Filmkommentaren First Five Years

Five years ago Allan Berg called me to pitch an idea he had: Should we make a film blog where we could express opinions and spread information on our common passion: Films. Allan (who lives in Randers in Denmark, whereas I live in Copenhagen, the two cities being 4 hours train distance from each other) organised what became filmkommentaren.dk with a local webbureau Infoserv that has the motto ”keep IT simple”. Which we have done, kept it simple: text + photo + links where our readers can find more info and clips and trailers. Ambition: an average of one text per day. All year round.

We decided that Allan should stay with Danish as his language for posted texts – I went for English, the language I use when teaching and tutoring around the world. For four years we got a generous 50-50 start and IT maintenance support from the local FOF (Denmark’s largest provider of adult liberal education) but no financial support from anyone. Well, once we applied to the DFI (Danish Film Institute) for a small help to cover the basic costs but got a no because ”there are so many film websites so that would make a precedent to support you”, words to that effect. So filmkommentaren.dk is totally con amore, and we have been happy to invite other Aficionados to post texts.

Here we are five years later, this text being blogpost/text number 2082. We have never really discussed editorial lines, we have written about what we wanted to write about: reviews, festival reports, notes, quotes from other media, comments, we have created smaller and bigger discussions. The focus has been the documentary film.

The first two texts were reviews of ”Forever” by Heddy Honigmann and ”Ghosts of Cité Soleil” by Asger Leth, that was back in August 2007, where we also wrote about Bergman and Antonioni, who died late July that year, and where we visited and covered the yearly documentary gathering of the DFI at the European Film College.

Statistics – We have had 96.521 visits in 2012 until this day, 39.351 so-called unique visitors. We are very happy for the interest. Thank you, readers!

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Tue Steen Müller
Tue Steen Müller

Müller, Tue Steen
Documentary Consultant and Critic, DENMARK

Worked with documentary films for more than 20 years at the Danish Film Board, as press officer, festival representative and film consultant/commissioner. Co-founder of Balticum Film and TV Festival, Filmkontakt Nord, Documentary of the EU and EDN (European Documentary Network).
Awards: 2004 the Danish Roos Prize for his contribution to the Danish and European documentary culture. 2006 an award for promoting Portuguese documentaries. 2014 he received the EDN Award “for an outstanding contribution to the development of the European documentary culture”. 2016 The Cross of the Knight of the Order for Merits to Lithuania. 2019 a Big Stamp at the 15th edition of ZagrebDox. 2021 receipt of the highest state decoration, Order of the Three Stars, Fourth Class, for the significant contribution to the development and promotion of Latvian documentary cinema outside Latvia. In 2022 he received an honorary award at DocsBarcelona’s 25th edition having served as organizer and programmer since the start of the festival.
From 1996 until 2005 he was the first director of EDN (European Documentary Network). From 2006 a freelance consultant and teacher in workshops like Ex Oriente, DocsBarcelona, Archidoc, Documentary Campus, Storydoc, Baltic Sea Forum, Black Sea DocStories, Caucadoc, CinéDOC Tbilisi, Docudays Kiev, Dealing With the Past Sarajevo FF as well as programme consultant for the festivals Magnificent7 in Belgrade, DOCSBarcelona, Verzio Budapest, Message2Man in St. Petersburg and DOKLeipzig. Teaches at the Zelig Documentary School in Bolzano Italy.

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