A film blog by Allan Berg Nielsen & Tue Steen Müller
A film blog by Allan Berg Nielsen & Tue Steen Müller
The courage to address the world with ambiguity never stooping to easy answers, can also be attributed to the Russian filmmaker, Victor Kossakovsky, who never tires of reminding us that film is an emotionally charged medium, and even when it…
Through documentary films, exhibitions and discussions Ukrainians from the art world travel Europe to present their country and its search for an identity. It’s “a cultural diplomacy project of HRDFF Docudays UA organized with support from the Open Society Initiative…
In a way it’s an old fashioned film. In storytelling. And I mean that as a compliment. The director plays with the film medium, jumps around in time, gives references to slapstick movies, Buster Keaton and others, in the search…
Get up Wiktor, says grandmother, you have to go to school. Wiktor, 12 years old, goes to a ballet school, where the teacher trains him, and when not in school he plays with a friend, or is with the caring…
I was in Amsterdam from Monday till Friday. 4 nights at NH Carlton Hotel, the festival centre close to everything and the place where you meet old and dear friends. Including the busy artistic director Orwa Nyrabia, whose first edition…
… which all deserve to be mentioned and noticed by other festivals. “How Big is the Galaxy” (Photo) by Ksenia Elyan (Russia, Estonia, 72 mins.), with Max Tuula and Maria Gavrilova as producers as well as late Alexander Rastorguev for…
I was very happy to know that the new film by Belorussian director Andreu Kutsila received – in the midlength category – the main award at IDFA for “Summa”, a Belorussian/Polish coproduction with Miroslaw Dembinski as the Polish partner. In…
Normally when I go to an art exhibition, I walk around alone, stop in front of the paintings, it’s silent, maybe I talk with the one who are with me, but I love this chance of stepping into a world…
I went to the Eye that everyone has praised during its few years of existence. And it is really something. I crossed the water with the ferry next to the Central Station, 2 mins. it took to get to the…
The film was screened and there was a half hour talk afterwards. These IDFA talks, I understood, are formatted to have no questions from the audience. I sensed a disappointment in the hall, probably many would have loved to get…
I got a mail from the producer of this film, Sandor Mester: “Hungary 2018 is not at the IDFA Forum because it is already in the Feature Length Competition this year and it was not there last year because it…
IDFA Competition for Feature-Length Documentary Anand Patwardhan won the IDFA Award for Best Feature-Length Documentary (€ 15.000) with Reason (India). The film is a broad-ranging examination of Indian society, where secular rationalists are hunted down as they attempt to stem the rising…
I was at the opening of The PiterKiT International Student Film Festival in Piter – Saint Petersburg. On Wednesday. Huge celebration, three hours with music, clips from films and speeches, maaany speeches due to the celebration of 100 years of…
This text is taken from the website of the IDFA festival: The 31st IDFA has just officially been opened by Minister for Foreign Trade and Development Cooperation Sigrid Kaag in Koninklijk Theater Carré with Aboozar Amini’s film Kabul, City in…
It’s about creating the feeling of being there. To quote Richard Leacock. First time feature length director Afghan Aboozar Amini, who emigrated from the country when a teenager, was educated in Holland and in the UK, does that. Takes us…
I have for years been visiting Saint Petersburg – for the Message2Man festival or for seminars/workshops organized by dear friends Ludmila Nazaruk and Viktor Skubey. In 2016 Skubey organized the conference “How to Reach the Audience”, which was filmed and…
… 2018 ended. Was it good or bad? I normally watch all the films in the main international competition, the long documentaries to make my own hit list. This year it was not possible. I watched three, the winner of…
No doubt, Sergey Loznitsa is the master of making creative archive documentaries – a part of his impressive oeuvre that also includes fiction films and documentaries like “Austerlitz” – in the archive films he stands out with films like…
I started working on a film about Stalin’s show trials, which were held in the USSR in 1930s, a couple of years ago. My initial idea was to edit the footage from different trials in order to show how the…
You have to be careful with “vonhörensagen” but in this case it had its influence on the talk with Vitaly Mansky, that took place friday afternoon at the Polish Institute in Leipzig, a couple of hours after his film had…
A piece of the press release that came out from DOK Leipzig an hour ago, check the whole list and the jury motivations on the festival’s website, link below: “I Had a Dream” (photo) by Claudia Tosi has won the…
I would have loved to see more from the Retrospective 68 – An Open Score but I was anderswo engagiert, i.e. introducing the Lithuanian retrospective and moderating the discussions afterwards BUT I saw the last section, number 7 which was…
I have known him for years – since back to the days of the Bornholm festival in the 90’es. He came to Leipzig for one screening of the film and for a talk. We hugged and I told him that…
An understatement: They were angry my friends from Lithuania, Georgia and Ukraine. After having watched Werner Herzog and André Singer’s “Meeting Gorbachev”. Nothing, absolutely nothing about the violent Soviet attacks that took place in Vilnius, in Riga, in Georgia… Did…
10.30 in the morning, Kupferstrasse in Leipzig. There is a line outside the Kupferhalle, where Werner Herzog is to hold his masterclass or as the DOK Leipzig organisers called it, “a conversation” with Kristina Jaspers, who knows about the director…
Full house in Cinestar, two cinemas with people ready to watch “Meeting Gorbachev” by André Singer and Werner Herzog. Two wonderfully short and good official speeches came from representatives from the city of Leipzig and from Sachsen. A longer one…
From variety.com I received a very informative interview with André Singer on his making of the documentary with Werner Herzog, written by Damon Wise. The film is to be shown at the Ji.hlava Festival and opens the DOK Leipzig tomorrow…
One year ago good friend, producer Stefano Tealdi sent me a rough cut of what is now a finished film that has been screened in Locarno, Chicago and is in the programme of DOKLeipzig, that starts next week. I found…
Here we are – watch our films, meet our filmmakers. It seems like this is the policy of the Lithuanian Film Centre this year, where the population-wise small country celebrates its centenary. According to an article in Cineuropa – link…
There he was, Orwa Nyrabia, the new artistic director of IDFA, to be watched through streaming yesterday afternoon. I saw the first half of his presentation and could only nod, when he started telling us press people that documentaries are…
Here comes IDFA’s response to the question of no Eastern European projects in the selection of IDFA 2018’s Forum, sent today by the artistic director Orwa Nyrabia: The fact that there are no East European projects in IDFA’s Forum 2018…
Below you have the presentation from IDFA (International Documentary Film Festival) of the Forum, no doubt the gathering of documentary film professionals, who want funding and/or publicity of the film, that they are working on. The event has been there…
The Forum at IDFA is for documentary filmmakers the place to launch the new projects, they want the documentary community to be aware of, and eventually be interested in, eventually to invest in. Projects are presented/pitched followed by meetings. It…
Well, I should have been in Riga now, where the International Film Festival is one day old, and were it goes on until the end of the month. It is a festival with many sections: a tribute to Ingmar Bergman,…
… in Sibiu, Romania celebrates its 25th edition. For that reason Cineuropa brings an interview with the founding director Dumitru Budrala. He looks back and makes a status on the state of the documentary art. Here is a quote –…
… on a big screen… for free, read what DOKLeipzig has to offer its film interested audience, taken from the website, what a good idea: The East Hall of Leipzig’s Central Station is turning again into a festival cinema during…
There is a grand focus on Lithuania at DOKLeipzig this year. Festival director Leena Pasanen has since her time at the Finnish television YLE been an admirer of the small Baltic country’s impressive documentary tradition. She stands behind a uniqe…
… IDFF standing for International Documentary Film Festival. A press release came out today from the festival that starts October 25 and runs until October 30. With its 22nd edition. I have taken some bits and pieces to highlight what…
So here it is, the announcement of the Official Selection for DOKLeipzig. The filmmakers were of course informed in beforehand but were not allowed to express their enthusiasm before publication, which they can do now. First step for me who…
IDFA presents a main focus program, ME, about the personal and autobiographical documentary film. Me is a selection of different cinematic expressions by filmmakers whose study of themselves is both a journey into their own private history as well as…
The IDF (Institute of Documentary Film) based in Prague hosts a yearly so-called Silver Eye Award that has been granted annually since 2009 to the best East and Central European documentary films in two categories: short and feature documentary film…
Demand the Impossible! In his essay The Ultimate Display from 1965, Ivan Sutherland formulated the almost prophetic dream of a computer display of reality that creates a perfect illusion of materiality. Films like The Matrix interpreted this as a nightmare,…
More documentary film history… chapeau for DOKLeipzig and IDFA that both festivals (more than before?) look back and not “only” take the temperature of what’s new in the documentary world. Here some words on the selection done by Czech documentary…
The festival in Leipzig works apparently according to film editing rules: Don’t give all the information up front, give it piece by piece. The official programme is not announced yet but the festival introduces a new section called Late Harvest.…
A mail arrived from IDFA announcing quite a film historical event as part of the festival: “You are cordially invited to the IDFA 2018 world premiere of Dziga Vertov’s recently found and restored film, The Anniversary of the Revolution. Possibly the first…
I could not be there – Sunday in Malmø at the Nordisk Panorama, where 8 projects developed at the Dok.Incubator were presented. For that reason I was happy to receive an email from the organisers saying “play the trailers” –…
The festival in St. Petersburg is over and awards were announced yesterday after a grandiose (experienced through photos on Facebook) closing evening that had Viktor Kossakovsky’s “Aquarela” on the program, of course, this is his home town! Grand Prix and…
To meet the audience with a positive attitude is of course the best festival invitation you can make. I thought about it this morning, when receiving a newsletter from Leipzig: They have a good press office in DOK Leipzig that…
”El Pepe, a Supreme Life” is a new documentary by Emir Kusturica about the former Uruguayen president José “Pepe” Mujica, loved by his nation, being President 2010-2015 after having spent 13 years in captivity. (Photo of the two in Venice).…
At the third edition of a mountain film festival in South Korea, Lithuanian Arunas Matelis received the award for the best adventure and exploration film. Here are some words about the festival, followed by the clever jury motivation for the…