Festival

Legendary Estonian documentarian, artist, politician etc. Mark Soosaar lives in Pärnu at the Baltic Sea, and has since 1987 been, he calls himself so, “the chief” of Pärnu Int. Documentary Film Festival, the oldest film festival in Estonia. According to…

If you happen to be in Edinburgh today read what you should do to watch films, have a drink, eat some takeaway and go to tango nuevo… If you are not in Edinburgh, well enjoy the tone of this text…

The innovative festival in Skopje is over and awards have been distributed. Apart from two of the films, frequent readers of filmkommentaren.dk will know the winning films very well from reviews and notes. Here you are, and below you get…

June 26-29, la Rochelle, the 23rd edition of an event that used to be in Marseilles but now has moved to the Bay of the Bascay on the Atlantic Coast. Among professionals it has been stated that the Sheffield DocFest…

Miff stands for Moscow International Film Festival that started its 34th edition last night, again with a strong documentary element. For the second year the MIFF has a documentary competition programme with 7 films plus a section with 18 long…

”Make Docs Happen” on the catalogue and on the posters surrounding the theatre where the pitch of 11 projects from all over Europe – to a panel of 11 broadcasters and distributors – took place. And make docs happen is…

It is the third edition, it takes place in Skopje, it goes on until June 22nd, it is a festival with its own, original profile and a special communication strategy – subscribe to its free newsletter, from where the following…

Emanuela Macchniz, student at Zelig School for Documentary, Television and New Media, placed in Bolzano Italy sent this report to filmkommentaren.dk: Last April (25 – 30) the Association Ness El Fen organized for the seventh year the new documentary film…

Football starts tonight, will try NOT to write too much about it unless there are real great creative moments documented, but I could not resist this wonderful piece of Irish humour taken from facebook. Enjoy that and some fine matches,…

It has always been important for a documentary to be screened at the International Film Festival in Karlovy Vary that this year runs from June 29 to July 7 with a strong programme that was announced two days ago. There…

The Danish Cinemateket in Copenhagen hosts May 20-23 the Jewish Film Festival that offers a programme of feature films, animation, short films and documentaries. I had a preview of the documentary ”Auf Wiedersehen: Til We Meet Again”, a family story…

The winning film of the festival was a local production by Carlos Sanchez-Libre and Josep Badell, ”From the Streets to the Fields”, 80 minutes long, shot at the World Cup of football in South Africa 2010, a film with many…

The Barcelona Sports Film festival is part of the FICTS, Fédération Internationale Cinema et Télévision Sporttifs. This organisation includes festivals all over the world, has its office in Milano, and has set up rules for the festivals that operate with…

It is new, it is not easy to get an audience, but it is there, said Barbara Destefanis, the driving force behind the festival and the enthusiastic and committed director of the Nikita Distribution company, that manages a sportsfilm online…

The third edition of a Barcelona sports film festival runs the coming three days. Around 70 films dealing with sport will be presented, 25 of them in competititon, divided into different catagories, from animation films to short fiction to documentaries…

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…