A film blog by Allan Berg Nielsen & Tue Steen Müller
A film blog by Allan Berg Nielsen & Tue Steen Müller
This morning, my daily newspaper reminded me of a John Cage-quote: “I like to be moved, but I don’t like to be pushed”. Two days ago in Oulu, Finland, I found myself in a situation which I liked. It might…
I guess that most readers know that James Marsh ”Project Nim” is about the dramatic life of a chimpanse… nevertheless read how Peter Bradshaw precisely introduced the film in Guardian August 11 2011: “Project Nim was a sensational Pygmalion-type experiment…
Awards were distributed at the Nordisk Panorama festival in Oulu. The best documentary prize went to the succesful Danish documentary “Ballroom Dancer” by Andreas Kofoed & Christian Bonke. The jury motivation: “The Nordic Documentary Award goes to a perfect example…
No, I did not see the pyramids or the Egyptian Museum. Yes, I saw the Nile from my hotel and had a quiet wonderful boat trip late night on the river. Yes, I crossed the Tahrir Square every morning on…
A press release from Montréal, where the RIDM Festival resides, this year from November 7-18. The festival has chosen to celebrate its 15th edition with a “special anniversary program, 15 Years, 15 All-Time Favourites”… “to mark our first 15 years,…
Crisis… maybe, but films are made, just received this press release from DOK Leipzig: Some 2,850 films from 77 countries were submitted to this year’s International Leipzig Festival for Documentary and Animated Film, among them 2,200 documentaries and 650 animated…
There are 11 feature length documentaries in the international competition of the Message to Man festival that takes place September 22-29. There are well known festival hits and winners like ”Bad Weather” (Giovanni Giommi), ”The Collaborator and His Family” (Adi…
The 9th edition of the documentary fest in the capital of Lithuania takes place September 20-30. The opening film is Carlos Klein’s fine documentary Where the Condors Fly about Viktor Kossakovsky shooting his masterpiece Vivan las Antipodas. A prologue to…
A kind of summing up after 5 intense days of Baltic Sea Forum in Riga Latvia, the16th edition. The reader should know that I have been part of the event from the very beginning, where it took place on the…
First day of pitching at Baltic Sea Forum in Riga taking place at the Albert Hotel on the top floor of the hotel, that has Albert Einstein quotes everywhere (!) – and a beautiful view to the city of the…
Scene efter scene stilles i kø i disciplineret række og forbindes kontrapunktisk med interview- og dialogmateriale, dokumentariske beretninger i løsreven fastholdelse. Det er meningsfuldt i en ganske anden form for filmfortælling end den normale danske tradition; og det er befriende,…
The Baltic Sea Forum in Riga – September 5-9 – includes several interesting film projects from the Baltic countries, Russia, Georgia, Ukraine plus some Western producers with themes relating to the East. The 16th edition of this classic forum that…
Every year late August the French documentarians go to Ardèche to discuss and to watch, and have a good time. This year (August 19-25) the seminars include themes like ”The Necessity of Criticism?” and how to ”build a Political point…
A great director, not very well known today, but for this film blogger his “Le Sang des betes” (1949, 22 mins.) from a slaughterhouse in the Parisian suburb, is a unique masterpiece in the history of documentary films. The film…
Info to our film professional readers: The 16th edition of DocsBarcelona will take place May 28 – June 2. In other words, the event will be moved away from the freezingly cold weather in Barcelona in February 2012, where the…
The fine documentary festival in the capital of Portugal celebrates its 10th edition this year, October 18-28. There are changes in the direction, which is now a collective, and there are exciting novelties in the programme. Here is the press…
… yes, what does that stand for? The answer is Festival International du Film Insulaire, taking place on the island of Groix that lies in France in Brittany. From August 22 to 26 the 12th edition of this festival takes…
… will be revealed tomorrow, according to Realscreen, TIFF being Toronto International Film Festival, prestigious and like other big festivals (Berlin, Cannes and Venice) nowadays putting a good focus on documentaries, or as they call it in the trade magazine,…
It started yesterday and runs until July 27. It is the fourth edition of DocMontevideo in the Uruguayan capital. And it has a very professional approach to why and how to reach a goal that is both regional and international.…
In the four years it has been in existence DocMontevideo has established a space in the continent for contacts and reflection using the information and communications media. Our mission is to contribute to constructing a market in Latin America that…
Filmkommentaren received this fresh and happy summer report from the Magnificent 7 team, Svetlana and Zoran Popovic, in Belgrade – after the open air screenings at the Belgrade Fortress, July 9-11: Dear Tue. We had three wonderful evenings with films…
The festival in neighbouring country to Georgia, Armenia, started yesterday. This 9th Yerevan International Film Festival runs until July 15 and has a fine international documentary competitive section within its red carpet profile programme that has Agnieszka Holland and Alexander…
Young Georgy Molodtsov, participant at the first session of DocStories, film director graduated from VGIK 2008, took the floor on the last morning to – with great commitment and energy – introduce the work that is being done to promote…
There are often too many viewings, too many opinions which can make the directors confused trying to please everybody and thereby losing their own voice, said Menno Boerema, Dutch editor, at the first session of the DocStories Black Sea workshop…
During the first session of the doc storytelling workshop DocStories Black Sea presentations were made. One was – naturally – about the Georgian National Film Center, whose director Tamara Tatishvili (photo) came up with a very clear and encouraging status…
The first session of the new documentary storytelling workshop DocStories with around 20 participants from the countries surrounding the Black Sea is coming to an end in wonderful Tbilisi, Georgia. Films have been screened and discussed and analysed, and the…
On the 9th, 10th and 11th of July the Belgrade feature documentary film festival Magnificent7 organises a high quality programme of music documentary films. This is how it is announced on the website: ”“The Magnificent Seven” at BELEF is an…
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…
The excellent French-language Le Blog Documentaire (more about that on a later occasion) has published an interesting interview (this time in English) with the director of the Sunny Side of the Doc that opened yesterday in la Rochelle: Here is…
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 Latvian national premiere of the 15 Young by Young documentary series – 15 short films of 15 minutes from the former Soviet republics – young filmmakers making films about young people and their lives in today’s independent countries 20…
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…
Finally! It has been and is being shown all over the world, the unique work of Viktor Kossakovsky, a generous and overwhelmingly beautiful film that also witnesses a new direction thematically, a new tone for a director whose filmography includes…
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…