A film blog by Allan Berg Nielsen & Tue Steen Müller
A film blog by Allan Berg Nielsen & Tue Steen Müller
Success story: DocsBarcelona 2009 closed (10 days ago) with a room full of people to watch Brett Gaylor’s “RIP: A Remix Manifesto”. The film brought to the end six days of activities meant to encourage the creation and interest in…
There he is, festival director, producer and teacher Nenad Puhovski, who now for the 5th time launches a documentary festival in Croatia, and thus welcomes the world of documentaries in the heart of Zagreb. A clip from the welcome text…
Within the festival ZagrebDOX, see above, a project development and pitching session has taken place for several years and will take place again in 2009, where 13 projects have been chosen. Cecilia Lidin from EDN and I have the privilige…
Prestigious BAFTA (British Academy of Film and Television Arts) ceremony in London had Slumdog Millionaire nominated in 11 categories. It won in seven, including Best Cinematography, which gives us another chance to say bravo to Anthony Dod Mantle, about whom…
Good access news. Festivals help each other, we are not used to that, and establish a vod. Says the IDF site docuinter.net: On February 10, 2009 Berlinale hosts a special presentation. Doc Alliance, an association of Europe’s five key documentary…
At DOCSBarcelona Israeli director Avi Mograbi had two screenings of his latest film, ”Z 32”, a film that I have praised several times on filmkommentaren.dk On top of that the director performed a three hour masterclass for 180 people according…
What a pleasure to listen to Peter Entell at the masterclass in Belgrade in connection with the Magnificent7 festival. Well prepared he showed clips from his previous films, talked about them and about his way of filmmaking, especially related to…
You might say that the films should be able to stand on their own. And right you are. You should be able to understand and sense a film without any introduction or comment or explanation. To watch it on your…
Look at the picture. This couple, Svetlana and Zoran Popovic, stands behind the Magnificent7 festival in Belgrade. I have known them for years and have had the privilege to work with them for five years on the selection for the…
We experience right now the golden age of documentary. There has never been such a huge interest from an audience that age-wise mostly is young and has given up on television! And there have never been such an amount of…
It is such an adventure to go to the cinema for four days to watch 7 films that are received with enthusiasm and emotion by the most wonderful audience I know, the one in Belgrade. You can not overestimate the…
De tre nye stills i Filmkommentarens top er fra tre film, som bliver vist på 7BEST. Det er: Citizen Havel. Af Pavel Koutecky og Mira Janek. I 12 år fulgte Koutecky bag kulisserne dissidenten og præsidenten, den karismatisk beskedne og…
Step by step the DOCSBarcelona has grown into an international documentary event of great importance in the city that right now hosts the best football team in the world. It is now a festival and a pitching forum. The organiser…
Starting today the film festival for independent film, running in Park City, Utah, goes on until January 25. The website tells it all – films, panel discussions, and the documentary sections are growing in strength, as is the Sundance Institute…
The European Feature Documentary Film Festival in Belgrade, organised by Svetlana and Zoran Popovic from the Kvadrat Film School and in collaboration with the Sava Center, has published the 2009 programme: read here As I have had the privilege to…
A review of a good film can be repeated. That is the case for this documentary that got the Swedish Guldbaggen award as best documentary of 2008, at the ceremoney where most of the prizes very much deserved went to…
The Finnish documentary festival celebrates Broomfield and Leacock. It points in the direction of a selection policy that respects the old masters, which is furthermore stressed by the latest news from festival director Erkko Lyytinen on the dokblog of YLE.…
Below you will find a couple of brief status articles on Danish documentaries in the year that is about to finish, 2008. Nothing sensational, nothing quality-wise to be compared to ”The Monastery”, the Danish documentary from the last years but…
Bilal is a boy, whose parents are blind and have a hard life in a poor area of Calcutta. For a year the director has followed the little boy stumbling into the world as any other child does, who is…
De tre billeder i toppen af vores forside er jo fra film, som er vigtige for os. De er fra film, som Tue Steen Müller har valgt ud til 7BEST i Randers i marts: “Deconstruction of an Artist” af Peteris…
Le Monde (11.12.08) includes an interview with Werner Herzog to announce the big retrospective of the German master and his around 50 films. The series run from December 10 to March 2 2009. He says nothing specific new in this…
… that has the subtitle, ”reporting from a closed country” is content-wise a totally shocking experience. There you are in the middle of a military brutality that is filmed by courageous video journalists, who know that a documentation like this…
Am I just an object of study for you, René asks Helena, the director of the film, in one of their numerous conversations during the 20 years, she has followed the child/the youngster/theman René, who spends most of his life…
Sergey Dvortsevoy thinks it is important to reflect on WHY you make documentaries, well film in general. He started late as a filmmaker, he made ”Paradise”, ”Bread Day”, ”Highway”, ”In the Dark” and now ”Tulpan”, the latter a film with…
Below – in Danish – a critical text about yesterday’s broadcast produced by DR, our public broadcaster in Denmark. Today I met some of the participants at the party for European films, organised by European Film Academy, EFA. They had…
Tue Steen Müller har her på siden gennem snart halvandet år skrevet om alle de film, han har set – mest på sine mange rejser til seminarer, pitchings, undervisningen på sin italienske filmskole, festivals og en del mere. Og det…
Sometimes it is easy to express your opinion. Like in this case where I found a text from the film critic at The Guardian, Nick Bradshaw (November 28), that precisely and in much better English than I can perform –…
Taken from the idfa site: The VPRO Joris Ivens Award was presented to Anders Østergaard for Burma VJ – Reporting From a Closed Country. The film consists almost completely of material filmed in secret by a group of reporters during…
The Kurdish in Turkey – a long and complicated story about a people being suppressed. We have seen loads of news reports and some political documentaries about a conflict full of blood, and also for that reason it is nice…
The last day of the Forum at idfa in Amsterdam. For those who have never heard about it, let this text be the introduction, taken from the site of idfa: ”The FORUM is Europe’s largest gathering of filmmakers, television commissioning…
It is without any doubt absolutely fantastic to see all these documentary professionals gather in one room to exchange ideas, catch up from the last gathering, offer new projects, comment on the last films which have been watched or broadcast…
I know that I am biased in the following – working for the Institute for Documentary Films (IDF) in Prague that organises the Ex Oriente Film training Programme and the East European Forum in Jihlava – but I have to…
Here we come, monday morning, entering the arena in Amsterdam. Big room, round table, space for audience. They are all looking at us, when we react to the pitching. For many of us the body language communicates fatigue, another pitching…
A Bulgarian filmmaker makes a film for a charming, warm and smiling American photographer, Marion Michelle. He met her during the research for a film to be made in the footsteps of Joris Ivens, who made his ”The First Years”…
Something went wrong. Difficult to say what. Anyhow, the two old brothers live together but do not communicate. Somewhere in the north of Bavaria, in the countryside, where Heiner has inherited the farm and Fritz takes care of the household.…
With German master director Edgar Reitz (”Heimat”) as the president of the jury, the International Film Festival of Mannheim-Heidelberg gave the Special Jury Award to ”Another Planet” (see also review, go to ”search”). Here follows the motivation: “There are films…
Det går sjældent som planlagt, når jeg er på festival. Billetter kan ikke fås, visninger ikke nås, titler ikke til stede i on-line samlingen på markedet. Men, men så er der til gengæld store overraskelser, nye opdagelser, uventede møder. Det…
2008 CPH:DOX awards have been given out at the CPH:DOX Galla. DOX:AWARD 2008: went to Anders Østergaard for “Burma VJ”, with a Special Mention to Mark Hammersberg, Ester Martin Bergsmark and Beatrice Maggie Andersson for “Maggie in Wonderland” (see review).…
From the very well organised industry part of the the festival, I would like to highlight 3 of the projects that I am looking forward to see as finished film: ”Into Eternity” from Danish Michael Madsen and his producer Lise…
A learning lab. This is what Tine Mosegaard, the organiser, called the DOX-Forum in the catalogue intro for the 3 day industry event, an integrated part of the film festival. A programme consisting of pitching sessions and seminars like the…
Nomally panel discussions are boring with a lot of repetitions. This one was different. The panelists complemented each other and were open in their sharing information and points of views on the involvement of the art museums in distributing films.…
Around 20 minutes into this staged documentary I started to get impatient. Come on, make the story move, we got the message, the neighbours dont like each others, they dont talk, it is a silent war, where they will not…
Så er filmvisningerne i gang i Århus. Man skulle kunne være to steder nu. Må jeg her lige pege på de film i programmet, som Tue Steen Müller har anmeldt her på siden: Timo Novotny: Life in…
Trefeurig is the name of a small village community in Wales. This is where director and cameraman Gideon Koppel takes us – on a stunningly beautiful, wonderfully slow, and editing-like surprising voyage that I have difficulties in forgetting after two…
We met him years ago, this Hungarian director, who stood behind the much discussed, but great film ”Children of Kosovo”. We, meaning colleague Allan Berg and I, who defended the director’s right to use extremely aesthetical cinematographic means to describe…
Jakob Skovgaard Petersen, his wife and their two children were in Cairo for some years. Petersen was appointed Head of the Danish-Egyptian Dialogue Institute and he was there during the cartoon crisis. A brilliant and knowledgeable man, not only a…
I was at the Film House tonight to meet Jan Troell, the 77 year old Swedish master, who right now experiences big international success with his latest feature, ”Maria Larssons evige Øjeblik”. English title is ”Everlasting Moments”. A whole evening…
Nu kan vi der bor vestligere selv se efter, er Ari Folmans Waltz with Bashir vildt flot,men kold og tom? Kollega Tue Steen Müller gik frustreret fra visningen i København læser vi lige nedenfor. Og har den erfarne mand dårlige…
I have been thinking a lot – why does this film not involve me? Why do I stay in a careless mood? I had high expectations, I had read about it, seen the overall praise it has got and I…
Hammarsberg, Bergmark & Andersson: “Maggie In Wonderland”. Andersson is Maggie, credited as co-director in this moving documentary about herself, a Kenyan woman, who lives in Malmö on the 15th floor with a balcony full of pigeons. “It’s me telling you about…