Festival

Poland is a big country with a strong tradition for festivals and an impressive national production of documentaries, many of them in the short format. I had never heard about it before, but reading the site there is also a…

The Jan Vrijman Fund, part of the many actitivities run by idfa (International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam), has supported lots of important films from countries with limited means for the creative documentary genre. For that reason it is rather sad…

Another edition, the 18th, of the exclusive Visions du Réel in Nyon, Swizerland, a small festival in terms of audience, around 25.000, but important for the professionals, especially, it is being said, for the directors, is over and awards have…

Not bad for documentary interested people to be in the capital of Tunisia these days, where the yearly festival takes place, for the seventh time organised by the the Ness El Fen association with the support of arte France, CMCA,…

… or you could call it a mini-festival, is what the EDN (European Documentary Network) arranges every year in collaboration with and at the Danish Film School. This year it takes place May 12, from 14.00 to 22.00. This is…

Croatian producer Sinisa Juricic mailed me yesterday with the happy news about a film that he has been co-producing. It has been been selected for the Semaine de la Critique in the upcoming Cannes Film Festival. I post you the…

The strength of the time consuming observational documentary, in times where many stylistically move in the area between documentary and fiction (example Glawogger, see below), is one of the most obvious thoughts that comes to one’s mind watching the films…

… starts tonight and runs until April 27. As usual this festival offers a big programme – Switzerland is still a rich country, untouched by the international crisis? – with a lot of competition sections (7 different juries!) and a…

The international documentary festival in Tel Aviv, that takes place May 3-12, opens, like the Canadian HotDocs, with Ai WeiWei: Never Sorry by Alison Klayman, and another upcoming hit, Marley by Kevin MacDonald is also offered the Israeli audience. The…

The Canadian International Documentary Festival that takes place April 26-May 6 and that describes itself, and its selected films, as ”outspoken and outstanding”, has launched its programme and it is indeed an amazing selection of films in variety of themes…

Hot Docs gives a Doc Mogul Award every year and there shall be no objection, not at all, on the contrary, to the choice of recipient this year. For this blogger, when he was at EDN (European Documentary Network), Diane…

Emma Davie, Scottish filmmaker and teacher at Edinburgh College of Art, and tutor at numerous workshops for filmmakers from Europe and elsewhere, was in Ramallah at the Storydoc workshop that has previously been reported from on this site. She has…

This years Cinéma du réel is coming to an end, here is the list of awards given Saturday:             Louis-Marcorelles Award: Five Broken Cameras by Emad Burnat and Guy Davidi Special mention of Louis-Marcorelles Award…

This years Cinéma du réel (March 22nd till April 3rd) is already more than half way through, however here is a quick overview of what the festival has to offer this year. Along with the films in competition (four categories:…

He had just arrived from Paris, from his first solo-show in a gallery in the French gallery. He had exhibited the Palestinian Free State motive stamps from different countries that he had let produce, another piece of art happening from…

Below, in the previous posting, you get text and links to discover what is CoPro, Ramallah.doc and Storydoc. This posting is more a kind of mix of info and gonzo First about the CoPro training in Tel Aviv, where a…

Israeli and Palestinian film projects in development. I am in the airport in Tel Aviv waiting to go home after a week in Tel Aviv and Ramallah. Last year I was full of anger when I arrived to the airport…

The Brasilian documentary film festival starts March 22 and runs until April 1. Amir Labaki, director of the festival, film critic and cigar connaisseur, has again put together a programme of high quality, with competition sections and retrospectives. Among the…

This is a list of all the venues where the films of DOX BOX Globay Day for SYRIA are screened. Please note that the list is arranged as per HOST CITY and aphabetically. You can also check the nearest DOX…

On their website the organisers of Dox Box festival address us in the following way, under the headline Syria Global Day: The fifth edition of DOX BOX International Documentary Film festival in Syria this year was supposed to take place…

Syrian Documentary films will be screened around the world on March 14th, 15th and 16th, 2012: London, Berlin, Paris, NY, Prague, Tunis, Alexandria, Leipzig, Nuremberg, Marseilles, Cairo, Tangier, Marrakesh, Malmo, Copenhagen (see below, Danish readers), Montreal, Chicago, LA, Philadelphia, Vancouver,…

The international jury as well as the jury for the regional competition both selected short documentaries, when the members awarded their favourites. Ignoring the long documentaries the Big Stamp for the best film in the international section went to the…

Full cinema, festive atmosphere, premiere of the long awaited film by Dana Budisavljević, Croatian director and producer, and one of the founders of ZagrebDox at the time where she was working with Nenad Puhovski at Factum that stands behind the…

A wise festival person once said that it takes 8 years to build a festival. A look at the 8th edition of ZagrebDox confirms this assumption. This international documentary film festival has found itself. It is professionally organised, communicates very…

Of course ZagrebDox also has an industry section including a training workshop for 12 projects and a connected, public pitching session with 9 panelists. It took place March 1 in one of the cinemas in the Movieplex and attracted a…

Modern Times! Two films to reflect upon, both shot with a cell phone: Bosnian director Nedzad Begovic has made ”A Cell Phone Movie” (photo), and ”People I Could have Been and Maybe am” by Dutch Boris Gerrets. The latter has…

ZagrebDox is also a place to catch up on films that you missed at idfa and Nenad Puhovski, the festival director and programmer, does not hide the fact that he does a good part of the film selection for his…

This stunning film is a very appealing story about glaciers that are melting globally. A well-known photographer James Balog who has photographed nature (for National Geographic among others) for many years, had a deep concern of glaciers melting way faster…

One more festival, and one of great importance. The following text is taken from the site of IDF (Institute of Documentary Film), that stands for a huge so-called industry programme parallel to the festival. It all takes place in Prague,…

The 8th edition of a festival that has a strong programme with an international competition programme, a regional one, a retrospective with star director Jay Rosenblatt, a section with controversial documentaries like Mads Brügger’s ”The Ambassador” (photo) and Fredrik Gertten’s…

It is a good programme that the organisers of the Swedish documentary film festival has put together for ”a six-day-long documentary party” in Stockholm March 6-11. New Swedish documentaries in competition, among them Fredrik Gertten’s ”Big Boys Gone Bananas” and…

Nick Fraser, commissioning editor at BBC’s Storyville, wrote an article for The Observer (February 5), constructed as a diary from and about the Sundance Film Festival, where ” I have two films in the American competition. I am also judging…

The Cinéma du Réel has chosen its competition films for the 34th edition of the festival that takes place in the Centre Pompidou in Paris March 22 to April 3. 15 films have been taken for the International Competition and…

It is quite a challenge to choose one’s own family as the theme of one’s first feature documentary. Nevertheless this is what Carlo Guillermo Proto (1979) did with ”El Huaso”, a film that demonstrates a strong visual competence to convey…

This film is about American healthcare system and its severe problems. Americans spend around 300 billion U.S. dollars a year on pharmaceutical drugs. That is almost as much as the rest of the world combined. Healthcare throughout years became a…

The auditorium of the CCCB, cultural Centre of Barcelona, was full of hundreds of observers to the 15th pitching forum of DocsBarcelona. They provided the enthusiastic atmosphere for the 23 projects that were to be pitched there during two days,…

Session after session the pitch forum organisers and participants talk about the financial crisis in the European documentary market, mostly exemplified through the cutdown in budget, staff and time slots for documentaries in the public broadcasting companies. It was therefore…

The opening was fun and sweet, clever, serious and thoughtful. Alessandro Negrini (photo), director from Italy living in Northern Ireland & Tor Arne Bjerke, producer from Norway, took the auditorium by heart and brain with their ”Ballad of a Ghost…

I can not leave Barcelona and the documentary event that – on a personal note – I have been part on since its start 15 years ago, without having another personal note on football! I am lucky that I editorially…

The 15th edition of DocsBarcelona closed last night with quite a spectacular performance. After the screening of ”The Human Tower”, directed by Ram Devineni and Cano Rojas, a group went on stage to make the human tower happen in the…

I have quit my job, suspended my studies at KU, left my apartment in Copenhagen and moved away to USA for 8 months to do what I enjoy the most – to watch documentary films. I learned that watching film…