A film blog by Allan Berg Nielsen & Tue Steen Müller
A film blog by Allan Berg Nielsen & Tue Steen Müller
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…
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…
In 1972 Italian maestro Michelangelo Antonioni went to China to make a documentary for RAI with a duration of 3 ½ hours. The film, that was shown in cinemas in Italy and on television, and in a shorter version in…
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…
7 biografer viser Let’s Be Together i denne måned. In 7 Danish cinemas the new documentary by big talent Nanna Frank Møller is shown. Here is a repeat of the review made in connection with cph:dox last year: That Nanna…
It’s one of those great documentary moments. Barack Obama walks with Gordon Brown towards Downing Street. Obama stretches out his hand to say hello to the policeman in front of the building, they shake hands, Brown moves in the same…
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…