Festival

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…

The festival is over. The closing film sunday night January 29 was Whores’ Glory by Michael Glawogger, one of the most important documentarians of our time. There was almost a full house in the Sava Centre Cinema Hall, which means…

Fernand Melgar, director and Elise Schuss, assistant director and executive producer, represented ”Vol Spécial”, and hosted an extremely interesting session about how their strong social documentary came to life. And after-life: 1 year of editing, 160 hours of material, more…

Your batteries get charged at these workshops. You get to know how the filmmakers perform their craft. It is as simple as that. Some filmmakers have pedagogical skills, others need help, and indeed they receive that through Zoran Popovic, who…

Edition 8 of the Belgrade based feature length European documentary festival. The opening was last night and the audience was there again, hundreds, maybe almost 1000 spectators for each of the two films that were screened in the big hall…

The programme of the upcoming documentary festival in Barcelona, January 31-February 5, has been published. The selection is rich in quality and variety, and as usual the festival has its categories and for the second year the festival is competitive.…

Countdown for the 8th edition of the European Feature Documentary Film Festival, always an adventurous experience for this documentary consultant and co-selector of the 7 films together with Svetlana and Zoran Popovic. It takes place in Belgrade January 25-29, in…

It goes on and on, when will it stop or be stopped, the brutality in Syria? Today is friday, the day where many will be killed, as we know it from many weeks and months. And people opposed to the…

The second seminar of the Athens based documentary project development Storydoc took place during the last three days of November 2011. After a prologue in Ramallah, which was a training session for around 20 Palestinian filmmakers, the first session with…

Below you will find texts about some of the presentations at the Storydoc in Athens. But there was much more to take from the seminar It was only natural to have Syrian Diana el Jeiroudi make a follow-up of her…

How to interpret and convey the Greek crisis in a documentary? How to go from the reportage and the news clip to an understanding of how the population sees and feels the dramatic development in the country where stood the…

With the support of the Culture Programme of the European Union and the European Commission the documentary production company that is most active internationally in Greece, Anemon, led by Rea Apostolides and Yuri Averof, presented at Storydoc what they are…

This is what was written after I attended the Storydoc session in Ramallah, Palestine in March 2011: Nahed Awwad (PHOTO) showed us unique material from her 28 minutes long, scene divided disc. She presented what is to be an observational…

The American (LA) based member organisation IDA, International Documentary Association, holds its annual ”IDA Documentary Awards 11” December 2nd with a big show – the American way with sponsors, of course. The IDA has definitely an international perspective, as it…

This is not a neutral text. I have been part of the DOCSBarcelona team from the very beginning, and have seen how Joan Gonzalez and his team at Parallel 40 over a period of 15 years has built up a…

From press release of IDFA: The winners of the various IDFA competition programs were announced Friday, November 25 in Escape, during the awards ceremony of the 24th IDFA. Seung-Jun Yi’s Planet of Snail (South Korea) won the VPRO IDFA Award for…

The documentary film festival in Montréal RIDM sums up its activities and awards like this, with the DOKLeipzig winner “The Tiniest Place” again very much presented. More information, and trailers to be watched, by clicking on the titles below. To…

What does a cave being enclosed for thousands of years sound like? Or smell like? This film actually tries to tell us, but first of all it shows us what it looks like. Or to be more precise, it shows…

Awards were given at the cph:dox festival in Copenhagen and juries motivated their choices, this is the press release from the festival: In the main competition, DOX:AWARD, Ben Rivers’ ‘Two Years at Sea’ was awarded for its convincing depiction of…

I like it when a film slowly seems to get a hold of itself before your very eyes.  Like it’s getting smarter as it goes along. That’s how I felt watching this depiction of a huge hospital complex in Rio…

CPH:DOX on a November afternoon. I am watching a filmmaker’s film about her filmmaking and herself. Afterwards, I watch the filmmaker telling us about her film about herself and her filmmaking. I’m always interested in the creative process so I’m…

Text taken from Facebook, announced publicly in Copenhagen yesterday at the cph:dox festival by film producer and festival director Orwa Nyrabia from Damascus: Syrian filmmaker Nidal Hassan disappeared in Damascus on Thursday 3-11-2011, no information about him has come to…

IDFA (the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam) put a text on its website the other day with an appeal to ilmmakers with a film selected for the Cinema Verité Festival to seriously consider withdrawing their film and decline any invitation…

Cph:dox opened with an entertaining documentary with Russian Slavik Kryklyvyy, Latin American dancer, as the main character, who tries to make his way back to the top, where he was the best in the world – 10 years ago. The…

When noone else does anything to bring good documentaries to Athens, you have to do it yourselves! This is what three film people, all women, decided to do and if you have a look at their programme, you can only…

… at the International Documentary Film Festival was given out last night. Twelve awards. The best World Documentary, Opus Bonum, given by a one person jury, James T. Hong, was ”Lost Land” by Belgian director Pierre.Yves Vandeweerd, whereas ”Bakhmaro” by…

At a moment where European documentary film festivals are gathering documentarians and a local audience in big crowds to present huge numbers of film (DOK Leipzig, cph:dox, Jihlava, DocLisboa, idfa etc.) it is wonderful to see that other smaller, but…

Tonight the awards of the 54th DOK Leipzig festival were announced. A new record total of 74,500 euros (!) in prize money was granted to a total of 17 awards. The total prize list follows below. The three international competition…

In the train for Copenhagen after 5 days at the 54th International Leipzig Festival for Documentary and Animated Film. I had my currywurst mit scharfe sauce a while ago and am ready for the train ride home via Hamburg. Gives…

Festival directors must have visions and points of view. DOK Leipzig festival director Claas Danielsen has. The following is taken from the press release of the festival after the opening of the festival: Claas Danielsen held a very personal speech,…

Please surprise me, give me time for reflections, to smile, laugh, cry, tell me something I did not know in beforehand – or show me something that I have not seen before, or make some unpredictable montage of location connections…