Django tag template for date

It seems like value isn't a datetime object but rather a string. You'll need to convert it in your view before you can process it in the template.

There are several ways to do this, see How to parse ISO formatted date in python? for many examples.

So if your view has:

import re
from datetime import datetime 

def my_view(request):
    date_str = '2014-03-25T15:51:29Z'
    # must convert to datetime object
    date = datetime(*map(int, re.split('[^\d]', date_str)[:-1]))
    return render_to_response('template.html', {'date': date})

Only then you can do:

{{ date|date:'D d M Y' }}