DOComedy Now

I have been trying different inadequate and sort of inane ways of saying that a really good documentary film (or at least my own films) should take advantage of both reality and fantasy and mix them in a cinematic way which will enhance the spectators understanding and appreciation of the depiction and interpretation of reality. But as the first paragraph here shows, the wording gets a little… erhm… wordy and egg headed, so I was really happy to stumble over this quote from an interview with none other than one of my favorites, Tom Waits, who manages to add the pictures (which really should be my job, damn-it):     “Mostly I straddle reality and the imagination. My reality needs imagination like a bulb needs a socket. My imagination needs reality like a blind man needs a cane.” So regarding documentary films, always listen to what Tom says. (Afterall, he also gives these valid advices: "Never trust a man in a blue tre...

Bente Milton’s and my own film, ”My Avatar and Me” (2010/11), has now been showed at quite a few TV stations and at a number of festivals of which I’ve had the privilege to attend most of them. It is really a pleasure getting to show the film to people and discuss it with local audiences and colleagues from around the world. As Hans Christian Andersen once said: “At rejse er at leve” (“To travel is to live”) and as a film maker I just have to live... so I can experience something to make films about… J At the latest of the festivals – the small and lovely Guth Gafa International Documentary Film Festival in the north-western part of Ireland – a member of the audience first said she really enjoyed the film but then asked how the film could ever be selected for a documentary festival. Of course I couldn’t answer on behalf of the festival, but I completely agree that the film has many fictional aspects. And the reason for that was that we as filmmakers chose to blend different modes of ...

A causerie from a holiday If you have seen mine and Bente Milton’s film, ”My Avatar and Me” (2010, 91 min.,), you’d probably say: “What the heck does he know about the nature of documentaries”. I can’t blame you for thinking that, considering the freedom with which we undertook the task of making a “documentary” from the virtual world Second Life. Well, in our defense I can say that we didn’t set out to make a traditional documentary and that the film went through a lot of changes and discussions during the production due to various changes in the financing conditions (of course) and therefore maybe ended as a more fictional piece of work than what at least I myself had set out to make. But as our commissioning editor from ZDF/Arte came up with the term “a documentary fantasy” to describe the film, I was more or less satisfied. Nevertheless, as the production went on, so did the internal discussions on our team, and as I also appear in the film as myself, I surely had some stro...