Message2Man St. Petersburg /2

Second day in St. Petersburg started with a lovely tour to Russian Museum downtown at the square where a statue of Pushkin stands, always with birds resting on his stretched-out arm. The newly renovated rooms with the Russian avant-garde I had not seen before – what a pleasure to revisit masterpieces of Malevich, Filonov, Kandinsky and Tatlin.

After that off to Velican theatre where we watched young Danish Emil Langballe’s graduation film from the National Film School in England, ”Beach Boy”, a well balanced, cinematic non-moralistic portrait of a young black man and his relationship to a middle-aged British woman in Kenya. The young man makes a phone call to his girl friend, who is pregnant but is aware of his profession. The film is light and pretty much less demonstrative than the feature of Ulrich Seidl.

And then to Gare du Nord in Paris guided by veteran director Claire Simon, whose ”Human Geography” (104 minutes) appealed strongly to me, both because it is a very well made film but also because Gare du Nord is very familar to me. I have arrived there several times at 8am in the morning after 12 hours in train from Copenhagen, I have welcomed my mother when she visited us on vacation in ”la ville des villes”, and – alas – in November last year this was the place where co-editor of filmkommentaren.dk, Allan Berg, had his computer stolen, when we got out of a taxi…

Claire Simon is behind the camera, her friend Simon, of Algerian origin, is there with her to help her ask questions to people passing by. Small stories with people before they enter a train, observations, and talks with people working on the station. It becomes a film on Life and Love, superficial, what else could it be, but small stories placed in the heads of the audience for us to work more on. The focus is on people who ended up in France coming from all over the world, happy or not happy, with fine educations from back home, but apparently useless in the European country they have arrived to. IN that way the film is also a portrait of Europe of today.

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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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