Olaf Möller
Olaf Möller is a Cologne-born and -based film critic, writer and curator.
Articles by Olaf Möller:
17-22 March 2009 In the years since the Emergency Diagonale and the festival’s defence at the hands of Austria’s filmmaking community against a coup attempt by the government, the country’s second-most important annual event in cinema had been unable to find its way back into track. Truth be told, the Diagonale had been in a [...]
18–26 April 2008 Udine’s Far East Film Festival celebrated its tenth anniversary in the only style honourable and becoming: by simply performing its function as fine as ever, resulting in a program generally speaking superior to its recent editions, yet without any true revelations. The feting was mainly done by way of an auteur-done trailer [...]
29 October – 4 November 2007 The main reason I went to the Leipzig International Festival for Documentary and Animated Films this year was the retrospective: the festival turned 50, something like 20 programs offered a passage through a demi-century filled to the brim with masterpieces barely remembered these days – names forgotten, titles lost. [...]
20-29 April 2007 Udine’s Far East Film Festival remains a gathering place of choice for those truly serious about East and Southeast Asian cinemas: for those who really care about the cultures – right or wrong and in whichever state of willing-to-pleaseness movie-wise – instead of the clichés and the sly attempts at making something [...]
10–18 November 2006 The Torino Film Festival is quite comfortable with being the No. 2 among Italy’s main events in cinema: it has just about all the respect granted Venice but few of the Biennale’s problems with premieres and stars – and no, looking at offerings like the opening night delight, Clint Eastwood’s extraordinary feat [...]
March 21–26, 2006 After the screening of Florian Flicker’s No Name City (2006), basically everybody at the Diagonale’s opening agreed that this tall verité tale about the internal troubles’n’struggles in a Viennese Western Town was a more than fitting metaphor for the festival, its development, as well as that of Austrian cinema – just how [...]
April 21–29, 2006 “No to Chinese Goods”, howled a cluster of Lega Nord-campaign posters from a downtown Udine wall when on the 21st of April the 8th Far East Film Festival opened in Friuli’s main city. The election was already over and decided – even if Berlusconi was frantically trying to pull a Bush on [...]
November 11–19, 2005 In the last few years, the Torino Film Festival (originally called Cinema Giovani) has gained something of an international reputation as one of Europe film culture’s Must-Attend Events. A supreme quality in programming it always had; what it lacked, it seems, was the savvy – or simply the budget – to get [...]
Möller affectionately discusses the films, writing and philosophy of the cineastes who wrote for German film magazine, Filmkritik, a culture or ‘movement’ strong enough to rival Cahiers.









