Author Bérénice Reynaud

Sundance 2022 espoused the to and fro of the volatile situation of the pandemic. The Festival was supposed to be hybrid: each film afforded several in-person screenings, duplicated by one remote screening for e...

The Perils November 2021: as I prepare, confident in my virtual screening accreditation, to make my film selection for the AFI Fest, a bad surprise is in store for me: virtual screenings represent only a fract...

I From the comfort of my home, and the peace of my computer, I didn’t miss the long lines in the cold, or my shoes soaked in dirty snow, nor did I miss the crowded trips in the shuttles fighting week-end traff...

AFI FEST Presented by Audi Two Invisible Wars Ensconced in the mountains of the Southern Caucasus, a disputed breakaway enclave within Azerbaijan, the small republic of Artsakh (formerly Nagorno-Karabakh) is...

The label of “auteur cinema”, whether poetic or political, is often the cloak under which African cinema is “discovered” and appreciated. We know the canon: Ousmane Sembene, Souleymane Cissé, Med Hondo, Djibril...

I believe in ghosts, vampires and public employees That a certain morning fly away from their houses. Because I am a man in love. — Luis Caicedo Places of Anger and Desire Female directors provided rewardi...

What are you looking at when you’re looking at me? As Sundance may be one of the last film festivals I will cover for a while, maybe it is a good time to probe what a festivalgoer’s pleasure is made of. 1. Do...

The Grain of the Real Always the champion of the most cutting-edge documentaries from Asia, the Vancouver International Film Festival (VIFF) presented two remarkable films by young Chinese women, which, albeit...

The Voice in the Church For the opening night of its 27th edition at the Directors Guild of America, the PanAfrican Art and Film Festival (PAFF), landed quite a coup by organising, a week before its internatio...

The Warden and the Young Man In 2012, Ava DuVernay made history by becoming the first black woman filmmaker to get a major award at Sundance. Since then, she has continued to change the way African American wo...

On Oct 30, the day before the American Film Market opened in Santa Monica, the Asian Society of Southern California had organised the US-China Entertainment Summit at the Skirball Center, allowing the speakers ...

Beyond the Great (Digital) Divide Posited at both ends of the aesthetic spectrum (French auteur cinema versus Sundance alum), Doubles Vies (Non-Fiction) and Can You Ever Forgive Me? engage in a conversation ab...

– Are you going to sleep with the Chinese? – Yes, I think so. – When? – Maybe later on today. Barbara Two events made the trip worthy to the American Film Market (AFM). First was the screening of Mathieu A...

Pan African Dreams: the Dreams that Dance Attending PAFF is to open oneself to a world of images, colours, sounds – even the suggestion of smells – from all corners of the African diaspora, and, for its 25th a...

Penelope, gone Pedro Almodóvar’ense Julieta was felicitously at home at the Vancouver International Film Festival (VIFF) – as the character is based on a Canadian woman named Juliet, the protagonist of Nobel P...

Not at Home Having, in the past, expressed my contentment at attending Sundance, I feel entitled, this year, to introduce a slight drawback in my comments. There were some very good films this year, but I didn...

In the fall 2016, US film festivals on the West Coast had the foresight, the clout and the good luck to uncover some significant gold nuggets: Telluride world premiered Barry Jenkins’s Moonlight, and AFI FEST P...

The 24th PanAfrican Film and Arts Festival (PAFF) took place again last February, in the middle-class African American enclave of Baldwin Hills/Crenshaw, next to the culturally vibrant Leimert Park, in the Sout...

This is an appropriate question, as last fall the 34 year-old Canadian festival unfolded its second year with its new administrative team (Jacqueline Dupuis taking over the functions of Executive Director in 20...

Beyond I had spent too much time designing my schedule before requesting press tickets for the first weekend of Sundance, and as a result, none of the films I wanted to see the Saturday of my arrival were avai...

The AFI FEST presented by Audi is a great opportunity to catch up with films you have missed somewhere else, while offering Angelinos who don’t travel a showcase for those that, otherwise, may not make it to ou...

Chantal Akerman’s suicide on 5 October, 2015, did not only leave a void. It burnt a hole in the texture of time, and those of us who were nearby (in body or in spirit) were charred. She consumed her life to the...

Foreword In the 13 years before her death, Chantal Akerman completed only three narrative features, La Captive (The Captive, 2000), Demain on déménage (Tomorrow We Move, 2004) and La Folie Almayer (Almayer’s F...

Feature image: Female Directors (Yang Mingming, 2012) “Black cat, white cat – who cares? As long as it can catch mice, it is a good cat.” Sichuan proverb, reportedly quoted by Deng Xiaoping With the increas...

When Wu Tianming died in March 2014, commentators around the world were aware that a page of Chinese film history had definitely been turned. Born in 1939, Wu had to wait, like many people of his generation, fo...

China’s “Fifth Generation” was born out of a paradox – the enthusiasm of “rusticated youths” who had been sent by Mao to the countryside admitted to the Beijing Film Academy (BFA) after years tilling arid field...

Feature image: The Diary of a Teenage Girl (dir. Marielle Heller) A recent medical report intuits that people who complain live longer and healthier lives; so maybe this report is going to shave off a few week...

The only US festival to have bothered with a FIAPF accreditation, AFI FEST presented by Audi joyously continues to assert its presence in the heart of Hollywood and in the midst of a chaos of overflowing lines....

As Bill, who had met me at the airport with the Festival sign, is driving me to the hotel, I learn much about him. He’s a retired law professor. In his youth, he lived in the US, and had been close to the ONCE ...

Agnès Varda in Californialand A blonde walks in the street, sporting fashionable sunglasses; the image is in black and white, yet has a very contemporary feel. Maybe it’s the elegant physical freedom with whic...

Looking over the Frontier It’s a pity that, at Sundance, we are so busy trying to discover the next hot feature that the wonderful offerings of the New Frontier section are not at the top of our priorities. A ...

It rained during most of my stay at the latest Vancouver International Film Festival (VIFF) – a thick, persistent, almost sweet, drizzle that covered the horizon in greyish tones and gave the cityscape an air o...

It is always ‘before the Revolution’ for us, sons of the bourgeoisie. – Bernardo Bertolucci, Prima della rivoluzione (1964) Invited as Guest Artistic Director by the 2012 AFI FEST presented by Audi, Bernardo ...

Fruitvale We were lucky. The cold front that had swept through most of the US in January receded on time, so we could enjoy the relatively mild weather, and even sunshine glittering on the snow, while waiti...

Monster From the Deep Off the coast of Bangladesh, the tiny island of Banishanta (about 100 by 10 metres) is flat, exposed to the vagaries of the Bay of Bengal, with its treacherous monsoons and cyclones tha...

As many had expected, Benh Zeitlin’s first feature, Beasts of the Southern Wild, won The Grand Jury Prize, as well The Excellence in Cinematography Award (for Ben Richardson’s magic-realist imagery) in the US D...