Festival

ESCAPING RIGA by Davis Simanis One of those screenings where everything worked out as it should. Young Latvian director Davis Simanis (looking at you from above on this page) travels to Copenhagen, where he has never been before. He walks…

Cph:dox fills our columns these days – reviews, reports etc. BUT the second largest city in Denmark, Aarhus, has its own festival, Aarhus Filmfestival that includes shorts and docs, the latter with themes like ”fights”, ”life”, ”female”, ”ex-Soviet” and titles…

THE LOOK OF SILENCE by Joshua Oppenheimer       It’s horrifying, it hurts to watch the scenes that shows these brutal perpetrators re-enact their killings committed around 1965 in Indonesia, where the slaughtering of communists were performed by a…

Scenes to remember… one of the many good things about being at a festival is the conversations you have with colleagues in the breaks. Conversations that very often bring up scenes that have impressed you, scenes that will stay in…

Here follows the jury motivations for the main competition winners and for the German competition winner, Domino Effect, a film that has been reviewed on filmkommentaren.dk Golden Dove: Claudine Bories und Patrice Chagnard (Frankreich) for the film Les règles du…

The winners have been found. And apart from “my” main prize the juries agreed with me, awarding “Les Regles du Jeu” and “Toto and his Sisters”. Here is the press release and notice that you can find the motivations on…

Your filmkommentaren.dk correspondent has seen the 12 long documentaries in the Dok International Competition 2014. He thinks it would be fun to make HIS list of winners for that category. I.e. a main prize and two honorary mentions. The films…

Copy-pasted press release from the festival: The documentary film CITIZENFOUR about the NSA scandal and Edward Snowden’s revelations was awarded the “Leipziger Ring” on Wednesday night. US American filmmaker Laura Poitras received the film prize of the Peaceful Revolution Foundation,…

Time runs. From Jihlava to Leipzig monday, from one documentary film festival to the next one with a special bus, a symbol of festival friendship, this initiative has been called. And we were many, who accepted the generous offer of…

The website of the Jihlava IDFF announced last night: OPUS BONUM – Best World Documentary Film Award Best Film: Je suis le peuple (I Am the People), dir. Anna Rousillion Special Mention: 20 Centavos (20 Cents), dir. Tiag Tambelli and…

News taken from the website of the IDF (Institute of Documentary Films): For the sixth time at Jihlava International Film Festival, Institute of Documentary Film announced Silver Eye winners at the Closing Ceremony. The holders of the awards are three…

Take a look at the photo. It’s about Love, isn’t it? It comes from the film of Polish Wojciech Staron, ”Siberian Lesson”, that he made in 1998. On film stock. Here is the Jihlava catalogue description of the film: In…

Gustav Mahler was in Jihlava. His face is looking at me from the wall in the breakfast room of Grand Hotel, which was grand once, an art nouveau building from the outside but how could they put that terrible furniture…

Click below and you get the local organisers of the pan-European screenings of ”1989”, and in many cases also the location of the screening that takes place on November 5th. What a great effort that lies behind this initiative. The…

SECOND CHANCE / THE ETERNAL LIGHT / AUDITIONING FOR PARENTHOOD I am back in Jihlava after 5 years. I stopped working for the training programme Ex Oriente in 2009, where the final session with pitching took place in this cosy provincial…

1989 by Anders Østergaard & Erzsébet Rácz  Of course the film had to start with 1956 and it does so with very fine and moving archive footage of people searching for the remains of Imre Nagy, whose government was not accepted…

The festival in Georgian capital Tbilisi ended yesterday and I found this message on the FB page: The award ceremony is over and we would like to announce the results: International Competition: The main prize of this section goes to…

Cecilie Bolvinkel from EDN is responsible for extensive ”Member of the Month” – interviews, that can be found on the website of the association. A fine one came out two days ago with Claas Danielsen because ” DOK Leipzig 2014…

After DOKLeipzig and Jihlava IDFF have announced their programme, these (idfa and cph:dox) two significant documentary festivals have press released selection decisions, ambitions and visions. Idfa (November 19-30) first – take a look at the website, link below – seven…

Sergey Sukhanov is the hero of this film. When in Eastern European countries for workshops I very often ask the filmmakers to say or write ”main character” or ”protagonist” instead of hero. But in this case Sukhanov is a hero.…

First an explanation of the title of the film, enigmatic and fascinating it is: It refers to the ten centimeters of space below the ceiling where there was no water…  the space that saved lives at the unbelievable dramatic flood…

The day after DOKLeipzig (below), the Jihlava International Documentary Film Festival (IDFF) announces its programme schedule, October 23-28. The newsletter from the Czech festival does also, as DOKLeipzig, focus on statistics in its first paragraph. After headline ”57 world, international…

Today DOKLeipzig announced its programme for the festival, that runs from October 27 to November 2. Whether you like to highlight it or not, the press release stresses that the festival offers 41 world premieres – 29 documentary and 12…

The Georgian international documentary film festival has launched its programme for its second edition (October 14-19), well thought and competent, with competitive sections and side bars like ”Ukranian Voices”. Here you find ”Euromaidan” put together by Darya Averchenko and Roman…

Politics. Freedom to say what you want. In films as well. The Message2Man – that had its 24th edition this year – and its organisers are of course backing this basis for any film festival. Nevertheless the festival cancelled a…

It was a Swedish documentary that got the Grand Prix at the Message2Man 2014 festival: Forest of the Dancing Spirits (photo), directed by Linda Västrik (104 min. | 2013 | Sweden, Canada). I copy-pasted a description of the film from…

A scoop for DOKLeipzig. Read the festival’s press release: The 57th International Leipzig Festival for Documentary and Animated Film will open on 27 October 2014 with the long-awaited film “CITIZENFOUR” by Laura Poitras. In the last instalment of her 9/11…

Second day in St. Petersburg started with a lovely tour to Russian Museum downtown at the square where a statue of Pushkin stands, always with birds resting on his stretched-out arm. The newly renovated rooms with the Russian avant-garde I…

We already told that for the second time the AegeanDocs festival is running, it opened on the 20th of September (and runs until the 28th) with a screening of “The Act of Killing”. Producer of the festival Chara Lampidou sent…

Do you know the situation for Russian artists, was the first question that came from the audience at the Q&A after Danish Andreas Johnsen’s ”Ai Wei Wei” screening last night at the St. Petersburg documentary festival. The film about the…

Copy-paste quote from RealScreen on Martin Scorcese talking about his new documentary “The 50 Year Argument” on New York Review of Books, co-directed with David Tedeschi. A talk taking place in Toronto at the international film festival, read more, link…

Are you on drugs was the question, jokingly asked by panelist Esther van Messel from First Hand Film, when Russian producer Vlad Ketkovich was pitching the project ”My Beliefs” to be directed by Tatiana Chistova. Could be… Ketkovich, wearing a…