A film blog by Allan Berg Nielsen & Tue Steen Müller
A film blog by Allan Berg Nielsen & Tue Steen Müller
Classical documentary approach: Something is wrong, we have to tell about it, let’s go and get the facts and convey them to the world. That’s what Arto Halonen, Finnish documentary director, and journalist Kevin Frazier decides to do. With a…
It starts as a film about a third ”…wood” after Holly- and Bollywood: Nollywood from Nigeria. But it takes place in Antwerp, where a young man, John, wants to be a superstar in this kind of right-to-the-heart, often moralistic, home-movie…
Tuesday evening May 6, Riga, the old fine cinema in the middle of the city. I am invited to the premiere of a film, that I have had the privilege to follow for a couple of years. The director Peteris…
I don’t need to write a lot about this film, do I? The winner of IDFA 2007, screened and awarded at an enormous amount of festivals, broadcast all over, including in Denmark. A well constructed dramatic story with a wonderful…
This music documentary film is about Swiss music – the famous and for many, including me, unbearable yodel – and Swiss artists who have developed their music from the yodel into a great innovative and fascinating rythmic play with the…
What a darling! Very simple idea, charming main character, a film for all ages about a young student, who earns his money as a porter, and carries a coca cola fridge up the mountain to a place where it can…
Catherine Destivelle is the name and after numerous films (at the Trento Film Festival) about people dying in the mountains, and about heroes who save people, or fight the mountains – it was such a relief to meet a female…
Normally you say that something must be wrong if you leave the cinema to say that the cinematography was excellent, but the rest of the film… You do say so with this ambitious film but it is justified because it…
Here are the results of the jury work. 4 of the films will be reviewed in the coming 3 days. Plus one that did not get a prize: Stranded. Gran Premio “Città di Trento” – Gold Gentian and 5000 Euro…
Time for banalities. My own ones and examples from the films I have seen. Word banalities. My own first: Wow, how much the viewing situation means for your evaluation of a film. Being in a jury you will always watch…
Last day of watching. I write this while another commercially thought tv documentary is running on the screen. Makes me think about this genre where you can argue that the scenography – the mountains with or without snow – is…
The jury has seen 25 films in 3 days. Diversity is the word that applies to the selection. But also quality in most of the films, in very different formats and storytelling traditions. Diversity because there are several films for…
… have to break the news that “Blind Loves” made it to Cannes! As expected and as so well deserved. Juraj Lehotsky is in the Director´s Fortnight section with names as Jerzy Skolimowski and Claire Simon. Congratulations and may this…
I am in Trento, in the jury of the Trento Film Festival that has the thematic subtitle: Montagna. Esplorazione. Avventura. The festival starts today and goes on until May 4. 34 films are in competition, short and long. It is…
Renata Medero, documentary film student at Zelig, Bolzano, Italy, writes this review of a neo- classic: Unforgettable images… whether you like it or not. Some films deliver images to never be forgotten, some beautiful, some not. But – what happens…
Holiday. The family goes to the countryside, to the datcha. We don’t know if it is far away, probably not if you judge from the condition of the car, that has severe problems in getting started. It can not have…
A quote from DOX Magazine 74 (www.edn.dk), page 16, from a discussion between Neelima Mathur and Iikka Vehkalahti on “Universality vs Diversity”. Vehkalahti from YLE Finland writes: … perhaps it is that in the genre of cinéma vérité – as…
A good title for a documentary? At least a title that calls for sympathy for the one flying? And for some experience shared by other people: A man comes to the airport. He wants to check in, goes to the…
A Love Affair – and a small follow-up on the review of “Blind Loves”: It all started around 1990. Even though I had been working for the National Film Board of Denmark since 1975, my knowledge was very limited when…
I saw this beautiful film sunday morning in Vienna during the Ex Oriente first session ( www.docuinter.net ). The director Juraj Lehotsky took the short way from Bratislava to show us a feature length, four chaptered (following the loves stories…
This is a pure commercial for one of the most important documentaries from the last years. Timo Novotny’s film has been shown all over the world, it has been awarded for its innovation of the genre, it is a vision…
Make extraordinary film about ordinary people, and ordinary films about extraordinary characters! It is very easy to apply this slogan to the film about Marianne Greenwood, a citizen of the world, an adventurer, a writer and photographer. A woman with…
I know it is rather subtle but I have to express my boyish entusiasm after a football match tonite where Michael Laudrup, the best football player Denmark has ever had, made his underdog team, Getafe from Madrid play 1-1 in…
It is a fairy tale. Could only happen in the country of Hans Christian Andersen! Danish film director, poet and journalist Jørgen Leth meets a Danish millionaire and expresses how much he would like his films to be published on…
The letter below, written to film consultant Dola Bonfils from DFI (Danish Film Institute) reacts to the fact that more and more of the support from the DFI is allocated to journalists with current affairs issued to be made into…
To the Danish readers and tv viewers, in Danish: HUSK AT SE DR2 21.40 I AFTEN hvor “Sangfugle” bliver vist, et hit over den ganske verden. Here is an excerpt from the review written on this blog (the film is…
Can you write about ”Fitna” as a film? Can you separate it from all the furore the film has already created due to its content and the fear for consequences? Can you do so with a film everyone talked about…
Wish I were in Rio de Janeiro or Sao Paulo! For the 8th time Amir Labaki (it started yesterday) launches his documentary film festival with the provoking Orson Welles inspired name “It’s All True”. I was there years ago as…
The interview that Allan Berg refers to in his Danish language article “La Jetée” is in English and is one of the very rare conversations that are printed with the enigmatic French master. The interview is wonderful reading. Here are…
May sound very “internal” to many of you, and it is indeed. But you should know about the fact that Institute of Documentary Film in Prague has been rightfully honoured by its sister/brother institution European Documentary Network. I am very…
The documentary film about Vaclav Havel (directed by Pavel Koutecký and Miroslav Janek) has now been seen by 100.000 viewers in the Czech Republic. The film was released in January 2008, runs 119 minutes but can now also be seen…
The festival is over. The prizes have been given. It happened saturday night and the winner was Volker Koepp with his story about the children in Kaliningrad, ”Holunderblüte”. No objections, not at all, Koepp is a master and deserves to…
Maybe – at the end of the day – documentary festivals will be events that you travel to in big numbers as you travel to visit art exhibitions, says Allan, my co-blogger. He could be right if you consider the…
Saturday morning in the café. The sun is shining in Paris today. In 90 minutes we have booked the videotheque to catch up with some films in the international competition. And then a couple of films later this day. Here…
It is raining cats and stones in Paris. No spring feeling yet. Nevertheless the cafés are full outside as all the smokers are situated there now. No smoking inside. Full houses at the festival for the two screenings in the…
I am sitting in the niveau -1 in the Centre Pompidou. This is where the acceuil for the Cinema du Réel is situated. As always in the Centre during the festival, it is difficult to create anything just close to…
Yes, for those who do not read Danish, “we” (Allan Berg Nielsen and me, Tue Steen Müller) leave for Paris tomorrow to follow the 30th edition of Cinéma du Réel, which took off with the subtitle “antropological and ethnographic films”.…
Allan refers to the point 5 in the Minnesota Declaration of Werner Herzog: “5. There are deeper strata of truth in cinema, and there is such a thing as poetic, ecstatic truth. It is mysterious and elusive, and can be…
This documentary from 1992 tells about Sergei Parajanov (1924-1990), considered to be one of the masters of cinema, far too little known compared to his importance as it is said on the website www.parajanov.com that honours him, brings quotes about…
The director was – in his own words – given a second chance after a brain tumor operation. The doctors gave him three years more to live and he has used these three years to – own words again –…
Allan Berg, my fellow blogger, is fascinated by Werner Herzog. And indeed, he is a great filmmaker, who has brought something new to the documentary genre. “Little Dieter Needs to Fly”, as an example, is a pure masterpiece. Allan advises…
I missed it when it was at cph:dox last year but the Swedish broadcaster SVT2 had it on its excellent strand KSpecial programme last night. And I was glad to see it. Not so much because of the film itself…
15 documentary projects were presented at the ZagrebDox pitching thursday the 28th of February. There were 9 commissioning editors around the table. 4 from the West (Arte, YLE, ORF, Jan Vrijman Fund) and 4 from the region, from the Bosnian,…
The new photos at the top of filmkommentaren.dk are showing, from the left, Danish director Joergen Leth and his cameraman Henning Camre on the set of Notes on Love, Werner Herzog in action – which film is that…. – and…
He wrote “The History of the Great Men”, 30.000 pages about the universal aristocracy. He wrote it in his small kitchen and he had all the pages neatly organised on a shelf in his bed room. The great men and…
Last day of festival. I have a seminar in the morning where I present the state of the art of documentary in Europe. I am trying to find the right approach to the audience which includes people, who come because…
Sometimes, actually very often, reality cheats you, or in this case the weather! While I was in safe surroundings inside the Al Kindi cinema to a session about ethics and documentaries, about the relation between the filmmaker and the person…
It is monday morning and once again I find myself with Pirjo Honkasalo and Niels Pagh Andersen, who are to talk about ”3 Rooms of Melancholia”. For four hours with 25 people in the hall. It goes very well, we…
No, they don’t know it or them, says Orwa Nyrabia, one of the DOX BOX organisers, when I doubt him stating that the audience to the seminar of French academic Martin Barbier, ”Back to Basics”, had never heard about ”Nanook…
Full house for the film of Omar Amiralay from 1982, ”The Misfortune of Some”, produced for the French channel Antenne 2, during the Lebanese war. Amiralay is the Syrian documentary filmmaker, his films have been shown all over the world,…