Message2Man Selection

The annual international film festival of documentary, short, animated and experimental films “Message to Man”, which will be held from September 15 to 22, 2017 in St. Petersburg for the 27th time, has announced the competition programs.

We (Allan Berg and I) have seen five of the ten films in the full-length international competition. About “A Modern Man” wrote Allan (in Danish, here a clip, shortened, translated by me): Maybe she (Eva Mulvad, director) wants to build a new modern film style, where the characteristic is, that the film – freed from the literary progressive narration, and freed as well from the journalistic investigative drama – functions on old cinematographic conditions by putting scene by scene next to each other… Only Connect as said English director Lindsay Anderson

“Cameraperson”  by Kirsten Johnson is also competing, one of the

most acknowledged documentaries of the last year, no surprise it is here, happily surprised on the other side I am to see Georgian Mariam Chacia with her “Listen to the Silence” (Photo)  – after the screening in Leipzig I wrote: …an impressive work by the director and her producer Nik Voigt. It has a wonderful 9 year old boy as the main character. He is deaf, lives in a public school with other deaf kids, that is his world, and this is where his parents come to see him for a very short time before they want to go home again…

And ”Stranger in Paradise” is there, by Guido Hendrikx, got these words on this site: …A chamber play, original and intelligent, unfolds according to (that’s where the documentary part comes in) Dutch and European rules for getting an asylum…

And finally one I have seen but not written about, a graduation film from Zelig film school, by Cecilia Bozza Wolf, ”Vergot” , a strong family and identity drama with two brothers as leading characters.

More information about selected films in the competition categories, check

http://message2man.com/en/ 

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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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