ZagrebDOX
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…
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
Læs mereZagrebDOX
ZagrebDOXPro
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…
Slumdog Millionaire – Anthony Dod Mantle
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…
Festivals collaborate on vod
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…
von Platen et al.: Long Bien Bridge
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…
Avi Mograbi
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…
Nils Vest: An Oppressed People is Always Right
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…
Manden der ville redde Saddam / Saving Saddam
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…
DR: Dokumania
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…
Danish Awards 2009
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…
Czech Doc Awards
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…
Peter Entell
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…
My Iranian Paradise
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…
Meeting the Film Makers
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…
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…
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…