A film blog by Allan Berg Nielsen & Tue Steen Müller
A film blog by Allan Berg Nielsen & Tue Steen Müller
16th edition, June 5-15, with Finnish Leena Pasanen as the new director for a festival that has the subtitle ”International Celebration of Lives”. There is an international competition with 12 films (with films like Danish „It Takes a Family” by…
(with the) Program extended by limited online screenings The International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA) is planning its 33rd edition. With Dutch cinemas now re-opening, IDFA is looking forward to holding the festival in theaters from November 18th to 29th, albeit with…
… and Fipresci Award Having watched all the competitive films the International Documentary Jury of the 60th Krakow Film Festival consisting of: Łukasz Żal – chairman (Poland), Renata Santoro (Italy), Tod Lending (USA), Eva Mulvad (Denmark), Martin Horyna (Czech Republic)…
This is a copy paste from the Krakow FF website of today: The 60th Krakow Film Festival invites you to screenings of award-winning films at the Pod Baranami Cinema in Krakow! The pioneering decision to organize this year’s entire Krakow…
And what are your thoughts about that? The moderator of the pitching session – sitting in her home somewhere in North America – asks the sales agent sitting in her home in Zürich Switzerland. The pitching team is from Norway, the project deals with people…
I have been brought back to thinking about the different ways films start, while watching the Krakow FF international competition of this year. I think we all agree about the importance of catching the attention of the audience from the…
60th edition! Wow! And then you have to go online! Instead of having all of us invited passionate film lovers sit and applaud one of the most important documentary festivals ever. A challenge for you but I am sure the…
Take a look at the photo above. Taken by the photographer F Fagregas: A concert with The Boss, Bruce Springsteen at Nou Camp. Where I have been several times with Joan Gonzalez, director of DocsBarcelona. Last night at the award…
Tonight the opening of the Krakow Film Festival takes place at 7pm. The festival 2020 goes online – with the same high quality in selection as always. Competition programmes, thematic sections, a Dragon Award for the master Peter Forgacs, films…
Rum hedder det. Både i ental og i flertal, både i fysisk betydning og i mental betydning. Rebecca hedder også Vera og hun kan godt være i to tilstande, viser det sig. Grit Tind Mikkelsens dejlige film spiller på alle…
3 months ago a state of alarm forced us to leave the office from where we always produce DocsBarcelona. In this context, this edition has been prepared: looking out the window to see the few things that were happening in…
Yesterday a masterclass was held with Danish editor Niels Pagh Andersen in conversation with me. I was happy to see that almost 130 attended the class with ”the Skinny Romantic”, as he has been called by Ai WeiWei, whose ”Vivos”…
Zane Balcus wrote this essay: New features of something to come were felt in February during Berlinale. Then only a few people were seen on the streets in face masks, but hand disinfectants were regularly provided in the toilets of…
Strange feeling… DocsBarcelona opened last night, online, with the director of it all, Joan Gonzalez (the man in the middle, as toastmaster) calling upon the Head of Program and the Head of Industry to come with comments on what is…
Organised by Núria Campreciós from the DocsBarcelona team, I had a chat with the Young Jury Reteena – who has to decide the “Award to the best film of the Reteena Itinerary, awarded by young jury Reteena, made up of…
Agnieszka from Fine Day Promotion invited me to watch a new film by Tomasz Wolski, ”An Ordinary Country” – look at the great film poster above, which reveals the content of the film perfectly, surveillance, not of today (could it…
I met – on skype – Atahualpa and Diana Lichy last week for a conversation about ”Memorias de un Tiempo Eterno” that is selected, as one of four, for the Rough Cut Pitch at the upcoming DocsBarcelona, taking place May…
Baltic Sea Forum for Documentaries (BSD) is the most important documentary training and pitching event in the Baltic countries, taking place in Riga, Latvia. The 24th edition is scheduled to take place from 1 – 6 September. The call for…
When Anders Østergaard received the Carl T. Dreyer Award five years ago, these were accompanying words on this site: Østergaard has developed his own original and playful take on how to treat creatively the past… it was just after he and…
Just watched the one hour online discussion initiated by DocuDays ua, here is the link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gZUMw3nEwF0&feature=youtu.be&fbclid=IwAR3kxqPXIBBRRAelRQLkO-e6Fu8-sFTzXgDTQDModXkGbFPzzmV6XNphuR0 with these people taking part: Ondřej Kamenický – director of International Human Rights Documentary Film Festival One World; Melanie Iredale – deputy Director of Sheffield…
From one award ceremony to the next, thanks to Online. Two nights ago I was in Kiev for the Docudays ua, last night I was in Nyon for the ceremony of the Visions du Réel, where many awards were given…
I have been to many award ceremonies at the Docudays ua festival in Kiev. I was there again last night. Online. Which was of course different from being in a cinema hall with hundred of other film enthusiasts. Who express their…
Being on many mailing lists… these days I get bombarded with online offers for films to watch, conferences to follow, from festivals or production companies or distributors. It is indeed overwhelming, and lovely at the same time. Overwhelming, because how…
I have copy-pasted a part of the press release text about the competitive Panorama program, naming the top director names that will have their film presented in the online festival – reserved for the Spanish audience. Check the festival page…
DocsBarcelona has launched its program for the 23rd edition of a festival with an industry section. I will with other posts get back to the industry activities – conferences, masterclass, speed meetings, public pitch, rough cut session. The festival includes…
… subtitle: The Robinson of Manhattan Island… The Happy Woman and the Sad Man… that’s how the couple Güngõr and Ilhan Mimaroğlu has been characterised, tells the son of Güngõr, Rüstem Batum. He says so in the third and last…
I will try to avoid too many superlatives in this review of a brilliant documentary that is currently being shown at the online Visions du Réel festival in Nyon. So I have chosen to start with a copy-paste of the…
It’s been a week since I posted on this site. My Mac needed a new battery. But in between the privileged isolation in our garden in Copenhagen with lovely weather and visit of the grandchildren before they today returned to school (which, alas,…
English title: The Building – Excellent film. A work on constructivism that is superbly constructed… Soviet history. Architecture. With lovely portraits of and episodes with Ukrainians of today, who work in The Building in Kharkiv that was meant to the…
Summer camps for kids. Indoctrination performed by charismatic leaders. Sometimes with abuse of minors. A well known theme for many documentaries. With traumas carried into adulthood like it was for Hungarian Judit Oláh, who is the director of this well…
Positive message from the Kiev festival, DocuDays, as always with clever thoughts and energy: This year, due to the quarantine, we have decided to hold the 17th Docudays UA online. On 24 April through 3 May, we will present…
The Krakow Festival – that runs its 60th edition online – announces its intl. documentary competition programme. I have taken bits and pieces from the press release: ”In this difficult time of quarantine the documentary competition will be your window to…
… and today came the news from Barcelona: With regards to the health emergency caused by COVID-19 and the uncertainty of its evolution, DocsBarcelona changes its format to guarantee the health of its participants, the continuity of its team, the…
It’s an understatement to say that I was shocked watching this film, that was part of the CPH:DOX Online program, that you can access until Sunday. Content-wise I don’t recall having been presented with so much hate and intolerance in…
It was expected… alas… but cheers to the festival team and the filmmakers that the festival will take place… online. I had expected – in my selfnishness – with my wife – to have celebrated our silver wedding in Krakow…
First the short synopsis of the film, explaining the title and introducing…”Noura and Machi (who) search for answers about their loved ones – Bassel Safadi and Paolo Dall’Oglio, who are among the over 100,000 forcibly disappeared in Syria. Faced with…
Musa Hadid is the mayor in Ramallah. A busy man, who goes around in his city, talks to his citizens, tries to solve smaller and bigger problems. With a focus on the smaller. He wants the city to be welcoming foreigners…
Just watched the online award ceremony of CPH:DOX, very well performed with the festival director Tine Fischer and the two programmers Mads Mikkelsen and Niklas Engstrøm guiding the viewer from one competition category to another, with juries giving their motivations…
Copy-Paste of a press release from a couple of days ago, written so well by Petra Blaskovic, who also worked for IDFA 2019. Here we go: Hungarian project Queen of Chess by Bernadett Tuza-Ritter won the HBO Europe Award, the Al Jazeera…
I remember when it was pitched at the Baltic Sea Forum in Riga. My positive reaction was with a smile of surprise. And expectation to what the director would get out of it in the final film. Now the film is…
Dilya. That’s her name, the protagonist who has given the title to the film. She does not give up in her fight to get Iskandar, her brother, out of prison in Uzbekistan. The prison is Jaslyk. He was sent to this…
”I will not let Kais feel my sadness”. Words from the father in this small gem of a film. Father and son. From Syria. Coming to Norway for a new beginning. But we, the audience, feel the sadness of Rabeea.…
This fine – in aesthetics as well as in content – documentary won The Dragon Award for Best Nordic Documentary at the Göteborg Film Festival beginning of February this year. The jury‘s motivation is so precise and well written that…
I was at the DokuFest(ival) in Prizren in 2016. Great experience with good films and an atmosphere of generosity in a beautiful place. Since then I have followed the program set up through the fine communication from the organisers. In that respect…
There is a lot of recommendations for the Cph:Dox Online Festival. Here are some more – from my viewing at home yesterday. In English, as many non-Danish film lovers follow what goes on in the digital documentary festival world –…
The initiative of the CPH:DOX to put documentaries online for the audience in Denmark can only be described as IMPRESSIVE, FANTASTIC, BRAVO – support it by buying tickets, there are so many fine films to watch until March 29. The…
The Filmkommentaren posts about this film goes back to 2010, where Dana B., the Croatian director of the film, presented the project at the Greek Storydoc. I was part of the Ex Oriente 2011, when Dana took part, searching for…
Acclaimed Ukranian director Serhiy Bukovsky has made a film that invites me – and an audience – to meet the composer Valentyn Silvestrov. I knew the name but not the person and just a little about his quite impressive work. When…
Tamara Stepanyan films her characters with warmth, asks questions with respect and out of curiosity… words picked from the review of ”Embers” written more than 6 years ago on this site, link below. A true documentarian she is. Her latest…
A follow-up copy paste from the site of the festival in Kiev: The RIGHTS NOW! award is given to creative documentary films which explore the contemporary world and make a significant contribution to the discussion of human dignity, freedom and…