A film blog by Allan Berg Nielsen & Tue Steen Müller
A film blog by Allan Berg Nielsen & Tue Steen Müller
Legendary Haskell Wexler died yesterday, 93 years old. Long obituaries giving information on his impressive career are to be found in Hollywwod Reporter, Variety and Indiewire (links below), several FB friends salute his strong contribution to film history and social…
Yes, this is how one the partners, CPH:DOX, of the very generous DocAlliance, ends the year with a Disney quote. And it IS a veeery good present that you should accept. The online platform – after a brilliant series of…
ALT KAN SKE I VIRKELIGHEDEN ”Det er en stor film. Den samler flere af Filmens traditioner. Det er en surrealistisk film. Man kommer til at tænke på Buñuels ‘l’Age d’Or’ fra 1930, som handler om Roms grundlæggelse, statsmagten, banditter,…
Some facts: Full title: When the Earth Seems to be Light Full names of directors: Salome Machaidze, Tamuna Karumidze & David Meskhi. A Georgian/ German coproduction. Produced by Goslab & Jörg Langkau. Co-Produced by Zaza Rusadze, Zazarfilm. … and a…
Always with a camera at hand, be it to catch a moment in life… THE JEWISH STREET (1992) by Allan Berg Nielsen The camera from high above shows me Riga. The city set in its landscape. I’m drawn…
… it becomes indirectly an adaption of Ginsberg’s poem. And at the same time it is a film about Frank’s doubts about filming this. It sounds wild and it is. It is radical and most unique. Avant-garde and uncompromising, not as…
Three persons in one room. Plus a film crew. Not a lot of space but the great Czech director and cameraman Mira Janek manages to move around to observe and catch the intense atmosphere of quite a unique family:…
I have run into a slate of giving verbal flowers to documentarians, whose work I appreciate a lot and who are to be highlighted right now for one reason or the other. Earlier today it was Sérgio Tréfaut who visits…
Yesterday Claude Lanzmann could celebrate his 90 year birthday. It gave me the inspiration to celebrate him by visiting youtube, where you can find a lot of clips from from Shoah and other of his films plus a long, very…
If you read the post below, ”Viktor Kossakovsky at IDFA”, you will discover his insisting on the form, on the composing of the image, on the aesthetics. If you want to see how this can be done, please go and…
Allerede i 1980’erne, da jeg rejste rundt i ind- og udland for Statens Filmcentral, var mit standardsvar på, hvem der er de betydeligste danske dokumentarister, Jørgen Leth, Jon Bang Carlsen og Anne Wivel – den trio, som dansk dokumentarismes aktuelle…
Og så går de i gang med at lave filmen. Filmens kurve bliver som Kirkebys kurve, den må skabe et nulpunkt, tror jeg det er han siger, og så må den med ham bevæge sig frem gennem en række af…
Se det er filmformidling af høj klasse på bagrund af en smuk film lavet af et af de fineste talenter i dansk dokumentarfilm – læs anmeldelsen ovenfor. Og det er – skriver én der var ansat i Statens Filmcentral (SFC)…
… New York and Moscow. Strong promotion of the creative documentary takes place these days in the two cities. Or should we call it the cinema d’auteur? Anyway, no-one would object to put that characterisation on French Nicolas Philibert, who…
Again and again DocAlliance, “Your Online Documentary Cinema”, brings quality to its users, who are hopefully many. This time a series of filmed masterclasses from the Jihlava 2014 festival. I visited one of them last year, the one with Wojtiech…
Under the headline “Always The Trouble With Avi”, the Filmforum at the Museum Ludwig in Köln shows a retrospective of films by Israeli Avi Mograbi, introduced by this great text by the curator Rasha Salti: “He is almost always in…
Copenhageners – it’s already tonight, sorry that i did not see it before, that Michael Glawogger’s masterpiece from 1998, ”Megacities” (photo) is shown as part of a programme called ”The Urban Planet”, organised by the active Copenhagen Architecture Festival “that…
The festival in St. Petersburg, that has existed for a quarter of a century, starts September 25 and runs until October 3. The selection has been announced but first some quotes from the News of the website: ”… Over 3,400…
Riga. The day after the Baltic Sea Docs, Edition 19. Producer Uldis Cekulis is developing a film project initiated by Kristine Briede. Theme: The poetic tradition in the Baltic cinema. They have been so kind to involve me in the…
The Dox Box has published its Newsletter for September, which is full of useful information for Arab filmmakers – and for us who want to stay updated on what happens in the Arab documentary world. The main story is that…
Werner Pedersen (WP) var ikke længe i dansk film, men han fik stor betydning for dansk kort- og dokumentarfilms udvikling. I 1959 blev han ansat i Statens Filmcentral, i 1962 blev han direktør samme sted og fra 1967 til 1970…
Subtitle: ”Faroese Cinematic Narratives”, that I enjoyed the great pleasure to be with the whole (yester)day. True pleasure indeed and admiration for the work of Ulla Boje Rasmusen and Andreas Fischer-Hansen to have done the fundraising to have a new…
One more well made film historical biography, this time on Robert Altman (1925-2006), interestingly made and enjoyable to watch. The director, Canadian Ron Mann, got the great idea to chapter the film by asking people who have worked with Altman…
It’s nice when a text is free of conventional promotion clichés, is well written and has an interesting point of view and an inviting programme. As the one below, copy-pasted from the Flaherty Newsletter, with Sukhdev Sandhu (more about him…
”It would be a major lapse to have a documentary that doesn’t contain the full reality. I wouldn’t want to be associated. This is not only your film”, legendary film critic Roger Ebert e-mails to Steve James during his making…
Jeg skrev om Helmut Berger, som Luchino Visconti gjorde til stjerne med ”Ludwig”, skuespilleren som blev kaldt for verdens smukkeste mand. Og så åbner jeg det danske Cinematekets katalog for august og september og ser en anden Visconti-skuespiller på forsiden,…
The film opened theatrically in New York, but had its premiere beginning of this year at the Sundance Festival. Reviews below, click and get them in full length. Many superlatives but if you read the full review from NY Times,…
To continue some name dropping after receiving today’s realscreen newsletter that announces ”the slate of docs” to be screened at the Venice International Film Festival, edition 72nd! World class name Frederick Wiseman presents ”In Jackson Heights”, which was pitched at…
Some name dropping on a tuesday evening, tabloid maybe, but I expect all three films to be of quality… Realscreen anounces today that a new film by Michael Moore is to premiere at the TIFF, the festival in Toronto that…
The Danish Cinemateket re-opens in August with – as usual – a fine programme, including a retrospective of films by Peter Bogdanovich, mentioned in the post below and in reports from the Amdocs festival in Palm Springs in March. A…
Before I went to Amdocs (American Documentary Film Festival) in Palm Springs end of March this year I would have shaken my head if anyone had said to me that I should revisit some of the films by John Ford.…
One more addition to the slate of posts on the premiere of ”Beyond the Fear” by Herz Frank and Maria Kravchenko, again from the Haaretz and again by Nirit Anderman, who wrote a competent review of the film. This time…
The film by Herz Frank and Maria Kravchenko was shown on the 8th of July, the day before the official opening of the Jerusalem Film Festival, whose leaders felt they had to play according to the rules of the Israeli…
Yes, it is a tradition to pay tribute to the festival in Pärnu Estonia that runs now and until July 19th – and let me repeat the introductory text from last year: ”the Pärnu International Documentary and Anthropology Film Festival…
I read somewhere that NYTimes plans to cut down in their movie reviews policy that so far has been working in the way that ALL films released theatrically in NY are reviewed. What that means remains to be seen, but…
Thank you to Cinemateket in Copenhagen who, in collaboration with the Copenhagen Photo Festival and Danish writer, filmmaker and beat expert Lars Movin, organised the Robert Frank program here in June. And thank you to Lars Movin for sharing his…
It was a privilege to follow the development and production of Peteris Krilovs ”Gustavs Klucis: The Deconstruction of an Artist”. And it was a privilege to see how the producer of the film Uldis Cekulis fought for the film to…
Det Danske Filminstitut skriver i dag under overskriften “Anne Wivel – dansk dokumentarfilms mor”: FØDSELSDAG. Filminstruktør Anne Wivel fylder 70 år den 18. juni. FILMupdate har bedt to filmkolleger skrive en hilsen. De to er Mikala Krogh og Tue Steen…
To receive an award at a festival that carries the name of Andrey Tarkovsky… Ego Media’s Guntis Trekteris proudly announces that ““Beyond The Fear” by Herz Frank and Maria Kravchenko (photo of the two) got Documentary Grand Prix in Andrey…
”Gateway to East European Documentaries” – that’s what the IDF (Institute of Documentary Film) calls its website DokWeb that I check out pretty often because of its information and articles, like the one by Filip Sebek, who has interviewed Russian…
Ved hjælp af Filmcentalen / For alle kan jeg gå langt tilbage for eksempel i den gamle diskussion om iscenesættelse i dokumentarfilm, og se de i den sammenhæng uomgængelige hovedværker, Jon Bang Carlsens It’s Now or Never og How to Invent…
Realscreen is a useful source for information on what is going on in – that’s what they call it – non-fiction. Normally it is short news, sometimes however longer articles of fine quality like the one from May 1st by…
Newsletter from DocAlliance with generous offers to watch films FOR FREE in the month of May. Strong recommendation from me to (re)watch Jørgen Leth and Ole John’s ”66 Scenes from America” (photo: Andy Warhol and Jørgen Leth). This classic was…
This article is brought now because the film has its international premiere at HotDocs in Toronto , tomorrow, April 25. A long prologue: On this site Herz Frank (1926 – 2013) has an iconic status. Co-editor Allan Berg and I…
Thanks to a Cineuropa website (very actual, well written and edited, covering also a lot of documentary events and films) and a link from the article, I got to know about the Play-Doc 2015 festival (Festival Internacional de Documentals) that…
The 30th edition of the DOK.fest in Munich invites the audience to watch five of the Israeili documentary master Avi Mograbi’s films. Mograbi travels apparently from one (well deserved) homage to the other, last one was in Paris at the…
Jeg har lyst til at dykke lidt ned i FILMCENTRALEN FOR ALLE, ned i repertoiret, finde ikke de film jeg har pligt til at se, men lige netop de film, jeg har lyst til at se streamet på min computer.…
Apropos the sad news about the Avala Studio in Belgrade, here is a written flashback to a night at the Sava Center at the closing night of the Magnificent7 2011: It was one of those evenings that you will never…
Dear friends, guests and colleagues of MAGNIFICENT 7 Festival, we’ve got a terribly important issue to share with you, hoping you will react, sign the petition and spread the word about the unthinkable events that are about to take place…
Det Danske Filminstituts streamingtjenste Filmcentralen fylder ét år i dag. Vi siger glade til lykke og bliver overrasket, selv om det selvfølgelig er i fødselarens ånd og i overensstemmelse med Filmcentralens inderste vilje, at det er os, som får gave:…