A film blog by Allan Berg Nielsen & Tue Steen Müller
A film blog by Allan Berg Nielsen & Tue Steen Müller
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…
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…
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…
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…
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.…
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…
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…
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,…
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…
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…
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…
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,…
… 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…
… 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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
… 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…
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…
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…
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…
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 –…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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”…
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.…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
2008 CPH:DOX awards have been given out at the CPH:DOX Galla. DOX:AWARD 2008: went to Anders Østergaard for “Burma VJ”, with a Special Mention to Mark Hammersberg, Ester Martin Bergsmark and Beatrice Maggie Andersson for “Maggie in Wonderland” (see review).…
From the very well organised industry part of the the festival, I would like to highlight 3 of the projects that I am looking forward to see as finished film: ”Into Eternity” from Danish Michael Madsen and his producer Lise…
A learning lab. This is what Tine Mosegaard, the organiser, called the DOX-Forum in the catalogue intro for the 3 day industry event, an integrated part of the film festival. A programme consisting of pitching sessions and seminars like the…
Nomally panel discussions are boring with a lot of repetitions. This one was different. The panelists complemented each other and were open in their sharing information and points of views on the involvement of the art museums in distributing films.…
Around 20 minutes into this staged documentary I started to get impatient. Come on, make the story move, we got the message, the neighbours dont like each others, they dont talk, it is a silent war, where they will not…
Trefeurig is the name of a small village community in Wales. This is where director and cameraman Gideon Koppel takes us – on a stunningly beautiful, wonderfully slow, and editing-like surprising voyage that I have difficulties in forgetting after two…
We met him years ago, this Hungarian director, who stood behind the much discussed, but great film ”Children of Kosovo”. We, meaning colleague Allan Berg and I, who defended the director’s right to use extremely aesthetical cinematographic means to describe…
Jakob Skovgaard Petersen, his wife and their two children were in Cairo for some years. Petersen was appointed Head of the Danish-Egyptian Dialogue Institute and he was there during the cartoon crisis. A brilliant and knowledgeable man, not only a…