Festival

A short follow-up – Mika Ronkainen got his well-deserved Dragon Award Best Nordic Documentary at the Göteborg International Film festival. The jury motivated the award to ”Finnish Blood, Swedish Heart” (photo) with these words: … a touching story of inner…

Magic evening in the Sava Centre last night. 8-900 people had decided to spend their saturday night out in the company of Finnish artist Kimmo Pohjonen. It was a good choice you could hear from the reactions during and after…

Ilian Metev, director of ”Sofia’s Last Ambulance”, started his friday masterclass at Magnificent7 festival in Belgrade playing Bach on his violin, quite a generous gift to the workshoppers from the young Bulgarian artist, who had a career as a violinist,…

The festival in Belgrade enters into its third day, and the response from the audience has been, yes, magnificent! On the opening wednesday night the film by Swedish Malik Bendjelloul ”Searching for Sugarman” was met by great enthusiasm by the…

Guest writer at filmkommentaren, Danish Mikkel Stolt watched Finnish Mika Ronkainen’s latest work ”Finnish Blood, Swedish Heart” (photo) at the Nordisk Panorama in September. The original, non-mainstream hybrid documentary made a big impression on Stolt, who concluded – referring to…

Two important prizes for a film by Lena Müller and Dragan von Petrovic, co-directed and filmed by Vuk Maksimovic, whose uncle is the protagonist of a film that the team itself – on the site of the film – calls…

A very interesting critique of (some of) the selected documentaries for the Sundance Film Festival comes from Anthony Kaufmann, who has written for NY Times, Village Voice, Variety among others. I dare to make a long quote from the beginning…

On Wednesday January 30 at 7pm the opening of the 9th edition of the EuropeanFeature Documentary Film Festival, Magnificent7 will be announcedby the lady, who represents the festival venue, the biggest theatre in the region, the Sava Center in Belgrade.…

This text is written for the catalogue of Magnificent7 2013: I am writing this from New York, a metropole of mainstream entertainment cinema, but also the place to be for two veterans of independent cinema, the 86 years old Albert…

It is a good idea to get on the mailing list for the idfa newsletter. The one from January 18 includes statistics on the 25th edition of the festival last November and communicates deadlines for the IDFA Bertha Fund (before…

A press release in an edited version: Moma, the Museum of Modern art in New York organizes February 15–March 4 “Documentary Fortnight 2013: MoMA’s International Festival of Nonfiction Film and Media”, the 12th annual two-week showcase of recent documentary films…

I can not write a review as I have not seen the final edit of the film, and as I have seen material shot by Khaled Jarrar as well as cuts during sessions of the Storydoc programme, I would definitely…

Samer lives in Ramallah, his mother is Safa, who lives with his father and siblings in Gaza. Mustafa lives in Gaza, his mother, Hekmat, and his sisters live in Ramallah. The distance between Gaza and Ramallah is around one hour’s…

Sometimes you are lucky because normally you leave a festival having NOT seen the winner. Not this year where this blogger was privileged to take part in the idfacademy where the first point on the agenda was a screening of…

Emotional moment when Emma Davie welcomed her audience at the premiere of the film at Munt cinema. She stressed how much her main character, Neil Platt, who died three years ago, wanted the film to be made, to have a…

… edition Number 20! In itself a marvellous event where filmmakers from all over the world meet to present their projects, catch up on professional and private matters, it is indeed a clear sign of the both warm and professional…

… was the headline of the afternoon session that I attended, run by EDN’s Mikael Opstrup with a (maybe too) small introduction by Jesper Osmund on the nature of what he (good choice) calls pitch trailers. Osmund, who has edited…

Was it because people were a bit tired hearing about crowdfunding that there were less people in the auditorium this morning. Or because of all the parties that are offered from the side of idfa? To idfacademy participants who are…

The programme is ”an intensive four-day training program for emerging filmmakers, producers, and film students”. As coach for the group of filmmakers from the Black Sea Docstories workshop I am there as well and have enjoyed the well composed and…

Famous for his film about his father, ”Nobody’s Business”, clever and funny with an excellent, playful montage, it was simply great to watch the newest documentary by Alan Berliner, also with a family member as main protagonist, also with a…

DOX:AWARD 
The act of Killing af Joshua Oppenheimer. 
Special mention til Tchoupitoulas af Bill og Turner Ross

. NEW:VISION AWARD 
Leviathan af Lucien Castaing-Taylor & Verana Paravel.

 NORDIC:DOX AWARD
 Searching for Bill af Jonas Poher Rasmussen. SOUND & VISION AWARD 
Beware of…

Have you ever thought about becoming a doctor or a nurse on a Bulgarian ambulance? Well, as this little marvel of a film suggests, there might be an opening or two coming up. It’s technically an observational film, but what…

For the 13th time the French launch their Month of Documentaries all over the country. More than 1700 films, new and old, are being screened in what can only be seen as the most effective promotional tool to create interest…

Behind the scenes, the making of.. a film. We have seen them lots of times, following how the actors prepare for their roles, how the shooting was done, how the director directed. This is exactly what ”The Act of Killing”…

The 10th Copenhagen documentary film festival runs until sunday. Filmkommentaren will review some of the films and recommend  Copenhageners and festival guests, what should be watched. A must of course is Oppenheimer’s ”The Act of Killing”. The film still has…

To be honest, I did not have high expectations. I knew that Dan Curean had worked 4 years on his film about wild horses in the Romanian Danube delta, but I had no idea that he had done so to…

DOK Leipzig winners have been announced to night. For this filmkommentaren correspondent it was a surprise (see post below) that the Swedish ”Colombianos” by Tora Mårtens got the first prize, the Golden Dove, whereas the Silver Dove to Ilian Metev…

Had an interesting conversation with Polish filmmakers last night at a dinner reception held by the good and always active people from Krakow Film Foundation and Festival. Two of their compatriots, members of juries, had to leave early for an…

The festival in Leipzig also hosts several workshops, where documentary projects are being developed. Andrea Prenghyova, one of the founders of the IDF (Institute of Documentary Film) in Prague, presented for the second year, in collaboration with the festival, projects…

Any films that we must see, film students and others who enter the festival centre ask me. Many, I answer, because there are many that have high quality. The problem in my answering is that many of the films I…

Time for a small report after three days at a festival that it is always pleasant to visit in a city, that it is always pleasant to visit. Eine Kulturstadt, that has developed immensely since the days around 1990 where…

The headline of the interview in Realscreen is “Mixing the real and the surreal” and the first lines go like this: “In time for its presentation as the cph:dox (Copenhagen International Documentary Film Festival)’s opening film, filmmaker Joshua Oppenheimer tells…

Wang Bing got one more prize added to his impressive filmography through the ”Grande Prémio Cidade de Lisboa”, the first prize at the DocLisboa that ended sunday. The film in question is ”Three Sisters” (153 mins., France Hong Kong, 2012).…

Opening nights can be very long with speeches and introduction of juries and honorary guests. DOK Leipzig is no exception. It took looong time to get people seated so the ceremony was delayed up front, and it did not help…

As a festival guest and reporter for this blog you receive loads of mails about what is to happen. Of course. The Leipzig festival sustains a good tradition for press releases that  – unlike others – refrain from saying ”we…

As advisor for the festival (that starts on monday the 29th), when it comes to films from the Baltic countries I was happy this morning to see that the festival on their site put a focus on 9 films with…

Signe Byrge Sørensen is CEO and producer at Final Cut for Real, which is located in Copenhagen, Denmark. She has been a producer for 14 years… This is how an extended interview with the producer of the opening film of…

I met Hungarian Klara Trencsenyi at the Astra Film Festival, where her newest work “Corvin Variations” was screened. Two years ago Trencsenyi organised a project development workshop for creative documentaries in Budapest that I took part in. Since then the…