A film blog by Allan Berg Nielsen & Tue Steen Müller
A film blog by Allan Berg Nielsen & Tue Steen Müller
The Baltic Way for me and for my whole generation, those who survived this event, will remain as a genetic code that is deeply and substantially engrained in the consciousness. As a believer, I see this event from a theological…
Darya Bassel: “Documentary cinema speaks better to people about events happening right here and now” A conversation between the Ukrainian filmmaker and screenwriter Maryna Stepanska and Darya Bassel, the Director of the DOCU/PRO Industry Platform and film producer, about the…
Af Tue Steen Müller, tidl. filmkonsulent ved Statens Filmcentral Børnelivet På gulvet i børnehaven ved Sankt Hans Torv sidder instruktøren, den pædagoguddannede Lise Roos. ”I de næste to uger fjerner vi legetøjet, men I kan jo stadig tegne og male og…
This year, the Dragon of Dragons award will go to two outstanding creators: a legendary American director and an eminent Polish cinematographer. Godfrey Reggio’s films are a cultural phenomenon – visually captivating and pioneering essays that have left their mark…
Saturday, February 20, 2005. An attempt to rehearse the opening of ZagrebDox, which should start tomorrow at the Europa cinema. Four technicians are bringing in the “beast” of an HD projector that came from Switzerland to the top of the…
Eyal Sivan is a documentary filmmaker, theoretician, and lecturer, renowned for his uncompromising political stances and for using cinema as a tool to question and review dominant narratives of the past and present. A noteworthy figure among politically engaged filmmakers,…
Press release of today from DocsBarcelona: Filmmaker Victor Kossakovsky will return to DocsBarcelona with Architecton, an epic and poetic meditation on architecture that at the same time offers hope for survival. With his latest film, which will have its Spanish premiere at the Barcelona…
“I wanted to show the dehumanization”, the director said in an interview with Business Doc Europe. Indeed, she succeeded. The film is a masterly done narrative construction with an image side and a sound side that each works on its…
Made in co-creation with lead cast: Shpresim Azemi, Xhevahire Abdullahu, Gëzim Kelmendi, Besnik Hyseni. It’s such a clever film. That stays with you. Touches your heart. Because of the way it is made and the consequent narrative. Birgitte Stærmose made…
The International Documentary Film Festival of Barcelona, DocsBarcelona, will pay tribute to the french filmmaking couple Raymond Depardon and Claudine Nougaret during its upcoming edition, which will take place from May 2 to May 12, 2024. The award recognizes Depardon’s…
All right, let’s have the synopsis (Scanorama Festival Kaunas 2023) first: ““The Mammoth Hunt” is a story about a film reel that for many years has been thought to be lost. On the reel, under conspiracy conditions, an abolished anti-Soviet…
Filminstituttet inviterer alle interesserede til reception og fejring af Lea Glob, når hun modtager dette års Dreyer Prisen. Lea Glob er uddannet dokumentarfilminstruktør fra Den Danske Filmskole i 2011. Hun blev Robert-nomineret for afgangsfilmen ‘Mødet med min far Kasper Højhat’…
2012. Hotel Prezident in Sremski Karlovci in Serbia, style Louis XVI, cherubines in the background. It is late sunday evening and our only way to watch el classico Barcelona against Real Madrid was to go online via some unauthorized links…
It was a fine night at Danish Cinemateket. As the opening film of a min-festival “Latvia Before and Now”, the award winning film of Viesturs Kairiss, “January”, was shown to an almost full cinema hall. Jesper Andersen from Cinemateket introduced…
Programmet for det danske Cinemateket i København er på gaden og det er som vanligt med appel til alle filminteresserede, også dem (som os her på flmkommentaren.dk), der sværger til den dokumentariske film eller noget i den retning i en…
What I did was to take a look at this site – www.filmkommentaren.dk – and pick the films I thought could go for being “the best”. They are listed here in a random order: Apolonia Apolonia, Lea Glob, Denmark/Poland, 116…
Dutch documentarian Jessica Gorter continues to make films from Russia (“Red Soul” last one I saw, before that one from the Leningrad Blockade) with strong content – and actuality. This one is about Yury Dmitriev, awarded human rights activist, working…
Tomorrow, December 1st, the Watch Docs festival, 23rd edition, opens in Warsaw with an impressive program including competitive sections, Main Competition and Green Doc Competition, plus “I want to see” (human rights focus), New Polish Films with among others “In…
Eurimages and the European Film Academy have the pleasure to award producer Uljana Kim with this years’ Eurimages International Co-Production Award. The award goes to her “to mark her outstanding commitment to co-production and the strong co-producing partnerships she has built…
… was founded one year ago, November 2022. And has since then performed an avalanche of activities, first of all protesting against the Ministry of Culture and its Reorganization at Georgian National Film Center followed by demonstrations outside the Center…
Retrospective and masterclass with one of the absolute masters of Cinema today, Portuguese Pedro Costa, at the legendary Festival dei Popoli that starts in two days. The festival site has this introduction to Costa: “To go back on Pedro Costa’s…
… was held yesterday afternoon with artistic director Orwa Nyrabia in the leading role after Head of New Media Kaspar Sonnen had introduced the DocLab: Phenomenal Friction. For more than an hour Nyrabia talked us through the 2023 program with…
This text was written by Tue Steen Müller in 2010 after a stay in Ramallah meeting Palestinian filmmakers including those in Gaza, with whom we tutors from Western Europe met to select makers to come to Corfu in Greece to…
THE FREEDOM TO SEE by Emma Davie It’s a bar in Ramallah called Beit Aneesh. Apparently named after an old lady that lived there. A laid back place with posters from the history of the struggle of the Palestinian people.…
”DOK Leipzig is opening a window on the world of Central and Eastern European cinema. The short and feature-length works presented here span the range from the socialist past through the times of upheaval to the present – personal, funny,…
In 2007 Marc Isaacs made ”All White in Barking”, in 2020 “The Filmmaker’s House” and now “This Blessed Plot”. You should know, when reading this article that I am a big admirer of Isaacs having seen, loved and written about…
One of the best European authors, Oeke Hoogendijk, whose three masterful films on art seen from unexpected and exciting angles we saw at “The Magnificent Seven”, this time turns to a very personal subject in a Kammerspiel style to create…
CineLink Industry has steadily evolved over the years into a home and thriving hub for documentary professionals. This year’s 29th Sarajevo Film Festival will feature an extensive lineup of documentary-focused activities with a focus on captivating storytelling. From deeply personal…
The Dealing with the Past programme is an additional platform for testimonies and stories that can serve as a base for developing film scripts, projects and films. The aim of the program is to initiate dialogue in the countries formed…
A copy paste from website of Baltic Sea Docs: We’re excited to announce the 20 film projects that have been selected for the 27th edition of Baltic Sea Docs in September! Many thanks to all submitters for sharing your work!…
Doclisboa (that takes place 19-29.10) will present another momentous retrospective – with the support of the Finnish Film Foundation – dedicated to the cinema of Anastasia Lapsui and Markku Lehmuskallio: this is the first complete retrospective dedicated to the directors.…
Norwegian Truls Lie, editor-in-chief of Modern Times Review, The European Documentary Magazine, wrote an interesting article () that you should read, inspired by his visit to the 25th Thessaloniki Documentary Film Festival this year, a reflection on the observational documentary…
It was one of those moments he has called “The Authentic Now”, Danish editor Niels Pagh Andersen. In the Docudays online seminar the other day with Andersen and Dana Bunescu. The latter showed clips from the masterpiece she did with…
I was in Kyiv last night. Again. For the opening of the 20th edition of the DocuDays ua International Human Rights Documentary Festival. Online via Facebook. It was like it was before in the Zhovten Cinema: An opening with speeches in…
”You’ve got to have love for your characters and do everything you can to give them confidence in the job you’ve been assigned”. Said Camilla Nielsson to me in an interview back in November 2014, published in a Danish Film…
In recognition of his outstanding contribution to the art of film, director and writer Mark Cousins will receive the Honorary Heart of Sarajevo Award at the 29th Sarajevo Film Festival. This will not be his first encounter with the city…
This film has been shown at numerous festivals and now the audience In Barcelona gets the chance to watch it and meet one of its directors, Vitaly Mansky, in the Q&A. At a session the day before, entitled “Documentary filmmaking…
In 2011 I attended a Summer School in Neringa Lithuania for film students. A film by Mantas Kvedaravicius was shown, his first. ”Stasys Baltakis, teacher at the Lithuanian Academy of Music and Theatre, the film school of the Country, introduced the…
This is a text I wrote for the premiere of the film, 30th of June 2018: Wow, it’s tomorrow at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival that Bridges of Time has its premiere. The film, a co-production between the three Baltic…
This is a text that I wrote in October 2017 when Arunas Matelis film had its world premiere: … with the subtitle ”A Different World”, a film that many of us, who think Lithuanian Arunas Matelis is a great artistic…
The 20th anniversary of CPH:DOX became a record breaking year for Denmark’s largest film festival. During the festival, the audience number reached 125,680 – in total. Audiences flocked to the cinemas – both in Copenhagen and in the 28 municipalities…
DocsBarcelona will pay tribute to 73-year-old filmmaker Helena Třeštíková, one of Europe’s leading contemporary documentary filmmakers. Her extraordinary career of more than fifty titles will be recognised with the Honorary DocsBarcelona Award 2023, an award that celebrates “a prodigious production strongly linked…
”Most of what follows is true, but reality and dreams are like conjoined twins, if one dies both will perish”, a text from, who else, Danish master Jon Bang Carlsen, a text he could have used already almost 50 years…
First a flashback to 2013 where I saw the director’s “Belleville Baby” and wrote (on this site): “Swedish Mia Engberg’s”Belleville Baby” is beautiful. Why, because it has a feeling, an atmosphere, a personal tone (the director’s own voice and her text is excellent)…
Here is a copy-paste from the website of Croatian ZagrebD0x (March 26 – April 2), a good read: Master, expert, maestro, connoisseur, virtuoso… The ‘title’ can be given both to a craftsman and an artist, but one thing is for…
Sunday is the ceremony, where Latvian film is to be praised in all categories you can think of, also for camera, sound, editing etc. and what is attributed to fiction filmmaking. I have a heart for Latvian documentaries so I…
Lee Konitz er på vej ud til en bil i Sisimiut. Han peger til højre og spørger kvinden, der følger ham ud, om der er et barn i barnevognen derhenne? Svaret er ja, faren er lige inde og hente noget.…
In 2011 I attended a Summer School in Neringa Lithuania for film students. A film by Mantas Kvedaravicius was shown, his first. ”Stasys Baltakis, teacher at the Lithuanian Academy of Music and Theatre, the film school of the Country, introduced the…
Memories… Names, film projects, episodes. 30 years of IDFA Forum! Actually I don’t remember the first time I was there. Was it the first edition? At the time I worked at the National Film Board of Denmark and had a seat in…
This text is written by filmmaker Maxi Dejoie: On December 10th, Mariupol 2, the last documentary by Mantas Kvedaravicius and Hanna Bilobrova, rightfully received the award for best documentary of the year at the European Film Awards ceremony. After it was…