A film blog by Allan Berg Nielsen & Tue Steen Müller
A film blog by Allan Berg Nielsen & Tue Steen Müller
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…
I dag lanceres CPH:DOX’ nye, helårlige streamingtjeneste PARA:DOX, som byder på et udvalg af verdens bedste dokumentarfilm og et stort vidensunivers med aktuelle podcasts, talks og artikler, der sætter filmoplevelserne i perspektiv. Viden, perspektiv og store filmoplevelser. Det er omdrejningspunktet…
Serbian director Mila Turajlic is my cinematic historian, when it comes to tell me about the history of Yugoslavia and Serbia. At IDFA she presented her two new films “Non-Aligned: Scenes from the Labudovic Reels” and “Ciné-Guerrillas: Scenes from the…
The International Human Rights Documentary Film Festival starts tonight. The director Oksana Sarkisov writes the following strong welcome words with the headline “Taming the Fire” In 2022, the phrase “world on fire” is more than a metaphor or a reference to some…
Click above and you will see the shortlisted documentaries for the European Film Award in the documentary category. Today the nominations for the award to be decided in Reykjavik on the 10th of December were announced: The House of…
The award for the most notable international documentary film was granted to 07:15 – Blackbird by Judith Auffray, the best Czech documentary is Kapr Code by Lucie Králová. The award for the best Central and East European documentary and for the best sound design went…
What is a documentary At my first day in Zelig Film school i met a man named Tue Steen Müller that immediately asked us to present ourselves and talk about a documentary we saw. I briefly explained what brought me…
Zelig Film Fest Bolzano 10 films, 28 graduates… 5 films were shown last night, 5 will hit the screen tonight. I am not here to review the films but I will not refrain from saying that the general quality is…
An important film was programmed last night in the cinema in Myrina: A Jewish Life Direction Team: Christian Krönes, Florian Weigensamer, Christian Kermer, Roland Schrotthofer. Israel, Austria, 114 mins. 2021. Annotation: Marko Feingold, born in 1913, grew up in a…
Lucky us, my wife and I, to be invited to Aegean Docs on the island of Limnos. The 10th edition of a special documentary film festival that takes place in 9 (nine!) islands in the North Aegean Sea: Lemnos, limnos, Ikaria,…
Total trust can only come from curiosity and love, Heddy Honigmann said in an interview. The director who passed away this year continued by saying that she loved the people, she films. That is so obvious in her “Oblivion” from…
This text is written by the festival directors of Magnificent7, Svetlana and Zoran Popovic: Poland 2021 101 minutes director: Pawel Lozinski The work of one of the most important European filmmakers, the masterful cinéma vérité as a direct embodiment of the legendary…
I Have No Idea How Much They Loved It – but I think they did, the audience for the masterclass with Polish Pawel Lozinski. We (Lozinski and I as the moderator) enjoyed a lot what we were asked to do: Choose 7 shots/sequences…
Heddy Honigmann died May 21 this year 70 year old. Some of her films have been shown at Magnificent7. On Sunday the 18th at 6pm one of her masterpieces, “Oblivion”, from 2008 will be shown for us to remember a magnificent…
“We haven’t seen so poetic documentary for a long long time! Beautiful shots, true beauty of the nature and people, true beauty of the documentary!” A visit “behind the scene” is this email text from from Svetlana and Zoran Popovic…
Monday morning. Copenhagen ariport. Departure for Riga. Beautiful weather. Arrival one hour later at 9am, 20 minutes ahead of time. Hugging friends upon arrival at the hotel, shaking hands with newcomers. Lovely to see – after years – Ukrainian Darya…
After two years I feel privileged to be back to a festival that has given me so many fine moments. The atmosphere in the city of course, a city that celebrates cinema with its many genres, a festival that greets…
The Danish Film Institute is launching another large-scale effort to make the Danish film heritage widely available, this time focusing on the key period of documentaries from 1960-1990. Danish documentaries are on a roll, both at home and abroad. Real…
Lyon. June 2022. Rue du Premier Film… a visit I had been looking fwd. to, the museum of the Lumière Brothers in the villa of their family, the Cinema on the same side of the street, the café on the…
The Romanian director – and cinematographer – and producer – and festival organizer of One World Romania – Alexandru Solomon is being celebrated at the Transilvania International Film Festival in Cluj that runs now and until the 26th of June. I…
The google translate of the Catalan title goes like this: “The Wind that Moves Us” for the film, that won the first prize in the DocsBarcelona Latitud category. And I don’t hesitate to say that this was so well deserved,…
Beldocs in Belgrade started two days ago, Millenium Docs Against Gravity takes off today. The latter in 8 cities and with an online version from May 24. Both have industry sections and both have a focus on Ukraine. In Belgrade…
The programme is out for the 25th edition of DocsBarcelona. Twenty-five editions!!! Which means that I have become 25 years older as has the founder of it all Joan Gonzalez, who back then in a workshop in Granada proposed to…
A tour down memory lane together with important names in modern documentary history. 10 years ago – on this site – I wrote about Belgian writer, director and journalist Hugues Le Paige : ”The director of this film (Le Prince et son…
”I call my method of work “Fishing in the river of time”. As life is extremely talented, we just put camera, set composition and wait. And life happens. So film happens…” From an interview with Laila Pakalnina in connection with…
It’s all there: Competitions, Industry events, a focus on Benelux – and it’s all superprofessionally conveyed at the website – www.fipadoc.com Is it like any other international documentary film festival? Yes, with national and international, short and long films and the industry…
2017, on this site: High expectations. What else can you have with a project from Slovak film director Peter Kerekes, who won a big award at the Karlovy Vary festival the other day. Let me remind you of the many innovative, entertaining…
An article by the always competent Vladan Petkovic in Cineuropa – link for the whole text below – gives me the opportunity to praise the DocAlliance platform as so many times before. Due to the pandemic, I guess, DAFilms has…
It was a happy and proud man I talked to the other day. A man who had been honored, and wanted to share his joy with me. So well deserved the honor! First an edited and translated version of a press…
… their first names are Susana and Ansgar, well known by the editors of this site due to their films “Still Life“ and „48“, (). This new film by the Portuguese couple demonstrates again how perfectly they know how to combine…
I have already posted (on FB) advertising texts about Danish editor Niels Pagh Andersen and his book launch at IDFA sunday morning through a debate with IDFA director Orwa Nyrabia. The launch was set up as a masterclass with the…
Full house at beautiful Tuschinski last night – for a 25 year old film, a classic in world documentary history, Johan van der Keuken’s Amsterdam Global Village. 4 hours (!) plus one hour with the film’s producer Pieter van Huystee,…
“At this year’s edition of DOK Leipzig, a total of 63,250 euros in prize money will be awarded. In addition, there are non-cash benefits worth 10,000 euros that filmmakers will be able to use in developing their films…” A quote…
25 years, still alive and kicking, young and fresh – is the impression I get from going through the website of the film festival in the Czech provincial town that is full of films, of Cinema from October 10 till…