Author Roger Macy

The stand-out film of the 2023 Nippon Connection – although the ‘Visions’ jury in Frankfurt didn’t agree with me – was Amiko, (Kochira Amiko, 2022), written and directed by Morii Yūsuke in his feature debut. No...

This midsummer, in the centre of Italy, I encountered an enviably rich film festival with more than 30 great historic films, all unseen by me. There were three by Jean Renoir, four by Michael Powell, two by Ern...

Cinema Ritrovato had never gone away in 2020 and 2021 but now there was no online alternative and most festival-goers were back at the usual venues to a visibly packed week. Although there was a ‘last minute’ q...

The Japanese film festival in Frankfurt, Nippon Connection, kept going in ’20 and ’21 as a digital-only festival, so kept its easy number co-ordination – the 22nd Festival was at the end of May ’22. There was a...

When I wrote last year on Cinema Ritrovato that “it is by no means certain that we will have reached ‘post-COVID’ any time soon”, did I really have any inkling that we would all be in lock-downs for most of the...

Bologna in 2020 was destined to be different, with COVID-19 still lapping around. Frankly, when I saw the postponement announcement, that was the last I expected to hear of the festival this year, receding into...

Who is the author of a documentary film? This was just one question that arose repeatedly during the week of the Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival. I’ll give it its full English name just that on...