Festival

1989 will be remembered in festivals and on tv. And documentaries will be a strong visual element to show the changes that took place when the Berlin Wall went down, followed by the decline of the USSR. The following text…

Wow, they deserve it! Atanas Georgiev, director and his team, who can add one more acknowledgement to the one they got at ZagrebDox some months ago at the world premiere: Last night they were awarded the ”Regards Neufs Prize” at…

Morgane turns 18. She lives with her father and brother. Her mother lives somewhere else. Morgane still keeps her teddy bears lined up at her bed, but she is also the young girl on her way to adulthood caring about…

Still photos from a prostitution environment, without any persons pictured,   accompany the words from a witness statement to the police. It is a alarming declaration read by a male voice, straight forward and neutral without any attempt to touch the…

A minimalistic film school diploma work, full of tension and importance, with a terrifying story told through staged interviews with the director’s parents, a sister and a boyfriend. Intertwined to these fragments of words that carry the narrative – about…

From without and from within the cinema is dying, if not already dead. You shoot a dinosaur in the head on a Monday but the goddamned animal is so big and clumsy and stupid it will not roll over till…

It is huge in content and very professional in communication. The festival in Toronto gets closer as does the parallel TDF, Toronto Documentary Forum: April 30-May 10 for the festival, May 6-7 for the forum. A newsletter comes out for…

Be careful if you are German, has made a good documentary and wants it to go to DOK Leipzig 2009. New regulations have been introduced, read this press release: Starting in 2009, all films screened in DOK Leipzig’s German Competition…

It is not very often that jury motivations are useful to read. This one is, from the documentary competition at the Belfast Film Festival, named after the Maysles Brothers. The members were Karolina Lidin, Charlie Philips and Ben Kempas. Here…

Documentary festivals flourish. For the 4th time ”Doc a Tunis” takes place, April 1st to 5th. A lot of films are shown from the host country, and from Marocco, Algeria and Libanon, and from Syria comes the film ”Dolls. A…

The Idfa based Jan Vrijman Fund, named after the late Dutch documentarian, who made several great films, including one about the COBRA painter Karel Appel, has finished the first round selection for 2009, second round deadline June 1st. The fund…

The excellent “One World Human Rights Film Festival” in Prague is over and awards have been distributed. One of the awards not only carry the name of Vaclac Havel but when I was there years ago, I was told that…

The annual EDN award for 2009 goes to Nenad Puhovski and his ZagrebDox. The motivation goes like this: ZagrebDox is a documentary event initiated by Nenad Puhovski, consisting of a weeklong festival and a financing forum entitled ZagrebDox Pro. Within…

”Six Ordinary Stories” by Syrian director Meyar Al Roumi is a quite refreshing report on six ordinary taxi drivers and their work and life in Damascus. Ordinary, well also extraordinarily open they are as well as critical to the life…

Another fine new initiative from DoxBox 2009 is the “Point of View” festival newsletter. Editor-in-chief is Danish Ulla Jacobsen, who by this year decided to leave the post of the DOX Magazine after more than a decade as the brilliant…

The writing workshop is over. An amazing development from Day 1 to Day 3. 5 documentary projects are ready to be piitched internationally. Projects with quality and passion. The doors should be opened for these filmmakers to proceed to the…

Second day of a workshop organised by DoxBox that really has put an emphasis on establishing a so-called industry section of the two year old festival. Mikael Opstrup and I tutor 6 filmmakers with projects and 6 with no projects.…

Nicholas Philibert is here. Three films have been shown, “Le Pays des Sourds”, “Retour en Normandie” and “La moindre des choses”. Last year the Syrian audience could enjoy “Etre et Avoir”. Philibert did a master class, denied to be called…

It is sometimes difficult to understand the mechanisms of censorship. I saw the funny, maybe a bit repetitive documentary by Massoud Bakhshi, “Tehran has no more Pomegranates”, a playful and well made film about the big city, using wonderful archive,…

It is one of those minimalistic films that subject-wise has been seen so many times: Man lives alone outside the cities, big house, animals – cows, chicken, horses, cats and dogs – he has retired from the noisy world full…

Orwa Nyrabia, together with Diana el-Jeiroudi the founder and director of the festival: We considered 300 films. 90 of them we requested for the selection. 100 passed for the selection committee, 6 people, and out came the around 40 films…

Second edition. Second time that Damascus has an international documentary film festival. The programme is enlarged, there is an industry section, sidebar retrospectives, it is all there. Impressive it is to be back. Full house at the opening film, “China…

Second edition of the documentary festival in Damascus, Tartous and Homs in Syria. Reports from the 1st edition can be found on filmkommentaren.dk. I dont have the programme schedule yet but have seen the list of films and guests who…

It is the fourth time the programmer Cian Smyth organises the documentary festival ”within” the Belfast Film Festival, March 26- April 4. And again it is a pleasure to see a varied selection of high quality films, 44 in all,…

Awards were given out tonite at ZagrebDOX. The regional awards are the ones to be noticed signaling strongly the current high quality. All 3 films have or will have a well deserved international recognition. The two first have been written…