Magnificent7 Summer Screenings

The tireless organisers of the Belgrade European Feature Documentary Film Festival, Magnificent7, Svetlana and Zoran Popovic, and their many helpers, all of them filmmakers themselves, have put together a summer programme, 3 directors, who have already visited the festival (10th edition in 2014), represented with each two films: To be screened July 10, 11 and 12.

This is a clip from the announcement: Selection for this year`s Belef is a great opportunity to acknowledge the constant presence of these authors, and to create special authors’ nights with the goal of familiarizing ourselves with their themed circles and sensibilities. We have selected three representatives from leading documentary fields – Thomas Riedelsheimer from Germany (Breathing Earth and Touch the Sound (PHOTO)), Mika Ronkainen from Finland (Screaming Men and Finnish Blood Swedish Heart), and Marc Isaacs from Great Britain (All White in Barking and The Road-A Story of Life and Death). They are, before all, linked by the fact that with their films they created modern European documentary filmmaking, and some of the works we will see have earned cult status and marked their further development. 

Thomas Riedelsheimer is dedicated to the phenomenon of art and the rhythms of creation, creative pulsating of the artist’s breathing in conjunction with the work and space in which it is conceived. Mika Ronkainen reexamines the rhythms of silence, and of communication throughout different, surprising forms, from articulated to unarticulated. Marc Isaacs is, from a psycho-social standpoint, focused on the pulsating of people in England’s urban environments, rhythms of their presence and absence, acceptance and rejection. Finally, these authors` nights give us an opportunity to personally experience the rhythms of the authors’ evolvement from one film to the other. 


The Popovics say: BELEF is Belgrade Summer Art Festival with a concept, developed last year, to be the festival of (Belgrade) festivals. So, this is actually special promotion of M7 within BELEF. As a summer festival they insist on outdoor events and we love the idea because it’s a rare possibility to create ad hoc open air cinema in the very center of the town. There will be special, quite big screen and we’ll use big and mighty video projector to get high quality picture, full HD.

We asked producers,, distributors and authors to send us the best quality screening prints as digital files. Exclusively for this summer edition Thomas Riedelsheimer made for the first time special HD master (to be used for Blue-Ray) of his legendary “Touch the Sound”, since it is originally made on 35mm and only DVD was produced until now.

This is the second year that we promote M7 in the summer and documentary fans are eagerly waiting for new excitments.

http://www.magnificent7festival.org/pages/BelefNajava_eng.html

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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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