Festival

The second edition of the Warm Festival, (28th June-4th July), a festival on contemporary conflicts with a strong focus on film and photography, will take place in Sarajevo next week. Seven days of screenings, exhibitions, conferences and talks, gathering journalists,…

Israeli filmmakers call to snub Jerusalem festival after docu on Rabin’s assassin pulled | i24news. Published June 17th 2015: Israeli filmmakers are understood to be considering withdrawing en masse from participation in the Jerusalem Film Festival, following its organizers decision…

The catalogue foreword to the “Free Thought” documentary section of the Moscow International Film Festival (June 19-26) is written by curators Sergey Miroshnichenko and Grigory Libergal. Their text is a reflection on ”patriotism”, that is a theme in several of…

Interesting (read it all via the link below): Five documentaries previously censored at Turkish festivals or cinemas will be shown at Documentarist, the festival that starts today saturday in Istanbul with a fine programme. “A common trait linking all five…

Still a young part of the MIFF, Moscow International Film Festival, the documentary programme of the upcoming 37th festival (June 19-26) has been announced. Good friend and documentary addicted promoter Georgy (”Gosha”) Molodtsov tells me that the “Free thought” programme…

The photo is by Ukranian photographer and filmmaker Alexander Glyadyelov, whose exhibition was arranged during the 2015 DocuDays UA festival in Kiev. About him is made a 6 mins. short documentary with interview and examples from his work. Title “You…

It was a proud festival director Joan Gonzalez, who welcomed the audience to the final evening of the DocsBarcelona 2015 with the screening of Ivan Gergolet’s fine film about the 93 year old Maria Fux, ”Dancing With Maria”, followed by…

It was a happy producer, Signe Byrge Sørensen, who checked messages on her i-phone here in Barcelona to find out that Chilean/German Estephan Wagner’s beautiful documentary ”Last Dreams”, produced by Final Cut for Real, had got the Audience Award at…

All right, a Dane writes about Danes, forgive me please – the photo is taken inside La Pedrera, one of Gaudi’s masterpieces in Barcelona where Signe Byrge Sørensen friday night held her masterclass giving around 40 people a personal insight…

He came into the cinema after the screening, the audience stood up and gave him a standing ovation after they had seen German Marcus Vetter’s portrait of him, ”The Forecaster”, alias Martin Armstrong or Marty as they call him in…

It’s wonderful when the ever perfect DocsBarcelona team makes a small mistake like the one on the photo announcing that the panelists of the Rough Cut Screenings that took place tuesday and wednesday were… yes, read for yourself. No, your…

For some years I have had the pleasure to host an exclusivity at DocsBarcelona: Rough Cut screenings. And it is rough cuts that are being screened in their full duration to a panel of hand-picked documentary professionals in a relaxed…

The winners of the MIDFFl Doker 2015 have been announced. The jury members (I was part of the one for feature duration documentaries) was working from their homes, the discussion, led by chairman Victor Kossakovsky, who demonstrated that he not…

I am in Barcelona, it’s summer, there is an outdoor pool outside my hotel window, and it is crowded. I am not here for holidays, DocsBarcelona has started with some events for professionals and tomorrow is the opening of the…

There have been masterclasses with Avi Mograbi and Michael Glawogger, world class directors of documentaries, at previous DocsBarcelona festivals. This year the festival has invited Signe Byrge Sørensen, producer of ”The Act of Killing” and ”The Look of Silence” AND…

There was champagne on the football pitch the other day in Madrid, where FC Barcelona won the Spanish League. And the Danish fan in his corner chair in the garden house took a cigar from the humidor and celebrated his…

Interesting article in Nonfics yesterday by Daniel Walber, a clever comment and reflection on the fact that the Cannes Film Festival has introduced a ”Oeil d’Or” (Golden Eye) award of €5000 with 14 films competing and with a jury that…

Respect! All right, we can get no official support due to the economical crisis, but we will make the festival anyway. We will finance it out of own pocket. This was the thought of a group of independent Russian filmmakers,…

… and the winner is, was the headline of the e-mail I received from Francesca Scalisi today. She sums up the experience with the Flying Film Festival, that she was initiating, like this: It went so well that probably we…

Subtitled The Tel Aviv International Documentary Film Festival, DocAviv, 7-16.5.15, has launched its programme and it looks well thought and categorized in themes, that apart from the traditional Israeli and International competition are ”Art and Culture”, ”Art” and ”Depth of…

The 46th (!) edition of Visions du Réel is going on with still a couple of days left. Before the festival Doc Alliance brought an interview with the festival director for some years, Luciano Barisone, a man who is not…

At the beginning of March I posted a text about a great initiative taken by young filmmakers – Francesca Scalisi and Mark Olexa – both graduated years ago from the Zelig Film School in Bolzano: ”The festival will start beginning…

… at DOK Leipzig, a press release announces from the festival. Like American presidents the new director of the important festival has chosen to reveal her changes after her first 100 days in office! Here comes most of the press…

Of course IDF (Institute of Documentary Film) stands behind this wonderful initiative, it calls itself “Project Father and Mother”, but there are other well-known partners – One World Romania Association (Bucharest, Romania), Restart (Zagreb, Croatia), Mozinet (Budapest, Hungary) and Filmtopia…

First I have to make a confession, I didn’t make it to the end of the 5 hours long film! Not because I was bored, I just had a painful neck. But I did see about 240 minutes and I…

Marseille. The city of Zinedine Zidane. A multicultural melting pot with areas/quartiers, where violence is a daily menu with gangs operating, murders and huge social problems. If Zidane is an icon for football fans, Yvan Sorel is it for practioners…

Esther’s father married and divorced 5 times. Why? And how might that influence my life, the director wants to find out and makes a film that ends with footage from her own marriage, where she is walking the aisle with…

Peter Bogdanovich joked about himself, ”I master the namedrop”, he said, referring to his enormous knowledge of films and film stars, actors and directors. What I am about to do now is precisely the same, namedropping, films and directors, which…

A morning seminar moderated by English film critic Neil Young. Subject: International Film Festivals. What to remember if you go to them as an American documentarian. 20 people listening, asking questions. Basic information was given, especially from Neil Young, who…

After 10 hours and 40 minutes of flight Copenhagen to Los Angeles and a good night’s hotel sleep off to Palm Springs for the fourth edition of the American Documentary Film Festival that opens tomorrow March 26 and goes on…

You must have a passport or an id, the woman at the desk said. Mikael Opstrup from EDN and I were at the entrance of the Palace of Parliament in Bucharest an early morning and we wanted to enter to…

We normally do not promote individual film projects on this site but exceptions were invented to be done… Yesterday in Bucharest, Adrian Pirvu, at the One World Romania’s “Cooking a Doc” went on stage to present (photo by Adi Marineci)…

Went to watch ”Queen of Silence”, full house, a film directed by Polish Agnieszka Zwiefka, her first film, produced by Heino Deckert and shown at this festival as one of four films in a well deserved homage to Deckert as…

I arrived a couple of days ago to Bucharest for the One World Romania. Together with EDN’s Mikael Opstrup we were taken to the hotel, I was given one of those rooms, where you can not open the window so…

“May you live in interesting times.” This Chinese curse pops up in my mind when I think about you, Ukrainians. To a documentary filmmaker, times like these are not only a curse, but also an opportunity. After all, we are…

Denmark has a new festival. The first Copenhagen Architecture Festival took place last year and the second edition is coming up soon and has spread to the city of Aarhus as well. More than 70 events in 19 different venues:…

Why not? Yes, why not activate us frequent flyers and all the others, who sit up there in the air for hours? Why not give us passengers quality (short) documentary and animation to watch and ask us to vote. Three…