A film blog by Allan Berg Nielsen & Tue Steen Müller
A film blog by Allan Berg Nielsen & Tue Steen Müller
Here comes a list of films from this year´s CPH:DOX that has already been reviewed on filmkommentaren.dk. As the policy for our independent and self-funded blog-site is that we only review and comment (almost) positively, you can consider these links…
It is indeed overwhelming the program of CPH:DOX. Films, now also with a section for fiction films, concerts, the CPH:Forum with 33 projects, including well-known directors being present like Petra Costa, Victor Kossakovsky, Guido Hendrickx, Mila Turajlic, Shaul Schwarz and…
Yes. Documentary is Cinema. Where the best directors know what they are doing. Have chosen a form for what they want to tell. Before shooting. This is what Swedish Anna Eborn has done with this gem of a documentary film.…
Years ago Nenad Puhovski, founder of and director of ZagrebDox, said to himself: I also want to give an award, I will call it ”My Generation”. (Remember that Puhovski has a competitive category for filmmakers under 35 with an attached…
Last night the winners were announced in Zagreb, here comes some of them, click below and you will get the whole list: Nebojša Slijepčević Tue Steen Müller elimir ilnik, Jury International Competition BIG STAMP FOR BEST FILM IN INTERNATIONAL COMPETITIONUP…
Her name is Anastasija, she is one of the children in “To Be Continued” by Latvian documentary master Ivars Seleckis, who is here at ZagrebDox, where his film was shown last night. Tonight Seleckis (who will be 85 this year)…
Look at the photo – happy award winners of the ZagrebDox Pro announced last night. Below, I have copied a text from the site of the festival. I attended the pitching forum, good atmosphere, good presentations, well trained by Leena…
Tonight the award ceremony will take place at the 15th edition of the ZagrebDox. I have been in the International Competition jury together with Nebojša Slijepčević and elimir ilnik. The results will be announced on this site tonight or tomorrow.…
The following text is a copy paste from the website of DocuDays UA in Kiev, explaining the visual concept refelcting on how … the new digital world changes us, our way of thinking, habits, ways of communication, our whole consciousness.…
The festival in Kiev takes place March 22-30 and I am happy to go again, always a pleasure to be at a festival that has an idea, makes a (political or social) statement, know about the documentary world and pick…
The 15th edition of the Croatian international documentary festival starts tomorrow. It is a festival that year by year has grown and developed, with competitions for international and regional films and a lot of side sections. You can’t complain if…
Kim Longinotto, in her latest film presented at this week’s Berlinale (and already shown at last Sundance), portrays the Italian photographer Letizia Battaglia who has documented the Sicilian mafia over more than four decades. Battaglia happened by chance to become…
A total of 107 films were screened at DocPoint Festival in more than 260 screenings, a fifth of which were sold out. The documentary film event for children and young people, DOKKINO, organised in connection with the festival, gained 3…
He was right Atanas Georgiev, the producer and editor of the film “Honeyland”, when he said that it was close to be a masterpiece and hmmm, I was right when I gave it the highest marks in a review the…
Oh childhood with all your curiosity and innocence! Where the world is open for you, where you can ask all kind of questions. Where you can wish for everything, which is what the two boys do in Finnish debut director…
DOCS & TALKS 2019 / CINEMATEKET 06/02 17:30 Stedet introduceres i smukt fotografi, Lars Skree og Henrik Bohn Ipsen er fotograferne. Der er myndighed over disse billeder. Et jysk landskab, som er meget, meget mere end et vindblæst hjørne af…
DOCS & TALKS 2019 / CINEMATEKET 04/02 14:00 / ØST FOR PARADIS 26/2 17:00 It stands out. I can not avoid superlatives. And I can not express in words, in a language that is not mine, how I feel after having…
Lovely to meet documentary colleagues in Helsinki at the DocPoint. You get to talk private matters, food and drinks – and documentaries. Have you seen… ah, you should see… what is your next destination… Already when arriving in the airport…
The 18th edition of the Finnish documentary film festival is going on right now and until Sunday in a Finnish capital full of snow – I have been moving very slow from cinema to cinema, luckily they are very close…
DOCS & TALKS 2019 / CINEMATEKET / SØN 03/02 14:00 The location is Hnutove, Eastern Ukraine, war zone for years. A village from where – for the very same reason – many Ukrainian families have moved away. But not grandmother…
DOCS & TALKS 2019 / CINEMATEKET RADIKALISERING Jeg forstår på foromtalerne at Mari Gulbianis film handler om radikalisering og dette for tiden sært indforstået præcise begreb vender og drejer jeg nu jeg har set Gulbianis værk og slet ikke…
DOCS & TALKS 2019 / CINEMATEKET / FRE 01/02 16:45 … Men løsningen er alligevel så let at en femårig kan forstå det. Vi må stoppe udslippene. Det er sort-hvidt. For enten sætter vi gang i en kædereaktion som udløser…
Well, it was quite friendly but of course there were – and should be – discussions about which films should be taken for the DocsBarcelona 2019 edition in May. On the photo you see the selection group except for the…
DOCS & TALKS 2019 / CINEMATEKET / ØST FOR PARADIS STEDETS ÅND Hun er bekymret, denne i alle måder smukke kvinde på fotografiet fra en scene i filmen, hun er nedtrykt, hun hedder Poh Lin Lee og hun holder…
THE DANISH INSTITUTE FOR INTERNATIONAL STUDIES (DIIS) AND CINEMATEKET PRESENT DOCS & TALKS – FILM AND RESEARCH DAYS, JANUARY 31st – FEBRUARY 6th, 2019 Daughters of foreign fighters from Georgia, flood-affected islanders in Kiribati and Australia’s hermetically sealed asylum centres.…
Quote from filmkommentaren post in August: … thinking of the many documentary adventures I take with me from the Sarajevo Film Festival: To be part of the training team of representatives from ngo’s and human rights organizations was the experience…
Taking the title of Agnès Varda and JR’s wonderful film as headline, I look back at festivals, pitching sessions, film schools… that I had the privilege to attend in 2018. Privilege is the right word to use, when you board…
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…