A film blog by Allan Berg Nielsen & Tue Steen Müller
A film blog by Allan Berg Nielsen & Tue Steen Müller
Where the impression of the Sheffield DocFest film selection is one of British provinsialism (see below), there is reason to say bravo to the American Silverdocs, that offers its viewers a quality programme. The Discovery Channel supports the festival but…
… starts tomorrow. The festival and its industry activity used to be a couple of weeks in November before the idfa in Amsterdam. Now it has moved to June, presumably to have more new films without having to compete with…
Koutecky died tragically in 2006, 50 years old, after having completed twelve years of filming Vaclac Havel. The material was edited by his colleague Miroslav Janek and the masterpiece Citizen Havel was born. An award has been set up in…
The festival ended this evening with the prize ceremony in the huge Kijew Kino. The jury, of which I was the chairman, judging 20 international documentaries, made the following decision – quoting the short motivations, reviews of three main prize…
It has a story, a point of view, a humanistic approach and a director, who is also the cameraman and who has the skills to catch magical moments as they happen in life. A decade ago the director made ”Siberian…
I want to be seen, says one them. I want to be conventional, says the other. Both of them took a very unconventional decision, to change from being a man to being a woman. The title says that they have…
From a filmic point of view it has everything, it is so well done: strong characters, who are developed, as a similar strong story is being unfolded, with conflicts, dramas, emotions, intimacy, closeness. The style is aggressive, the camera goes…
It is so natural that Krakow has been a Cultural Capital of Europe. It has history, beautiful buildings, an active outside life with loads of cafés – yes, we are many visitors in this city and the Main Market Square…
Vera and Marcel, brother and sister. Marcel, film director. They sit together around a table. They do so to recollect and remember Tonia, the mother of the siblings, a woman who was in jail and a woman who was filmed…
In the old festival hotel Cracovia, next door to the Kijow Cinema, where the main programme of the festival is running, there is a so-called Industry Zone, where festival people meet and talk to filmmakers in an informal atmosphere about…
First an introduction taken from YouTube, where the Krakow Film Foundation has posted videos and some trailers from films taking part in the 51st (!) edition of Krakow Film Festival, 23rd – 29th May 2011: KFF is one of the…
For many of us it never goes beyond the words, when it comes to put into reality all the good intentions about the promotion of the documentaries. Few have had the strength and courage to link all the elements of…
The way to the audience can go through the showing of documentaries on a regular basis as Parallel 40 has initiated with the ”Documentary of the Month”, see above. Or it can be through festivals, the more and more popular…
It is good and bad at the same time. Bad because it reflects that international cooperation for the production of non-mainstream documentaries no longer happens between the national film funds and/or the national broadcasters, good because it reflects that festivals…
The French based (in Marseilles) promotion and distribution mechanism Aflam, which has its focus on Arab cinema, pays a tribute to the late Syrian documentary film director, Omar Amiralay, who died in February this year. Amiralay was a persona non…
Wonder how many documentaries will be screened in Cannes this year? The stars are there, the most fascinating is Faye Dunaway on the gorgeous poster of this year.
I have written about and praised the DOX magazine a couple of times as the magazine for the creative (artistic, authored, call it what you want) documentary. But if you want to follow what happens in the more commercial sector…
Zanda Dudina from the National Film Centre in Latvia read my text about the film on Rudolf Ming, see below. She tells me that Rudolf – 13 at the time of the film, 16 today – now have a real…
Good news it is that this Latvian documentary, produced by the studio that carries the name of documentary legend Juris Podnieks, has made it to the Hot Docs festival (see below) and will have three screenings in Toronto in the…
Want to share this beautiful photo from Belgrade, from Svetlana and Zoran Popovic, Magnificent7, European feature documentary festival, next edition January 2012.
Conversations with documentary filmmakers from Italy is always full of head shaking over the situation in Italian television, which is basically run by the main character in Italian documentary of today: Silvio Berlusconi. There are public funding mechanisms, and they…
If idfa in Amsterdam is the biggest in Europe, Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival is North America’s largest documentary festival, conference and market. It returns for its 18th annual edition from April 28 to May 8, 2011. Showcasing the…
The excellent vod (video on demand) portal DocAlliance, set up by five European film festivals, makes a generous offer: to watch five films by Polish documentary master Marcel Lozinzki. The five films, including the masterpiece ”Anything can Happen”. Here is…
Nothing happens. Or a lot happens. Up to you as audience. It depends on how you define ”a story”. In mainstream definition terms one would say that there is no story, and yet here is an outline of the short…
It is not unusual that we do proper promotion for events that we are involved in ourselves. This is no exception! Loyal readers have read my texts from Israel and Palestine – where a workshop was held that ended up…
Twice per year the Danish Film Institute (DFI) invites the national documentary filmmakers, distributors, promoters and bureaucrats, including television people, to meet for information and inspiration. The first meeting took place on monday this week, a so-called ”DOK-dag” (Documentary Day)…
From the DOK Dag (see above): Could have listened to and watched much more of the work of multi artist Kaspar Schröder, an original talent, who also makes films and has got a lot of well deserved praise for his…
On this site we have been writing about this film a couple of times. It came out of the European training programme called DocuRegio, where I met it, and I was surprised that the festivals in Leipzig and Amsterdam did…
The International festival of documentary films Cinéma du réel March 23rd -April 5th 2011 opened this Wednesday in Paris at le Centre Pompidou for the 33rd time. Readers of this blog are used to a broad coverage of this festival,…
.. is the name of the newsletter of the Thessaloniki Documentary Festival that also carries the name: Images of the 21st Century. A clip from the newsletter text: The 13th Thessaloniki Documentary – Images of the 21st Century ended on…
Ukranian filmmaker Sergei Loznitsa is being honoured with a big retrospective of his work (11 documentaries) at Doc Fest in Thessaloniki, that runs until March 20. The festival has a fine newsletter (free subscription) from where this press text –…
Could not resist, had to bring that photo, even if I have now idea about the film – it has its premiere at the festival. Here is what is written about it on the site: The first big piece of…
The festival in Damascus still runs today and tomorrow. I left this morning and the few times I was in the cinema, it was full. Beyond any doubt, this festival – that has been running for four years – has…
So there we were at the beautiful Danish Institute in Damascus on a rainy tuesday, March 8. The small shops at the soukh were closed, not because of the International Women’s Day but to celebrate the constitution of the governing…
Three projects were given a financial support at the end of the presentation day at Dox Box Campus 2011: ”Brakes” by Bassel Shehade received the ”Best Syrian Project Grant” of 6000$ (previous title: Female Wheels). ”My Uncle. ”The Terrorist”” by…
I am listening to Cara Mertes from the Sundance Institute, she has a power point presentation. Behind her is a quote by Robert Redford: Because audiences are starved for new ideas, voices and visions… as a motivation to set up…
There is no revolution in Damascus – small demonstrations in front of the Egyptian and Libyan embassy were stopped immediately by the authorities – but there are many revolutionaries among the participants at the Dox Box Campus that runs parallel…
Fourth edition of a festival – without Omar Amarilay, see below – that deserves a lot of respect for its ambition to show creative documentaries from all over the world to an audience that normally has no chance at all…
It can only be a very sad opening of the fourth edition of the Syrian documentary film festival Dox Box, that runs from March 2nd to 10th in Damascus. The reason is that the festival will be without THE Syrian…
Readers will know that I teach at Zelig Documentary Film School in Bolzano. 3 of the new students, who are in their first year of study, have recently written reviews of films on this blog and I am happy to…
It is not new that the NY Museum of Modern Art has a very active film department and a very high quality in selection. Neither is it new that the Museum shows a lot of documentaries. But it is maybe…
This is how Danish veteran Leth is characterised on the site of the coming ZagrebDox (February 27 – March 6) in a quite interesting intro text, that also has a greeting to what is called Danish puritans: “Can ‘eroticism’ be…
The Italian director Andrea Deaglio and his Turin Based production company Babydoc pass on the information that their film ”Il futuro del mondo passa da qui”, with the subtitle ”City Veins”, has been selected for the festival Cinema du Réel,…
“Guanape Sur” by Jànos Richter has been selected for the Premiers Pas section of “Visions du reel”, that runs in Nyon Switzerland from 7-13.April 2011. The director graduated from the Zelig Documentary Film School in Bolzano last year. His film,…
Mila Turajlic’s Cinema Komunisto closed the Magnificent/ Festival in Belgrade a bit more than a week ago. The reception was overwhelmingly positive and the film is now up for a theatrical release. The organisers of the festival Svetlana and Zoran…
It was a proud Joan Gonzalez, director of DocsBarcelona, who texted me this morning. In the newspaper Vanguardia, page 2, Gonzalez was given a ”GreenLight”, a tribute that is given to people, who has done something special for their profession…
It was the first time that DocsBarcelona included awards. At the fifth edition of the festival statuettes and cash prizes were distributed. €6000 was given to the film “Foreign Parts” (photo) by Verena Paravel and J.P. Sniadecki. The description of…
… hopefully, because there were many talented directors with interesting and intriguing project proposals at the 14th edition of the Pitching Forum in Barcelona, see below. This posting does not allow to mention all the 23 projects which were presented,…
… edition number 14 it was on February 3 and 4. For those readers who are not familiar with the terminology – pitching in the film world is about filmmakers throwing film ideas and proposals to broadcasters, film funds, sales…
Greenaway needs no big introduction and no need to stress his importance for European cinema as a master constantly searching for new possibilities for expression. I was not able to attend (with 300 others) his masterclass, that he – taken…