have seen loads of news reports and some political documentaries about a conflict full of blood, and also for that reason it is nice…
IDFA Forum 1
The last day of the Forum at idfa in Amsterdam. For those who have never heard about it, let this text be the introduction, taken from the site of idfa: ”The FORUM is Europe’s largest gathering of filmmakers, television commissioning…
IDFA Forum 2 – What´s on the Agenda?
It is without any doubt absolutely fantastic to see all these documentary professionals gather in one room to exchange ideas, catch up from the last gathering, offer new projects, comment on the last films which have been watched or broadcast…
IDFA Forum 3 – East Beats West
I know that I am biased in the following – working for the Institute for Documentary Films (IDF) in Prague that organises the Ex Oriente Film training Programme and the East European Forum in Jihlava – but I have to…
IDFA Forum. We, the Commissioning Editors
Here we come, monday morning, entering the arena in Amsterdam. Big room, round table, space for audience. They are all looking at us, when we react to the pitching. For many of us the body language communicates fatigue, another pitching…
Valentin Valchev: See you at the Eiffel tower
A Bulgarian filmmaker makes a film for a charming, warm and smiling American photographer, Marion Michelle. He met her during the research for a film to be made in the footsteps of Joris Ivens, who made his ”The First Years”…
Isabel Grünwald: Brothers
Something went wrong. Difficult to say what. Anyhow, the two old brothers live together but do not communicate. Somewhere in the north of Bavaria, in the countryside, where Heiner has inherited the farm and Fritz takes care of the household.…
Ferenc Moldoványi: Another Planet
With German master director Edgar Reitz (”Heimat”) as the president of the jury, the International Film Festival of Mannheim-Heidelberg gave the Special Jury Award to ”Another Planet” (see also review, go to ”search”). Here follows the motivation: “There are films…
Opstrup: The documentary Narrative 4
THE DOCUMENTARY NARRATIVE (Now in an English version) The creation of the documentary – compared to the documentary programme and the fiction film. Mikael Opstrup 1. Fiction is defined by the story. A course of events that is written down…
Mikael Opstrup: The documentary Narrative 3
Remark to Ib Bondebjerg by Mikael Opstrup Thanks for Ib Bondebjergs comment on my ‘Den dokumentariske fortælling’ which I guess can be translated to ‘The documentary narrative’. However it misses my approach to the matter. Remark to Ib Bondebjerg by…
Ib Bondebjerg: A Poetics for the Documentary
A poetics for the Documentary – basic genres and formats Ib Bondebjerg I think it is a very valuable endeavour Opstrup (ed.: Mikael Opstrup: “The documentary Narrative / Den dokumentariske fortælling”, 9.10.08 on this site, written in Danish and English. Search on…
Seth Gordon: The King of Kong
János Richter, direction student at the Zelig Documentary Film School in Bolzano has written this review: Billy Mitchell has a carefully styled mullet haircut and wears patriotic ties. His whole appearance communicates his conception of perfection. He is the owner…