A film blog by Allan Berg Nielsen & Tue Steen Müller
A film blog by Allan Berg Nielsen & Tue Steen Müller
I saw this beautiful film sunday morning in Vienna during the Ex Oriente first session ( www.docuinter.net ). The director Juraj Lehotsky took the short way from Bratislava to show us a feature length, four chaptered (following the loves stories…
Wish I were in Rio de Janeiro or Sao Paulo! For the 8th time Amir Labaki (it started yesterday) launches his documentary film festival with the provoking Orson Welles inspired name “It’s All True”. I was there years ago as…
Cinéma réel festivalen har en socialantropologisk pris (Prix réalités de l’immatériel), dens 2500 euro blev givet til en film om den sibiriske rensdyr-nomade- og jægerkultur Evenk, som er ved at forsvinde ind i den russiske agrare kultur, en problemstilling, filmprojektet…
Den forrygende oplevelse på Cinéma réel sidste uge var Vardas cinéma vérité om at tage til Hollywood og optage en film med udsøgt casting: Viva (Warhols superstar), Jerome Ragni & James Rado (Hair) og i biroller Shirley Clarke (!) og…
Filmen, som i lørdags vandt hovedprisen på Cinéma du Réel i Paris, er en vidunderlig fortælling om en flok børn og deres frie liv sammen uden mange voksne omkring sig. Jo, de går da i skole, men det er uden…
The festival is over. The prizes have been given. It happened saturday night and the winner was Volker Koepp with his story about the children in Kaliningrad, ”Holunderblüte”. No objections, not at all, Koepp is a master and deserves to…
Maybe – at the end of the day – documentary festivals will be events that you travel to in big numbers as you travel to visit art exhibitions, says Allan, my co-blogger. He could be right if you consider the…
Saturday morning in the café. The sun is shining in Paris today. In 90 minutes we have booked the videotheque to catch up with some films in the international competition. And then a couple of films later this day. Here…
It is raining cats and stones in Paris. No spring feeling yet. Nevertheless the cafés are full outside as all the smokers are situated there now. No smoking inside. Full houses at the festival for the two screenings in the…
I am sitting in the niveau -1 in the Centre Pompidou. This is where the acceuil for the Cinema du Réel is situated. As always in the Centre during the festival, it is difficult to create anything just close to…
Yes, for those who do not read Danish, “we” (Allan Berg Nielsen and me, Tue Steen Müller) leave for Paris tomorrow to follow the 30th edition of Cinéma du Réel, which took off with the subtitle “antropological and ethnographic films”.…
15 documentary projects were presented at the ZagrebDox pitching thursday the 28th of February. There were 9 commissioning editors around the table. 4 from the West (Arte, YLE, ORF, Jan Vrijman Fund) and 4 from the region, from the Bosnian,…
Last day of festival. I have a seminar in the morning where I present the state of the art of documentary in Europe. I am trying to find the right approach to the audience which includes people, who come because…
Sometimes, actually very often, reality cheats you, or in this case the weather! While I was in safe surroundings inside the Al Kindi cinema to a session about ethics and documentaries, about the relation between the filmmaker and the person…
It is monday morning and once again I find myself with Pirjo Honkasalo and Niels Pagh Andersen, who are to talk about ”3 Rooms of Melancholia”. For four hours with 25 people in the hall. It goes very well, we…
No, they don’t know it or them, says Orwa Nyrabia, one of the DOX BOX organisers, when I doubt him stating that the audience to the seminar of French academic Martin Barbier, ”Back to Basics”, had never heard about ”Nanook…
Full house for the film of Omar Amiralay from 1982, ”The Misfortune of Some”, produced for the French channel Antenne 2, during the Lebanese war. Amiralay is the Syrian documentary filmmaker, his films have been shown all over the world,…
This is a small report from the first day of the new DOX BOX documentary festival in Damascus. At the opening yesterday there was full house in at the Al Kindi Film Theatre, where the DOX BOX team, headed by…
Sneak preview of a film from Poland shot in Afghanistan by Jacek Petrycki, master in camerawork as he has shown so many times before with Kieslowski and Marcel Lozinski. Beata Dzianowicz has written and directed this film about a group…
What to do a loong grey saturday in February in Copenhagen? You go to watch documentaries at the Danish Film School where EDN (European Documentary Network) per tradition invites professionals and film students to attend a mini-festival with long and…
It must be a good sign for the documentary genre that festivals are starting all over the world. And that the more established ones break their audience attendance records year after year. A Golden Age for the documentary? I think…
Nenad Puhovski is a filmmaker and film school professor and festival founder and organizer from Zagreb, Croatia. His commitment to the documentary is enormous. He has through his Factum delivered several critical films on Croatian politics and action during the…
It is one of those ideas that is so obvious that normally noone takes it! However, Cian Smyth did and put it into practice. To make a documentary film award, and a festival, in the name of The Maysles Brothers…
The prestigious Berlin film festival, the Berlinale, offers a good selection of documentaries this year. 30 it is according to which is the excellent site of IDF (Institute of Documentary Film), that is based in Prague. The Berlinale takes…
My Danish writing blog colleague writes above, under the caption “Oscar kritik”, linking to a group of festival people, who object to the selection of films nominated for this years documentary Oscar. He proudly mentions that two Danish films are…
If you happen to be in Barcelona tomorrow, 1st of February, you could visit Institut Francais at 17.30 to meet two French masters in documentaries – at a masterclass open to the audience. Thierry Garrel is Head of the Documentary…
For four days Barcelona hosts the documentary film festival DOCSBarcelona. This second edition takes place in the Alexandra cinema situated in one of the ramblas of the beautiful city. I am writing this from my hotel room preparing for the…
En række festivalledere har i frustration over Academy Awards udvælgelsen / nomineringen af dokumentarfilm, de finder – skal jeg kalde det “ikke-tidssvarende” – på et weekendmøde lavet deres egen liste over årets 15 bedste film. To danske film er på…
… and the festival that we have been writing about on this blog every day for a week has had a magnificent start. On saturday the opening Basque film “Nomadak tx” gathered more than 600 people, accompanied by full house…
On this blog we have many times written about the Danish manyfold awarded film by Pernille Rose Grønkjær, “The Monastery”. You can click on the title and read all about it. Now it is to be the closing film at…
The sixth film to be shown at the unique festival in Belgrade, starting tomorrow saturday, under the subtitle “European feature documentaries”, organised by Svetlana and Zoran Popovic and their team, and with me taking part in the selection is …
The fifth film to be shown at the unique festival in Belgrade, starting this coming saturday, under the subtitle “European feature documentaries”, organised by Svetlana and Zoran Popovic and their team, and with me taking part in the selection is …
The fourth film to be shown at the unique festival in Belgrade, starting this coming saturday, under the subtitle “European feature documentaries”, organised by Svetlana and Zoran Popovic and their team, and with me taking part in the selection is…
The third film to be shown at the unique festival in Belgrade, starting this coming saturday, under the subtitle “European feature documentaries”, organised by Svetlana and Zoran Popovic and their team, and with me taking part in the selection is…
… for feature length European documentaries For the fourth time I have had the privilege to select film for this unique festival together with the two organisers Svetlana and Zoran Popovic THE MOSQUITO PROBLEM AND OTHER STORIES Made in a…
This is the fourth edition of a unique festival of only 7 films but with a huge audience and a warm support from its visitors. It is organised by Svetlana and Zoran Popovic and their team, and I have had…
Following the example of last year’s festival, the international and national competitions are now open to fiction films as documentaries. We said it last year and we repeat it again today: it is not a question of creating a sterile…
Min kollega, Tue Steen Müller har på rejse langt borte fået en julehilsen fra dette nye firma, som vil sælge kopier af fremragende nye danske dokumentarfilm, lige nu og til at begynne med indehavernes egne, men senere udvider de tre…
En af de mest bemærkelsesværdige film i lang tid, efter opsigtsvækkende rundrejse gennem et år til en række festvaler i udlandet, efter en tur i enkelte biografer herhjemme NU omsider i tv: DR2 mandag, 10. december kl. 20:55: Jeg…
Phie Ambo is one of the most obvious talents in new Danish documentary film. She showed great observational skills in her last film “Gambler” about the filmmaker Nikolaj Refn Winding (the “Pusher” trilogy), skills she is also using in her…
Another strong story from the Iraqi war. This time about a journalist, Yunis Abbas, who was captured by the Americans accused for being part of a cell that planned to kill Tony Blair when he was to visit his war…
Oh, how joyful it is to discover something new, when you think that you know your documentary film history, have seen it (almost) all, at least what is considered as masterpieces and know where your priorities lie. And there comes…
“This is the director’s point of view on Jacques Vergès which may differ from the opinions of people interviewed in the film”. These words are to be found on screen at the start of this fascinating film about a man,…
One of those films that are hard to watch. A beautiful young girl falls ill and turns into an aggressive young woman full of aggression to end up as a plump adult full of medication that can calm her down,…
Things are moving in the documentary genre. New and original ways of storytelling come out of the blue. Like in this case where British director Brian Hill went to the Downview Prison in Sutton England to make a film with…
Lad mig gøre det kort: lad være med at se den her film. Er du til pornografi, bliver du skuffet, er du til eksistentiel dybde, bliver du skuffet, er du til filmisk skønhed, bliver du først forført, siden skuffet. Folk…
It’s countryside again. This time Nicholas Philibert heads for Normandy, where he 30 years ago was the direction assistant of René Allio on the film “Moi, Pierre Rivière”, a “based on a true” story about a young man who in…
An excellent idea. A filmmaker gives a football star a camera and asks him to film from inside during the world cup championship in Germany 2006. And luckily for the film, but bad and sad for the player, he only…
cph:dox har spurgt om vi vil lave et link til festivalens hjemmeside. Med allerstørste glæde. Denne festival har i løbet af fire år markeret sig stærkt i bevidstheden hos et antalsmæssigt stigende dokumentarpublikum, der går i byen for at få…
Der er masser af grunde til at tage en tur til Odense for at se film fra den 27.august og en lille uge frem. Der er kortfilmfestival med et bedste af det bedste fra hele verden. Der er mulighed for…