Festival Reports

First, a bit of news from the front. Those who have been following some of the local drama outlined in my last dispatch from the San Francisco Silent ...

On Sunday, 12 May 2024, an online crowd of over 100 participants gathered to bid farewell to the two-month-long Film for Mother Festival (hereinafter ...

Taiwan International Documentary Festival (TIDF) is one of the few remaining international film festivals in the Chinese-speaking world that celebrate...

Film history is back in vogue, or perhaps it never went away. When Il Cinema Ritrovato – likely the world’s largest and most popular event dedicated t...

Whether local or visiting festival-goers, distinguished or emerging filmmakers, industry professionals or members of the press, few attendees would ha...

There are two main sites of the New York Film Festival. On the northside of West 65th Street, in the Lincoln Square neighbourhood of Manhattan, is the...

Ōtaki is a small town on the southern side of Te Ika-a-Māui, the North Island of Aotearoa. Like many small towns in New Zealand, Ōtaki centres on a qu...

Nader steps into the light of the crackling fire. Sitting around it, sporting the traditional red and white ghutra, the elders of an unnamed village i...

In the years – decades even, or so it sometimes feels – that I have been dashing off these festival reports, I have never put pen to paper in a state ...

To begin, then, with Hamlet: to be or not to be, this seems to be the question these days for the city of Berlin when it comes to its longstanding sta...

The day I arrived in the Netherlands was the same day that the provisional measures request from South Africa in their genocide case against Israel wa...

“I know that Creation is a Great Wheel that cannot move without crushing someone!” La Roue (1923) “If cinephilia is dead, then movies are dead too...

Does protest work? Can cinema make a difference?  These were the two questions implicitly posed by "Film and Protest: Popular Uprisings in the Co...

For its first iteration as an annual event, the Adelaide Film Festival invited audiences to “see in the dark”. Enticing hot-pink branding accompanied ...

In the middle of last October, DocLisboa presented again, as a window on the present – its tagline: “In October, the whole world fits in Lisbon”. Impo...

Over the past several years, San Sebastian IFF has slowly become one of the major European platforms for showcasing Asian Cinema. Priority might be gi...

Five hundred-plus films and a cold, dark Baltic city filled with medieval churches and Soviet high-rises: what more could a cinephile ask for? Where y...

Chinese independent cinema has long been associated with the term ‘underground cinema’ since its emergence in the 1990s. Due to its non-compliance to ...

Some background The only way to begin responsibly is with some facts about the status of the Castro Theatre in San Francisco, the long-time home of t...

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 w...

Locarno is, and can feel, half a world away from Hollywood, but much of the press talk leading up to this year’s 76th Locarno Film Festival concerned ...

“Well, to be completely honest, the award’s very nice and all, but I’m only here for the gig. I was ignorant to this whole thing until just a while ag...

A wise man - and a festival director to boot - once said to me, “Film festivals are not about the films. Neither are they about the Q&As with the ...

To begin with, a brief note on the possibilities or impossibilities of film criticism within the ambit of festival reports. I have not written one in ...