Sight & Sound on Documentaries

The good old, well esteemed English film magazine Sight & Sound has just published its September issue with a special focus on documentaries, titled “The Power of Documentary”. I did not buy it yet but will do so from reading what the issue includes on

http://www.bfi.org.uk/sightandsound/issue.php

The excellent critic Mark Cousins has chosen “10 film that shook the world” to be shown at the BFI Southbank in London. This is what he writes:

“I allowed myself to be vague about what a film is (there are made-for-TV pieces in the selection), but was determined not to commit the sin of Anglocentrism. So from China we’ll show Heshang – The River Elegy (Jun Xia, 1988); from Japan Minamata: The Victims and Their World (Tsuchimoto Noriaki, 1972); from the US Bowling for Columbine (Michael Moore, 2002) and The Thin Blue Line (Errol Morris, 1988); from Britain Death of a Nation – The Timor Conspiracy (John Pilger and David Munro, 1994), BBC News Ethiopia Report (Michael Buerk and Mohammed Amin, 1984) and McLibel (Franny Armstrong, 2005); from Germany Triumph of the Will (Leni Riefenstahl, 1936); from France The Sorrow and the Pity (Marcel Ophuls, 1970);and from Iran For Freedom (Hussein Torabi, 1980).”

Did you see them all?

Did he forget some obvious films?

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Tue Steen Müller
Tue Steen Müller

Müller, Tue Steen
Documentary Consultant and Critic, DENMARK

Worked with documentary films for more than 20 years at the Danish Film Board, as press officer, festival representative and film consultant/commissioner. Co-founder of Balticum Film and TV Festival, Filmkontakt Nord, Documentary of the EU and EDN (European Documentary Network).
Awards: 2004 the Danish Roos Prize for his contribution to the Danish and European documentary culture. 2006 an award for promoting Portuguese documentaries. 2014 he received the EDN Award “for an outstanding contribution to the development of the European documentary culture”. 2016 The Cross of the Knight of the Order for Merits to Lithuania. 2019 a Big Stamp at the 15th edition of ZagrebDox. 2021 receipt of the highest state decoration, Order of the Three Stars, Fourth Class, for the significant contribution to the development and promotion of Latvian documentary cinema outside Latvia. In 2022 he received an honorary award at DocsBarcelona’s 25th edition having served as organizer and programmer since the start of the festival.
From 1996 until 2005 he was the first director of EDN (European Documentary Network). From 2006 a freelance consultant and teacher in workshops like Ex Oriente, DocsBarcelona, Archidoc, Documentary Campus, Storydoc, Baltic Sea Forum, Black Sea DocStories, Caucadoc, CinéDOC Tbilisi, Docudays Kiev, Dealing With the Past Sarajevo FF as well as programme consultant for the festivals Magnificent7 in Belgrade, DOCSBarcelona, Verzio Budapest, Message2Man in St. Petersburg and DOKLeipzig. Teaches at the Zelig Documentary School in Bolzano Italy.

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