A film blog by Allan Berg Nielsen & Tue Steen Müller
A film blog by Allan Berg Nielsen & Tue Steen Müller
A special tribute was given to the Swedish commissioning editor Vera Bonnier, who had her last pitch at DOCSBarcelona. For 34 years Bonnier has worked for SVT, the Swedish public broadcaster, and has now decided to retire. She comes from…
Krzysztof Komeda… was the one who made the music for several of the films of Roman Polanski, Jerzy Skolimovski, Andrzej Warda, Danish Henning Carlsen and Jørgen Leth. He died in 1969, 38 years old. I am sure you remember the…
Last night of a festival with a small amount of films and a huge audience. With the focus on the authored films and with the authors – or other creative persons from the crews – present and taken care of…
In ”Way of Nature” (”Naturens Gång”) Swedish filmmaker Nina Hedenius uses a radio piece to convey to the audience that there is a world outside the farm that is the location of her film. In a workshop session at Magnificent7…
Take a look at the photo. The young woman leaning forward is Caroline. She is a social worker at a reception centre for asylum seekers in a municipality of Paris. The woman with her back to the camera is Zaleh,…
Jukka Kärkkäinen (JK) and his cameraman J-P. Passi (JP) are in Belgrade to present their film ”The Living Room of a Nation” that has been highly praised on this site several times. The JK presentation of the film and himself…
The Sava Center in Belgrade hosted two films for the opening of the 6th European Feature Documentary Festival, Magnificent7. The big hall made last night room for around 1500 spectators for each of the two films, that were introduced to…
The 6th European feature Documentary Festival opens tonight in the big hall of the Sava Centre in Belgrade. My guess – based on ticket office information and on experience from previous years – is that more than a thousand spectators…
The Catalan public broadcaster TV3 has since 1990 performed a very honourable competition for reports and films that ”raise a voice against the violation of human rights. The goal is to defend the rights of individuals and democratic values such…
The 32th (!) edition of the festival in Paris takes place March 18-30. Both bloggers of this site will be there to report in Danish and English. Here is an overview of what the programme includes, taken from the site…
This text about Polish master Marcel Łoziński is written by grand old man in Finnish documentary, for many years a producer, director and commissioning editor at YLE, Jarmo Jääskeläinen. The text is taken from the site of the international film…
This text is taken from the site of the Finnish documentary film festival Docpoint, that goes on 26-31.1.2010: I never made the decision to become a documentarian, to place myself in some fixed category. I don’t even like the word…
”What an achievement! I don’t recall, when was the last time that I witnessed so captivating a historical documentary, here told by Czech Jewish survivors of the holocaust. They were interviewed between 2000-2006 by Lukas Pribyl, the researcher, writer and…
Yes, it is him on the small poster, that advertises a fine programme to be performed by The Danish Institute in St. Petersburg. For four days a Film Festival Denmark will take place showing an excellent programme of films from…
A quote from my welcoming words for the Magnificent7 Festival: What is a good film festival? You will not be surprised when I answer that question by saying: Come to the 6th edition of Magnificent7! Again we – Svetlana and…
January 21-25 2010 are the dates for the 6th edition of Magnificent 7, the European Feature Documentary Film Festival. A unique festival with a selection of only 7 films that are shown once in the Sava Center in Belgrade, Serbia.…
The CMCA (Mediterranean Centre for Audiovisual Communication) has finished its 14th festival edition, and the publicity around the awards, the juries (2, one for documentary, one for reportage) and the films have never been bigger. The awards were given in…
The 12th edition of a festival that has grown in volume and importance. You felt it immediately when you were with the Turkish organisers and their young group of volunteers – all together people from or linked to the Association…
Learning by watching – still the key quality challenge for the documentary film maker. At the festival in Istanbul your film-journey constantly took you to places, where you could not go yourself or where you would never dream of going…
“VTR Film Directing Research Production” is run by director Enis Rıza and executive producer Nalân Sakızlı. Husband and wife. Around them they have young committed and skilled women – the festival director of this year, Bahriye Kabadayı, the conference director…
In the framework of the festival a Congress was organised on the Saturday December 12 at the Galatasaray University that is situated wonderfully at the Bosporus. The Congress, organised for the 9th time (the festival for its 12th time), had…
no-one, when it comes to the exclusivity rules of film festivals! There is nothing new in the fact that major festivals insist on having premieres (world, international, European or whatever they want to call it) and therefore block for screenings…
The premiere of a new documentary by Nino Kirtadzé, ”Something About Georgia”. High expectations after her award-winning documentaries ”The Pipeline Next Door” and ”Durakovo: Village of Fools”. And big disappointment, I have to say. Pure propaganda for the politics of…
The Pitch.Doc day included 10 projects to be pitched after a couple of days of training done by Georgian filmmaker Salome Jashi and me. The public pitching panel, arranged and organized by Anna Dziapshipa, had around 10 people to react…
The short name is ”Nationality: Human”, the long one is the South Caucasus Documentary Film Festival of Peace and Human Rights. The festival is supported by the Open Society Georgia Foundation (Soros) and partners and the woman running it is…
The Pitch workshop has started. 10 projects have been selected from 5 countries: Georgia, Armenia, Azerbjadan, Ukraine and Moldova. A diversity of themes were presented by filmmakers with a different background. They met each other, heard about the state of…
Arrived early morning in Tbilisi coming from Copenhagen via Istanbul. Turkish Airlines, to be recommended for its service. Drove on George Bush Street to the hotel, yes, George Bush Street! Says something about in which direction Georgia wanted and wants…
It is the 10th edition of the international film festival that starts tomorrow in Tbilisi, capital of Goegia. And goes on until the 6th of December. Mike Leigh is guest of honour and makes a masterclass and there is an…
MOMA in New York needs no further introduction as the museum of modern art. Less known – at least in Europe – is it that this museum, often much more precise and professional than festivals all over, put together interesting…
From the press release of idfa, impressive numbers, yes, the interest in documentaries is huge, bravo: Although the festival runs until Sunday, we can already cautiously say that the festival has once more received more visitors than last year… If…
There you go, a real camera stylo personal essay film with an original, personal style. I was completely taken in by the beauty of the film, “The Edge of Dreaming”, of Scottish filmmaker Amy Hardie. It touched me, made me…
I saw two films supported by the Jan Vrijman Fund. ”For Home Viewing” by Mikhail Zheleznikov is a half hour, wonderfully controlled, cinematically original and funny first person story by the director, who tells about his view from his home…
Second day of the Forum, better atmosphere, better projects in general and a proof that the pitching sessions in a smaller room with around 10 broadcasters and film funders around the table, that this extra-to-the-big-room-format work well and can give…
And there you are again at the world’s biggest documentary festival! You carry your festival bag to the hotel – film catalogue, catalogue for the project Forum, a so-called industry guide with photos of broadcasters and film funders, market catalogue,…
This prestigious festival that honours the art of cinematography introduces now – in its 18th edition – a competition for documentaries, feature and short. 12 films are nominated in the feature category, among them several that have been reviewed or…
On the site of idfa, the world’s biggest documentary film festival, that is running right now, you can download the English version of the idfa daily, called ”the international voice of idfa”. There are articles about the films, interviews with…
If anyone deserves to be honoured for his life long oeuvre it is Frederick Wiseman, who yesterday at the opening of idfa in Amsterdam received an award, specially created for the occasion, including €5000. An example for all documentary makers,…
Maziar Bahari, who was arrested and imprisoned in Teheran, and has recently been released will Sunday, 22 November, from 15.30 to 17.30, be present at idfa in the Escape Lounge, where he will be talking about his recent experiences and…
Here follows a list of films that an idfa visitor could watch on this blog writer’s recommendation. Goes without saying that I only know a few of the films that have their premieres in Amsterdam. I mention 20 titles and…
The biggest documentary film festival opens in a couple of days. If you attend you will have an enormous lot of choices. Here is the introduction from the organisers: From November 19, Amsterdam will once again be the focal point…
Especially for our Danish readers: The masterly done documentary ”Another Planet” by Hungarian director Ferenc Moldoványi will be presented in Copenhagen on November 20 in connection with the celebration of the 20 year birthday of the UN Convention on the…
Claas Danielsen is festival director of DOKLeipzig. His opening speech of this year’s festival is a high quality personal hommage to the documentary and to an audience that by public television is increasingly being treated as ignorant and unintelligent. Read…
A bit post festum an extract of the awards at the DOK Leipzig 2009. Several of the winners have been mentioned or reviewed on this site: The International Jury for Documentary Film awards: for Documentary Films and Videos / Long…
Tre års tornerosesøvn er forbi, uhyret jaget på flugt, støjen ophørt. Posthus Teatret åbnede igen i forgårs for at deltage i CPH:DOX visningerne. Københavns mærkværdigste og mest stædige biograf viser igen film, som biografdirektørerne kan lide og som de holder…
The festival in Reus ended last night. The jury chose ”Of Time and the City” by Terence Davies as the best film, honouring the personal courage of the director not to forget his personal commentary and creative use of archive…
Director Josep Rovira and researcher Montserrat Bailac told me that I would probably not really understand their ”Dear Dona Elena”, as there was no contextual information given in the film that makes a focus on the fifties of a Spain…
The festival invited producer and director Edmon Roch to present his ambitious docu-spy film ”Garbo – the Man who Saved the World”, which is the story about Juan Puol, the double agent who during WW2 for the Germans was Arabal…
Reus, town of Gaudi in Catalonia, a couple of hours from Barcelona. For the fourth time the city hosts a film festival that deals with memories and presents films that work creatively with archives. It is a small festival with…
It’s show time in Copenhagen. The international documentary film festival starts November 6 and runs until November 15. A huge programme is set up to satisfy the local documentary addicts and the visiting professionals. BUT they don’t get the best…
Stop reading if you want to avoid a personal text that is full of emotions and warm thanks from me to the women running the IDF, Institute of Documentary Film, based in Prague with the task to promote Eastern European…